Fiduciary Duty

by Tim Michaels

  Whether Gordo was actually expecting H to write out a check to the company at that very moment, or simply to hand over wads of cash wasn’t clear. Even Gordo couldn’t explain what he was thinking when questioned by the police a few hours later. What is clear is that after about half a minute of abuse, H got up and walked out of his office, toward the stairs. Now, the bottom four floors of the M & O building resemble nothing so much as a mid-range hotel, though there is no swimming pool smelling of chlorine in the central atrium. All the offices on those floors are along the walls. Above the remaining ten floors have the more standard office building – cubicle farm configuration.

  As H and Jeremy fled Gordo’s office for the elevator, he followed, bellowing for security. In response to his yelling, two security guards headed up, one by stairs and one by elevator. Twenty or thirty seconds later, H and Jeremy found themselves surrounded.

  “Detain them,” Gordo yelled. All the witnesses agree he actually used the word “detain.”

  Hemmed in on all sides, H fumbled in her purse for the mace she always carried. Meanwhile, with all the commotion, and seeing his mother flustered, Jeremy started bawling. As one of the guards reached for him, H snatched him up protectively and yelled, “Don’t you dare touch him!”

  At the same moment, Gordo tried to grab H from behind, bumping her off-balance. That pushed Jeremy over H’s head and past the rail. H still had a grip on him, and would have pulled him back to safety but for the fact that between his weight and his desperation, Gordo had a lot of momentum in him and he barreled into H’s back. Had she let go of Jeremy, H wouldn’t have gone over the rails as well, but obviously, she did not. H died when her head hit the polished teak floor three stories below, still protecting Jeremy by shielding his body from the worst of the impact. Jeremy landed on his back, and broke his spine in three places. One piece of his spine went through his left lung. He survived for another forty – two minutes, long enough for the paramedics to get him to the emergency room. Mercifully, he was unconscious for most of those forty-two minutes.

  My first instinct, when I saw my beautiful wife and my wonderful baby boy broken and lifeless on a metal table was to go the M & O building and kill everyone. At that moment, I would not have left a person alive in the building. I wanted revenge, an eye for an eye, and then some. My fists clenched. A part of me noticed, as I had that thought, that the coroner was backing away and I took a small amount of satisfaction that a complete stranger was afraid of my rage.

  Then, very quickly, it was gone. I calmed down a little bit. Even in my despair, I understood that revenge wouldn’t help. It wouldn’t help H or Jeremy, and it wouldn’t help me. I had lost my wife and my son and nothing I could ever do would bring them back.

  Over the next few days, I began to realize that there were specific people at fault for the chain of events that killed my wife and son. Those people should pay a price for their actions. It wasn’t a need for revenge, it wasn’t even anger. It was, however, a realization that a basic, implicit contract between people had been broken. The contract had been broken on purpose, actively rather than passively, by commission as opposed to by omission, and with no thought given to what horrible consequences might result.

  Many decisions had to come together for H and Jeremy to lie bloody and broken in M & O’s atrium lobby. First, the company had to have brought me out to Ohio under false pretenses, having made promises it clearly had not intended to fulfill. Later, the company had to avoid allowing me to work, and then punish me for it. Later still, the company had to make it impossible for me to get health insurance. And, of course, there were the events that took place M & O’s headquarters, the events that directly killed H and Jeremy. But not for any of those actions, H and Jeremy would still be here.

  But it wasn’t the company that had made those choices. A company is nothing but the people who make it up and the people who own it. A company chooses nothing and does nothing. People make choices and do things. People had made the choices that led to the deaths of my wife and son.

  Those who were responsible, who had made those decisions, were unworthy of the power to make choices that could affect other people. If they were so callous with my family, they could, nay, they would be and were just as callous with other people, and with equally tragic results. Destroying their ability to do such damage would be a public service. H had always been a crusader, a pursuer of just causes. Following through on that public service would be my way to honor my wife and on. More than that, it was my fiduciary duty to H and Jeremy.

  But who was responsible? Not the guards. They were pulled into a volatile situation too quickly for them to realize what was happening. Gordo clearly bore some responsibility, and my experience with him said he took pleasure in the company’s screwing me over to boot. But Gordo, despite not being a good person, was acting out of desperation – his livelihood was at stake. True, it was partly his own incompetence. The decisions that killed my family may have been precipitated by different people, but in the end, these were people following directives or procedures that came from the same place. The responsibility worked its way up the chain of command, to the CEO who made the decisions, the board of directors that enabled him, and the shareholders who empowered him. But most shareholders were small potatoes. There were only a few very large shareholders whose voices mattered.

  But even then, I wasn’t being precise enough. Yes, the company’s officers, the board, and the large shareholders were responsible for the broken promises made to me over the past few years. But the death of my wife and son, that wouldn’t have happened without the merger. The merger, in turn, had required strong support by the CEO, his top officers, and the board. It also required a lot of “aye” votes. Those who cast large blocks of votes in favor of the merger, they had made the chain of events that killed H and Jeremy possible. They had killed my wife and son, as surely as if they had planned it. They did it for profit, and they didn’t much care whom it would affect or how. In fact, that was a generous assessment – the merger, after all, had been justified on the basis of sticking it to the employees. And they had certainly stuck it to my family.

  And so I had my targets, the people who directly or indirectly made the decisions that killed my family in order to earn just a little bit more profit. I resolved that those people, those people would pay.

  Part 3. The Apex Predator

  Chapter 1. The Party Boy

  I bought a five-year-old nondescript van from a private detective who was looking to trade up. He seemed delighted in showing off the vehicle’s amenities. The van had a bed, a small toilet, and tinted windows. It also had a small hatch on the underside through which someone in the van could enter and exit. I didn’t expect to need that capability, but one never knew.

  The detective threw in some decal labels that could be affixed to the side of the van, indicating it belonged to, variously, two plumbers, a pet shop, a flower shop, or the local cable company. While neither of the plumbers, the pet shop nor the flower shop existed, I’m pretty sure the cable company wouldn’t have been amused by their identification with this vehicle.

  A couple days later, I was on the road to New York City. There were four New Yorkers, or at least there were four people who listed New York City as their primary residence, on my list. Three lived on Central Park West, and two of those lived in the same building. The building, which had its own Wikipedia entry, was home to a number of A-list celebrities and financiers. According to what I could find online, the building took up an entire city block and was actually made up of two separate and distinct towers sharing a large, ornate art deco lobby.

  The two targets that lived in the building couldn’t be more different. One had the improbable name of John Smith. Starting from humble beginnings, Smith had amassed a fortune over almost forty years of investing, primarily in telecommunications, energy, commodities, and in the past three decades, IT. Despit
e his long career, Smith was an enigma. He seemed to make no public appearances, and the most recent picture I found of him was almost twenty years old. The picture was blurry and out-of-focus.

  Tadeos Krikor (“TK”) Frangulyan was the other resident of the building on my list. He was twenty-eight years old, the son of the late Tadevos Krikor Frangulyan, owner of a shipping line and two railroads. The younger Frangulyan was a party boy whose picture was often in the celebrity sheet: Page 6 of the New York Post. Pictures of him sober were harder to find. Since his father’s demise a few years earlier, TK had styled himself a trader. Other investors noted that the companies Frangulyan invested in appeared to be an eclectic mix, if not to say completely random.

  I arrived in New York City and found my way to Central Park. I realized with some surprise that I had never actually been in New York City before. I would have been impressed, I guess, except that I had recently spent a fair amount of time in São Paulo. I had also been to Mexico City and Tokyo, both of which were larger and more imposing than New York.

  It was early evening. I found a place to park and started walking down Central Park West. Across the street from the building where Smith and Frangulyan lived, I stopped and leaned against the wall between the sidewalk and Central Park. After a few hours, I hit the jackpot. A bright red convertible Maserati pulled up in front of the building. Behind the wheel was an easy-to-recognize TK Frangulyan, sporting a mini-Mohawk of the same color as the car. The rest of his hair was blue.

  As he pulled to a halt, I crossed the street. I was about ten paces from him as he tossed his keys to the valet and said, “Keep it here, Hoss. I’m coming down in a sec.”

  He walked into the building. I made a right turn at the sidewalk and headed in the direction of my van. The farther I got from the building, the faster I moved until I was just about running by the time I reached the van. I hopped in and made a quick U-ee, cutting off cars in both directions. I got back to the building just as Frangulyan hopped into his car. Fortunately, Manhattan’s bumper-to-bumper evening traffic meant the Maserati’s famous ability to accelerate was virtually useless and I was able to keep up with little difficulty.

  In the end, I followed Frangulyan around for about a month, during which time his picture was in the gossip page of the New York Daily News three times. More nights than not, he took women home, sometimes two at a time. About twice a week, he took them to a cabin in the woods an hour and a half north of the city. It took me a while to locate the cabin, as the first few times his Maserati lost me shortly after leaving the city. I finally found it through the simple expedient of lying in wait at the furthest known point in the route on nights he was heading out. It helped to have night vision binoculars.

  Women weren’t the only toys he liked. At least twice a week Frangulyan went to the Hammacher Schlemmer store on East 57th street. Frangulyan never left the shop without buying something. Once he came out with a dogbrella and a shower stall for dogs. I have to assume it was a gift as he didn’t have a dog himself. But his real passion was electronic gizmos. On occasion, a guy who looked like a graduate student would meet him at the Hammacher Schlemmer store and follow him around for an hour or two, giving advice and animatedly answering questions. One day, after Frangulyan left, I walked up to the guy. It turned out he really was a graduate student – in robotics at Cornell. He told me “the oaf who just left” often hired him to build small robots and gadgets. It paid a lot more than being a teaching assistant and was more fun too, even if he had to “put up with a lot of nonsense from that dimwit.” Clearly Frangulyan was as classy with his employees as his public persona would suggest.

  We chatted a bit more then I looked around the store. I bought a little radio controlled boat for Jeremy and got H a foot massager. Afterwards, I drove back to Canton with a plan in mind. The plan involved toys. The first toy was a cross-bow. I had actually made one before, back when I was in junior high school. My mother had not been amused and made me promise never to use it. She was aggravated enough by the cross-bow to keep her list going, and eventually extracted promises never to get a motorcycle, a tattoo, or smoke crack. I went on to build trebuchets, and together with a couple of buddies won a couple pumpkin-launching contests. I’m not sure my mom was amused, but she tolerated that hobby.

  A good cross-bow can be made out of wood in a few hours, provided you have a decent workshop, good tools and a barrel to steam the bow. I already had the tools, and a trip to the local hardware store got me the wood and the barrel. Since I wasn’t particularly interested in historical accuracy, I also bought a few strips of fiberglass to line the back of the bow for strength.

  Then I got to work. It took me a day to build my first cross-bow. I built two more the next morning, and ten bolts to boot. I also made a target with a large bale of hay. Because I didn’t have much furniture, the living room made a nice practice range. I found that from distances of ten feet or less, it was extraordinarily easy to hit the target, and hard to pull the bolts out of the bale of hay once fired.

  Over the weekend I drove to Pittsburgh. It was a trip I had made many times with H and Jeremy. H had loved Ikea, and the closest store was in Pittsburgh.

  I drove up and down the city, looking for garage sales where I sought out radio controlled cars and other toys. By the end of the weekend, I had purchased seven radio-controlled toys of different sorts, plus a little mobility scooter whose former owner had recently passed away. The scooter was emblazoned with an assortment of patriotic stickers. I also picked up a small collection of clocks and timers of various sorts. Finally, at a church fundraiser, I got a hideous tan and orange full-length ladies coat still in the dry-cleaning bag. The bag was somewhat discolored – clearly, the coat hadn’t been worn in years, presumably because it was so ugly. The faded receipt from the dry-cleaners indicated that I paid less for the coat than its previous owner had been charged for cleaning it.

  Once back at home, I did some disassembling, some reassembling and some soldering. Eventually, I had a radio controlled rectangle on wheels that could move along at a healthy 12 miles per hour. The rectangle was low to the ground, but could accommodate several attachments. One attachment was literally nothing more than a disguise – a skirt, well, more like the Pope’s miter, which added about a foot to the width and three feet to the height of the box. More importantly, the skirt had flashing lights giving the thing the look of 1950s monster movie robot. A second attachment was an air horn. In addition, a small speaker with a computer-generated voice could be hooked onto the top of the rectangle. I named the whole contraption Floyd.

  Floyd and the crossbows were toys for Frangulyan, but when I made my move he would most likely have a lady friend along with him. Since I wasn’t in the business of generating collateral damage, I would need a toy for her, too, and what I had in mind would surely meet with Frangulyan’s approval. What I made looked an awful lot like the restraints prisoners wear – a set of handcuffs and foot cuffs chained to each other. I also made a set of handcuffs with a three foot chain. One of the cuffs had a timer on it, which, upon counting down to zero would release the lock.

  With that, I was almost ready to move. I packed my van. I was taking one crossbow, five bolts, the timer-equipped restraints, several days’ worth of canned food and water, the hideous ladies’ coat (still in the dry-cleaning bag), some warm clothes for myself, a ski mask, a flashlight, a little vial of acid, a small blanket, a bicycle and a small .22 caliber pistol. Last of all, I had Floyd and his accessories.

  Then I drove to Frangulyan’s cabin. It was only a few weeks into the New Year and there was snow on the ground much of the way. It wasn’t fresh snow, but it was still white and pretty, with only the faintest hint of the ugly, late-in-March-or-early-April gray and black sludge to come. I felt quite good, both confident and ready.

  As I drove, I explained the plan to Floyd a few times. I tried to consider all possible scenarios, and
for the fun of it, I kept switching languages and accents. Eventually, I found myself speaking a mishmash of gibberish and nonsense that almost, just almost, sounded like it meant something. I realized I was imitating Jeremy when he was about a year old. So I started telling Floyd about Jeremy, and of how quickly he had been changing and developing new skills, and how much I missed seeing him grow over the past six months. Once I started to cry. Floyd never said anything, but he seemed sympathetic.

  In the evening, I parked near the side of the road about ten miles from the cabin and waited for Frangulyan to drive by. I had never seen him head up there before 7 PM, nor after midnight. At 1 AM, I concluded Frangulyan wasn’t coming and I went to sleep. Despite the cold, I slept very well in my thermal sleeping bag. I woke up a little stiff, but my back wasn’t any worse than normal. It hadn’t been giving me trouble in weeks, in part because my weight was down and I was exercising so much more than I had in years. As to Floyd, he slept on the floor of the van and never complained.

  The next morning I drove into a local town and jogged around a park. Floyd stayed in the car. Then I cleaned myself up with a wet towel and some Purell. Afterwards I had some lunch in a little diner and took in the few local sights. By nightfall Floyd and I were waiting for Frangulyan again. He didn’t come by that night either.

  The next day, while jogging at a park, I saw a woman walking a dog at the park. From behind, she looked exactly like H – the same posture, the same walk, and the same black ponytail turned up at exactly the same place. I changed direction, going around a group of skate rats and jogged up to her. She sensed someone coming up behind and turned around, startled.

  My heart dropped a bit as I saw it wasn’t H. In fact, she didn’t look like H at all.