Fiduciary Duty

by Tim Michaels

  Dusty definitely had a different personality than I did, and I knew I would have to use him for longer than any previous character. As a result, I was careful to flesh him out as much as I could even before leaving Ohio. I had left my wedding ring at home, and I had a stud put in my ear when I flew out to Los Angeles. Still, being Dusty continuously took a bit of adjustment. For a day or two, I kept feeling for my band or putting my finger up to my ear. Dusty didn’t leave Los Angeles for Santa Barbara until the real me was completely in storage, sort of like hibernation but without the dreams. Becoming Dusty was disconcerting because none of the personas I adopted on the job had known or ever thought about H and Jeremy, and Dusty was definitely no exception. Being away from the memory of H and Jeremy for a few months was going to hurt. Still, I had no choice in the matter.

  When Dusty arrived in IV, he subleased a room in a three bedroom apartment from a former student whose parents had cut him off when he dipped below a 2.0 average. The apartment stunk of stale beer with an undertone of pot. The small balcony, on the other hand, smelled of urine and cigarettes.

  Within minutes of moving in, Dusty went to work on the female residents of the building. Unfortunately, though he was constantly hitting on just about every coed who crossed his path, his roommates and neighbors quickly realized he was never, ever successful. He wasn’t a bad-looking guy, but he carried with him a loser vibe that prevented him from, as one of his roommates put it, “closing the deal.” Still, he was popular among some of the male denizens of the apartment complex since he shared their interests, dressed the same way they did, and somehow had the funds to keep everyone in beer. It took them about a week to realize he never imbibed himself.

  “I was in AAA for a while, man,” Dusty explained, “Ten step program, you know? But at least I get to see my buddies enjoy a brew and they say that’s good too, right?”

  Dusty spent a few weeks hanging around IV and discretely following Zhou from place to place. He learned that Zhou worked all the time. Zhou usually arrived at the lab in his Porsche around 8 in the morning and he never left before nightfall. Sometimes he spent the night at the lab. On those nights he would put out a “Do Not Disturb” sign, lifted from a Ramada Inn, presumably to keep the janitorial staff from bothering him. During the day, Zhou only ventured out for lunch. His schedule scarcely varied – weekends and holidays meant nothing to him. He had no life outside of work.

  Dusty tried to befriend Zhou once or twice at Freebirds, the only off-campus spot Zhou ever went to for lunch. Zhou rebuffed all attempts at conversation courteously but efficiently. The problem wasn’t Dusty. Outside the lab, in any setting that could even remotely be viewed as social, Zhou simply avoided non-perfunctory communication. Dusty had even witnessed Zhou walking right past the head of the marine biology department without as much as a glance or a grunt in response to the latter’s effusive “Good morning, Steve!”

  Given Zhou’s habits, there were only three places I, or more likely, Dusty could get to him: on or around the campus, at his home, or on the drive between the two locations. Dusty wasn’t comfortable with taking Zhou out on the drive. It was too public and too hard to prevent potential witnesses. Besides, Zhou drove his Porsche too fast, and frankly, Dusty was a slow-moving kind of guy.

  Zhou’s home also presented problems – the high walls of the estate and the exclusive neighborhood made reconnoitering, whether by me or by Dusty, difficult. However, it was fairly obvious that the house had a good security system, including quite a few cameras located around the perimeter.

  That left UCSB as the best location to kill Zhou, and ideally, in his lab in the middle of the night when nobody else was around. And the best time would be at the end of Finals Week, just before the start of Spring Break, as most students would either have left town or would be celebrating the end of another quarter. It was always possible that Zhou himself would leave town, but that didn’t seem likely. Where would he go, after all?

  Finals week was only a couple of weeks away, and since Dusty was going to do all the preparations himself, he had to move with uncharacteristic quickness and determination. First, he found another apartment for sublease. The existing tenant was a coed at Santa Barbara City College who had been offered the opportunity to dance with a troupe on the East Coast through midyear. The apartment was a one-bedroom, close to downtown Santa Barbara, and there were no roommates. The problem was, subleasing an apartment to someone like Dusty was an iffy proposition, as Dusty seemed like the kind of guy who might leave behind a fair amount of damage. So I secured the apartment for him, in his name, by the simple expedient of a) looking like I belonged in Santa Barbara and not IV and b) paying the rent through the end of the lease in a lump sum in cash.

  Dusty left the downtown apartment mostly untouched, which meant it contained only those items the coed had left behind. The décor was certainly more girly than Dusty (or I) would have selected, but it didn’t smell of beer, pot, urine or cigarettes. It didn’t matter much, though, because Dusty wouldn’t be spending much time there.

  He brought only one item into the apartment: a $1,500 racing bike he picked up from a bike store near the beach. It was several orders of magnitude nicer than the old beater Dusty used to ride around IV. But the bike wasn’t for Dusty, it was for me. And it was the sort of bike that wouldn’t be raising eyebrows in Santa Barbara if ridden by a forty-two year old.

  For the next few weeks, Dusty hung out in IV, bought beer for his boys, and watched the girls go by. Winter in Santa Barbara is chilly enough to require light coats, and Dusty complained sadly about the difficulty in discerning the precise shape of the women coming and going to and from campus.

  As the quarter started coming to a halt, there was one last bash of parties. To an observer, it would seem that Dusty went to just about all of them. Uncharacteristically, he bought drugs. A lot of drugs. Half a pound, in total, of acid, coke, speed and horse. LSD, cocaine, methamphetamines and heroine. He put it all in one Ziploc bag. A doctor would have told him not to sample the random mix. Heroine is a sedative, while cocaine and methamphetamines are stimulants. Mixing downers with uppers has a tendency to cause blurred vision, confusion, drowsiness and incoherence. The heart races and slows down very quickly. The LSD would throw in a psychedelic effect for added confusion, and it too messes with the user’s heart-rate. Dusty took the hypothetical doctor’s advice and left the little bag alone, opting instead to store it behind the seldom-used stove in the kitchen of the apartment he shared.

  Activity slowed to a crawl during finals week. Dusty’s ogling opportunities diminished and his usual beer buddies had become scarce. Having declined to attend class regularly, they were now trying to cram in ten week’s worth of knowledge in just a few days. Dusty, at heart a very social creature, started acting morose. It got worse once Finals week actually arrived. As the days wore on, the campus emptied out as students took their last exam and went home. By Friday, IV was like a ghost town. Ironically, it was a ghost town populated almost entirely by homeless people. Around three in the afternoon, Dusty’s last remaining beer buddy had a final, after which he was driving home to Santa Cruz.

  Dusty offered him some Chinese takeout he had ordered.

  “I ordered too much, dude,” Dusty said, “Dig in, my brother. Its good stuff, right?”

  After they finished eating, Dusty broke the news.

  “Yeah, bro, I think I’m heading out, too,” Dusty said, “No reason to stick around, ya?”

  “Where to, Dustbuster?” the student asked.

  “I dunno, dude, somewhere where there are girls,” Dusty replied, “I’ll come back in a week when the shorties return, yeah? Like those birds in Cupertino, right? Good luck with your final, OK?”

  And with that, Dusty went to pack up a few meager belongings. Then he hopped on his crummy old bike and headed off. He rode through IV until he hit a bike path at UCSB. He too
k the long way off the campus, around the lagoon and past the marine biology department. Zhou’s red Porsche was in its usual spot. Only two other cars were in the parking lot.

  From UCSB, Dusty got onto the bike path that paralleled Ward Memorial Boulevard and the beach. As Dusty pedaled, I pulled the stud out of my ear. Twenty five minutes later I arrived in Santa Barbara. None of his IV buddies would have confused us for the same person though I still had on the torn jeans and ratty army shirt Dusty was always wearing. I was lighter on my feet, faster moving, and a lot more determined.

  Chapter 4. Swimming with Sharks

  Once at the apartment downtown, I put Dusty’s beater bicycle next to the racing bike in the living room. Then I took a long shower. I would soon need complete possession of my faculties and that meant I needed all trace of Dusty out of my system. After I dried off, I changed into a new and rather expensive track suit.

  I looked at my watch. I had a few hours to kill, so I took a walk down State Street, the social heart of Santa Barbara. Music drifted onto the street from bar after restaurant after bar. The cold weather didn’t deter people from celebrating the end of the work week and the temporary absence of college students.

  I walked into a bookstore to browse. A woman leafing through books in the travel section looked like a younger version of H. She caught me staring at her. She smiled. I smiled back. My heart skipped a beat, then we both went back to browsing. A few minutes later, she left the store.

  Impulsively, I followed her out, curious. I nearly slammed into her as she stopped abruptly to check a text message.

  “Whoa, watch it,” she said.

  “Uhh, sorry” was all I could reply.

  She giggled as she recognized me from the store.

  “Are you in a hurry or something?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, “I’m John.”

  “Lisa,” she said.

  From up close she didn’t look quite as much like H. She was shorter, had more freckles, and the end of her nose had a slight upturn. But like H, she was very cute.

  We awkwardly extended our hands. She giggled again. I started to laugh.

  We talked a bit, discussing nothing at all, and then the little details of our lives that make us who we are. She was an accountant, working for a tech start-up downtown. She had grown up in Ventura, about forty minutes down the coast, and was a self-described “California girl who loves to surf, bike and hike.” She was also an animal lover, and she showed me pictures of Stan and Ollie, her two black labs. I told her I had recently been in Brazil on business, and was a consultant.

  Without discussing it, we started walking down State Street, eventually stopping in front of a sushi bar which she said was her favorite in town. Neither of us had eaten dinner, so we sat at the bar where we could eat our food and watch the chef at work. We split a couple bowls of Miso soup, a seaweed salad, some edamame, a spider roll, and an assortment of sushi. It wasn’t the best sushi in the world, but it is hard to ruin a seaweed salad and the spider roll was pretty good.

  We talked about her family. She had an older brother in the Bay Area, and her parents still lived in Ventura.

  “They’ve been married for thirty seven years,” she said.

  I told her I was a widower, that my wife and son had died in an accident.

  “I am so sorry,” she said, reaching out to put her hand on mine.

  I looked at her big brown eyes and the freckles on her nose. I could fall in love with this woman. I was already doing it. And then I realized that I still had a job to do. And Lisa, she was wonderful, but she wasn’t H and I was still a married man, even if I had left my ring back in Canton.

  “I can’t do this,” I said, “I’m sorry.”

  I got up, handed the waiter a hundred dollars, and walked out without looking back.

  I walked back to the apartment, slightly depressed. Once there, I filled a backpack with the items I was going to need. The first item I put in it was a second track suit, this one several sizes too large, half a dozen hand towels, a ski mask, and a two-foot long lead pipe. The pipe had been salvaged from a house that had been torn down, no doubt to be replaced by yet another McMansion. I also brought Pedro’s red bandana, and the empty cartons of Chinese food that Dusty had eaten earlier in the day, neatly folded. Then I grabbed the newer of the two bikes and headed out the door.

  The end of finals week meant the bike path to UCSB was empty on this Friday night. Ward Memorial, the road the bike path mostly paralleled, was also just about free of cars. When I was halfway to campus, I pulled over behind some bushes and removed the items I had packed from the backpack. I put the second track suit on over the one I was already wearing and stuffed hand towels underneath it, between the two layers of clothes. Then I slipped on the ski mask. It was cold enough, next to the Pacific Ocean on a late winter night, that the ski mask wouldn’t be completely conspicuous, particularly in the dark. To complete the disguise, I stuffed the cheeks of the ski mask with a couple of wash cloths. Finally, and very carefully, I slid the two foot length of pipe between my track suit and my spine. It would hide the pipe, this evening’s backup weapon of choice, while changing my posture and the way I moved. The most important tools for the evening were a Ziploc bag full of powder in my pocket and a couple of empty boxes of Chinese takeout, collapsed and stored under my tracksuit.

  I wasn’t particularly concerned about running into people who knew Dusty. Odds were that nobody would be around anyway. However, there were security cameras on campus and I didn’t want to be identifiable on tape after the fact. The measures I had taken completely disguised my body shape, making me look like someone much bigger and stockier. Once I was satisfied, I stashed my backpack and resumed the ride to the university. The bulky disguise made it an uncomfortable ride, which is a real pity, because Santa Barbara on a quiet moonlit evening is almost as pretty as Rio. Well, not really, but Santa Barbara is still very nice.

  Once on campus, I rode straight to the marine biology department. For a moment I held my breath, but Zhou’s Porsche was still in the lot. The rest of the parking lot was empty.

  I locked my bike on a rack and walked – carefully, so as not to dislodge the pipe in my back – into the Marine Biology building. The entire place felt empty but Zhou had to be there. I was just hoping not to run into the janitorial staff.

  Once in the building, I walked straight to the student lounge on the second floor. I had been in the room before, and I knew the vending machine sold packages of ramen and of shrimp with rice. With gloves on my hands, I bought a package of each, popped them in the microwave, and then put them into the little takeout boxes that Dusty had ordered earlier in the day. I mixed in some soy sauce and fair sample from the baggie of powder that Dusty had assembled.

  Once at the door to Zhou’s lab, I took off the ski mask, slid the pipe out of my track suit and put it next to the door. I slipped on Pedro’s red bandana. With his hands still in gloves, Pedro opened the door and walked in.

  The lab contained several small tanks and one larger one at the far end. Zhou was next to the larger one, writing something on a notebook.

  “Low mein and shrimp weeth rice,” Pedro said. His English was clearly not very good. It was doubtful that Zhou would notice a difference between Pedro’s strong Argentine accent and the Central American accent ubiquitous among delivery people in Southern California.

  “I didn’t order takeout,” Zhou said without looking up.

  “Nobody else left in building, so nobody else order eet needer,” Pedro said, “And my boss, he not let me come back without money.”

  “I said I didn’t order it,” Zhou said. He looked up, but if he noticed anything funny about Pedro’s attire, it didn’t register on his face.

  “My boss, he not let me come back without money,” Pedro repeated, this time angry.

  Ba
rely glancing up, Zhou said, “I didn’t order it. Please leave now.”

  “You eet already? Ees good food. Low mein and shrimp weeth rice,” Pedro said.

  Zhou thought about it. By the look on his face, it appeared Pedro was making inroads.

  “Joo have to eat,” Pedro said, almost pleading, “Ees good food.”

  That cogent argument apparently won Zhou over.

  “OK, I’ll take it,” Zhou said.

  Pedro grinned from ear to ear.

  Zhou fished around in his pocket and handed over a $20 bill. Pedro gave him the food, and then counted out Zhou’s change. Zhou put the change in his pocket, oblivious to Pedro’s hand, extended in expectation of a tip.

  Pedro shrugged and walked out, muttering under his breath as he closed the door behind him.

  I slipped off the bandana and waited in the darkened hallway. I could see Zhou’s silhouette through the frosted glass on the door. He was still writing. After a moment, his silhouette reached for the shadow of a take-out box and started to eat. A few minutes later, he shook a few times and then started rocking back and forth. I waited a few more minutes, eye on the frosted glass, ready to move quickly if Zhou started making too much noise or looked like he was calling for help on the phone.

  When his moaning just became audible through the door, I stepped inside, pipe in hand. I locked the door behind me. Zhou was bent over, as if ready to vomit. He was still shaking.

  The big tank next to Zhou contained half a dozen four-foot sand sharks. The sand sharks wouldn’t eat Zhou, but they might take a few bites. That and the saltwater could only make it harder for authorities to piece together exactly what happened. Using the tip of the pipe, I shoved Zhou face first into the water. He shook as his body tried to take in oxygen. I put the pipe between his shoulder blades and pushed him down. His convulsions increased as he fought for a breath. It took about thirty seconds for the first shark to tentatively nudge him. By then Zhou was no longer moving.