There’s security video footage from the club that shows Faith leaving the club alone. That’s the last time anyone knows her whereabouts until she…until she…”
Ninh started to sob.
I got up out of my chair and put my hand on his shoulder.
Then Maria started to sob too. I stood between them with one hand on each of their shoulders for a while.
“I don’t know that there’s anything else to say,” Ninh wheezed as he tried to compose himself.
“Has Christine been interviewed?” I asked.
Ninh nodded and sighed.
“Do you want to see Faith’s room?” Maria asked suddenly.
“Yes, very much,” I nodded.
Maria and Ninh led me up a flight of stairs to an attic type space with a sharp A shape. Tigger lined the walls. A single bed with a pink bedspread sat in the middle of the room. It was waiting for a girl that would never return.
Maria brought me samples of Faith’s school assignments and picture after picture. Maria insisted that Faith was a great artist. She did appear to have a real talent for drawing realistic frogs and people. Still they lacked a vitality. The eyes seemed lifeless in the people that she drew which made the figures eerie, even ominous. They looked like the real living dead. They made the gray, bleeding, brain eating zombies seem even more fake.
Faith got high grades in all of her classes. There were few red marks on any of her papers.
Maria told me that Faith loved math and people. So she wanted to be a math teacher.
Maria broke down at that point for a while.
So I studied the pictures of Faith. I was surprised to see how much Faith looked like me when I was that age.
Eventually, Faith’s sister, Hope, came home. I was glad that I waited.
Hope had gotten one strange text message from Faith. That message arrived just a half hour before Faith’s mysterious death.
This was the message: “RTEFGIBNALSD CQAPBP”
“What do you make of it?” I asked Hope.
“I think that either she butt texted me or she was already…under the influence,” Hope’s lip quivered.
Hope stood there. She was tall, thin, olive skinned. Her eyes were black and alert. Her head was as round as a basketball. She hardly resembled her sister. She hardly resembled the woman I had watched stagger onto that bridge over and over again. But the eyes were the same. And there was a tear clinging to her eyelashes.
It was emotional.
I said my goodbyes. I pleaded that they pass on any updates to me that they might receive. They promised that they would. We all hugged.
I waved and waved goodbye as I started my walk back to the bus stop with left over chorizo taco meat, tortillas, and a container of pho in a plastic bag.
5
Club Canoodle! That was the place.
I had read everything that I could find on Faith’s mysterious death. Still the name of the club was news to me.
News articles had reported the story very carefully. There were dozens of references to a “downtown Minneapolis nightclub” and so forth. But I had failed to find an article that gave the name of the actual club.
I had a thread to pull on.
I went home. First, I went for a run. Then I fired up my laptop.
The first thing that I learned was that Club Canoodle had closed shortly after Faith’s semi-suicide. But that was just the beginning of the story.
Club Canoodle was a real liars den where everybody was stealing from everybody.
Club Canoodle first opened its doors in 2011. It was a venture by three partners who had known each other since high school.
The club was immediately successful. The owners of Club Canoodle expanded into restaurant and bar concepts launching a gastropub in the Longfellow neighborhood of South Minneapolis. They launched a similar gastropub just over the river in the Highland Park neighborhood of St. Paul.
By 2016, the money was still rolling in. One of the partners served as the accountant. He was recorded without his knowledge saying that he felt like he was the only smart person involved in the business and he deserved a “hell of a lot more” than one third of the take.
So that accountant partner decided to help himself to more than one third of the take. He effectively started stealing from his partners.
At first he stole a modest amount. He upped his take to perhaps only thirty-five to forty percent of the total.
His partners noticed the slight dip in what they were making, but the thieving accountant attributed it to the higher cost of the new menus at the gastropub. Incidentally, that supports the accountant’s contention that he was the only smart one in the partnership. The new menu at the gastropub had replaced some of the menu items with the highest product costs with more economical offerings. In other words, the cost of food at the gastropub was obviously going down and not up. The partners should have had more money rolling in, not less.
So the accountant got bolder. By the end of 2017, he had upped his take to somewhere around fifty percent of the total.
One of his partners finally suspected that something fishy was going on. He tried to talk the other partner into a formal audit of their accounting by someone outside of the company.
I imagine the conversation went something like this:
Partner 1: I don’t get it. When I go to visit our nightclub and gastropubs they are always busy. Everyone from the bartender to the lowest bus boy reports that we are doing a lot of sales. We are more popular now than when we started. Yet, somehow, we’re making less money.
Partner 2: Well the cost of everything has gone up too. We’re paying our managers more in salary…
Partner 1: But those things have gone up by like three to five percent. Plus, our prices have gone up. And I’m taking home about ten percent less.
Partner 2: Taxes have gone up…
Partner 1: Why don’t we just have an accounting firm do an audit?
Partner 2: I trust Partner 3. We’ve known each other forever. We’re best friends.
Partner 1: Yes, but I’m not saying that he’s the reason our take is smaller. Maybe he’s failing to catch our managers stealing from us or something.
Partner 2: I just really don’t think that we need an audit. We’ve still got plenty of money coming in.
After a conversation that went roughly like that, the partner who was against an audit told his accountant partner that the other partner had suspicions that something was wrong money wise. Of course the thieving accountant denied it.
At that point, he could have walked away from the theft. He could’ve started to disburse the money evenly again, or at least more evenly.
That’s not what he did.
Instead the thieving accountant approached the partner who finally suspected that something was amiss with the bookkeeping. The thief had a simple offer. It was a criminal conspiracy.
The accountant promised to divert forty percent of the proceeds to both himself and the inquisitive partner. That would leave just twenty percent for the remaining partner. But he was likely described as an idiot who would never know.
Almost immediately, the accountant changed the arrangement without notifying his conspiring partner. Rather than a forty-forty-twenty split, the accountant decided that he would actually do a forty-five-thirty five-twenty split. After all, he had built his lifestyle around fifty percent of the take. He had a considerable mortgage on a multimillion dollar home. He had put his kids into private school. And he had a mistress that he could only keep happy with expensive gifts and occasional trips to places like Paris.
That scheme backfired. The two partners may have been pretty dumb, but even the partner who had hemmed and hawed about doing an audit began to realize that something was wrong when his income was trimmed to only twenty percent of the take without his knowledge.
At that point, he approached the now conspiring partner. He shared what his take home pay had been to that partner.
It didn’t take a
lot of math to realize that the accountant partner had lied to his conspiring partner. Forty percent is two times twenty percent. The conspiring partner immediately realized that he was not making double what the lone, poor, honest partner was making.
The accountant was still stealing from him.
So the conspiring partner, probably more out of anger than guilt, went to the police and told them everything that was going on.
He was recruited to wear a wire. That’s how he got the accountant partner on tape. And they had hours of tape.
Everybody got busted. The lone, poor, “honest” partner? He had a scheme too.
He had recruited a shadowy network of bartenders and wait staff to steal money from the till. There were several of them over the years who stole around one hundred dollars every night that they worked. They got to keep fifty dollars for themselves.
Club Canoodle closed down. Almost everyone who worked there was awaiting trial.
At that point, only the cooperating partner who had plead guilty had been sentenced. He was in the Hennepin County Adult Detention Center in downtown Minneapolis serving a three hundred sixty-four day sentence.
Club Canoodle went down in figurative flames.
But there was something else that was interesting about Club Canoodle. It went out of business one month after Faith stumbled to her mysterious death on the Third Avenue Bridge.
Their corruption made me wonder if someone at Club Canoodle wasn’t involved in her death somehow. Certainly the employees that had been there had the power to overserve Faith. I believe that bartenders are prohibited from serving grossly intoxicated people, but Club Canoodle certainly didn’t seem to be obeying the law before or after Faith’s death. Plus, who would suspect a server or a bartender of slipping a roofie into a drink? Yes, as women, we take great pains to keep our drink with us, to never take a sip out of someone else’s drink, and to never set our drink down and take our eyes off of it. But I certainly haven’t surveilled the bartender every time that I’ve ordered a drink. I’ve never looked askance at a server who brought me a drink who had every opportunity to do anything from spit in it to pour dish soap in there. Certainly someone at Club Canoodle could have slipped Faith a roofie.
Who could it be? Frankly, the partners didn’t seem bright enough to have gotten away with it this long. Even the smartest one, the accountant, hadn’t thought about how simple the math would be if the other two partners talked about their respective takes after he had entered into a conspiracy with one of them.
Plus, it had to be someone who was there. Faith’s death had occurred on a Saturday night. (I guess technically Sunday morning.) What were the odds that the owners were at Club Canoodle late on a weekend night? It seemed unlikely that any of them were involved in the mysterious deaths. But an employee might have been.
So I decided that I would write a letter. The police had made the cooperating partner interview just about every shady character in the business to make their case. If there was anybody besides the police who knew what devious things the employees at Club Canoodle had been up to, it was certainly that partner, Mark Mulhorn.
Plus, it was easy to write him. I knew where he was. He was in jail. And I didn’t think that I would need to be any more specific than that when I addressed the letter. I didn’t think that the cells have postal numbers.
I decided to do a couple of things when I wrote this letter. First, I decided that I would go to the post office downtown and get a post office box. I did not want this jailbird to know my address.
Second, I decided that I would enclose a somewhat risqué photo of myself in the letter. My first thought was a swimsuit, but I didn’t know if that violated the decency rules at the jail. It might be imperative that my photo pass any kind of inspection.
So I decided to wear my shortest skirt, my most dangerous heels, and my tightest blouse. And I just hoped he was straight.
If straight, I had no doubt that he would be attracted to me. Not because I’m so pretty, but because he was in jail. And from what I’d heard even the most feminine looking guy was looking good to him right now.
I even had an idea of a specific name to ask Mark about.
When I first looked at Faith’s final text message to her sister, “RTEFGIBNALSD CQAPBP”, I had no idea where to start. I discounted the idea of it being a butt text. Because I thought that a butt text would be something more like, “RRRRRRRRT”. But I still thought that it might have been random gibberish. Not because of a butt text, but because it was typed by someone grossly under the influence.
But what if it made sense?
That was the hypothesis that I started with. I started with the idea that in some way, Faith was trying to send an understandable message to her sister. If that was the case, then what could it be?
My first guess was that the two sisters had some kind of code that they had first developed as children and still used from time to time as adults. I imagined that I might have done something like that if I had been lucky enough to have a sister instead of a brother. But who knows, maybe having a sister is just as nasty and rough in its own way.
I concluded that it couldn’t be a code though, because Hope, Faith’s sister, didn’t recognize the message and had no idea what it said.
So if it wasn’t code, what could it be? I was stumped until I looked at the keyboard on my phone. I realized that many of the letters in the text were close together. They could’ve easily been hit on accident by a woozy and grossly intoxicated woman.
When I looked at the text in this light, it seemed that what Faith was trying to say was a name. It was either Reginald Cab or Reginald Capp.
Presumably this was the man who was involved in doping her up.
That was who I had to ask Mark about. Was there an employee or a regular patron at Club Canoodle named Reginald Cab or Reginald Capp?
I certainly could have asked that question to Mark in my letter. But I didn’t want to. I wanted to see him when he answered the question. I wanted to see him even if we were separated by glass, or, worse yet, on monitors.
I wanted to see him because I learned something the other day. I learned how to be a human lie detector.
Actually, I learned how to detect lies at a better rate than chance.
Most people think that they are pretty good at knowing when someone is lying. But put them in a laboratory and have them come face to face with randomly assigned truth tellers and liars and most people perform at chance.
That’s right. You could flip a coin, bet on black in roulette, or interpret a passage in the I Ching without even seeing the liar and have just as good a chance at detecting their lie as you would if you watched them lie right in front of you.
However, there is one group of people who do better than chance, better than the I Ching at catching lies. Who are they? Teachers? Police Officers? Politicians? (Because they have so much experience lying themselves.)
All wrong.
The group that does the best at detecting lies is the Secret Service.
How do they do it? Well the exact interpretation is not available as far as I know. (Frankly it’s not something that I’ve researched.) But I do know this much. They don’t listen for a change in tone, cadence, diction, or anything like that. They don’t look to see if the person is blinking. (Take that The Velvet Underground. Villains don’t always blink their eyes.) They don’t look for an ashy or pale complexion. They don’t look for a single, prosaic bead of sweat. They don’t look at any of these things or any of the other supposed ways that people use to tell if someone is lying.
They look for microexpressions.
What are microexpressions? They are just what they sound like. They are the tiny facial expressions that most of us make when we lie. They could be a slight grimace, just a flicker of a wrinkle at the edge of the lips. Or just a very slight movement of the skin next to the eyes. It would be something like a twitch but nowhere near as dramatic.
Which microexpressions do we make wh
en we’re lying? I don’t know. I can only guess. I think that’s a recondite secret of the Secret Service.
So I just operate under the principle that any microexpression means that a person is lying. And it works. Here is my proof of concept. I took a social media quiz called Lying/Not Lying: Try for Yourself.
So I did.
I got seven right out of ten. I may not be a perfect human lie detector, but I’m better than chance.
Of course if you’re a nerd like me you know. Let’s assume that you were going to flip a fair coin. (That’s how anal mathematicians are. They even have to specify in every math book that I’ve ever seen on probability that it’s a fair coin. You know Cheatin’ Charlie is out there with his cleverly unbalanced fifty cent piece that almost always comes up heads.) When you flip a fair coin there is a fifty percent chance that it will land on heads and the same chance that it will land on tails.
But have you ever actually flipped a coin a large number of times?
Let’s say that you flip your fair coin one hundred times. What you would see is that you don’t get anything like perfectly alternating heads and tails. You get long runs. If you look at a group of ten, you might have seven heads in a row in that group.
Was my seven out of ten in lie detecting proof that I could detect lies better than chance? Or was I no better than chance even though I got seven out of ten because sometimes when we are engaged in a fifty-fifty task, we get seven out of ten just by dumb luck?
Was I really a somewhat better than chance lie detector? I chose to believe that I was.
That’s why it was so important to see Mark when I asked him questions. Plus, if I got to visit him in jail, then I could ask him all kinds of other stuff.
So I began to work on my letter. I debated over how much to reveal about myself.
Should I say that I was a journalist? A researcher?
I decided that might scare him off. My best move was probably to play a women who was interested in him. Especially with my risqué photo.
But I wasn’t interested in him. He might lie to me, but I felt that it was imperative that I did not lie to him. I was seeking his cooperation.
Bridge over Icy Water Page 5