Dead Anyway (21 page)

“For the purpose of?” she asked.

“Breaking into organized crime. It’s the only path to Austin Ott.”

She took it all calmly, her face neutral, her head nodding at the right times to signal she was following the narrative.

“I knew there was something up with you,” she said.

“You’re a perceptive person.”

“But you kept coming back, even though I was suspicious.”

“I did. I knew you were a good person who wouldn’t hurt me. I’m also perceptive. At least I used to be.”

“Though I never imagined anything like this,” she said.

I booted up one of my laptops as I was telling her my story. I did a search for “Arthur and Florencia Cathcart” and set the computer in front of her so she could pick through the material. She looked up at me a few times as she read.

“You’re a lot skinnier and balder, but I see the resemblance,” she said. “Your wife was very beautiful. I can tell she was a very good person. I’m so sorry.” She read some more, then looked up at me. “What does all this mean?”

“It means I have to find the people who did this thing. And now it’s no longer my private enterprise. I’ve involved you, so there’s an even greater need to follow this through to the end.”

“What do you mean ‘this’? What is ‘this’?”

I didn’t have an answer, because I’d never had anyone but myself around to ask the question.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m figuring it out as I go along.”

“What’s wrong with going to the police? Why do you think you have to take this on by yourself?”

Another unanswerable question.

“No one will try as hard as me or care as much about the outcome. I’m dead anyway, so who’s better suited to the job?”

She frowned.

“You’re not dead. You might be a little nuts, but you’re not dead.”

“You should go visit your mother for a while. You’ll lose your job, but I’ll compensate you for your lost salary. You can be on a flight tomorrow.”

“You want to get rid of me,” she said, in a tone that belied the harshness of her words.

“I want you to be safe. I put you in this situation.”

“Enough with the guilt. Crap happens. I’m staying with you. I make $45,000 a year. Feel free to write the check. What happens next? I’m signing up.”

She got off her chair and started to clean up the kitchen, not a difficult task, since I kept it impeccably clean. I watched her for a while, then realized I was on the verge of falling asleep, the night’s frenzy having finally taken its toll. Natsumi told me to go ahead, that she’d occupy herself studying my larder and filling out a shopping list.

“This is really going to cost you, buddy,” she said. “You’ve never seen my monthly mascara tab.”

“I’ve got boxes of makeup in the other room. You can probably help me with that.”

“I can help you with a lot of things,” she said. “More than you know.”

Soon after, I was out cold, allowing mercifully little time to absorb another massive, irredeemable shift in the nature of the universe.

L
EO
D
UNLOP
survived his ersatz heart attack, to my relief, since that wasn’t a foregone conclusion, as careful as I was with the dosage. I knew he was okay because forty-eight hours after collapsing he logged back on to his computer. I didn’t bother to copy down the log-in information. It would all be there when I wanted it.

He started out by returning emails telling more or less the same story, thanking people for their concern and explaining it was probably just something he ate. He didn’t directly blame my iced coffee, which was also a relief. He noted that toxicology tests showed traces of Dobutamine, which can induce arrhythmia and angina, but no one knew how that could have gotten in his bloodstream.

He spent a long time with his correspondence, the story growing in drama with each email. Then he went to a web site that featured bikinis, with the innocuous name Sun and Fun that probably just squeaked by the corporate censors.

Eventually, his voyeuristic ardor slacked, he actually started to do some work. I was glad to see he’d been truthful about his duties at CMT&M, as the enterprise financial management system came up and he went right into accounts receivable. He was one of five billers, the work divvied up based on the size and geographical location of the customer. Fortunately, for my purposes, Leo’s customers were among the largest, and his territory was the lower Great Lakes industrial region.

He was also impressively productive once he actually got under way. His keystrokes were fast and sure, and far more precise on the first pass than mine would ever be. Probably allowed for more time with the bikinis.

As with most industrial businesses, about a third of the customers accounted for most of the sales, the other two-thirds a long tail of small, infrequent orders. Each had been vetted and approved by the comptroller’s office, and given the same credit terms, a tolerant and leisurely sixty days before interest was applied.

I left the spyware running in the background, gathering and recording all the incoming data, and searched for services that allowed you to open a small sales office, or merely create a mailbox that expressed the dignity of an actual street address. Part way down the first Google page was a site called
spacejockeys.com
that stopped me immediately. I’d seen the name before, when I was burrowing around Florencia’s personal financial file which she kept in a walled-off subaccount within the general agency system. I took a break from the current task to go back into those files to find the reference.

It was an entry in accounts payable covering the lease of five hundred square feet of office space at an address in Scottsdale, Arizona. The service gave you a discount if you paid twenty-four months in advance. The issuer of the purchase order, Florencia Cathcart, chose that option. Based on the date, the lease had six more months to go. I copied all the information into a Word document for later examination, then went back to my original endeavor.

The spacejockeys site allowed you to choose from a menu of vacancies, with specifications, and to pay with an ordinary credit card. I deployed one of my rarely used, dead guy Visas, burning up nearly the entire credit limit.

I chose Evanston, Illinois as the location, and leased a simple drop box in an outlying industrial park. I called it First General Metallurgy Associates, LLC.

Part of the spacejockeys service was logistics handling. You could have packages and mail shipped to the site, then forwarded on to another location. So I opened up another operation, this one a warehouse near Gerry’s shop in the clock factory where you could lease small storage cages.

Natsumi came in the room and looked at the screen over my shoulder.

“Do you mind?” she asked.

“Why would I deny my partner in the purchase and distribution of industrial precious metals?”

“Sounds expensive.”

“Not if you steal them.”

“Okay. Noted.”

L
EO WORKED
past closing hours, but eventually logged off. I waited another hour, then logged back in and started exploring.

The financial management system at CMT&M was nicely tied together and nearly unsecured. Leo had access to every subprogram but corporate finance and human resources, which was the barest minimum protection. It was also child’s play to get behind the reports and functional screens to the application itself, where I could make adjustments at a deeper, less noticeable level.

The first thing I did was provide First General Metallurgy Associates with the highest credit level, with notes that our Dun & Bradstreet ratings were impeccable. I backdated the entry by a year.

Then I checked the CMT&M inventory for available product and was pleased to see a nice supply of palladium, iridium and gold, all high value per troy ounce, the standard unit of measure. Heavier than hell, but still shippable.

It wasn’t hard to pack several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise into packages no bigger than a few cigar boxes.

There was a hot link directly to purchasing on the inventory page, so I went there and placed my order. The confirmation, sent to First General Metallurgy’s new email account, said the metals would be shipped the next day.

Natsumi sat with me through the whole process, transfixed.

“I never believed you could actually do things like this,” she said. “I thought it was all Hollywood baloney.”

“Hollywood doesn’t know the half of it.”

W
E WENT
out after that on an expedition to buy food, as well as clothing and other necessities Natsumi left behind. My role was to follow her around and express enthusiasm for her purchases. I’d never really done this before, since Florencia greatly preferred to shop alone, citing my poorly restrained impatience.

It wasn’t something I’d want to do every day, but I had to admit there was a certain thrill of exploit to the experience, a satisfying cycle of search and discovery. I shared this with Natsumi.

“Maybe tomorrow we’ll introduce you to another activity common to twenty-first-century civilization,” she said.

We had dinner at a pleasantly underlit restaurant connected to the shopping mall. It was late, and the place was drifting toward the end of the day. However, we felt attended to and unhurried, and slipped easily into the rhythm of our evenings out, oddly unaffected by recent tumult and revelation.

I fell asleep that night with emotions that would have once been inconceivable. And as such, too novel to bear close examination, and thus fortunately, not of an anxious and sleep-depriving nature.

C
HAPTER
17

O
ver the next few weeks we fell into a general routine. I’d get up early and run the food truck around the Hartford area, Natsumi would get up late and work on her paper until I showed up again in midafternoon. Then we’d sit together in front of my computer and she’d watch me perform a variety of tasks, including the purchase of industrial precious metals.

My goal was to get near, but just shy of $5 million worth of product before suspending operations. I wanted to stay well inside the maximum purchase limits and sixty-day aging on my account to provide leeway for future contingencies. I supported this strategy by paying for the first shipment, thus showing good faith, and buying another two weeks before anyone took note of any unpaid bills.

Once I hit my number, it was time for a field trip.

“You’ve been in too long, you need exercise, and this can’t be outsourced,” I said to Natsumi when I got home from my food truck route. “How are you at weight lifting?”

“I’m small, but game,” she said.

“Good enough.”

We drove the Outback to the spacejockeys warehouse in a drab, nearly forgotten New England industrial park. I checked the inventory of very heavy little boxes and was relieved to see it was all there. I wondered if the handlers guessed what they were handling—if any of them had taken basic chemistry in college and remembered the periodic table of the elements, where each element was ranked by mass. Which, when within the earth’s gravitational field, translated into weight.

“Oh, my God, these things are heavy,” said Natsumi, when I handed her the first box.

“The only things that pack more value in a smaller package are gemstones,” I said, “and that’s a different scam.”

It took about fifteen minutes to load the Outback, whose valiant springs took the weight remarkably well. We drove it to Gerry’s shop at the clock factory and unloaded. The springs held up better than we did.

“I hope I didn’t wreck anything in my back,” said Natsumi, after the last package was secured in a room behind Gerry’s dust collector. “I’m too young to be hobbling around.”

“I’ve been hobbling around for months now,” I said. “You get used to it.”

“You hauled more than me. I feel bad about that.”

“I don’t. I was merely hauling my share. As were you.”

“Sounds collectivist,” she said.

“Buddhist.”

I kept one bar of gold, the heaviest and most valuable of the metals by troy ounce. Then I laid out for Natsumi the next phase of the plan. To her credit, her voice carried none of the alarm I could see in her eyes.

“This sounds a little dangerous,” she said.

“It is, but only a little. I always do everything I can to stay safe. My objective is to move forward, not to perform derring-do.”

“I know. The world itself is pretty dangerous. What’s the difference?”

I explained the upcoming steps in the process, the first of which was driving to the FedEx retail outlet to send this note to Little Boy Boyanov:

Mr. Boyanov:

I have engineered a means for acquiring a large quantity of gold kilo bars that a buyer of the proper stature could obtain at a price seventy-five percent below market value. You are that buyer.

Given the sensitive nature of this transaction, I have strict requirements for how we engage.

The first meeting will entail a proof of product. I will bring a single kilo bar. You will bring the means for confirming product purity of the sample, which will be twenty-four karat. Please be careful that your test is precise. This is in your interest.

We will meet in the sauna at the Capital City Gym on Trumbull Street at ten
P
.
M
. Thursday night the twenty-sixth of this month. The gym closes at eleven, so the sauna is mostly empty at this time. Towels only, please.

I will come alone. I request you do as well. I will be carrying a gym bag. I will be able to identify you.

If you agree to the first meeting, please move the flowerpot next to your front door from the left side to the right by Wednesday the twenty-fifth.

I signed the note Auric G.

“You’re going to be essentially naked, alone with a murderous gang leader while in possession of a gold bar,” said Natsumi, summing up the situation.

“It’s hard to stow a gun under a towel,” I said. “Anyway, there’s no percentage in stealing the bar when he could get his hands on a truckload for twenty-five cents on the dollar.”

“Good point.”

I
T WAS
a little out of my way to drive the food truck down Little Boy’s street off Franklin Avenue, but I fit it in. The flowerpot moved well before the deadline, which would have been less encouraging if I’d known better what Little Boy actually had in mind.