Wade in the water

It’s something that Lars told me the first time when he commanded me in Viet Nam. Then he told me the second time when he trained me in Seattle twenty years later. If he saw me tonight, he’d tell me again. “If you open the flood gates, you’ve got to be ready to wade in the water.”

Without Maizie to wake me up this morning, I slept in. It must have been at least 7:00 when I got out of bed and started putting myself together until I resembled an upright walking male homo sapiens. By the time I’d managed the task, I could see Riley on the front walk talking to Mrs. Prior as the latter loaded Maizie into her car for Maizie Day. Once every two weeks, Mrs. Prior takes Maizie to the spa to have her nails done and get a shampoo. I used to do it myself, but Mrs. Prior says that Maizie loves to get pretty at the spa.

She’s a guard dog, damn it! Pink ribbons ruin the whole effect.

I went downstairs before Riley could push the doorbell and got in her car for the ride to the office. Riley often swaps days when she has class or an advisor meeting with Lars. I really wouldn’t mind if she just took the time off, but she’s got a work ethic that is uncompromising (unless there is a video game that just has to be tried at the office). I told her from the beginning that I’d pay her while she was in school or working on her thesis. But today I was thankful that she was making up the time from yesterday’s visit to Lars.

“It’s approved,” she yelled, dancing in her seat. “Lars says it is a good thesis and the evidence is well and carefully planned out. It’s a good thing, too, since I’ve got over half of it written. Another month and I’ll be able to finish this. In January it should be all edited and ready to submit to committee.”

“I’m really proud of you, Riley,” I said. “You’ve worked hard for this and you deserve to get your degree. I hope you’ll be able to put some time in on this case, though. It’s going to take two of us to solve this. The information may be on the laptop, but I’m betting that there is a shortcut that we can follow as well. It would be just like Simon to use the laptop as bait without really having the clues on it.”

“I’m ready to work today. I had enough of academia and research the past two days. What’s next?” she asked.

“Well,…” I hesitated. I’d never sent Riley out on this particular type of assignment before. I’d asked her to keep an eye on someone and given her a couple of interviews to do, but this was going to require a lot more of her than she expected.

“You’re not sending me to the library again, are you, Dag?” she moaned to me. I laughed. Okay, she wants field work.

“No, Sweetcheeks. No library for you today,” I laughed. “I want you to have lunch with someone. We need information about the place she works and the people she works for.”

“Sure. What’s the scoop?”

I told her in detail what I’d learned last night without including what I’d been doing to get the information. I filled her in on the whole scenario and the identity that I’d used, the cover story, and what I wanted her to interview Cinnamon about.

“Let me get this straight,” she said at last. “You want me to meet this stripper, pretend to be your west coast girlfriend… Wait, do I know you are married to a woman on the East Coast? Okay, so it’s an amicable arrangement. I’m used to sharing you around. So I pretend to be interested in going to work where she does so I’ll have something to do while you are out east. Do I have a job or am I simply a kept woman? I find out how she got the job, who hires, who owns the place, and what she knows about the Missing Man. Maybe get her to introduce me to Angel if I can.” Riley paused.

“Yes, but there is one other thing that I want you to be sure of,” I said. “Don’t make any arrangements for a threesome.”

Riley turned in her seat as she pulled up in front of the audience and stared at me. Then she shocked me again.

“Believe me, Sweetcheeks,” she threw back at me, “if I thought there was any chance, I wouldn’t be sharing.”

“Just bring back the info and pick me up at the Swedish American Center at 8:00 tonight. I’m going back in and trying to get to Angel.”

“Well, this will be fun,” she said as I handed her two hundred dollars. “But just one other thing.” I paused half out of the car and turned back to her. “Was she good?” she asked with a raised eyebrow.

“No personal sniffing, Riley,” I said with a wink. Then I sent her on her way.

I spent the day, or until 2:00, digging into more of Simon’s financial statements. It suddenly occurred to me to check the disk for fuzzed files. File fuzzing is one of the easiest ways to conceal information on your hard drive. Frankly, I use it myself. I figure that if my computer was in the hands of someone with my talents, my secrets wouldn’t be safe for long regardless of what I did. But my worry isn’t about people with my talents. They don’t even know I exist. It’s people who I work for who would be likely to think that they could walk off with my computer and have all the information on my clients that they want. For them, file fuzzing is as effective as any means of protecting unencrypted data.

It’s a pretty simple technique. You change the file extension. First off, my own preference is to put information in an image file so that the text is bit-mapped. That way no search engine can discover the file by searching for likely words in the file. After I’ve got an image, let’s say a JPEG file, I change the extension. The most common would be to change it to a .doc file, but pretty much any application would do. I tend to conceal mine as .dll because no one attempts to open those since they are system files. Regardless, if you try to open the file, you get a message back that says it is not a valid .doc file. It looks like it’s been damaged.

The truth is, however, that most applications leave a code in the hash that identifies the file type. So I have a program that examines every file on the computer to see if the file type in the hash matches the extension. If they don’t match, I’ve got a fuzzed file. I also know what to open it with. The process of examining every file, however, is a lengthy one. I set it up to run while I was gone and figured I’d pick it up on Sunday.

Then I took a taxi to the Swedish American club in Ballard.

Even though they never allowed me to speak Swedish or to hear them speak it, my mother and father were very firm about keeping in touch with other Swedes. I started coming to the Swedish American club in the fifties and except for a few years when I was in my twenties and knew better, I’ve been coming back for special occasions ever since. In the past couple of years I find that I’m coming back more and more frequently. These are the people who make me feel like family.

Saturday afternoon I play cribbage with all comers and drink water since I can’t take any more of the dark, highly caffeinated Swedish coffee. There is always a Saturday evening social dinner where the families all bring what they can to share. My stop at the grocery for knäckebröd and herrings each week is winked at and deemed an acceptable contribution. Surprisingly, it seems to always be eaten.

Today, my presence at the social was an attempt to fill the time before I could get on with the evening’s investigation. Even though I was going to the Condo on official business, I couldn’t help but feel squeamish about people possibly finding out that I had been and was going back to such a place. All these kind mother substitutes that I surround myself with on Saturday afternoons would be shocked and never speak to me again. I lasted the evening and walked out of the club at 8:00 when I saw Riley’s car pull up in front. She often comes in, but this time she stayed in the car and I worried that things had gone poorly and she was upset with me for sending her to interview Cinnamon.

When I got in the car I was shocked with what I saw.

It was only her car that convinced me that it was Riley sitting in the seat next to me. She wore a straight black wig with bangs cut straight across her eyebrows. The plunging neckline on her silk blouse drew the eye downward to the skin-tight shiny black pants she was wearing. Over this was a waist-length jacket with three-quarter length sleeves. Her makeup accented her eyes and lips. She could easily have been one of the women I saw at the Condo last night. I was staring, I confess.

“You told her my name was Debbie?” she growled at me. “Debbie?”

“Well, you look like a Debbie today. Or a Barbie,” I chuckled. If there was one thing I learned early on, you don’t call Deb Riley “Debbie.” I’m not really sure what came over me when I had to give Cinnamon a name so she would know who was calling. But she looked like a Debbie all right.

“I hope you enjoy the threesome, then,” Riley smirked.

“You didn’t!” I was truly horrified.

“I’m joking, Dag. Don’t make me explain.” Touché! I was definitely being a bit paranoid about this whole part of the job.

“Don’t you think you took the get-up a little far? You don’t actually have to go to work there. I just wanted you to interview the hostess.”

“I needed to look like I could go to work there. She invited me to go interview with Mr. B and Mr. S. Now does that sound fishy or what? Interview with BS.”

“Don’t get carried away. Drop me off at the Condo and go home and clean up. This outfit gives me the willies,” I said. I’m not sure that is what it was giving me, but it wasn’t right for Riley. “I’ll be finished by 11:00. Swing by and pick me up then.” I concluded. One of Riley’s jobs is schlepping me around. It’s a matter of necessity. I can’t walk as far as I used to and driving for me is a real pain. But I didn’t want her to feel like she was just a chauffeur. “Uh, it’s Saturday night. When I finish interviewing Angel, I’ll take you for a burger at Dick’s if you are all cleaned up. We’ll want to talk about what we’ve both found out. Okay partner?”

She turned toward me and fluttered her eyelids. “You sure you want me to change?” she asked coyly. “You could bring Cinnamon along if you want to. I wouldn’t mind.”

“You are an evil woman, Deb Riley. Behave,” I laughed.

Getting into the condo was a less mentally harrowing experience than it was last night. I knew how it worked and what I was looking for. Those areas that I didn’t know, I didn’t want to find out.

Cinnamon was engaged with another “friend” for which I was silently thankful. Over all, there were more men at the Condo which I suppose seemed logical since it was Saturday night. But they were not all engaged with young women. There were card games at a couple of poker tables and two or three small groups talking intently. There was even one group watching a ball game on a widescreen TV in the Den.

I didn’t know exactly how to progress, but I knew that somewhere along the line someone would ask me who I’d like to spend time with. I joined a bridge game forming up before I realized the stakes. At a hundred dollars a point, I was thankful that I partnered with an ace player who pulled my ass out of the fire with three straight wins. I walked away from the table with an extra $1000 that they pulled out of their wallets and started motioning for girls to come join us. As I slipped away from the group, Cinnamon came up to me and pulled my arm.

“Over here,” she said. “I know you want to meet Angel, but if she’s not your type, you just raise an eyebrow at me and I’ll come and rescue you.” She pulled me across to a game room in which several young women were playing pool with two older men “helping” them with their shots. There was a great deal of wiggling and giggling going on. Sitting on a stool with a glass of wine and a sour look on her face, it was evident that she at least was not having fun. Before we got around the table to approach, Cinnamon whispered in my ear. “I liked your girlfriend a lot. I’m sure we could all three have a lot of fun together. Don’t throw away my phone number.” Then we were next to Angel and Cinnamon was bubbling.

“Angel sweety, I want to introduce you to Jeremy. He’s quiet and shy, but really nice.” Angel groaned almost audibly and Cinnamon dropped her voice. “He’s also a friend of a friend of yours. You might have a lot in common.” Angel’s attention sharpened and focused at those words. “Well, toodles!” And then Cinnamon was off around the table to coach another girl on what shot to make.

“Hi Angel,” I said. “Can we sit and talk for a while?”

“I don’t know, QuietandShy. Maybe we should go someplace where we can lock a door behind us. What did you want to talk about?” She might have been angry or depressed a minute ago, but she was every bit a professional when she took my arm and smiled. She led me out of the game room. At 6’2”, there are not too many women that look me in the eye, but when Angel stood up, she faced me eye to eye. I estimated between three and four inches of her height were the spikes she wore on her heels, But that still left her nearly six feet tall. She was artificially blonde, and if I’d learned anything in my two evenings in the Condo, other parts of her were artificially enhanced as well. Her face was so perfect that I guessed she’d had a nose job at one point, too. When we crossed the room together conversations paused as people watched.

“I’m looking for Simon.”

The expressions washed across her face like water, one after another. But the one I caught most was fear. Her eyes darted around the room and she scarcely forced herself to keep from looking at the overhead security camera concealed in a casino-like bubble.

“Shhhh.” She said placing a finger on my lips and letting a smile fill her face as if I’d made a perfectly naughty suggestion. “Not here. Let’s get our coats.” She ushered me to the door and we retrieved our coats. “Mr. Jeremy wants to take me dancing at the Color Box, Davey. We’ll be back in a couple hours,” she said to a burly security man who stood in front of the elevator. He looked angry, but held his tongue as he stared at me before stepping aside to allow us to enter the elevator.

We didn’t speak until we were out the massive front doors of the Condo building.

“There’s an all-night coffee shop two blocks from here on Olive,” I offered. “Unless you were serious about going dancing at the Color Box.”

“The coffee shop will be just fine,” she answered. “I just don’t want to talk about Simon up there. You can’t tell who is listening.”

I’d forgotten that the designated coffee shop was uphill from the Condo, so I was unable to carry much of a conversation while we walked. Angel was polite and concerned, but not much help. It was frankly all she could do to make the climb in those ridiculous shoes. Once there, however, we settled into a pair of chairs next to the window and sipped our beverages. Then she launched in before I was able to start.

“Where is he?” she began. “He was supposed to call me Monday with instructions on where and when to meet him. And nothing. Nothing all week. I’ve been worried sick.”

“I was hoping you would be able to help me on that front, Angel,” I said. “I’m looking for him, but this is as fresh a trail as I could find.”

“Why do you want to find him?” she asked, suddenly defensive.

“Because he asked me to find him,” I answered. “It’s an old game we used to play called Simon says. I got a note along with his laptop computer that said, ‘Simon says Find me.’ If I can, that is exactly what I’ll do. When did you last see him?” Angel visibly relaxed. If Simon says, then it must be okay. That’s the way it has been for as long as I can remember.

“He spent part of the night with me on Wednesday. He had to leave and go home to his bitchy wife half way through the night. He was going to fly to Singapore on Thursday and then he’d send me instructions on where to meet him. Since then nothing.”

“Are you his mistress?” I don’t know any way to ask these questions subtly.

“I’m his soul-mate, his inspiration, his conscience, and his guardian angel,” she said.

“Sounds like a tall order.”

“I’m a tall woman. Or didn’t you notice? You’re pretty tall yourself.”

“Not many women can look me straight in the eye, I confess,” I said. She really didn’t answer my question. I was going to have to figure another way to ask it.

“Yes, I’m his mistress,” she supplied bluntly, catching me off-guard. “I hate the word. It does absolutely nothing to describe our relationship. “I rescued Simon at a time of moral crisis,” she continued. “He didn’t know what to do and I helped him.”

“With sex?” I asked. “That’s always an effective resolution to a moral crisis.” Okay, I was being a little judgmental.

“You’ve got a lot of prejudice and bitterness locked up inside, don’t you?” she said flatly. My cheeks were stinging as if she’d slapped me. And I’d have deserved it. “Simon discovered that a lot of his wealth was not particularly legitimate. His partner isn’t honest.”

“And you believe Simon is?” I asked.

“Simon has made his share of mistakes,” she answered, “but down deep he is a man with a conscience and sincere regret for his past indiscretions. I simply had to help him see a way to make amends.”

“It sounds like you’ve been very busy. How long has this been going on?”

“About six months.”

“And how is Simon making amends?”

“We’ve researched hundreds of charities over the past few months and Simon is getting ready to transfer all his wealth to good causes.”

I was frankly stunned. For all the world I could not imagine Simon giving anything away. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. The Simon I knew in college was altruistic to a fault. But by the time we graduated that idealist was a bad memory. The Simon that had always been in my peripheral vision had only one goal in mind: to dominate the world one dollar at a time.

“So Simon wants to give away all his money?”

“Well, not exactly all of it,” Angel said. “He can’t let the bitch wife die in poverty can he? And we’ll need a little to live on. But you can’t imagine how much there is to give away. We can make a real difference.”

Angel had a genuine fervor. I softened my judgment of her and began to think that perhaps there was more to Simon than I’d given him credit for. Maybe that was why he’d left the message for me. But I’d found nothing yet that indicated the kind of wealth that Angel was referring to. Wealth, yes, but not the kind that would allow you to endow several charities and still have enough to keep Brenda from living in poverty. From the look of it, I’d had to guess that Angel wasn’t exactly low maintenance.

“Is there any reason that you can think of that Simon would disappear?” I asked.

“Well, yeah,” she sang at me with that unique tonality that reminds you of a teenager. “His partner, his wife, the mob, and god knows who else. Jeremy please find Simon for me.” A tear collected in her eye and she dabbed it away before it could run her mascara.

“I’ll do my best, Angel,” I said. I gave her one of the cards I’d had printed up with Jeremy’s name on it and my newly purchased cell number. “Just give me a call if you hear anything will you?”

“If Simon says it’s okay, then I’ll call,” she answered. “And if I hear anything from my clients, I’ll let you know, too.” We got up and left the coffee shop to walk back to the Condo. It was nearly 11:00, just in time. She slipped her hand through my arm and I wasn’t sure if she was just being companionly or if she was actually thinking she could support me as we headed back down the hill.

“You mentioned clients. Do you have any other jobs besides the work you do at the Condo?” I asked.

“I’m a travel agent,” she laughed. She pulled up closer to me and whispered in my ear. “I could take you around the world. For a price.” I was stunned to silence by the implied offer. We’d no more than hit the curb when a late model sports car pulled up to the curb and Davey the doorman jumped out.

“We’re not doing this again,” he yelled at Angel.

“Davey, it’s okay,” she started.

“It’s not okay. Get in the damn car.”

“Hey!” I said stepping up to Davey. Angel was obediently getting into the car. “Just back off and leave the lady alone.” He turned on me with a snarl.

“The lady is my business,” he yelled in my face. “And you better keep away from her if you know what’s good for you.”

“Don’t make threats at me, champ,” I answered pulling up to my full and most intimidating height. He didn’t answer. He just hauled off and slugged me. Hard. In the face.

I heard the car squeal away from the curb as I hit the pavement.