yacht party; one ticket was just smarmy. And anyway, she didn’t have time to feel much of anything. She needed to get Sherman’s office rigged for sound.
It used to be that getting a surreptitious wire on someone took tremendous sleight of hand and incredible risk.
That was before cell phones.
Cell phones have two notable characteristics that make them excellent for use in clandestine operations in suburban settings: They are easily lost and entirely nonthreatening. So if you want to wire someone who wouldn’t normally be looking for such things, all you need are two cell phones, one to leave sitting open in the vicinity of the person you’re interested in and one pressed to your ear listening in.
A fully charged cell phone battery will last three days, which should be more than enough time to glean the information you desire.
Fiona opted for the fake tree sitting on top of the file cabinet just adjacent to Sherman’s desk. She noted the faux leaves were dusty, which meant it had probably been a good week, probably more, since the cleaning crew in the building had bothered to run a feather duster over the atrocity. Fiona thought that having a fake plant in Miami was a sin just as egregious as the fake tan out front. Some things just didn’t need to be replicated when the original was perfectly well and good.
A few moments later, Sherman returned holding Roberge’s file. It wasn’t terribly thick, though Fiona thought there was probably something of interest to be gleaned from having a look inside.
“His number is 534-24…” Sherman started.
“435, okay,” Fiona said. “What was next?”
“No,” Sherman said, “534.”
“534,” she said, writing while she spoke, “25, you said?”
“No,” Sherman said. He repeated it again and Fiona pretended to take it down, and then read it back to Sherman, all in the wrong order again, which seemed to frustrate poor Mr. Sherman.
When she couldn’t get the spelling of Roberge’s name down-nor his driver’s license, or his address, all information needed for the application, and so she could have one of Sam’s buddies run a background on him, provided she didn’t get everything she wanted just by asking Mr. Sherman-it appeared to Fi that Sherman was about to have a stroke.
Fiona could smell perspiration and not the healthy, clean kind, but the kind that is generated when your body goes into fight-or-flight mode. “Here,” he said, and tossed the file to Fiona. “It’s all right there on the front page. Just copy it yourself. Okay? Just copy it yourself!”
He sat back in his chair and laced his fingers on top of his head, gathered up his hair and tugged. Not a good day to be king.
Roberge’s employment file noted that he worked as security guard for the company. It also noted that he’d previously been convicted of a felony. On the line where it said, “If Yes, Please Explain” Roberge had scrawled, all in caps ASSAULT, EXTORTION, ETC. It shuddered Fiona to imagine what ETC. meant. If you put assault and extortion on an application, what aren’t you admitting? Drowning puppies?
She handed the file back to Sherman, who looked at it like it was contagious. “Job title?” Fiona said, even though she already knew. Didn’t want poor Mr. Sherman to know she’d been peeking, though it’s hardly covert activity when you do it right in front of someone; though it must have been hard for Mr. Sherman to pay attention to much of anything at that moment.
“Consultant,” Sherman said. “Security.”
Companies who hired ex-cons for security deserved all of the bad things that happened to them. Personally, Fiona thought she had a very strong work ethic and while she occasionally worked on the other side of the law, it wasn’t like she was breaking arms for drugs. Robbing a bank is a victimless crime, really. And selling guns, well, at least in America people had the right to bear arms. She was sure most people who purchased guns from her did so for perfectly reasonable purposes. And anyway, it wasn’t her commitment in question. If people needed guns, they’d get them from somewhere.
“And purpose of Mr. Roberge’s presence at the location?” Again, Sherman looked nervous, maybe on the verge of tears. “Sir, it’s required for the insurance. If we do this the right way, your insurance won’t be contacted, the police won’t press charges and everyone sleeps like little babies.”
“He was investigating a possible security breach,” Sherman said. “Look, Ms. Bowes? I can’t have this getting in the newspaper, okay? This is really sensitive. The slightest sense of impropriety and this whole race could go down the tubes. Did you see that yacht that blew up? Those are the kinds of people who want to breach security, ma’am. Mr. Roberge was sent to check out a possible negative, uh, person of interest. That’s all I can say.”
A negative person of interest. That’s all he had to say.
“All right,” Fiona said. She figured her ruse could only last so long and that if she kept hammering Sherman, he might not last much more, either. “All I need is Mr. Roberge’s signature on this form and I think we can avoid prosecution.”
“He’s not here,” Sherman said.
Of course he wasn’t. Fi suspected he was lurking about the city somewhere, however. And it would be good to know where that was. “Well, if you can fax the form back to our office by five this evening, I think that should be fine.”
“Yes, yes, fine,” he said. He stood up and Fiona decided to give the man his dignity and allow him to dictate when the meeting was over. Besides, she was eager to get to her car to hear his next conversation.
She walked back through the cubicle maze and into the foyer, where unfortunately the receptionist was back on duty and the security guard woman was now standing and looking threatening by the door, though when Fiona got near she gave her a nice smile. “Everything go well?” she asked Fi.
“Crisis averted,” she said. The guard looked saddened by this. “But I’m sure something bad will happen later.”
Unfortunately for the security guard, it turned out the bad thing wasn’t going to happen on her watch. This was made clear to Fi as she slipped her cell phone from her purse and listened in on Timothy Sherman’s conversation. He was screaming obscenities at someone, telling them they’d nearly destroyed the entire boating organization with their stupidity and that if he didn’t get a signature from him there was a good chance someone from “Catch A Predator” would be waiting for him at his shitty apartment when he got off work. He then told the man-presumably Roberge-to stay right where he was, that he was bringing the form to him.
Fi got into her car and waited for Sherman to appear, which he did a few moments later. He jumped into a matching Lexus-this one had the official seal of the race stuck to the side door, like he was a real estate agent-and pulled out of the lot.
Fi didn’t think she needed to be particularly savvy in her tail, since it was clear Sherman wasn’t looking to be followed, particularly since he was talking into a cell phone the entire time he drove and nearly sideswiped a bus and then quite nearly rammed a Miata being driven by a woman who literally had blue hair.
While paying attention to surroundings was not Sherman’s strong suit, it was Fiona’s, and when it became clear after twenty minutes of driving that she was following Sherman back to a rather familiar destination-a loft above a nightclub in a not so nice part of town-she began to realize things we’re not going to be as simple as planned. So when Sherman made his final turn down the street where the loft is, Fi just kept going, especially since she could hear an ambulance siren in the distance and saw that people were mingling on the sidewalk and looking about with their hands over their mouths. Never a good sign.
Fi parked her car around the other side of the block and walked to the mouth of the street, where another group of people were already assembling.
There was a fire engine, a Lexus and quite a bit of mess on the street. And Timothy Sherman walking towards the scene in what looked to be a rather significant state of agitation. “What happened?” Fi said to a teenage boy wearing a backwards Marlins cap.
“Man got shot,” he said. He pointed to the Lexus. “Half his head is over there on the ground.” He was so nonchalant it almost startled Fi. She looked at where the kid was pointing and sure enough, a good portion of Roberge’s head was on the pavement, along with glass and blood and brain matter. Bad day to be Rob Roberge, Fi thought. After spending some time observing the scene, she decided it would be prudent to give me a call and fill me in.
“Still not seeing the funny,” I said when she was through.
