'Blends right in,' Vinnie said.
'And you think Hawk is somewhere behind him?'
'Yep.'
'And after this man eventually stops following us and goes home, Hawk will follow him there and find out who he is?'
'Yep.'
'What if Hawk loses sight of him or something?'
I n the backseat, Vinnie laughed.
A dele turned and looked back at him.
'Well, it's certainly possible, isn't it?'
'No,' Vinnie said, 'it ain't.'
51
K energy provided us what they called a liaison executive, a slightly overweight, currently blond woman in a dark blue suit named Edith, and put us all into a vacant office. I knew how it came to be vacant. It was Gavin's. Marty had brought two helpers with him. The helpers were women, and good-looking. In the years I'd known Marty, all his helpers had been women, and all of them had been good-looking. It made me wonder sometimes about the nature of the hiring interview.
Marty commandeered the desk that used to be Gavin's. The helpers set up their laptops on a conference table that had been moved in. Marty suggested Adele pull a chair up to the desk and join him. She did. Vinnie headed for the outer office.
'No,' Adele said. 'Please, Vinnie. If you could stay.'
V innir said 'Sure' and sat at the end of the conference table and looked at nothing. Marty smiled at Adele. She smiled back.
'Tell me what you know,' Marty said.
Since my job was simply to ensure compliance, I decided to take a break from the complexities of accounting and went and sat in the outer office at one of the empty secretarial desks. I was a bit big for the armless secretarial chair I was in, but there weren't any others. I put my feet up on the secretarial desk and made do.
I was still there with my feet up and my hands laced comfortably across my stomach about ten minutes later, when Bernie Eisen came in with a couple of other suits he didn't identify.
'What the hell is going on here,' Eisen said to me.
'Audit,' I said.
'Audit?' Bernie said. 'An audit? Whose audit? Who's auditing us.'
'Me.'
'You? You? You can't audit us.'
I didn't hear a question there, so I didn't answer it. Eisen looked past me to the inner office.
'Who the hell is he?'
'Marty Siegel,' I said. 'World's greatest CPA.'
'Adele and Edith are both in there,' he said.
'True,' I said.
'For God's sake, what is Adele doing in there?'
'Talking to the world's greatest CPA,' I said.
'Get her out of there,' he said to the two suits. The two suits looked puzzled.
O ne of them, a sturdy-looking curly-haired guy who reeked of health club, said, 'Get her out?'
'Get her out,' Eisen said. 'If she won't come, goddamnit, drag her.'
The suits looked even more uncertain.
The health-club guy said, 'Bernie, we can't just drag somebody.'
The other suit was balding and tall and looked more like cycling and tennis than health club. He shook his head and kept shaking it.
'God knows what she's telling him,' Bernie said. 'I'm getting her out of there.'
'Bernie,' I said. 'See the guy at the end of the conference table? The one sort of half asleep looking at the ceiling?'
'What about him?'
'I fear that if you touch her he will shoot you.'
'Shoot?'
