said he had nothing to do with it, but that he might be able to arrange for the return of my things.”
“For a price?”
“Naturally.”
“How much?”
He waved that away, too. “The point is that I don’t trust myself to remain calm in the situation. I’d like to retain you to be available to retrieve my things if and when this person does call me back.”
I started to mumble a protest, but let it peter out as Windmann reached into his jacket pocket for his billfold. He extracted four bills, laying them down one at a time on my desk.
The whole set-up stunk, but I put my olfactory objections on hold as soon as I saw the color of his money. It was orange. Euros in the denomination of fifty. I’d never been bought in Euros before, it was a novelty. Times had certainly changed. The U.S. dollar was no longer the currency of coercion.
“It’s all I have at the moment,” he said. “Is it sufficient? To start with?”
I held one of them up to the window to see its watermark. Peek-a-boo. As far as I could tell, the bills were genuine.
I said, “Consider me retained. Paul.”
He smiled winningly.
“Thank you, thank you so much. I feel better already.”
Well, that made one of us. I opened my center desk drawer, swept in the bills and took out my carboned receipt pad. I started to write.
“I really don’t need a receipt,” he said.
I kept writing. “Yeh, well, I do.”
I had him sign it—his signature looked like a broken kite string—then handed him the copy and kept the original.
He stood and we shook hands.
He said, “I’ll call you as soon as I hear anything.”
He started toward my office door.
I called to him, “By the way, Paul, what kind of business are you in?”
“I don’t see how that—”
“Would it be real estate by any chance?” I was thinking back to that curtain-twitcher at Rauth Realty.
He triple-blinked and his lips curled into a half-smile lazily like worms awakened from dark soil. He said, “I’ve got my fingers in a lot of different pies, Mr. Sherwood.”
“Sounds messy.”
The smile went away. He said, “I’ll be in touch.”
After he left I changed clothes, into a pair of khakis and a dark blue Polo sport shirt. I got my last can of Coke out of the mini-fridge and sat back at my desk. I played the four new messages on my answering machine.
The first two were from Matt Chadinsky, both long messages, richly embroidered with expletives, which ate up the allotted times. Omitting all the swear words, the messages only amounted to, “Where are you? I told you to stay put.”
Yeh, easier said than done.
The third and fourth messages were both from women. None from Paul Windmann, which meant he came by and rang my bell without even calling first. His wrongness was growing by steady increments, but I was past being surprised.
But life still offered some surprises: the third message was someone who wanted to hire me.
“Good afternoon. This is Mrs. Dough. D-O-U-G-H, like bread.” She had a clear, young voice with just a twist of New England twang to it. “My husband John and I would like to discuss the possibility of hiring you. Your Yellow Pages ad says you perform background checks on potential employees. We’re new to the neighborhood and are in the process of hiring a nanny for our two-year-old daughter. We’d like to stop by this afternoon, say about three o’clock, if that’s okay. We don’t have a landline yet, but my cell phone number is…” She read off a 917 number and I wrote it down on the same sheet I’d jotted Windmann’s address on. I paused the message and called her back, got her voicemail and told Mrs. Dough three o’clock was convenient for me.
Then I played the final message.
“Hello, I am trying to connect…to contact George Rowl. I don’t…he told me he was to be seeing you this morning, but I do not heard from him since…is maybe I misunderstood. I am sorry, I will call you again.” Click.
Since it was the last message I’d received, I picked up my phone and dialed *69, but it was a number with a masked I.D. I listened to it again, a distinct accent in the woman’s voice. Sayre Rauth? No, her accent was barely noticeable. This woman’s was thick, nearly as thick as that mustached goon’s had been—or the woman Paul Windmann described to me as the one who robbed him.
But I wasn’t any linguist, it could’ve been anything from Croatian to Ukrainian to Turkish, for all I knew.
That was the problem, what I didn’t know outweighed what I knew ten to one.
Time to remedy that and get the odds on my side.
Just for a change.
Chapter Eight: KNUCKLING DOWN
I powered up my laptop computer, unplugged my phone, and switched the line over to my modem. I logged onto the Internet and brought up a search engine.
I started by searching on some of the names I’d come across so far. I began with Sayre Rauth.
Nothing.
I next tried Rauth Realty in Manhattan.
Again nothing.
I tried words at random, typing in “spinach manifold,” and got six hits. So the search engines were working, if not properly, at least to form.
Next I typed in, “Paul Windmann.” I got several results, but none that were relevant. Most of them pertained to a Water Board commissioner in Melbourne, Australia. There was even a picture of the guy, a dark-complexioned man in his late fifties.
I was beginning to feel like I was wasting my time, so I typed in a name I knew would at least get me some direct results. Law Addison.
This time I got thousands of hits, which presented the new problem of too much information—
Lawrence Addison, age 39…born in Taunton, Massachusetts…attended Boston University… worked in now- defunct Boston-based brokerage firm as a financial analyst before starting Isolde Enterprises, a financial management firm based in Manhattan…a roster of A-list celebrities as clients, supporting his intoxicating international lifestyle…“Stockbrokerage is as much an art as painting a picture or writing a sonnet,” said Addison in a recent…adhering to a conservative investment strategy… $100,000 on corporate credit cards for airline tickets… trips to Rome, Switzerland, Bahamas… $80,000 sky-blue Mercedes-Benz… avid opera buff…$20,000 donation to Lincoln Center Performing Arts… web of fraud… over 100 wrongfully endorsed checks from client accounts… unapproved transfers… deposited funds in Isolde’s corporate bank accounts… mingling personal expenses and the firm’s operating costs… managed 250 portfolios… assets with a market value of over $2 billion… among those who trusted Addison with millions… star-studded clientele included Oscar winners, rock musicians… allegedly paid complaining clients with funds siphoned from other clients’ accounts… were said to be held in escrow, trust, or sub accounts, but Isolde had no escrow, trust, or sub accounts… Ponzi-type scheme… Manhattan federal grand jury indictment… separate civil action brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission… forensic accounting probe revealed… MONEY GURU TO THE STARS ARRESTED… faces up to 20 years in prison on three federal counts
