6
She waited in the living room and watched John Felker come in and sit in the chair across the room. She picked up her telephone, listened to the dial tone, then put it back in the cradle. 'You were a policeman.' The light was behind her, so it shone over her shoulder to illuminate him and remind her that there wasn’t much time left before dark.
'Eight years. You want to know why I’m not now.'
'Yes.'
'It’s a long story.'
'What else have we got to do?' It sounded wrong, even to her. It was almost flirtatious. She tried to be businesslike. 'I’ve got time.'
'It came to me that the job just wasn’t what I pretended it was.'
'What was it?'
'You take a long, close look at all the people you’ve arrested, sometimes the easy way, sometimes the hard, with broken bones and blood and abrasions. They’re mostly the kind of person who, when you talk to him, just hasn’t got a clue.'
'A clue about what?'
'It isn’t just that they don’t know there’s a law about resisting arrest. They’re not too clear on laws like cause-and-effect and gravity. The world goes on around them and steps on them all their lives, but they don’t have any idea why, and it drives them half crazy. They don’t know why the guy next door has a new television set and they don’t. Later on in prison they get tested and they can barely read, and they’re addicted to everything, and their future is nothing.'
'You felt sorry for them?'
'Not sorry enough to stop arresting them. What happened to me was that I could see that my own future was the same as theirs. I was going to have to spend twelve more years with these people—dragging them in, because they don’t even know that much, that when they’re driving at a hundred and ten, the helicopter over their heads isn’t going to lose sight of them if they go a hundred and twenty, or that fifteen cops at their door aren’t going to give up and leave them alone, no matter how hard they fight. If you spend all your time with them, you’re just living the other half of their lives.'
'Twelve more years—that was until retirement?'
'Yeah.'
'So you quit?'
'I quit. I drew my credit-union balance and went to school. I got a C.P.A. license and went to work as an accountant at Smithson-Brownlow.'
'What’s that?'
'It’s the twelfth biggest accounting company in the country. The St. Louis office is one of seventeen.'
'Sorry, I count my own money. What happened?'
'I lasted almost five years. Then one day I was at work and I ran across a problem. I think it was an accident, but I can’t even be sure of that. Somebody may have been setting me up to see it.'
'See what?'
'One day a guy I didn’t even know, on a different floor of the building, comes in, turns on his computer, and a message on the screen says, ’Bang. You’re dead.’ Then everything that was in his hard disk rolls across the screen and disappears forever. It’s a computer virus. You know how they work, right?'
'Sure,' she said. 'You lost everything.'
'No,' he said. 'They lost everything on his machine and five or six others and the mainframe. But one of the bosses was in early, kept his head and stopped the rest of us from turning ours on. The computer company sent over a program doctor, like a detective. He managed to find out how the virus worked, and delete it from the program. It took him about two weeks. He also searched every floppy in the office and found out the virus came from a disk somebody had brought in with a computer game on it. Every disk he used that went into another computer got that computer too, and so on. Of course nobody admitted to the computer game, and they couldn’t tell whose machine was first. But mine was clean.'
'Why did yours miss out?'
'I was handling a lot of single-client personal accounts. I would enter what I was doing and pass the disk on to the woman who oversaw the mainframe, and she would feed it to the machine for the company records. She kept the disk for backup and I got a new one.' He looked tired now, his brow wrinkling a little as he remembered. 'So I took a chance. I spent the first two days of the quarantine printing out everything in my files. Every word came out. For the next day or two I looked it over for signs of the virus.'
'What did you find?'
'A lot of transactions I didn’t know about.'
'Stealing?'
'Yes. There was a pattern. There were lots of accounts where somebody had money in a portfolio— retirement funds, mostly. There would be dividends that were supposed to go for reinvestment, but instead they went to money-market accounts inside the portfolio. Then there would be a withdrawal from that account marked as an internal transfer to another account. The problem was, that one wasn’t part of the portfolio. It didn’t belong to the customer. I checked the number and it wasn’t even an account that was under the company’s control.'
'It doesn’t sound complicated enough to be the perfect crime.'
'It wasn’t. But the customer wouldn’t notice right away. His balance wouldn’t go down, it just wouldn’t go up as much as it was supposed to. If he saw a report of the transfers, he would see that dividends received were being moved from one of his own accounts to his holding account and then to another account. He would assume that was his, too. Finally, I called the money-market fund’s customer service number to get the name of the owner.'
'Wait. They’ll tell you that over the phone?'
'I was just trying to find out if it was legitimate. If it was one of our accounts, they’d tell me what I wanted to know. If they wouldn’t, I’d know it was trouble. I said, ’I’m John Felker, from Smithson-Brownlow. Can you fax me a copy of the last statement for account number 12345678?’ '
'And they did it?'
'Yes. Only not for the reason I thought. They did it because it was mine. There was almost half a million dollars in the account.'
'It was in your name?'
'Yeah. At first I was furious. It took me maybe an hour to get scared.'
'What did you have to be afraid of?'
'I started thinking. The computer virus had nothing to do with the company. It’s a random act, like a drunk throwing a beer bottle into a crowd at a ball game. This was different. Somebody who had studied the operation— my part of it, specifically—had gone through and carefully moved things around. Whoever did it had access, knew the names of clients, that kind of thing. They were doing it to me.'
'Did you go to your boss?'
'I was going to, but you have to imagine what the atmosphere was around there. They were losing money, probably clients. We were all suspects for bringing the virus in, so they were looking at us like the enemy anyway.'
'So what? They already knew about the virus. This might have been part of it—some angry ex-employee or something.'
'Right. But what if I had been stealing money? All of a sudden the virus hits and everybody in the firm starts scrutinizing all of the old records. All I could do was go to the boss and tell him the transfers on the computer were part of the joke. Only they weren’t in the computer, like the virus. The money had really been moved and deposited in my name. I decided that before I brought this up, I had better keep looking until I found out enough to prove I wasn’t a thief.'
'Why would anybody do this, anyway? If they put it in your name, it wasn’t for the money.'
'That was what my boss would have said. Then it occurred to me that the half million could have been only
