Paranoia (2 page)

I picked up the phone and called Arnold Meacham’s office, told his assistant that I was on my way, and asked how to get there.

My throat was dry, so I stopped at the break room to get one of the formerly-free-but-now-fifty-cent sodas. The break room was all the way back in the middle of the floor near the bank of elevators, and as I walked, in a weird sort of fugue state, a couple more colleagues caught sight of me and turned away quickly, embarrassed.

I surveyed the sweaty glass case of sodas, decided against my usual Diet Pepsi—I really didn’t need more caffeine right now—and pulled out a Sprite. Just to be a rebel I didn’t leave any money in the jar. Whoa, that’ll show
them
. I popped it open and headed for the elevator.

I hated my job, truly despised it, so the thought of losing it wasn’t exactly bumming me out. On the other hand, it wasn’t as if I had a trust fund, and I sure did need the money. That was the whole point, wasn’t it? I had moved back here essentially to help with my dad’s medical care—my dad, who considered me a fuckup. In Manhattan, bartending, I made half the money but lived better. We’re talking Manhattan! Here I was living in a ratty street-level studio apartment on Pearl Street that reeked of traffic exhaust, and whose windows rattled when the trucks rumbled by at five in the morning. Granted, I was able to go out a couple of nights a week with friends, but I usually ended up dipping into my checking account’s credit line a week or so before my paycheck magically appeared on the fifteenth of the month.

Not that I was exactly busting my ass either. I coasted. I put in the minimum required hours, got in late and left early, but I got my work done. My performance review numbers weren’t so good—I was a “core contributor,” a two band, just one step up from “lowest contributor,” when you should start packing your stuff.

I got into the elevator, looked down at what I was wearing—black jeans and a gray polo shirt, sneakers—and wished I’d put on a tie.

3

When you work at a big corporation, you never know what to believe. There’s always a lot of tough, scary macho talk. They’re always telling you about “killing the competition,” putting a “stake in their heart.” They tell you to “kill or be killed,” “eat or be eaten,” to “eat their lunch” and “eat your own dog food” and “eat your young.”

You’re a software engineer or a product manager or a sales associate, but after a while you start to think that somehow you got mixed up with one of those aboriginal tribes in Papua New Guinea that wear boar’s tusks through their noses and gourds on their dicks. When the reality is that if you e-mail an off-color, politically incorrect joke to your buddy in IT, who then cc’s it to a guy a few cubicles over, you can end up locked in a sweaty HR conference room for a grueling week of Diversity Training. Filch paper clips and you get slapped with the splintered ruler of life.

Thing is, of course, I’d done something a little more serious than raiding the office-supply cabinet.

They kept me waiting in an outer office for half an hour, forty-five minutes, but it seemed longer. There was nothing to read—just
Security Management
, stuff like that. The receptionist wore her ash-blond hair in a helmet, yellow smoker’s circles under her eyes. She answered the phone, tapped away at a keyboard, glanced over at me furtively from time to time, the way you might try to catch a glimpse of a grisly car accident while you’re trying to keep your eyes on the road.

I sat there so long my confidence began to waver. That might have been the point. The monthly paycheck thing was beginning to look like a good idea. Maybe defiance wasn’t the best approach. Maybe I should eat shit. Maybe it was way past that.

Arnold Meacham didn’t get up when the receptionist brought me in. He sat behind a giant black desk that looked like polished granite. He was around forty, thin and broad, a Gumby build, with a long square head, long thin nose, no lips. Graying brown hair that was receding. He wore a double-breasted blue blazer and a blue striped tie, like the president of a yacht club. He glared at me through oversized steel aviator glasses. You could tell he was totally humorless. In a chair to the right of his desk sat a woman a few years older than me who seemed to be taking notes. His office was big and spare, lots of framed diplomas on the wall. At one end, a half-opened door let onto a darkened conference room.

“So you’re Adam Cassidy,” he said. He had a prissy, precise way of speaking. “Party down, dude?” He pressed his lips into a smirk.

Oh, God. This was not going to go well. “What can I do for you?” I said. I tried to look perplexed, concerned.

“What can you
do
for me? How about start with telling the truth?
That’s
what you can do for me.” He had the slightest trace of a Southern accent.

Generally people like me. I’m pretty good at winning them over—the pissed-off math teacher, the enterprise customer whose order is six weeks overdue, you name it. But I could see at once this wasn’t a Dale Carnegie moment. The odds of salvaging my odious job were dwindling by the second.

“Sure,” I said. “The truth about what?”

He snorted with amusement. “How about last night’s catered event?”

I paused, considered. “You’re talking about the little retirement party?” I said. I didn’t know how much they knew, since I’d been pretty careful about the money trail. I had to watch what I said. The woman with the notebook, a slight woman with frizzy red hair and big green eyes, was probably there as a witness. “It was a much-needed morale boost,” I added. “Believe me, sir, it’ll do wonders for departmental productivity.”

His lipless mouth curled. “‘Morale boost.’ Your fingerprints are all over the funding for that ‘morale boost.’”

“Funding?”

“Oh, cut the crap, Cassidy.”

“I’m not sure I’m understanding you, sir.”

“Do you think I’m
stupid
?” Six feet of fake granite between him and me and I could feel droplets of his spittle.

“I’m guessing . . . no, sir.” The trace of a smile appeared at the corner of my mouth. I couldn’t help it: pride of workmanship. Big mistake.

Meacham’s pasty face flushed. “You think it’s funny, hacking into proprietary company databases to obtain confidential disbursement numbers? You think it’s recreation, it’s
clever?
It doesn’t
count?
”

“No, sir—”

“You lying sack of shit, you
prick
, it’s no better than stealing an old lady’s purse on the fucking subway!”

I tried to look chastened, but I could see where this conversation was going and it seemed pointless.

“You stole
seventy-eight thousand dollars
from the Corporate Events account for a goddamned party for your buddies on the
loading dock?
”

I swallowed hard. Shit. Seventy-eight thousand dollars? I knew it was pretty high-end, but I had no idea how high-end.

“This guy in on it with you?”

“Who do you mean? I think maybe you’re confused about—”

“‘Jonesie’? The old guy, the name on the cake?”

“Jonesie had nothing to do with it,” I shot back.

Meacham leaned back, looking triumphant because he’d finally found a toehold.

“If you want to fire me, go ahead, but Jonesie was totally innocent.”

“Fire you?” Meacham looked as if I’d said something in Serbo-Croatian. “You think I’m talking about
firing
you? You’re a smart guy, you’re good at computers and math, you can add, right? So maybe you can add up these numbers. Embezzling funds, that gets you five years of imprisonment and a two-hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar fine. Wire fraud and mail fraud, that’s another five years in prison, but wait—if the fraud affects a financial institution—and lucky you, you fucked with our bank
and
the recipient bank, your lucky day, you little shit—that brings it up to thirty years in prison and a one-million-dollar fine. You tracking? What’s that, thirty-five years in prison? And we haven’t even got into forgery and computer crimes, gathering information in a protected computer to steal data, that’ll get you anywhere from one year to twenty years in prison and more fines. So what have we got so far, forty, fifty,
fifty-five
years in prison? You’re twenty-six now, you’ll be, let’s see,
eighty-one
when you get out.”

Now I was sweating through my polo shirt, I felt cold and clammy. My legs were trembling. “But,” I began, my voice hoarse, then cleared my throat. “Seventy-eight thousand dollars is a rounding error in a thirty-billion-dollar corporation.”

“I suggest you shut your fucking mouth,” Meacham said quietly. “We’ve consulted our lawyers, and they’re confident they can get a charge of embezzlement in a court of law. Furthermore, you were clearly in a position to do more, and we believe that was just one installment in an ongoing scheme to defraud Wyatt Telecommunications, part of a pattern of multiple withdrawals and diversions. It’s just the tip of the iceberg.” For the first time he turned to the mousy woman taking notes. “We’re off the record now.” He turned back to me. “The U.S. Attorney was a college roommate of our house counsel, Mr. Cassidy, and we have every assurance he intends to throw the book at you. Plus, the district attorney’s office, you may not have noticed, is on a whitecollar crime campaign, and they’re looking to make an example out of someone. They want a poster child, Cassidy.”

I stared at him. My headache was back. I felt a trickle of sweat run down the inside of my shirt from my armpit to my waist.

“We’ve got both the state and the feds in our corner. We’ve
got
you, pure and simple. Now it’s just a matter of how hard we’re going to hit you, how much destruction we want to do. And don’t imagine you’re going to some country club, either. Cute young guy like you, you’re going to be bent over the bunk someplace in Marion Federal Penitentiary. You’re going to come out a toothless old man. And in case you’re not current on our criminal justice system, there’s no longer any parole at the federal level. Your life just changed as of this moment. You’re fucked, pal.” He looked at the woman with the notebook. “We’re back on the record now. Let’s hear what you have to say, and you’d better make it good.”

I swallowed, but my saliva had stopped flowing. I saw flashes of white around the edges of my vision. He was dead serious.

In my high school and college years I got stopped fairly often for speeding, and I developed a reputation as a virtuoso at getting out of tickets. The trick is to make the cop feel your pain. It’s psychological warfare. That’s why they wear mirrored sunglasses, so you can’t look into their eyes while you’re pleading. They’re human beings too, even cops. I used to keep a couple of law-enforcement textbooks on the front seat and tell them I was studying to be a police officer and I sure hoped this ticket wouldn’t hurt my chances. Or I’d show them a prescription bottle and tell them I was in a rush because I needed to get mom her epilepsy medication as quickly as possible. Basically I learned that if you’re going to start, you have to go all the way; you have to totally put your heart into it.

We were way beyond salvaging my job. I couldn’t shake the image of that bunk at Marion Federal Penitentiary. I was scared shitless.

So I’m not proud of what I had to do, but you see, I had no choice. Either I reached deep inside and spun my very best tale for this security creep, or I was going to be someone’s prison bitch.

I took a deep breath. “Look,” I said, “I’m going to level with you.”

“About time.”

“Here’s the thing. Jonesie—well, Jonesie has cancer.”

Meacham smirked and leaned back in his chair, like, Entertain me.

I sighed, chewed the inside of my cheek like I was spilling something I really didn’t want to. “Pancreatic cancer. Inoperable.”

Meacham stared at me, stonefaced.

“He got the diagnosis three weeks ago. I mean, there’s nothing they can do about it—the guy’s dying. And so Jonesie, you know—well, you don’t know him, but he’s always putting on a brave front. He says to the oncologist, ‘You mean I can stop flossing?’” I gave a sad smile. “That’s Jonesie.”

The note-taking woman stopped for a moment, actually looked stricken, then went back to her notes.

Meacham licked his lips. Was I getting to him? I couldn’t really tell. I had to amp it up, really go for it.

“There’s no reason you should know any of this,” I went on. “I mean, Jonesie’s not exactly an important guy around here. He’s not a VP or anything, he’s just a loading dock guy. But he’s important to me, because . . .” I closed my eyes for a few seconds, inhaled deeply. “The thing is—I never wanted to tell anyone this, it was like our secret, but Jonesie’s my father.”

Meacham’s chair slowly came forward. Now he was paying attention.

“Different last name and all—my mom changed my name to hers when she left him like twenty years ago, took me with her. I was a kid, I didn’t know any better. But Dad, he . . .” I bit my lower lip. I had tears in my eyes now. “He kept on supporting us, worked two, sometimes three jobs. Never asked for anything. Mom didn’t want him to see me at all, but on Christmas . . .” A sharp intake of breath, almost a hiccup. “Dad came by the house every Christmas, sometimes he’d ring the doorbell for an hour out in the freezing cold before Mom let him come in. Always had a present for me, some big expensive thing he couldn’t afford. Later on, when Mom said she couldn’t afford to send me to college, not on a nurse’s salary, Dad started sending money. He—he said he wanted me to have the life he never had. Mom never gave him any respect, and she’d sort of poisoned me against him, you know? So I never even thanked the guy. I didn’t even invite him to graduation, ’cause I knew Mom wouldn’t feel comfortable with him around, but he showed up anyway, I saw him sort of hanging around, wearing some ugly old suit—I never saw him wear a suit or a tie before, he must have got it at the Salvation Army, because he really wanted to see me graduate from college, and he didn’t want to embarrass me.”

Meacham’s eyes actually seemed to be getting moist. The woman had stopped taking notes, and was just watching me, blinking back tears.