Spygirl (15 page)

“I'll do it for you,” I offered.

“Forget it. You have to have a Ph.D. in fucking origami to do these things.” He crumpled up Part B and threw the remaining wad in the direction of Oscar's desk. It arced high and landed inches away from Oscar's feet, rolling sluggishly a couple more inches. Oscar didn't flinch. Evan visibly recomposed. “And how can I help you, Miz Gray? ”

“New case?”

“Ah.”

He pulled a fat yellow folder out from under a stack on his desk and threw it into my outstretched hand. “What is it?”

“I'm not sure,” he said. “George said it's another dot-com case, which means you'll find our subject does lots of coke in the company bathroom and spends his IPO money on whores.” He reflected for a second. “Why don't I work at a dot-com?” It had the subject's name written on it in bloated graffiti-style lettering.

Below it in the lower right corner was the tag
DOW.
“Who's Dow,” I asked him.

“Wally.” Wally Yoo was nineteen and a computer-science un-dergrad at NYU. He'd been hired to do odds and ends around the office. George and Sol, never ones to kick a money-saving deal out of bed, had made him the unofficial network manager at the Agency. Wally did the work of an entire software-management company, all for about eight dollars an hour and the whole time outfitted like a Ninja. He was Korean-American and he was obsessed with Unix, a radical kind of martial arts called Ninjitsu, the cartoon-character Garfield, and a girlish Korean movie star named Bae Doo-na. He had a little stuffed Garfield pillow he kept on top of his computer with a heart-shaped pin stuck on it, and he usually had a black bandana tied around his head, with floppy spikes of his hair popping out the top.

I was fond of Wally, and in one moment of shared vulnerability I told him I'd broken up with my boyfriend, and he told me, in exchange for my candor, that he had Tourette's Syndrome. “I was, like, in this informational video about it,” he said. “And they taught us how to control the tics, so I don't
present
anymore.” He leaned in closer to me, his hair flopping forward over his bandana, one hand over his Garfield desk calendar. “That means I don't show any sign of the disease now.”

But Wally did still
present.
Like the time when Evan asked him to organize our archives, which are all kept semi-numerically at a store locker in Long Island City, and Wally told him, “Shut your piehole!” Or the time at lunch when he yelled “Stinky fish lips!” for no reason. (He later claimed he'd said “Bring me some chips!”)

I carried the file over to him. “So, is this your new tag?”

He laughed. “It means ‘hungry dog’ in Korean,” he explained. “I like the graffiti style. I'd like to make a music video sometime
with Korean-style animation.” I wasn't sure how this latter sentiment related to the font he was developing.

My new case seemed, at first, to be a typically boring e-commerce investigation. Probably my fifth like it since I started at the Agency. As I would soon discover in “The Case of the Swindling Spin Doctor,” his crimes and his pathology were a prototype for the dot-com zeitgeist. At this time, March 1999, dot-commerce was peaking. At least a quarter of our clients were venture capital companies that were going through the motions of due diligence by hiring us to check out their newest incubation project. They were more like intubation projects. Many of these firms, we were quickly realizing, were like junkies trying to get their last fix before they overdosed, scavenging around for capital when they were tens (or hundreds) of millions of dollars in debt.

Our routine in such cases, in addition to doing our usual checks, included calling random lower-level employees of the company (mail-room staff, human-resources reps) to determine if there was any delay in their payroll. Certain kinds of guys were relieved to talk to anybody. José, the IT guy, is used to getting attention only when he's being berated by rich guys running his company because their keypad is sticking. We would ask the José's if any of their paychecks had bounced, or if they had missed any pay periods, only to discover their payrolls were six months behind schedule.

Many of our clients considered our work so rote that they had already started dishing out financing to the company they had hired us to investigate before they'd even engaged our services. Some had their suspicions raised by the dubious fate of that initial investment, as was the circumstance in the case of the Swindling
Spin Doctor, probably the most brazen con artist ever to appear across the desks of the Agency.

With a few exceptions, the guys we investigated at these companies were so young they barely had college degrees, let alone paper trails and business histories that showed anything but their ability to hold down a summer job at Vail or flip burgers. These cases could be extraordinarily boring, but George and Sol insisted on taking them because they paid well.

Joe Smith, my subject, was running an online software-developer and retail portal. Mostly there were a lot of dull press releases about the company. These releases are some of the most important clues we use, especially when they're read as propaganda, as Brown's dime-store Marxist semiotics program taught me.
PR Newswire
and
Business Wire are
about the party line. I read some mind-numbingly tedious ones: “Joe Smith was appointed president of
U-Celerate.com
on May 8, 1998. He is the former CFO of
BusyCorps.com
, which he founded, and has also worked in financial advisory positions at International Business Machines and Peat Marwick. Mr. Smith also maintains a private financial consulting business handling clients from northern Massachusetts to the Cayman Islands.”

Anybody who wants to change their identity and slip into anonymity will pick the most ubiquitous first and last names they can muster. There are at least 10,000 Joe Smiths in the United States. It's harder to prove what evidence we find
isn't
about them than what is. Michael Ford. Karen O'Connor. These are all fitting names if you plan on committing identity fraud, embezzlement, tax evasion, or any other kind of crime. Not that I'm handing out advice to criminals.
Au contraire.
I'm Spygirl. I found tens of thousands of documents—bankruptcy records and corporate filings—for Joe Smiths. I found Joe (aka Joseph) Smiths who were convicted rapists, embezzlers, founders of Vanderbilt University,
professional wrestlers, and a Playboy bunny (Joe, short for Joanna).

This annoyed me and supplemented my resolve. I hated being lied to. I wanted to find Joe Smith if it killed me. Like wading through the knot of neckties at the Garment District, my job is a tricky business of finding what's already there, and there's always an element of chance involved. I tried focusing my searches for information about Joe Smiths with dubious pasts.

I found two curious things. The first was a news article mentioning his business partner in their company, a Russian named Dmitry Aleksandrov, who was being investigated for possible mafia connections in Philadelphia. The second was something Gus had brought to my attention.

When we ran the Social Security number our client had provided us, it turned up invalid. No such number had ever been issued. “Call the client,” George said. The client talked to Mr. Smith, who called back saying he'd mistyped the number. This was a big red flag indicating a big fat liar. The last digit was a seven, not an eight, they said. So Gus plugged it in again. This time, it was a valid number, but it was somebody else's. Although Joe Smith was listed as having used the number, it had been assigned to one Lonny Perkins. I was leaning over Gus's desk the whole time, and was getting very worked up. “Yes! That bastard is lying! Yes!” It was thrilling.

Gus, for the hell of it, started playing with the numbers in the Social, changing the last digits, and every time he did, he came up with another number it looked like Joe Smith was using—not to mention the similar names “Jack Smithe,” “Joe Smyth,” and “Joe Nguyen.” Gus ran those names and got nineteen other Socials, all listed to other people, that Joe Smith appeared to be using.

I ran those names in some news databases and came up with
lots of nothing; then, finally, I hit something promising. It was a clip from the
New York Post
, which I think of as the crack rock of newspapers. But it tends to have more consistent and in-depth coverage of nonviolent criminals than, say,
The New York Times.

“The
Post
has learned that a prison inmate conned a major publisher into signing him to a $50,000 contract for a book about how to avoid being bilked by financial consultants. Sources at the publisher now admit that Joe Smyth, a tax advisor and felon convicted of bilking his former investment clients out of more than $15 million, was slated to publish his book, tentatively titled
Buyer Beware: An Investor's Guide to Stock Analysis
, with them in 1998. Although the book's editor and agent declined to comment about the incident, the publisher confirmed that the book had been canceled, although it was only
weeks
away from publication. The book's author, Joe Smyth, is serving two more years of an eleven-year sentence for fraud and tax evasion.”

I took the piece to George, who seemed underwhelmed. “Well, do we know it's him?” he clucked.

“I have a feeling it is.” I knew as soon as I said this he would nail me for it.

“You can talk to your shrink about feelings. I want facts.” This was defeating, but I thought I could use some of my connections in the publishing business to get hold of the manuscript. I called several friends at the publishers, but they said the whole scandal was very touchy and they wouldn't know where to get the book if their lives depended on it. Then I had an idea. Since it was a business book, I'd call Andrew. Even though I felt a little strange about my last encounter with him, he was my final resort. I figured he might have gotten the proposal, and, with any luck, would still have it.

I told him the situation. “Oh,
my God.
Amy, darling, is this
work
safe
for you?” His intonations conveyed a hushed sense of shared peril.

“Don't be silly Andrew. You know I'd never put myself in any serious danger.”

“I do?”

He had a point. “Honestly I'm much better-behaved now than I was in college.”

“Hmmm. Well, it doesn't ring a bell, lamb chop, but I'll have my assistant check and see if we have it on file.”

Working at my desk, I was diverted by Sol, who was entertaining a mystery guest—a woman—at his desk. We almost never had clients to the office, and on the two occasions when we did, we all had to wear business attire and shave. (Wendy and me notwithstanding.) Evan's scruffy mug suggested something else was afoot.

That day on a smoking break I asked who she was.

“Probably our next hire,” said Gus.

“I don't want them to hire her!” Linus interrupted.

Why? we asked.

“I think I'm in love with her,” he confessed, looking exasperated. Our potential new hire, Renora, was Linus's female Platonic ideal: a gamine Sylvia Plath devotee who had translated Nietzsche's collected works and loved Tom Waits.

“You'd make a beautiful, tortured-looking couple,” I suggested.

“No, I can never be with a woman I actually love,” Linus insisted. “It would ruin the whole point of love—desire and unful-fillment.”

“You need to stop reading so much Goethe,” Morgan sniffed. “You all do for that matter.”

“I think he just needs to do the Han Solo.” Evan chuckled.

“What's that?” asked Noah. Wendy and Gus giggled.

We filed back into the office as Noah assured a glum-looking Linus that he had the
Star Wars
trilogy on DVD.

I spent the rest of my day thinking about Edward and working on my case. There were several other abstracts and wire pieces about Smythe, but none that had any information that wasn't already in the
Post
article. The rest was spent alternating between downloading Blue Oyster Cult songs off Napster and running searches. At six, I was deciding whether to take off or call Andrew back again when the phone rang. Please let it be Andrew, I quietly pleaded. I hit the line.

“Boo?”

“Hey, Ben.” My disappointment was audible. “How are you?” I asked, gently.

“How come you never call me anymore?”

“How about having an adult conversation like, ‘Hi, Amy. So nice to hear your voice. How are you’?”

“Hi, Amy, how's your pussy doing? ”

“I'm getting off now.” I lowered the receiver.

“Mooooo!!! Waiiiiiit.”

“What?”

“I'm sorry. That was rude.”

“You're right, it was.” I took a deep breath. “You know, Ben, you don't make it easy for me.”

“I just don't understand why you don't call me anymore.”

“Well, you're my ex-boyfriend and we're both dating other people. Plus you're obscene, you're rude, and you're nauseating.”

“So we can't be friends? ”

“Wait, I haven't gotten to the negatives yet. I think you should be grateful we're not enemies at this point—”