Revenge of the Cube Dweller (23 page)

I am not finished investigating the payment to Ms. Bonnie Q.
Reynolds yet, so I go up to nine and park myself by good old Mazie’s desk.

“Hi, Mazie. Do you remember me?” I ask.

“Why, of course I do,” she says. “What brings you to my part of the woods?”

“I am looking for the vendor setup form for a vendor named BQR Environmental Services. It’s probably a few years back, but I am wondering if you could pull it for me.”

“Why do you need to see that?”

“I’m in Internal Audit, didn’t I say?”

I see the blood drain from Mazie’s face.

“Anyway I’m doing a test of vendor setup records,” I say. “I requested a bunch of them last week from your supervisor, but this is an extra item that needs to be pulled.”

I watch as Mazie tries to stay calm. I cannot imagine the stress she is feeling at this particular moment, with the realization that auditors are looking at vendor setup.

“Well now. Just give me a minute here to look this up,” she says, and I watch her trembling hand click through a few screens on her desktop. “Looks like we set their record up in 2003. I’m not sure we still have those files on-site; they may be in storage somewhere.”

“Can you check, please?” This is not Cindy I’m dealing with.

I can see that Mazie wants me gone and is probably thinking maybe the fastest way is to find the document, give it to me, and hope that I will not return to stumble across her illicit activity.
Too late, Mazie
. But still, she returns in minutes with a document.

“Do you need a copy, or do you just want to take a look at this?”

“I just need to look at it.”

Mazie hands me the paper. I turn it over and look at the approval signature.

“Hal!” I do not believe my eyes at first, but when I consider it, this does make sense. Hal had overseen all those operations back then. Still, I cannot picture Hal—the great guy Hal, the father figure Hal—involved in a bribery scheme. He is the person who approved the setup of BQR. There are no other authorizations on the page. I suppose if I pull the monthly invoices, I will see his signature on them too.

“Mazie, would you mind if I make a quick copy of this?”

“Help yourself.” She seems relieved that I am not asking for anything related to MCAL Electric or Larson Consulting.

When I return to my cube, I call Lucy on her cell. Her voice sounds like I just woke her up.

“Meet me for coffee?”

“Where, when?” she groans.

“Starbucks Utica Square, in fifteen minutes.”

L
ucy looks as beautiful as always. For a fifty-three-year-old woman who just rolled out of bed, that is something of an accomplishment. She is reading a book and drinking herbal tea, so I place my coffee order without disturbing her.

“Let’s move outside so we won’t be overheard,” I say.

We settle under an arbor away from other patrons.

“And you’re surprised by this?” Lucy asks after I tell her about Hal.

“Yes! Why shouldn’t I be? He is a sexist and condescending, but I never did think he was a crook.”

“Did it ever occur to you that the entire management of Bishop is crooked? Baldwin certainly knows what Hal did because it was in his secretary’s files, right? This is no secret.”

Lucy is right about this, and it occurs to me that corruption extends deep into the Bishop organization. In controls talk it’s
known as “tone at the top.” This means that if the most senior executives cheat, others below will see that behavior as acceptable and will cheat as well. It works the other way around, too. If executive management sets the tone that cheating or skirting the rules will not be tolerated, others below them fall in line. The trouble is that executives always say that they expect everyone to operate with integrity, but then they wink when the top sales guy takes a kickback or their big deal maker spends thousands in strip clubs.

Sometimes the higher-ups give the message to work within the company guidelines of honesty, excellence, stewardship, and all the other “who we are” statements, but then supervisors place extreme pressure on line management to make their quotas. “Rank and yank” is the term used at evaluation time to forcibly rank all employees and then fire the bottom-feeders who, for whatever reason, have fallen short. No excuses, just results.

At Bishop, management receives their annual bonus based on earnings and nothing else. Winston used to say, “You get what you pay for.” So if all you care about is the bottom line, people will do everything they can to increase that figure, even if it crosses into unethical territory. It might start innocently enough, but it can quickly end up in shifty accounting and sidestepping costly regulatory requirements.

Top management gets to be top management because they are competitive people who want to be winners. They might gamble with their employees’ safety as well as the safety of communities so that they don’t end up as the guy with the shitty quarterly earnings and miss their bonus targets. The poor fellow who says, “Well, we didn’t make any money, but everyone is
safe, and we are beloved by the community in which we operate” gets zilch and a quick boot to the curb.

Perhaps not all Bishop main managers are crooks, but the environment is perfect for managers to slide into the world of bribes, kickbacks, and manipulated financial results.

I think about Hal and the pressure he must have been under to succumb to illegal activity. I wonder what the conversation with the Bishop brothers was like when they discussed what to do about the Longview plant. The thing was old and held together with the engineering equivalent of duct tape. Necessary repairs would have been costly, and Hal would never have been able to meet his financial targets if fines were levied.

Maybe Hal set up this bribe and then got his promotion to oversee all the gas plant operations. Perhaps the Bishops appreciated his resourcefulness in saving all the capital maintenance dollars required to get the Longview plant up to spec by bribing the state inspector. He probably got rewarded with extra bonus money for going the extra mile. A new house for Nancy and Disney World vacations with the kids probably soothed whatever gremlins ate at his conscience.

The pressure to succeed can be formidable for men like Hal. They have been winners all their lives, and the idea that their career might get sidetracked can be devastating. No wonder he seemed despondent when he left the other day. He had played the game and then got sacked two yards from the goal line.

“Lucy, these things are more complicated than you think,” I say. “Morality is not black and white—it has lots and lots of gray.”

“Oh really. And exactly what shade of gray is bribing government regulators to look the other way when you spew carcinogens into the breathing space of unsuspecting citizens?”

“I’m not talking about the end result. I’m talking about how people—you know, the ones you feel so deeply for—find themselves able to commit unthinkable acts. It can be a very slippery slope.”

“No it’s not.”

“Yes it is. They don’t start out wanting to break laws and hurt people. They just find themselves backed against a wall and make really bad decisions. It’s really sad, Lucy.”

“I don’t feel sorry for them. Not even a little bit. I feel sorry for the people who live in Longview who are getting sick while you’re sympathizing with the guys responsible.”

“Okay. You’re right,” I concede. I take a sip of my coffee and look around; we are still alone. “We need to figure out what to do about this.”

“I am serious about the one-week deadline, Tanzie,” Lucy says. “I’m not comfortable sitting on this, especially since we now know that Bishop bribed the regulators.”

“Agreed.”

“Maybe you should call Dan and arrange to be a confidential informant.”

The same thought had crossed my mind on the way to Starbucks, but I feel conflicted. There is a slim chance that I could keep my job at Bishop, and I don’t want to take a chance of screwing that up by having anyone know that I snooped around Bishop’s files. I am also smart enough to realize that confidences can be broken through negligence: slip of the tongue, a discarded memo. A further complication is the cyber investigator that Todd told me about yesterday. I am unclear what techniques this guy might have at his disposal to identify me as the hacker, and as compelling as the Longview situation
is, I am not willing to risk getting caught. Yes, I am a very selfish person.

“I think I like the anonymous informant idea better. If we provide enough detail, surely someone can get Hal or Ms. Bonnie Q. Reynolds to admit guilt, or we can give enough details to get an investigation going.”

We go back to my condo and spend the rest of the morning documenting the Longview plant situation. Lucy writes a memo in environmental science-ese outlining the discrepancies between internal plant measurement and compliance reports filed with the TCEQ. I decide to spare Lucy from knowing about Baldwin’s discovery that his computer was hacked and his engaging a security specialist. I only warn her not to communicate with me via email on any of the particulars of Longview or Bishop.

She has a flight to catch at 1 o’clock, so she packs up and we get in my car to head to the airport.

“We’re doing the right thing on this, Tanzie. Really we are,” Lucy begins as I drive.

“I know,” I say, looking ahead.

“I didn’t mean those things I said last night about your life being silly.”

“Yes you did,” I tell her. “And it is sort of silly. I know that. But I’m just trying to get my life back, Lucy. It’s been a tough year for me.”

We are silent for the next few miles. I am trying not to cry, and Lucy gives me time to compose myself.

“This has been so much fun,” I finally say, just as the floodgates open.

Lucy doubles over in a combination of laughter and tears. “Oh God. Don’t make me feel bad!”

“No. I really needed you here, Lucy. We don’t always agree, but I really did need someone to work through this with me. I feel very alone on this, and you’ve been a lot of help.”

“Thanks. I know I can be a fanatic sometimes.”

“Sometimes?” I pull up curbside to the United Airlines dropoff and give my sister an awkward hug as she adjusts her backpack in the passenger seat.

“Let me know what happens,” she says as she gets out of my car. “I love you.”

“Me, too,” I shout out the window as I watch my sister push through the glass doors to the ticketing terminal.

I go back to the office to use my computer to establish an electronic document trail that could be given to even the least capable government auditor for follow-up. It takes awhile to put a paper trail of reports together, but around six or so, I am satisfied with my product.

As I stand at the post office dropbox, I take a deep breath, thinking about what I am about to do. Up until this point, it has just been a lot of talking. Once I mail the files, it will be real. People will know about Bishop. People will speculate as to how all this was discovered. I know how these things play out. Who has access to the files? Who has an axe to grind? I am sure that I have adequately covered my tracks, but what if everyone thinks Sullivan is the whistleblower? I could see the Bishops talking about “that nincompoop in EH&S” again and administering punishment on an innocent guy. Still, if I don’t do this, Lucy will, and then it would be fairly easy to track me down. It would
not take long to figure out that Lucy O’Leary, environmental Nazi, has a sister who works at Bishop.

Maybe if Sullivan had been a little nicer to the cleaning lady the decision would have been harder. But just as many others on the horns of dilemmas do, I elect to save my own patootie.

I pull open the slot for domestic first-class mail and slowly watch the legal envelopes drop out of my hand: the first to the enforcement division of the TCEQ, the second to the Oklahoma City district office of the FBI, and a third to the
Tulsa World
newspaper, attention Dan Schweitzer.

To celebrate my divorce from a life of silliness, I drive to Woodward Park, a lovely botanical garden near my condo, and sit on a bench near an expanse of azaleas just starting to bloom. I think about Sullivan and Hal and the people in Longview. I think about the Bishops. I think about the cyber security guy. It is getting dark as I watch the joggers and dog walkers go by, and I light a cigarette, exhaling into the crisp Tulsa air.