The Bum's Rush (7 page)

"If you don't mind the advice, Mr. Former,
don't be in any hurry to volunteer for the blame. Trust me. I have some
experience in these matters and with these people. If this whole thing
can't be put to rest cleanly and privately, the people who called me
into this will see to it that you and the blame will be on a first-name
basis."

He thought this over. "Your background would lend itself to knowing about that, now, wouldn't it?"

"Been checking into my background?"

"I made a few calls."

"And?"

He considered his reply. "A mixed bag."

"Such is life," I said.

"On one hand, I'm told you have a real knack for
finding people who don't want to be found. They also say you can keep
your mouth shut. They say your family connections in the city give you
a big edge."

I waited.

"On the other hand " He let it hang. From under the
desk blotter he produced an eight-by-ten glossy. I didn't even have to
look. I knew what it was. " there's this," he finished.

He held the famous picture of me and a couple of
local ladies of the evening cavorting in the fountain of the Olympic
Four Seasons Hotel.

"A friend of mine over at the Times sent this to me."

I didn't bother looking at it. "It's a long story," I said.

"Undoubtedly."

He turned the picture his way and studied it closely. I began to count the ceiling tiles.

"Now," he said. "I can understand the getups on the
girls here. Tools of the trade, I suppose. But what in hell are you
doing with those ... those ..."

"Accoutrements," I offered.

He gave me a thin smile. "Ah, accoutrements. Well?" he pressed.

"You had to be there."

He held my eyes as he slipped the picture back under the blotter.

"And what do these political types imagine that you can do by yourself that the whole police department can't?"

"All I'm going to do, Mr. Former, is poke around a little."

"Poke what?"

"Well, first I want to talk to the people she
worked for and with. See if there was any hint that maybe something in
her life had changed recently. Like maybe there was some sort of a
crisis in her life. That kind of thing."

"Then?"

"Then I'm going to see if I can get into her apartment."

He shook his head slightly. "I think a couple of the women in her department already tried that."

"Did they get in?"

"I'm not sure. I don't think so."

"How well did you know Karen Mendolson?" I asked.

"I wouldn't know her if I passed her on the
street." He sensed my surprise. "If you count part-timers and
volunteers, this library employs the better part of six hundred
people." ?Again I was surprised. "Six hundred librarians?"

"Oh, no. Of the full-time staff "

"How many is that?" I interrupted.

"Three-hundred fifty, give or take. Of that number,
no more than a hundred or so are actually librarians. You know, people
with degrees in library science."

"Karen Mendolson?"

"No." He tapped a green file on the left side of his desk. "U Dub. Business administration, nineteen seventy-five."

I held out my hand.

He placed his palm on the file. "Mrs. Franchini has
one for you. Mrs. Donna is Karen's direct supervisor. She can tell you
a great deal more about Karen." He checked his watch. "She's expecting
us now."

I took this to mean I was supposed to move. You
learn to make those kinds of inferences when you're a detective. Former
followed me out the door and down the bluecarpeted hall toward the
elevators. Here on the fifth floor of the library, any vestiges of a
public building had been left below. Up here, we could have been
striding down any corporate corridor anywhere in the world. None of
that smeared quality, the greasy residue of too many grubby hands, that
one finds in public buildings. Up here all was shiny and clean.

Donna Franchini was waiting outside the elevator as
the door slid open. As promised, she was holding a manila file folder.
She was a tall woman, nearly my height, in a crisp white blouse and
ankle-length denim jumper and a pair of sturdy black shoes the size of
cinder blocks. She was impatiently tapping her right foot. Her long
gray hair was twisted on top of her head in some sort of tight braid.

As she looked me over through a pair of oval
glasses, her expression suggested acute gastrointestinal distress.
Without either fanfare or introduction, she said, "Follow me," turned
on her rubber heel, and started down the long hall. I stood still. 

Halfway down, she realized I wasn't in tow and turned back.

"Are you coming or not?"

"Not," I said.

"What?"

I stood my ground. "You heard me. Not."

She put her hands on her ample hips. "What's the matter with you?"

"Depends on who you ask." "

Reluctantly, she stiff-legged it back my way. "Do you have a problem?" I kept my mouth shut.

When she got close enough, I said, "Why don't we start over?" I stuck my hand out. "Leo Waterman. Pleased to meet you."

She looked at me like I was a tax assessor covered with shit.

"Don't be infantile," she said.

"Just polite," I corrected.

"And why should I be polite to you, Mr. Waterman?" she sneered.

"Because I don't work for you, and I don't have to
put up with your crap, and maybe because we're also not married and I'm
not trading you occasional bad sex for putting up with your lousy
attitude." She opened her mouth. I talked louder. "Or, even better, I
know this is weird, but maybe just because that's just how human beings
ought to treat each other." At least she'd stopped tapping her damn
foot.

"Are you finished?"

"For the time being."

"My office is "

"I don't want to go to your office. I want to see Karen Mendolson's coworkers. The people she spent her day with."

She tapped the folder. "I am Ms. Mendolson's direct supervisor. Any and all relevant information... "

"Let's call Mr. Former," I suggested.

Gazing deep into each other's eyes, we shared a long Maalox moment. She took a deep breath. "I assure you, Mr. Waterman "

"How did she manage to siphon that much money from what is supposed to be a well-organized public institution?"

She stood straighter, as if she'd rehearsed this in
front of the mirror. She checked the hall for ears. None. She lowered
her voice.

"She was extremely lucky. We were in the midst of a
Transitional Administrative Realignment. Duties and responsibilities
were being shuffled so the normal system of checks and balance was
somewhat askew. Were that not the case, it would have been impossible."

"And?"

"We operate from a computerized system with an
acquisitions module. She set up a phony vendor with a post office box
number. Then she ordered books from that vendor. The books, of course,
never came, but she told the system they had, and the system then wrote
a check to the vendor. Once the check arrived, she would delete the
order I record from the system."

"How could that be possible?''

"It was possible because during our Transitional
Administrative Realignment the same person had control of both the
vendor files and the payment files. Under normal circumstances, those
duties are quite separate and distinct."

"How long did this go on?"

"Nearly nine months."

"Long realignment," I commented.

"We are a very complex institution," she responded.

I held out my hand. "Fortner said you had a folder for me?"

She wanted to refuse, but changed her mind, reluctantly handing it over after an intense inner debate.

"Her coworkers," I said. "Could I see them now, please?"

She pushed out a gust of a sigh that mussed my hair and again strode off down the hall. This time, I tagged along.

She turned left at the end, and then quickly left
again into a large office area consisting of perhaps eight separate
work areas. Her heels beat time down the narrow aisle to the windows on
the north side of the building. Two young women were working in the
area, both in their thirties. One was blond running toward red. Svelte,
athletic looking, in a black knit dress. The other had dark hair worn
to the shoulder, black bangs cut straight across her forehead. Both
visibly stiffened as Franchini blustered into the room.

"Mr. Waterman is looking into the Mendolson
affair," Franchini whispered. "He wishes to speak with you." With that,
she folded her arms across her chest and sidled over toward the corner.

"Would you mind if I spoke to them alone?" I asked.

Minded wasn't the half of it. "I am the super--"

I kept saying, "I know. I know," as she sputtered
her way through another public self-assessment. We shared another
touching moment before she shouldered me aside and marched out the
door. We all watched her go.

"You guys on work release?" I asked.

"What?" said the brunette. She wore a blue sweater over a full-length flowered skirt.

"From jail," I said. "You know, where they, like,
let you out so you can work. I figured a body'd have to be sentenced by
a judge to work for that woman."

Both women hid smiles. We introduced ourselves. The athlete was Gina Alleman. The brunette was DeeAnn Williams.

"I think if I tell you what I'm supposed to do, it
might make it easier for us to talk." They seemed agreeable, so I told
them the whole thing. The politics. How going to the police was our
last option. That the best thing that could happen to Karen was for us
to find her.

Finally I asked, "Can somebody define Transitional
Administrative Alignment for me?" This time they didn't bother to hide
the smiles.

Alleman jumped in. ' 'It means that Barb Watson had a baby last--what?" She looked over at Williams. "May?"

"End of April."

"A very difficult birth," Alleman went on. "For a while it didn't look like either of them were going to make it."

"She's still not back," Williams explained.

"What were her duties?"

"She did payment files and order records."

"And Karen?"

"She ordered books and kept the vendor records."

I applied my vast knowledge of public agencies.
"So, let me guess. Because this Barb Watson is still on leave, they
never rehired the position. That would seriously screw up the budget.
What they did was palm her work off on m

Karen. Am I getting warm here?"

"Sizzling," Alleman confirmed.

"So, what should have been a system of checks and balances was suddenly useless."

They nodded in unison and then both checked the hall.

"Karen was working sixty, seventy hours a week," Alleman said.

"And you guys had no idea she was " I let it hang.

"Well, we all knew how unhappy she was."

"Karen and '' Williams jerked a thumb over her
shoulder "were always at one another's throats. And, you know, since
the thing with Earl "

"I expected her to quit every day."

"Or burn the building down."

"What thing with Earl?"

They glanced at each other. Williams took the lead.

"You remember back right after the first of the
year, when we had that real cold weather, when those three homeless
people froze to death, right outside here?"

I said I did. Anchormen had agonized. Pols had pontificated. Hearts had bled. And life had gone remorselessly on.

"You know how down on the first floor, the building
has a big overhang and the homeless like to get in there right up
against the building, you know, to keep warm?''

Williams took up the thread. "There was a group of
regi ulars who had been sleeping there for years. One of them was an
old guy named Earl. He carried this sawed-off broom with him all the
time. Used to sweep the curbs." She made a two-handed sweeping gesture.

I knew just who she meant. The old guy had been a
fixture in the city's homeless population for as long as I could
remember. Sweeping imaginary refuse from the sidewalk down into the
gutter with a broom so old and worn it looked more like a mustache on a
stick.

"Looked like Popeye's father," I said.

"Yeah, that's him." Williams smiled. "Anyway, Karen
and Earl were good friends. She sort of adopted him. Every morning
she'd bring him coffee and a muffin, and sometimes if he was around
she'd even buy him lunch."

"Until--" Gina said ominously.

"Until?"

"Until the higher-ups decided that these people
were bad for the shrubbery. That was their excuse. That they were hard
on the landscaping. They put up that fence that's there now. They got
the cops to keep them out."

"They stopped letting them use the bathrooms, too."

"Then we got that cold weather."

"They found three of them huddled up to the fence, dead."

"One of them was Earl."

"Karen was devastated," Alleman said.

The sound of a bus five stories below in the street
intruded upon the silence. Williams folded her arms and said, "Karen
bought him a little funeral out of her own money."

"Really?"

Alleman shook her head sadly. "Karen copied up a bunch of posters about the funeral and hung them all over the square."

"All the street people came. All of them."

"Must have been a hundred of them," Alleman finished.

"You guys went," I said, more a statement than a question.

They nodded in unison. "She hardly talked after that," said Williams.

"I still think she was clinically depressed."

I kept at it. Heard the whole story of Karen's estrangement
from Franchini, up until that one day when she just didn't show up at
work. About how they'd been so worried they'd gone to Karen's apartment.

"What about her social life?" I asked. They both shrugged.