|
|
|
Fish by SF Johnston
(Installment THREE of THREE - continued from Summer 2007 Issue)
"Nap time, Mr. Riley?" said Mr. Walsh. He was standing inside the doorway to the library, his arms folded across his chest.
I looked over at him and tried to bring my eyes into focus.
"Well?" he said. "Your twenty minutes are up. Where's the CD?"
Things weren't looking too good.
"Come on, come on, where is it?" he said, walking towards me and extending his right hand. Now here was a man who was used to getting what he wanted. "Come on Stock, Mr. Raoul will be here any minute."
Mr. Raoul. Something deep within the recesses of my mind shifted and then leapt forward into conscious thought. Everything else dropped away. Mr. Raoul. And Mr. Raoul's goatee. I had it.
"GHOTI," I said quietly.
I walked quickly over to the table. Sure enough, there it was. The annual report flyer with its classic colors and company acronym. General Holdings Overseas Trust Incorporated. GHOTI. It had been right there in front of me all along.
"Mr. Walsh," I said, with a good measure of dramatic confidence that I keep in reserve for just such occasions, "I know exactly where Mr. Pliny hid the CD. Would you and Carolyn please join me at the table?"
I slipped off my latex gloves with what I hoped was panache, but which probably wasn't due to the unfortunate fact that my right index finger got caught, causing the glove to snap back onto my wrist. Ow! I almost yelled.
Instead, I suppressed the pain with spartan fortitude and summoned my strength. I was about to explain the mystery. This was excellent. This was just like TV.
I dropped my latex gloves on the table, glared at them, and then picked up the flyer. "GHOTI," I said.
Then I looked at Carolyn, trying to extend my moment of glory. Her eyes were brimming with wonder. She was amazed. If I asked her out on a date right now, I thought, she would turn down the date and drag me right to the altar. My stunning intellect had won her adulation. She was mine.
"I know how he did it, Daddy," she said, pushing me aside and grabbing the flyer.
"Ow!" I yelled out loud this time as my hip slammed into the edge of the table.
"I learned it at Harvard," she continued, oblivious to my pain. "It's a language trick the nerds know." She looked back at me quickly and then continued.
"GHOTI", she recited, like she was in a grade-five spelling bee. "GH sometimes sounds like F. As in Tough. O sometimes sounds like I. As in Women. And TI sometimes sounds like SH. As in Motion.
"GHOTI," she said. "FISH."
She took off her gloves easily, laid them gently down on the table and beamed at her father, who didn't pat her on the head.
"That's right, Carolyn," I said, trying to salvage some dignity from the situation. I walked over to the alphabetized business shelves, and pointed at the section marked ‘G'. "Mr. Walsh, I think you'll find that the CD has been hidden right here in the General Holdings Overseas Trust Incorporated annual report for––"
"Actually, it will be right here," said Mr. Walsh, walking briskly past me to a shelf marked "F". "Under ‘Finance'. I'll come over to your section when I want information on government regulations or Green Party initiatives."
He pulled out an inch-thick volume labeled GHOTI Annual Report, flipped it open and pulled out a silver CD. It flashed in the light, and I peered at it curiously, trying to see if it was labeled. It wasn't. What was on that thing?
A chime sounded from deep inside the house.
"That will be Mr. Raoul," said Mr. Walsh, striding over to me. He removed the white envelope from his jacket pocket and handed it to me.
"Mr. Stock Riley, it is my sincerest wish that you use this money to purchase yourself some decent clothing. Carolyn will see you to the back door, and our driver will take you home. You were never here." He spun on his heels and strode out the door.
"Thank you, sir," I said to his vanishing presence.
I pocketed the envelope. As Carolyn led me across the upper hallway to a back staircase, I heard Mr. Walsh's booming voice greet Mr. Raoul at the front door.
The thought of Mr. Raoul receiving the CD that I had seen for all of ten seconds finally became too much. I was dying of curiosity. I had to know.
"Carolyn," I said at the top of the stairs. "As we say in the business, a certain amount of reciprocity would not be remiss as compensation for your subjugation of my authority during the expository phase of the investigation."
She looked at me for a moment, smiled mischievously and then started down the staircase.
"You mean I stole your thunder in there. And I owe you."
"Sure," I said, following her. "You could put it that way." We got to the bottom of the stairs, stopped in front of a closed door, and I gave her a little mischievous smile of my own.
"I just got ten thousand dollars for twenty minutes work and I'd sure like to know what was on that CD."
She was silent for a few moments, and I knew she was deciding whether or not to tell me.
"Okay," she said finally. "You did an amazing thing in there today. We never would have found it. But you pulled it off...."
She opened the door and we started walking down a long hallway that ended in another door, presumably to the waiting car. A series of small, framed prints depicting various floral arrangements ran along the right wall. She stopped to straighten one of them, then turned and leaned into me conspiratorially.
"I'm not supposed to know," she said. "But I do." She paused, and looked around the hallway to make sure we were alone.
"The information on that CD was delicate alright, but it wasn't financial."
"Aha," I said.
"Remember Daddy said that he and Mr. Pliny had an arrangement?"
I nodded.
"Well, they sure did." She winked.
Did that wink mean what I thought it meant?
"And they made a movie."
Oh dear God it did.
"Maisy caught them at it, on a security screen," said Carolyn. "She said she saw it by accident."
"But it must have happened when she was fooling with the system," I added.
Was this for real? Talk about lifestyles of the rich and famous. I wondered if any of this was getting to Carolyn more than she let on.
"I'm pretty sure the movie was on the CD," she said. "The man that tried to break in was trying to steal it. Like the one he stole of my sister and put on the internet. In my sister's case...well, people already know she's wild, and all that did was get her on the cover of StarStruck."
"But your father and Mr. Pliny––"
"Have conservative customers. Skittish shareholders. It's a whole other ball game."
"And that's why Mr. Pliny had a heart attack," I said softly. "He would have been ruined too. So who is Mr. Raoul then?"
"Mr. Raoul fixes Daddy's problems. He makes things go away. If I'm right, he'll be taking all of Daddy's computers to some lab, and he'll make sure nobody can retrieve anything ‘delicate' from them. He'll destroy the CD, and all the security tapes. He'll have a word with our security people, and he'll have a very special talk with our friend the intruder too, to find out how he knew about the CD."
"A very special talk," I repeated, my imagination going in a horrible direction. "But wait a minute. Why the hurry? Surely if Mr. Raoul works for your father, then we could all have looked for the CD togeth––"
"Mr. Raoul doesn't work for Daddy," said Carolyn matter-of-factly. "Mr. Raoul works for himself. He has many important clients and his time is very expensive. Mr. Raoul calls the shots. Not Daddy."
Carolyn started walking down the hallway again, and I followed. But something about what she had told me didn't quite add up.
"It's the time factor," I said. "I still don't understand the rush. It sounds like Mr. Raoul is going to be here for a while, 'fixing' everything. Surely we could have had a spent a little more time looking…."
Carolyn stopped a few feet in front of the door at the end of the hall, turned, and put her hands on my shoulders. She brought her mouth close to my ear. "Daddy would have been very embarrassed if Mr. Raoul found out that the CD had gone missing," she whispered. "Mr. Raoul is on it too."
Yikes.
Carolyn turned away. She was going to open the door, send me on my way and I would probably never see her again. This was tragic.
"Carolyn?"
She turned back to me, but I didn't know what to say. Who was I to think that I could––
The door banged open, and there was Maisy, silhouetted by the blazing sunlight outside.
"Carolyn! Whoever you are again! What are you doing here?"
"Maisy, this is Stock Riley," said Carolyn. "He's a hero."
"A hero!" said Maisy, throwing her arms wide and advancing. "I love heroes!"
She grabbed me and gave me a long, hard kiss that––well, let's just say that I probably shouldn't tell you what my loins were doing. Then, just as abruptly, she pushed me back and away against the wall.
"Bye-bye Carolyn! Bye-bye Mr. Stock Hero!" She half-walked, half-ran down the hallway, grabbed the print that Carolyn had straightened and then raced up the stairs and onto the landing. We were alone again.
"But isn't it funny," said Carolyn, as if nothing had just happened.
"Life?" she said. "No, I mean the painting from Holland with the sunset and the fish. The one with my sister's stash. Well, one of her stashes, anyway." We both looked down the hall at the pale square where the floral print used to be. "It's hilarious when you think about it."
"Yeah," I said, confused. "Cocaine is hilarious." Which it patently isn't.
"No," she said, looking at me with exasperation. "The seafood stand in the painting? It said Haring on the front."
Haring. Now that she mentioned it, it did sound very familiar.
"Does Haring mean...in Dutch, I mean...what I think it means?"
"Yes." She smiled. "Get it? The fish the man was going to eat––"
"Was a herring."
"Yes. It was a herring."
It was starting to dawn on me now. "I remember. The sunset reflecting off the water made the fish look––"
"Red."
"So the herring was, in fact, red," I said, dumbfounded.
"It was a red herring," she said, and smiled.
I stared at her.
"Well, I thought it was funny," she said. "You know. Considering it was a wrong clue and all."
She was incredible. I was dying to ask her to enter into a mutually beneficial but achingly platonic detective partnership that would be fraught with sexual tension and highlighted by one stunning success after another. But I was having trouble formulating it so eruditely. In fact, I believe my thought process at the time was something along the lines of Gee, lady, you're smart and pretty and stuff. And before I knew it she had ushered me out the back door past two burly security guards and into the waiting Town Car.
It was the same driver, as the two sprays of driveway gravel streaming out behind the car clearly indicated, but despite his best efforts I did in fact make it home to my tiny apartment.
***
And it is tiny. But it's the first place in my life that I could ever call home. A permanent home that isn't on wheels, I mean, with a window that you can always count on to give you the same view each morning. Even if some mornings the view contains a car that whisks you away to a world you will never understand in a million years.
I stood there in my kitchen, and realized to my amazement that it had been less than an hour since Carolyn's phone call had sent Cairo screeching up onto the curtains. Only the envelope in my pocket told me that any of it had really happened. Ten thousand dollars to hide a secret.
Cairo sidled into the kitchen and skulked in the corner like he had a secret or two himself. Criminy, we all have secrets, I see it all the time. Look at Maisy. I wondered about Carolyn, and what secrets she might have, and then I wondered what it was about secrets that made us fight tooth and nail to protect them. The way I figured it, people hid secrets to hide who they really were. I bet that's why you hide your secrets.
Which means we all have the same kind of secrets, in a way. I guess that's a kind of comfort, seeing as how my dad is in jail, my sister lives on the streets in Canada, and Rainbow and I were once responsible for the death of…no. Those are other stories.
And I was serious earlier. Don't tell anybody what I just told you about the Walsh's. I'm pretty sure Mr. Raoul doesn't even know I exist, and I'd like to keep it that way. I certainly wouldn't want him to come poking around trying to "fix" things.
THE END SF Johnston © 2007 |
