Money To Burn (2 page)

“This is an unbelievable little gizmo,” he said, trying to convince me. “It’s a phone that allows for conferencing, plus secret taping of calls. When I pull up this antenna and push these two buttons, it can record voices through up to fifteen feet of concrete and from as far away as fifty yards.”

“Best of all, it looks like a Frisbee covered in dog doo,” I added. “So you can stash it in the bushes under windows and no one ever tries to pick it up.”

Unperturbed by my sarcasm, he put down the recording device and opened his side desk drawer. I got a glimpse of an electronic extravaganza crammed into the small space. He selected a small black box and placed it on the desk.

“This is a beeper,” he explained. “You can reach me twenty-four hours a day.”

“First of all, Bobby,” I said. “You’re so fat that when your beeper goes off, people are going to think you’re backing up. Secondly, I don’t want to be in touch with anyone twenty-four hours a day, including myself.”

He ignored my jibes and continued searching in his desk drawer, this time selecting a small red-and-white metal square that he placed on his desk. It was supposed to look like a pack of cigarettes, but featured a brand name and design so phony that it was obviously a surveillance device—or a toy.

“Know what this is?” he asked proudly.

“A pack of candy cigarettes?” I guessed.

“Fooled you, didn’t it?” he said, pleased. “This is a combination video and still camera that automatically takes pictures at any interval you specify while adjusting for lighting conditions. Yet it looks just like a pack of cigarettes.” If he wasn’t repeating the salesman’s spiel word-for-word, he was pretty close.

“Ingenious,” I said. “It opens up the entire world of illegal videotaping. You could put it on your bedside table, tape sexual encounters and your girlfriends would never know until they asked you for a cigarette afterwards.”

He stared at me, finally grasping that my enthusiasm did not match his. “What’s the problem, Casey?” he asked.

“The problem is we don’t have any money,” I explained. “If I hadn’t just demanded a big advance from my latest client, we would not be paying the rent this month.”

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“I could ask some of my stable of lovelies for financial assistance,” he volunteered.

“God, no.” It was bad enough sharing a business with a 360-pound goofball. I drew the line at sharing my fate with a 360-pound gigolo.

“Really, they wouldn’t mind,” he assured me.

“No, Bobby. I’m not going to borrow money from your girlfriends. We have to earn it.” I glared at him, a little pissed that he had recently made me a partner and then promptly stopped taking on new cases. Half of zero is still zero, no matter how glorious you make it sound. “We’re in business to earn money, remember? Besides, your harem suffers enough without being hit up for loans.”

That was my opinion only, understand. His harem did not appear to be suffering at all and, in fact, by all indications, was thriving. I’d learned an important lesson from watching Bobby D. in action: there are hundreds of romance-starved middle-aged women in this town and only a handful of middle-aged men who don’t pick their noses in public, date one another or secretly covet their mother’s underwear.

Though he was a fashion moron and a faithful wearer of bad toupees, Bobby loved his ladies with a public passion unmatched since Don Juan hung up his tights. He showered them with flowers and filthy telephone calls in the middle of the afternoon when they were the most bored at their jobs. He remembered their birthdays, while conveniently forgetting their actual ages. He considered Valentine’s Day a national holiday more sacred than Easter. And he wined and dined his women year-round until they spilled over their XL Victoria’s Secret panties. He thought them all beautiful regardless of weight, and frequently told them so. In return, they adored him, cleaned his apartment, cooked him dinners, and agreed to be seen in public with a man who dressed like Englebert Humperdink and made Humpty Dumpty seem svelte.

Or, at least, that was the Bobby I had come to know and love. Unfortunately, the man before me seemed but a pale imitation of his original self. Ever since he had suffered a heart attack four months before, Bobby had been much more subdued than normal and far less eager to shake down desperate wives and husbands for a fee. Recently, he had been downright withdrawn and the truth was that I missed the old Bobby. I had never realized how much I clung to his exasperating sleaziness until it was gone.

“Bobby,” I told him. “I know the heart attack scared you. But you have to take back your life. You’ve got to get back to work.”

He was quiet, chewing thoughtfully on a jumbo Tootsie Roll while he thought the situation over. “I suppose you’re right,” he finally said. “My mind hasn’t been on work. Thoughts of mortality and all that.”

“Maybe you’re getting tired of peepingth=d of pe into the corners of people’s dirty lives?” I suggested. “Just like you got tired of watching the ‘Jerry Springer Show’?”

“Of course not.” He looked affronted. “It’s just time to get back to work, that’s all. I need to get back into the swim of things. Bust the crust.” He grinned lewdly. “Need any help?”

“Sorry, buddy. You’re not busting any crust of mine. But I’ll let you know if you can help with this latest case.” I examined the camera disguised as a cigarette pack. “Tell me again what this does.”

He adjusted a dial. “Turn this knob to the thirty and you set the camera to take a photo every thirty seconds, for up to a hundred exposures with the special film cartridge. You can program it to take photos faster or slower than that, if you need to. Switch the film canister and, voila, you can videotape instead, even at night. Think of how easy this makes surveillance. Just put this sucker on a windowsill, press a button and go have doughnuts and coffee while this does all the work.”

“If I wanted to spend my time drinking coffee and eating doughnuts,” I reminded him, “I would have joined the police force.”

His chuckle was as greasy as ever. “Try it,” he insisted, sliding the device toward me. “Let me know if it’s reliable and when I get back into the swing of things, I may give it a go myself.”

“Sure,” I promised, not all that enthusiastically. “I’ll let you know.”

I’d agreed to start tailing Thomas Nash that afternoon. Although he lived in Durham as I did, he was in nearby Raleigh on business for most of the day. It was a simple matter to keep pace with him, thanks to my new car, a 1961 Porsche 356 B—the so-called bathtub Porsche. It wasn’t as trustworthy as my former car, a 1965 Plymouth Valiant, but it had gone down in flames and was now gathering rust in a junkyard in Garner. I’d picked up the ‘61 Porsche for a song from an old farmer who kept it stored in his barn after its owner, his son, died in Vietnam. The farmer drove it for a couple of years until he discovered the Porsche was created by a German who had worked for the Nazis. As a World War II vet, the old farmer wouldn’t be caught dead driving a German car and he’d sold it to me for peanuts. After twenty years of sitting in a dusty old barn, the car had its problems. It spent more time up on the block than parked on one, but it was getting there.

While I watched Thomas Nash do all the things an up-and-coming CEO and brilliant scientist does, I pulled a box of Snackwell’s creme cookies from the backseat and ate about fifty of them, all the while congratulating myself on the calories I was saving. Just for the hell of it, I placed Bobby D.‘s latest toy on the dashboard and recorded the entire afternoon.

Not much happened. First, Thomas Nash had his shoes shined outside the legislative building while I waited in my car, searching every nearby grassy knod hy grassll without luck. I couldn’t even find a lone gunman. Then he hopped into a very nice tan Mercedes SL convertible parked at the curb and zipped over to the local Staples. I followed him through the aisles, but he was not harassed by a single salesclerk.

After packing his car to the gills with bags and boxes— he had to lower the convertible’s top to fit in a file cabinet he’d bought—he took I-40 back toward Durham, the tops of his many bags flapping in the wind. Despite his tendency to speed, I was never more than a few cars behind him at any time.

Once we hit downtown Durham, Nash made two stops. First he pulled into Brightleaf Square and entered one of its buildings, leaving me outside in the parking lot trying to figure out if I should tail him or guard his car, since he’d left the top down and all of his recent purchases were sticking out of the backseat as an invitation to every thief in town. Yes, Durham has its share of snatch-and-grab artists, most of them on extended leave from New York City, i.e., hiding out with Grandma down South.

I took a chance and stayed with the car. Nash didn’t take long. He returned about ten minutes later and told me he had one more stop, and not to bother coming inside with him. Hey, he was paying the bill. I was happy to sit on my butt, if that’s what he wanted. He left his car parked where it was and walked two blocks down Main while I stood on the sidewalk, watching him trip over cracks and trample flower beds. He disappeared into a tall, green-glass building that was maybe fifteen stories high and qualified as a skyscraper in these parts. I didn’t know much about the building, only that the neighbors had fought tooth and nail for the city council to block its construction. They had lost the fight—and a good portion of their daily sunshine.

Nash took a long time in the green building and looked lost in his own private Idaho when he finally returned to his car. I snapped a photo of him walking into a street lamp and shutting his tie in his car door, then followed him down the street toward a residential area in downtown Durham.

To my surprise, Nash’s laboratory and home turned out to be a converted historic house only a few blocks from my own apartment. It was located just off Main Street, across the street from several bigger tobacco companies that routinely perfumed the streets with rich smells. I always wondered why the cigarette factories smelled so good, when their products tasted so nasty.

I parked at the curb and helped Nash lug his office supplies inside. Like I said, for $100 an hour, I’d even do windows.

“Thanks,” he told me absently, dumping his packages in a corner of his office. His mind was already elsewhere as he eyed the blinking answering machine light, decided to ignore it, then surveyed the empty reception room. “My partner’s out of town on business and we haven’t hired a new receptionist yet. The old one quit on us.”

“I thought King Buffalo was already up and running,” I said.

“It is, but we’re farming out the production right now to a bigger company. We’re hoping to build our own factory and operations soon.”

Of course. Nothing was ever what it seemed. Even the little companies were simply satellites of the big ones. When you get right down to it, there are really only two companies in the world: McDonald’s and the Gap. And Bill Gates probably secretly owns both of them.

“Want to see the laboratory?” he asked, a spark of enthusiasm lighting his eyes for the first time that day.

“Sure.” Why not? He was cute for a mad scientist and I wanted to see him strut his stuff. We descended steep stairs into the basement I saw where his current profits had gone at once: a completely modern research facility had been installed in the basement of the house. Smooth white dry board fronted the brick foundation walls and spotless counters stretched the entire width of the building. A pristine white carpet covered the floor and muffled all sound. There was a large metal desk in one comer heaped high
with stacks of papers and a big-screen computer system. I counted three other computers, including one that was busy calculating numbers on its bright blue screen as if it had been working hard all day while its owner was in Raleigh having lunch.

Every counter held a series of work stations, each consisting of a different combination of beakers, plastic tubing, jars of clear and colored liquids and, sometimes, a small black box with adjustable dials.

One corner of the room was piled high with half a dozen bales of cured tobacco, the pungent smell of the leaf mingling with the odor of fresh paint.

“Wow,” I said as I made my way across the carpeted floor. “Where’s Frankenstein?”

“Not bad, huh?” He led me to one of the research stations. “I can’t go into detail, but I’m experimenting with various extraction methods and altering the genetic code of the leaf itself. The trick is to eliminate tar and nicotine without losing flavor. You can enhance flavor by adding a substance like ammonia, but I’m working on an all-natural mix of herbs and other plants, some of them common and others from as far away as the Amazon Basin. What you see are different combinations of various extracts.” He waved a hand around the room. “The real secret is in the tobacco itself. I’ve had farmers all across North Carolina growing special hybrids for the past three years. No chemicals and no fertilizers allowed. Just my genetically altered seedlings, very specific growing techniques and selected organic compounds added at certain times. If I can get the right base of tobacco this season, I’ll be able to complete my research within the next two years and we could be out with the product within three or four years.”

While I watched, he took a dropper and extracted a sample from a beaker that was a thi

I coughed and he looked up, startled. “Oh,” he said. “Hi there,” as if I had just happened to wander in. “Why don’t you look around the house or something? I just want to finish this up.”