Dollar Down

By

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and
events described herein are products of the author's imagination or
are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any
resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations, or persons,
living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

ISBN 13: 978-1-60174-208-7

Dollar Down
Copyright ©
2015 by Sam Waite

Cover design
Copyright © 2015 by
Judith B. Glad
Design concept by Sam Waite;
View of Paris
from Sacre Coeur© Pocholo Calapre |
Dreamstime.com;
Golden currency symbols © 123dartist -
Fotolia

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My taxi eased along wet cobblestone that ran narrow
between stone apartments adorned with stone statuary. A
pig-snout gargoyle grinned as icy drizzle flowed from its tusks onto
a young woman clutching her collar against the cold. Her
light-brown hair swayed gently in the easy rhythm of her stride, a
contrast of warmth and vulnerability in the hard City of
Light.

It would have been a nuance to savor, if my only client
had not gone missing the day I arrived in Paris and my bank
account wasn't down to a pocketful of nickels and lint.

My flight from Houston had landed last night. Trevor
Jones, the man who hired me and brought me here, didn't
answer my call from the airport. He was supposed to have
arranged accommodations. Instead, I found my own way to the
St. Lazare district, to a hotel that boasted a one-star rating, and
a two-person elevator. My room had a single bed, an enamel
tub chipped at the rims and a knee-high refrigerator filled with
overpriced drinks. I walked a block to buy a bottle of four-euro
wine. It made the bed feel less lumpy. Early next morning
Trevor didn't answer a call to his office. I left a message and
waited two hours for an answer that didn't come. Then I called
a cab.

Two unreported hours for most people wasn't reason
to call out the bloodhounds. For Trevor, it might as well have
been a month. His secretary said he'd missed a client meeting
without calling. I'd done a job for Trevor once before when I
was still employed at an agency. He kept a log of every working
hour, each of which was billable at a sum high enough to give
any of my clients nosebleed.

The driver pulled alongside the curb on Rue de
Bassano, a short street that met the Champs Elysées
near the Arc de Triomphe, icons that won bragging rights for
the Paris office of Winchell & Associates, the world's
premier management consultancy. Trevor was a partner in the
firm.

Winchell was founded in home-spun Ohio, but had
grown to span the globe. More than fifty percent of its partners
were non-American, although the firm's language was English,
even among professional staff whose native language was
something else. Revenues exceeded seven and a half billion
dollars last year. Associate consultants graduating out of the
top two percent of Harvard or INSEAD started at more than a
hundred thousand dollars a year. Mid-career specialists got
more. Its information network had few rivals outside national
intelligence agencies. The firm's New York database was a
dumping ground for knowledge gleaned from former Japanese
bureaucrats leveraging connections for higher salaries, former
spooks too smart to stay in the CIA, Indian engineers with
doctorates in metallurgy and MBAs in finance. People left the
firm to run major corporations and then paid the firm millions
for global studies.

Incestuous wealth.

I'd earned barely enough to keep the doors open since
I opened my own investigative office three months ago.

The call from Trevor was supposed to have changed
that, but he'd fallen off the radar. A plea to his secretary got me
an interview with a honcho in the firm.

"How do you know Trevor?" Sabine Duveau sat
square-shouldered and spoke like a drill sergeant cursed with
a seductress's voice. She was French, but it was hard to place
her accent when she spoke English. The best fit I could make
was midtown Manhattan, without the edge. I took her to be in
her mid-forties. She was the director of the study Trevor was
working on and commanded her realm from a massive wooden
desk designed to give moving men hernias. The walls were
paneled in dark-stained hardwood.

Bookshelves lined two of those walls. The only
adornment was a painting of a window that was weathered
and framed in wood whose moss-green paint was peeling. It
was surrounded by a white iron grill that showed signs of rust.
Artistic squalor amid splendor. I wondered what that said
about her.

"About three years ago," I said, "Trevor suspected a
particular company was presenting false data to facilitate a
merger. The company was effectively bankrupt, but its
management would have pocketed millions, if the deal had
been finalized. He hired the agency I worked for and, through
extra-legal means, I found evidence that he was right."

"That was you?" Ms. Duveau leaned back in her chair,
pursed her lips and micron by micron drew her mouth into a
smile that teased tiny crinkles at her lavender eyes, playfully
darkening them with widening, glistening pupils as though
they had heard their own private call to samba. "I'm
impressed."

So was I.

"That's quite a famous study." She touched one index
finger to her bottom lip. "It's been cited in in-house seminars
from M&A procedures to ethics—mostly ethics. In this firm,
no one else, as far as I know, has ever hired a private
investigator or used 'extra legal evidence,' in a study.
Nevertheless, you saved our client an enormous amount of
money."

"I thought it was all confidential."

"For the sake of discussions outside the firm, the study
has been sanitized. Names and a few other details were
changed. We're quite careful. You haven't told anyone who the
client was?"

I shook my head. "Not even you."

"There's no need. I'm among those who know. Why did
Trevor hire you this time, Mr. Sanchez?"

I told her about the call two days ago, when Trevor
mentioned a project for PDVSA, Venezuela's national oil
company. I filled in background about my career with Global
Risk Management. It came to an abrupt end in Japan, when I
was told to abandon a case that was on the verge of being
broken. I had to choose between loyalty to the company or to
my Japanese colleague who had risked her life to solve the
thing.

"As a matter of professional honor, I quit and opened
my own shop."

Trevor was my first client outside a nasty divorce case
and a few skip traces. I was happy to get the work, even though
he hadn't explained exactly what he wanted me to do. He had
insisted on a face-to-face meeting for that.

Ms. Duveau's expression went from stern to respectful
to impish. Now it was soothing. "You must have loved her
intensely. Your colleague, I mean."

It was my turn to smile. "You don't buy the
professional ethics angle?"

"I have no doubt of your ethics, Mr. Sanchez. Trevor
would never have dealt with you otherwise. What happened
between you and your colleague, if you don't mind my
asking?"

"She's there." I shrugged. "I'm here."

"I see." Ms. Duveau silently stared at her desk for an
uncomfortably long time. "I'm very much worried about Trevor.
He missed a client progress report this morning without
notifying us. That doesn't happen in this firm, not without a
disastrous reason. We've tried to contact him every way we
know how. We've also called the police. They said they would
notify us if they get a report on him, but it's too early for them
to consider him missing." She scowled, apparently at what she
considered incompetence on the part of law enforcement. "It
will probably be days before they act. Time is critical in a
situation like this, don't you agree?"

I nodded.

"Are you still interested in a job, Mr. Sanchez?"

Desperate might have been a better choice of word, but
that was between me and my answering service. "Yes."

"Would you wait here? I'll ask my secretary to bring
you coffee."

While she was gone, I took a close look at the painting.
I couldn't recognize the medium. It wasn't oil, and it wasn't any
sort of watercolor that I'd seen. Books on business strategy,
architecture, history, music and literature lined her shelves.
Rene Descartes' work on coordinate geometry was next to a
photographic study of Argentine gauchos. A collection of
William Blake's art and essays rubbed covers with Robert
Service poems of the Alaskan wild. I took it down and opened it
to pass the time.

"That's one of my favorites." She'd opened the door as
I was reading Service's
The Shooting of Dan McGrew
.
"Unaffected and feral." There was the imp again. "I have a
proposition that I think will fit our situation nicely, if you agree
to it. The managing director of the firm's Houston office is a
long-time friend and close colleague. I'm sure he'll cooperate.
He owes me more favors than he can ever repay. I'll explain the
urgency and ask him to fax the required documents before the
day is out. Once you sign them, you will become an employee of
Winchell & Associates, temporary of course. This office
will assume all responsibility for your schedule and salary, but
from here, it will appear that you are on staff in Houston. What
do you say?"

"It sounds complicated, why?"

"In the merger investigation, Trevor paid you out of his
own pocket. The firm doesn't deal with private investigators
directly. I'd rather not do that. As an employee, you will sign a
confidentiality agreement. You may then have access to all the
information available on the study. That could be an advantage
in your work."

"Why go through Houston?"

"That's the base for the study. It's about oil. You're
being from there makes it all the more convenient. This way
we avoid a lot of nosy interviews from the firm's personnel
office. Do you agree?"

"In principle. We haven't discussed fees."

Ms. Duveau went to her desk and pulled a folder out of
a drawer.

"These are files on the Orimulsion study for Petroleos
de Venezuela. Are you familiar with Orimulsion?"

"Vaguely, tar suspended in water used as a fuel for
power plants."

"That's correct—vaguely. This will provide details.
Read it and write a credible job description that fits your
background. My secretary will give you information on
positions available in the firm. You would be an industry
specialist of some sort, I expect. Also, fill in your compensation.
You may be generous with yourself, but be reasonable. I'm
afraid the best we can do for accommodations is a cubicle
among the business analysts. My secretary will show
you."

I took the folder and started to leave.

"Have it ready by six. Houston will be starting its work
day then. If you have no other plans, let's have dinner."

"I'm free." The imps in her eyes were gone. Ms. Duveau
was a drill sergeant again.

"Good. I'll stop by your cubicle when I'm done this
evening."

Dismissed, Private Sanchez.
She was back at
work before I closed the door behind me.

Ms. Duveau's folder had a stack of charts that were
sketchy on details, but I did learn that Venezuela had enough
hydrocarbons to rival Canada for having the world's largest
reserves. A lot was light, sweet oil, but most by far was
bitumen and extra-heavy oil. It was gunk that lay in a belt two
hundred seventy miles long and forty miles wide in the
Orinoco. Technology was steadily expanding the volume of
recoverable fuel, but still the stuff was costly to dredge out and
refine. The Saudis weren't in danger of being toppled from the
peak of OPEC. At least, not yet.

Winchell & Associates had been hired to expand
the market for unrefined Orimulsion, and the firm was doing a
good job.

I didn't find anything to explain why Trevor Jones had
hired me, but I did think of a niche for myself. Orimulsion had a
high content of minerals such as nickel and sulfur that rained
back down after it went up in smoke. That and other ecological
worries were sometimes the subject of public protests. I wrote
myself a billet as a security specialist.