What the Dead Leave Behind Read online

  Rebecca finished her drink in one long gulp and excused herself to the restroom.

  “Order me another Manhattan,” she said.

  I turned in her chair and gestured to the waitress. She came to the table quickly, took our orders, and left. Not much was said while we waited for Rebecca to return. When she did, Diane asked, “I’ve never been to the East Side; do you live here now?”

  “I live in the same house that I bought when I was working for you,” Rebecca said.

  “I remember.”

  The drinks were served. The waitress asked if we wanted to close our tab because she was going off duty; the bartender would be there to serve us, she said. I noticed then that the bar was empty. Late Tuesday night in St. Paul. I paid for the drinks. The waitress left. I sipped mine. Diane sipped hers. Rebecca stared at us both.

  “What offer?” she said. “You said you were going to make a better offer.”

  “First, you need to understand, Pamela Randall’s plan isn’t going to work.”

  “Why not?”

  “You might get Diane fired, maybe arrested; ruin her career over allegations that she’s paying you to commit corporate espionage. Isn’t that why you gave her all those little gifts? So people would remember seeing you pass Barek’s trade secrets? But the endgame—the Szereto Corporation isn’t going anywhere.”

  “Why not?” Rebecca repeated.

  “I don’t feel well,” Diane said.

  I turned my attention to her. She seemed pale. Her eyes were heavy. Her breathing was labored.

  “McKenzie, I…”

  Her eyes closed and she slipped out of her chair.

  I tried to catch her.

  We both ended up on the floor.

  I wrapped my arms around Diane’s shoulders and cradled her head.

  I called her name.

  Someone called mine. There was an echo-chamber quality to it.

  I found Crawford. She was looking at me, an expression of curiosity on her face.

  I closed my eyes tightly and opened them again.

  She was still staring.

  The room tilted sharply.

  “Well, dammit,” I said.

  *   *   *

  For a long time I couldn’t tell if I was awake or asleep. I could move my head, but that was all. Someone was talking to me. Or was I talking to myself? I had a habit of doing that. The inner voice usually told me things that I already knew. This time it was telling me that I was too, too clever for my own good. Trying to turn Rebecca Crawford; pay her to join my side like any decent mercenary and give up her co-conspirators. It didn’t occur to me that she might be angry at me for ruining a scheme that was at least a year in the making. Or that she might be frightened into doing something rash.

  You’re a shrewd one, the voice said. Yes, you are.

  “You can shut up now,” I told the voice. “I get it.”

  This is why you’re not a real private eye. Who the hell would give you a license?

  “I said I get it.”

  “McKenzie.”

  “I’ll think of something. I always do.”

  “McKenzie. Wake up.”

  My eyes snapped open. I was staring at a white wall. The wall became a couple of walls, a floor, a ceiling, a closed door—no windows.

  “McKenzie.”

  I turned my head. Diane Dauria—her arms and legs had been fixed to a chair with duct tape. Her hair was disheveled. There was swelling and a deep redness between her ear and her chin.

  “Are you awake?” she asked.

  “What happened to your face?”

  “He punched me. I woke up while he was carrying me into the office and tried to get away. I guess I drank less of my drink than you did.”

  “Office?”

  “In the bar. He dragged us through the kitchen to this place.”

  “He?”

  “Bartender. I guess a friend of Becs—Rebecca.”

  “He fixed our drinks.”

  Nothing gets past you.

  “This bartender,” I said. “Does he walk with a limp?”

  “He’s wearing a leg brace.”

  Just wonderful. You knew Kid Cardiff tended bar on the East Side.

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Give me a minute to think.”

  Think? You?

  “Enough,” I said.

  “McKenzie,” Diane said. “Are you here?”

  “I’m here, I’m here.”

  It was a small office and crowded with a desk, file cabinets, and large cardboard boxes. One of the boxes was opened—paper napkins with the name of the bar imprinted on them. There were two chairs. Diane was in one and I was in the other. I struggled to get out of my chair. Whoever taped Diane down had done the same to me, and he did it well enough that I knew I would be unable to break through my bonds. I stopped struggling.

  “We’re in trouble,” I said.

  You think?

  “What are we going to do?” Diane asked.

  I regarded my cast. “How long was I out?”

  “An hour. Maybe more.”

  The cast had been taped to the arm of the chair, I told myself, but not the wrist inside it. “What happened to Rebecca and Cardiff?”

  “After they taped us to the chairs, Cardiff said he’d have to keep tending bar until closing so no one would wonder why the bar closed early. Rebecca said that was okay, she needed to make a call.”

  There was a clock on the wall—12:46. But did the bar close at one o’clock or two?

  “Okay,” I said aloud.

  This is going to hurt, I told myself silently.

  I straightened my fingers and tried to pull my arm out of the cast.

  I was right, it did hurt.

  Yet my wrist didn’t move.

  I tried to twist it out.

  Which only caused it to hurt some more.

  “McKenzie,” Diane said.

  “Shhhh.”

  I kept pulling and twisting even as the pain rippled up my arm into my spine. I noticed—my wrist didn’t move, but the cast did. It slipped ever so slightly beneath the tape. That’s when I realized it wasn’t genuine duct tape. It was a cheap knock-off, and the dust from the plaster cast was starting to erode the adhesive. I kept twisting. My wrist kept hurting. The cast kept turning until it broke away from the adhesive.

  The door opened.

  “McKenzie,” Diane said.

  I stopped struggling against the tape and looked up. Ronald Cardiff stepped in front of me. There was a metal contraption protecting his right leg. He was balancing most of his weight on the left.

  “Hey, Kid,” I said. “How’s the knee?”

  “I owe you.”

  “About that—”

  Cardiff hit me with a straight punch hard enough to loosen my teeth. The sound it made and the jolt of hard bone against his knuckles seemed to make him happy.

  “At least you’re hitting me and not a woman,” I said.

  He punched me again.

  I didn’t have anything to say after that.

  Rebecca arrived. She didn’t mind at all that Cardiff was slapping me around. She moved to the desk and leaned her butt against it. Suddenly it was very crowded in there.

  I said, “How are you doin’, Becs?”

  “You should have taken my offer when you had the chance.”

  “The dinner and drinks sounded fine, but the sex part—ewww.”

  “Who are you kidding?”

  “Rebecca,” Diane said, “this is insane.”

  “I knew you’d think that. That’s why I didn’t ask you to join us.”

  “Join you in what?”

  “A chance to get rich and retire in a year.”

  “How many of you are involved?” I asked.

  “Eight, including the Kid.”

  I glanced up at Cardiff. “What about your pal?” I asked.

  “He’s in the hospital.”

  “Too bad. So sad.”

  Cardiff look
ed as if he wanted to punch me again and then decided it wasn’t worth the effort.

  “He was just a hired hand,” Diane said. “If he had been paying attention like he was supposed to, you would never have left that parking lot.”

  “The others—all minority shareholders of the Szereto Corporation?”

  “Szereto and Barek both.”

  “Candy Groot, too?”

  “No. Pamela didn’t trust her to go along with the plan.”

  “What plan?” Diane asked.

  “Didn’t McKenzie tell you?”

  “Rebecca intends to frame you for corporate espionage against Barek Cosmetics,” I said. “Maybe the FBI will step in, maybe it won’t. If it does, Rebecca will turn government informer and take a pass. You will be portrayed as the big bad boogie-woman; the heartless, greedy mentor manipulating the poor, naïve, starry-eyed protégé into making bad choices. In any case, Barek most certainly will take legal action, like when Starwood Hotel and Resorts sued Hilton or when GM sued Volkswagen over trade secrets. Once the scandal is percolating nicely, the Szereto Corporation board of directors, led no doubt by Pamela Randall, will use the company’s unfit-to-serve protocols to remove Evelyn Szereto, accusing her of compromising the company’s fiduciary credibility by fostering an atmosphere that allowed the scandal to take place or some such nonsense and, of course, for handpicking you to run the company.

  “Next, the conspirators will make Szereto available for sale to Barek, thus eliminating a need for lengthy and expensive litigation. Evelyn won’t be able to prevent it because when they remove her from the board for conduct detrimental to the company, they’ll also remove her ability to vote her stock. She’ll make a great deal of money, like everyone else who owns a piece of Szereto, but she’ll lose her company. Meanwhile, having made a bundle by selling their stock to Barek, the conspirators will make more money still when the value of Barek’s stock increases after the company absorbs the Szereto Corporation products, customers, brand name, and market share. That’s the plan, anyway. Right?”

  “You put it together nicely,” Rebecca said.

  “Only it’s not going to work.”

  “Why won’t it work?” Pamela Randall asked.

  She was standing on the other side of the doorway looking in, the kitchen behind her. I smiled when I saw her.

  “I knew you’d be along sooner or later,” I said.

  “How did you know that?” Rebecca asked.

  “Because I didn’t wake up dead. Obviously you were waiting for instructions.”

  “Instructions?” Pamela said the word as if it surprised her. She stepped into the office and saw Diane for the first time. “Oh. No.”

  “What?” Rebecca asked.

  “What is Dauria doing here?”

  “She came with McKenzie.”

  “What do you expect to do now?”

  “That’s what I wanted to ask you.”

  “You’re missing the point. Dauria is the villain. The bad person who committed corporate espionage against a competing company. The one who blatantly stole a Barek product and introduced it to the marketplace on Valentine’s Day.”

  “So?”

  “You have her taped to a chair.”

  “So?”

  “So what do you think is going to happen once you untape her?”

  “Why should we untape her?” Cardiff asked.

  Pamela practically screamed her answer. “Because we need a villain, not a victim. None of this works without a villain.”

  “Pamela,” I said.

  “What?”

  “It’s a moot point anyway.”

  “Why?”

  “The entire plan hinges on you removing Evelyn from the board of directors in such a way that she would be unable to vote her stock against a sale.”

  “Yeah?”

  “She doesn’t own any stock. Not a single share.”

  “She’s chairperson of the board.”

  “So Vanessa doesn’t need to be.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Vanessa owns everything. She’s letting Evelyn run the company while she raises her son. My bet? She’ll vote against a sale. In fact, she was the one who killed the deal with the Europeans in the first place.”

  “No. No, no. I was there when the vote was taken. It was Evelyn.”

  “It was Vanessa. Evelyn was merely voting her proxy.”

  “She didn’t say she was voting Vanessa’s shares.”

  “That Evelyn,” I said. “She surely loves being large and in charge, doesn’t she?”

  “What does this mean?” Rebecca wanted to know.

  “Let me think,” Pamela said.

  “Are you telling me that everything I did was for nothing? I killed a man for you.”

  “Give me a second.”

  “Randall, I promise—if I go down for this, I’m not going alone.”

  Pamela stared at me for a moment.

  “We need to talk,” she said. “Outside.”

  She led Kid Cardiff and Rebecca out of the room and into the kitchen before firmly shutting the door behind them.

  “I knew you were trouble the minute you walked into my office,” Diane said. “Now what’s going to happen?”

  “You’re a businesswoman. What would you do?”

  I yanked at my cast until it slipped out from under the duct tape. I used my free hand to quickly untape the other, or rather I should say I used the fingertips that were uncovered by the cast, which made the task take an agonizingly long time.

  Behind the door I heard voices raised in argument. I didn’t think the debate was going in our favor. At the end of the day, Pamela was a pragmatist. She’d vote to cut her losses. My only question—why was it taking them so long?

  After I freed my hand I worked on the tape that secured my ankles to the chair legs. When that was done I crossed the small office to where Diane sat. I had managed to free one hand when the voices ceased. A moment later I heard someone at the door.

  I dashed to the side with the hinges.

  The door opened slowly. It not only hid me from view; it kept me from seeing the rest of the room.

  Diane screamed.

  I pushed hard against the door and hit something solid, knocking it off-kilter.

  I came out from behind the door and found Kid Cardiff.

  He had a gun in his hand and the same expression on his face as the time I fought him in the parking lot—as if he were unsure of what was happening.

  Diane screamed again.

  She wasn’t frightened—no, that’s unfair. I’m sure she was as scared as could be. But she was screaming to distract Cardiff.

  I grabbed the hand that held the gun.

  Cardiff attempted to pull it away.

  I used my cast to hammer down hard on the inside of his elbow, causing his arm to fold. The gun was now pointing upward.

  It went off. Debris from the ceiling rained down on us.

  I forced the cast against Cardiff’s arm to hold it in place while I wrestled for the gun with my good hand.

  Rebecca was standing on the other side of the doorway, Pamela behind her.

  She also had a gun.

  She pointed it at me.

  I pivoted so that Cardiff was in front of me.

  She fired anyway.

  The bullet hit Cardiff low in his left side.

  He cried out in pain and fell backward against me. I was so wrapped up around him that his weight forced me down. He rolled on top of me. The gun slipped from his hand and rattled on the floor. It was just out of reach. I lunged for it, wrapped my fingers around the butt.

  Rebecca moved against the doorframe and pointed her weapon at me. A nine-millimeter SIG Sauer P228—the same damn gun that I usually carry when I feel I need one.

  Diane screamed at her, “Rebecca don’t.”

  Rebecca hesitated for a single beat. It was enough time for me to bring Cardiff’s gun up.

  I swear to God, Rebecca fired first.


  I have replayed the entire scene over and over and over again in my memory, and each time Rebecca fired first—her bullet tearing into the floor about a foot and a half from my head—before I shot her three times in the chest.

  Diane screamed again. Only this time she meant it.

  Pamela turned and ran. I shouted at her, “Where do you think you’re going? Where do you think you can hide?”

  I pushed and pulled my way out from under Cardiff. He was still alive. I checked his wound. If you have to get shot, the lower left side of the abdomen is the best place. There are no major organs to worry about. I didn’t tell him that, though. I checked his bleeding. He didn’t see me do it, but I also pulled my smartphone out and set it on record.

  Diane freed herself from the chair. She grabbed the office phone and called 911. She was weeping while she told the operator where she was and what happened.

  We both tried to ignore Rebecca’s body as best we could.

  I leaned in close to Cardiff’s face.

  “You’re dying, Kid,” I said.

  “No.”

  “It’s true.”

  “The bitch shot me.”

  “She was looking out for herself.”

  “She always did.”

  “Kid. Kid, you don’t have much time.”

  “I know.”

  “Tell me about Frank Harris.”

  “Frank?”

  “Frank Harris. He came here a year ago last Christmas.”

  “The bum from Szereto?”

  “Yes.”

  “How’d you know ’bout him?”

  I didn’t, I told myself. I was just taking a chance because of something that Rebecca had said earlier—Do you want to cut yourself in, too?—and what she said later—I killed a man for you.

  “Rebecca said you did it,” I told him.

  “No, it was her. He found out she was working for Barek while pretending to work for Szereto.”

  He was the director of human resources, I reminded myself; was working the job when Diane hired Rebecca on a contract basis.

  “He tried to blackmail her,” Cardiff said. “Dumb fuck. Said he was tired of doing dirty work for the bosses. Said he was going to change his life; said if she took care of him he’d disappear, she’d never see him again. Becs said she’d be happy to give him a piece. Told him to follow her to the office. Fucker actually licked his lips. McKenzie, I don’t want to die.”

  None of us do, I told myself. Aloud, I said, “What happened?”