There's a Rock in My Shoes

By Peter Geller

Darold Sanderson, a midlevel accounting supervisor for a New York–based publishing company, has always led a very quiet, unassuming life and is content to keep it that way. His only close friends have already passed away, and the only remaining "person" in his life is Rock Hard, an old-time, hard-bitten private investigator. The only problem with the relationship is that no one other than Darold has ever seen or spoken to him, and Rock will only talk to Darold! Suddenly, Darold's whole life changes when he innocently discovers a minor accounting error in the company records, an error that would have cost his company $16,000. No big deal, these kinds of errors occur all the time. Darold corrects the error. His natural curiosity, however, leads Darold to try to discover why this error occurred. One thing leads to another, and before he knows it, Darold has met and begun living with a woman unlike any he has ever met. He also realizes that people are trying to kill him! But with Rock's help, Darold escapes one jam after another as he gets closer and closer to solving the mystery. To protect himself, since the police believe this is all in his imagination, Darold is forced to go into hiding and investigate the whole matter by himself. This leads Darold into a world that he never knew existed and may, at any time, cost him his life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9781684566716

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Peter Geller

There’s a Rock in My Shoes

Copyright © 2019 Peter Geller

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

New York, NY

First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc. 2019

ISBN 978-1-68456-670-9 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64584-999-5 (Hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-68456-671-6 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Book 1

Prologue

His name is Rock Hard. He’s been a private detective for the past fifteen years. His specialty, when he can afford to turn down any case to and including lost pets, is murder. Before becoming a private cop, he was a detective sergeant in the New York City Police Department. A cop’s life is usually a day-by-day existence with much less excitement than you see on all those cop shows on television. Rock’s was pretty much the same way except that you might remember him for the Lance Boil murder trial. He spent three years tracking down Boil’s murderer, the last two on his own time when the department cold cased the investigation. He finally cornered the guy in a shooting gallery in the South Bronx, near the Hunts Point Market. The shoot-out cost the killer his life and Rock six months in the hospital, four days on the critical list, and at home, recuperating. He still says that it was worth it: the city deserved something for the $679.75 after-tax they paid him. Rock was injured four other times in the line of duty and once when his wife caught him with a cute little meter maid who was ticketing his car until she found out he was a cop. He has a long list of decorations, including the Mayor’s Medal for Bravery for the Lance Boil case. He retired from the force the first chance he got to do it with full pension benefits.

Now he has a one-room office at 149th Street and Sheridan Avenue in the Bronx, furnished with a desk, two chairs, one file cabinet, and a coffee maker. He used to employ a secretary, but he got tired of putting up with her sharp tongue and total lack of respect for the valuable job he performed. Now, he uses an answering machine and has learned how to type, albeit with two fingers. He has one close friend, so close you could almost call them the same person—me.

* * *

It was midnight when Rock called me. It always seemed to be around then that he called me. I guess he didn’t realize that some people had real jobs to do. A woman, Janice Harper by name, had hired him to protect her from her ex-husband, Guido Pabloma. The divorce, she claimed he was screwing half the woman’s club she was a member of, netted her half of his $3.5 million net worth and their apartment on Sixty-Seventh and Third. She claimed he was a sick son of a bitch who would try to kill her just for spite.

She was willing to pay Rock $200 a day plus expenses to either scare her husband off or come up with some other way to stop him without her having to move away and hide from him for the rest of her life.

From Janice, Rock learned that her ex was known to have contacts with certain elements in society that weren’t known for following the law. In fact, after talking to some old friends in the NYPD Criminal Investigation Division, Rock discovered that hubby was reputed to be connected to the Carbone crime family, and that they were investigating him for all sorts of criminal activities. They hoped to get a grand jury to indict him on racketeering charges and send him away for fifteen to thirty. Rock figured that this was good and bad news. The good news was that it gave him something to use as blackmail to scare the ex away from Janice. The bad news was that it might take the city five years to indict Guido, by which time Janice would be either sleeping in a dirt bed, or Guido would put a contract out on both Rock and Janice. He really wanted to avoid having to get into a shooting war with the mafia.

Rock wanted me to help him get enough other dirt on Guido to scare him off or, failing that, to use enough physical force to send him to greener fields! My job would be to stay with Janice and make sure that Guido didn’t move on her before we were ready to stop him. Rock, in the meantime, would follow Guido around and see what dirt he could pick up. Physically, Rock stood six feet, one inch tall, weighed 185 pounds, and had straight blond hair, so it’s not easy for him to be missed in a crowd. He has, however, over the years, become quite skilled at looking like many different people depending on his mood and the availability of extra clothing. I figured he would carry around two to three changes of appearance and wouldn’t be spotted by Guido unless he really blew his cover, something he wasn’t likely to do.

About a week into the program, Janice was out going to a gym for her weekly exercise program. Crossing Fifth Avenue half a block behind her, I noticed a cab ignore three different flag downs for rides. Instead, he seemed to be keeping Janice about twenty yards ahead of him, making no attempt to get closer to her. At one point on Fifty-Ninth Street off Fifth, the crowd thinned out, and it seemed to me, the cab sped up and started getting closer to Janice. Just then, a cop showed up on the corner, and just as suddenly, the cab slowed down again and resumed his twenty-yard spread. I suddenly got the idea that I wasn’t the only one following Janice, and that the driver of the cab wasn’t going to be nearly as nonviolent as I was. I sped up and closed the distance between me and Janice, and a minute later, the cab once again started to speed up. When the cab was five yards away, it was obvious that his plan was to run her down. I put my head down and charged Janice and reached her three feet ahead of the cab. I managed to shove her up against the building and out of the path of the cab. I wasn’t so lucky with myself. The cab caught me a glancing blow to my left side and pushed me against the same building as Janice. He kept going, turned the corner, and disappeared. I picked myself off the ground just as Janice screamed a curse at the back of the cab and kept walking. I knew that I was going to be hurting in the morning, but I had no choice but to keep up with my tailing of Janice, so I limped after her for the rest of the day.

Another week went by, and Rock came to me with a plan. He told me that we would have to break into Guido’s apartment and steal some papers that he, somehow or the other, knew that Guido kept there. These papers would provide enough evidence to put Guido in jail immediately and keep him there for the next twenty years. Sounds simple. Don’t bet on it. Guido may have been a lot of things, but stupid wasn’t one of them. You had to know that he would take all sorts of precautions to prevent exactly what we were planning. And if we were caught, we weren’t going to be turned over to the police. I told Rock he was nuts and that I didn’t spend my time pretending to be a second-story man.

Two nights later, and against all my better instincts, I found myself dressed in all black, carrying a bag full of tools, which Rock had handed to me, and following behind him as we crossed 118th Street and Third Avenue, a block away from where Guido was living since Janice kicked him out of their apartment. If nothing else, the least I could do was be Rock’s bagman literally. It was 3:00 am, and according to Rock, Guido was supposed to be spending the night at his girlfriend’s apartment downtown.

Nevertheless, we decided to take no chances and approached the apartment building like it was the Pentagon, and we were trespassing. The front door was locked. Rock reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small black box and showed me a bunch of what looked like burglar tools. Gingerly taking an aluminum pick out of the box, Rock inserted it into the door lock and started to jiggle it around. After a minute of that, he asked me to hold the pick in the position it was while he went back into his little black box and pulled out another tool with a long pincer on the end. Inserting that in the lock alongside the pick that I was holding, Rock played with that for a minute until I heard a click and felt the door open. God, how I wished that I could do stuff like that. I probably would have rung the doorbell.

We quietly made our way up to the fourth floor where Guido’s apartment was and repeated the same process on the front door. Again, it took Rock about a minute to get the door open. We entered the dark, quiet apartment, and just as we were about to start looking for the papers that Rock said were there, there was a loud squeaking sound, and an interior door opened. Guido and three other men came out into the living room and faced us. Over one of their shoulders, I could see into the room they came out of, and it looked like they had a card table set up and were probably playing cards while we broke in. Two of them had guns!

It looked like Rock and I were in for a very short evening and very long thereafter. But before that happens, it’s time to wake up!

* * *

Wake up, Darold! You were sleeping and dreaming about Rock again. It’s time to get out of bed and back into the real world. How is it that you always know you’re dreaming even while you’re still asleep and in the middle of the dream and can remember every single detail no matter how small? I guess it’s a skill that I developed after years of practice. I don’t even have to be asleep anymore. I can live in Rock’s world whenever I want to, and he seems more than willing to let me do it. Best of all, he never gives me bad advice. Well, to be honest, you would have to be asleep or nuts to follow most of the advice that he gives. That’s still more than I can say about any other person I know, even if I had known someone with whom I could share the same level of personal information that I do with Rock.

By everyone else’s standards, I lead a normal, if dull, middle-class existence. I go to work five days a week. I don’t have the world’s most exciting social life, but I have one nonetheless, and I’m content to continue living just the way I have been for the foreseeable future.

Rock’s life was everything that mine wasn’t. Where the most exciting thing in my life was the two-week vacation I took every year at a resort in the Jewish mountains, better known as the Borscht Belt, Rock’s was filled with excitement. You could never predict whether Rock was going to be working on a murder case, grand theft, or a husband cheating on his wife and both of his girlfriends! Rock never got out of bed before 11:00 am and rarely went to sleep before 3:00 am. Rock ate in coffee shops, cheap restaurants, and bars three meals a day, seven days a week. I always ate lunch at my desk during the week. I prepared and ate most of the rest of my meals at home, eating out in moderately priced family-style restaurants maybe twice a week. We didn’t talk much about his sex life, but I could only imagine that it was a lot more exciting than mine was. Mine was, in fact, virtually nonexistent. Rock wore whatever clothes he felt like at the moment, whether it was jeans and a T-shirt or sport coat and open-collar shirt. The one thing he never wore was a suit and tie. Me, I wore the same basic blue or gray two-piece suit, white shirt, and tie five days a week, and slacks and a sport shirt on the weekends. Despite living alone, I slept in a two-piece woolen pajama set. Rock slept in the nude!

Rock and I have known each other since I was nineteen. It seemed that it was just around that time in my life that I was having a particularly hard time making friends. I hadn’t started dating yet. That wouldn’t actually happen for another four years, and even in school, there was nobody who I seemed able to talk to and tell my problems to. Rock was my solution to everything that bothered me.

I don’t know how he found me, but he just seemed to show up one night. From the very beginning, it was like I had known him my entire life and that he knew more about me than anyone else. We’ve been closer than the proverbial two peas in a pod ever since. Best of all, my dream life went from the dull, normal nonsense that all teenaged boys dream about to the exciting world of Rock Hard. I’ve never looked back.

Chapter 1

My name is Darold Sanderson. I’m forty-three years old, having just celebrated my birthday (by myself) on March 10, 1990. I have been an accountant at Herkimer & Sons for the past seventeen years and have never been married.

I’ve spent my entire life living within two miles of where I was born in Ridgewood, Queens, since I could never seem to get up the energy or the nerve to move to a new apartment, much less a whole new neighborhood. Besides, I like the neighborhood I live in because people leave me alone. I don’t have to think about how or where I’m going to do my shopping, where I’m going to eat if I decide to eat out or, best of all, what I’m going to say to the next-door neighbor who I don’t want to talk to anyway.

By most standards, my life has been repetitious and boring, but it’s always suited my purposes. All the really exciting stuff happens to Rock, not to me. Plus or minus a little bit, I can probably tell you what I’ll be doing on March 10, 1991, 1992, and 1993. If I stretched a little bit, I could probably also tell you what I’ll be eating for lunch on all three of those dates.

Like every other guy my age, I was classified 1-A by the draft board the day I finished college. At that time, that meant that I had about three months before the army got around to drafting me. From there, there was only one future for all of us—Vietnam. The only out was to teach in what they called a special service school in New York City. My mother, God bless her, managed to get a friend of hers, the principal of the local junior high school, the one in fact that I went to, to get me into a walk-in exam that the city was giving for prospective teachers. If you could walk and chew gum, you could get a license to teach. You didn’t even have to be able to do them at the same time. I took the test and barely qualified.

I taught general science and typing—I couldn’t type with more than two fingers and even then, very poorly—to eighth and ninth graders for four years, always knowing that I would quit as soon as I hit twenty-six. It was at that age that they considered you too old to go chasing around in a jungle after the Vietcong, so the chances of you being drafted dropped to practically zero. Had I known just how miserable those four years of teaching would actually be, I would probably have opted to allow myself to get drafted.

It was in college that I met the five guys who became my only ever best friends. We met in sophomore accounting, and by the end of the semester, we were as close as any real brothers could ever be. We were together constantly. When we finally graduated, they all moved out of their parents’ homes and took apartments in an old law tenement building on Christopher Street in the West Village of Manhattan. They wanted me to move in too, but I didn’t. I was also teaching a block away from my mother’s house, and it would have been dumb to give up the convenience just so that I could live alone.

By 1970, all but Sam were dead, killed in Vietnam. Sam was on his way to a preinduction physical at Fort Hamilton early one Saturday morning in February 1970 when a mugger decided that he liked Sam’s watch. It was a graduation present from Sam’s sister. After spending a year in a coma, she buried Sam next to their parents. Sam was the last of the horde to die. I haven’t wanted to change anything ever since.

Sam’s funeral ended a period in my life that I would just as soon forget. It was only five years, but it felt like a lifetime. During my senior year in college, my brother Frank was killed by a drunk hit-and-run driver. When the police finally caught up with him four days later, he admitted that he had been drinking—he was drunk when the cops caught him—but told them that he couldn’t remember anything about that night even though the collision ripped off the front fender of his car. I guess he never wondered where it went to.

Every year, on the first weekend in April, just as the early flowers are beginning to come out, I rent a car and drive down to the Vietnam War Memorial. I put flowers on the grass in front of all my friends, except Sam. I do it in April because I don’t think that they should have to wait until Memorial Day to get a little bit of attention, and because the fewer people around when I’m so emotional, the better. On the way back to the city, I stop off at the cemetery in New Jersey where Sam is buried and put flowers on his grave.

Not that I was ever good at it, but after Sam died, I found that I didn’t make friends as easily as I used to. Nowadays, it seems to take a month for me to just want to give someone my name. About the same time, I feel myself backing off. After that, I start to drift away. It’s been like that for years now, and I guess, I’ve gotten used to it. The only person who has known me for more than a couple of months—knows my name, where I live, and what I do for a living—is the bartender at the Limelight. I still go there every Friday night, at a very early 5:00 pm and alone, of course, and have a couple of Scotches. Since there usually is no one else around, the bartender has the time to stay close and BS with me. Is that what you call a friendship?

Chapter 2

Darold, wake up! Time to move your backside and get on with your life. There are places to go and things to do. My name is Darold Sanderson, but now is not the time to be talking about me. I get one day a week off, and my girlfriend and I like to stay in bed for as long as possible. Today is not that day. Six days a week, I’m up and out of bed by 5:00 am , finished with my workout by 6:00 am , dressed and out of the front door by 6:45 am , and in the office by 7:30 am sharp.

I’m senior partner at Kravitz, Saltenbach, and Sanderson, a big Wall Street law firm specializing in patent law. I’ve won disputed patents for a number of clients and successfully challenged patents claimed by an even greater number of people. On occasion, and this is one of my most favorite things to do, I’ve been known to convince the NYS attorney general to institute criminal charges against a company that I’m suing. Of course, I always win my cases, and this has helped me earn fees on some very large settlements.

I own a penthouse apartment on upper Fifth Avenue with a view of Central Park from windows in three rooms and a view of the Metropolitan Museum of Art out of another. My favorite room is the library. It has about two thousand volumes covering virtually any subject you can imagine except the law. I figure the firm keeps enough of those in its library. Mine is reserved for all the subjects, and there’s a bunch of them that I’m really interested in.

My girlfriend Marielle is a model. She’s been on the cover of Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Sports Illustrated. She stands an even six feet tall in her stockinged feet, two inches shorter than me. Her gross income last year was $1.5 million. I made $2.2 million.

I don’t mind that Marielle can’t walk twenty feet outside our building without drawing a crowd. I’ve been known to do the same thing but with a slightly fewer number of people. We’ve kept good relations with the doormen, but only because we tip them in the four-figure range every Christmas.

Okay, I think it’s time to really wake up. It’s been one of my favorite dreams, but I can’t afford to be late. If I fall behind in my workload, my boss will eat me for breakfast. I find it interesting that I know, even while I’m still asleep, that it’s all been a dream. That’s one of my neater tricks. I’ve had the same dream so many times that I can recognize it while I’m still asleep. As usual, it’s been fun, but now, it’s time to get back to real life. Talk to you later. Okay?

Chapter 3

The week hadn’t started off real well. I was having trouble concentrating, and I was snapping at people for no reason at all. Even my landlady, who I usually get along with and enjoy being around, was getting on my nerves.

I could hardly wait till Friday since I would be starting my vacation. I always went to the same resort in the Catskill Mountains that my parents started taking me to when I was six. I’m sure there are more exciting places, but the weather in the mountains is cooler than in the city, and the dress code calls for nothing more formal than shorts and a polo shirt. There tends to be a fairly stable population of guests at these resorts, and it has, for me, become a comfortable place to stay. Because of the weather, I always went on vacation the last week in August and the first week in September.

There are always a lot of single Jewish women at the resort, mostly elementary schoolteachers, finished teaching the shortened summer school programs to supplement their incomes and taking a little time off before starting the regular school year immediately after Labor Day. They are not the kind of women Rock would have chosen to be with, but they were just fine for me. I could compare teaching experiences from twenty years ago with their current ones. As bad as mine were, I think the teachers of today have it worse. When I need excitement in my life, there’s Rock!

* * *

As I told you before, Rock and I are old friends. I’ve known him since 1965, around the time my girlfriend Candy met her football player. We started to get close right after Candy left and became inseparable after Sam was buried. Rock and I are so close that it seems that every thought I have, Rock is bound to have soon afterward. I know everything he does, and he likewise seems to anticipate everything that I do.

I can’t honestly tell you how Rock and I met, only that he showed up one day that I was feeling especially depressed. I wouldn’t usually hang around with a guy like Rock. Big, dumb lummox, he’s only interested in adventure and excitement, and as he’s fond of saying, Living life on the edge. I truly envy anyone who can consistently ignore the niggling little details of everyday life. Actually, he’s so different from me that whenever I try to tell him what it’s like being me, he kind of glazes over and goes to sleep.

The thing I find most interesting about Rock is how regular he looks. I would expect a decorated police hero to be big, muscular, and tough. Maybe even a scar or two. Just the opposite with Rock. If you could bump into him on the street, you would think that he was an accounting supervisor from Queens. Rock actually comes off a lot like I do. Physically, he looks like me: five feet, eight inches tall, weighs thirty-five pounds more than he should, balding slightly, and wears thick reading glasses.

Rock’s better at parties than I am. He mingles better. When I go to a party, I tend to find one person and talk to him all night, or as long as it takes for him to walk away from me. Rock almost never goes to parties with me. It would be better for me if he did.

Once you’re in my apartment, there are two doors you can choose from. One goes into my bedroom and the other into the bathroom. Some women acquaintances have thought that I was trying to seduce them because of the layout of the apartment. I don’t think I would mind it too much if it had that effect on women, but so far it hasn’t!

I make a good living, but you couldn’t tell it from the way I live. I get used to things, and once I do, I don’t like to change them around. My mother and I moved into this apartment back in 1975. The one we lived in before was much bigger. It was one and a half miles across the line in Glendale. We didn’t need all the extra rooms anymore, and Mom had started to feel sad about the place once Dad died. She couldn’t go into his office without crying, and she used to tell me that everything in the apartment reminded her of him.

We moved only the furniture that we could fit into the new apartment and gave the rest away to the Salvation Army. I didn’t pay taxes for two years because of all the clothes and furniture that was written off as a charitable donation. Because of my job, I admit to playing a game with the IRS, knowing exactly what I could get away with without being audited. The money I saved not buying new furniture, I put into a certificate of deposit, money which is still sitting there earning 9.5 percent interest.

I don’t go out much, especially not during the week. It’s all I can manage to put in my normal ten-hour days, be home by 7:00 pm, eat dinner, watch a little TV, and be in bed by 10:00 pm. When I was younger, I would occasionally stay in Manhattan after work and take in a movie or a show. Not anymore. The last time I tried, paying fifty-five dollars for a ticket to see a revival of The Man of LaMancha, I fell asleep halfway through the first act. It’s cheaper and more comfortable to fall asleep in front of the television.

Chapter 4

As usual, my morning started out with me checking the accounts payable ledger. I had a lot of more important things that I should have been working on, and since my promotion to section head in May, I had other people to do this job, but well, you know how accurate clerical types are. Besides, I’m an early riser, and I usually get to the office by 7:15 am . That early, when the phones aren’t ringing, I can do the same amount of work three clerks would spend a whole day doing.

The size and location of an office, they say, is the best indicator of the corporate status of the occupant. I believe them. My office screams of someone one level below the bottom of the barrel. Nevertheless, I’ve always tried to keep it just like my apartment, neat and orderly. Over my years at Herkimer, I’ve occupied seven different work spaces, starting with a metal desk in the middle of a one-hundred-foot-long-by-fifty-foot-wide room. The nearest window was twenty-five feet away. I had to get up and walk to it to tell whether it was sunny or raining.

There were forty-nine other desks in the room, every one of them exactly like mine. We could choose a desk chair with or without arms. There were no other choices. We were allowed to personalize our desk with a family photograph only. I bought an 8×10 imitation gold frame and kept the picture of the three smiling kids it came with. Nobody ever asked me who they were. I still keep the photograph on my credenza. One of these days, I’ll get one with a sheepdog in it.

Now that I’m a supervisor, I have a ten-by-ten-foot office with a desk, credenza, three chairs, and a file cabinet. The walls are made of some kind of plastic and stand seven feet tall. The ceilings are nine foot, and I’m told that the walls don’t meet the ceiling for a reason. Supervisors are supposed to be able to hear as well as see what’s going on in their department.

I don’t allow the cleaning staff to come into my office at night to empty the wastebasket and whatever else they do. I found that they never put things back where they found them, and I was spending an hour every morning locating misplaced files and putting things back in their proper place. I leave the garbage pail outside my cubicle and do all the rest of the cleaning myself. A couple of years ago, I was given a pot of silk flowers by someone who was leaving the company and didn’t want to take them along. I leave it on the top of the file cabinet because I don’t know what else to do with it.

I forced my mind off my vacation and on to the accounting ledgers I came in early to check. Just as I thought, Sharon had already made her first mistake, authorizing a $16,589 check to a company named S&W Contracting instead of the $165.89 they were owed. My boss would have had my head if that one had gone through. I had let myself be influenced by Sharon’s looks. She had no experience as an accounts payable clerk. In fact, she told me that all she ever wanted to do was to be a professional dancer. She seemed bright, however, and I figured she couldn’t get the company into too much trouble as a grade twelve clerical assistant. Rock had told me that he would love to sit at my desk and look through the glass wall to where Sharon sat. Her legs, he said, went on forever, and miniskirts were coming back into fashion.

I interviewed a number of candidates for the job. Most of them had at least a year of experience working in either an accounts payable department or in some other type of financial environment. I had actually decided to hire a middle-aged man who had just relocated to New York with his wife. He had a year of junior college accounting and had worked in the auditing department of a publishing company in his native San Francisco. Sharon was the last person on the list, and since she had waited all morning to see me, I decided to meet with her just to give her the feeling of being considered for the job. That’s exactly how it went until she left my office. Then Rock showed up. According to him, no self-respecting single man would hire a middle-aged man for a job in his department. Sharon had the legs, bum, and smile that I should be demanding of an employee of mine.

What a piece of tail!

Bud out, Rock. This is business. I’m hiring an accounting assistant, not an underwear model.

"I don’t care what you’re hiring her for. You got your priorities, I got mine. A dynamite-looking woman can be just as good an accounting clerk as an ugly-as-sin one! Hire her."

I already have an experienced man interested in the job. I can let him take a lot of my responsibilities, and that will give me more time to do all the other stuff that Vesci wants me to be involved in.

"I remember 1997. I had been real busy with three cases at the same time, and I figured that I needed an office assistant to help me organize my notes and keep track of my expenses. I called an employment agency and told them what I wanted: She had to be between twenty-six and twenty-nine years old, at least 5’7", no more than 135 pounds, and have blond hair, natural, of course! She also had to be single. The guy at the agency asked me about what skills I was requiring. I told him that I had only one requirement: she had to be able to cross her legs so that the skirt rose above midthigh level.

Rock, I’m not interviewing for a Miss America candidate. I need someone to do a job of work for me. She, if it turns out to be a woman, doesn’t have to look good in a miniskirt. She has to be able to use a computer, maintain accounting ledgers, and organize her day so as to get a maximum amount of work accomplished. Vesci would never pay for the kind of assistant you’re trying to get me to hire.

"Who cares what Vesci wants? Who’s more important around here, him or me? I’m telling you right here and now, hire Sharon, or you and I are old history. I’m not going to spend any time sitting around this office trying to help you if I can’t look at Sharon’s parts."

Hard as I tried, Rock would not let me consider hiring the man. He wouldn’t stop interrupting my every thought until I finally relented and decided to hire Sharon. I don’t know what hiring Sharon had done for Rock, but I know what it did for me. Now I had to check every one of Sharon’s accounting entries to make certain there weren’t any more transpositions of decimal points! Rock’s visual enjoyment had just cost me an extra hour or two a week in work time.

The more I thought about Sharon’s mistake, the more concerned I became. She hadn’t worked for me for very long, but in that time, she had processed a large number of accounts payable and probably processed payments in excess of $50,000. If she could make such a major mistake on the S&W payable, what other errors had she made that I didn’t catch?

I changed the entry myself and wrote a note in my diary to call Sharon into my office to talk to her about her performance as soon as I got back from the mountains. As I was doing this, Sharon came into my office and sat down at my desk. She settled into the chair and crossed her legs. Her skirt rose to midthigh level. Rock claimed that she did that solely so that I could see her legs. Rock was right. She did have incredible legs. I tried to imagine Sharon being with me at the hotel. She would look better in a bathing suit than any other woman I knew. I imagined her taking the suit off and prayed that my face didn’t show what I was thinking. Whatever, Rock and I thoroughly enjoyed the view. I knew then that I would never have that conversation with her when I got back from vacation.

By 3:00 pm that afternoon, I was packed up and ready to leave. There was a tradition around here, one that I intended to keep, that you got to leave a couple of hours early on the day your vacation started. At that exact moment, Charles Vesci, the new head of the accounting department, was heading down the hall toward my office. He had come over from Sanderson & Co. only two months ago and was eager to make an impression on his new bosses.

Glad I didn’t miss you, Dar.

You know, if my mother had wanted me to be called Dar, she wouldn’t have added the old to my name. I hate nicknames, but what could you expect from a grown man who insisted that you call him Chuckie?

We have to work on the payables/receivable report, Vesci said. The accounting department has to be more of a contributor to Herkimer’s bottom line than it has been in the past. Since I took over the group, I’ve been trying to get it to be more proactive and less reactive. I need you, Dar, to make sure the report is finished and on my desk before the end of the month. I need you, Dar, to make sure we don’t drop the ball.

Rock was right about one thing. In my experience, the more a businessman sounds like Knute Rockne, the less he always seems to know his job. Who did Vesci think he was kidding? He knew that I was leaving for vacation and that I wasn’t going to be back until after Labor Day. Besides, what did he mean we?

The only way I was going to make sure that the report was done properly by the end of the month was to do it myself. Damn! This was going to add five to six hours to my day just so that Chuckie could make a hit with Robert Simon, the SVP in charge of the division. We were going to use the report to send out a glitzy marketing letter to the companies that are our top ten customers (receivables) and suppliers (payables).

Two hours later, I was buried in paper up to my eyebrows. Even the people in the tax group must have heard some of the choicer language that escaped over the walls of my office, and they sit fifty feet away. Sharon, getting ready to go home for the weekend, looked in and gave me her prettiest smile.

I needed some information on a new account that showed up in my journals for the first time. Since all new accounts had to be approved by Vesci, I called his office. His secretary told me that he had left the office at three fifteen for the weekend. The SOB must have walked straight from my office to the front door. I thought how much fun it would be to forget to leave the report on Vesci’s desk. Maybe I could accidentally leave a page out of the report. Vesci would never miss just one page out of the middle. I doubted he would even bother to read the report before stuffing it into the marketing letters. Some vacation this was starting out to be.

Chapter 5

W hat are we going to do about Sharon?

Listen, Sarah, I don’t know about you, but I think that her boss got lucky and saw the fake entry before Sharon had a chance to process it through the department ledgers. Other than an unlucky break, we would have pulled off another fake check and spent the money the way we always do.

I don’t think so. Sure, this guy Sanderson got lucky, but now he knows that Sharon put through a $16,000 check to pay a $160 bill! Who knows what he can come up with to explain what Sharon did?

Who cares? All we have to do is have Sharon quit her job at Herkimer and move on to greener pastures. Sanderson will never see another entry error, at least not from us.

The trouble with that is that accountants at medium-sized companies are a tight bunch of people. They have clubs and industry groups that they use to stay in touch with each other. Who says Sanderson doesn’t end up talking to another junior nobody accountant and Sharon’s name gets dropped into the conversation? Sanderson might brag to someone about the screwball blond who made the $16 grand accounting error. For all we know, the guy Sanderson is talking to has just hired Sharon.

Aren’t you seeing problems that are a million-to-one shot of ever happening? What are you going to do, pay Sharon to move to Bolivia? You’re letting your imagination run wild with you.

I didn’t create this moneymaker by taking a bunch of wild chances. I set this whole thing up to look like the most normal and boring situation imaginable. I don’t want anyone noticing something that doesn’t look right and start asking questions. We got to do something about Sharon. Once she’s taken care of, I can focus on starting over again in some other company.

Sarah, are you suggesting what I think you are?

Probably. We’ve got to eliminate Sharon. She knows too much about the con. She’s met both of us and could, if needs must, identify us to the cops. You have got to take her out!

What do you mean me? Why do I have to do it? I bargained for a simple con job, not a hit job. Why don’t you do it if you’re so sure that it has to be done.

Maybe I will.

You’re a coldhearted bitch, aren’t you!

Just practical, lover. I was born to an alcoholic father and a druggie mother. We lived on the wrong side of the wrong side of the tracks, and I never had any of the things normal little girls have when they were growing up. I was taking care of myself when you were being hugged and kissed by your parents. At least you had parents. I had a couple of useless wastes who I had to take care of instead of the other way around. Nobody ever gave me the choice of what I was going to do. It was either sit around and rot like my parents or go out and beat the world at its own game.

All right. Forget I ever said anything. I just mean that murder is in a whole other league than we’re used to. We’re ‘white-collar’ criminals, not hit men.

We are what the situation demands of us. If it hadn’t been for Sharon’s f——kup, we would still be writing and cashing fake payments, and no one would be the wiser. We got to take out Sharon, and whether you do it or I do, that’s final!

On another front, what do we do about Sanderson?

I’ll take care of that also. I can’t take the chance that Sanderson puts two and two together and warns someone about what we’re doing here. I’ll come up with a way to get close to him and then take the appropriate steps. I need you to do a quick investigation of our Mr. Darold Sanderson. Sharon told me that Sanderson was going on vacation, which should have made this the perfect time to put through the S&W check. If only the bimbo had waited a couple of more days before putting it through. Find out where he’s going, and I’ll try to cozy up to him. You know that I have ways to make men do what I want them to do. The closer I can get to Sanderson, the easier it will be for me to take him out.

You know something, Sarah? You worry me. We have what I think is nothing more than a minor hiccup, and you’re acting like our whole world has just caved in on us. How can you possibly believe that the only solution to this problem is killing one and possibly two people! I swear, it almost seems like you enjoy the idea of murder.

I have to admit, it is an exciting idea.

Chapter 6

Saturday turned out to be one of those late summer days that give you an advanced look at what fall is going to be like. I don’t own my own car. The only time I need one is when I go on vacation, so I rented one on my way home last evening. I enjoy renting cars more than I would owning one. I can rent a different car every time. Depending on my mood, I can drive a big, boxy sedan or a low-slung red sports car. This time, I rented the brand-new black Thunderbird convertible that Rock recommended. The weather was so nice that I drove with the top down.

When I left Queens early Saturday morning, the temperature was in the low sixties, and the whole neighborhood smelled of newly cut grass. One of my neighbors planted a kind of late-flowering shrub a few years ago, and it was just coming into bloom and smelled a little bit like perfume. That smell mixed with the grass was heady and sweet but not like the heavy sweet perfumes that were popular with young women today. By the time I reached the resort, the temperature had risen to the high seventies, and the mountain air smelled fresh and clean. The lousy week I had just finished, along with the report I was forced to write late into Friday evening, faded beyond memory somewhere around the Throgs Neck Bridge. I even managed to think a good thought about Chuckie Vesci. I liked his choice of women he tried to pick up.

I checked in at the Blue Sky Resort in the northern Catskills, 150 miles north of New York and ten miles outside the small town of Catonsville. It sits on two thousand acres of land and is right next to a state park. There are riding and hiking trails scattered all over the property and the adjacent state park, and in the fall, the whole area is crawling with tourists up for the leaf season.

There’s nothing fancy about the resort. The main building looks Victorian. It was built in 1908, but most of the gingerbread and flourishes have long since fallen off. In addition, there are twenty-two cottages, simple white clapboard A-frames. Each has a small sitting room, a slightly larger bedroom, and a kitchenette. I eat my breakfast and lunch there but always have dinner in the dining room. I have a drink in the bar every night while I’m at the resort. I don’t like to drink by myself. I prefer to be surrounded by people, but I make it clear I want to be left alone.

Because it’s small and out of the way, the Blue Sky doesn’t attract the young, hip crowd that big resorts like the Concord and the Pines get. Like me, most of the guests go there for the forest and mountain hiking trails that surrounded it. During the day, they hit the trails, either on foot or horseback, or go antiquing. The countryside is green and lush with evergreen forests that seem to go on forever. The whole area smells of pine trees the year round.

The owners, Sadie and Harold, a couple in their seventies, have been trying to sell the place for the last fifteen years. They’re both too old and nasty to handle guest relations but are smart enough to hire a staff of energetic young college kids whose cheerfulness make up for their lack of experience.

* * *

Sarah Washburn checked in right behind me. I know that because she tripped over my suitcase after I set it down to sign the registration card. Trying to regain her balance, she grabbed me and put both her arms around my shoulders. Her momentum pressed our bodies together, and I could feel her breasts push into my chest. I could tell she wasn’t wearing a bra. We stared at each other from two inches apart, and she flashed a huge beaming smile with a mouth full of straight white teeth. She seemed to be having trouble righting herself, and I got embarrassed by the physical contact. I didn’t, however, do anything to break it. I just stood there, smiling back at her.

When she finally got back on her own feet, she