“Stop fucking with me! I don’t like people fucking with me! You understand that, pecker-brain? You understand what I’m saying to you?”
Leo Diamond was very close to peeing his pants. He had never been this terrified in his life. A life that in recent years had mostly been spent in front of a computer screen where the greatest danger was to one of his virtual existences during an encounter with a six-armed, copiously muscled Orkus guarding the voluptuous Lady Loretta in the castle keep of Lord Duruda.
The threat facing Leo now had fewer arms than an Orkus but was nearly as big and by some measures a lot meaner. Claymore Mason, his given name a momento of his father’s service as an explosives expert with the U.S. Army, was the head of security at Bernstein’s. He was a massive six-and-half-footer whose girth was as imposing as his height. A man no sane person would ever want to anger.
His size notwithstanding, Mason’s present job rarely involved violence. Most days it just required him to act as a one-man armored limo brushing aside obstacles while escorting important visitors around the Bernstein Building, or keeping the building’s security detail, a dozen young men and women, up to his demanding three-part standards. They were expected to maintain an immaculate appearance, always exhibit professional courtesy, and above all else, never, ever, let anything happen on site that interfered with the safe and orderly conduct of company business.
Bernstein’s security chief took these standards very, very seriously. He had grown up in Camden, just across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, a place long known in urban planning circles as the armpit of New Jersey. This mini-city of 80,000 unhappy souls was once the hometown of manufacturing heavies like Campbell Soup and The Victor Talking Machine Company, predecessor of RCA. But by the time Claymore Mason was growing up here in the 1970s and 1980s it was little more than an angry festering racial ghetto whose only resident industries of note were the skin and drug trades along its infamous Admiral Wilson Boulevard.
Though Mason was rumored to have made his bones in a bareknuckle street brawl at the age of fourteen, he’d miraculously avoided getting a criminal record. From street fighting he went on to do a little professional boxing, and was just another part-time bodyguard beefing up the entourage of a coke-selling entrepreneur before landing low-level security work in Altantic City. Which was where Mitch Bernstein noticed him for some unknown reason and gave him a once-in-a-lifetime career opportunity that Mason seized gratefully.
He had worked very hard for his new employer, demonstrated unflinching loyalty, earned his present place many times over. Now it seemed threatened because of something done by Leo Diamond.
Though Mason was very good at managing his security crew, he was much less skilled when it came to the electronic devices that supported the Bernstein Building’s physical security arrangements. True, the electronics here weren’t the Tom Clancy spy world variety with microphone transmitters smaller than a pinhead or laser beams that could be focused on glass surfaces to pick up conversations inside a room from a van out in the street. Bernstein’s set up more closely resembled those found in gambling casinos. It included cameras that let you look at practically any part of the building from a central monitoring area and zoom in for a closer look when required. And it featured devices that except for a few privacy protected areas like restrooms, allowed security to tune in on almost anything spoken inside the building and on company phones, as well as anything written or received on company computers.
All this visual and audial monitoring generated an enormous amount of information for which Mason was responsible. Not that he had to go through it all on a regular basis, of course. There was no reason to bother unless a theft of company property or data was suspected, a harrassment suspect was being watched, or some other infraction was under investigation. All the other information gathered from monitoring was merely saved for a time and then destroyed.
Mason knew his technical limitations and was too smart to try and fake things. To ensure all these devices were operating properly he had a helper. Someone whose regular job was to keep the company’s computers running at top efficiency, but who also had considerable skills when it came to servicing monitoring devices. Leo Diamond.
There were good reasons to suspect it was Diamond who screwed up the building’s monitors during the critical half-hour when Myron Hamish was murdered. He fit the profile.
Mason leaned close to the squirming suspect seated on a stool in one corner of the room known as the security shack. The building’s monitor controls were located here, the screens and receivers that let you view and hear in real time.
Diamond was familiar with this room because of the assistance he provided
Mason. He was one of the very few people beside the security chief who had a room key. He knew how to disable any part or all of the building’s monitoring system for a brief period and how to bring it back on line. He even had a motive. A crazy motive but a motive, to play such a game.
Diamond was a self proclaimed libertarian who was always happy to share his views. Especially with Clay Mason, who couldn’t avoid hearing them.
“Don’t you see,” he’d say, as the two were doing one of their regular monitor checks. “All this watching, this listening, this spying we do on people at work. It impinges on their basic rights.”
“Sure, Leo, sure,” the security chief would answer, staring at one of the screens and pointing. “Why are we getting fuzziness from that camera pick up?”
“These damn things are liberty killers,” Leo would answer, making the necessary camera adjustments. “Somebody ought to kill these privacy killers.”
Talk like this struck most people at the company, including Clay Mason, as just nerd rants. Until now.
Now Diamond was going to explain his part in this affair. Mason would see to that. He would then pass along what he learned to higher authorities. After that, Diamond, or Diamond’s remains, would be turned over to the police.
The terrified little man slouched and cowered in his lowly place. His own shaking was amplified by a stool leg that had been deliberately shortened to turn a naturally uncomfortable backless seat into a still more uncomfortable rocker.
Mason was no longer cursing. But as he bent his huge shaved head and glowering face closer to Diamond’s, he projected, along with a ferocious hostility, a breath that was almost preternaturally foul. It was a breath deliberately tainted with a mouthful of gorgonzola cheese. A nasty trick Mason had learned during a short stint as an intimidator of gaming cheats in Atlantic City.
“Why did you fuck me this way, Leo?
“I didn’t...”
Mason bent still closer to Diamond’s face. The little man tried to turn away but couldn’t. His questioner had grabbed hold of his little spade beard and was pulling it so hard that the two men almost seemed on the verge of a venomous kiss. Leo was hiccuping with fear, choking on his own unswallowed saliva and the fumes Mason kept exhaling.
“Leo,” Mason said is a voice made even more frightful by its soft undercurrent of hatred. “Leo, listen to me carefully.” No more shouted vulgarities. Mason’s words poured forth in a perfectly modulated, middle American, death-tinged whisper. “Tell me why you shut down my security system or I’m going to tear every part of you into pieces before giving your family the parts for burial.”
“I didn’t...”
“Tell me, Leo.” Two thick fingers released Diamond’s beard and began caressing his vocal chords. “Tell me, Leo.”
“I got an email. It wasn’t my idea. I got an email.”
Mason stopped stroking, but his fingers still pressed hard against Diamond’s throat. “Who sent the email, Leo? What did it say?”
An hour later, in another part of the building, a quickly convened conference brought together Bernstein Financial’s six top surviving executives. The conference took place in a room one floor up from where Bernstein had his desk among ‘my people,’ and one floor down from where the company’s main TV and radio broacasting studios were located. By a ghoulish coincidence, this was the same floor and just a few yards away from the Xeroxing cubicle where Myron Hamish met his untimely end. A cubicle currently sealed off with yellow tape, where police technicians still scurried about as purposefully as germ hunters in a cholera hot zone.
The conference room’s mahogany table was round so that no one could sit at its head. This was another expression of Bernstein’s official credo that everyone in his organization had the potential to contribute equally to the common prosperity.
Nonetheless, Bernstein, with Connors on his immediate left, had taken the same place at the table he always occupied and where no one else would think of sitting. It was a place that allowed him to watch other conferees file in without having to turn his head to do so.
The four people who joined Bernstein and Connors were now in their own unofficial but well established places around the table, strung out from Connor’s left in a way that closely mirrored their current clout within the company. This was a fluid arrangement, however, one subject to changing department revenue production and to new growth opportunities each executive was able to devise. For business reasons Bernstein cultivated the sense of constantly shifting power and position because it created the kind of insecurity that boosted profits. For personal reasons he encouraged this behavior because he often found amusing.
These days, with the boss about to step aside, the competition within this tight circle of super-ambitious managers had risen to such blatant levels of ass-kissing and back-biting that Bernstein and Connors were sometimes beside themselves with laughter recounting the maneuvering. The death of Myron Hamish, the company’s famous music man, the person who created and headed the organization’s most profitable division, was certain to ratchet this competition up still further. Hamish’s own vacant place at the table, just to the left of news chief Ron Pinkman, who in turn currently occupied a position just to the left of Joe Connors, hinted at what lay ahead.
Everyone cradled or sipped from a cup of house java, poured by habit upon
entering the room from a carafe in one corner. Large TVs on the walls that were
usually tuned to real time broadcasts of company programming or trailers for future programs had been switched off. Their screens stared down on the conferees like blank oblong eyes, darkened and silent as if to suggest the dark mood that was supposed to prevail here.
Usually before one of these get-togethers you would hear the chatter of clever people trying to outdo each other with observations about markets, or making semi-snide remarks about their work mates. Today, silence. Everyone waited nervously for the boss to speak.
Mitch Bernstein, ever the showman, let his audience’s anticipation level rise. Finally he rose from his chair and looked down at them pensively, as if searching for just the right words to express a deeply felt emotion that temporarily defied verbalization. In truth, he was simply going over in his mind yet again which one of these piranhas would ultimately inherit operational control of the company he’d created when, as he fevently hoped, he moved into the mayor’s office.
His audience, four men and a woman, looked up toward their leader with expressions akin to those that the ancient Israelites must have worn as they watched Moses descend from the mountain with those funny looking stone tablets. Everyone seemed honestly shaken, perhaps even a bit frightened, by the murder that had occurred in their midst. The room’s excitement level was doubtless also raised by the personal opportunities this event had created. No one felt any real sadness over the death of the man who had caused the meeting to be called.
“This morning,” Bernstein intoned, “we lost a beloved fellow colleague. He was
taken from us in this very building, just a short distance from where you’re sitting, by a heinous act of violence. We’ve lost someone who made our work lives richer. Far more tragically, we’ve lost a dear friend. I’d like you to bow your heads now and join me in a prayer in memory for our music man, Myron Hamish.”
Every head bowed in unison. There were a couple of quiet amens. The only woman present, Clarisa Thomas, emmited a choked sob that was just loud enough to be heard by everyone in the room.
The heads remained bowed. For one minute. Two. Three minutes. No one wanted to be the first to look up before the others, or before the man staring down at them indicated it was time to do so. And he was in no hurry. In fact, under his own somber veneer, he was enjoying the show.
Though only one other person in the room was Jewish, Bernstein had noticed that on suit breasts under all the bowed heads a cut black ribbon was affixed, a traditional symbol of mourning in the Jewish faith. The gross cynicism, the shear hypocrisy of this display of grief for a person everyone in the room detested impressed Bernstein, a man well acquainted with both characteristics.
He was even more impressed by the ingenuity of these people. How did they find out so quickly that this symbol of mourning was appropriate? And where did they get those black ribbons? They couldn’t have bought them outside because the police were only now letting people leave the building after being questioned.
Were the ribbons cannabalized from old typewriters or printers? Did they keep a supply of ribbons and black armbands under their desks on the off-chance someone in the office who was Jewish died during working hours?
Bernstein was reminded of that scene in “The Maltese Falcon” when the widow of Myles Archer pays a visit to Sam Spade wearing formal widow wear, with a black veil no less, just a few hours after her husband has been bumped off, as if she had been keeping it cleaned and pressed in her bedroom closet for just this occasion.
Bernstein felt a sudden surge of pride in these subordinates. People who could
get up these rigs on such short notice were clearly people who could meet the day-to-day challenges of running the enterprise he had created. If only the information Clay Mason had passed along a few minutes earlier hadn’t so strongly hinted that one of these highly competent people was also a murderer. That, alas, could produce a host of problems for his mayoral campaign, and perhaps even for the future viability of his company.
Connors was right when he suggested that experiencing a serious crime first-hand could make mayoral candidate Mitch Bernstein appear more sympathetic to crime weary Philadelphia voters. This was true both for liberal voters who might sympathize with his personal loss, and to the law-and-order Rizzo crowd who might now think he better understood their fears in a visceral way. But Bernstein had assumed at first that Hamish was murdered by a company supernumerary. A maintenance man, perhaps, or one of Mason’s macho crew. Or one of those hirsute stock market composers Myron employed, a couple of whom were in the building when the murder took place. Or a company salesperson. God knows they were capable of beating anyone to death who for some reason seemed to stand in the way of a commission.
One of his top executives as the murderer, however, that complicated things. Connors’ idea was still basically sound. There was still a way to turn this lemon into lemonade. The squeezing would just have to be done a bit more carefully.
Leo Diamond would be turned over to the police now that Mason had gotten all the information that miserable ingrate could supply. His information would become part of their investigation—minus that one crucial fact that might get them to look too closely and too quickly at the people in this room. That part of the investigation would be pursued internally until a suitable outcome was determined by himself, an outcome that played into Bernstein’s plans for election to public office.
All heads were still bowed. Bernstein noted that two of the phony mourners were moving their lips. The Lord’s Prayer, he wondered? A meditative chant?
Yesterday’s closing prices for Lucent and Ford?
He almost smiled before remembering that security cameras were recording this scene. Wouldn’t this make great footage for our six o’clock ‘Market Wrap Report,’ he thought. Just a few seconds’ worth to show the powerful effect of Myron’s murder on company staff. He would discuss this idea with the show’s producer after this meeting.
Bernstein sighed. So much foolishness in the world. So much mendacity. He allowed himself an inner smile. Such wonderful training for Philadelphia City Hall.
His mind jumped seamlessly to the problem at hand. To his executive team. He wondered which one of these hard-drivers had put Myron down. With the help of Connors and Mason’s people he was sure he would be find out soon enough. Once the killer was unmasked and the event spun in just the right way, the police would be brought in to take the credit . Philadelphia’s finest, after all, would soon be Mitch Bernstein’s finest.
“Thank you, friends,” Bernstein intoned at last. All bowed heads rose slowly. Eyes were dabbed. Noses blown. Everyone feigned returning to a business-as-usual mode. Joe Connors, Ron Pinkman, Clarisa Thomas, Malcolm Eggers who everyone called The Limey, and Kyle Wells who Bernstein was pretty sure had actually killed some people while serving as a marine, all looked up at their boss expectantly.
“We have to move on,” Bernstein said gravely. “Myron would have wanted that. The first thing to be considered now is how to play his murder in our own media. Then we have to figure how to present it to the outside world.
