Fool Me Once

"We're just friends," she protested again. "We're just having a few drinks and--"

"Is that right?" Ryan demanded loudly. "Just friends? How about talking to another of your friends?" he asked her and pointed beyond her off shoulder.

"Say hello to Sharon," he snarled.

Ryan had been worried about not being able to react naturally, but it wasn't necessary to fake anything now. He was genuinely enraged again at his wife's unfaithfulness. He'd lived with it for so long. It was good to let it out.

Sharon Michaels had quietly slipped behind the table and "borrowed" a full pitcher of beer from an adjoining table. When the camera shifted slightly to center her in frame, she dumped the beer on her husband. Enough of the cold liquid splashed on Carrie's gauzy white top to make the material nearly transparent. Her hard, erect nipples were suddenly poking a hole in the wet fabric. The view would be obscured by a blurred circle in the final cut but, at the time and place, Ryan and the club crowd could immediately, quiet clearly tell she was braless.

He took in her micro miniskirt and the high stiletto heels she wore and shook his head. A second camera crew had established themselves on the other side of the table and caught his disgusted expression perfectly.

"Have you even got panties on?" Ryan sneered.

Without waiting for an answer, he reached down to lift up his wife's skirt to find she did not, in fact, have any on. The crowd--that part of it that was close enough to see--roared. It was another shot that would have to be edited with a blurred circle, but viewers of the final product would be able to easily figure out what hadn't been there.

Carrie's hand swept down quickly to yank the skirt back into place. She struggled to move, tucking her legs under the table.

Across from her, Sean Michaels was still struggling to wipe the beer from his eyes. He had yet to utter a word. His eyes were huge circles in a pale face. He was dividing looks between the camera lens and his angry wife. That he hadn't yet said anything wasn't keeping Sharon from haranguing him viciously.

"What do you have to say for yourself?" she demanded in a loud voice. "Speak up, you son of a bitch. What are you doing here with this slut?"

The crowd loved it and the noise level rose again. The producer had a beatific expression on his face. There would have to be a lot of editing on this, but it would be the best episode he'd put together in the last year and a half.

Sharon reached out and caught her husband's earlobe between thumb and forefinger. She yanked him out of his seat and began dragging him toward the exit. It started a general exodus. Carrie lurched to her feet and struggled to push her way out of the club. She was in shock and wasn't very steady on her five-inch heels. The club's customers weren't cooperating either. They resisted her attempts to get out quickly and a number of men took the opportunity to cop a feel or two on her journey to the front door. She never noticed.

Outside, the camera crew dogged her steps as she desperately trotted down the sidewalk. She abruptly realized she was going in the wrong direction and had to turn back toward the parking lot where she'd parked her car. Going back past the club made the patrons still gathered outside all that much happier.

The rain was causing her top and skirt to cling tightly to her body now. Her mascara was running and her hair was plastered to her head. She dodged into an alley and trudged down it, finally finding a doorway into some building where she could shelter for a moment.

"I can't believe..." she breathed. The host was still with her, as was the main camera crew.

"What, Carrie?" Johnny asked interestedly. "Would you like to explain why you've been seeing another man behind your husband's back? I'm sure he'd like to know."

"I can't believe he'd humiliate me this way," Carrie wailed.

Johnny looked at her in disbelief for a moment, shocked out of his professional face. His line of patter failed him for a moment.

"Don't you think you've been the onedoing the humiliating, Carrie?" he asked at length.

Carrie didn't answer. She might not even have heard him. She struggled to get past the host and continue down the alley.

When she got to her car, her shaking fingers wouldn't cooperate. She had a hard time retrieving her keys from her small clutch bag and fitting them into the lock. Johnny finally took them from her and opened the door for her. She had to try several times to get them out of his hands before he finally gave them up. She wouldn't respond to any of his questions. She just kept shaking her head no.

Ryan knocked on the window, letting his knuckles rap hard on the glass.

"Hey, sweetie," he said facetiously, "what's your hurry? The party's not over yet...look what I have for you."

His lawyer had been primed and ready since the morning after Ryan called the TV show's producers but the paperwork sat in Ryan's file, waiting for the right time to be brought forth. When Ryan heard from the producer two days ago, he called the attorney and set certain things in motion. The petition for divorce Ryan had already signed was taken to the courthouse and filed with the clerk of the court. There was a certain required formality Ryan had had to arrange and that was going to happen right now.

Ryan stepped back to allow the older man in a western suit and an expensive looking, cream-colored Stetson get closer to the door. The short, slender man showed Carrie his process server's badge and identification. He was only another private investigator Ryan had hired, but the badge looked very official. She stared in confusion for a long moment. Finally, at the man's gesture, she rolled down the window.

"Carrie Denise Gilchrist?" he asked formally. She nodded.

He slipped a sheaf of papers from his inside pocket and slapped them into her hand.

"You are served," he said succinctly and backed away.

He sniffed, certain he was going to catch a cold from all this. Opening an umbrella, he walked back out to the street where he'd parked his car. One of the cameras caught a view of his slow walk down the sidewalk, but it didn't make the final version of the incident.

Carrie was still holding the documents that had been thrust into her hands. She looked as if she'd lost the capacity to be anymore shocked. Her expression was lifeless, uncaring.

"Carrie!" Ryan said sharply. She turned to look at him.

"Don't bother going home," he growled. "The locks on all the doors were changed twenty minutes after you left the house this evening for your rendezvous with your "friend." I hired a bunch of movers to pack everything in your closet and the boxes will be delivered to your parent's place in an hour or two.

"I don't care where you go, Carrie. I loved you, but that love is dead. You killed it and it won't ever come back...never!

"Don't call me, don't write me, don't try to get hold of me in any way, shape, form, or fashion. Understand?" he said harshly. "I don't want to see you, I don't want to hear from you, I don't want to hearabout you. You're trash and I should have kicked your ass out the first time you cheated on me. Just looking at you makes me want to throw up."

His mouth worked for a moment as if he might actually vomit. He struggled to find more words but none came to him. He turned and walked away, leaving his soon to be ex-wife sitting frozen in her seat. The camera crew hurried to catch up.

Somehow, the cameras had all lost track of Sean and his wife. It wasn't known until much later that they found out she'd whisked him into a cab she'd called for before entering the club and took him home. Neighbors heard Sharon berating the man until the wee hours of the morning.

When the producers came by a week later to inquire on the status of their relationship, she bullied Sean into signing a release so the show could use his image. There was a little suspicion on the part of the producers the man never knew what he was signing. He had only one chance and that was to do exactly what his wife wanted, every time she wanted it. When Sharon thrust a ballpoint at him, he signed where her finger pointed.

Ryan went home and shaved off both mustache and beard. They'd served their purpose.

Chapter 6

The morning after the TV show was videotaped, another attorney Ryan had hired showed up at the bank and settled into one of the overstuffed easy chairs in the big, well-appointed suit where the most senior officers had their offices. When Jon Harrison...the bank president...walked in, he asked why Carlton J. London was sitting there with three of his law assistants in attendance.

Harrison knew exactly who the attorney was. They were both members of the same art groups and charitable organizations in San Antonio. London was also one of the finest civil law attorneys in the state. Slim and dapper, he was tough as shoe leather in the courtroom or in the saddle at the ranch he had out west of Abilene.

Mr. Harrison flinched and his face paled when he was told London was representing Mr. Ryan Gilchrist, husband of Mrs. Carrie, a senior manager in Sean Michaels' section. Mr. Gilchrist had filed suit against the bank for failing to enforce it's own morality clauses with a number of specifications.

Mr. Gilchrist was suing under the common-law tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress claiming the bank knew of his wife's affair with a junior vice-president, did nothing about it, and attempted to cover it up in spite of the morals' clauses in both their contracts. The suit claimed the institution had thus fostered a climate in which Mr. Gilchrist's marriage had been irreparably damaged.

With the preliminaries over, Mr. London announced he would be pleased to see Mr. Sean Michaels' personal records. Locating the supervisor of the Human Resources department, the attorney presented him with the first in a stack of subpoenas signed just this morning by a friendly judge.

The president called his senior managers together to find out just how deep in the excrement they were wading. The HR director was pulled out of the meeting twenty minutes into the meeting. He came back in a few minutes later pale and trembling. With the whole bank hierarchy in the meeting, a junior in his department had come by and noticed the subpoena lying on his supervisor's desk.

Not knowing the legal department had not yet seen the writ, the junior employee had produced the requested records and two of Mr. London's assistants had used the high-speed copier in the junior's own office to make a duplicate of every document in the file. Another of Mr. London's assistants had departed the building immediately with the duplicates in hand while Mr. London was scrutinizing the originals in the small conference room.

Did anyone know if the Human Resources director could get some of the security guards together and forcibly remove the file from Mr. London's hands. Just because he had a subpoena, was that the final word? What could they do about the copies that were already out of the building and beyond their control? No one in the room would look at the HR manager, or the bank president.

Before anything could be done, the phone in the corner rang and the most junior of the executives answered. After listening for a long moment, he told the president Mr. London had let loose a string of four-letter words while going through Mr. Michaels' personnel record and hadn't stopped mouthing them for a long while.

Now Mr. London now asking for the records ofall sexual harassment complaints in the bank for the past two years. He was saying something about getting a subpeona duces tecum, whatever that was, to make that happen. The junior executive wanted to know if this was important.

Three levels of management had a simultaneously urge to throw up their breakfasts.

********

Ryan and Consuela had discussed the TV show as a way of replacing the confrontation Ryan would have had with Carrie in family court using his own video recordings. Then, based on what she knew of the banking industry, they'd quickly realized not only would the episode of 'Busted' accomplish that aim, it would almost certainly spark an audit of Michaels' entire stewardship of the personal wealth division. It did.

A week after Ryan's attorney filed the suit against the bank, Consuela got a late evening call from an excited friend still working at the bank. The building had gone into a virtual lockdown just before lunch. Apparently, it was all coming from what was discussed in a panicked meeting upstairs that had begun shortly after the big bosses came in. Ever since noon, an army of men and women in expensive suits and carrying voluminous briefcases had come into the bank and disappeared into the express elevators to the top floor.

Just at closing time, a second, smaller, army of people in cheaper suits had arrived. This group glanced about with hard eyes and one of the tellers had seen two of them show FBI credentials to the guard before he would let them in. Other people with different looking badges had come in right behind them. No one...no one...looked happy.

Someone was even saying the senior vice president in overall charge of the investment and personal wealth divisions had had to be restrained when he tried to open a window on the twenty-second floor. That was probably just a rumor, butwow! Could Consuelabelieve all this, her friend asked.

Consuela thanked her girlfriend and begged off, saying she needed to get Belinda to bed. Seconds after hanging up, she used the disposable cell phone to call Ryan's throwaway with the news.

They discussed destroying the pre-paid cell phones but decided not to until one or the other got some indication they were even suspected of being in contact. They couldn't bear to lose the one way of communicating with each other they had left. The sound of each other's voice was becoming increasingly important to them.

They would limit the use of the cell phones though. It was the smart thing to do.

********

"Mr. Gilchrist?

"Yes?" Ryan answered absentmindedly. His attention was on the quarterly inventory he was studying and not on the two men who had wandered in his office's open door.

"Special Agent Thomas, Special Agent Williams, Federal Bureau of Investigation. May we speak with you?" the taller agent asked.

"You're in now, I reckon you might as well," Ryan answered, glancing up at last to show them an irritated scowl.

He was truly annoyed with the two agents, though not for the reason they suspected. Instead of being unhappy they were there, he was upset they hadn't come by several weeks earlier. Waiting had never been his strong suit.

He motioned with his free hand. The agents shoved their badges closer so he could see them.

"Nah, I don't want to see your badges," Ryan growled. "I can buy ones that look just like that in the toy section at Walmart. Show me your ID cards, gents."

The agents looked at each other, faintly surprised. Very few citizens asked for the hard-to-reproduce identification but the agents were obligated to produce them upon request. They did.

Ryan examined them for a moment, and then picked up the office phone. Looking in a phonebook, he had a number for the local FBI office in seconds, called them and had a short conversation with the Special Agent In Charge of the San Antonio office. He admitted they did have two agents fitting the description Ryan gave and with those ID card numbers. Ryan grunted, thanked the agent in charge, and hung up.

"Okay," he said, "you're real...what can I do for you." His eyes and forehead had cleared and his voice was friendlier.

"You have had occasion to doubt the validity of a federal officer, Mr. Gilchrist?" asked the older agent. Ryan nodded.

"Two...maybe two years and three months ago, some jerk came around wanting to talk to all of my workers about some "anti-racketeering" complaints or something like that. He flashed a badge around and had my boys wandering around wondering who 'Rico' was." Ryan grinned at the agents.

"Turned out he was a union organizer come down from New York, New Jersey or somewhere. He thought he'd do a little bit of intimidation...figuring if I was scared enough, I'd let the shop go union and so on and so forth. He's still in a federal prison somewhere, I think. I had to testify at his trial."

The agents glanced at each other, a habit that was slowly beginning to get on Ryan's nerves. He wondered if they were even aware of it.

Actually, both were thinking therehad been an entry in Gilchrist's file to the effect that he had indeed cooperated in a sting operation some years ago. The special agent who'd been in charge of that had made a number of glowing comments about Gilchrist.

"So...who's doing some racketeering now?" Ryan asked, trying to get things moving.

"No, no," Special Agent Thomas said. "We're part of a joint task force organized under the Department of Justice and the Department of the Treasury. We're investigating allegations of money laundering at the bank where your wife works...formerly worked."

"Hah!" Ryan snorted explosively.

"Have you boys done your ground work?Don't look at each other dammit! One of you justanswer," he ordered them peremptorily.

Startled, the two agents threw another fleeting look at each other before facing back to the man they were supposed to be interviewing. They both flushed slightly. Ryan shook his head and sighed loudly.

"If you have investigated anything about me," he said in a disillusioned tone, "you already know I won't have a wife when the judge lifts the continuance my so-called wife's lawyer asked for," Ryan added.

"We do know that, Mr. Gilchrist. We know other things too. We're aware the divorce is held up pending the outcome of the criminal investigation...and maybe the trial...but we think you might have information that might assist in the investigation. Is there anything you'd like to tell us?"

That was from Agent Thomas. It was accompanied by a glowering look intended to frighten the guilty into spontaneous confessions.

Ryan was unimpressed. His only reaction was to show them a confused frown.

"Gents, I canspell bank, and on a good day, I can write both "money" and "laundry" down on paper without hurting myself too bad, but that's about it. How the dickens can I help you with what's going on down there. Shoot, I don't hear anything from there, now that me and the wife are on the outs," he said forcefully.

Ryan sighed when the agents shot another look at each other before either spoke. He wasn't all that impressed with his first visit from law enforcement about the bank fraud.

The FBI agents accepted a cup of scalding hot, almost bitter, coffee from the urn in the corner and continued questioning Ryan for another fifteen minutes without the agents learning anything of interest. They tried every angle they could think of but neither got any signals from the guy that he had anything at all to contribute.

********

"What do you think?" Agent Thomas asked his pardner as they drove away.

"I didn't get anything," Williams replied.

"Me either," Thomas replied, "the guy's a little bit of a rube, don't you think? I don't think he's got the smarts to be mixed up in this."

"Nope. I don't think that at all," Williams shot back. Stan Williams had been in the Bureau for twenty-two years and had seen a lot more people come and go than his junior pardner.

"Gilchrist isplenty smart. Watch his eyes if we talk to him again and you'll see what I mean. He's sharp, but he doesn't mind folks underestimating him. Gives him an edge," Williams commented.

"But...I doubt he's involved in this," Agent Williams remarked. "All he's got is a BBA and a grand total of two or three night courses in elementary banking practices some years ago. I don't see how this guy could be part of it."