Джозеф Файндер - Vanished

“No, you didn’t,” I said.

“No, I did not,” Kim said with a slow shake of her head. “But Roger always tells me, if he’s not here, and I need to know anything about a deal he’s working on, go right to Marjorie.”

Marjorie shrugged and said, “Oh, that’s an exaggeration,” but she was still blushing and smiling with unmistakable pleasure.

“Come on, sweetie,” Kim said to her. “Roger always says, if Marjorie doesn’t know it, she can always find it out. Why do you think he calls you the librarian?”

“Why are you so interested in what Roger was working on?”

“Just doing my job,” I said. Marjorie Ogonowski worked at a cubicle, so we sat in Roger’s office.

It wasn’t what I expected at all. I’d figured his office at Gifford Industries would have at least some of the pompous décor of his home library. A decent copy of a George Stubbs painting of horses. Maybe even an antique John J. Audubon print of the Brown-headed Nuthatch. But it was a tiny and dismal cubbyhole with no distinguishing features. His desk chair wasn’t an Aeron or anything stylish and emblematic; it looked like overstock from some low-end office-furniture supply house.

There was no computer on his desk.

“But why?” she said. “Does this have anything to do with his disappearance?”

“Do you know anything about it?”

“I asked you.”

I didn’t feel like getting into that kind of standoff, so I said, “That’s the operating theory. What can you tell us, Marge?”

“Marjorie. If you’re working for Leland Gifford, you know exactly what he was working on.”

I paused for a moment. She had a point. “Mr. Heller indicated in an e-mail to his wife that if anything happened to him, you’d know why.”

“He did?”

I nodded.

“Can I see that e-mail?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“What did he say about – about something happening to him?”

“He must have said something to you along the same lines.”

“You’re not going to tell me what he said?”

“That’s the problem. He didn’t say. Nothing beyond that. What do you think he was referring to?”

She was a plain, mannish woman, with short light-brown hair, straight bangs high on her forehead. No lipstick or makeup of any kind. Even her gray suit was man-tailored. She was immensely smart, no-nonsense, precise in her language and mannerisms.

She blinked owlishly. “He didn’t tell me everything. Despite what Kim said.”

“He must have told you enough to make you worried about his well-being.” That was sheer speculation on my part, of course. She obviously took pride in her special relationship to Roger, which I doubted was sexual – she was defiantly asexual. He might have confided in her, because she was so ferociously competent.

“He told me very little about it.”

“About what?”

“About what he’d found.”

I waited, and when she didn’t go on, I said, “What did he find?”

“Mr. Murray, do you have any idea what Roger did here?”

“John,” I said. “No, not really.”

“We mostly worked on M & A stuff with biz-dev deal teams, checking the books, going over the P & L on current and expected, working on rev-rec issues.”

It had been a while since I’d heard that kind of biz-buzz English-as-a-foreign-language. Not since my McKinsey days, in fact. It took me a few seconds to do a mental translation, and I said, “You guys buy companies.”

“In simple terms, yes. I’m just an associate counsel, so I assist Roger. And I have to say, Roger Heller was the smartest person I’ve ever met. He was a pure structured-finance genius. And he’s never gotten the credit he deserves around here. People far less qualified are always getting promoted over his head. He should be general counsel or CFO. At least he should have become managing director of the global M & A practice. But it was like he was frozen in amber.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“Maybe because he’s too smart. He intimidates people.”

“Is that so?”

She nodded, then pushed at the nosepiece of her glasses. “He always says what he thinks. It’s like there’s no filter. I guess I’d say that most people don’t get along with him. They see him as sort of humorless. But Roger and I – we get along great. He expects the best out of everyone he works with, and I give him my best. He expects nothing less than perfection, and I–”

“You gave it to him.”

“I usually don’t make mistakes. He knows he can always turn to me.” She smiled. “I document everything. He used to call me ‘the reference librarian,’ and then just ‘the librarian,’ for short. We always got along great.”

“He trusted you.’

“I think he did.”

“So what did he tell you?”

She’d begun to feel more comfortable with me, I could tell. “He said he’d found something in the books of one of the companies. During the due diligence. Something he said was ‘troubling.’ ”

“What was that?”

“He didn’t say, really. But he said he wished he hadn’t. He said he was afraid for his life. He was terrified.”

“I don’t quite follow. Why would discovering something ‘troubling’ make him afraid for his life?”

“Well, he – he left out a step, obviously. As I said, he didn’t tell me everything. But he sort of indicated that he’d called them on it. He’d let them know what he’d found.”

“Called who on it?”

“The company. The one that was doing – whatever.”

“Doing what?”

“Corruption of some sort, I guess.”

“But why’d he contact them?”

She shook her head. “Obviously, he was upset. But that’s just the way he is, you know? He always has to cross every t and dot every i. I think that’s why we get along so well.”

I was sorely tempted to say something, but I all but bit my tongue restraining myself.

She went on, “You know, his father is this famous – you know who the fugitive financier is, Victor Heller? Is, was – I’m not sure. He’s either in prison or he died in prison. But I got a really strong sense that Roger was reacting to his father’s criminality. I mean, that’s just my take on it – he never liked to talk about his father. Once we were in a car on the way to Dulles, and I kind of summoned the courage to ask him about Victor Heller. I guess I thought we’d worked together long enough that we could talk about that kind of thing? And he said his father was a brilliant and misunderstood man, and he should never have gone to jail. Something in his tone told me not to pursue it, so I just changed the subject. And later I realized that I wasn’t really sure what he meant, you know? What did that mean, his father should never have gone to jail? Did that mean that his father shouldn’t have broken the law? Or that his father shouldn’t have gone to jail for whatever he did? I never got that, really. But I couldn’t ask.”

“Hmph,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“And another time he said to me – well, it was sort of an aside, sort of a joke – he was talking about some kind of tricky variable-interest entities he noticed on a company’s balance sheet, and he said, ‘You know, in a good market, this is called financial engineering. In a bad market, it’s called fraud.’ I never knew what to make of that. What he meant, exactly.”

I was sort of lost myself. I said, “Meaning, you couldn’t tell if he approved or disapproved?”

She was quiet for a long time. “I’m not even sure what I mean myself.”

“But he reacted in a very moral way to what he found in that company’s books – what what company did you say that was?”

“I didn’t say.”