The Woman Who Stopped Traffic (7 page)

CHAPTER 8

“I’ll be there in a minute,” Ben Silverman said over the phone.

Natalie was leaning against the side of her over-heating Taurus Limited in the Silicon Bean parking lot. “But why?
– Do we need to meet here?”

“One minute,” Silverman repeated and clicked off.

The meeting she’d just had with Nguyen hadn’t gone at all well. Indeed, he’d been uncharacteristically beside himself:
“You come and sit in on the most sensitive strategy session of the hottest company in the Valley, about to go public … you take it all in – and then you decide you WANT OUT?”

A colleague and member of the company’s executive team had just died. It did rather put her fake profile page into perspective.

Silverman’s graphite grey Porsche sluthered to a halt alongside her.

She’d finally found a clothes store and was wearing a long crepe skirt. Chocolate-brown boots sheathed her feet – far too warm for outdoors in the Valley. Her toes wriggled uncomfortably. The smell of burned tire-rubber drifted. Silverman’s legs seemed to appear from the sports car long before he did.

“Follow me.”

Huh?

He strode not into the coffee shop but rather round to the side, past the cardboard boxes spilling out back. A Hispanic barista with sensitive eyes was on smoke break, sitting quietly on the back steps. Asphalt gave way to rough ground, which descended into a culvert caked dry with desiccated brush. Ascending the other side, they came to a wall of faded eucalyptus bushes splotched angry maroon-red in places, the leaves crinkling in the airless noon heat. Silverman held aside a branch.

“Where the hell are you leading me?”

“You’ll see.”

On the other side, they dropped down into the rear parking lot of a residential complex comprising twin level-blocks, all built in classic Californian motel style, outdoor stairs leading to the upper units. The amount of parking surface made the units seem like an afterthought to the automobile. The blocks were set at off-ninety degree angles to the street beyond, like huge airplane wings; everything seemed designed to connote with mobility and ease.

Blocking a street exit was an unmarked Crown Victoria Interceptor, electric-blue flickering ominously in the grill. For the first time, she heard the fierce crackle of police radio. Beyond gawked a kid on a pushbike and a Hispanic lady cradling a baby.

One crime scene operative was leaning into the shade, scrutinizing the screen of a black SLR camera. Another was showing a bottle of chemicals to a third team member. What appeared to be the medical examiner was talking into her recording device about “the conjunctivia of the eyelids caused by strangulation
–”

A team like this didn’t attend to a straightforward suicide case
– even one involving a senior software executive in the heart of Silicon Valley. But the question foremost in her mind was just how the lead investment banker advising the company that Malovich had worked for could belly-up to a crime scene like this – and, why said banker had brought
her
there?

Silverman moved to the edge of the area, stopping just short of the tape. A uniformed cop was reading out an odd inventory list: “slatted wooden futon bed with mattress and sheets, assorted toiletries including two containers of Lorazepam sleeping pills, a Linksys-Cisco wireless router still in its box … and in the kitchenette, twenty four bottles of Crystal Geyser mineral water, eight unopened boxes of
Cracklin’ Oat Bran and a half-eaten beef jerky. It’s like the guy’d barely moved in.”

The
man listening turned. He was heavy set, wearing comfortable jeans and a plaid shirt sporting a prominent yoke. She noted a finely knotted leather belt seeming too thin to encompass his mass. He had the look of a small-town sheriff, missing only a sweat-stained Stetson. His eyes met Ben’s, then Natalie’s. Otherwise his face was immobile. Perhaps in his fifties, he shouted quiet authority.

“This is Natalie Chevalier. She’s assuming Yuri Malovich’s role at the company. Natalie, this is Detective Pulver of the Sunnyvale Police Department.”

She was rather stunned by this introduction, feeling growing anger and confusion. “Pleased to meet you, Detective.”

“You can call me Bill. Welcome to 12A Garden Court, Natalie. Would you excuse me a moment? It looks like a couple of reporters have shown up,” and his steady gait took him over to the street exit blocked by the Crown Vic.

“Ben, I am
not
taking over Malovich’s role at the company! Now what the hell are we doing here?” she hissed. “
What is going on
?”

“My dad was a homicide cop in San Jose, recently retired. He plays in a golf tournament with a lotta these guys still serving in the force.”

“He golfs with this guy Pulver.”

“No, but he golfs with a guy who fishes with Pulver.”

“
And
?”

“So Dad gets the scuttlebutt. You find a dead senior executive of what may be the highest profile company in the Valley, its gonna draw attention
–”

Pulver was back. “I guess the press already cottoned on to who this guy is. Was.”

He said to Ben: “So your old man ain’t goin’ quietly. Gotta keep his nose in.”

“You know it.”

“Well, can’t begrudge him that. I’d kill for his solved rate. And you’re a hotshot banker up in the city? Not following in your father’s footsteps, then.”

“Not directly. As I said on the phone, my bank works pretty closely with Clamor. It would be great to get a sense of what we’re up against here.”

Natalie felt Pulver draw back a little, his gaze lift to the screen of eucalyptus bushes behind them. “Short commute for the guy,” he said to himself. “Less than five minutes by car, and the same by that shortcut there on foot.” He nodded ahead.

“Yeah,” Ben turned back to him, having followed his gaze. “From my brief meetings with Malovich, he seemed to travel light through this world. Physically, that is.”

Ben allowed a beat.

“Mind sharing a bit of what went on here, detective?”

“Well, I guess your old man knows anyway.” Pulver looked at Natalie. “I’ll share what I can.” He wadded up some gum. “The deceased hung from a hook drilled into the two-by-fours of his ceiling. The construction of those units was so flimsy that after a few hours, the ceiling fell in, awakening the upstairs neighbors.” Pulver’s jaw sank down into the gum. “The arriving officer checked the body, and even a cursory glance told him all was not well. Burn marks on the neck.”

“Taser? Stun gun?”

“Wouldn’t be the first.’

Silverman said to Natalie: “It’s a popular way to disguise homicide as suicide. Believe it or not, a crime writer came up with a story like this involving a stun gun, causing copycat cases. Life imitates art, you could say.”

Natalie asked them which book.

“I never read ‘em,” the detective said.

Silverman said: “Anything from the ident technician yet?”

Pulver looked at him like he’d well over-stepped the mark.

“OK,” Silverman tried to backtrack. “Well, tell us how we can be of assistance. We both had contact with the vic in the days leading up.”

“Who said we’ve classified him a victim?” Pulver looked over to the street. A couple more cars had arrived, likely journalists. The blogosphere would be lit up over this one. “Who said we’ve pronounced it a homicide?”

She got it: how detectives needed to manage the information flow. You’d only got one chance to watch an interviewee react as he or she heard about it for the first time. They would want “homicide” kept out of the press for as long as possible.

Pulver drew matters to a close. “Where can I reach you both?”

“I’m probably flying back to my home in the Bahamas by mid-week,” Natalie said, “but can always be reached at either this number or email address,” and she handed him her card.

Silverman looked at her, but it was Pulver who said: “Miss Chevalier. It would be real helpful if you stuck around for the time being. We may need to talk to anyone who knew the deceased.”

The insistence in his eyes suggested he may become real
un
helpful if she didn’t. 

“Now if you’ll excuse me once more, I need to do something about these vulture scribblers descending on our asses.”

“What the
–!” she said to Silverman as soon as Pulver was out of earshot.

His hands flew up, palms open. “Take it easy, Natalie.”

“Mind coming clean about just why you’ve got me roped into this?” she asked with arms crossed.

“I’d love to,” he replied. “I’ve got an appointment in forty five minutes with chief puppeteer Jon Vogel at his home on the peninsular. Why don’t you ride down with me, and we can talk it all through?”

“I don’t think so.”

“There are things you and I should discuss. It’ld be worth your while.”

They walked back to their cars. Finally: “What things?”

“Like how we get through this situation and return to our normal lives,” he replied.

She thought about returning to the Clamor office, and trying to re-engage Nguyen – no. What else?

The interior of his car was angular and masculine. It smelled new and clean. The scooped out seat offered welcome lumbar support.

“So,” she said. “Talk.”

CHAPTER 9

“Where’s that accent from?” Ben asked. “I keep trying to place it.”

“The South.”

“But whereabouts?”

She eyed him sideways, then stared back at the highway his sports car was devouring. “South Carolina.”

“I see. Columbia? Myrtle Beach
–?”

“
Charleston
.”

“Of course,” he said. “Heard great things about it. The food… what was it that Rhett Butler said again, about Charleston? You know: something about going back there to see whether there wasn’t something left in life of grace and charm?”

She said nothing. 

“Yup,” Ben continued. “I even remember my mom talking about it, quoting some etiquette expert as saying Charleston was ‘the most mannerly city in all of America’.”

She was conscious of having her arms crossed, of looking straight ahead, her hair shielding her face.

Ben: “OK, my concern is in protecting the IPO, which right now is looking like a pretty tall order.”

The road started to descend from the Valley into a section of two-lane highway, carrying them towards Salinas. The Porsche sucked down into the highway’s sweeping curves. Natalie pushed her boots deeper into the foot well, clasping a charm bracelet round her right wrist. “Hold on Ben. Just indulge me a little, would you? By telling me some more about yourself. This is all rather sudden. And try not to get us both killed while you’re about it.”

He eased up and started talking about his time at the University of California, Davis, due east of San Francisco. About beginning on the trading floor at Carmichael Associates, then managing to get into Stanford business school – before quitting a year later for the first dotcom boom. It sounded like he’d never left Northern California, physically at least.

Football, she was thinking. Football and perhaps head of bar ops, Delta House ’95 or whatever: “You play much sport at Davis?”

“Not a lot. I was too into my course.” He caught her look. “English major. But I kept up with the spelunking,” and he clocked her surprise again. “Sea caving, down the peninsular here.

“By the way, this here on the left,” and he pointed up towards the yellow-brown grass ascending skyward: “these are the
Pastures of Heaven
Steinbeck wrote about back in the day.”

Natalie took in the view, the new information.

He said: “Boy,
The Grapes of Wrath
. I tell ya, that book taught me all I needed to know about the Depression – and about my dad’s side of the family.”

Silvery remnants of barn and broken down corral sped past. She decided to lighten the tone a little: “So you weren’t tempted to become a writer yourself? Pen that Great American novel?”

“All I could think to write about was myself, and even
I
’m not that interested in me.”

She laughed involuntarily. “So why did you engineer for Buffalo Bill back there to forbid me from leaving town anytime soon?”

“Detective Pulver makes his own calls. From my perspective, it’s great to know that someone’s looking into the human trafficking problem at Clamor. Someone smart, someone technical. And, you’re not an investor in the company, which almost places you above suspicion.”

“Above
suspicion? Of
what
?”

He didn’t answer, asking instead: “How much d’you know about IPOs?”

She hesitated, perplexed. “Back in the day, dotcoms seemed to treat them as these big marketing junkets. Whose is the latest hot web site everyone should visit –”

“But you’re aware an IPO is really about raising capital.”

“Of course I am.”

“And that the sudden marketability of the stock gives existing investors an opportunity to cash out. A liquidity event, we call it in the trade.”

“Right.”

“So, people get twitchy about their stockholdings as IPO day draws near. They want to lock in, to the big win. It’s within reach: they can
feel
it.”

“If you say so.”

“I do. I’ve witnessed it many times.

“Take Malovich for example, who held options over 5% of the company. You know about stock options
– how they give the right but not the obligation to buy shares at a set price, and typically a pretty low one at that?”

“Ben. I was a head of security for a rather big software company.”

“Well I calculated just how much Malovich stood to make. Given how early he joined the company, it would have cost him around five hundred thousand dollars to exercise those options. And after the IPO, he could have sold the stock for some six hundred and twenty five
million
dollars, based on what we expect the IPO to price at, which would have netted him a profit of – rounding up –”

“Six hundred and twenty five millions dollars.”

“Erm, right. So it doesn’t make sense for him to have committed suicide,” Ben continued. “But it may very well make sense that he died at the hands of someone else.”

“Why?”

“Because of what happens to options after employment terminates, whatever the cause.”

“How so?”

“When your employment ended at your last job, what happened – to any options you hadn’t exercised?”

She winced. “Sure, I had to exercise and sell them within weeks or the company would cancel them –”

“Just like at Clamor. You have a brief window after employment ends to exercise your options, or they’re gone. Which effectively augments everyone else’s stock holding by five percent.”

“But that’s not motivation
enough. Let’s say you’re going to make fifty mil’ anyway. And you have the opportunity of making another two-and-a-half – only, for the extra gain you’ve got to get rid of someone. Doesn’t make sense.”

Silverman was silent.

“So,” she said, changing the subject. “You weren’t tempted to become a detective yourself, like your dad?”

“You don’t just become a detective, Natalie. You’ve got to become a cop first. Which is hard work, and dangerous work. Neither of my parents encouraged me down that path. But I’ll say one thing: my dad was an unbelievable detective. He said he got his clues from the victims themselves, like he was communicating with them beyond the grave or something.”

They swept down the long Carmel Valley. Ben checked his wing mirror then overtook a slow moving RV with out-of-state license plates.

“Why
do
we need to go see Vogel?” she asked.

“I’ve set in motion events to kick out these Multiworld guys. No one could tell me anything about them. So we’ll buy back and cancel their shares for the price they paid. Mail a check to a P.O. box in Aruba if need be.”

“And you can just do that? Force the repurchase of stock now worth hundreds of millions of dollars?”

“Technically, it’s worth whatever it was valued at in the last funding round, which – granted, is a fraction of the IPO valuation. But, if we can show that this Multiworld crowd invested fraudulently, we should be OK. We can get a court order.

“We’ve searched for Multiworld in every database at Carmichael’s disposal, and that’s a few. We even put calls in to the Aruba Chamber of Commerce. I’ve been through the paperwork at Clamor’s offices. They never submitted Foreign Investment Disclosure forms when they invested. The Clamor guys faxed those requests over several times, according to the physical transmission reports. Of course, the fax number’s now dead.” He shook his head. “Hell, we
deserve
a court order!
Whoever’s heard of an investor who no one’s ever heard of
!”

“OK, OK!
– but how does any of this involve Vogel?”

“Oh. We’ll still need an extraordinary stockholder resolution to affect the buy back, and therefore Vogel’s vote. He owns almost forty percent of the company.”

At the valley’s mouth lay an oasis of smoky-green pine trees. They turned onto coastal Highway One, bypassing Carmel-by-the-sea.

“Ben, I know you suspect that another investor may have had something to do with Malovich’s death, but there could be other reasons why people wanted him dead.”

“No kidding. What was that PhD he wrote? Hunting and fishing among the Russian mafia?” and he grinned morbidly.

“Hey, there’s big money to be made from that stuff. You do it right, and people don’t even contest the rogue charges on their credit card statements. Why bother, for a buck? But if these guys can work that scam with a few million cardholders worldwide, well. Malovich’s thesis did a lot to curtail that stuff, directly or indirectly.”

“That could have been his problem right there,” Silverman said. “Particularly among the Armenians. I remember dad telling me about those guys, man. Some of the stories.” He whistled. “One crew presented a Russian Kamov Ka-32 military transport helicopter as a gift: to the San Francisco Police Department. Can you believe that?”

Finally they turned onto Pine Glade Way, home to movie stars, sports celebrities, technology billionaires, and not too many others.

She nodded. “I don’t know which prospect is worse. An insider taking the life of another shareholder, or the Russian mafia.”

Silverman said: “neither is good, but both
–”

“Multiworld?”

“I just don’t have a good feeling about this one, Natalie.”