The Malfeasance Occasional Read online

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  EDITOR’S NOTE

  Thanks to Criminal Element’s talented and enthusiastic visitors, our inaugural, crowd-sourced fiction project spun out a glorious kaleidoscope of interpretations upon the theme of GIRL TROUBLE.

  This issue is roughly organized from less-to-more “graphic,” but that refers only to the explicitness of language and subject matter, not necessarily to the seriousness of underlying themes or implications. Word choices aside, early entries may be dark-hearted and later ones wickedly funny.

  I’d like especially to recognize Laura K. Curtis’s editorial assistance and also to thank Christopher Morgan and Jennifer Proffitt. We are, in turn, grateful to all the site visitors who trusted us with their work and suggestions. We hope readers will be as delighted and provoked by the crime stories in this e-collection as we are proud to be able to share them.

  Clare Toohey

  GIRL TROUBLE ISSUE:

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Editor’s Note

  “Follow Us on Facebook and Twitter” by Eric Cline

  “Mad Women” by Patricia Abbott

  “The Wentworth Letter” by Jeff Soloway

  “The Barnacle” by Hilary Davidson

  “My Brother’s Keeper” by Charles Drees

  “The Third Echo” by Sam Wiebe

  “Magda” by Cathi Stoler

  “Crow’s Lesson” by Robert Lopresti

  “Her Haunted House” by Brendan DuBois

  “Girl of Great Price” by Milo James Fowler

  “Benign” by Caroline J. Orvis

  “Them Old Blues” by Ken Leonard

  “Incident on the 405” by Travis Richardson

  “Birds of Paradise” by Chuck Wendig

  Copyright

  All individual story copyrights reserved by their respective authors.

  Cover art copyright ©2013 Brian Rau

  Follow Us on Facebook and Twitter

  by Eric Cline

  The woman who fired me has a lovely daughter. Her name is Amber.

  Amber is sixteen. She has lots of friends, judging by her Facebook page. I’m one of them.

  I might be the only 33-year-old male Friend she has. And she doesn’t even know it; she thinks I’m a teenage girl in Tacoma, Washington named Kirsten Marcus. If she knew who I really was, and that I actually live in Maryland, like her (in Laurel, only an hour’s drive from her and her mom’s home in Columbia), well, I’m afraid she would Unfriend me.

  * * *

  I didn’t start out to be a villain. Hell, who does? I was going to be a titan of industry. I listened to motivational speakers in my car.

  I was excited to work for Gretchen Metz. I believed in her product. I believed in the Purse Pistol.

  “A 100-pound woman with a gun need not fear a 300-pound man with a knife,” she said in the hiring interview. “But that’s only if he doesn’t grab the gun and shoot her with it.

  “And what if she falls down one day while she’s got the gun in her purse? The hammer of a revolver could be jarred just enough to fire a bullet. And what if your child finds it and thinks it’s a toy? Tragedy would strike. My goal is to make a handgun that can be fired by only one person, scanning their fingerprints on the handle.”

  “Create an entire new industry!” I said. “As different from a regular pistol as an iPhone is from an old rotary phone! Police departments could use it too.” Sure, I was acting peppy to get the job, but it really did sound like a good product.

  She was divorced and had sole custody of Amber. The company’s office and workshop was in an industrial park in Laurel.

  No, I didn’t start out to be a villain.

  But I’m enjoying the role immensely.

  * * *

  Once, companies told people what was important. Marketers created the habit of mass consumption of cigarettes in the 20th century.

  Now, people tell companies what is important; Facebook is the New Lung Cancer. Nobody in business knows what to do with social media, but they know their potential customers use it, so they must desperately follow.

  Me, I’m smarter than that. I know exactly what to do with it.

  I created “Kirsten Marcus” on Twitter and Facebook by stealing some girl’s photos off a Russian-language Facebook page. The real owner of that apple-cheeked blonde face would never stumble across my creations.

  Amber was the weakness in the Metz family’s armor. She had, I discovered, pestered every kid she knew to follow her on Twitter and had, as a result, amassed 824 followers.

  “Kirsten Marcus” offered to be the 825th if …

  U FOLLOW ME & I’LL FOLLOW U, K? I’D LOVE 2 HAVE TWIT BUDDY ON OTHER SIDE OF USA!!!

  Amber had already made that bargain with others and readily agreed.

  From there, Amber’s Twitter follower became a Facebook Friend. And soon, Ms. Gretchen Metz got a friend request from her daughter’s Friend, which she accepted, probably without a second thought.

  In law enforcement, they’re called “breeder documents.” One good forged document, say a birth certificate, gets you a social security card, which gets you a driver’s license, which gets you a credit card; one good lie breeds a whole new identity for you.

  And that’s how a smart villain uses social media! It’s a breeder document on steroids.

  * * *

  Amber taught me so, so much.

  Flickr photo of a 10-year-old Amber on the lap of a chubby man dressed in a Santa suit. Caption:

  My uncle, Ron Kane, died a year after this pic was taken. He and my mom were super close growing up. Unk, we love U and miss U every day!!!!

  Mother’s maiden name: Kane.

  Facebook scan of an old Polaroid of Gretchen Metz (Gretchen Kane then, I guess) with Big Hair. Her sweatshirt said Cumberland High:

  OMG! My mom in high school! Breakfast Club ha ha! At least good looks run in the family!

  Her mother had posted a comment: “Very funny. I was very little when that movie came out!” Yeah, ha ha indeed. Hometown, probably Cumberland, Maryland, and definitely the place she went to high school.

  Time for some Google: “kane ‘gretchen metz’ cumberland.” An obituary from five years ago:

  Nora Kane, a lifelong resident of Cumberland, survived by daughter Gretchen Metz of Columbia and brothers Mark Mooney and Jay Mooney, both of the District of Columbia.

  (Confirmed hometown, Cumberland. Confirmed maiden name, Kane. Mother’s maiden name, Mooney.)

  Amber used her Facebook profile to comment on a news story: a fire in some old widow’s house. The lady had been sleeping; her cat had batted her face until she woke up, and they got out alive. Amber had written:

  Teers in my eyes! Heart warming. I had a cat named Tiger because he had stripes and I NO he would have saved me. But I started getting asthma & we could never have a cat agan, but if we coud I would LUV 1!!!! Dont listen 2 the haters! Cats R Kool!!

  Jesus, thanks for sharing, kid.

  Yeah. Thanks for sharing. Childhood pet name: Tiger. It wouldn’t be mom’s childhood pet, but it sounded like the only pet name that would come to her mom’s mind.

  * * *

  I enjoyed working for Gretchen Metz. I only became a villain because she made me one.

  I replaced that pathetic brochure she called a web site with an interactive but easy-to-maintain one. I started a blog that I ghost wrote for her. I got her a
story in The Wall Street Journal.

  I did my job well.

  We had lunch together occasionally, but didn’t socialize too much beyond that. She was an engineer, and she had four others working for her, so she spent most of her time with them. She never talked about her ex-husband or her current love life. She went on and on about her daughter, though: Amber was on the honor roll, Amber was on the swim team, that kind of crap.

  I would listen politely. I had no interest in her daughter of any kind. Awright? But Big Mama must have thought I did. Because Amber ultimately got me fired.

  It happened when I was outside the building on a hot day in the summer. The industrial park was not what you’d call scenic (unless signless buildings with semi containers parked all over are your thing). Half the time I worked from my apartment, half the time I doubled as an office assistant (as I had agreed—it was a startup). But I was taking a breather, sipping a soda outdoors, when I saw a pair of boobs jiggling in a red bikini top. Bikini bottom too. And a body that flattered them both.

  “Yowza yowza!” I said, in sincere appreciation of the female form.

  Amber giggled. She was flattered. It was her beneath the sunglasses and a floppy hat.

  I about choked on my Mountain Dew. She greeted me respectfully by my last name. There was a twinkle in her eye as she went in to see her mother.

  I sweated out that afternoon at my desk, half-heartedly doing a media release. What would she say to her mother? What would her mother say to me? I half-expected to be shown the door that day. Maybe if I had, I wouldn’t have resented it as much.

  Slowly, as the days went on, I got the feeling Amber had said something to precious Mumsey. Because the boss would give me an occasional blank look, like there were things she wanted to say. And soon she was pestering me about my workload. At the same time, she was telling me to not do certain things! “We’re not ready for people to put in orders,” she would say. “We need to pull it back.” In other words, I was too successful at the publicity!

  About three weeks after “yowza yowza,” I was canned.

  Gretchen Metz really laid it on thick, trying to “handle” me: “You’ve done a great job. It’s my fault because I brought a PR person on too early. I can’t have you whipping up consumer interest before we have a product to sell.” She was looking so sad, you’d think I was firing her.

  I tried, damn it. I tried to be upbeat and positive and helpful.

  “Pre-sales!” I said. “Start selling now! You can cure cash flow issues. I can help you with that.”

  “No.” Her mask of compassion dropped. Her face was now stone. “Money is not a problem. My angels have given me a good line of credit and they know how far away I am from market.”

  See how she’d set me up? When I’d been hired, it had all been, “We’re going to sell the world’s safest gun, we’re going to do this, we’re going to do that.” But then after I dared to glance at a post-adolescent young adult who pranced around half-naked, it was all: “I’m doing this, I’m doing that, I, I, I…” And she had told her venture capital angels before she had told me, her right hand man!

  * * *

  The job market was tough. I thought I had a job with Castle Bastion Arms in Virginia; they called me for an interview on the strength of my time with Purse Pistol LLC.

  But once they found out I had done “only PR” (only!) I could see the three of them on the panel lose all interest.

  “Now, we would be willing to pay a head hunter fee,” said one. “If you could bring one of her engineers over to us. Someone who has had the experience of solving those problems.” He quickly held up both palms. “Without infringing on the patents she has already taken out, of course.”

  Another of them said, mostly to himself: “Don’t know why she won’t let us license her patents. We’re the ones with the manufacturing experience.”

  I thought of a certain publicity video she had made with me, and about some information she had let slip.

  “Her crew is pretty tight,” I said. “Good luck poaching one of them. But what about prototypes? Schematics?”

  I saw a sort of lust in their eyes. But they said the words they had to say:

  “Obviously, we’re not asking for material you do not have any sort of title to…”

  “But if there were items, say, discarded in the trash, which maybe you had taken as mementos, souvenirs…”

  “Drafts of documents for which patents haven’t yet been filed…”

  “We would be willing to take a look at such material, obviously on an informal basis…”

  “And I do believe that there might be room in Public Relations for an extraordinary talent…“

  “A two-year contract, and we could talk salary…”

  They were slick. I guess I sort of affectionately blamed them, too, for bringing me over to the dark side.

  I had a lot to think about on that drive up the Beltway back to Laurel.

  That night, “Kirsten Marcus” was born on Twitter.

  * * *

  I had shot the footage for a planned promotional video that Gretchen scrapped when she decided to supposedly “pull back” on publicity. It was taken on the firing range.

  We didn’t wear ear protection. She was dry-firing it for a demonstration.

  “Will this look good, with just that little camcorder?” she said. She had the gun, I had the camera.

  “It’s the YouTube age,” I said. “People expect shaky. They love grainy. They think it’s more authentic.”

  She held the little thumb drive out. “Okay, this is called enrolling. Your fingerprints have to be encoded on this, using a special machine that will be available at licensed gun dealers.”

  She pushed the drive all the way into the bottom of the revolver’s butt, next to the lithium battery. Glassy ovals raised up slightly from both sides of the handle. She pointed those out and said, “Unless your thumb or one of your fingers is touching one of these scanners, the cylinder is locked. You have to be gripping it to fire it. Your child cannot discharge it, nor can a burglar.”

  Looking at that video after I returned from the interview at Castle Bastion, I wished I could reach through the screen and grab the device from her; she and her team had worked out several different technical challenges, and every one of them was embodied in that prototype.

  “It looks pretty damn slick,” I heard myself saying on video. “Seems like you’ve worked out all the bugs. Why not go to manufacture now?”

  She laughed, cupping the pistol with both hands as she looked down at it.

  “Oh, we’ve worked out every bug except one. This is one of three hand-built prototypes, and each one of them cost about $5,000 each. That’s not retail price, that’s cost.”

  “Ouch,” video-me said. “Isn’t a good conventional handgun six, eight hundred bucks?”

  “Yeah. People will pay a premium for our unique safety features. But we’ve got to figure out how to sell for under two grand and still make a profit. Because right now, the only person who has one in their home is me.”

  Video-me laughed. “So, took advantage of the perks of the office, huh? Took one of them home?”

  “Yeah. It’s good to have a model when I’m working at home and one of my team calls to discuss an issue. But, and maybe this would be good for the promo video to talk about this, I do have a teenager at home. She has friends visit her. I usually have it locked in my safe, but God forbid I’m careless, and they find it. That’s what this product is about. It will reduce the risk of a personal tragedy if someone is horsing around.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Actually, on second thought, don’t put anything like that in. I don’t want to lose my privacy, or my daughter’s. So many tragedies.”

  “Yeah,” I said in real life, and stopped the video.

  Two prototypes in the office. The locks were redundant, and security cameras were all around. No way I was getting in there.

  But some residence in Columbia? With some ri
nky-dink personal safe? Hell, I could do it.

  As I followed the mother and daughter on Facebook and Twitter over the next several days, I imagined myself as the star of a Hollywood movie: one of those thrillers about a gentleman burglar. There I would be in my ski mask and black spandex suit, cutting through glass, hopping over laser beams, listening to tumblers with a stethoscope.

  I didn’t even have to drive by to case the house; Google Streetview gave me images of the address (which I had gotten from online county records).

  It was a nice but not opulent rancher with a privacy fence. It was on a residential street with neighbors on either side, but they were big lots, and everyone had landscaping—rolling hills, bushes—that gave them plenty of privacy.

  That would give me plenty of privacy.

  It was Amber who told me they would be going on vacation. First on Twitter:

  Ho hum. Going on yearly NY trip this week. Dont like leaving MD when its still warm. Wanna hang wit my crew in OC!

  The beaches of Ocean City, Maryland were still nice in September. If I could have gotten away to there, I certainly would have. Why go all the way up to New York … City? Somewhere else in the state?

  I Googled the date range and found out that it was Rosh Hashanah. Did they go to New York every year to celebrate? The mother’s Facebook page was silent, but adults are getting savvy about not tipping off burglars. A day later, I noted that Amber’s tweet had been deleted. No surprise there; Mom followed her daughter on Twitter (I guess most parents do these days) and must have had a fit.

  When I searched through mom’s online profile for a New York connection, the mystery just got deeper. Her married cousin lived in Buffalo, New York.

  Buffalo.

  Every year, Mom hauled her daughter up to Buffalo in the early fall instead of spending it on the beach at Ocean City?

  I didn’t know that much about New York state, but I was pretty sure it was a “First prize, a week in Buffalo, second prize, two weeks in Buffalo” situation.

  They could only be going up there for religious reasons. What other reason could there be for pointlessly sacrificing pleasure?

  So, I had the house to myself. Their house. My self.