Spoonbenders

IRENE: Change the word “services” to “screwing” and you’ve got it.

LAST DAD STANDING: Oh. That’s…what’s the word I’m looking for? “Bad.”

She laughed. Out loud. Did that mean she should type “LOL”? Some kind of punctuation smiley face?

IRENE T: So, so bad. I didn’t realize it, though, because everywhere else I’d worked was worse.

When her son was born, she’d been trapped in her father’s house, working jobs that barely covered the cost of child care. Burger King assistant manager. Shift manager at Hot Topic. Night manager/cashier at the Dollar General. Lev had long since bolted, so no help there. It wasn’t until Matty was about to enter first grade that she glimpsed daylight and made her escape. Pittsburgh became her destination solely because a friend of a friend was willing to sublet a room to her. She took a series of low-level jobs. She was good with money, as every boss she worked for eventually figured out. She learned how to keep a ledger and, when PCs entered the picture, picked up Lotus 1-2-3 and databases like Paradox.

She liked the honesty of numbers. The zeroing out of debits and credits, the black-and-white judgment of reconciliation. A balanced ledger was a thing of beauty.

Matty turned twelve the year she finally wedged a foot into a white-collar door. At Haven Financial Planning she became a receptionist with “light bookkeeping duties.” It was a tiny firm on the edge of the city, and when she signed on as employee number five she didn’t know anything about finance, or about any of the instruments by which money could be hidden, put to work, shielded, and redirected. By the time Haven fired her and initiated legal action against her, she knew not only how those instruments could be wielded, but exactly how the company used them to separate clients from their cash.

It was the lying, of course, that tipped her off and tripped her up. Not the casual fibs; she wasn’t surprised at the way the company’s partners, Jim and Jack, told aging clients how wonderful they looked, complimented ugly women on their hair, flattered fools on their business acumen. It was the deeper, down-to-the-money lies that got to her. One of Irene’s jobs was to help with signings, managing the stack of documents with their dozens of yellow SIGN HERE stickies. While the clients signed, the partners ushered them along on a wave of encouragement, talk of future returns, confident-sounding advice. And it was clear to Irene that Jim and Jack were lying their asses off.

LAST DAD STANDING: How did you know they were lying?

IRENE T: Women’s intuition.

LAST DAD STANDING: Heh. Did the numbers not add up or something?

IRENE T: I didn’t know enough to know what the numbers were supposed to be. So I started studying the paperwork.

That limited power of attorney, for example. Jim and Jack always made it sound like a formality, but in actuality it was the key to the kingdom, because it allowed Haven to put clients’ money into “special situation investments.” The primary SSI, which could take up to 40 percent of the money, was itself an investment company that funded other corporations, which were usually described as tech companies that were about to “explode” in value. (“Have you heard of the Internet, Mrs. Hanselman? It’s huge.”) Every time Haven transferred money into the primary SSI, Haven took a portion as a fee. The “technology” firms that SSI invested in were in fact nothing but investment firms, which were also controlled by Haven.

LAST DAD STANDING: So what does that get Haven?

IRENE T: Jim and Jack got another cut every time they moved money from one puppet partnership to another.

LAST DAD STANDING: OH.

IRENE T: It was a vampire machine. Every time they made a transfer, a little more money got siphoned from the client account—until it all evaporated.

LAST DAD STANDING: But how did they explain to the customer when they tried to withdraw their money?