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When Doug walked in to the chapel, I met him and escorted him over to Babson. As I scanned the room I recognized Doug’s boss, Shawn Brumberger, from his photo on the Beauceron website. He wore a well-cut dark suit, a starched white shirt and a blue Eastern College tie patterned with yellow rising suns. His short dark hair was tinged with gray and artfully arranged to cover a bald spot.
I walked over and introduced myself, then led him to where Doug and Babson were talking. Babson said, “Thank you for lending Doug to us for the weekend. I’m sure he’s going to do a terrific job.”
“He was a great catch for us,” Shawn said. “Nearly twenty years on Wall Street. What he doesn’t know about municipal bonds isn’t worth knowing.”
“Eastern alumni are the best hires you can make,” Babson said. “We pride ourselves on providing a well-rounded liberal arts education that will help our graduates succeed no matter what path they take.”
I’d heard Babson’s patter so often it washed over me, but Doug and Shawn smiled and seemed to agree. I left them and walked around the room to make sure everything was going smoothly. I snuck back to my room for a few minutes to feed Rochester and make sure he had water, and promised to come back after dinner and take him for a long walk.
A few minutes after I returned to the chapel, the caterer removed the Japanese screen and invited us all to take seats at the round tables. I sat up at the front with Babson, Doug and Shawn, and we were joined by two alumni participants.
We all chatted over a wedge of iceberg lettuce dusted with blue cheese, chicken cordon bleu, roasted heirloom potatoes and fingerling carrots, and after the dinner plates were taken away, I snuck back to the kitchen and assembled a doggie bag for Rochester. I went out the back door of the chapel and delivered Rochester his treats, then returned to the table for dessert.
As we were finishing, Babson stood up and gave a brief speech about his plans for Friar Lake, that it would be one of the premier academic conference centers of the east coast. Then Doug spoke for a few minutes about what people could expect the next day. He asked them to come to the morning session with a list of places where they got financial information, and told a couple of stories from his Wall Street days.
We reopened the bar in the nave of the chapel, and though many of the guests went to their rooms, a dozen stuck around over snifters of brandy and tall glasses of Irish coffee. When Doug and I were the last two left, we walked outside into the cool darkness, the sky above us spangled with stars.
“So what have you been doing since graduation?” Doug asked me.
I told him about the work I’d done, how I’d taught myself HTML and moved into web development. “Then Mary had her first miscarriage and ran us into credit card debt with some retail therapy.”
“That’s tough,” Doug said.
“Yeah. Around that time a guy I worked with passed on some hacking software to me, and I picked up some extra cash doing some freelance projects.”
“You’re a hacker?”
“That’s what the state of California calls me,” I said, trying to make light of my conviction. “I might have gotten off with a slap on the wrist as a first offender, but I broke into some companies that took offense.”
I took another sip of my brandy and told him the rest of the story – the year in prison, the two years on parole.
“You sure wouldn’t have been the guy in our class voted most likely to go to prison,” Doug said. He was quiet for a moment, and I worried that he was going to judge me because of my criminal background. Instead, though, he said, “You know about computers, right? Since I was able to help you out here, maybe you could return the favor.”
“Just ask,” I said. “I need to take Rochester out. You want to come with us and tell me what you need as we walk?”
He agreed, and we went back to my room to retrieve Rochester. He was sprawled on his side on the floor, snoring and making small whimpering sounds. I squatted down beside him. “What’s the matter, boy? You all right?”
In a flash, he was up from his after-dinner nap and jumping around me, licking my face and hands. “Come on, let’s go for a walk,” I said, grabbing the fur around the back of his neck for balance so I could stand up. I hooked up his leash, grabbed a flashlight and a plastic bag, and the three of us walked outside.
“What do you think I can help you with?” I asked, as Rochester tugged me forward.
“I’ve only been at Beauceron for a couple of months but I’m worried that there might be something not quite kosher going on,” Doug said. “I need to keep this job because I need to stay close to my kids, and this is the only job I could find in the area. But at the same time, I could lose my license if I’m know about criminal activity and I don’t report it.”
The night was quiet and almost spooky. Friar Lake was located at the top of a low mountain a few miles from the Delaware River, surrounded by farmlands and a couple of new suburban developments. Beyond the stars above, the only light came from the couple of street lamps and a few windows in the dormitory. We walked on a paved path that ran beside the woods, which were dark and deep.
“What is it that you think I can help with?”
“Do you know what a Real Estate Investment Trust is?” he asked.
I nodded. “I have some of my retirement money invested in one.”
“At Beauceron, we have a number of our own funds that customers can invest in, and one of them is an equity REIT. We take investor capital and use it to provide first and second mortgage loans to commercial operators—apartment houses, shopping malls, that kind of thing. A lot of the properties are risky and they pay us high interest, which we pay out to our investors. It’s our best-performing fund by far – double-digit returns, which in this economy is phenomenal.”
“Sounds too good to be true.” Rochester stopped, nosing around the base of a maple tree with a gnarled trunk. The air smelled fresh and humid.
Doug took a moment to collect his thoughts. “After Catherine and I sold the house in Westchester, I lived in Hoboken for a while. Last week I went up there to talk to a guy I knew who might be a client, and on my way back, I was driving down US 1 near Newark airport, and I remembered that our REIT had invested in a property near there. I thought it would be fun to drive by and see what was generating all this revenue.”
We started walking again. “What kind of property?” I asked.
“A strip shopping center called Route One Plaza, anchored by a grocery store at one end and an electronics outfit at the other. But when I got there, both the big stores were shut down, and there were only a couple of small businesses still struggling in the middle.”
“So a bad investment,” I said.
He shook his head. “Not according to our books. We’re still carrying that property as income-generating.”
“Could there be something you don’t know about?” I asked. “Maybe there’s a bankruptcy trustee who’s keeping up the payments or something like that.”
He shook his head. “I checked, and the limited partnership that owns the center isn’t even paying the property tax. There’s already a tax lien for more than the land is worth.”
Rochester finally found the spot he’d been looking for, and popped a squat to do his business. I juggled the flashlight and the plastic bag, and it wasn’t until I was finished that Doug continued.
“Here’s the thing,” he said. “I need some help going through the list of properties that the fund invests in and checking each one out. I don’t have the computer skills to do all that research, and I’m so busy scrambling for clients I don’t have the time either. Is there any way you can help me out?”
We stopped again beneath a lamp post, and I looked at Doug. “What are you going to do with this information?” I asked. “Report them to the authorities? If the company closes down you’ll be out of a job anyway. So why not just quit if you think there’s something criminal going on?”
“Shawn is pressuring me to bring new investors into our funds, particularly the REIT. So there’s a chance I could get arrested, too, if there’s illegal activity. But like I said, I can’t afford to walk away right now.”
He took a deep breath. “I keep hoping that maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that shopping center is generating income—it could be that the leases have to be paid even if the store closes. Or maybe it’s an outlier, and I’m getting upset over nothing. It took a long time to get this job, and if I quit, I’ll fall behind on alimony and child support, and everything I’ve worked for will go down the drain.”
He took a deep breath. “The atmosphere at Beauceron is very competitive – everybody seems to be chasing after the same investors, and nobody is willing to talk about the actual quality of the product. You’re the only guy I know who has the ability to get in there and see if there’s something wrong. Please?”
I’d been in trouble in the past, and I appreciated everyone who’d given me a helping hand. It was my turn to pay forward those old favors. “It looks fishy, I agree. Once this seminar is over I’ll have some time and if you send me the data, I can look it over for you.”
By then we had circled back to the entrance to the dorm. A few lights were on in the newly renovated bedrooms but it looked like most of our guests had already gone to sleep.
“That would be awesome,” Doug said. “I’ll even give you my ID and password so you can see everything I do.”
I shook my head. “You shouldn’t do that, Doug. I mean, yeah, we knew each other years ago, but you don’t know that you can trust me.”
I opened the door to my room and let Rochester off his leash. Then I turned to Doug.
“I really appreciate this, Steve. I’ll email you my password as soon as I get back to my room.”
“No! You don’t want an email trail showing you gave somebody else your password.” I stepped inside and got a pad and pen from the desk. “Write it down.”
While he wrote, I thought about how my curiosity had gotten me into trouble in the past, snooping around in places on line where I wasn’t supposed to be. If I helped Doug I’d make sure to keep my snooping within legal limits so I didn’t hurt myself, and everything I’d built since my return home.
