The Darkness - Jason Pinter [24]
left, Talcott would drink enough to make him sleep like
he'd been shot.
He brought up a small tumbler, filled it to the brim, and
downed it, closing his eyes. He looked at us, slight embarrassment on his face. Then he pushed the bottle toward
us.
"No thanks," I said. "I didn't have breakfast."
Jack looked right past the bottle. I watched his reaction, but there was none.
Talcott coughed into his fist. His eyes were a little
watery. I got the feeling he didn't particularly enjoy the
scotch, but needed it enough to get around that small detail.
"You don't know what it's like out there," he said.
"Out where?" said Jack. "What are you talking about?"
"The economy is in the toilet. The dollar is barely
worth the paper it's printed on."
"I cash my paychecks," I added. "We know this."
"But companies...they're getting hit the hardest. There
aren't as many customers to go around, and the customers that they do have, well the money they pay doesn't
buy what it used to."
"What's your point?"
"Sixteen-twenty Avenue of the Americas, we've lost
a dozen tenants from that building in the last two years.
Two years! And you know how many tenants have moved
in? One. That's a few hundred grand that we used to be
making that just disappeared in the wind."
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Jason Pinter
Talcott paused, eyed the bottle.
"We needed the extra money."
"And..." I said.
"That company...718 Enterprises...they never leased
the property," Talcott said. "They were never officially on
our ledger. They never paid us a dime."
"Then why did you say..." I replied, but Jack cut me off.
"So what does that mean?" Jack said. "They didn't pay
for the space? How did you bring in money?"
"The company itself didn't pay us," he replied, eyes
looking at the bottle like it was a well-aged steak. "There
was a law firm."
"Kaiser, Hirschtritt and Certilman," I said. "They
occupied the floor above."
Talcott nodded, his eyes red. He bit his lower lip. Hard.
"Go on," Jack said.
"The law firm leased one floor. Eighteen. About a year
after they leased it, our tenants on seventeen moved out.
We needed money bad. So when Brett Kaiser came to us
and made a proposition, we had no choice. The tenant that
occupied that floor had left three months earlier. We
couldn't afford to take another hit without recouping
some of our losses."
"What was the offer?" I said.
"Somebody would occupy the seventeenth floor. Only
for legal purposes, the firm would be listed as the leaser.
They would take care of monthly payments for both
floors. That was that. We treated it like a tenant was
simply occupying two floors."
"So who was on seventeen?" I asked.
"I don't know," Talcott said. "That was part of Kaiser's
deal. He said the people on seventeen would never need
anything from Orchid, and we should never ever contact
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them for any reason. I never went to that floor, and they
never even hired a cleaning crew as far as I know. One
time, though, one of our maid services told me she accidentally got off on the wrong floor, got lost. She said the
offices were closed, and had some sort of security system
she'd never seen before. Like something out of the space
program, she said."
"Doesn't sound like something a law office would
employ," I said to Jack. He didn't respond.
"There's something wrong with that company. I don't
know what it is, but I had a feeling that some day
somebody would ask me these questions. I never wanted
to know what they did. But I had to lease as much space
as possible or the building could have gone under."
"I'm sure Kaiser knew that," I said. "And knew you
wouldn't ask questions as long as the checks arrived on
time."
"I never needed to or wanted to ask questions," Talcott
said. "There are plenty of tenants whose businesses I'm
not fully acquainted with. As long as they're running a
legal operation and paying on time, they have their right
to privacy."
"And you have a right to know where your money is
coming from," I said.
"What if," Jack said, "you had a choice between getting
paid and having