Chapter 7

Bobsy Atwater returned to a familiar theme, “Tech is always planning ahead, thinking ahead. Maybe not about where disruption will take us, but how to ... upend the fucking table sooner. Shortcuts, outside the box shit. Why cut up frogs when naked mole-rats are so much better?”

Wish I’d never looked at those photos.

Vanessa’s the cook in our family, but I have a few go-to dishes. One is the Famous Senate Bean Soup. Now it’s hard to go wrong with a dish that includes ham hocks and onions, but I believe I’ve improved it over the years.

My version is spicier, packs more flavor-punch. After all, I’m not a 70-year old white guy worried about re-election. Walker has always enjoyed my two-day soup. Mindy, when she lived with us. Pilar claims to like it. Vanessa would never let on that it’s anything less than fabulous.

Even my mother usually has a second bowl.

Why am I thinking of bean fucking soup? Because it’s a dish, blander version, that Daddy can eat. Since his ... incident.

Technology may move the fastest in the Valley, but it affects every American city. In KC, I see fewer taxicabs in the entertainment neighborhoods -- Waldo, Brookside, the Plaza, Crossroads, Power & Light District, River Market.

Uber and Lyft.

The sharing economy -- cars, apartments, freelancers, part-timers ... all of that and more is changing the landscape. A good thing? Too early for me to guess.

I knew, personally and professionally, that what had once been my private domain -- digital detection to coin an oversimplified term -- was now becoming more and more corporate.

Not necessarily a bad thing for my line of work. Because certain dark side talents ... physical surveillance, underground contacts, underbelly familiarity, law enforcement friends, quasi-legal shortcuts, are difficult for outsiders to do.

Also, darker yet, bribes, threats, coercion, hacking, intimidation, influence, hidden media access, off-market gadgets. My little profession may be waxing or waning, but it’s unlikely to disappear.

Are city fixers good or bad for the city in question? Moralists can argue either side of the aisle and make a compelling case.

With Bulldog Bannerman, I lean more toward the positive. He is, I believe, morally neutral. He’s interested in progress, in keeping the wheels turning.

So far as I can tell, Bulldog doesn’t favor Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Anarchists. He wants Pragmatists.

Probably from my middle class, Midwestern, financially conservative upbringing, I was uncomfortable turning my weekly expense report in to Bunny Carville. The Four Seasons for one. Room service and wine from the minibar. Restaurant meals. Flying first class. Uber.

But every time I mentioned that ticking clock Bunny just shrugged, “It’s what Bobsy wants.”

Groggy from reading, and logging, all those Nelson-Eamons surveillance logs -- my notes and the notes from four Orange County private investigators -- something I’d seen rang the faintest of bells. Or was it something I’d heard?

I wasn’t worried that I couldn’t remember whatever it was, couldn’t bring it into focus. It happens to all of us and I was pretty sure the thought, the feeling, the hint, would resurface.

To facilitate the intellectual process, I opened a bottle of red from my hotel bar.

Some people, probably superior beings, would keep a photo-worthy home like our loft pristine. Just in case the “Elle Decor” editor might drop by. With her stylists, photographers, writers, in tow.

Our Wrigley loft is lived in and shows it. Rollerblades, soccer balls, Lululemon yoga pants, magazines, watering cans, newspapers, digital gadgets, music blaring ... the stuff of life.

“Elle Decor” would probably be welcome, I’d have to check with Vanessa. But if you’re reading this Ms. Editor, please give us a chance to tidy up. Thank you.

In the middle of everything else that’s going on, I take on another pro bono case. One that I’m happy, quite happy, to assume. It’s for Vanessa, for Euforia. And even if Vanessa hadn’t been involved, I’d probably have leaped at the opportunity to work on something where I might actually make, you know, some progress.

Vanessa stills runs the business side of BEAR on Broadway. And she’s well connected, well respected in the culinary community. Vanessa is known as strict, but fair. And known for hawk-watching the balance sheets at BEAR and Euforia. The Unicorn Club too.

“Winter, my linen bills are too high.”

Linen, I learned is a major component of any serious restaurant’s operation. Tablecloths, napkins, uniforms, towels, aprons, rubber tread mats in the kitchen and behind the bar. Mops, dust and wet. Towel dispensers in the bathrooms.

Many products can be customized with logos. It’s a mostly unseen part of the industry that I’d never given much thought to.

Vanessa doesn’t buy her uniforms and table linen, she rents them from Excella Express. And Excella has an interesting reputation. Prohibition ended in 1933 after a disastrous 13-year run. So the Organized Guys were looking for additional revenue streams and restaurant supplies seemed logical and easy.

Kansas City was divided into sections, one linen supplier per. Lack of competition proved lucrative, as was the protection angle.

Over the years, various reformers were discouraged, purchased, intimidated, beaten, voted out. So the path to linen legitimacy was uneven, slow, and sometimes scary.

Excella persevered over the decades. Changed hands, on paper anyway, a few times. But it was always around, supposedly always in the black.

Vanessa told me, “It’s tricky. The Excella invoices vary from month to month and that’s understandable.” Euforia has 24 employees and on any one night, from 14 to 20 might be working.

Likewise, the customer volume varies from night to night.

And there is wear and tear, napkins go missing, uniforms get torn, stained.

Vanessa showed me the numbers, “I think I’m paying 12 to 15% too much. But it’s difficult to prove.”

Winter ‘Linen’ Jennings on the job. I am all over the case.

Euforia is in Brookside. I followed the Excella delivery truck, a cab with a fairly big ... behind thing, on its route for a couple of days. And those days start early.

Excella is located in an industrial section of Kansas City, Kansas. A huge plant where they do laundry things. Cleaning, drying, sorting, packaging.

Euforia’s driver starts at 6 in the morning. I hadn’t thought about it, but restaurants want to get their deliveries -- food, beverages, linen, equipment -- out of the way before customers start arriving.

This driver, Courtney Hammil, was a cute 30-something with muscular arms. Her route started in the Country Club Plaza, went south to several Brookside restaurants, then finished in Waldo.

Rear and side entrance doors I hadn’t noticed were manned by early morning cleanup and prep crews. Someone at each restaurant casually scrawled a clipboard signature for Hammil. Usually a Latino, sometimes African American, occasionally white.

At Euforia it was Alphonse Eggers, a black guy with some style to his stride. And a huge, infectious smile. Vanessa trusted him, so I did too. Though I kept him in the back of my mind. But I wouldn’t check him out unless everything else came up goose ova.

What those early-morning signers John-Hancocked for was inventory. Not invoices.

Hammil heaved up the back door of her truck, lowered a clanging metal ramp and went into each restaurant carrying empty green Excella laundry bags. Came back with the laundry bags full of, I assumed, laundry. An amazing amount of laundry.

She temporarily stored those in a bin beside the truck and dollied down neatly wrapped packages of what I, again, assumed to be laundry, clean version.

Once the incoming load was signed for, she heaved the laundry bags up into her truck and trundled off. Unaware that Ace Detection was on her trail.

This was just one of the checklist items for me to ... um, check off. No money exchanged hands, no promise of money was committed in writing.

Euforia’s only other direct contact with Excella was through the route salesman, Jeffrey Mallow. Because there was a ‘mal’ in his name, he went to the top of my two-person suspect list. Malfeasance, malefactor, malignant ... it’s no wonder I rose to the middle of my profession so quickly.

“Each night before you go to bed, my baby, Whisper a little prayer for me my baby. And tell all the stars above This is dedicated to the one I love”

The search for eternal life, -- shorthand, the God Pill -- wasn’t a stately march of science. Well, partly it was. In more traditional, relatively conservative environments.

But in many Valley locales it was a balls-to-the-wall race for primacy. Certain patents, let alone the products, would be worth ... well, no one knew how much. Massive disruptions in so many fields -- medicine, insurance, pharmacy, tech -- would almost erase some companies while creating entirely new ones.

In the meantime, I plodded along. Tailing Nelson-Eamons employees we’d followed before. From their homes this time around. Compiling notes. Coordinating reports from the Orange County contingent. Reading, re-reading, mumbling, cursing, drawing diagrams.

All with that faint background whisper I was trying to bring into focus.

In Kansas City, I continued to drop by Sister Mary Packer’s shelter for lost little girls. Although Mary is gone, strangled to death by a meth head, her shelter, her singular way of helping in the most elemental way, lives on.

Mary’s replacement, a 45-year old toughie named Gloria Vanlandingham, didn’t have Mary’s compassion, her empathy. Gloria had something else though, toughness.

She’d been hooked on increasingly potent varieties of drugs, had turned tricks, had served time, had been a low-level dealer. She’d been through what the little girls who came to her doorstep had. And more.

Phillip Montgomery, who had started the Sister Mary Foundation when his daughter, Mindy was volunteering there, had appointed an overseer. Someone to keep tabs on how Gloria was handling her responsibilities. And to keep a casual eye on the finances. Gloria accepted the oversight without demur.

Gloria VanLandingham was off the hard stuff, but for some reason I liked it that she drank beer every night. It made her seem more human. This large, stout, African American woman liked the girls in her charge and they came to adore the no-nonsense former prostitute.

And that’s one attribute she shared with Sister Mary, a straight-ahead, no time for crap, approach to running the shelter.

It was a Wednesday evening, around 9. I’d taken Lyft to the shelter, knowing I’d have a couple of brews with Gloria. She kept the door to her living quarters open and we could hear the girls. Gossiping, laughing, arguing, bitching.

My heart went out to them. So young, most of them. Homeless, or the next thing to it. Home was worse than the street for some of them.

Then, ding-dong!

I set my can of Bud down in mid-sentence. Gloria was staring at me, puzzled.

Homeless. That had been what I was trying to recall. One of the Orange County private investigators had noted one of the Nelson-Eamons employees -- I’d have to check my files -- had visited a homeless youth center in San Francisco. Larkin Street, if I remembered.

Had he gone there more than once? Was he a volunteer? I’d remembered the little tidbit because it didn’t fit any of the patterns of the other Nelson employees. They all worked killer hours, well most of them did. Down time usually went in one of two directions -- catch-up chores or social.

Charity work, though admirable, was an anomaly. A small one, but I didn’t have anything big to work on. Nor medium.

Like so many cases I work on, the Great Laundry Caper had looked puzzling from the outside, from my perspective anyway.

I tailed Jeffrey Mallow, the Excella salesman. He made the same stops as the delivery driver, Courtney Hammil. He also called on additional restaurants, bars, country clubs. Through astute detection methods, I asked a couple of the managers, I learned Mallow was trying to open accounts with them.

Made sense.

He didn’t call on his existing customers as often as Hammil made deliveries. But he saw each of them at least once a month. To personally schmooze. And present an invoice.

In the old days, pre-Sullivan twins days, I would have had trouble accessing those invoices for some comparison shopping. Now, thanks to ... um, digital exploration, I was scrolling through 27 different accounts.

It was grunt work. Studying line-item expense -- say, aprons -- by line-item expense. But grunt work is part of the job description.

The Excella accounting department was robotically consistent. Thirty aprons cost $36. To determine the per-unit cost, I did a quick mental analysis. Then reached for my office calculator. $1.20 per.

The per-unit charge varied by product, a tablecloth cost more than a napkin. But within each category the charges didn’t fluctuate. The per-unit cost was the same no matter how close nor how far away the customer was from the laundry operation. No matter how many units were processed each day.

Hmm.

How could Mallow fiddle the dirty laundry? He wasn’t involved in the pick-up at Euforia, that was Hammil. He left a monthly invoice, but that was paid by check. By Vanessa.