Contrastación de hipótesis

Sunnyvale, California, Monday, January 14

I ^{sent my}

The hotel was four blocks from Heavensent. I walked.

In the lobby I told them I was expected. The guard called Oka’s admin, gave me a temporary badge, and buzzed me in. At Oka’s office door, I paused. A meeting was underway. But before I could sneak away to the break station to kill time, Oka spotted me. “Just our man! We’re waiting for you. Come in, come in.”

“I hope I’m not late. I had nine thirty. Is that right?”

“Yes, yes, my friend, but when you’re expecting a desperado, people get overeager. This is Ross, he’s been with me some time.” Ross shook hands and smiled.

Oka pointed out a heavyset man in his fifties. “This is Gil, our most recent hire.” Recent was the last thing Gil looked. He easily had ten years on Ross. Gil was angled into the far corner of the cramped room and didn’t try to get up to shake hands. He didn’t smile, either.

“So you guys remember what I told you,” Oka said. “Watch Josh here close. Even check out the bathroom before you let him use it. I saw this movie once where the guy arranges to have a gun in the bathroom. Then he comes out and blows away everybody in the room.”

Ross and Gil laughed. But later, in my old apartment, they checked in and behind the toilet tank exactly the way Oka suggested.

“You guys go and tell Krishna that our desperado will be over in a few minutes. I want to talk to him alone. I’m a super bad macho cowboy.” Oka waved a large black garbage bag, one of the heavy ones with a yellow draw string. “If Josh tries just one thing funny, I’ll bring you his pieces in this garbage bag.”

Ross and Gil smirked and were off.

Oka changed tone once we were alone. “Josh,” he said.

“Yo.”

The Chickens of Pianosa

“Josh, I remember you and Lorraine together. If you were to confess now to murdering her, I still would not believe it. The police never knew you two, and are just trying to do their job. And we need the police if we are going to find Lorraine.”

“I didn’t do a very good job in talking to them,” I said.

“I don’t know what you could have said. But they have not settled on you as a murderer, and I keep telling them, they should look somewhere else.

Be patient.”

“Rely on it. I have no choice.”

“You knew her best,” Oka asked. “What do you think happened to her?”

“I think she decided to disappear. In San Jose women are not often snatched off the street without a trace, and Lorraine was smart and streetwise.

Someone could kill her maybe, but with no noise, no witnesses, no physical traces, no known motive, nothing? Lorraine? Not likely.”

“Too,” Oka added, “she left only about $20K in cash.”

“That’s a lot of money on the side of the tracks I grew up on.”

“It’s enough to buy half of the island I grew up on. But Lorraine, you, and I are all a long way from where we grew up. Lorraine had exercised options worth over a million dollars. She was not a big spender and I don’t think she lost it all in the market.”

“So she threw away $20K to misdirect us?”

“Not even threw away. You are her heir. She might not mind giving you a gift. Unless she is pronounced dead, she can always come back for it. And even if she were pronounced dead, then popped up again, wouldn’t you be good for the money?”

Time for a change of subject. “What’s this about you retiring?” I asked.

“Yes. I’m retiring. You remember I have this name that even most people in Indonesia can’t pronounce.”

“Right.” Certainly most Americans couldn’t pronounce it. ‘Oka Ohoma’

was as close as they got, and being a practical guy, Oka went with it. These days he claimed not to remember what his name was originally.

“And because of it folks were always kidding me about Oklahoma. So maybe three years ago I took the wife and kids on vacation. Oklahoma turns out to be a wonderful place and the kids loved it.”

“What’s to do there?”

“Lots. You have to promise me you’ll come visit.”

“Come visit?”

“Yessiree, Josh. We’ve bought a big ranch just outside Sallisaw. The wife

∃

is visiting there now, doing stuff with the house. As soon as the kids are out of school, the whole family is moving.”

“What are you going to do there? Just take it easy?”

“I’ve got a partner there and I’m going into the poultry business. You remember me talking about the Pianosa Bantam? The taste is quite different and my brothers and I have been trying to get it accepted in the premium chicken market. We have a plan, and now we need to raise enough poultry to supply our test markets.”

Pianosa, somewhere in the Java Sea, was Oka’s home island. It had been a sort of cruel paradise. Since prehistoric times two tribes shared this small island. “Sharing” meant the men taking every opportunity to kill each other and steal their women and chickens. The result over the generations was intelligent men of a cheerful fatalism, women who can make a man’s blood boil in his veins with a giggle, and poultry whose genes are a valued part of every modern breed.

The finest fowl bred along the Java Sea was the Pianosan Bantam. The Pianosans had ranged up and down the islands, purchasing breeding stock from reasonable owners and taking stronger measures with the others. Pia-nosans refused to sell their own birds into flocks off their island well into Dutch times. Men were expected to earn their living through fishing or piracy. The literal translation of the Pianosan word for coward is “chicken seller”.

“Evildoers all over the Internet will cheer when they hear you are leaving the business,” I told Oka.

“Thank you, my friend. Now we should join Krishna, Gil and Ross. But first, this is a very big deal.” Oka held up a two page document. “Legal insists you copy it out word for word and sign it. Lorraine was handling very sensitive stuff. You don’t trade our stock, do you?”

“No. It’s all gone.”

“Great. Well, I don’t mean great you sold, but it does make things easier.

The guy in the office next door is in New Orleans. You can sit in his office while you copy this over.”

I executed a signed holograph copy. In addition to the confidentiality language, it warned me that anything I said to Oka’s crew could wind up used in court against me. All of it went without saying and I had no problem with the agreement. I returned and Oka checked my copy carefully against the original.

When he finished, Oka smiled. “If you promise to behave, I’ll leave the

The Chickens of Pianosa

bag here.” He held the garbage bag up by the drawstring. I threw up my hands in submission. He stuffed the bag into a bookshelf and we were off.

Krishna’s setup for going through Lorraine’s files was convenient. I had worried it would be one of those awkward arrangements where I gave instructions and another guy typed on the keyboard. Instead, Krishna had arranged for me to have my keystrokes captured, leaving a record of everything I typed. I was working with copies. Any alteration or destruction I made would have no effect, except to show what I was trying to hide.

I could guess why the big deal about the nondisclosure. Not a day went by when Lorraine did not get an email from several of Heavensent’s CXO’s.

Every week she would have at least one exchange with everyone above the VP level. Before I left, Lorraine was busy. After, she must have done meetings all day and email all night.

A lot of the traffic would be quite useful in making money on stocks. In particular, there was extensive discussion of companies that Heavensent might buy. As far as anything explaining Lorraine’s disappearance, I came up blank. The CFO was strident in his objections to some of her sales projections. But I didn’t think that would drive him to murder.

We had lunch in the Heavensent Cafeteria. I tried to participate in the conversation, but my thoughts were elsewhere. I ate in silence while the others talked.