NoHo Noir Short Fiction: 'Beware the Ides of April'

“Hey babe,” Garibaldi Fox said as he sauntered into Lyla’s office and threw himself into a chair opposite her desk with the boneless grace of the teenager he’d been when they first met.

“Don’t call me babe,” she said, but she was smiling.

“Don’t you look suave,” she said.

“Just came from a meeting at Warner’s,” he said without much enthusiasm.

“Let me guess,” she teased. “They’re rebooting the Harry Potter franchise already and want you to play Lord Voldemort.”

“They’re resurrecting Rin Tin Tin,” he said. “The gimmick is that in this version Rinty is a ghost dog.”

“And you would play?”

“His grieving owner who solves crimes with his supernatural help.”

“Wow,” Lyla said.

“That about covers it,” he said.

Fox Accounting

Riverside Drive

Toluca Lake, CA 91610

3:15 p.m.

“Thanks for fitting me in,” he said, leaning over Lyla’s desk to hand her a thick accordion file bulging with receipts and canceled checks and scraps of paper with scribbles on them. “I know this is last minute.”

“Why should this year be any different?”

Lyla eyed the accordion file with weary amusement. “And this is an improvement over the shoebox,” she added, retrieving a check that fluttered free of the file.

“You know,” she added. “You pay extra to have checks sent back. The bank can just store them for you.”

“I like getting them back,” he said. “I like holding onto my money, even when I’ve already spent it.”

She raised a skeptical eyebrow.

Yeah, you’re a financial genius, she thought, thinking about the restaurant he’d invested in because he loved the idea of owning his own eatery.

“It’s the twenty-first century, babe,” she said, “time to go paperless.”

“Don’t call me babe,” he said with a smirk.

Lyla shook her head and dumped the file on her desk, knowing there wouldn’t be any sort of order to the items crammed inside. As she started sorting, Garibaldi’s phone buzzed with a text. He read it and laughed and immediately began tapping out an answer.

Lyla watched him fondly for a minute. They’d been seeing a lot of each other since Celia’s accident. For the first couple of days, when they didn’t know if she was going to survive, they’d practically lived at the hospital, leaving his mom to take care of Larissa and sleeping in shifts.

Lyla’d been impressed by the way he stepped up, to tell the truth. Her ex wasn’t usually a step-up kind of guy. He had people for that.

A check caught her eye as she threw it onto a pile like she was dealing a game of Texas Hold’em. It was a residual check for 13 cents, made out to “Gary” Fox.

Like President Obama, who’d briefly been “Barry” in college; Garibaldi had shortened the name his Italian mother had given him and rebranded himself in high school as the all-American “Gary.”

That had lasted until he’d landed a guest role in Forever Knight opposite Canadian actor Geraint Wyn Davies. Practically no one could pronounce the star’s French first name without turning it into a grunt, but it hadn’t hindered his career. After 1987, “Gary Fox” had disappeared from the internet movie database.

“How’s Rob?” Garibaldi asked without looking up from his phone. It was a Droid and he’d spent much of the week after Celia’s accident obsessively downloading apps to customize it. She’d envied him having something to distract him from the sight of their broken daughter, tethered to her bed with tubes and wires and hoses, breathing with the help of machines.

Lyla had barely been able to look at Eric, much less talk to him when he came by to check on Celia. Lyla blamed him for the accident because he’d been driving and it was no consolation to her at all that he blamed himself as well.

Garibaldi had told her she was being too hard on the kid and had been the one to comfort Eric when he’d collapsed in a sobbing heap as the doctor told them he might have to amputate Celia’s left leg.

Lyla knew it was unfair, but when she saw his only injuries were a cut above the eye and bruises where his seat belts had grabbed, she hated him. In the darkest part of her heart, she wished that he was the one in the hospital bed.

“Rob’s fine,” she said absently, her attention drawn to a check made out to “Katie Morrigan” for five thousand dollars.

Katie Morrigan was Garibaldi’s assistant but the check wasn’t drawn on his production company’s account. Lyla knew that Katie often signed documents and checks for Garibaldi Productions but as far as she knew, she was only authorized to sign checks up to twelve hundred dollars.

“Did Katie sign this?” she asked, shoving the check across the desk to him.

He glanced at it. “Yeah,” he said, “she never quite gets the F right on Fox.”

“And that’s okay with you?” Lyla asked.

“Sure,” he said. “She handles all my day-to-day expenses.”

He started to hand the check back but then looked at it again.

This isn’t good, Lyla thought.

“What?” she asked.

This check is for five thousand dollars. There’s no way I okayed that.”

Lyla was already leafing through the checks, looking for others that had an F that didn’t match Garibaldi’s signature.

She found one, made out to a charity dedicated to helping prostitutes get off the streets. She glanced at the amount. Fifteen hundred dollars.

She handed it to her ex with a question on her face. He looked at the check and blanched.

This really isn’t good.

Lyla shoved half the checks toward him.

“Help me look,” she ordered and that was the last thing either of them said until they both had piles of the forged checks sitting in front of them.

Lyla totaled everything up. The number stunned her.

 “Don’t you ever look at your bank statements,” she asked.

She called up his CNB account on her computer and logged in. She’d set up his online banking years ago; he’d never changed his password. She was horrified as she switched from account to account, looking at huge withdrawals, wire transfers, daily ATM transactions.

“Does Katie have your ATM pin code?” she asked.

“Yeah, course,” Garibaldi said. “You know how much I hate waiting in lines.”  

“And your passwords?”

“Sure.” He thought for a minute.

“She’s got a company credit card too.”

Lyla managed not to snort. The production company was a tax dodge. He had a nice little office on Melrose, near Paramount, but mostly he used it as a frat house where he and his posse of middle-aged friends could act out their Entourage fantasies and indulge in #WINNING antics.

“Did Katie know you had an appointment to do your taxes today?”

“Yes,” he said. “She set it up.”

“She set something up,” Lyla said and angled her computer screen so he could see the balance in his checking account. Six dollars and sixty-six cents. That was Katie giving him the finger.

“She’s cleaned you out,” Lyla said. “The savings account, the investment account, Larissa’s college fund … it’s all gone. Looks like she started looting your accounts around March 23rd and planned her exit strategy for today.”

She tapped some more keys to check his credit card balances. Five platinum cards, all maxed out.  A hundred thousand in debt already starting to pile up interest.

She didn’t even want to see what was on the AmEx.

“March 23rd?” he repeated, a pensive look in his eyes.

“Ring a bell?” she asked.

“I got back from Prague on the 21st. On the 22nd I …”

He trailed off but Lyla didn’t need the details.

Garibaldi stared at her computer screen.

“How long were you banging her?” Lyla asked, as neutrally as possible.

“Oh man,” he said. “Do you think that’s what this is about?”

He gave Lyla the look of wounded innocence he’d first used playing a victim in an episode of Law and Order.

When he saw Lyla wasn’t buying it, his expression melted into his “I’m a bad boy and you love it”  grin. Lyla just stared at him.

“It didn’t mean anything,” he said. “She understood it wouldn’t happen again.”

Are you really that freaking stupid?

“You need to call the police,” she said. “Right now.”

“I’m going to kill that little bitch,” he said. He hit speed-dial, touching the speaker button on the phone’s screen as the call connected.

“Garibaldi Productions,” Katie said.

He started speaking as soon as he heard her voice but of course, it was a recording.

 “If you are calling for Garibaldi Fox, press one. If you’re calling for Katie Morrigan, press two. If you are Garibaldi Fox, press three to go fu…

Garibaldi hit the “end” button.
He sat there in silence for a moment.

 “How bad is it?” he asked.

Lyla looked through the piles of receipts and checks and wire transfers.

“You know that dog movie you don’t want to do?”

He nodded.

“Take the money and run.”