NOONE
Mask of the Demon
Richard Marchant stood at his window watching the street scene below at 2:00 AM. This city never sleeps he thought to himself as he saw a Chicago PD cruiser, lights on and siren blaring weaving in and out of the few cars on the street headed for some alarm call. Fools, he uttered under his breath, barely a whisper even though he was alone on this floor. None of them have any imagination, not even the real Marchant had any. For as smart as he was, he missed the true possibilities of what he had created here. He had also misread the true nature of the last maintenance man he hired, the one who could see the possibilities and assume Marchant’s identity in total anonymity even in the close proximity of so many. No one ever sensed the change that took place. Only he, the new and improved Richard Marchant had a clue to the metamorphosis. A quiet and cynical chuckle passed his lips as this idea completed itself within his mind.
The Real Marchant had owned the building for over a decade when he (at that time known as Stan Oliver) was hired as the new maintenance man, Stan had seen the possibilities almost immediately. Marchant was already a recluse from most people. Marchant had installed a state-of-the-art security system, but only for the common areas and exterior. The improvements he had made otherwise were superficial not structural or even updating the original utilities between apartments. So it had been easy for Stan to manipulate the necessity of repairs and with himself and only a few select workers (of his own choosing) doing the work, he had been able to hide the true purpose of some of the extent of the work. This Building was a dream come true for a man with yearnings to fulfill. By the time Marchant started asking too-revealing questions, Stan took the next step and replaced Marchant with himself. Getting rid of the body had been easy, he used the furnace in the basement, small sections at a time. Marchant becoming even more reclusive wasn’t even noticed and within eighteen months no one was there who had ever seen or heard the real Marchant’s voice. Ever since then, Stan was the only Marchant anyone knew, he didn’t even think of himself as Stan Oliver any longer.
He turned his attention back to the street outside his window. There was a street walker strutting up the street on her way to somewhere with better pickings, he supposed, down there five stories below his vigil. She had just walked by a drunk passed out on that stoop at the brownstone across the street. He could return to his computer screens, but that would garner him little tonight, everyone was in the dark sleeping when he got up from his console a few minutes ago. Before too long he would select another toy to play with? After it had been long enough from the time when that Varner couple had disappeared, there was no hurry as yet chuckling to himself again.
So he might as well go to sleep himself, tomorrow was another day and who knew what new possibilities it might bring. As Marchant lay in his bed relaxing before he fell into slumber he gave a last thought to Noone, what an idiot he was, he had never made any attempt at becoming involved with any of the women living here. Not Mandy Johnson when he offered her old Ms. Millers furniture, not Felicia Tanner when she moved in, nor veiled pleasantries to those two women who he just showed apartment 412 too, the man had no clue to possibilities at all.
*****
Noone woke up rested but with a new purpose. After eating a bowl of cereal and drinking a cup of coffee, he washed his dishes and went out his apartment door to start his usual duties about the halls, stairs, laundries as was his custom, not hurriedly, but with casual attention to detail. He nodded good morning to people passing him on their way to work or at least away from the building. He carried all the trash to the dumpsters at the back of the building and swept areas and the sidewalk of dust and small debris. By midday most everything was shipshape so he put away his broom and dustpan in the utility room, went to his apartment and cleaned himself up. Afterwards he knelt in his closet for a moment before he stood up put his windbreaker on and left his apartment for a walk. He walked to the nearby green area where he took a seat on one of the benches.
Before he could take the SAT phone out of his jacket pocket, he saw Mandy Johnson pushing a stroller down the walk towards him. She stopped in front of him a smile on her face.
“Hello Mr. Noone, I almost never see anyone I know when I’m walking Danna here.” Mandy said cheerfully. “I haven’t seen you since you found that screw in my air vent.”
“HI Ms. Johnson, how is little Danna? You don’t need to call me mister, most people just call me Noone. No, I haven’t seen you lately, I assume all is working well in your apartment.” Noone answered her politely and with no hint of sarcasm.
“OH my no, everything is fine. I just saw you sitting here and wanted to say hello. You have always been more than nice to me, Noone and I appreciate it.” Mandy stopped there, she didn’t want to prattle on, if she might be intruding on his quiet time away from the apartment building. “You can call me Mandy, you know, I would like that.”
“Thank you, Mandy, I will.” Noone answered with a smile on his face. He was in no real hurry to make his call, but also becoming too friendly with a woman this much his junior could be taken the wrong way.
“Well I better get back, I need to get Danna to Mrs. Timmons so I can go to work. I hope to see you again soon. Bye Noone.” Mandy said as she started pushing the stroller again.
“Goodbye, Mandy.” Noone replied.
Within a few minutes Mandy had turned the corner where the walk met the sidewalk at the street where the green space ended. Noone reached in his pocket to retrieve the SAT phone. Noone tapped the screen to contacts and then touched the one that read CIWS. The number he called was international and another SAT phone, this one on Grand Cayman. After a couple of rings there was answer.
“Wendy speaking.” A woman’s voice answered.
“I know that Wendy, it’s me. I am sure your caller ID told you that.” Noone told her with the sound of sarcasm in his tone.
“Caller ID did, but I needed to hear a voice. You taught me that you know.” Wendy Speller answered him mockingly.
“I did and you learned well. Everything is okay there I assume.” Noone asked.
“It is and it will be a whole lot better if you’re going to tell me we have a contract. So I have more to do than work on my tan, swim and go down to Hell Town every few days.” Wendy said almost giggling at the end.
“Something like that you might say. Is William around?”
“Sure is boss, he is on the south end fishing right now.”
“That’s fine, you can catch him up later. Right now it’s you I need to get started researching anyway.”
“Cool beans. Who, what, where and how deep.”
“I knew you would be pleased.” Noone said feeling slightly happy at the sound of Wendy’s excitement. “Jot this down. The name is Richard Marchant, lives in Chicago, Illinois. Some kind of mathematics wizard a couple of decades ago at least, who invented something to do with computers? After getting a big buyout dropped out of the business and bought an old apartment building in Chicago. He has been pretty reclusive ever since then.”
“I got all that, what’s the hook. Are we looking for anything specific?” she asked.
“Yes and no. I want you to get absolutely every piece of info you can, right down to his grocery lists. Up to and including today. When you get it all, correlate, study, dig into every detail. I am looking for the slightest change in behavior, routine, spending. I don’t care how small, there’s going to be something there and I know between you and William you can find it. Don’t call me, I’ll call you in a couple of days to see how you’re doing. Calling me is not safe right now.” Noone told her.
“It usually isn’t. We’ll get right on it. So am I to assume the sabbatical is over now?”
“Not sure but probably. One other thing set up your net to catch anyone looking into Noone, just in case.”
“On ‘em both Casper. Talk soon.” And Wendy disconnected the call.
Noone disconnected the call on his end and turned the phone off, then he put it back in his jacket pocket. Sitting there in the sunshine he smiled to himself, thinking about Wendy and William. He had found them both, at different times and in different situations about a year apart ten years ago now. Wendy was first, but she wasn’t called Wendy when he met her. Back then she went by Laurie which was short for Laurel Tailer.
*****
Casper was on a contract in Rome at the time, but working for a government official in central Africa. His contract dealt with an Italian industrialist of infamous reputation. The government official had suspicion that the industrialist was supplying arms and munitions to a rebel force in his country illegally, but couldn’t prove it. Casper had been hired to resolve the situation without causing an international incident. This was a type of contract that Casper normally dealt with, however sometimes no government was involved.
Casper found Laurie and friends hacking into the industrialist’s computer system. Laurie had a local reputation within a small circle as a hacker. She had come to Rome to study digital media communications at John Cabot University. But she had dropped out of college and was living in that old abandoned factory called “Metropoliz” near the Via Cristoforo and Aniene where many dissidents, transients and migrants lived at the time. She was young with long dark red hair and full of the lust to experience life on the edge. Casper used their attempts at hacking as a Trojan horse to accomplish his ends and discredit the industrialist. He also rescued Laurie just before the industrialist’s security forces routed the Metropoliz looking for the hackers in retaliation. Laurie was the only one to escape and eventually Casper convinced her that she could do better work, working for him in much better surroundings from his base of operations on Grand Cayman. That was when he changed her name to Wendy Speller and she had been with him ever since.
William had joined them several months later after Casper found him while working on a different contract. William had been a British Royal Marine who had served in Sierra Leone before his service was over. He had grown up on Guernsey Road in Stoney Croft England near Liverpool. His specialty was in security and had found a home with Casper and Wendy. William had not been his name either, but it was William Sweet now.
Privately the three of them joked about being very adept Ghosts.
*****
Noone enjoyed his short walk through memory, but needed to return to the apartment building so his normal habits did not appear to change. He also had some ideas he wanted to try out on his own while Wendy and William were working on their research.
Over the next three days Noone kept count his paces down hallways as he swept or picked up trash, and then at night in his room noted the calculations to feet and inches on paper. Then under the guise of changing batteries in smoke detectors in some of the apartments of different types he kept the same count of apartment layouts, doing the same calculations that night. What now formed was a dimension layout plan of each floor of the building. Midmorning the third day he took this layout with him as he visited the Chicago Building Department and checked the blueprints on file there, since there had been no permits pulled for remodeling in the past several years he could see discrepancies between what was on file and what existed in his building. For one the dimensions of rooms did not add up anywhere to the dimension of halls they touched. And they were not the same as drawn on the official plans. Somewhere and at some time since Marchant bought the building there were a few feet on very floor missing and it was the same on every floor. Tomorrow he would talk to Wendy and William to see what they had found as well, but he was seeing a pattern in the building.
As Noone lay in his bed that night he considered the possibilities, now if what he heard from Wendy and William seemed to give clues to when and by who these differences occurred he had to decide what to do next. Noone’s sleep came at length and fitful at best.
*****
Detective Sergeant Forbes was in his office when his desk phone rang, answering it he heard the voice of one of Ted Varner’s friends checking on any progress in the missing person’s report that had been filed. The man was not at all happy when told no new information had come forth and was not at all willing to accept the possibility that they had just left to avoid the back rent or eviction.
“Ted and Sarah are not that kind of people Detective, I know them and I have been close to Ted for a long time. Him not calling me for this long, even if they had felt they needed to do that, just would not happen. I am telling you something is wrong there” the man almost yelled into the phone.
“I know you are upset sir, but I am telling you we checked every detail. They both quit their jobs. Neither one of them filed a change of address with the post office. Then they took all their personal belongings with them.” Forbes answered him. “The case is not closed, but we have no leads to follow and no evidence of any wrong doing apparent.”
“That just is not good enough Detective. I am going to see if someone else will do something.” And with that he hung up.
Forbes put the receiver back in the phone and turned to his partner Sam Taylor. “I agree with him in a way, but what else can we do. There’s no evidence and no witness that was here to give us a premise to push any harder.”
“You’re right, I agree. There is nothing we can do for now.” Sam answered almost without real concern.
*****
“I am glad to hear from you, boss, I thought you were going to call yesterday.” Wendy said without a greeting when she answered the phone.
“I had intended to, but got busy checking some things out here first.” Noone told her. “What have you two found?”
“Not exactly sure what it means, but there does appear to have been some changes over time in this Marchant’s spending.” Wendy answered with what sounded like as much a question as an answer. “You were right he did graduate from Illinois with a degree in mathematics. Then worked in the early computer industry. Not exactly sure what he developed specifically, but he did get a large buyout a little over twenty years ago and seems to have left the business when he did. That’s when he bought the apartment building in Chicago. Marchant moved all his financial accounts there at the same time.”
“Okay, so what after that?”
“What is odd is he bought the building outright, no mortgage. Then it looks like he spent some sizable amounts on refurbishing the building, not enough to have totally gutted and replaced everything, but enough to have made a real difference in it. Then he just settled in and his spending settled into a routine pattern of expenses and incomes. No extravagant purchases or excessive traveling, gambling, or anything.” Wendy fell silent for just a moment to accentuate that fact and then continued. “That is until about ten years ago when his expenses in the building increased again, very regularly for about eighteen months. After that his spending fell back into a stable pattern, it was just a little different than before but not exactly the same.”
“Different, how?”
“A little more on food, not much just a little and he changed some of the magazines he was subscribing to. Not as many scientific and geographic ones, more popular mechanic and sporting ones. Also William wanted to tell you something he found.” She added and then gave William the phone.
“Boss, coincidentally just before Marchant started spending more on the building he had hired a new maintenance man, Stan Oliver. I’m pretty sure that whatever they were doing was repetitive, when I looked at the receipts it was like a kit, the same every time on a regular schedule.”
“What were they buying?”
“Framing lumber and plumbing materials mostly, but a little electrical and then the expected drywall and paint.” William said. “Also this Oliver guy, he isn’t working for him any longer about the time the spending stops and the four other men that were working there during that time. Well their last checks look like they got bonuses, but not this Oliver. Also when I searched their socials, it looks like they moved away shortly after that, but Stan Oliver I can’t find him having any social security payments after that.”
“Alright, now that is interesting and it begins to fit with what I found here. There’s a discrepancy between the layout of the interior apartments and what is on file at the building department, yet there are no permits on file for any work being done after the first year Marchant owned the building.” Noone told them.
“What do you want us to do now Casper?” William asked.
“Nothing yet, I’ll call in a few days again. Once I have a better idea of how and what I want to proceed with.” Noone answered him.
“Okay boss, we’ll be ready. You just let us know.” William told him and disconnected the call.
Noone did the same and put the SAT phone back into his jacket pocket. Then he leaned his back against the bench, folded his arms behind his head and just thought for a while, before he stood up and walked back to the apartment building.
