Disclaimer: I don't own the situations or characters portrayed herein. I'm just playing with them for a while.


Chapter Eleven: An Old Man's Foley

Several things went wrong the next week. For one thing, a pipe under Mr. Spencer Randall's kitchen sink somehow got disconnected, spilling water all over the floor and necessitating an emergency visit from a plumber. For another, Mr. Spencer Randall had the misfortune to slip rather badly in the water that covered the kitchen floor, requiring several trips to the doctor and an order of rest for the next few weeks while a fractured wrist healed.

If Mrs. Evangeline Beaufort de la Zouch lost all interest in the injured and suddenly geriatric-seeming Mr. Randall, she could hardly be blamed. Much to Leonard Baynes' annoyance, however, she seemed to have set her sights on, of all people, the cadaverous-faced Mr. Thompson. For his part, Mr. Thompson, while more than a little alarmed, was also highly flattered.

Far from being discomposed, Mr. Randall (or, rather, Stetson) was highly delighted. He couldn't show it, of course, with Leonard Baynes and probably Dr. Barton-Brown monitoring his every move via the various bugs planted around his apartment. But now that the "plumber" had come, he felt at least that their plan to get to the bottom of this was finally underway.

While taking it easy for a "fractured wrist" (which had really been a carefully stage-managed series of prolonged gasps, a heavy thud from a laundry bag, some more gasps and groans, and ultimately a forged X-ray) he was working behind the scenes. A newfangled remote audio player, courtesy of Francine and installed by the phony plumber, was working overtime in his apartment. It was busy providing Leonard Baynes and his bugs with several hours' worth each day of opening and closing cabinets, hums and groans, floorboard creaks, microwave beeps, soft snores, and toilet flushes. Occasionally, depending on what was necessary, Lee would pull out the little device Francine had given him and carefully select one of ten prerecorded conversations to change things up.

In the meantime, while Baynes thought Lee was at home, Lee himself went undercover as a janitor at the Philanthropic Society, and since no one ever noticed an elderly janitor, he could hear everything.

What he discovered was interesting.

Far from being the center of an organized ring to pass secret information to Al-Qaeda and Russia, the senator from Utah was simply a decoy. Any shady dealings he had were due simply to gambling debts, not international intrigue. He didn't know the use that he was being put to (because the best decoys are the ones who don't know it).

It had become apparent to Lee early on that there was nothing really there at the Philanthropic Society. They were a mixed bag: rich and genuinely good-hearted people, rich and calculating people, good-hearted people using the calculating people's money for good, calculating people using the good name of the society to advance their social agenda, diplomats looking to mingle, and politicians working hard to distract their constituents from a recent scandal by doing good things. What was distinctly lacking at the society was any kind of massive conspiracy of the sort he had been sent to find.

This started a question in "Mr. Randall's" mind (and in the mind of Mrs. "B. de la Z.", as they had started to call her simply for sanity's sake).

What was the point of the whole rigamarole in the first place? If no information brokering was happening at the society, why had he been sent to the society at all?

One evening, while the purely auditory Mr. Randall was still laid up at his apartment, cursing softly as a splatter of canned beef stew hit his hand as he removed it from the microwave, Lee and Amanda could be found at the Society headquarters by a janitorial cart, exchanging covert information under the guise of Mrs. Beaufort de la Zouch looking for a phone charger.

"I think that weirdo Thompson is at the bottom of it."

"It's rude to call him a weirdo."

"He is, though. Just last night he was snooping through the cloakroom looking for any scraps of information he could find. He gives me the creeps."

"Ok, ok, so he's a little off. What kind of information?"

"Anything he can sell. I don't trust him."

"Maybe you shouldn't decide to date him if he's dangerous."

"But I think he'll lead us to where we need to go. Listen; I have an idea. Yes, it's about three feet long, and bright blue." The last sentence was said much louder, for the benefit of a passing waiter.

"What's the idea?"

"We put false information in one of the pockets in the cloakroom and see where it winds up."


Forty-eight hours later, a startling piece of information showed up on a certain, very specific desk in Washington. The owner of that desk smiled grimly.

The fish were rising to the bait, and now he had a better idea of who was involved.