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ound a suspicious account, you would remember, wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t know. It wasn’t my job to look for them. I just set up the accounts and paid the vendors. Darrell Cooper was supposed to keep an eye out for any problems.”
“What problems in particular?”
Marzetti shrugged. “Excessive costs, lack of information on who ordered from the vendor, what they ordered. That kind of thing.”
“So your job was confined to paying the bills?”
He nodded so vigorously I thought he’d get whiplash. “Right. You might want to ask Cooper about this suspicious account.”
He turned toward the house. “But someone told me you had mentioned a suspicious account appearing in the system before you left,” I said.
His eyes flashed anger. “Who told you that? Whoever did is a liar.”
“How would you know? You said you couldn’t remember.”
He stopped short, wearing a deer-in-the-headlights expression. “You . . . you’re trying to trick me. Put words in my mouth.”
“No. I just want to verify that there was an account for ITN Consultants in the system before Brad came onboard. Nobody’s accusing you of anything.”
“Look, just leave me alone, okay? I don’t know anything about any fake vendor,” he snarled.
“I didn’t say it was a fake vendor.” I enunciated each word with care. “I said it was a suspicious account. Now, why don’t you tell me what you know about this?”
Marzetti’s eyes darted around. “Look,” he said. “I don’t remember an account—suspicious or phony or whatever you want to call it—and I don’t know anything about this ITC or whatever they’re called. And as for Kozmik, I’m through with that place. So you can quit wasting your time and mine.”
He did an about-face and stomped toward Marzetti Manor.
* * * * *
As I drove up I-95 to Philadelphia, I pondered Marzetti’s reaction. Maybe, like Brad, he had stumbled across something he wasn’t supposed to find. Odd that Marzetti, like Cooper, had left so quickly and so soon after discovering the problem. Had he planned on leaving or did finding the account have something to do with it? Perhaps someone—Cooper?—had warned him not to tell anyone about the account. Cooper could have found a way to hack into the system and create the account. And, maybe, after Brad raised the alarm again, Cooper cut bait and ran, taking most of the money and leaving some of it behind to implicate Brad.
An interesting theory, but that’s all it was. I needed hard proof.
It took me less than two hours to reach Cooper’s place, a dilapidated row house in a shabby North Philly neighborhood. One of several identical iterations squeezed together. The building looked tired, as if the only reason it stood was the support from its twin brothers to either side.
I parked in an alley littered with old syringes, spent condoms and broken glass. As I climbed the stoop, I had to wonder: What’s a former corporate middle-manager doing in a shithole like this?
I rang the bell. While waiting, I had time to consider if Duvall had led me to the wrong Darrell Cooper. Duvall had said this was a forwarding address. Maybe he was just having his mail sent here and living somewhere else. Then why not get a post office box?
I knocked and waited some more, thinking of cheesesteaks. I hoped I could get one far from this god-forsaken neighborhood. The door opened a crack.
A pale-faced woman with shar-pei wrinkles stuck her snout under the chain. The odor of cigarettes and B.O. drifted out. “Whatcha selling?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m looking for Darrell Cooper.”
“Really? Well, ain’t he the popular one?”
“Does he live here?”
“Depends on what you call ‘living.’ He keeps his shit here and stops in from time to time.”
“When did he move in?”
“Couple weeks ago.” Right around the time he quit Kozmik, so it probably was the right Darrell Cooper.
“And someone else has come to see him?”
