Technically, it was Tina’s email that interested me, not the whole internet. I never got past her email.
When I’d glimpsed it on Friday, I was stunned by her assortment of saved spam, all of which bore subject lines related to, shall we say, “male enhancement.” Most of us don’t look at that stuff, let alone save it. I couldn’t imagine uptight, goody-two-shoes Tina reading emails from Shane Maverick, Constantine Braver, and Kong. Unless her boredom at work had turned her into a sexual voyeur. Not Tina. Not likely.
Then I got really nosy and discovered something else. Call me unethical, but the computer did, after all, belong to me. So I opened her spam emails and read them all. The subject lines had little or nothing to do with the actual messages.
Maybe that’s common spam practice, I thought: catch readers’ attention with a sleazy come-on and then sell ‘em what you’re really selling. Except these senders weren’t selling anything that I could see. Even if the messages sounded vaguely sexual, they contained no hyperlinks to other websites and mentioned no products or services for sale. Examples:
For a real big time
Kept me up all night long
Enlarge your demands
Compared to Chester or Brady, I had little computer savvy. But I knew that if I right-clicked the sender’s name, I should be able to see “properties”; i.e., the sender’s email address. Curious, I pointed my cursor at “E.Z. Manning” and clicked.
Imagine my surprise when I recognized the email address. Or, to be accurate, the domain. It was none other than mattimoerealty.com. But the bigger shock was what came before the @ sign: a name I didn’t know at all. Someone calling himself rocco@mattimoerealty.com was sending porn spam. Or something that looked like porn spam. And for some reason Tina Breen was reading it. Saving it, too. Another question bloomed in my brain.
I clicked on her “sent” files. Yup. Tina was not only reading this crap; she was replying to it. Well, not exactly replying, if by that we mean saying something. Tina’s replies were blank. And there were many of them.
Back to her inbox. When I checked the properties of “Rod Wunderly,” I uncovered another mattimoerealty.com address. Not rocco this time, but stuart. Trembling, I right-clicked all the porn spam senders. Every single one featured my company’s domain, yet each sender had a different name before the @ sign. I didn’t know any of them.
I returned to Tina’s sent files. She had answered every porn spam message with a blank message. What the hell? Knowing Tina, I wondered if this was her weird way of fighting back, of trying to make the world a cleaner place. Bored at work, had she decided to waste the spammers’ time and cram their inboxes? That might make sense if these were real spammers. But they couldn’t be. To paraphrase that classic horror-movie line, “The emails were coming from inside the house!”
Who were the senders, and what were they up to? What was Tina up to? Maybe this was nothing more than an innocent game played during dull work days by an employee or two who knew more about computers than I did. Someone who had figured out how to set up several email accounts for the purpose of cheap laughs.
But for me that didn’t wash. The Tina Breen I knew wouldn’t deign to play with smut. Not even make-believe smut.
So what the hell was going on?
I glanced up at the sound of the front door clicking open. There stood the potential answer to my question. If the potential answer was in a mood to cooperate. Since she was holding a gun, that seemed unlikely.
Pushing with my feet, I rolled the desk chair as far back from the computer as I could. As far from Tina Breen as I could. And I raised my hands in the universal sign for “I surrender.”
“That gun’s not real, is it?”
I stared at the weapon she held in her shaky right hand.
“I’m warning you, Whiskey. Don’t make me use this thing.” Tina’s voice cracked.
I kept my eyes on the small metal revolver. It was either a snub nose 22 or a toy. I decided to believe it was a toy. Totally bull-shitting, I said, “Come on Tina. I’ve seen Winston and Neville playing with that thing!”
“No, you haven’t!” she snapped. “I would never let my boys play with guns. Not even a toy like this.”
She winced and reluctantly dropped the replica into her handbag. It took a long moment for her to regain a sense of menace. Then she approached her computer screen and scanned it to see what I’d been reading. Her next comment caught me completely off guard.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“Me?! How about you? Why did you come in here with toy gun blazing?”
“If you’re half as smart as I hope you are, you’re going to pretend none of this happened,” Tina snarled. “You never pried into my email. And you didn’t see me this morning when I came in to clean out my desk.”
“You’re quitting? I thought you couldn’t afford to lose this job! Friday you got down on your knees and begged me not to let my business fail! You said you and Tim were at the end of your rope-“
When I mentioned her husband’s name, Tina’s right eyelid pulsed. Then her upper lip twitched, and her breathing turned ragged.
“I never wanted him to do it!” she hissed. “I would have stopped him if I could! But you know how men are, Whiskey. They gotta fix things their own way. Even when things aren’t really broken!”
“Do what? Fix what?”
Was she talking about Tim? Or a Mattimoe Realty employee who had been sending fake spam?
“Oh, darn it, Tim wrecked everything!” she said.
Although Tim Breen had never worked for me, Tina would know how to set him up with an email address, or several email addresses, at my business domain. But why would she? What had he done? And did she really intend to quit? If so, I probably wouldn’t need to replace her immediately. Not 'til Odette started selling Big and Little Houses on the Prairie.…
This was not the occasion to mentally review my payroll.
“Tina, you’d better level with me. What kind of trouble are you and Tim in?”
“Oh god,” she moaned, sinking into a lobby chair. “All Tim wanted to do was be the breadwinner again. Being the laid-off stay-at-home dad made him feel like less than a man!”
“So he started sending email porn spam?” I asked, trying to find the connection.
“No! He talked to MacArthur about doing the same kind of work he does.”
“Being a Realtor? Tim should have come to me about that!”
“Not a Realtor, Whiskey! A cleaner! And now you know why I can’t stand that man. MacArthur turned my husband into a criminal, just like he is!”
“MacArthur’s not a criminal…“ I wished I could have been more specific, but I really wasn’t sure how to defend him.
“Oh yeah?”
Tina had a crazed look that made me want to put my hands on my cell phone. Subtly, I reached toward my sweatpants pockets.
“Somebody you know hired Tim as a cleaner. To make their problems disappear,” Tina said.
“Somebody I know?”
Nothing in my pockets. Damn. Then I remembered: I’d left my phone in my purse. In the bathroom.
“Oh yeah,” Tina said. “You know this person. It’s one of your super-rich friends.”
“I have no super-rich friends, Tina. Just a few super-rich former clients. Who do you mean?”
Tina shot straight up from her chair. “I know what you’re doing, Whiskey! You’re stalling for time, hoping somebody else will come by and stop me from doing what I gotta do!”
“What do you gotta do?” My heart thumped.
“I’m really, really sorry, but I gotta take whatever cash you got in the safe. Then the boys and I are going to meet Tim. We’re going underground. The four of us gotta disappear-“
Her voice dissolved into choked sobs.
“What does Tim’s ‘cleaner’ business have to do with spam?” I said.
“That’s not spam!” she sputtered. “Those are Tim’s notes to me about how he was doing. We had kind of a code. If I understood what he was telling me, I replied with a blank message. If I didn’t understand or needed more information, I didn’t reply at all. Then he’d try again. Tim said sending emails on his Blackberry would be safer than making calls! He didn’t think anybody would read them if they looked like spam.”
I glanced at the email message that I’d left open onscreen.
“’Enlarge your demands’? What did that mean?”
“Tim wanted me to ask you for a raise. You, of all people, were never supposed to get shot!”