What Doesn't Kill Us--A McKenzie Novel by David Housewright (most read books txt) 📗

preapproval for any social posts about KTech from a committee that he would set up. Except, King never set up a committee and continued to fire off tweets. The SEC asked a judge to hold King in contempt. The judge scheduled a hearing to consider both sides of the argument. King didn’t show up and didn’t explain his absence. Add that to the fact that he was a no-show for his company’s annual meeting, and you have a business community wondering out loud if this was simply the flamboyant King being King or if it was symptomatic of a more serious problem.

Meanwhile, I now had certain knowledge that Charles was Dave Deese’s half sibling, along with Porter and Jenna King. I was sure Dave would be happy to hear it. Would the King family be happy to hear from him, though? Deese had done all right for himself. Only these guys were Silicon Valley millionaires, even if they didn’t actually live in Silicon Valley. Plus, they had a media presence. Lord knows what TMZ and the other gossipmongers would have to say if they heard about this. It was no wonder Elliot Sohm and Emma King were cautious about what they told me when we met.

’Course, I had yet to uncover a single reference to King’s parents; not a word identifying the King patriarch—Charles’s, Porter’s, Jenna’s, and apparently Dave’s father—and that, after all, was the favor I was asked to perform.

The obvious move would be to look up the birth records of Charles, Porter, and Jenna King. In Minnesota, anyone can get a noncertified copy of a public birth record of anyone else. It’ll cost you all of thirteen bucks. Except, to acquire the record—in person or by mail—I would need to provide answers to the specific questions found on a noncertified birth record application such as the first, middle, and last name of the child, the child’s date of birth, city of birth, and county of birth—this assuming that the child was actually born in Minnesota—plus the first, middle, and last name of the child’s parents including their last names before the marriage. In other words, to get the information that a birth certificate would give me, I needed to have the information that the birth certificate would give me.

I decided to make a phone call instead.

“What do you want?” H. B. Sutton asked instead of saying hello.

“A very good evening to you, too, H,” I said.

“It’s past business hours.”

Her voice was cold and hard and utterly humorless and hearing it always made me want to turn up the thermostat; this despite the fact that H. B. was actually a very pleasant woman and usually good company—once you got to know her. Or, rather, once she got to know you well enough to crack open a door in the wall she built around herself. I blamed her flower children parents for the wall. After knowing her for about three years, she reluctantly confided to me what the H. B. stood for.

“Heavenly-love Bambi,” she said.

“Lord Almighty.”

“Try growing up with a name like that, especially while wearing the peasant blouses and skirts my parents dressed me in, the flat sandals. Try going to high school or college; try getting a job.”

“Do you even speak to your parents?”

“Only during the summer solstice.”

Which partially explained why H. B. lived on a houseboat moored to a pier on the Mississippi River next to Harriet Island in St. Paul; why she worked alone as a personal financial advisor out of the houseboat.

I asked her once why she didn’t go to court and have her name changed.

“Would I be the same person if I had been named Elizabeth or Joan?” she asked.

“You certainly would have had to endure a lot less teasing; a lot less discrimination in school and the workplace.”

“Says the man whose parents named him after Mount Rushmore.”

“Hey, I was conceived in a motor lodge while they were taking a vacation in the Badlands,” I told her. “And it could have been worse. It could have been Deadwood.”

H. B. laughed at that, one of the few times I had heard her laugh. From that moment to this, we’ve been pals.

“Sorry for calling so late,” I told her. “I lost all track of time.”

“S’okay. What do you need?”

“Information.”

“About your investments?” H. B. asked. “You do read those quarterly statements I send you, right?”

“Just the bottom of the first page where it tells me that despite buying expensive condominiums and cars and pianos and such for the past ten years, I’m currently worth three times as much money as I started with. How is that even possible?”

“Because I’m very good at my job?”

“The rich get richer…”

“McKenzie, you called?”

I could picture the frown on her face. I knew that Elliot Sohm, with her dimples, big bright eyes, and easy smile would be cute when she was sixty because H. B., with her dimples, big bright eyes, and somewhat reluctant smile was cute at sixty. She was all of five two and one hundred and ten pounds dripping wet, not that I’ve ever seen her dripping wet.

“What do you know about Charles King?” I asked.

“Very charismatic, very smart. He knows crap about artificial intelligence technology but he sure knows how to hire people who do. Why? Are you concerned about his sudden disappearance, too?”

“Should I be?”

“You do have about five percent in his company.”

“I own five percent of an eight-point-one-billion-dollar tech firm?”

“No, McKenzie. You have about five percent of your net worth invested in an eight-point-one-billion-dollar tech firm.”

“Oh. That’s different. Wait a minute. I thought you were a big proponent of index funds.”

“Why do I bother? McKenzie, eighty-some percent of your account is in index funds; the rest is in active investing. I don’t have the exact figures in front of me. Read the damn statements. God, McKenzie.”

“About King. Not showing up for his company’s annual meeting and the hearing with the SEC last week, is that really a big thing?”

“King Charles is a lot like Elon