Items related to None of Your Business
With a nod to Ed McBain and Fay Weldon, author Valerie Block creates a hilarious tale of a heist gone wrong that ranges from the living rooms of Park Avenue to the parking lot of the White Castle on Queens Boulevard.
Mitch Greiff, celebrity tax accountant and partner in a prestigious Manhattan firm, hates foreign food, strange hotel rooms, and unfamiliarity. He has nightmares about learning new computer software. So when he disappears after a series of sophisticated wire transfers that siphon millions of dollars from his clients’ accounts, Mitch’s partners and estranged wife, Patricia, are completely astonished and confused.
Detective Dennis Sprague of the NYPD Computer Crimes Squad doesn’t buy it. Why would a man who’s had all the breaks in life suddenly go on the lam? Who wakes up, looks around his spacious Upper East Side co-op, gazes at his former-model wife, and says, “The hell with this—I want to live in fear!”
As Sprague investigates, he becomes convinced that Mitch Greiff must have had an accomplice. Sprague works on the assumption that there’s always a girl in the picture. He looks into Patricia, but Mitch’s long-suffering wife never even called Missing Persons, because she didn’t miss him. So Sprague sniffs around the office eye-candy, Heather Perkins, whose signature is on all the wire transfer approvals, and who has a reputation for keeping company with the partners after hours.
And then there’s Erica King, Mitch’s “loophole rabbi.” Sharp, dry, and meticulous, she makes up in financial acumen what she lacks in social graces. The collective assumption around the office is that the acid tongue, floor-length skirts, and dingy white tennis shoes mean that Erica is a virgin and will die that way. But Detective Sprague suspects that there is something more to Erica King than the plainest Jane in Manhattan.
From elegant Park Avenue matrons to nasty asthmatic forgers in Queens, Valerie Block has created a unique cast of characters. She combines a hilarious comedy of manners with a police procedural and strikes fiction gold.
Mitch Greiff, celebrity tax accountant and partner in a prestigious Manhattan firm, hates foreign food, strange hotel rooms, and unfamiliarity. He has nightmares about learning new computer software. So when he disappears after a series of sophisticated wire transfers that siphon millions of dollars from his clients’ accounts, Mitch’s partners and estranged wife, Patricia, are completely astonished and confused.
Detective Dennis Sprague of the NYPD Computer Crimes Squad doesn’t buy it. Why would a man who’s had all the breaks in life suddenly go on the lam? Who wakes up, looks around his spacious Upper East Side co-op, gazes at his former-model wife, and says, “The hell with this—I want to live in fear!”
As Sprague investigates, he becomes convinced that Mitch Greiff must have had an accomplice. Sprague works on the assumption that there’s always a girl in the picture. He looks into Patricia, but Mitch’s long-suffering wife never even called Missing Persons, because she didn’t miss him. So Sprague sniffs around the office eye-candy, Heather Perkins, whose signature is on all the wire transfer approvals, and who has a reputation for keeping company with the partners after hours.
And then there’s Erica King, Mitch’s “loophole rabbi.” Sharp, dry, and meticulous, she makes up in financial acumen what she lacks in social graces. The collective assumption around the office is that the acid tongue, floor-length skirts, and dingy white tennis shoes mean that Erica is a virgin and will die that way. But Detective Sprague suspects that there is something more to Erica King than the plainest Jane in Manhattan.
From elegant Park Avenue matrons to nasty asthmatic forgers in Queens, Valerie Block has created a unique cast of characters. She combines a hilarious comedy of manners with a police procedural and strikes fiction gold.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Valerie Block is the author of the novel Was It Something I Said? She lives and works in New York City.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
CHAPTER ONE
The bus was packed. With her laptop between her feet, Erica King stood, along with passengers in various states of exhaustion, attached to briefcases, shopping bags or sticky children and their awkward accoutrements. A woman with a cell phone in one ear and a finger in the other enriched the experience with timely news reports. “I’m on the bus,” she shouted. “We’re on 53rd Street. We’re on 52nd Street. We’re on 51st Street. No, 2nd Avenue . . .”
Erica had had another dust-up at the firm: a new accountant had come into her office to introduce himself. After shaking her hand and looking her over, he asked: “Jewish?”
“No.”
“You look Jewish.”
“Excuse me?”
“I could swear you were Jewish.”
“What does my religion, if I have one, have to do with anything?”
“So you’re not practicing, but you were born Jewish, right?”
Erica stared at this intrusion.
“But you’re something, right?”
It was not possible to raise her eyebrows any higher. “Something?”
“You’re Italian, Armenian, Russian, something like that? Greek? I can usually guess it right away. I’m always right.”
“You’re right, I am something. I’m running late. If you don’t mind.”
“Oh, I get it. I’m supposed to leave now, like I offended you?”
Who hired these people? Who raised these people? What were these people thinking? People bothered Erica. People were overrated.
A thin woman in her mid-seventies, with straight white hair in a pageboy, boarded the bus and, seeing no empty seats, stood holding on to a pole. A seated woman called loud, “Ma’am, would you like to sit?”
The thin white pageboy didn’t hear the offer.
“Ma’am!” She tugged on the jacket of the man standing above her. “Would you get that woman’s attention, please?”
“Who? That old lady?”
“Yes, the old lady.”
“Ma’am!” three people shouted at her.
The thin white pageboy turned around, startled, and acknowledged the gesture. Just then, a heavy, also elderly woman sitting in the first seat of the bus grabbed her wrist, and offered her seat. However, entering passengers blocked the way. In the meantime, the heavy lady was rapidly and elaborately shouting to the bus at large, in Italian.
The standing woman looked about her in studied bewilderment at the barrage. “What? What is she saying?”
What the woman was saying was this: “Look at me! I’m ninety years old, and I’m giving up my seat to that poor woman! I’m in good health, thank God! I didn’t give my seat to you, with the baby and the stroller and the screaming toddler, because you’re black, and you look so strong. But that woman there, she’s old and pathetic. She’s probably only in her seventies, but look at me, robust, and ninety years old! Giving up my seat!”
The parade of human beings making a spectacle of themselves on the M15 was revolting. Was it not possible for a human being to give something to another without insulting the recipient or praising herself?
The bus lurched, and Erica grabbed her laptop to prevent it from falling.
A seated man looked up past the visor of his Mets cap, and asked, “Are you pregnant?”
“Excuse me?” Erica said, with as much outrage as she could.
“I said, are you pregnant?”
“Do I know you?”
“What?”
“Even if I did, that is never an appropriate question,” Erica said loudly.
“I mean, if you were pregnant, I’d offer you my seat.”
“And if I’m not, you’ll just insult me and let me stand? How gallant.”
He turned to the woman next to him. “Doesn’t she look pregnant?” The woman stared straight ahead, refusing to get involved in someone else’s bad day. Erica pushed through people to exit out the front door. She walked the rest of the way home.
In fact, she wasn’t Jewish, and she wasn’t pregnant. She was something. And why was it up for public discussion? She went to Marjorie’s apartment and ordered a chenille throw blanket in periwinkle for Marjorie from the Living Cove catalog. Erica was reveling lately in the proprietary interest.
********************
Her first Christmas in the new job, Erica had arrived on the last day before the long holiday weekend and found a silver box from Bergdorf Goodman on her desk. Inside, a pair of tomato-red leather gloves with swanky gold buckles lay on a bed of smooth white tissue paper. The card, written in Mitch’s secretary’s left-leaning script, said, “Dear Erica, Happy Holidays, Mitch Greiff.”
She wrapped the gloves back up and went about her business.
At the end of the day, Mitch said, “Did you get your present?”
“I did. . . . One moment.” She darted back into her office to retrieve the gloves. “I appreciate the gesture, but I can’t accept the gift.” She handed him the box.
“Why not?”
“I’m here to do a job,” she said evenly. “I expect to be paid for my time and effort. You don’t need to give me presents. You already gave me the vase with the company logo.”
“That was from the partners. The gloves are from me. I like to acknowledge the people who work for me. Don’t you like them?”
“You’re missing the point. Did you pick them out yourself?”
“No,” he admitted.
“Now I have to write a thank-you note, and rush around in the Christmas crowds to get you a present, something you probably don’t need, and, from the looks of your wardrobe, probably nothing you’d ever wear.”
He smiled slightly. “I don’t expect a present from you.”
“Then can we just dispense with the seasonal niceties?”
He considered this. “Would you rather have cash?”
“What, in an envelope? Save it for your doorman. Pay me what I deserve, and let’s eliminate the bullshit.”
He sighed. “It’s not that big a deal.”
“I know I work for you; I like working for you. I don’t need the feudal rituals; they make me uncomfortable and distract me from my work. If it bothers you, tack on whatever you’d pay in gifts to my annual salary.”
He stood, head cocked. She was fascinated by his height, his authority, the thicknesses of his black-and-white curls, his heavy-lidded eyes. It was hard to tell what he was really thinking. This was also fascinating.
“Whatever you say,” he said, sounding tired and annoyed.
“Good. And if it’s okay with you,” she added on her way out, “I’d rather skip the Christmas party. I have work to do.”
She didn’t want to offend him, but she was no longer able to even pretend to be neutral about social ceremonies.
On January 3, Angie, the Office Manager, came by with her check.
“You’re in the majors, kid,” she said, handing Erica the envelope.
Mitch Greiff had given her a $5,000 raise.
Some gloves.
********************
Mitch Greiff wished that all his employees were as easy as Erica King. She perched there, with her clammy white face and coarse, nylon-looking hair, blinking, alert, no nonsense, no bullshit. She didn’t ask about his wife, his kids, his fish. She had no patience for gossip— office or celebrity—or fools of any kind. If he asked, “How was the weekend?” she would respond, “Did you get my e-mail about the McPhain entertainment deductions?” and the day was off and running. Erica was the only one in the office who actually read all twenty-five pages of the Daily Tax Report every single day.
Erica bit her nails and ripped her cuticles to the point of blood, and beyond. The parched-mouth intensity of her was just too much for some people on an average Tuesday at eleven, and every six months Marty Slavin brought up “letting her go” at a partners’ meeting.
“She does fine work,” Mitch insisted. “She practically lives here.”
“Exactly: she’s slow. She’s weird! She skulks through the halls.”
“She’s thorough, and deliberate, and this is not a personality contest.”
“A good thing it’s not a beauty contest, either.”
“I notice your qualifications for accountants include beauty, and blond hair, and twenty-six years or less,” Mitch turned to him. “Have any of your people stayed here for more than a year?” Marty’s hires left because he grew tired of their after-hours company, and found them employment elsewhere. “Erica King works for me and my clients, and no one has a bad thing to say about her. She stays.”
“Can we put a bag over her head?”
She was sharp; she could be dryly amusing. She enjoyed strategy, gamesmanship, outwitting the structure. Daily she came up with ways, small and large, clever and unusual, to gain advantage for the cli- ent, the department or the firm. Sometimes Mitch felt that Erica King was miscast, that she shouldn’t be wasted on mere bookkeeping and tax planning, that she should be using her talents in the service of something larger—straightening out the Pentagon, for example. But she was invaluable to him. A nerd, he thought, in a nerdy profession. So what? All she asked was to be left alone to work, and her work was terrific.
On the other...
The bus was packed. With her laptop between her feet, Erica King stood, along with passengers in various states of exhaustion, attached to briefcases, shopping bags or sticky children and their awkward accoutrements. A woman with a cell phone in one ear and a finger in the other enriched the experience with timely news reports. “I’m on the bus,” she shouted. “We’re on 53rd Street. We’re on 52nd Street. We’re on 51st Street. No, 2nd Avenue . . .”
Erica had had another dust-up at the firm: a new accountant had come into her office to introduce himself. After shaking her hand and looking her over, he asked: “Jewish?”
“No.”
“You look Jewish.”
“Excuse me?”
“I could swear you were Jewish.”
“What does my religion, if I have one, have to do with anything?”
“So you’re not practicing, but you were born Jewish, right?”
Erica stared at this intrusion.
“But you’re something, right?”
It was not possible to raise her eyebrows any higher. “Something?”
“You’re Italian, Armenian, Russian, something like that? Greek? I can usually guess it right away. I’m always right.”
“You’re right, I am something. I’m running late. If you don’t mind.”
“Oh, I get it. I’m supposed to leave now, like I offended you?”
Who hired these people? Who raised these people? What were these people thinking? People bothered Erica. People were overrated.
A thin woman in her mid-seventies, with straight white hair in a pageboy, boarded the bus and, seeing no empty seats, stood holding on to a pole. A seated woman called loud, “Ma’am, would you like to sit?”
The thin white pageboy didn’t hear the offer.
“Ma’am!” She tugged on the jacket of the man standing above her. “Would you get that woman’s attention, please?”
“Who? That old lady?”
“Yes, the old lady.”
“Ma’am!” three people shouted at her.
The thin white pageboy turned around, startled, and acknowledged the gesture. Just then, a heavy, also elderly woman sitting in the first seat of the bus grabbed her wrist, and offered her seat. However, entering passengers blocked the way. In the meantime, the heavy lady was rapidly and elaborately shouting to the bus at large, in Italian.
The standing woman looked about her in studied bewilderment at the barrage. “What? What is she saying?”
What the woman was saying was this: “Look at me! I’m ninety years old, and I’m giving up my seat to that poor woman! I’m in good health, thank God! I didn’t give my seat to you, with the baby and the stroller and the screaming toddler, because you’re black, and you look so strong. But that woman there, she’s old and pathetic. She’s probably only in her seventies, but look at me, robust, and ninety years old! Giving up my seat!”
The parade of human beings making a spectacle of themselves on the M15 was revolting. Was it not possible for a human being to give something to another without insulting the recipient or praising herself?
The bus lurched, and Erica grabbed her laptop to prevent it from falling.
A seated man looked up past the visor of his Mets cap, and asked, “Are you pregnant?”
“Excuse me?” Erica said, with as much outrage as she could.
“I said, are you pregnant?”
“Do I know you?”
“What?”
“Even if I did, that is never an appropriate question,” Erica said loudly.
“I mean, if you were pregnant, I’d offer you my seat.”
“And if I’m not, you’ll just insult me and let me stand? How gallant.”
He turned to the woman next to him. “Doesn’t she look pregnant?” The woman stared straight ahead, refusing to get involved in someone else’s bad day. Erica pushed through people to exit out the front door. She walked the rest of the way home.
In fact, she wasn’t Jewish, and she wasn’t pregnant. She was something. And why was it up for public discussion? She went to Marjorie’s apartment and ordered a chenille throw blanket in periwinkle for Marjorie from the Living Cove catalog. Erica was reveling lately in the proprietary interest.
********************
Her first Christmas in the new job, Erica had arrived on the last day before the long holiday weekend and found a silver box from Bergdorf Goodman on her desk. Inside, a pair of tomato-red leather gloves with swanky gold buckles lay on a bed of smooth white tissue paper. The card, written in Mitch’s secretary’s left-leaning script, said, “Dear Erica, Happy Holidays, Mitch Greiff.”
She wrapped the gloves back up and went about her business.
At the end of the day, Mitch said, “Did you get your present?”
“I did. . . . One moment.” She darted back into her office to retrieve the gloves. “I appreciate the gesture, but I can’t accept the gift.” She handed him the box.
“Why not?”
“I’m here to do a job,” she said evenly. “I expect to be paid for my time and effort. You don’t need to give me presents. You already gave me the vase with the company logo.”
“That was from the partners. The gloves are from me. I like to acknowledge the people who work for me. Don’t you like them?”
“You’re missing the point. Did you pick them out yourself?”
“No,” he admitted.
“Now I have to write a thank-you note, and rush around in the Christmas crowds to get you a present, something you probably don’t need, and, from the looks of your wardrobe, probably nothing you’d ever wear.”
He smiled slightly. “I don’t expect a present from you.”
“Then can we just dispense with the seasonal niceties?”
He considered this. “Would you rather have cash?”
“What, in an envelope? Save it for your doorman. Pay me what I deserve, and let’s eliminate the bullshit.”
He sighed. “It’s not that big a deal.”
“I know I work for you; I like working for you. I don’t need the feudal rituals; they make me uncomfortable and distract me from my work. If it bothers you, tack on whatever you’d pay in gifts to my annual salary.”
He stood, head cocked. She was fascinated by his height, his authority, the thicknesses of his black-and-white curls, his heavy-lidded eyes. It was hard to tell what he was really thinking. This was also fascinating.
“Whatever you say,” he said, sounding tired and annoyed.
“Good. And if it’s okay with you,” she added on her way out, “I’d rather skip the Christmas party. I have work to do.”
She didn’t want to offend him, but she was no longer able to even pretend to be neutral about social ceremonies.
On January 3, Angie, the Office Manager, came by with her check.
“You’re in the majors, kid,” she said, handing Erica the envelope.
Mitch Greiff had given her a $5,000 raise.
Some gloves.
********************
Mitch Greiff wished that all his employees were as easy as Erica King. She perched there, with her clammy white face and coarse, nylon-looking hair, blinking, alert, no nonsense, no bullshit. She didn’t ask about his wife, his kids, his fish. She had no patience for gossip— office or celebrity—or fools of any kind. If he asked, “How was the weekend?” she would respond, “Did you get my e-mail about the McPhain entertainment deductions?” and the day was off and running. Erica was the only one in the office who actually read all twenty-five pages of the Daily Tax Report every single day.
Erica bit her nails and ripped her cuticles to the point of blood, and beyond. The parched-mouth intensity of her was just too much for some people on an average Tuesday at eleven, and every six months Marty Slavin brought up “letting her go” at a partners’ meeting.
“She does fine work,” Mitch insisted. “She practically lives here.”
“Exactly: she’s slow. She’s weird! She skulks through the halls.”
“She’s thorough, and deliberate, and this is not a personality contest.”
“A good thing it’s not a beauty contest, either.”
“I notice your qualifications for accountants include beauty, and blond hair, and twenty-six years or less,” Mitch turned to him. “Have any of your people stayed here for more than a year?” Marty’s hires left because he grew tired of their after-hours company, and found them employment elsewhere. “Erica King works for me and my clients, and no one has a bad thing to say about her. She stays.”
“Can we put a bag over her head?”
She was sharp; she could be dryly amusing. She enjoyed strategy, gamesmanship, outwitting the structure. Daily she came up with ways, small and large, clever and unusual, to gain advantage for the cli- ent, the department or the firm. Sometimes Mitch felt that Erica King was miscast, that she shouldn’t be wasted on mere bookkeeping and tax planning, that she should be using her talents in the service of something larger—straightening out the Pentagon, for example. But she was invaluable to him. A nerd, he thought, in a nerdy profession. So what? All she asked was to be left alone to work, and her work was terrific.
On the other...
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- PublisherBallantine Books
- Publication date2003
- ISBN 10 0345461843
- ISBN 13 9780345461841
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages352
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