Chapter 4: Embrace the Hate - Lucidity

MADDEN DIDN’T OPEN THE ENVELOPE RIGHT AWAY ONCE SHELBY left. The customer in the gym outfit needed help picking out a bungee cord to secure a couple of bikes to the rack on the back of her car. He suggested she buy a combo pack with some shorter and longer cords, then went outside and attached them to her bikes for her.

A few other customers came in, not exactly a steady stream, but enough to keep him occupied. He broke for lunch forty-five minutes later, the envelope still sealed in the back pocket of his jeans, walked up the street to Cafe Barrone and settled in at an outdoor table.

Shelby’s contract was a single page. Madden felt his heart race as he read through the terms. The whole thing was crazy. Was he reading the zeroes correctly? There were six, weren’t there? He counted again, just to make sure. He was still staring at the contract when his phone rang. He looked at the Caller ID and saw it was Tom Bender. His first impulse was to decline the call, but after letting the ringer cycle twice, he decided he needed to speak to the guy sooner rather than later.

“Madden,” he said.

“Bender,” Bender said. “What’s up, dog?”

“I think you know what’s up.”

“I’m always trying to make the world a better place. And that includes your little world, Detective. How does it feel to be back in business? You stoked or what?”

“Who’s Hal Shelby?”

“Ever heard of Google? Use it much?”

“I was about to. Then you called.”

“Well, I’ll give you a hint. He had one dumb idea. Crowdfunding. We take it for granted now, but who’d have thought that you could stick your inane concept up on the Web and people, perfect strangers, would give you money for it?”

Bender’s site was called OneDumbIdea.com—or ODi, as the site’s prominent red logo read. It covered start-ups and personalities of Silicon Valley. Its tagline, attributable to no one, was “Most smart ideas seem dumb at first. Just like this website.”

Shelby was the guy behind an operation called Gushr, Bender explained. He’d sold it to Facebook about nine months ago and walked away with something in the neighborhood of four hundred million in cash and stock. Madden vaguely remembered reading about it in the papers.

“How did it come up?” Madden asked.

“What?”

“This whole thing with me.”

“I don’t know. I think he sent me a text. Or maybe it was an email. He only sends one-sentence emails, so they seem like texts.”

The fact that Shelby had some sort of email brevity rule didn’t surprise Madden.

“Sometimes you don’t even get a full sentence,” Bender went on. “A lot of the time it’s one word or even just a piece of punctuation or an emoticon. I think he just said, ‘What’s Detective Madden doing?’ That’s pretty verbose for him. He once told me that his dream was to be quoted in the press with a period, but the press refuses to quote just a period. They always say he had no comment. And he always calls up the editor of the publication and says that he had a comment. A period. ‘What’s that mean?’ the editor asks. It means whatever you want to it to mean, but it’s a comment, he says. I actually did a story about it. It was called, ‘Hal Shelby’s having a period.’ I thought he would hate it, but he loved it. He sent me three exclamation points. We’ve been friends ever since.”

“Well, he certainly conducts himself a little oddly.”

“It’s about gaining a psychological advantage,” Bender said. And then Madden heard him say it again. There was an echo on the phone. “That’s the way it is with these guys.” Again, the echo. And suddenly he realized Bender was there in the flesh, standing just behind him to the left, his phone in one hand, a dog leash in the other, his pug attached to it. He had sort of an Indiana Jones–style distressed leather man purse strapped across his chest, resting against his right hip.

Bender was one of those guys who looked clean and well coiffed yet tired at the same time, his white pasty face framing the dark bags under his eyes while small clusters of spider veins nestled high on both cheeks. He’d put on weight since the last time Madden had seen him. He was a little more corpulent, and his usually spiky, gelled hair, was longer and slicked back. He stared straight ahead for a moment, gazing in the general direction of the El Camino, its lanes thick with traffic, before sitting across the table from Madden.

“How much is Shelby’s deal worth?” Bender asked. He folded his hands on the table expectantly.

“One million for finding the body,” Madden volunteered. “Another for finding the husband. And a million bonus if I do both.”

Bender let a low whistle. “Not bad,” he said.

“I’m telling you because you’ll find out anyway.”

“That’s a given,” Bender said.

“But if those numbers leave this table, there will be repercussions.”

“Is that a threat, Hank? Because you know I don’t do well with threats.”

“I don’t either,” Madden said. “And I bite. A lot harder than that mutt of yours.”

“That’s low, Hank. Insulting the dog.”

Madden looked down at Beezo, named after Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos, one of the few people Bender seemed to truly respect. Beezo didn’t look insulted. Quite the opposite. Madden reached down and gave him a pat.

“How’d you know I’d be here?” Madden asked.

“Because you’re a creature of habit, Detective. You come here every Tuesday and Thursday at almost exactly one o’clock. You’re an easy mark. You’re lucky no one’s out to get you. Myself, I keep moving. I mix it up. I take precautions.”

“Since when?”

“It’s toxic out there. There were always haters. But now they’re bolder, more vicious. They actually want to harm you. And not only mentally. I’m talking physically. It’s the jihadification of the Internet. Extremism rules.”

“I hope you didn’t write that anywhere.”

“Of course I did. And I may have inadvertently disparaged several religions and the State of Israel in the process. There is no equivocation in provocation, my friend. Which is why I’m now wearing this bulletproof vest.”

Madden looked at him more closely and realized that Bender really wasn’t heavier but was simply wearing something underneath his clothing, apparently the aforementioned vest.

“Pretty good, huh?” Bender said. “You can barely tell, right?”

Madden nodded his approval. It was better than the one he used to wear.

“The truth is it wasn’t my idea,” Bender said. “I made some crack on Twitter about needing a flak jacket, and I got contacted by this company. Now they’re paying me twenty grand to wear this thing around for a couple of months and write about it. Which got me thinking about the whole self-defense market. You know, embrace the hate. We do a contest. Have someone win the chance to taze me. And we video the whole thing and give any money we make to charity. You know, little kids with polio in Cameroon or wherever the fuck that outbreak is. You can emcee the ceremony. Talk about your own bout with polio. Hank Madden, one of the last cases in the U.S. That’s real, man. Living proof. You can even throw a line or two in about overcoming your childhood sexual abuse at the hands of your pediatrician. What do you think?”

Madden looked at him with a mixture of disbelief and horror.

“Are you serious?”

“By definition.”

Madden shook his head. Alas, the rest of Silicon Valley wasn’t as colorful as Bender. In fact, it was pretty mundane, which Madden had been struggling with in his writing. He was OK laying out the bones of his story, but the flesh, the descriptions of people and places, that part always fell flat. He’d been having a hard time bringing the milieu to life. The generic niceness of the place, its pervasive pleasantness. The weather, the outdoorsy-ness, the proximity to so much natural beauty; the beach, mountains, Napa, Sonoma, Tahoe, Yosemite. That proximity was important. It was what California dreams were made of. But it also created pressure. If you weren’t taking advantage of it, there was something wrong with you. You weren’t living. How did you write about that? For Madden it wasn’t really sweetness but a concept of sweetness. Like Splenda. A yellow packet of Splenda. Healthy yet unhealthy.

He’d thought about that one day walking up to The Dish, the radio telescope set in the foothills right off Stanford campus, one of those points of interests on the long list of points of interest. A series of paved paths snaked up into hills, and at the top—or even near the top—you could look down into the valley and see all the way to the bay. The first thing that caught your eye was the Hoover Tower, home of the conservative Hoover Institute (Herbert Hoover was literally the university’s first student), because it was the tallest building for miles, a monument amongst the sprawl.

Staring out at that view, Madden could see something majestic about the place, the grandeur of man’s control of the land, almost every acre of which had been carved up and developed. But inevitably he’d find himself imagining it long ago, in its nature-wrought state. The bucolic early days. The haciendas. The beginnings of towns. No cars. The real El Camino Real, when it was a dirt road, with no pavement, no cars. And instead of a university, he saw the farm where Leland Stanford bred his racehorses.

Madden wished he could have been there. Strange, he thought, that as he got older he looked back—way back—instead of looking to the future. He didn’t care about the future. Didn’t care about the spectacular advances in technology, the ones he’d never see. Those were the things Bender cared about. Boldly declaring the next big thing before it was the next big thing—or as Bender once told him, “People don’t remember when you’re wrong. They just remember when you’re the first to be right.”

“So that’s it?” Madden asked. “The next big thing—embrace the hate?”

“You gotta zag when the world zigs,” Bender said.

Just then the waitress came by with Madden’s salad and set it down in front of him. Noticing he had company, she asked Bender whether he wanted a menu.

“It’s all right,” Bender said. “I’m not staying. I want to give this man his privacy.”

He said it pretty loudly, so it came off sounding like he actually didn’t want to give him his privacy.

Once the waitress left, Madden said, “Look, I’m not sure I’m going to take Shelby up on this offer. Unlike you, I don’t like to rip people off, even billionaires.”

“I don’t think he’s a billionaire, Hank.”

“Whatever. Two, three months from now, he’s going to ask me what progress I’ve made, and I’m going to say none. And he’s going to say why did you take this on if you knew you couldn’t do it. I know how these guys work. They may not seem like they expect results, but they do. And they get nasty when they don’t get them.”

“Who cares,” Bender said. “And who says you won’t get results.”

“I just wanted to write a book. You said it would write it itself, Tom. You encouraged me. You were one of the ones.”

“This is the book, Hank. Write this. You’re having trouble because you aren’t a guy who lives in the past. So live in the present and write about the past while you’re at it.”

That made some sense, even though it was completely contrary to his own thinking as of late.

“I’d need to get a look at the case file. Refresh myself. There’s politics. I can’t just walk in and announce I’m working this case. It’s still active. It would rub people the wrong way, especially if they knew what I was getting paid on top of what I’m already getting paid from my pension.”

“You’re looking at it wrong,” Bender said. “Start with the guy who’s already done the research.”

“Who? Pastorini?”

Pastorini was the detective who’d worked most closely on the case before he ascended to the job of Menlo Park Police Chief. He was Madden’s friend and former boss.

“The guy had a stroke,” he reminded Bender. “He’s learning to walk and talk again.”

“Nah. Not the detective. The guy who wrote that book about it. Frank Marcus. He did a lot better job investigating the case than you guys did.”

Oh, Christ, Madden thought. The book. Madden remembered the bold red letters of its title all too well: Never Found Never Dead. And all of a sudden there it was in front of him. Bender had reached into his man purse, pulled out a hardcover edition and set it down on the table.

Madden had read the book years ago, when it first came out. He even attended an author event at the old Kepler’s Books bookstore, which had since moved to the building right next door to where they were now sitting.

“He’d be the first one I’d talk to,” Bender said. “He says people still come to him with tips.”

Madden wasn’t sure whether Bender was ignorant or whether Bender was just being Bender. Possibly a combination of the two.

“I don’t know if you know, but there’s some bad blood there. Some things he wrote didn’t sit too well with the guys working the case.”

“Of course they didn’t. Which is why you should go talk to him. You’re not a cop anymore, Detective. You’re a mercenary.”

“He embarrassed the MPPD.”

“I embarrassed you,” Bender said. “You got over it.”

“Not really,” Madden said.