Miz Scarlet and the Acrimonious Attorney

by Sara M. Barton

  “Yes.” The lawyer perched on the edge of his desk. “I offered it fully furnished for fifty thousand dollars under the assessed value. The real estate agent sold it in four days.”

  It was my opportunity to speculate, so I took the ball and ran with it. “Your blackmailers successfully chased you out of Florida. Did that mean they were able to move on to the next pigeon without having to worry about you causing any trouble?”

  “I guess that’s true. I just wanted to get away from my tormentors, no matter what I had to do to get it done. Believe me when I say that I have never been tempted by underage girls.”

  “That may have been why their ploy was so successful,” Kenny told him bluntly. “They counted on you to be mortified about what you supposedly did.”

  “I wonder if they did the same kind of thing to the other victims, playing on their reputations and their sense of moral decency.” I glanced up at the two men, trying to see my way through the confusion. “Could there specific connections between the victims? Did anyone else have a second home down in the Keys, Paul?”

  “Ah, I see where you’re going with this. Let me think a minute. One of them had a vacation home in Key West. Another had a yacht that he sailed down to the Keys every winter. The third victim had just purchased a condo up near Miami. The fourth...she owned a couple of units at a resort and came down occasionally. It was more of an investment than anything else. And the fifth....” He suddenly went quiet, unable to finish his sentence.

  “Are you okay?”

  The attorney didn’t answer. Instead, he stood up and slowly walked over to the window, staring out at the city lights twinkling below. He stayed there for a couple of minutes. I studied his reflection in the glass. He looked like a man who had just been punched in the gut.

  “The fifth lived in Margie Grimshaw’s building in Surfside during the high season and in Manhattan the rest of the time.”

  In his voice, there was a note of sadness. Why did that bother him so?

  “Do you personally know that fifth victim?” I asked gently, going with my gut feeling. He nodded.

  “Alice. We’ve been...ah...I’ve known her since our days at Columbia Law School. She asked me to be her escort for a party in Miami and introduced me to Johnny Zee.”

  “Do you think she was picked because of her association with you?” I knew I had struck a nerve when Paul blanched. Kenny observed the senior partner for a few seconds, and then he moved in for the proverbial kill.

  “Was everyone being blackmailed because he or she supposedly committed a crime, Paul? Or did some people just have terribly embarrassing secrets the blackmailers threatened to reveal?”

  “Sometimes secrets can be devastating,” he remarked, not expounding on that thought. Spoken like a man who is privy to everybody else’s business. How did he know all this if he wasn’t heavily involved in the case as the go-to guy?

  “So, you are aware of why they picked the people they blackmailed,” I remarked. It was a simple statement of fact, but it took Paul by surprise nonetheless. He sucked in the air like a man suffocating.

  “Oh dear!” was all he managed to say before he dropped onto the carpet for the second time. My companion stepped forward, giving me a tsk-tsk as he reached for Paul’s arm.

  “I must say, Miz Scarlet, you have a knack for bringing a guy down without landing a single blow. Give me a hand.”

  We lifted him up carefully and settled him back in his desk chair. His eyelids fluttered a few times before he opened them. Moving closer, I studied him carefully. Was he having heart palpitations? Had he entered a catatonic state, thanks to the shock of realizing those secrets weren’t secret any more? It was hard to tell why he seemed to be unaware of his surroundings.

  “Paul, we’re not here to blackmail you or cause you any pain. We’re trying to prevent the murderer from acting again. Do you understand what I am saying to you?” Leaning in, I waited for him to notice me. “We want to help you keep your secrets, but we also want to make sure that the bad guys can’t hurt anyone again.”

  The gist of my words seemed to get through to him. He shifted in his chair and took a breath. I could sense his distress, but I reminded myself there was a killer on the loose. This wasn’t the time or the place to sugar-coat reality. “Paul?”

  He unexpectedly shot Kenny a sideways glance. When Kenny saw that, he went from playing good cop to playing bad cop in less than three seconds.

  “That said, what’s the deal with the six of you? Obviously, you all travel in the same Florida social circles. Did the blackmailers have a little insurance policy that ensured you would all cooperate as a group? Did they make sure that each of you found out what one other victim’s supposed sins were?”

  Wham! The attorney fell back into his desk chair like he was a ball that had been slugged into the outfield by Aaron Judge’s bat.

  “It was a nightmare,” Paul groaned.

  “I’m sure it was,” Kenny agreed. He sat back down in his chair and waited. I followed suit.

  “If I tell you something, it stays in this room. You don’t ever disclose it to anyone.”

  Kenny gave him a quick nod. “Since Neville Martin hired us to look into Philip’s death on behalf of the law firm, you are one of our clients. What you tell us now about your personal life is confidential, even from your partners, unless it directly impacts the professional reputation of Martin, Dubinsky, and Moore.”

  Paul turned his attention to me. “What about Scarlet?”

  “Oh, I’m here as his assistant. He makes the rules. I follow them.”

  “Good. Give me just a moment to figure out how to explain just how devious this whole scheme really was.” Paul took in a big breath and pursed his lips, blowing it out slowly. He put his trembling hands on the top of his desk, as if to steel himself for what he was about to say. And then he shared the details of a plot so Machiavellian that I instantly understood his reluctance to speak the words out loud.

  “For about six months, I lived in fear that people would find out that I had bedded a sixteen-year-old. I worried that Margie would call the police and report me, or Sybil would tell one of her schoolmates or, even worse, a teacher. And then one day, when I was at my condo, Johnny Zee called me. He told me he needed to see me right away. I was sure he was going to tell me that he found out. But when I opened the door and let him into my living room, he burst into tears.”

  From what I had read about him in numerous articles, I understood the wealthy owner of Siren of the Seas was a real tough guy. Wasn’t he the husband who was relieved his wife was getting a divorce because it meant he could get her off the payroll?

  “What happened to him?”

  “He had had a traffic accident.”

  “What kind of accident?” Kenny wanted to know. “Was someone injured?”

  Those two questions made Paul grimace. “Johnny was drunk at the time. Or at least he thought he was.”

  “Who did he hit?”

  “A little old lady.”

  “How badly was she hurt?”

  “She died.”

  Chapter Twenty Three

  “Is that the truth?” I asked him. The attorney’s eyes narrowed as a specter of suspicion crept up on his assumptions and spooked them. Boo!

  “Yes, of course it....” He suddenly stopped talking. The moment that his old version of events was replaced by a new one, he slapped his desk with his palm. “You think it was another parlor trick?”

  I didn’t even have a chance to respond. Kenny jumped in and took over.

  “You thought you bedded down a fifteen-year-old girl while you were obviously under the influence of some drug, Paul. If your blackmailers were willing to do that to you, why wouldn’t they fake an accident for Johnny Zee? Did Johnny actually see the dead body for himself?”

  “Well, no. Margie told her boyfriend to throw it in the back of his SUV, drive it down to the marina, put it in the boat, and dump it at sea...oh my God!”

  “Margie a
nd her boyfriend were witnesses to the alleged crime?”

  “Yes. One of them took photos of the dead body when it was lying in the street, so Johnny knew that it really happened.”

  “I’m sorry,” I broke in, more than a little baffled. “If Johnny Zee hit a woman with his car, why didn’t Margie and her boyfriend call for an ambulance? That doesn’t make any sense to me. At the very least, they should have reported the accident to the police. Isn’t that what people normally do under the circumstances?”

  “That’s what upset Johnny so much. He said he was so confused at the time it happened that he didn’t understand what Margie’s boyfriend was offering to do for him. By the time he sobered up, it was too late. That body wound up in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.”

  The few pieces of the puzzle that I had were beginning to form a sinister picture in my head. “Did the blackmailer use Johnny Zee’s beloved yacht to transport the corpse to its watery grave? That surely would have added salt to his wound and drawn him further into their web of lies. Am I close?”

  Paul quickly confirmed my suspicion. “Yes. When Margie’s boyfriend stepped off Siren of the Seas, he had the woman’s bloody purse, with her wallet inside tucked, under his arm.”

  “This was supposed to be proof the blackmailers were telling the truth?” I had trouble concealing my opinion of the dubious evidence.

  “Yes.”

  “Where did the purse and the wallet end up?” asked Kenny. “Does Johnny have them?”

  “No, Margie promised Johnny she would get rid of them, but then she used them to extort more money from him.”

  “I guess we know now who caught the biggest fish at the tournaments. It wasn’t you or Johnny Zee,” I remarked. “You two never had a chance.”

  “I feel like such an idiot.” Paul slumped over his desk, burying his head. “How could I have been so foolish?”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that,” said Kenny, putting a hand on the distraught man’s shoulder. “You were clearly reeled in by a pair of master anglers, if you’ll forgive the fishing pun. The good news is it was all a con. It appears that you’re all off the hook as far as prosecutable cases go.”

  “And what’s the bad news?” Paul squeezed his eyes shut, unable to let go of his embarrassment. That would come with time and a healthy wallop of justice for the guilty.

  “We’ve still got a real murder to solve.”

  “Yes, they killed poor Philip.”

  “As far as we know, he’s the only victim murdered in this scheme. That begs the question of why it turned deadly.”

  “You must have a theory of some kind.”

  “As a matter of fact, I do.”

  Paul sat up in his desk chair and gave Kenny his full attention. Maybe realizing that the only killing was an anomaly helped him to focus on the hunt for the murderers. “Tell me what you think happened.”

  “My best guess is that the killer somehow connected the dots and determined that Philip was helping you. The blackmailers decided they had to get rid of Philip before he could spoil everything.”

  “You might be right about that, Ken.”

  I listened to the men flesh out their take on the murder, still wondering where I fit in with the violent turn of events. I had a theory of my own. “When I showed up in Florida, the killer must have recognized me and panicked. That’s why he came after me, thinking that I knew more than I did.”

  “We don’t know for sure that he planned to murder you, love,” Kenny countered. “He could just be trying to scare you off.”

  “How can you possibly doubt that the killer acted with lethal intent? Was I not bagged like a Thanksgiving turkey and dragged onto the back of a stolen pickup truck?”

  “That must have been frightening,” said the attorney. He wanted to know more, so I gave him the short version of the attack. That seemed to jog loose a memory.

  “You know, your theory may hold water after all, Ken. Philip told me about a couple of incidents just before he was murdered.”

  “He did?” Kenny didn’t bother to hide his interest.

  “He believed he was getting close to identifying the mastermind. I think those near-misses made him even more determined to keep digging. Perhaps that’s what got him killed.”

  “Especially if Philip was getting ready to slay the goose that laid the golden egg,” Kenny agreed. “He must have figured out the con.”

  “The con....”

  Paul sat there for a few moments, staring at Kenny, and then he suddenly vaulted up from his chair, his excitement palpable. “Of course that’s what he meant by that last message! How could I not have seen that? It was right in front of me.”

  “What was in front of you?” I asked him.

  “A couple of months ago, Philip told me that he called an old friend of his, someone who was in federal law enforcement. He wanted to use him as a sounding board, to see what he’d need to get his hands on, evidence-wise, in order to get the feds interested in taking over the case.”

  Kenny stretched his long legs and shifted in his chair. I could tell he was getting antsy. We had to get going if we were going to catch our flight. “How did that go? Were the feds interested?”

  “I don’t honestly know.” Paul stood up and moved away from us. Walking over to the window, he stayed there, staring out at the city lights in the distance.

  Kenny looked up at the wall clock and then at me. I gave him a shrug. There was nothing we could do but wait for Paul to come to the point and hope it was important enough to risk missing that flight.

  “Paul?” I prodded him softly, trying to steer him back to reality. “I hate to rush you, but we really do have to get going.”

  When he turned back to us, he had a knowing look on his face. “I think I understand now the context of Philip’s words. After he died, the police found a notation on his calendar. He was supposed to meet someone with the initials M. B. for dinner the following night at Max Downtown. The police had trouble putting a name to the initials, so they questioned all of us to see if we knew who M. B. was. Even Philip’s assistant didn’t recognize the initials as belonging to a current client.”

  “Surely they checked his cell phone directory, his Rolodex, his email contacts....”

  “Yes, but they couldn’t match the phone number to the initials. They did, however, find that a day or two before he died, he had a phone conversation that went on for almost an hour. The number was spoofed to protect the caller. I think it might have been Philip’s friend, calling to discuss the possibility of building a case.”

  Kenny tapped his fingers on Paul’s desk, beating out a rhythm as he tried to put the pieces into place. “So, if he was ready to turn over evidence, maybe the killer found out and put the kibosh on that plan by murdering him.”

  “But wouldn’t the FBI have gotten in touch with Philip after he missed the meeting?” I asked Kenny.

  “Not necessarily. It could have just been two old friends meeting for drinks and an off-the-record chat. I don’t know that the FBI would automatically suspect that there was a connection if Philip hadn’t had a chance to share the information. His friend might just assume it was a mugging that went bad in the parking garage.”

  “Surely he would have wanted to check into Philip’s death,” I responded, “if for no other reason than to rule out the possibility of a connection.”

  “But you’re forgetting an important fact, Scarlet. The Hartford Police arrested a suspect in Philip’s murder, none other than his thieving nephew. If Philip didn’t make contingency plans in the event of his untimely death, why would his law enforcement friend feel the need to question whether the cops had the right guy? Forty thousand dollars is nothing to sneeze at, motive-wise.”

  “I suppose that makes sense,” I grudgingly conceded. “But that wasn’t Jason I met in the parking garage.”

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  “Could Jason somehow be connected to Margie and her friends?” Paul wanted to know.

&nbs
p; Kenny shook his head. “I just don’t see it.”

  “But the forty thousand dollars is missing,” the attorney reminded us. “There’s no denying that.”

  “Unless....” I was about to suggest a plausible explanation, but one look at Kenny’s dark expression and I didn’t dare finish my sentence.

  “Unless what? Please go on.” The attorney gave me my opening. Who was I to turn it down?

  “Could Margie and her friends have set up Jason as the fall guy in Philip’s murder?”

  “You’re suggesting that someone removed forty thousand dollars from Philip’s bank account and put it into Jason’s?”

  “Don’t say it,” Kenny warned me. “Please don’t say it.”

  “Kenny.”

  “Scarlet, this case is complicated enough without you going off on a wild goose chase.”

  “But I have to,” I told him. It was true. “If Margie was legally Philip’s wife and she got her name added to his bank account, she could have done it. Don’t forget about the guy who looks like Philip.”

  “Someone looks like Philip?” Paul was taken aback. “He has a doppelganger?”

  “It’s more of a resemblance than a perfect match,” I replied. That didn’t seem to dissuade Paul from considering my point.

  “Huh, maybe that fits....”

  “Nice going,” Kenny mouthed to me as the attorney pondered the possibility. He tried to reassure Paul that I was just letting my imagination run wild, but the other man disagreed.

  “No, Ken, she might have something there. We had a recent incident at Martin, Dubinsky, and Moore. One of the weekend security guards reported that a man claiming to be Philip had trouble with his office key. The guard had to let him in. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but now....” He threw his hands in the air, clearly confused. “There have been so many strange happenings that I just don’t know what to think any more.”

  I couldn’t really fault him on that. The more we dug for answers, the more questions we had. How did that make any sense? “Kenny, do you suppose Hawley needed to get into the law firm to search for Philip’s evidence?”