Toni L.P. Kelner - Laura Fleming 06 - Death of a Damn Yankee

by Toni L. P. Kelner

  Aunt Maggie dozed off after a while, so I sent her up to bed, but kept watching for Richard. He finally got back at a quarter past ten, and headed straight for the bathroom. He’d carried a six-pack of Cokes with him, and said that he’d had enough caffeine to last him a week.

  “Well?” I prompted when he came down to the den.

  “Well nothing.”

  “Linwood didn’t go anywhere?”

  “Oh, he went places, but he didn’t set any fires.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a notebook. “I got to his house and parked about half a block away. Linwood showed up a few minutes later, stayed in the house long enough to eat dinner, then headed for the car.”

  “Didn’t he see you?”

  “Of course not. I’m a trained professional.”

  I goosed him.

  “Okay, I’m an untrained amateur, but so is he. He didn’t even look around, just got in and drove away. A few seconds later, I followed.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “Where didn’t he go? He couldn’t have given me a more thorough tour of Byerly if he’d tried.” Richard listed the roads they’d gone down, and I had to agree that Linwood had covered most of the area.

  “You’re sure he didn’t know he was being followed? He could have been trying to shake you.”

  “He could have lost me if he’d wanted to, but he didn’t try. In fact, he made it easy to follow him. He stopped at stop signs, used turn signals, and drove below the speed limit.”

  “Really? That doesn’t sound like Linwood.” From the way he usually drove, I’d always suspected that he harbored a secret ambition to become a stock car racer. “Maybe he knew you were there and was leading you on a wild-goose chase.”

  “Why bother? Why not just go back home if he spotted me? It would have saved a lot of gas. Besides, if the way he’s been acting recently is any indication, he’d have confronted me if he’d known I was following him. At least he’d have flipped me the bird.”

  Richard was right. Subtlety had never been Linwood’s style.

  He said, “At any rate, at a little after nine, Linwood drove back to his house, parked, and went inside. I waited to make sure he wasn’t coming back out, but when the lights in the house went out, I figured he was in for the night.” He leaned forward and rubbed his lower back. “I had no idea how much work it is to drive around aimlessly.”

  “Poor baby,” I said, and took over the back rub for him. My wearing panty hose for a few hours hadn’t been nearly as uncomfortable as his night.

  “What about you?” he said. “Did Grace break down from guilt and confess?”

  “No such luck,” I said, and told him what had happened. “Burt’s supposed to get me Max Wilder’s file sometime tomorrow. I’m just hoping it will do us more good than the other files we’ve got stacked up.”

  “It will,” Richard said serenely.

  “Do you have a hunch about Max?”

  “No, it’s just that when you rub my back, I’ll agree with anything you say.”

  “Is that so? What if I rub someplace else?” I demonstrated.

  Richard rubbed some in return, and we decided it was time to go upstairs. There was nothing like seeing a recent widow to make me appreciate Richard. A lot of things could suddenly change, and I didn’t want to waste any time with my husband.

  Chapter 28

  I was impressed. The doorbell rang at eight-thirty the next morning, and when I went to the door, Ralph Stewart, a security guard from the mill, was standing there with an envelope.

  “Hey there, Laurie Anne. Mr. Walters asked me to bring this by for you.”

  “Thanks, Ralph.” I was dying to open it, but didn’t want to violate Byerly’s code of manners by shutting the door in his face. “Won’t you come in and have something to drink?”

  “No, thank you. I’ve got to get back to the mill.”

  He left, and I started ripping the envelope open before the door was closed. “Burt came through!” I said to Richard.

  “How do you suppose he handled the horrendous Hortense Hunsucker?”

  “You’ve been saving up that piece of alliteration, haven’t you?”

  “Alliteration is an old and honored poetic device. For instance, Shakespeare—”

  “Investigation now, alliteration later.” I pulled out a typed note, and read it out loud:

  Dear Mrs. Fleming,

  Please accept the enclosed as payment in full for your consultation in the matter of Marshall Saunders’s missing password. I appreciate your effort on the behalf of Walters Mill, and hope this recompenses you adequately for your services.

  Burt Walters

  “Did he really send a check?”

  “Of course not. The letter is just camouflage for getting Miss Hunsucker to send Ralph out here with Max’s file.” I pulled several folded sheets of paper out of the envelope. “Application form, including references. Insurance application. Tax stuff. Formal offer letter listing salary and benefits. Job appraisals. Work schedule, and actual hours worked. Even a copy of the photo from his employee ID.”

  “Now what?”

  “Now we look at it and see what we can see.”

  For the better part of an hour, that’s just what we did. And we found exactly nothing. I was desperate for there to be something there, but I sure couldn’t find anything. I looked hardest at Max’s references and the information about his former jobs, but it all looked fine to me. Then again, how would I know if there were something off-kilter?

  “Richard, maybe we’re going about this the wrong way.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning that the Saunders’s financial information didn’t help us because we don’t know beans about finances, Marshall’s statistics didn’t help because we don’t know statistics from a hole in the wall, and this stuff isn’t going to help because we know next to nothing about human resources.”

  “An impressive selection of folksiness, and I’m afraid I agree. What’s the alternative?”

  “Consulting an expert. What do you say I call Cathy at work?” Cathy was GBS’s human resources person, and if her complaints were at all accurate, she’d read as many résumés as I’d written lines of code. I just called the number for my office, and a familiar voice answered, “GBS. Can I help you?”

  “Michelle? This is Laura.”

  “Laura! How are you doing? Are you having a good time?”

  “Pretty good, but—”

  “Is something wrong with Thaddeous?”

  “He’s fine.”

  “He hasn’t got a new girlfriend, has he?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “As far as he’s concerned, you’re the only woman in the world.”

  “It’s not that I don’t trust him, but you know it’s been a while since I’ve seen him, and you know what they say. Out of sight, out of mind.”

  “In your case, it’s absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

  “That’s what I want to hear. So, have you found me a job down there?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I tell you, Laura, I’m going crazy up here. Maybe I should just come down and get a job as a waitress to tide me over until I can find something in my line.”

  “Not on your life! You know Thaddeous won’t hear of it, and neither will I.” To distract her from the idea, I said, “I need to ask Cathy a question. Is she around?”

  “She won’t be around for another six weeks. Maternity leave.”

  “She’s not due for two more weeks.”

  “You know that, and I know that, but the baby didn’t know that.”

  “Rats!”

  “Is there a problem?”

  “No, I just wanted to ask her a question.” Then I thought of something. “You help Cathy weed through résumés, don’t you?”

  “All the time.”

  “Then let me ask you. How do you go about check
ing somebody’s job references?”

  “It’s a piece of cake. You just call the human resources department of the company where they used to work.”

  “What kinds of things do you ask?”

  “The usual stuff. How long did the person work there? Was his or her work satisfactory? Why did the person leave the company?”

  “What about personal references?”

  “The same thing. You call and ask how long he or she has known the person, and whether they consider the person a reliable worker. Most of the time, they do, of course. Nobody gives a personal reference unless they’re sure the person is going to say good things. Why are you asking about this?”

  “There’s this man whose background we’re trying to check out, and—”

  “You’re on another case, aren’t you? Is it another murder?”

  Michelle had always taken vicarious pleasure in what she called our cases, and had been even more enthusiastic ever since she had had a chance to help Thaddeous and me in Boston.

  I said, “Well, we were looking into something else, but now it looks as if a murder is involved.” Before she could ask for details, I added, “I’d tell you more if I could.”

  “Of course, if you don’t trust me…” she said, sounding huffy.

  “Come on, Michelle, you know I trust you. Heck, you’re nearly family. It’s just that Richard and I promised to keep it a secret. Once it’s all over, I’ll tell you everything I can.”

  “Okay, I can wait.”

  “Anyway, this guy moved to Byerly a few months ago, and I have a hunch that he’s lying about something, but everything in his personnel file looks on the up-and-up.”

  “You’ve got a suspect’s personnel file? That’s unusual.”

  I had to laugh at that. “They checked everything out when he came to work at the mill, so I guess there’s no reason for me to call people back.”

  “Not necessarily. What I told you before just applies to the people you’ve got good feelings about. If there’s somebody you’re not sure about, you dig a little deeper. You know that guy we brought back for a second interview last month? The gorgeous one who applied for accounts payable?”

  “Sure, I remember him. I thought we were going to hire him—everybody liked him.” Some of the single women had been more than a little disappointed, and one of the male programmers was heartbroken, too.

  “We were that close to making him an offer, but I had a funny feeling about him. When Cathy told me to get in touch with him so they could talk money, I stalled her long enough to go over his references again. I’d talked to the human resources department before his interview, but this time I talked to his direct supervisor. It turned out that the supervisor suspected him of setting up phony accounts to pay and pocketing the money, but she couldn’t prove it. That meant she couldn’t fire him, but since they had a layoff coming up anyway, she got rid of him then. Of course, she were afraid to put anything on paper because of lawsuits, and this being a big company, human resources never knew anything about it. They only told me what was in his folder, not what the supervisor suspected.”

  “How did you get the supervisor to tell you?”

  “First, I spoke to her long enough to figure out she had some sort of reservations about the guy that she didn’t want to bring up. Then I started shooting the breeze with her, and eventually I found out that we went to the same church when we were kids, and that we were even confirmed together. Between one thing and another, she decided she didn’t want me to get screwed by hiring this guy, so she spilled the beans. Off the record, of course. By spending that extra hour and forty-five minutes on the phone, I saved us I don’t know how much money.”

  “That’s amazing.” I wasn’t looking forward to being on the phone that long, but if that was what it took, I was willing to give it a shot. I reached for a pad and pen, ready to take notes. “Tell me what to do first.”

  “It depends. You have to find out if you’ve got anything in common, maybe sports, or TV shows, or music. But don’t give an opinion until you know what they like. I mean, you don’t want to tell somebody who hates science fiction how much you love Star Trek. Be sure to agree with them, but don’t make it sound as if you’re kissing up. Usually you’re better off talking to another woman, but sometimes a man is good. Once she trusts you, you work your way over to what you really want to know. Be subtle, but not so subtle she doesn’t know what you’re after.”

  I was furiously writing all this down, then crossing things off as she contradicted herself. “It sounds complicated.”

  “Are you kidding? It’s a piece of cake.”

  “Uh-huh.” I looked at my notes, which were illegible by then. “I guess I’ll give it a shot.”

  “Look, Laura, is this important?”

  “It could be.”

  “Then fax me the file, and let me see what I can do. If there’s something there, I’ll find it.”

  I enthusiastically agreed and hung up, but faxing the file wasn’t as easy as it sounded. There are a few fax machines in Byerly, of course. The mill had one, and there was probably one at Arthur’s dealership and at some of the other businesses around town. What there wasn’t was a copy shop with a fax machine on every other corner the way there is in Boston. Even if there were, I’d be reluctant to hand over Wilder’s file to somebody who might recognize his name and then casually mention that fact to somebody else in town. So Richard and I headed for a copy shop in Hickory, fairly sure that nobody there would care what we were sending.

  After that, we took the morning off, knowing that Michelle would do a better job than we could have. To Richard, taking a morning off means going to bookstores, so we visited the three that Hickory offers. On the way back to Byerly, we stopped at Fork-in-the-Road for barbecue, as I once again tried to decide if they or Pigwick’s had better food. This was a long-term research project for me, one I was in no rush to complete.

  I heard the phone ringing as we pulled into the driveway at Aunt Maggie’s house, and ran to grab it.

  “Burnette residence,” I said, out of breath.

  “Laura, please tell me that they have answering machines in North Carolina,” Michelle said.

  “Lots of people do,” I assured her, “just not Aunt Maggie. She says if it’s that important, they’ll call back.”

  “She’s right—this is the fourth time I’ve called.”

  “Does this mean that you found something?”

  “Of course. I told you I would.”

  “And?”

  “And you’d better stay away from this guy. He’s not just a phony, he’s a con artist. A pro!”

  “What are you talking about?” Richard had caught up with me, and I motioned him down to the den so he could pick up on the other extension.

  I heard paper flipping, as if Michelle were looking through the pages we had faxed. “Okay, I started with the last place listed on Wilder’s application. The woman in human resources said he was a model employee: punctual, reliable, never shirked, even baked cakes for peoples’ birthdays. He only left because he was downsized through a lottery, and I got the impression that half of the people in the company broke down in tears when it happened.”

  “But you said—”

  “Just listen. So I called the job before that, and they loved him even more than the first place.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Hear me out. So I’m thinking that this guy is really as wonderful as these people are saying, because I’m not getting the first hint of anything suspicious. Just to be thorough, I decide to try his personal references. Of course I don’t expect to find anything, because like I said before, personal references never say anything bad. Only I couldn’t get any of them.”

  “You mean they weren’t at home?”

  “I mean they don’t exist. At least not at those numbers and addresses. This Wilder character, if that’s really his name, gave three personal references with phone numbers, and every one of those phone numbers h
as been disconnected. According to his file, he was only hired in late January, yet all three of his references have moved without leaving forwarding numbers. Do you know what the chances of that are?”

  “Astronomical,” Richard said from the downstairs phone.

  “So I called information for those three people. All of them supposedly lived in Atlanta, but none of them are listed. Then I called my cousin who works at the library in Maiden, and got her to check the crisscross.”

  “The what?”

  “It’s like a phone book, only it lists people by address instead of by phone number. One of the addresses didn’t even exist. There’s a street there, but there’s no such number. The other addresses were for actual apartments, but those people didn’t live there, and the people who do live there have been there for years.”

  “How could that be?”

  “The first thing I thought of was that nobody checked the personal references, just the job experience.”

  “I’m sure they were checked.” Miss Hunsucker might be a pain in the neck, but she was thorough.

  “That means Wilder set up phone numbers for the sole purpose of having people available for references. Then, after he got the job at the mill, he disconnected the lines.”

  Though I was glad to know my suspicions about the man had been confirmed, I was flabbergasted at the extent of his deception.

  Michelle went on. “Needless to say, after not being able to reach the personal references, I called back the job references and asked a few more questions. That’s when I got the rest of it.”

  Michelle paused, obviously waiting to be prompted, and I wasn’t about to disappoint her. “Don’t stop now.”

  “I called back the woman at the most recent job, and I could tell she was wondering why I was bothering her again because Max is such a gold mine of an employee. She goes on and on about him, and I just know it can’t be true, so I finally ask if she went out with him, because it sounds like she was in love with him or something. She says that’s not it at all, that he was like a father to her.”