Deadly Interest

by Julie Hyzy

  She shook her head. “Common mistake. Never keep a will in a safe deposit box. Causes too much hassle. Sonny-boy needs to work with the attorney who wrote it up. Whoever that is, is bound to have a copy.”

  “I guess he needs to talk with Owen then.”

  “Owen? You mean Mr. Riordan?”

  I nodded. “Mr. Dewars said he wrote up Mrs. Vicks’ will, not that long ago.”

  “Makes sense I guess,” she said with a shrug. “That’d be where I’d start if I was the son.”

  “But she probably didn’t put in the box,” I said. “If she hasn’t been down here.”

  “I’ll check.” Lorna shook her head after pawing through more files. “Must have been when I was on break, like you said.” Her eyes were clouded with self-doubt when she pulled out the file. “She was in here just last week.”

  She followed me back to the tiny cave of a room, still muttering about her error. I wasn’t quite sure how to shake her, but a buzz from the front jerked her attention that way.

  “Customer,” she said. “I have to run. I’ll get ahold of Mr. Riordan for you now. Let’s see what we can do about finding you a better space to work.”

  Not ten minutes later, a woman breezed into my dank cave. “Hi,” she said in a breathless way, as though she’d just run in from an adventure and couldn’t wait to tell someone about it, “I’m Maya.” Her perfect teeth flashed brilliant white against the ebony of her face as she dropped three legal pads of paper and an assortment of pens on the table in front of me. I could tell from her glance and slight hesitation that she’d noticed my black eye, but she didn’t comment. “Maya Richardson.” Tall and thin, her black hair was pulled back from her nearly poreless face, and though the effect was severe, it was also quite elegant. She wore small thick-banded gold hoop earrings and a cross pendant gold necklace. Her taste in clothes was superb. I recognized the pink and navy block suit from a display at Neiman Marcus that I had to pass on after seeing the sticker price. She thrust out a perfectly manicured hand and we shook. Firm grip. “Lorna called Owen, but he’s out at a client’s, so I’m here to help you.”

  “I’m Alex St. James,” I said.

  “You know, you’d think they’d tell me that you were here. Not a word.” Maya maintained eye contact while she spoke, whirlwind-fashion. “Lorna told me why you’re here. Thank God they’re finally doing something. It’s been what? A week already?”

  “One week tomorrow.”

  “The longer it takes, the less chance of catching the monster who did that to poor Evelyn.”

  “You knew her?”

  “Very well. She was one of my clerks.” Apparently realizing that I wasn’t familiar with the bank’s reporting structure, she continued. “Owen and I run the loan department. He handles all the corporate and foreign transactions—you know all the important stuff.” She emphasized the word and grimace-grinned conspiratorially. I could only guess that there was a male-female competition involved. “I handle the personal accounts. Lines of credit, home-equity, things like that.”

  “Mrs. Vicks worked for you?”

  “Ten years,” she said. “The old management hired me straight out of grad school and within two years I was running this end of the department,” she said with pride. “If you have any questions about anything, you go ahead and ask. If I can’t help you, I’ll find somebody who can.”

  “I thought she worked for Mr. Riordan.”

  Her brows furrowed over dark eyes. “That what they told you?”

  I nodded.

  “I guess technically that’s true.” She grimaced again, less good-naturedly. “Two months ago I got promoted to Senior Vice President. I still report to Owen, because he’s Executive VP. That means that my employees are still his employees, too, but Evelyn and I worked together every day. She helped Owen occasionally, but not nearly as much.”

  She stopped herself, taking a quick glance around the room. “Lorna was right,” she said. “This is miserable. I can at least help out with this. Come on.” She grabbed the box closest to her, and canted her head toward the hallway. “Follow me.”

  I scrambled to throw the paper and pens in the other box before picking it up and heading out.

  On the way, Maya chatted like we were old girlfriends. The lunchroom apparently had an abundance of unused space and she figured I’d be happier there. I followed her, keeping up the brisk pace even though I still felt vague aches from my recent tussle with the intruder at Mrs. Vicks’.

  “It might be noisy in there sometimes,” she said, apologetically over her shoulder as she led the way, “but it can’t be worse than that room downstairs.”

  Getting to the lunchroom meant an elevator ride up to twelve, then wading through half-a-dozen offices where busy people, mostly women, glanced up with curiosity as we passed. One after another, like a wave of surprised eyeballs, their gazes followed us on our path to the far reaches of the twelfth floor.

  “Wow,” I said, pleased, when we walked in. One wall boasted floor-to-ceiling windows and though it offered only a bird’s-eye-view of Clark Street, the room practically shimmered with cheer when compared to the ground-floor vault area. Snow clustered in one corner of the windows and stretched out icy patterns across half the expanse as though Jack Frost had come by and been interrupted mid-task.

  “You like this better?” she asked with in a hopeful tone.

  “Much better,” I said.

  “Good.” She dropped her box on one of the many empty tables. “Take your pick.”

  I glanced at my watch. Nearly eleven o’clock. “This is great,” I said, meaning it. “Thanks.”

  “Not a problem.” She glanced at her watch, too. It was one of those black-faced ones with no numbers, but with a sparkling diamond where the twelve should be. “I have to run,” she said. “Busy day today.”

  “I have an appointment at two this afternoon. Can I just leave these records here when I take off?”

  Maya thought for a moment. She raised an index finger. “Hang on.” Within a minute she’d left the room and come back again with a contagious sort of triumph. “Hand me a piece of paper, okay?”

  I did.

  Maya wrote a quick note, and I was surprised at her little-girl penmanship. Tiny proper letters in an almost back-slant handwriting. Had I encountered the note before meeting the woman, I would have come to the erroneous conclusion that Maya Richardson was timid and introverted.

  “There,” she said, “Nina Takami in bookkeeping will lock them up for you every day, I’ll leave this on her desk to let her know. She’s right in the next room.”

  “Got it,” I said.

  “Great.” She started toward the door and turned just as she cleared the threshold again. “Listen, I mean it. You have any questions on anything, you see me. Owen didn’t know Evelyn as well as I did.”

  * * * * *

  An hour later I knew nothing more than I’d known before. I couldn’t imagine why David considered anything in either box important. Mrs. Vicks had opened her accounts with Banner Bank twenty-three years earlier, a few years after Barton had left home. Flipping through the old documents, I found a pattern of sorts. Paychecks automatically deposited every two weeks, and a series of small dollar amount checks, some of which were written with such precise repetition that I gathered Mrs. Vicks had been on the budget plan for all her utilities. Every month, however, she wrote one even-dollar amount check. No payee listed on the statements. If I wanted to know who they were written to, I imagined I’d have to look them up on antique microfilm machines.

  Interesting pattern. The checks were for two hundred dollars for the first three years, then moved to two-hundred-fifty. They stayed there for just over five years before inching up to three hundred for about four years. They zoomed to five hundred then and stayed at that amount for three more years until ceasing completely.

  Could be a savings plan. Retirement account. Investment. David had told me that she’d accumulated over fifty-thousand dollars. I mad
e a note to research the checks’ payees as soon as possible. It was probably nothing, but if I was going to be here anyway, what the heck.

  Right now, though, it would have to wait. Almost one o’clock. I wanted to get back to my office to check on a few things before my meeting with Dr. Hooker at two. I boxed everything back up and looked for Nina Takami.

  * * * * *

  When I walked through the glass doors of our office, everyone looked up. Not used to such attention all at once, I stopped in my tracks. Across the expanse of the hub, where the entire support staff worked in low-rise cubicles, I saw Jordan spring from her chair and make her way my direction.

  “What?” I asked.

  Her dark eyes scanned the corridor I’d just left. “Come on,” she said, with a tug at my arm, “I’ll tell you all about it in your office. We have to get you out of sight.”

  I stood my ground. “Why? What happened?”

  “Nothing, yet,” she said. “But Barton Vicks came by this morning. Early. Like eight-thirty. Wanted to see you. Nobody else.” She spoke quickly, her eyes over my shoulder as though he’d barge in any moment.

  “What about?”

  She shook her head. “He wouldn’t talk to any of us,” she said again, with asperity. With a glance to the side and another shake of her head, she added, “No, that’s not true. He talked to us plenty. Complained the whole time that we were hiding you and that we were lying about you not being in. Wouldn’t talk to Bass, wouldn’t talk to Gonzales. I told him I’d be happy to make an appointment, but he said he’d just sit and wait till you showed up.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “About a half hour ago he started screaming about being made to wait, about how his mother was murdered, and how you were part of the conspiracy against him.” She gave me one of her meaningful looks. “We called security and had him escorted out, but I know he’s coming back. I’m afraid of that dude, Alex. He’s creepy. And he knows where you live. Remember that.”

  “Okay, listen,” I said. “If he comes back, give him my cell phone.”

  “What are you, nuts?”

  “The best way to handle this is to make him believe I’m trying to help. Give him my cell number and get his. Tell him I’ll try to give him a call as soon as I can.”

  Her mouth twisted, skeptical. “You sure?”

  We started moving toward my office. “I’m out for the rest of the afternoon anyway. I have that meeting at two and I told Detective Lulinski I’d try to stop by today. Let me just grab a couple things, and I’ll be out of here.”

  “The sooner you’re out, away from that guy, the better I’m going to feel,” she said with a backward glance. Then, “Holy shit.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  I turned to see Barton Vicks exit the elevator at our second floor landing. He moved with heavy-man deliberation toward the glass doors, his lips moving in an angry conversation with no one. Intent on the door, he didn’t notice me until he’d pulled it open.

  “Hey!”

  He immediately picked up his pace and made his way toward us, looking for all intents like a linebacker about to go for a tackle. I pulled my arm out of Jordan’s grasp and decided to meet him head on, closing the gap in three strides. “Barton?” I said.

  “What the hell is going on?”

  I feigned ignorance. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re avoiding me, that’s what the hell I mean. I sat out here in your lobby for over three hours this morning, waiting for you. You said you were going to help me. This is how you help my mother? The old lady’s dead, and this is how you treat her son?”

  “Barton—”

  He interrupted me, again. The man was apparently never interested in what anyone else had to say. “Don’t you give me no lies about how you’ve been working on this and that’s why you weren’t here. I know that’s the kind of shit you business people hand each other, but I’m not going to fall for it.”

  “In all honesty, Barton,” I said, my voice coming up enough to go over his. I was sick of him taking the floor with his speeches, “I went out to breakfast this morning.”

  Jordan had moved out of my line of vision. I caught sight of her again, behind Barton. She picked up the nearest phone and spoke into it, her left hand cupping the receiver as she watched us with wary eyes.

  Barton took a step forward, his voice rising. “Out to breakfast, huh? My mother isn’t even cold in the ground yet and you’re out on a date with the rich bastard she used to work for.”

  “How the hell do you know who I went out with?”

  His fat face broke into a smile that made me cringe. “My mother told me she was talking to you. She told me that the day she died. Said you were going to help her through some of her problems. Money problems. Well, let me tell you, Miss Prissy-pants, whatever she told you, you better tell me.”

  “I think it’s time you leave, Barton.”

  “I’m not going nowhere until you spill it all.” He took another half-step forward, planting his feet shoulder-width apart, his hands balled into fists at his sides. I took a reflexive step back, and as my field of vision expanded, I noticed that Bass had joined the wide-eyed audience. He stood directly outside his office, balancing on the balls of his feet as though ready to step forward to help, then stopping himself with a jerk and a look of confusion.

  Oh yeah, I had a lot of help here.

  Bart wasn’t finished talking. “I tried making this easy for you.” He shifted his weight. To say he towered over me would be an understatement. He leaned forward—menacingly, and the only thing that kept me from leaning away was pure stubbornness on my part. “I tried asking nice for your help the day of the wake. And what did I get from you? You ain’t done shit for me. Nothing. Where’s your loyalty to my mother?” His jaw thrust forward and he worked it. I could feel the tremble in his body—his need to lash out—to hit something or someone. And since I was the closest, I figured he would aim at me. His voice dropped to a growl. “I ain’t going nowhere,” he said again.

  “No, really,” I said in my calmest voice, as I watched Jordan meet the security team at the glass doors—three men in beige uniforms, one of them carrying something yellow and ribbon-like. “I insist. It’s time you left.”

  They grabbed him from behind, pinning his arms back. Two of the men held Barton as he thrashed, issuing a scream so primal it made my ears clench and the hair stand up on my arms. The third uniformed guard wrapped the yellow ribbon around Bart’s wrists and I saw now it was some sort of plastic tie-wrap.

  They had him out the doors in less than thirty seconds, but I’d hardly say he’d been subdued.

  “Holy shit.” Jordan repeated.

  I watched him go, quelling my frantic heart pounding and blowing out breaths to regain some calm. “You can say that again.”

  * * * * *

  “Who you looking for?”

  The elderly security guard behind the semi-circular desk interrupted me as I consulted the building directory. Skinny, with a ring of sparse gray hair rimming his bald pate, he scrunched up half his face as he addressed me again, his voice weary with impatience. “Just tell me who you’re looking for. I got it all here.” He tapped his forehead.

  Walking over to him, I smiled. “Dr. Thomas Hooker,” I said.

  He leaned backward, eyes wide, giving me a once-over with undisguised confusion. “Dr. Hooker?” He scratched the side of his head. “You’re not one of his regulars.”

  “No.”

  He waited several beats. Maybe he expected an explanation for my visit, but I remained silent, smiling, wishing I’d just gotten the suite number off the directory.

  “Four-oh-one,” he said, finally. “You sure he’s expecting you?”

  I ignored the question, and murmured, “Thank you,” as I turned toward the two elevators standing open to my left. Three others juggled passengers somewhere between the ground and fortieth floors.

  Four-oh-one proved to be a small office at the far end of the corr
idor. A heavy wood door with the suite number and “Health Partners, Office of Medicine and Mind,” let me know I’d found the right place.

  There was no receptionist. A tiny, hand-lettered note tacked to the center of three inner doors addressed me: “Alex St. James,” it read, “be with you shortly. Please help yourself to something to drink. Thank you.”

  I assumed coffee and water awaited me beyond the closed door, but I opted to pass. Just as I was about to sit, the leftmost door opened and a man stepped out, looking surprised.

  He was beautiful. He sported blond hair, cut Robert Redford style, but he didn’t have the famous actor’s rough complexion. I guessed him to be just about my age, but with the smoothest, purest skin I’d ever seen on anyone older than a toddler. “Dr. Hooker?” I asked, extending my hand.

  “Yes,” he said, as we shook.

  “Alex St. James.”

  Blue eyes. Bright blue eyes, they clouded in uncertainty. “I’m just leaving now. Do we have an appointment?”

  “Yes,” I said, my turn to be puzzled. I pointed to the note. “Two o’clock.”

  I watched understanding clear the tight expression off his gorgeous face. “Oh, I’m sorry. You must mean my uncle.”

  “Oh,” I said, trying to mask my disappointment. “I didn’t realize . . .”

  “I know,” he said with a smile that knocked me for a loop, “it happens a lot around here.” He pointed back toward the seat I’d almost taken. “I’m late for an appointment, but I’m sure he’ll be with you in a moment.” He glanced at his watch, as did I. Five before two. “Don’t worry, he’s very prompt.”

  “Thanks,” I said to his departing figure.

  Darn. That could’ve been fun.

  I sat with a fishing magazine on my lap, turning pages, reading nothing. At two o’clock Chicago time, it was noon out in California. As far as I knew the snow hadn’t cancelled any flights, so William and Miss Caroline were out there now, until Sunday. I knew I should put him out of my mind, but I couldn’t.