“That is way weird,” Libby said. “That’s why sometimes he limped and sometimes he didn’t. Why sometimes his hair looked different, and one day Tuxedo would jump on his lap and another day hiss at Jeremy.”
“We see what we expect to see, not always what’s really in front of our eyes.” Evening light was fading to night dark and even flashlights didn’t reveal much inside the holes in Jeremy’s house. They had to take their chances. Charlie had insisted Libby go to the Esterhazie’s or to Lori Schantz’s but the kid was getting fed up with this.
“I’ll leave if you will,” had been her reply.
Life sucks when your teen can make such pronouncements while having to bend over to look you in the face. “I have the feeling it was Harry who Tuxedo didn’t like,” Charlie said now. “The man who was holding a gun on us this afternoon. He even had the nerve to attend Jeremy’s memorial. That’s why Betty Beesom practically went into shock at the beach that day. She knew there were two of them. She didn’t trust Harry for some reason, and especially not with Jeremy dead. But Harry got to her before our little trip to the eye doctor and convinced her somehow that he’d see to it everything was all right for her. And since she ended up owning Jeremy’s house, maybe she decided that meant Harry, too, would look after her—if she didn’t give him away, that is.”
“Exactly when did you figure all this out?” Dalrymple wanted to know.
“Like I told you, I was beginning to tumble that day we lunched at the Pit. All those lookalikes, the clever impersonations and disguises, makeup—probably surgery even—to look like someone you aren’t, and so convincingly. On the way home on the 405 I kept feeling I was on the cusp of what was going on here, just almost there, and then my ears did their thing and I couldn’t concentrate on anything else. And Mrs. Beesom kept saying she meant Hairy the cat when she’d slip and say ‘Harry.’ And then Doug came across all those Beesom brokerage accounts that had been cashed in, and Tuxedo started dragging tortured hundred-dollar bills into the house instead of poor birds and bugs. It all came together. And the redwood house and the red Ferrari.”
“What would that have to do with someone methodically destroying his identity electronically?” Dalrymple pulled a chunk of wall away to make a hole bigger and Ed pointed a flashlight down it to disclose stacks of bills, neatly piled. These holes were cut into unusual cavities between the inner and outer wall, and there had been less damage to wall and cash down that far. “Oh, all this money.”
“Right. Maggie told me her retired clients in their estate planning are desperate to avoid inheritance tax and long-term care costs—to leave their money to their heirs, not the government or nursing homes. The two Jeremys got a lot of money somewhere and invested it to make more. And they wanted to take it with them. In cash—tax free. But only one of them knew where it was hidden. The dead one. That’s why the guy over there behind the garbage cans is so stoned and pizza-fed. He found some of it. But not all. The Jeremy who was Harry saw this hole with a seagull in it before he shot at me. He’ll be back, and soon, for the rest and for Betty and anybody who gets in his way.”
“Especially—I would think—you, Libby, and Maggie,” Ed said solemnly.
“Where do you get all this shit?” Attorney Seligman was holding out a black plastic Hefty Cinch Sak with a yellow drawstring. “You just make assumptions all around, upside down and right and left—and why didn’t you share all this with me yesterday?”
“There wasn’t time then, and there isn’t time now. And you wouldn’t have believed me anyway. You want to spread that bag open wider for more ‘assumptions’?”
“You’d have to disappear electronically to make so many huge cash transactions in so short a time,” Dalrymple said. “Even on multiple accounts supposedly in several different names.”
“This had been planned for a long time.” Charlie had to swivel from the hips up to get to the bills and then get them to the plastic Hefty bag. “At least since the condos on the alley had their doors and windows boarded up. I’d be willing to bet the art niches were configured somehow to open and allow money to be stashed. But only the one Jeremy knew about it. The mastermind. He could have been stashing it away for years.”
“Do you think Mrs. Beesom’s niches were used to stash money, too?” Libby asked.
“Yeah, we’d better finish here and get back to her. Art and Wilma are in danger, too, just being there. And Jeremy had the key to Betty’s house, so it wouldn’t take much to slip in while she was at church or the beauty parlor and stuff money in her walls, too.”
“We really should leave the money in the wall, let the authorities remove it,” the lawyer with the garbage bag said. “We’re just bagging it for the murderer—make it easier for him to haul it off.”
“And let every drunk and druggie walk off with handfuls instead?” Charlie turned to point at the homeless man they’d been ignoring. He was moaning now, and she was, too. He coming out of his chemically induced slumber, and she’d remembered too late never to twist her torso. The paramedics and then Amuller’s men had tried to question him but he’d been too incoherent to make sense, so everybody gave up on him. Charlie was glad to see he was alive, but the other Jeremy would shoot him for sure if he stayed so close to the holes in the alley wall.
But she needn’t have worried. The man who staggered to his feet from behind the garage can was the other Jeremy, and he was still armed. The homeless man was too hopeless and embarrassing to look at, so they hadn’t. The other Jeremy lifted the can’s lid to reveal the bum stuffed inside it, part of the back of his head all over the back of his T-shirt. “Finish putting my money in the Hefty, folks, and then we’ll go next door for the rest.”
CHAPTER 40
“YOU SAID YOU’D take care of me in my old age,” Betty complained while Charlie pretended to look for some device in the old lady’s art niches that would release the entry to a stash hole.
“Oh, I intend to, Betty love,” the man with the gun said in Jeremy’s voice. “You won’t have to worry about a thing again ever.”
“But I didn’t mean the house or money. I meant … looking after.”
“Were you two twins?” Charlie played for time. Ed had called Amuller on his tiny cellular before they went into the alley, telling him what they planned to do and that they expected the murderer to be back for the loot any minute. Of course, he’d had to leave that message on the detective’s voicemail.
“Just brothers. And I suggest you hurry, Charlie. I’m getting nervous.” This brother’s hair was redder and not as thin as the other’s.
Great, now you notice.
“Why? You’ll just kill us all anyway.”
“Oh, I think I’ll take lovely Libby with me. Just for snuggles. That ought to frost your huevos, huh?”
“So was Gladys your girl or your brother’s? Or both?”
“Cousin, actually. The third heir. You can see why she had to die. I just didn’t realize she knew that was in the plan.”
“Well, once you killed your brother, she might have guessed.”
“She was stupid. Who knew what she would guess? Now get moving or I’ll pistol-whip your precious blond bombshell in front of your eyes.”
He grabbed Libby just as Charlie inadvertently touched a spot of extra plaster in the niche and the bottom flapped down on hinges, hidden until the flap released to reveal them. The picture of the Last Supper slipped into the hole half its length, stopped by, she was sure, more hundred-dollar bills.
But she had no time to look because Libby decided to be fed up again. Just when Jeremy’s brother noticed the Last Supper slipping but after he’d grabbed Charlie’s daughter from behind, Charlie’s daughter performed a catapult.
It was something she’d learned in cheerleading. It did not involve a somersault or leap on her part but was used as a method of hurling one of the smaller, lighter girls from behind her in a somersault over her head to the top of a pyramid, a spectacular maneuver they were not allowed to use since
a girl on an opposing team had broken her neck at cheerleader camp when it went wrong. But Libby and Lori Schantz thought it was wonderful and practiced it endlessly last year, Lori flying through the air, catapulted by Libby, often caught by Doug.
Much heavier and caught unaware and unwilling, the other Jeremy didn’t fly through the air but landed on the stairs between the dining and living room areas and Libby, unable to control her angst, jumped hard on the middle of his back where it spanned the two stairs. His bones cracked instead of the pistol in his hand. It went flying.
* * *
“Well, he just made me soooo mad,” Libby had said at the time, not the least in need then of Officer Mary Maggie’s counseling on guilt because she’d almost certainly caused a man to become a paraplegic. And no more so now, two weeks later.
It was a Saturday morning and they all crowded into Charlie’s breakfast nook to look at the preliminary plans Mrs. Beesom spread on the table. The plans to rebuild Jeremy’s house. Officer Mason had stopped by to check on the survivors.
“It’s going to be just like before.” Maggie Stutzman was the first to notice.
“That’s right, except there won’t be no holes in the walls on the alley. I’m even thinking we should all go together and have the gates rebuilt.”
“I agree,” Maggie said. “I liked it better here when we had gates.”
Officer Maggie gasped heavenward. “But this is Belmont Shore, or have you people noticed? The reason the gates were here was not to protect you but to protect the money the Jeremy brothers and their cousin didn’t want to pay taxes on. The real danger was here inside the walls with you.”
But the glances among the other four women in the room were in solid agreement. Even Libby-the-rebel Greene’s.
“And,” Betty went on with a certain aplomb, “we’ll find a nice young man to live in it who knows how to fix things and knows who to call if he doesn’t.”
“But who isn’t about to inherit a huge amount of money,” Charlie added.
“And who is only one of him,” Libby said, garbled, but they all knew what she was saying.
“Hear ye, hear ye,” Maggie the lawyer pounded the table, “let it be known the women of the compound do hereby agree. And you, Officer, are our witness.”
Officer Mason pushed her glasses back up on her nose, tucked her hair behind her ears, and shook her head. She reached to the top of the refrigerator to scratch Tuxedo under the chin and reached for the door out. “Oh and Charlie, two things. We finally traced the phone that was used to report Jeremy’s death. A cellular belonging to the people in the redwood house.”
“Probably the Jeremy named Harry stabbed his brother and put him in the car while I was putting groceries away and then he called in the murder on his way home. Maybe they had a fight because the Jeremy we liked wouldn’t tell him where the money was and might have suspected his brother might commit murder to get all the money. So, what’s the second thing?”
Mary Maggie Mason’s sloppy grin was back suddenly. “I just heard on the radio this morning that Mitch Hilsten and Deena Gotmor are engaged. Thought you’d like to know. Not that I can make much sense of anything in this place.”
Libby cheered the news with a whoop when the police woman had left, and added, “Poor Deena.”
“Oh, Charlie, I’m sorry.” Betty blinked red eyes, one cleared by surgery already and the other scheduled.
“So what do you think, Greene?” Maggie Stutzman asked with a certain vengefulness.
I think he deserves a lot better than Deena-Gotmor-lips-and-boobs surgically.
Boy, me too, she and her common sense agreed. “I think he’s a big boy and can make his own decisions without my opinion.”
“When the real Jeremy said I’d be taken care of”—Betty changed the subject to the one at hand—“this is what he meant.” She tapped the preliminary plans with her finger. “But I meant like family would look after an older person. Help out with appointments and shopping, check on you every day, take you places you’d be afraid to go alone. I got enough money.”
Charlie and her best friend exchanged helpless stares.
“You can’t hire people to do what family and friends do out of kindness. Hired folks beat you and steal your money. I really didn’t know the house belonged to me. And Harry didn’t used to seem so mean. He just kind of got worse all of a sudden. Jeremy warned me about him even after he was dead, poor man.”
“But why did Harry frighten you so at the memorial service on the beach walk?”
“He’d told me on the phone he’d see to it I was blamed for Jeremy’s murder if I told anybody about him. He just kept weaving in and out and behind people down at the beach, dressed different, wore a baseball hat, but I knew him right away. It was the way he looked warning at me that scared me so. I almost told you about him, Charlie, but then I remembered that look.”
She’d confessed to Amuller that Jeremy didn’t trust his brother, who had been in trouble more than once. So he kept secrets from him. “They didn’t either one say anything about no woman. And when Jeremy died I still never thought Harry done it.”
Jeremy, or maybe both Jeremys, had worked out in the home gym in the redwood house’s walk-out basement. Gladys apparently acted as the lady of the house, and there was always a Jonathan Phillips at home as there was a Jeremy Fiedler in the compound.
The P-T revealed that an enormous inheritance had befallen the three, none of them named Jeremy. When they saw how much the government would take of it, they’d decided to ensure they’d give up no more when they realized the fruits of their investments on the rest of it. Most of this was probable conjecture, since the injured cousin whose name was neither Harry nor Jonathan had refused to talk.
The three had built their own illegal trust out of distrust, and come upon the scheme of disguising their profits by using false names and phony companies until the capital gains couldn’t be traced. Ultimately they and the money disappeared in the electronic melange of a fast-growing, only-partially understood transfer of record keeping to an even-less-understood, more confusing, and ever-upgrading medium known as “software.”
Record keepers at the lower levels have never been well paid and as a result have become increasingly less educated and, according to the morning’s P-T, totally overwhelmed by the constant changes in technology. Computerized records of the government and particularly of law-enforcement and tax-collecting agencies are held hostage to hackers, and this induced the “Jeremy brothers”—their true names still not revealed—to mastermind this scheme, largely utilizing the computer skills of teenage hackers—in this case, the unusual use of female teenage hackers.
Under the guise of being a dirty old man, they could induce young girls to do highly illegal hacking for a chance to run away from home for long periods and scare the holy shit out of their parents so that when they did return they had really big negotiating rights. They could make good money in cash they didn’t have to declare to parents or to government and could spend as they pleased.
A few had turned up dead, which is not unusual for young women anywhere—who’s more vulnerable than a rebellious teen? Still, Charlie figured the Jeremy who was Harry did some work on his own there. One Jeremy knew how to work women, the other knew how to terrify them into submission or kill them. Harry must have hired the young girls to leave bouquet bombs in an attempt to scare occupants out of the compound so he could search for the stash, too.
One of the fathers had come forward already, and there would be more parents talking hard with more runaways as the story continued to break in the news. One of the fathers would have been the voice on Jeremy’s answering machine heard by his neighbors when they forced their way into his house.
“Betty, when did you know there were two Jeremys?”
“Not till about a month ago. You know how nosy I am.” She looked around the table with a nod and a lift of the chin. “Surprised I didn’t notice sooner, but my eyes had been going for a long time
and I was worrying more about myself and being alone in my old age.”
“Didn’t you want to know why there were two Jeremys?”
“Jeremy promised me if I kept still about it and didn’t ask questions I’d know soon enough and he’d see I was taken care of. He was always so dependable, I believed him. But I still got good neighbors, don’t I?”
Charlie hadn’t thought Betty capable of keeping such a secret even for a month. But she’d never thought to question Jeremy, either.
Johann Sebastian Amuller had come to collect the loot in the Hefty bags. He gave Charlie a suspicious squint, but made no new threats as to her imminent arrest for Jeremy’s murder. His brother offered a far better motive and obvious intent to kill as witnessed by neighbors, a noted lawyer, and a well-known ex-Lieutenant in the Beverly Hill’s homicide department, all able and willing to testify on Charlie’s behalf. J. S. knew he was right, but he couldn’t prove it. He trusted his gut and his prejudices and Good Cops, Bad Guys. Charlie hoped she’d never have to deal with him again.
“I wonder what the good Jeremy told Tuxedo that day we all sat here and called him up from the dead?” Libby said out of the blue where she came from, bless her. “’Cause what he told me sure came true. ‘Watch out for Rory Torkelsen.’”
“Me too,” Betty said, and so did Maggie. They all looked to the top of the refrigerator into the half-lidded eyes of the inscrutable feline. Tuxedo’s yawn was the only answer.
“What do you mean, yours came true?” Charlie the mom overreacted. “Rory Torkelsen—”
“Yeah, tried to strong-arm me into one of the little boys’ rooms last Friday at school. Had some friends in there already telling me how I’d pay if I ever told on them.”
“Did they—?” Charlie started.
“You didn’t break his spine, too?” Maggie the lawyer broke in. “Or those of his friends?”
“His friends are fine. He’s still walking kind of funny, though. Mo-om, don’t look at me that way. I saved everybody from the wrong Jeremy and you still think you have to protect me.” Libby left the room, disgust hovering in her wake. Tuxedo jumped from the refrigerator to the counter to the floor and pranced after her with a look of disdain for Charlie.
Killer Commute Page 23
