A Penny for Your Thoughts

by Mindy Starns Clark

  Was it possible that someone was closing down Feed the Need district offices? If so, then why? To cut costs? To channel the money for those programs into some other direction?

  “Look at this,” Marion said, pulling out two file folders. “It took me a while, but I think I finally figured out what this is.”

  She opened the first file to reveal the black-and-white photo of a small Hispanic-looking child. The girl had dark skin and big round eyes, and she wore a wrinkled, knotty scarf and sweater that brought to mind the people of the Andes. Behind the photo was a profile; her name was Rosa Parmenta, and according to the profile she lived in a small village in Peru.

  “Now this,” Marion said, and she opened the second file. It held another black-and-white photo, this time of a group of children—three dirty but smiling faces, the two boys bare chested, the girl in a light Mexican-style embroidered dress. The profile with this photo listed the children as three siblings—Javier, Luis, and Martina Gonzales—and it said that they lived in the Mexican city of Guadalajara.

  “Are these the children people sponsor through Feed the Need?” I asked. I thought of Frank’s words at the wake, and I knew he was right—with these pitiful but adorable faces in front of me I definitely felt the urge to donate some money.

  “When you agree to sponsor a child, you get a photo and profile, just like this,” Marion said. “We have a team that prepares these things, that carefully monitors the database, that makes sure we track the progress of the children through the district offices.”

  “Okay.”

  She pulled out another piece of paper full of scribbled notes and lots of arrows and circles.

  “This is Wendell’s handwriting,” she said. “This is how he brainstormed, how he worked through problems.”

  I tried reading the notes, but I couldn’t make much sense of it until Marion interpreted for me.

  “Right here,” she said, pointing, “March 1, new database software. March 15, users trained, department reduced by 15.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means last March, Feed the Need bought some new database software that was so good it allowed them to let 15 people go from the child-tracking department.”

  That sounded fishy to me; obviously, it must have to Wendell as well, because from that circle he had drawn several arrows with question marks and other notations.

  “Spell it out for me, Marion,” I said. “This is too confusing.”

  She pulled back out the two photos. She placed them side by side on the desk and then stood in front of me, her arms folded across her chest.

  “Look at the pictures,” she said. “What do you see?”

  It didn’t take long. The hair was different, the clothing was different, but the face was the same.

  “This is the same girl!” I said, picking up the pictures of the two little girls. “Rosa Parmenta and Martina Gonzales are one and the same!”

  “Exactly.”

  My eyes met Marion’s, and she paused a beat before continuing.

  “Think about it, Callie,” she said softly. “Field offices are being closed. The children’s photo records are being faked. Half the staff of the tracking department is laid off. All of this without the knowledge of the President or the CEO. What does that tell you?”

  I hesitated a beat.

  “That somebody somewhere is cutting costs. That somebody somewhere is up to something.”

  That hung in the air for a moment, and I thought that “somebody” was most likely Alan Bennet, the person who was responsible for having me shoved into a grave, the person who had had his hands in Feed the Need’s finances for the last five months.

  As far as I could tell, any way you looked at it, this was a man who was up to no good.

  Thirty-Three

  Upstairs, I turned on my laptop to check my e-mail. Sure enough, the home office in Washington, DC, had finally responded to my request for more information on Alan Bennet. I downloaded the file and opened another e-mail that was waiting for me from Harriet.

  It was a response to my phone call of the day before when I gave her the plate number of the man who had been following me around town. She had run the plates and come up with a name: Mitchell Ralston. There was no other information, and the name certainly didn’t ring any bells with me.

  I logged off and returned to my room before I opened the file and started reading. What I found was very disturbing. According to the research, the college Alan supposedly graduated from in the Midwest was now defunct. There was no way to check whether he had ever actually been a student there. More importantly, the three clothing manufacturers that he had listed in his employment history also no longer existed. Apparently, they had at one time been legitimate companies, but eventually they had all been closed down through bankruptcy or merger or something else. The details were unavailable.

  On a personal note, though Alan Bennet was currently single, he had been married three times. The first wife, an heiress, had died in a car accident. The second and third wives weren’t dead but merely divorced—with Alan receiving generous support payments in both instances! I thought of his dalliance with Judith Smythe and wondered if the stakes had been raised even higher now that she had inherited a large chunk of her father’s fortune.

  I closed the file and pulled out my cell phone to call Harriet back at the home office in DC. As I waited for her to come on the line, I reached into the box Marion had given me and pulled out the heavy set of accounting records from inside. A groan escaped my lips at the surge of pain from my side; my fall into the grave still resonated within my aching muscles.

  Finally, I heard a click on the phone and then the warm familiar voice of my friend.

  “Callie?” she said, and I was surprised at my own sudden rush of emotion. Sometimes I became so tired of being surrounded by strangers.

  “Hi, Harriet,” I said, sitting down on the bed. “Gosh, it’s good to hear your voice.”

  We talked for a while. She caught me up on office happenings down there, and then I told her briefly about my work up here.

  “I can’t believe you got stuck in that mess,” Harriet said, clicking her tongue. “Tom really got an earful from me. I let him have what for.”

  I smiled, knowing that even a little “what for” from Harriet was a formidable thing.

  “At least I think the end’s finally in sight,” I said. “But I need your help.”

  “You got it.”

  I gave her an abbreviated version of my discussion with Marion about the financial funny business at Feed the Need.

  “I’ve got two sets of books here,” I said. “Looks like one is the public version and one is private, if you get my drift.”

  “Oh, I getcha alright.”

  “Do you think you can do your usual run-through?” I asked. “Sniff out all the discrepancies?”

  “Like a bloodhound on the scent of a grouse,” she said, and I smiled. Harriet was from Texas, and every conversation with her was filled with colorful similes and metaphors.

  She agreed to come up on the first train in the morning. She put me on hold while she made her reservation, and then she came back on the line, gave me the time, and told me to meet her at the front entrance to the Thirtieth Street station.

  After disconnecting, I called and reserved a small meeting room for the morning at a downtown Philadelphia hotel that my old law firm had used from time to time. That was about the most anonymous territory I could think of. I didn’t want anyone to get wind of any of this just yet.

  Once I had hung up the phone, I decided that it was time to get organized—first my thoughts, then my things. Now that Wendell’s funeral was over, I felt sure the house would be quiet the rest of the day; I knew it was a good time to pause and take stock.

  I clicked open the database on my laptop and pulled out all of my notes and the file Duane Perskie had given me. It was time to brainstorm, time to come up with some real theories for all that had been going on. />
  This was how I worked best—by digging around, unearthing facts, then sitting down and sorting out my thoughts until I came up with some plausible ideas. In the process, I would let my imagination fly, playing with every possible motive I could think up, no matter how far-fetched some of them might seem. Eli had taught me this method; he was a strong believer in the problem-solving power of the unconscious mind. “These things have been stewing around in your brain when you weren’t even aware of it,” he would say. “Now it’s time to let your ideas out.”

  Following his lead, I typed in all of the information I had gathered thus far. Then I earmarked the names of the people I now suspected of killing Wendell: Alan Bennet and Judith Smythe. Because I couldn’t positively rule them out yet, I also highlighted Derek Smythe and Gwen Harding, though I doubted either one of them had done it. Apparently, Angelina had a pretty good alibi; at the time of the murder, she had been seen grocery shopping at a local store, and the checker confirmed her presence there. I made notes to that effect, but did check off her brother, Nick, as a possible suspect just in case his alibi wasn’t as airtight as the police thought. At the time of the murder, Nick had been in the city with Marion, helping her shop. Marion had been positively ID’d by a sales clerk, but I didn’t know whether Nick and Marion had been together the entire time, or if he could possibly have had a chance to slip away for a while and pay a visit up the back stairs to Wendell’s office. That left Sidra, who had the best alibi of all; she had been at a Bible study at her church, as attested to by her pastor.

  To my mind, that left two strong suspects, Alan and Judith, and three weak-but-still-possible suspects, Derek, Gwen, and Nick. Wendell Smythe didn’t seem to have any enemies. His will had already been read and held no surprises—everyone had been treated fairly. So what was it, what could’ve made someone want to kill him? I created a new category—motive—then typed in my best guesses.

  For Alan Bennet, I knew, his motive would probably have been about money. I was suspicious of anyone who lived above their means, but Alan’s marital history alone pointed to a man willing to go to a lot of trouble for the almighty dollar. I considered the ways he would benefit financially from Wendell’s murder.

  The most obvious way, of course, was taken in light of his relationship with Judith. Thanks to her inheritance from her father, Judith was now a much wealthier woman. If Alan’s intention was to marry her, then I supposed it made certain sense to see that she was as wealthy as possible first. On the other hand, the timing seemed kind of dumb. After all, why not marry her first, then kill her father?

  Of course, increasing Judith’s wealth wasn’t the only possible motivation for Alan. It could’ve been company related. Perhaps he had been diverting funds from Feed the Need into his own personal account, and Wendell had found out about it. Rather than facing the music, Alan could’ve killed Wendell to protect himself.

  Or maybe it was less complicated than that. Maybe it was simply a matter of ambition. Perhaps Alan felt that with Wendell out of the way, Judith would move up to President and he could step in as CEO of Smythe Incorporated. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had killed just to get ahead.

  I scanned the screen and thought a bit about Judith. What did I know of her so far? She was heartless, direct, ambitious, and up to something. Her ridiculous acts of vandalism against Sidra might have nothing to do with the death of her father. But at least I knew now that she wasn’t quite right, that she was acting out of some sort of desperation. Was it too much of a leap to imagine her committing a murder?

  I might have believed she had done it if the family dynamics were different, if she had perhaps suffered from years of abuse or neglect, which was the usual pattern for patricide. But from what I could tell, Wendell had been an exemplary man and a wonderful father; the usual child-parent murder motivation just wasn’t there. Despite Judith’s vicious acts of vandalism, for some reason I just didn’t peg her as the murderer—unless Alan Bennet had somehow pulled her in and twisted things around until she had become a party to something that ordinarily would’ve been unspeakable.

  Derek’s possible motivations seemed even further far-fetched. Could he have been involved in financial funny business within his own company? Perhaps his father discovered the mess, decided it was Derek’s doing, and threatened to fire him or turn him in to the police. It just didn’t fly for me, particularly when I thought about Derek’s personality. Certainly, he had his faults; he was weak, complacent, and a bit confused spiritually. But he just didn’t seem like a murderer. About the most likely scenario I could come up with regarding Derek had to do with the medical report I had found in his bedroom. Apparently, Derek was slated to donate a kidney to his ailing father. Was it possible that in a moment of fear—and knowing it was likely his father would die anyway and the whole thing would’ve been for naught—Derek had changed his mind and murdered his father instead? I doubted it, but I could think of no other motive.

  Gwen Harding was a bigger mystery, though my gut told me she wasn’t guilty. She had had the easiest access for committing the murder, but I knew she couldn’t have done it alone because of the person I chased from the bathroom. I did feel that Gwen knew something, something she wasn’t telling me. But I just didn’t think she had any part in her boss’s death. Her shock at the situation had been too great, her grief at his demise too genuine.

  And then there was Nick. I thought about our conversation in the kitchen, his proclaimed affection for the Smythe family. Was he really to be believed? I remembered how offended he was when I mistook him for a chauffeur, and I thought that perhaps his tremendous pride might’ve played into some sort of motive for him. Beyond that, the only thing I could think of was what Alan Bennet had said, about Wendell being on a nephrotic syndrome diet. What torture it must’ve been for Wendell to sit back and watch his family eat Nick’s heavenly cooking, only to have to deny himself of it completely! What if Nick had been slated to be let go—perhaps even sent back to Italy—now that Wendell could no longer enjoy his delicious cooking? To stay in America, to keep his job here—would that have been worth killing for?

  I was stretching, I knew. A good chef could always find work in a gastro-oriented society like ours. I put down my notes, rubbed my eyes, then saved the file, closed the laptop, and stashed it in my briefcase. Brainstorming had its place, but now it was time to examine the physical evidence and see if it held any important secrets.

  I went to the radiator and lifted the cover. I reached down to pull out my little collection, only to find myself grasping at air. Kneeling down to look, I was shocked to find the paper bag and its contents gone!

  I stood, scrutinizing the room, a chill going through me. Everything seemed the same, though now that I knew someone had been here, I could see some subtle differences. A drawer that wasn’t quite closed. The few items hanging in the closet pushed farther to one side.

  My adversary, whoever it was, was smarter and more determined than I had originally thought. At the office, my briefcase had been rifled through. Was I really surprised that someone had now gone through my room? I berated myself for not finding an even better hiding place for my evidence.

  I had made several mistakes now in this case, and I knew I was sorely out of practice for this type of investigation. I thought back to my conversation with Tom when he asked me to find Wendell’s murderer. I had warned him then that my usual financial investigations were a far cry from a murder investigation. He had scoffed, insisting that my talents and instincts would prevail. How wrong he was, I realized.

  I sat on the bed, trying to remember what had been in the bag that had been taken. I thought of the knife and photo from Sidra, along with the pack of letters, the comb, and the dinosaur from her apartment. There was also the pad of paper I had taken from Judith’s room, scribbled on with a pencil to reveal the information about me. I walked to the closet and looked inside, digging through my dirty clothes. The paintbrush was gone, too. Whoever had been here had found
it.

  There was no way to figure out who might have done this. Because I had been the first one to leave this morning, it could’ve been almost anyone who lived here. Beyond that, someone could’ve broken in while we were all at the funeral—perhaps this Mitchell Ralston after he shoved me into the empty grave. Trying to figure it out was futile.

  I felt the worst about the pack of Sidra’s letters. If I hadn’t taken them from her drawer, they wouldn’t be missing now. I wondered how I could tell her what I had done, what had happened. Worse than that, I no longer even possessed the knife or the paintbrush, both of which assuredly showed Judith’s fingerprints as final proof of her evil acts of vandalism.

  I went to the window and looked out at the rich green lawn, exhaling slowly, letting my heart rate return to normal. I knew that if I was smart, I wouldn’t let the invasion of my room here undermine my confidence as an investigator; instead, I would use my anger as a way to steel my resolve.

  My room may have been rifled, but I still had the two notes from the cemetery. Perhaps one of them had a good print. I wanted an ID on the man who lured me there, to see if the fingerprints belonged to “Mitchell Ralston,” the name that Harriet had given me from the car registration.

  “You wanna play dirty?” I whispered. “Then let’s get down to business.”

  Crossing to the door, I made certain that it was locked. Then I cleared an area at the desk and spread out my tools. The fingerprinting kit Duane Perskie had given me included the three most common types of fingerprinting powder: black for light objects, white for dark objects, and silver for glass and mirrors.

  I pulled out the black dust and then went to work on the paper, using an ostrich feather fingerprint duster to swirl each of the notes in a fine coat of dust. I then carefully applied the special tape to the prints that showed up, lifting them right off of the page. Once I was finished, I got out my phone and called Duane. He said he could get someone to run the prints if I brought them right over, so I straightened up the mess I had made, locked everything in my briefcase, and headed out the door.