The Trophy Wife Exchange

by Connie Shelton

  “He must have squirreled away nearly all the cash that passed through his hands,” Sandy said. “Three months past due—that goes back way before he left for China. Do you think Clint had been planning his disappearance for quite some time?”

  “I don’t know. He talked about other projects and certainly seemed to take my concert hall bid seriously. It’s possible he simply spotted a quick way out.”

  Sandy took the desk and Pen opened a door in the paneled walls, revealing a bank of file cabinets and a safe. The door to the latter was not locked.

  “Go through everything,” Sandy said. “I think we have a little time before the repo men reach this room.”

  “Or not. When you add it up, there isn’t a lot of furniture in this whole suite.”

  Sure enough, they heard sounds of the men hauling the drafting table onto their wheeled cart. The women yanked open drawers and stepped up their pace.

  For the most part the search was an easy one—nearly every file drawer was empty. The safe held two empty checkbooks, an expired passport in Clint’s name and a roll of old silver dollars. Only the coins might be of value, if a person took the time to take them to a dealer and have them appraised. It hardly seemed worth the effort, but Pen put the items in her purse to give to Mary. Better she have them than the moving men.

  Similarly, Sandy discovered the desk held only a few personal tidbits. A tacky keyring from Las Vegas, four pads of Post-it notes, a scattering of paperclips and a couple business cards.

  “It’s as if the whole office has been cleared of paperwork,” Sandy said, picking up the business cards on the chance they might provide leads.

  “My thought exactly. It doesn’t seem possible a man was actually conducting business here and there’s no trace of it now.”

  “So, did Clint take everything away before he left for China, knowing he wasn’t coming back? Or do you suppose someone else came in here after his so-called death and wiped the place clean?”

  Pen thought of the description Amber had given of Clint’s borrowed office in Shanghai, the space empty only days after he vanished. “I’ve no idea.”

  Chapter 54

  The two repo men were knocking at the door, literally. Time for Sandy and Pen to clear out. They grabbed the few items which might provide clues, the business cards and old passport.

  “Find what you were looking for?” the man called Pete asked.

  “Unfortunately not. The offices are empty.”

  He only shrugged. “We get that a lot.”

  “Well, we shall be out of your way then.”

  The elevator stopped on the next floor down and a young woman got on. She eyed the two older ladies. “If you went upstairs to Holbrook Construction, it was a waste of time,” she said, pressing the button for the second floor where a tag said the cafeteria was located.

  “We discovered. Did you know Mr. Holbrook or the employees?”

  “Only one. Tamara. We ate lunch together sometimes.”

  Pen smiled. “Yes, I remember Tamara. So, did the business move away?”

  “She didn’t say anything about that to me. One day she was at lunch, the next day she wasn’t. After about a week I went up there to be sure she was okay. Whole place, locked up and dark.”

  The car slowed.

  “Well, this is my stop. Morning coffee break. They have a really good mochaccino here.”

  Pen stepped out of the elevator, nudging Sandy along. “That sounds good to me.”

  They followed the girl, chatting their way to a long queue waiting for service.

  “I really need to get in touch with Mr. Holbrook,” Sandy told her. “Do you suppose Tamara would have a number or a new address for him?”

  “Dunno. I think I have her number in my phone.” She pulled a cell phone from her pocket and began thumbing across the screen as people ahead of them inched forward. “Yeah, here’s one time she called me and we met somewhere else for lunch.”

  Sandy took the number. Pen made a show of looking at her watch several times.

  “I’m afraid I don’t have time for a coffee after all,” she said. “I’m running late.”

  Sandy gave her a pseudo-impatient look and the two walked away.

  “Well, at least one thing this morning went smoothly,” Pen said as the two got into Sandy’s Mazda in the parking garage.

  “I’m not sure what a secretary can tell us but I’m willing to find out.” Sandy pulled out her phone and tapped the number she’d just received.

  “You might be surprised. The office staff are often the eyes and ears of a business.”

  “True. With otherwise-boring work, gossip often runs the place.” She perked up when the call was answered. “Hello, Tamara? This is Sandy Werner with Desert Trust Bank. I’m trying to reach Mr. Holbrook of Holbrook Construction and can’t seem to locate him.”

  “Sorry, I don’t work there anymore.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”

  If Tamara wondered how a banker had her personal phone number, she didn’t ask.

  “I’ve got some questions about the company and it’s the type of thing better discussed in person. May I come by, or possibly meet you somewhere?”

  A long pause.

  “You could come by the bank and meet in my office if you’re not feeling certain that I am who I say I am.”

  “Look, it’s not that. I really don’t care, unless you want to offer me a job. Right now, if I don’t get a paycheck real soon I’ll have to give up my apartment.”

  “Tell you what, then. Let’s call this a job interview. We’re short a teller at one of our branches.”

  Sandy had no idea if this was true but it was likely. At suburban branch banks, tellers came and went like butterflies. If she could do a good turn by providing Clint’s cast-off employee a job, it could be a win-win for everyone.

  “Come by in an hour.” She gave Tamara the address and hung up. With raised eyebrows she turned to Pen. “Well, at least she’ll talk to me.”

  She dropped Pen off at her Scottsdale home, hit the 101 Loop and arrived at her desk only five minutes before Tamara came walking through the door. Introductions and a little chit-chat paved the way into the conversation Sandy wanted to have.

  “Tell me about the last few weeks at Holbrook Construction,” she said.

  “Is this part of the job interview?”

  “Holbrook is a client of the bank and the questions are pertinent, so let’s say yes, it’s part of the interview. Everything said in here is in strictest confidence.”

  “Well, the office had been really quiet. Other than one lady coming in on a weekend who talked to Clint about some charity thing, no new jobs had come in for awhile. Not that he was worried or anything. We were in the midst of a huge project in China, and Clint was going to be away for several weeks.”

  “And he did go? All as planned?”

  “I sure thought so. I mean, yes, he went. I don’t know how the job was going over there. He touched base every few days for messages and updates in the office, but truthfully it was deadly slow.”

  “What happened next?”

  “Well, more than a week went by when I didn’t hear from him. Once I’d cleaned up the whole office and organized all my files and such, I was reading a paperback romance novel a day, sitting there at my desk twiddling my thumbs. The design engineers had finished their work a long time before, and even the draftsman didn’t need to be around. I was half tempted to forward the phones to my cell and just go out and have fun all day. Just my luck, I worried Clint would call and request something I had to be at the office to get for him.” She shrugged. “So I didn’t.”

  “Was it unusual that you didn’t hear from him for a whole week?”

  “Well, yeah. I was starting to get a little worried. Then one day the attorney calls. Derek Woo is his name. I’d thought he was in China with Clint—something the boss said one time—so I have no idea if Mr. Woo was calling from there or if he was back in the U.S.”
<
br />   She shifted a little in her chair across from Sandy.

  “Anyways, he tells me over the phone that Mr. Holbrook says my job is done. I’m finished as of that day. There would be a severance bonus which he would electronically deposit in my account.” Her mouth pinched in anger. “Some bonus. It was barely a week’s pay. I’ve got my rent, some credit card bills. It’s been two weeks since he told me this, and I’ve had one week’s pay to live on.”

  She seemed to remember her purpose in being here was a job interview with the bank.

  “I’m a good money manager, really. This just hit at a bad time. I never missed a day of work and I’m not the type who whines about emptying wastebaskets or washing the coffee pot. I like to stay busy at my job.”

  “I’m sure you do.”

  “It just kind of hurt, too, that Mr. Holbrook himself didn’t call. He still hasn’t called, if not to thank me for my efforts, then at least to say goodbye. Getting laid off by that lawyer just didn’t feel right.”

  Sandy realized with a shock Tamara had not heard about Clint’s accident. It presented something of a quandary—tell her Clint had been reported dead, or let her believe he might still be alive? Neither was a good answer, and she couldn’t take the chance Tamara would let slip to the wrong person that the death was now suspect. She gave it a moment’s thought then broke the news, in its official version, that Clint was believed to have perished during a fishing trip.

  Tamara’s face blanched. “Oh my god, I had no idea. Why didn’t anyone tell me? I just assumed he wasn’t coming back because he’d decided to move the whole business to China.”

  Sandy shook her head, giving the stunned young woman a few moments to absorb the news.

  “I’ll tell you what. I’m going to give a recommendation on your behalf to our HR department. There will be a background check, of course, and a formal interview with someone there. Call this number to set it up.” She handed over a business card. “Good luck. I’m sure you’ll ace it.”

  She watched Clint’s former employee get up and walk away looking as if she’d been slapped.

  Chapter 55

  Amber pored through the huge volume of emails that showed up once she cracked the code into Woo’s deleted files. Certain names showed up in abundance—Tiko Garcia and Rudy Tong. When she searched China or Philippine she got an Alphonse Ruiz, several others with surname Tong, the Beautiful Life Haven clinic where Kaycie had gone for her surgery and a scattering of others with the dot-ph suffix that normally went with Philippine websites and servers. It seemed a lot of crossover for a lawyer to have with his client’s personal business.

  As someone in the group had pointed out, why was Derek Woo connected in any way with a fishing trip for his businessman client? Somehow, he had to be involved in Clint’s disappearance, but so far she’d not found a direct link.

  However, when it came to opening and reading each individual message, she had a long way to go. The task felt daunting and she experienced a rare wave of discouragement. It could be she would never find the answers.

  Beside her on the desk, her phone let out a quick chirp and she glanced at the screen. A single word reminder message: EAT

  It was noon. She closed her eyes and stretched her arms over her head. Yes, it’s really that bad, she thought. I have to program a device to tell me not to get so wrapped up with my computer that I’ll starve. She stood and worked the kinks out of her back and hips with a few yoga stretches. She knew what Sandy or Pen would say—just wait until you’re older. You won’t be able to move if you don’t get some exercise.

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said as she went to the fridge for a glass of orange juice.

  The tangy cold revived her and she found a packet of string cheese and an apple to add a little protein and fiber to her lunch. She paced the length of the room, munching on the cheese, thinking about the task ahead. With each pass by the computer she clicked an email message from the list and quickly read it.

  Derek Woo to Tiko Garcia: Client arrives tomorrow

  Tiko: All is ready

  Woo to a company called Manila Charters: Destination set?

  Manila Charters reply: Yes. The sender’s name was Alphonse

  These all seemed to be about Clint’s arrangements for fishing—maybe even his disappearance—but the messages were so brief she had no idea if they meant anything special. She sat down and took a huge bite of her apple. Going through the messages, she began saving them to a separate folder where the Ladies could view them without the clutter of Woo’s other mail traffic.

  “I swear, this man must spend as much time online as a teenage girl,” she said as she went through the list.

  She paused when she came to a message that mentioned papers. It felt different. The term ID was in there. She flagged the sender, a C. Sanchez, and looked for other correspondence between the two. Nothing.

  A few days later something from the same server in the Philippines, but the identifier was Bureau of Documentation. Was there such a thing? The language in the message seemed almost juvenile, not really what a bureaucrat would use. Same server as the one that mentioned identification papers? It seemed like more than a coincidence, but when she performed a search on the domain name ownership, it wasn’t the Philippine government.

  WHOIS listed the domain owner as David Tong. Now, that could not be a coincidence.

  * * *

  Amber read off the names she’d collected from Derek Woo’s emails. The Heist Ladies had gathered at her apartment after Sandy called to say she and Pen had discovered something interesting about Clint Holbrook’s downtown offices.

  “Stop me if you’ve heard of any of these,” Amber said. “Tiko Garcia.” All raised their hands. Tiko had already been much discussed.

  “Alphonse—no last name.” Only Pen knew of him, and only the briefest mention from the bait shop guy at the beach.

  “David Tong.” Blank looks all around.

  “Perry Tong.” None.

  “C. Sanchez. I don’t know what the C stands for.” Nothing.

  She got the same response with the rest of the people and companies she’d unearthed from Woo’s collection.

  “I’ll consolidate the messages and send each of you copies. Maybe reading everything in context will bring something to mind. I’ve looked at them so often, my mind is numb.”

  Sandy took the lead next, filling Gracie, Mary and Amber in on what she and Pen discovered. Clint’s office furniture had all been leased and, this morning, was hauled away.

  “The whole top floor of the building is sitting there empty,” Pen said, sounding amazed.

  “Even before the repo men showed up, the place had basically been stripped,” Sandy told them. “There was not a file folder or computer in the whole suite. A couple of rolled up blueprints and some paperclips. The trash cans didn’t even hold anything of value. I think someone came in and cleared the offices, knowing the furniture would be repossessed. It had to have happened recently because I spoke with Clint’s secretary, Tamara, and she talked about filing and keeping the place neat up until she was summarily dismissed.”

  “You think it was Derek Woo?”

  “Or someone he sent there … I have no idea,” Sandy said.

  “He must have missed that little drawer inside the safe. Otherwise, he would have taken the empty checkbooks and the old passport. Well, I would guess. Who knows what the man’s up to.” She reached into her purse and got the roll of silver dollars, holding it out to Mary. “This is pitiful, I know. I just picked them up so they wouldn’t be taken by someone else.”

  A sad smile came over Mary’s face. “I remember these. At one point way, way back Clint collected coins. Just the spare change that came through our little retail store. Whenever he spotted an old coin he would stick it aside and take it home to look it up in a book. Guess he got too important to do that later on.”

  Amber sat at her keyboard for a couple of minutes, creating an email containing the messages she’d mentioned, to
forward to the whole group. Something that had nagged at the edges of her mind suddenly clicked into place.

  “I wonder what happened to the computer Clint carried with him?” she asked the group. “When I went to his office in Shanghai it was gone. Obviously, it never made it back to the downtown offices here …”

  “He must have taken it back to the hotel room each night he stayed in Shanghai,” Gracie said. “Then, I suppose the question becomes whether he took it with him to Manila. Surely the man operating the fishing boat would have turned it over if Clint had it with him that day.”

  “On a fishing boat?”

  “Well, you know … Some people can never leave their computers behind.” She was looking at Amber when she said it.

  “Hey. This is like an extra arm to me.”

  “Just teasing.”

  Pen spoke up. “Still, this is a very important question. If Clint did take the computer to Manila with him, most likely Derek Woo took possession of it. But if he left it behind in the Shanghai hotel, Kaycie probably brought it home with all their other things.”

  The room went quiet for a long minute.

  “Am I the only one thinking we should tell Kaycie our suspicions? If she does have Clint’s computer there could be tons of valuable stuff there,” Amber said.

  “And if the investigator was right, she could be in cahoots with him. Then what can of worms are we opening?” Gracie’s eyes were wide.

  Pen looked around at the group. “Perhaps the best idea is to approach gradually and see how it goes. We can say we’re suspicious of Derek Woo and have been since before the trip to China—some plausible reason will surely come to mind. Something about him masterminding the movement of a whole lot of money. We’ll ask if we can see Clint’s computer. Depending upon her answer, we’ll know what direction to take.”

  “So, like, if she’s nervous and refuses to let anyone see it, we’ll be pretty sure she’s in on the fake death scam with him,” Amber said.