“They were having an affair. Did you know that?” Kathy says, leaning over to take some chips.
“No, I didn’t.” Not that I’m surprised at this point, though. Mauriello doesn’t appear to have much enthusiasm for celibacy.
“Well, they were. Had been for years. He’s very charming and handsome, and I think she fell under his spell. I don’t think anyone but me knows that. She left her husband last year. I don’t even think George knew.
“She’d been really depressed for the last year or two—seeing a doctor, taking meds, but not showing much improvement. A few weeks ago, she came over very upset. She was crying. All she would tell me was that it had something to do with Mauriello, something he had done. She absolutely loved him. I found him appallingly superficial, but she loved the guy. She wouldn’t even tell me—her sister!—what it was he’d done. She was afraid to go to confession, even. She really didn’t know what to do.
“I told her to go anyway—just get it off her chest, you know? That’s it.” Kathy takes a sip of wine.
“Did she?” asks Honey.
“She went over to her church—St. Geronimo’s, you know, over in the Richmond District. She told me it went well. She confessed whatever it was she was covering up, and she felt better. Then this.”
Kathy is not all cried out, it seems, and she begins sobbing.
“Kathy,” I say. “I’m so sorry this happened. Forgive me for asking, but did Tina ever tell you just what the archbishop was doing or what she was doing to cover it up? Was he stealing? If I know this, then maybe we can find proof in the records. We have her laptop from work.”
Kathy shakes her head and speaks in that combination of talking and spastic breathing that accompanies crying. “I have no idea what the particulars were. I don’t even know if it’s the fraud you’re investigating or something else. I told you, I’m not a numbers person. I can’t even balance my own checkbook.” She gets up and fetches her purse from a dining-room chair. “Here,” she says, handing me a phone. “This was Tina’s. I don’t have her password, but maybe you can figure it out.”
“This is helpful. Thank you,” I say, handing the phone to Honey.
“Did Tina leave a note?” Honey asks.
“Not that I’m aware of, and I’m the one who found her Tuesday night. We had tickets to the Alley Theater. But she called and canceled. She said she wasn’t feeling well and was leaving work early, so I went over to her apartment around seven to check on her. I had the building manager let me in when she didn’t answer, and there she was. Someone had called the police, and they arrived just as the paramedics showed up. She was in bad shape, barely conscious, but she hung on for a few hours at Mercy Hospital. She kept saying that she wanted a priest. The one at Mercy was tied up, so I called St. Geromino’s, and they sent someone over. I didn’t even know she had a gun, for heaven’s sake.” Kathy’s breath still spasms as she talks.
“Have you thought about talking to the police about this?” asks Honey.
Kathy shakes her head.
“You really should,” I add.
“Let me just say something here,” Kathy says loudly, the wine having kicked in. “Archbishop Mauriello is a superstar in San Francisco. No one will believe me. Even if they do, he’s smart and careful. I’m sure he’s covered his trail.”
“He’s a snake,” adds Honey.
“Okay,” I agree. “Let me work on this tomorrow and see what I can find in the records. I’ll let you know if there’s anything that you can take to the authorities.”
Kathy gets up, stumbling a bit, and gives me a hug.
“Thank you,” she says. “Archbishop Mauriello ruined my sister, stole her soul. You get him, Tanzie. You get him.”
CHAPTER NINTEEN
Sunday Morning
It’s in the low fifties and windy when I venture out to my balcony for my Sunday-morning smoke. It takes several attempts to get my cigarette lit, but eventually I achieve success. There’s no chair on the narrow space, so I lean against the painted metal pipe that serves as a guardrail and think about my conversation with Kathy Westmoreland yesterday. I wonder how I would feel if it was one of my sisters who had become involved with Mauriello and ended up suicidal. Yes, Kathy, I think to myself. Don’t worry. I’ll get him.
My room service breakfast arrives, and the server sets everything up on the dining table. There’s a vase with a single purple flower, a dish with butter balls and six different jams, a water goblet garnished with a lemon slice, and a silver bowl with sweeteners and enough cream to make a ten-inch quiche. It’s quite an elaborate production for coffee and wheat toast, and I suppose all of this is an attempt to justify the $50 bill, which includes both an eighteen percent gratuity and $15 service charge. The real quandary is whether I’m expected to leave another gratuity when I sign the chit. I’m unclear as to exactly how much of the included charges go to the middle-aged man in the black suit who delivered my breakfast. I leave an additional ten bucks and hand the paperwork back to the delighted waiter. All of this will be paid for by Honey’s former student anyway, so it really doesn’t matter, I suppose.
I power up Tina’s laptop and, while it comes to life, eat my toast. I look over what Honey’s been doing while I was doing my day job. She followed my instructions, copying all the folders from the archdiocese network to the hard drive so that, if IT ever got around to terminating her access, we would have all the accounting records at our disposal.
There’s a folder labeled “Bank Recs,” which contains an Excel workbook for each year with tabs across the bottom indicating the corresponding month. Clicking through the tabs reveals nothing unusual, no large reconciling items—just basic small stuff. There’s another folder with PDFs of the bank statements, and I double-check that the balances on the account reconciliations match the bank statements. Again, nothing: The monthly disbursements are fairly routine, and none are made to individuals or suspicious-looking vendors. Apparently, the archdiocese owns the shelter, so there’s no rent. There’s just utilities, phone, insurance, and typical expenses like a linen service, payroll, food, and supplies. It’s actually remarkable how low the expenses are. I suppose heavy reliance on volunteers and donations helps. I make a note to check on the payroll at some point; perhaps Mauriello has a fictitious employee or two.
Nothing sticks out on the deposit side either. The cash receipts show a steady stream of mid-sized deposits, only a few over four figures, and then very large ones in March and October after the golf tournament and gala, which makes sense. The golf tournament grosses close to a million dollars, and the gala brings in about two. There’s an investment account where the unused cash sits until it’s needed for operations. If Mauriello was skimming money from this account, it would be easy enough to find. I spend the bulk of the morning cross-checking the activity in the investment account against the operating account, but once again I find nothing.
I take a break around noon and walk along the Embarcadero all the way to Fisherman’s Wharf, dodging tourists and street performers along the way. The morning fog has burned off, but it’s still windy and chilly. I stop at a crab stand outside Alioto’s to buy a cup of seafood chowder. The line is about ten deep, but the superb opportunity for people watching provides excellent distraction. Groups of tourists hang around, watching the cooks shovel crabs into huge cauldrons of boiling water. A couple with a combined weight of a grand piano complain loudly about the prices to a gaunt bearded fellow in loose-fitting cargo pants.
“Nine dollars for a cup of chowder,” complains the portly man, who’s wearing long shorts, high socks, and an XXXL-size Chiefs jersey.
“Outrageous,” agrees his companion. “Wouldn’t cost more than three even in a big city like Branson!”
I cringe, knowing what inevitably happens when a tourist complains to a local, particularly about prices.
“Then I suggest you take your next vacation in Springfield or perhaps Kansas City,” retorts the bearded man.
The exc
hange is typical of San Francisco. Herb Caen, the legendary San Francisco Chronicle columnist, was forever mocking visitors for their lack of sophistication. As I remember reading as a kid, he suggested that San Franciscans wear sunglasses in the fog to take the glare off the tourists’ white shoes.
“Sir.” I raise my voice a bit so the Missourians can hear me. “There’s no need to be rude.” The bearded man pays me no mind. “I’m sorry,” I say to the tourists as they leave, hungry and offended, and I silently wish them luck in their pursuit of more affordable eats and kinder hosts.
As they cross the street, I notice a man in a Giants cap standing by the bus stop, watching me. He catches my gaze, and suddenly he turns and walks up Taylor without looking back. I remember the man Sandy pointed out from the balcony. Is this the same man? I can’t tell. I debate following him, but in the end I decide that I’m just being paranoid. I’m also compelled by the smell of the chowder to stay put. Even at $9 a cup and upwards of five hundred calories, it’s worth the price on my pocketbook and waistline.
I lean over a white wooden fence, looking out to the boats as I eat. How did I ever leave this? I wonder to myself. Honey’s right; I do need to find a way to get back here. Maybe I could find something at one of the tech companies or even arrange a transfer to Westwind. Rocky would hate me, though. San Francisco is no place for a hunting dog.
A ping on my iPhone interrupts my thoughts. Mark has sent Sandy and me an email with a link to a shared folder, which contains Marshall’s and Doug’s emails. Our IT group has extracted them from Google Vault, a storage service that saves all our emails for perpetuity. Most companies have a rolling six-month purge policy to reduce the chances of a smoking-gun email in the event of a subpoena, but CoGenCo was burned on a record-retention dispute with a regulatory agency and adopted the current protocol. Sandy emails Mark to tell him we’ll get on it first thing tomorrow, but I decide to head back and take a look today instead.
Reading another person’s emails may seem exciting at first, but just like expense report reviews, it can become boring quickly—particularly when it involves a tedious guy like Marshall. I start with Doug Minton’s emails instead. There are several thousand emails, so I cull the list by looking for several key words: “Boomer,” “Gerard,” “Senen,” “bid,” and “Mojave.” That brings it down to a slightly more manageable six or seven hundred. Many are chains back and forth within a large group without unique or useful information—just “great,” “thanks,” and “OK.”
After a while of going through Doug’s emails, I decide to switch to Marshall’s. I can’t imagine anything duller than reading Marshall’s emails, except of course actually listening to him. But just looking over the headers for his emails from the past week, I see something that’s the opposite of dull: a familiar name. Rich Gibbons at Juno Exploration.
There was a Rich Gibbons who was the head of EH&S at my ex-husband’s company. He’d been fired a few years back. Now he and Marshall were sending emails to one another under the subject line Winston Lewis’s ex.
I start at the bottom of the chain and go up.
Rich,
Guess who showed up in my office this morning. Winston Lewis’ ex, Tanzie. She must have gotten hosed on the divorce, because she’s an auditor for CoGenCo, our parent in Houston. I got an email from headquarters about some sort of bullshit helpline call. You met her, right? Is she worth worrying about? She’s with her boss, who is off the charts good-looking. Total BITCH. My plan is to keep them entertained, flirt a little, just let them run down the clock.
Marshall
Interesting.
Marshall,
Yep, I met her. As I recall, she had quite a large rod up her fat ass. Small wonder Winston dumped her in the grease, looks like he got the better end of the deal on that one. If you’re asking me if she’s smart, I don’t know what to tell you. Mostly she just smiled and stayed in the background. Can’t hurt to flirt a little, usually that goes a long way with old ones like her. Yep, keeping them entertained is good. Keeping them out of the office is better. Take them out for dinner, site seeing, schedule long bullshit meetings. They’ll eventually go away.
Rich
I knew I didn’t like Rich. What is particularly annoying is that back then, I was a good ten pounds thinner than I am now. I was walking eighteen holes most days, not relegated to sitting in front of a computer screen eight hours a day. But what throws me initially is less what they said and more the fact that Marshall is clearly involved in something he doesn’t want us to know about; yet, he had suggested it in an email, of all things. The short answer, I guessed, is that he is “tree stump stupid,” as Sandy might put it. Marshall probably deleted this email right after he wrote it, thinking it was long gone. He didn’t realize that all emails get uploaded to the Vault when they’re sent.
I save Marshall’s email into our audit folder. After a moment, I forward a copy of it to Sandy as well. It looks like Rich Gibbons’s and Marshall’s opinions of me, my fat ass included, are going to end up as an important part of our work papers for this audit. Lovely.
I’ve just finished copying the email when Honey shows up fresh from church in her Lanvin dress, but with a veil this time. “I want to get to work right away,” she says.
“Have at it,” I say, pointing to the dining table.
If it were Lucy, I’d spend the next hour processing my hurt feelings. We’d have tea. I’d cry. Lucy would tell me how wonderful I am and not to be discouraged by a pint-sized Texan with an unimpressive golf game. But this is Honey.
“I need to run out for a bit,” I say. “I’ve been through all the banking information on Tina’s computer and have come up empty. And see if you can access her Outlook account—maybe there’s something in her emails.”
Honey wants me to stay and show her how to do this, saying we can just order room service for whatever I need, but I leave her and take the elevator down to street level. I walk west. Chinatown is bustling with tourists in search of cheap trinkets, and I make my way through the throng until I reach Pacific Heights. It’s a beautiful area of the city, and without question it’s the most affluent. The architectural mishmash of Victorian, French, and Spanish styles creates a synergy of beauty not found elsewhere in the city.
Normally, scenery this beautiful would wrench me loose from the foulest of moods, but today it isn’t working. I head down Washington, entering Lafayette Park. The place is crowded with families and tourists, but I find a bench over by the tennis courts and wipe off a fresh blotch of seagull poop before sitting down. The email from Marshall validates what Sandy thought all along, and I can’t help but feel stupid for not seeing it myself. It confirms the perennial fear of the middle-aged woman when a man shows interest. What do you want? My money? Free laundry service? Or, in this case, a distracted auditor?
I feel tears welling up, but I inhale deeply to pull them back. And just like that, the self-doubt is gone and replaced by anger. Anger that I’ve been played. The smiles, the gala, the golf were all just a ruse to keep me off track. Therefore, Marshall is toast. Wait until I tell Sandy. The dumb blonde and her fat-assed sidekick are going to put Marshall Carter in the pokey.
“Where have you been?” Honey chides when I return to the suite.
“A walk,” I say. “Did you find something?”
“I couldn’t get into Tina’s email. Her access must have been removed. But …” Honey pauses for effect, “I found a suicide note in her documents file.”
“Really?” Honey’s reaction is confusing. I would have thought she would be crying, but instead she’s in full investigation mode, caught up in the moment of finding something meaningful in a mountain of irrelevant details. Perhaps being a nun helps: Distancing herself from painful situations in order to remain calm and be of help must be part of the job.
I sit next to my sister and look at the computer screen. “What does it say?”
Honey pushes the laptop screen in front of me. The date on the note is from
Tuesday.
My Darling Joseph,
As I write this out to you, I am consumed with sadness. Sadness because I can’t seem to make you love me anymore, even after I’ve done everything I can. I left George, and I covered up the accounts, but none of this seems to matter to you. You became so angry when I went to confession. I didn’t say anything about you personally to the priest, but you didn’t believe me when I told you that, and that hurts. It hurts that I allowed you to ruin my life. I have no family, no self-respect, no soul. I know that suicide is a mortal sin, but I just can’t stop thinking about it. In a way, it’s what I deserve. My deepest sadness comes from putting my faith in a man like you. I thought you were my savior, but instead you led me down this path to Hell. I will save you a seat.
Until we meet again,
Tina
I consider the plight of this woman I have never met. Was this note a cry for help or the real deal, left on the kitchen table for the paramedics to find? Yet, Kathy Westmoreland said there wasn’t a note. Maybe Tina never printed this out. Maybe it was emailed to Mauriello.
“Were there any other usernames and passwords in that notebook you found the other day?” I ask, deciding to probe Tina’s email account. “I wonder if Tina had something like a Gmail account for private stuff.”
Honey walks over to the cardboard box of files that rests on the long, modern couch in the living room and takes out a pink spiral notebook.
“Yes. There are lots of different things here,” she says, showing me the page.
I wish I’d looked at this earlier. There are twenty or thirty different accounts, including bank access and three Gmail accounts: TMCjunk1, TMC7431, and Monsignor55. The TMCjunk1 address is exactly that, a junk email address to accumulate the many advertising emails from retailers. TMC7431 is a personal email address that Tina used for personal correspondence. There are some emails from her sister Kathy and other noncommercial addressees.
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