Clint Faraday Mysteries collection A Muddled Murders Collector's Edition

by Moulton, CD

  “Something they might even kill to stop from being discovered?”

  “I suspect ... possibly, though I don’t see it.”

  “You are here because of the will?”

  “Will? I don’t ... his will is attested and filed. I doubt there would be any challenge to it.

  “Mr. Faraday, there is the possibility – and I am musing alone in my room – that someone in that family has been taking very large sums of money through various nefarious means from accounts of the late Lawrence Lesley. Perhaps that is the real reason he has asked that I come here to Panamá. I wonder if perhaps that person or those persons might be driven to commit murder to avoid being discovered. If the taker was shown the will would instantly be modified to where the psychological bent of Lawrence would make him seek total legal ramifications against that person or those persons. He was suspicious of such things since immediately before his wife died. His suspicions have increased greatly.

  “There is no doubt whatever that the funds and assets are gone. It remained to discover which of the people with access to those monies might be the perpetrator of the embezzlement. Perhaps I must now find someone with enough savvy of monetary processes to discover ... things.

  “Well, that’s what I know. It is certainly beyond my skills to do these things personally. I will have to think much on this matter. For the moment that is what I know.”

  “Thanks. Perhaps I can find out if the possibility of embezzlement is any part of this weird puzzle. The opportunity is certainly there.

  “I wonder who kept his financial accounts?”

  “He kept them himself,” Rasmussen replied. “It is why I have no means to further investigate the matter.”

  “Is Switzerland?”

  “In California. I suppose it’s in his computer. He was quite the expert with the machines, as incongruous as that may seem. I have no way to know. I am not authorized to practice in the United States.”

  “I think I can use the fact that he was murdered as leverage to get access. Thanks. I’ll get on it.”

  “The guilty party will get there first and will erase it,” Orison warned.

  “I can also prevent that!”

  He took what little added information they had and headed for his place to pack a bag. He got to Bocas just at dawn where he called at immigration to arrange for an emergency passage, then went to have Sergio tell the family that they couldn’t leave until his investigation’s preliminary search was complete, maybe three or four days. That would be three or four days Panamanian time. He had a week.

  He didn’t want to go to the states for a week. The only reason this would work was because it was in California. When he was ready he called Marko. Then he called Dave.

  “Dave? You studied a lot of odd things for your books. What’s an organic source of scopolamine and that kind of drug?”

  “Here? Datura, probably,” he answered.

  “Datura?”

  “Datura metel, specifically. Those pink angel trumpet flowers that are all over hell and back. Jimson weed. That kind of thing. Belladonna. Chalice flower.”

  “I’m headed for California. Want to come?”

  “Fuck you!” Dave has sworn he will never go back to the states.

  “I believe Mr. Lesley’s attorney has contacted you?” Clint asked the housekeeper and general manager of the Lesley Horse Farms Estate out of Mendocino, California.

  The woman was a storm-trooper type with a look that told Clint he would go through hell to get anything at all from her.

  “Yes. I have already opened the office, that room there (pointing to a door just to the side of the entrance). If I may aid you in any way, please push the button on the interphone three times and I will answer. I must attend my duties.”

  THAT was almost a shocker! Cooperation?

  Clint thanked Frieda Helmut and went into the room. It was stern enough for an office, a place for everything and everything in its place. The two computers were side-by-side on a long desk against the back wall of the room. Clint called Frieda to ask why two.

  “The black one is on the internet at all times, the grey one is used for the business.”

  Clint noticed that the two computers were to one end of the bench/desk. There was plenty of room for one or two more – and it would be much easier to use these if they were more to the center of the desk and farther apart. He checked behind to find a connected network cable down behind the comp closer to the center of the desk and connectors for the printer on a small table to the left end of the desk were down behind the desk and one to the right. Two laser printers, one not connected to anything – but plugged in?

  There were two eight outlet surge protectors with the printers and two present comps plugged into them. The internet cable had a splitter with the one set plugged in and another cable to nowhere.

  Neat! She didn’t worry about what he would find on those comps because the one(s) with anything were moved. There was a small Polaroid picture above the office comp of Amanda, Donald and Lawrence standing in front of the comp desk holding a trophy. There were four comps visible behind them in that picture. That meant someone who knew he was coming had warned her, which meant she was in on something with one or more of this cast of characters.

  He spent a little more than hour on the two computers making copies of the disks available as well as copying the entire contents on the hard drives onto flash drives he dropped into his pocket. There were four plastic CD/disk files neatly arranged with spaces where four had been removed from one of the comp areas and two from another.

  He then found Frieda and told her he had to look at Lawrence’s rooms and possibly glance across the rooms of the others. She said that was understood. The second floor was the children’s rooms and the top floor was Lawrence’s suite.

  There wouldn’t be anything in those rooms.

  A few minutes later he saw Frieda going into a cottage across the lawn talking on a cell phone.

  He used his own phone to call Marko. There was no way he could get a legal warrant here to search her cottage. Everything he wanted to find would be there. Marko could have everything searched and copied with no one the wiser.

  Clint wasted over an hour looking around. All he could find out was that Amanda and Lawrence had more pictures together, starting from when she was born, than any of the others. She was shown with a man who worked at the estate quite often as well as sometimes with the others who worked there. Sometimes Frieda was in the background, but there were no pictures with her directly since Amanda was about ten years old. She was often on horseback.

  Of course, that might be because the others didn’t keep them. Amanda seemed to keep every photo she had ever taken, and that was at least a thousand. There was a drawer full.

  Clint got the three-ringer on his cell phone that told him to get Frieda away from her cottage. He called her and said he had to have some information she could give about the family. She said she probably didn’t know anymore than he did, but she would try. They were by the office and he stepped inside. She couldn’t see the cottage from the front. He was to keep her occupied for as long as he could, then was to press the “call” button on his cell to warn Marko he couldn’t go on.

  Later, when he was discussing the immediate family, particularly Donald and Trudy Lesley (her given name was Trudy, not Gertrude), he remembered something she’d said at that table when Lawrence had pulled his choking act. He wanted a closer look at her rooms! He pushed the phone button and almost immediately an alarm sounded out back. Frieda jumped up and ran toward the back of the house, Clint close behind, to see a dark figure in a ski suit running from her front door carrying a black bag. She screeched and raced toward the house. Clint went back and to Trudy’s and Donald’s rooms. There was a disk in an envelope taped behind a painting of a vase of flowers.

  He had called the police as soon as Frieda ran toward her cottage and was back downstairs when they drove up. He told the officer there was an apparent break-in
of the cottage out back. Four officers went through with Clint and to the house where Frieda was screaming into her cell phone that “... a lot of it is gone! Gone!”

  She saw them and asked what they were doing there. Clint said he called the police, the first thing you do when there’s a crime. She said there wasn’t much missing. Just some music disks and DVD’s she had collected. It was probably some of the teenagers in the village below. There were some very bad people there. From Mexico and like that.

  Clint said they would have to handle it. He wasn’t even a very good witness. He’d just run back with her when the alarm sounded and had called the police, then waited for them to come. They took his ID and he left. He wasn’t staying in the states for a week. He headed back to Panamá.

  “All of this should be somewhere in the disks or on the flash drives,” Clint explained to Dave, Judi and Marko. “I see your operative copied the comps’ hard drives the same as I did. We can find who and how much, I suppose.

  “The first thing I want read is the one from Trudy’s room. I want to know what she had on the old bastard. He backed right down when she said she knew something that would surprise the others about him.”

  He dug around in his bag and brought out the disk to slip into his computer. The index brought up pictures. More than a hundred of them.

  He clicked on the first and used the arrows to look at them in sequence.

  It was Lawrence meeting with a man for a few, then with another, then with both. There were usually horses or tackle in the pictures. Lawrence paid the two a big chunk of cash in three toward the end. Then there was a picture of Lawrence, Donald and Amanda putting two trophies into the case.

  Clint and Judi shrugged. Marko looked thoughtful. Dave smirked.

  “What?” Judi asked Dave.

  “Those things are dated,” Dave pointed out.

  Marko grinned. Judi looked thoughtful. Clint had a studying look on his face, then he nodded.

  “I can find who they are. These are proof of Lawrence fixing horse races, I think,” Marko suggested. “It will be a big race. Two of them.”

  “Oh! If it was the Derby or something ... but he never even had a horse in that,” Judi said.

  “Not the triple crown races, definitely,” Marko replied. “Still, big ones. He passed a lot of cash for the wins.”

  “He made it on the bets,” Clint said.

  “And he paid those two to see that two other horses didn’t win,” Dave added. “We have to find races where Lesley’s horses were expected to come in a long second and where there was an upset.”

  Marko and Clint nodded. Marko said he could use the dates on the pictures to determine which races. He could use the fact his old organization ran the betting on most tracks to find out how much Lawrence took from them.

  “I think I see what he had in mind,” Clint said. “That money was channeled through somebody else who would be cut out by his death. He would come here, change the will and manage to die while making it look like murder. That’s why it seems so contrived. It was. Maybe we can find who in the other files. The doctor and lawyer are back in big-time!

  “He was trying to make it look like someone murdered him. Someone in that family. He didn’t want there to be any clues left as to which one so they would all stay under suspicion.

  “I don’t think Trudy was blackmailing him, but someone was. Find out how and when regular payments started to one of them from those records.”

  “It won’t be in the records,” Dave stated drily. “That would put the suspicion on one. He wanted them ALL to be suspects to force them to live with that land the state or whatever would take away from them in death taxes. He was a nasty old bastard, but maybe with good reason for a part of it. I just wonder when it started. Before the wife died?”

  Judi nodded this time.

  “Nope! There wouldn’t have been any reason to hide the comps if there wasn’t something there,” Clint said.

  “Then let’s get at it,” Marko replied.

  They spent more than two hours pouring over the flash drives, then started on the CD’s. The comps hadn’t shown much that would indicate Lawrence was suspicious or that anyone was hiding something big. There were quite a lot of expenses in relatively small amounts all of them had taken. The banking records on the CD was much like it. There were regular large withdrawals labeled simply, “Estate: S” and “Estate: C”.

  That would be Switzerland and California.

  “I noticed something strange, but that may be because I have no idea how big the Swiss place is,” Judi noted when they sat back.

  “It costs one hell of a lot to run the California ranch,” Clint agreed.

  “You missed a disk,” Dave insisted. “I think I see who was behind a lot of it. She’s working with someone here to have known to hide those comps.”

  “Good old Frieda. She was ‘way out of character there.”

  Marko made a call. He told someone to find that CD and to watch every move Frieda Helmut made. He was about to ring off when he added, “See who she’s chummy with at that place. It will be someone who works with the horses, I think. You can ... no. That’s probably here.”

  “What’s probably here?” Judi asked.

  “The copy of Trudy’s CD that Donald made,” Clint said.

  Dave grinned. “She didn’t know about it. She could figure it had to be that.”

  “She didn’t figure it when he was killed,” Clint pointed out. “She was in shock then. I imagine she’s found it by now and will be running scared. She knows who’s involved here. That puts someone in a very bad position.”

  He called Sergio and said to quietly protect Trudy. Don’t let anyone have a tiny hint she was under special attention.

  “She isn’t the killer here, I don’t think,” Sergio replied.

  “No. She knows who is. She will have it figured by now,” Clint agreed. “We have to play it close until we find who else is involved. I don’t think more than one here.”

  “And there?”

  “Two, probably. We know one of them.”

  Then all they could do now was wait until there was a lot more information from the states. Clint considered the set-up, then shook his head and told them he was going back to San Blas. That doctor was the third tip of a very nasty triangle.

  Or maybe the lawyer.

  Or maybe both.

  “What...?” Marko asked.

  “I have to get my hands on Lawrence’s medical records from when he started using Orison until the present. They’ll be in Switzerland. I don’t think he’ll object to having them sent over here to Sergio as a part of his investigation. He’ll think all they’ll want here is copies for the files that no one will ever read. No one here has the ability to decipher them.”

  “What?!” Judi exclaimed. “Some of the best medical experts in the world are in David and Panamá City!”

  “Yeah, but the records will come here to Podunk Hick Island,” Marko said with a dry smirk. “I’ll have some of the boys in Switzerland see that nothing’s left out of those records when they’re sent.

  “What’s the important part, Clint?”

  “For what I’m thinking, X-rays and diagnosis forms.”

  “Well, the not-so-good doctor was preparing to claim confidentiality until Valdez said he would then have to stay in Panamá until he could be called to testify in court. Probably three or four months,” Sergio said. “He whined about his practice going to hell if he couldn’t go back soon – and why did we want his medical records, anyhow?

  “I told him the man died of poison, but he also had terminal cancer. We have to prove the cancer part and to show his health was bad. I told him if we had the complete records to prove it the defense wouldn’t even bother to bring it up.

  “He asked if we had found the killer. He was VERY nervous then. I told him the killer would almost have to be someone in the family who was here.

  “He said that if no one would probably ever look at more than th
e overall general diagnosis his client’s privacy wouldn’t be much invaded and no one has the expertise to understand most of it, anyhow, so blah, blah, blah. He gave a legal POA to Valdez to take to Switzerland. His secretary would see they had copies of everything. They would only show what we already knew, anyhow, so there wasn’t any real reason to withhold them if it would aid in catching the person who murdered him, would it?

  “He’s creepy. I suspect he’s involved in some way – or maybe he thinks he won’t be paid if they say he wouldn’t cooperate with the police in the old bastard’s murder.”

  “See?” Dave fired back. “Ha! ‘No one will even read them and won’t be able to understand what they’re reading anyhow!’ Told ya so! Told ya so!”

  Clint gave him the finger.

  “What’s going on? Why do you need ... Madre de Dios!” Serg cried.

  “Jesus H. Christ!” Judi cried. “That slimy doctor was deliberately killing him all along! Slow and painful! He has some way to get his hands on those seven million euros as sure as I’m sitting here.”

  “And someone’s already gotten their hands on a lot of it,” Clint pointed out. “You know what this means?”

  “Means? What?” Dave asked.

  “Someone in that weird family knew about the doctor all along,” Clint replied. “I want to know if that one was in it from the first or if something got him or her involved later.

  “When? I’ve come across some very nasty people before in my cases. I doubt anyone was as nasty as that doctor and whoever else in a part of this scheme. Frieda, almost certainly. Donald is explained, at least.”

  They nodded. Judi shuddered.

  It would take two days for the medical records to arrive in Panamá City. They would be sent on an airliner, then by a local air delivery system. They should be in Bocas on the 8:30 AM flight on Wednesday.

  They would just have to wait for that part. Clint would decide whether he wanted to go to San Blas later. He doubted he would learn much before he had the medical records. If that doctor was part of what he suspected he would have trouble facing him without putting a bullet square between his eyes. Even such a bastard as Lawrence Lesley didn’t deserve that!