“No, no, not yet, Mr. Royce,” she said. “Print out what?” She turned to the computer screen. “Okay, one moment, please.” She tapped a few keys and lowered her voice. “Excuse me, but are you all getting a lot of… No, no, I’m sorry, sir. Charts for Sam’s Soups, yes, certainly. Opportunity for margin expansion, and what was the other… oh, recurring revenue base. Yes. Right away. No, I don’t know if she was the only other one who had it in her database before she… before the… yes, sir. Just as soon as he gets here.”
I murmured to Macguire, “Let’s go look for your friend.” To Marla, I said, “We’ll be back.” Once Macguire and I were out in the hall, I said, “What’s your friend’s name? How long has she worked here at Prospect?”
Macguire blushed. “Bitsy Roosevelt.” His acne-scarred forehead wrinkled in thought. “She’s been here a year or so. I think.”
“Would you be willing to ask Bitsy if she knew this Victoria Lear person? See if Victoria was doing anything with the Eurydice Gold Mine?”
Macguire began, “Sure, but why do you ” but I grasped his arm and shook my head.
Brightly, I said, “Looks like we’re not the only food folks here today.”
Shifting his weight nervously next to the massive reception desk, Sam Perdue seemed to have utterly lost the serene composure he’d exhibited at the mine party. There, his blond hair had been neatly combed over what I now saw was a bald spot, and his pale face had been unemotional, almost ethereal. This morning his thin hair splayed out from what looked like a monk’s tonsure. His flushed face appeared miserable. His tie stuck out at a cockeyed angle, and one of his shirttails hung from his pants like a dishrag. Not surprisingly, the receptionist was resisting admitting him.
“I want to see Tony Royce right now!” I heard him demand. “It’s about unit expansion. He knows all about it.”
“You’ll have to wait, please,” the receptionist chanted as she pressed buttons on a telephone.
I greeted Sam with, “Hi, there. Are you doing all right?” I gave him a sympathetic look. “You seem upset.”
He looked at me with disbelief. “Goldy? Goldy Schulz? Are you catering another party for them already?”
“No, no, we’re just down here… with a friend.’ Behind me, in his sweetest voice, I heard Macguire ask the receptionist about Bitsy Roosevelt.
Sam sucked in his thin stomach and nudged the shirttail into his pants. “Are they going to invest in your catering business? You can tell me the truth, Goldy. Maybe I’m just wasting my time here.”
“I promise they’re not investing in me,” I replied heartily. The receptionist had hung up the phone. Carrying a load of papers, Albert Lipscomb’s secretary whisked down the hall to our right. A short, pear-shaped young woman in a beige suit entered the lobby and squealed with delight on seeing Macguire. Bitsy Roosevelt, no doubt.
“You’re married to a policeman, aren’t you?” Sam asked me uncomfortably. Albert Lipscomb’s question. Sam straightened his tie, but his face was still pinker than the walls.
I nodded and said cautiously, “Sam, are you sure you’re all right?”
He cleared his throat. “A woman fell on the steps going up to my restaurant at eight o’clock this morning and broke her ankle. We weren’t even open. It’s a bad break, and she was supposed to go by ambulance to Lutheran Hospital. I wanted to follow the ambulance, of course, to see if she was all right. But…” He paused and gazed at the massive rosewood desk. He seemed to have lost the thread of his story.
“And was she?” I prompted him. “All right?”
His face wrinkled with pain. “I don’t know, because there’s a picnic area that was washed out… you know the one just as you’re coming into Aspen Meadow?” When I nodded, he continued, “A child fell into the water this morning and nearly drowned. The parents flagged down the ambulance, and the ambulance stopped. The EMT gave the kid mouth-to-mouth and CPR.”
“What?”
“The ambulance… they have to do that, I guess, when’s it’s a matter of life and death, but the broken-ankle lady wasn’t very happy… . The kid’s okay, but they had to take him to the hospital; too… and I knew I was going to be late getting here… .” He blushed even more deeply and groped for words. “And then I couldn’t find a place on this street to park “
He was prevented from telling me more of his sorrowful saga by the receptionist’s announcement that he could go back to Mr. Royce’s office. Sam excused himself and rushed away.
Bitsy told us she had to go take the minutes of a meeting, “like right now,” so Macguire and I started back toward Marla.
“Bitsy says she didn’t work with Lear,” Macguire told me under his breath. “But she has a few people she can talk to. Says she has to be discreet, though.”
“Great.”
“I told you I’d make a good investigator.”
I sighed when we walked back into Albert’s reception area. There, Marla sat nonchalantly at the secretary’s desk copying words from the computer screen. Make that two good investigators.
“For heaven’s sake,” I exclaimed without thinking, “what in the world “
“Fantastic, you’re back.” She scribbled intently. “Keep a lookout for Lena, will you?”
Macguire squinted at the corridor, clearly delighted at an opportunity to conduct surveillance. I felt surrounded by lunatics. “Let’s leave,” I said, hoping to persuade them of the folly of their ways. “It’s quarter after nine. Albert’s not coming.”
Marla tore the top paper off the pad. “No way. I wanted to see who phoned our friend Albert this morning. Guess what other clients are worried besides me? He’s had twelve calls including the Hardcastles once and Sandy Trotfield twice.” Anger spiked her ” husky voice. “All Eurydice Mine investors. I scared a few folks, wouldn’t you say? Maybe Albert had more to hide with that assay report than he let on. So he’s playing sick to avoid everybody.”
“She’s coming,” Macguire reported, in a low growl that I suspected was heavily influenced by Humphrey Bogart. Marla tapped a few keys to bring up another screen.
“Everybody get on the couch,” I begged. . Lena entered looking as if she’d seen the proverbial ghost. “Who just talked?” she demanded. “Who said to get on the couch?”
“I did,” I replied. Heat flamed up my neck. Lena recovered and stared at me. “You have no idea how much you sound like… oh, never mind.”
I didn’t question her, just settled onto the couch by Macguire and Marla, who were earnestly flipping through investment magazines. Lena phoned Albert’s house and left a message on his tape. Fifteen minutes later, she dialed his cellular. No answer. Calls from Eurydice investors continued to pour in; I recognized their names from the Saturday night guest list. At ten o’clock I tried to convince Marla to go to her cardiac rehab. Instead, she got on the phone with Southwest Hospital and rescheduled.
At eleven, Tony Royce, looking as handsome as ever, rushed into Albert’s waiting room. Today he wore a camel blazer and dark brown pants that matched his perfectly groomed mustache. “He’s not here yet?” He addressed Lena. “What the hell is going on?”
“He’s had twenty-two calls;” she snapped. “And, no he has not called, written, or E-mailed his whereabouts.”
“Yeah, tell me about the calls.” Tony lowered his voice. “Marla, everybody seems to want to know about your little problem with the assay report.”
Marla exhaled loudly but did not reply. Tony’s energetically roving dark eyes took in our morose group. He asked if anybody wanted lunch and we all said we were staying put. When he returned an hour later, he bore bags containing two cold grilled cheese sandwiches for Macguire and grilled tuna and polenta, along with a raspberry-custard tart, for Marla, Lena, and me.
“I probably shouldn’t eat this tart, but I really was very upset,” Marla grumbled as she forked up a bite dripping with berries and cream. “It’s all Albert’s fault.”
Lena said sympathetically, “If he’s not here in a cou
ple of hours, I’ll drive up to his house to see if he’s hiding out.”
“I’m coming with you,” Marla said firmly. Unfortunately, we were all still there at three o’clock. In a convoy of four vehicles, Marla, Lena, Macguire, and I headed back up the mountain toward Eagle Mountain Estates, a swank development west of Genesee and east of Aspen Meadow. Once we were off the interstate, the large houses loomed in the mist. I felt a stab of worry about the Women’s Club dinner. I would give this expedition another forty-five minutes, and no more. We meandered along neighborhood streets until Lena pulled her Toyota up in front of an oversize A-frame of the genus mountain contemporary.
We rang. We knocked. We called. The front door was locked, as was the back. Marla traipsed around to a wall lined with windows.
“Albert! Albert Lipscomb!” she shouted. The more Marla called, the sicker Lena looked.
“Isn’t there something else we can do?” Macguire asked me. “The neighbors are going to call the cops if Marla keeps hollering like that.”
“I have a key, just wait a minute,” said Lena. She pawed through her purse and pulled out a key hanging on a chain decorated with a red plastic heart.
Within two minutes, we were all through the front door. Macguire loped up the stairs as if he owned the place. After a moment, he returned, smiling uncertainly.
“I don’t think there’s anybody here,” he reported to us.
As we walked through the first-floor rooms, I tried to calm Tom’s voice in my inner ear, something along the lines of not getting into trouble.
“Albert!” Lena called. “Al! It’s me!” There was no answer.
“Everybody wait here,” said Lena. “I know this place and I … know where Al keeps his things. If anyone’s going to pry, it should be me.”
Marla and I settled in the living room, which was decorated in brown, black, and beige. Along one wall were shelves full of books with fancy names like Driving Venture Capital on the Information Highway.
“Don’t touch anything,” Marla warned.
“We’re already in trouble, just for being here,” I informed her sourly. After the stunts she had pulled in the past few days, this hardly seemed the time for her to advise caution.
Macguire gazed out one of the floor-length windows. “The neighbors came out, anyway. They’re all gathered around like there’s been some kind of accident. Man, people are so nosy,” he said without a trace of irony.
Lena returned, looking even more anxious and ashen-faced than she had outside. Her blond cloud of hair appeared deflated. “He’s gone.” Her voice was vacant. “His suitcase, his clothes…” Her voice cracked. “His passport. We … he and I … He’s gone.”
“What?” Marla shrilled.
Wordlessly, Lena sank into a chair. I walked out to the kitchen, retrieved a Waterford glass from a cabinet, and filled it with water. Maybe I should have filled it with whiskey. Upon my return, Lena looked closer to fainting than when I’d left. She took an absentminded sip of the water, then said: “His closets are empty. His suits are all gone. Ditto his suitcases.”
Macguire interjected with, “Oh, man. I mean, can you believe this?”
“Wait,” I said. “What do you mean, gone? How do you even know where he kept his suitcases?”
“We… used to go to Estes Park together… .” Lena’s voice trailed off:
Marla addressed me tersely. “Call Tom.”
I gave her a helpless look and tried to think. Albert’s clothes and passport were gone? Where was he? “I will call Tom,” I said, “but I can tell you what he’s going to say. The cops won’t take an official missing person’s report yet. They have to wait forty-eight hours.” It was just shy of four o’clock. If Macguire and I didn’t hustle back to my kitchen right now, the Aspen Meadow Women’s Club would be out of luck.
A car honked out front and Macguire leapt to check the window.
“It’s Mr. Royce.”
Marla greeted Tony at the door and gave him the bad news. He choked and then he howled and insisted we were being ridiculous. Albert had to be somewhere around, he said firmly. Lena managed to struggle to her feet and confirm that Albert had absconded.
Tony looked wildly around the room. “There has to be a reason!” he cried. “This is absurd! He must have left a note or something!”
“You and I should go,” I said to Macguire. “We have an appointment to do food.”
“Well,” my ever-committed assistant protested, “who’s going to call the sheriffs department? They should jump right on this.”
I exhaled patiently. No question about it, Macguire was romanticizing police work. Once he spent a couple of months trying to track down drivers’ licenses and reports of missing persons’ vehicles, he’d change his tune.
When we came out to the stone foyer, Marla was slumped on the floor next to Tony. Both faces were studies in misery. Lena kept murmuring into a cellular phone about Albert being gone.
“I’ll call you,” Marla promised me. But she did not. At least, not for the rest of that day, Monday. Macguire and I were so busy with the chicken dinner for the Women’s Club, I didn’t have time to talk anyway. On Tuesday Marla did phone and say Lena had gone through Albert’s files at the office and the house. His datebook revealed nothing unusual planned, except for the partner meeting with Sam Perdue, which Albert missed. Tony confirmed that Albert’s passport and all his best clothes were indeed gone. Albert appeared to have packed and departed in haste. His Explorer was gone. None of the neighbors saw him leave. They hadn’t heard anything either, but of course it had been raining. Probably nobody even wanted to look outside.
Marla didn’t call again on Tuesday. I hoped her silence meant she’d spent most of the day at the hospital doing her rehab, the way she was supposed to. In any event, on Tuesday I was tied up preparing a last-minute vegetarian picnic for the board of the Audubon Society under porch eaves, because of the rain and came home so totally wiped out I slept for twelve hours straight. On Wednesday morning, Jake got loose. Arch and I spent several pleasant hours traipsing through damp pines and over soggy grass locating him. On our return, I pondered grinding up his dog biscuits in the disposal.
Marla showed up on my doorstep late Wednesday afternoon. Her frizzy hair was unkempt, and she was not wearing makeup. She was wearing a denim skirt and flowered T-shirt. Both her outfit and her appearance were totally atypical. Her skin, usually peaches and cream, was pale. I was afraid to ask if she was again short of breath.
“May I come in?” Instead of her usual bounciness, she sounded frighteningly subdued.
I invited her to sit down and gave her a glass of Dry Sack. The hand she took it with was trembling. For once it was good to have no jobs. I asked her to stay for dinner. She declined and drank her sherry in silence.
“Let’s go for a walk,” she said finally.
Arch was in the next room. I told him we were leaving. Even though the sun was finally shining intermittently through towers of white cumulus clouds, I put on a slicker, tossed Tom’s raincoat over Marla’s shoulders, and picked up two umbrellas. It would be good for Marla to walk. We emerged into the cool, wet-scented air.
I waved to a few neighbors as we moved down the sidewalk. Now that the rain had momentarily let up, the entire neighborhood, it seemed, was either out in their gardens putting in flowers, or out on their decks trying to soak up a little sun, dermatologists be damned.
“I feel totally depressed,” Marla offered glumly as we rounded the corner and started up a graveled foopath put in by some earnest Boy Scouts about ten years previously. The path was lined with pine trees and white-barked aspens, their buds still tightly closed because of the late spring. A sudden burst of sunshine made raindrops glisten sharply on each pine needle.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “Did Albert Lipscomb ever show up?”
“No.” She chuckled bitterly. Her fingers brushed pine needles and sent a shower of drops onto the gravel. “No indeedy. Tony filed the missing per
son report. this morning. The cops started looking for credit card usage, the usual. The Denver police department is mobilized now, too.” She took a deep breath, then moaned, “Oh, God.”
I tried to think. Had Tom mentioned anything unusual going on at the department? He had been tied up testifying in a forgery case he’d been working on for over a year. But I hadn’t heard a thing about what was going on at the department except for the usual complaints about Captain Shockley.
“The Denver department?” I asked. “Why?”
We came to a wooden bench, also placed by the Scouts. Marla said, “Goldy, will you sit down?”
I brushed raindrops off the cedar boards and obeyed. The sun slipped behind a billowing cloud; the sky darkened ominously. Next to me, Marla shivered as a raindrop fell. She said, “Before he left, Albert Lipscomb cleaned out the partnership account. Three and a half million dollars.”
“Judas priest… . How did he do that?”
“Well, he went to the central bank location. First of the Rockies, downtown Denver. Ordered the cash out of the account on Monday, picked it up on Tuesday. Apparently he charmed the teller, too.”
“Some charm job.”
“Must have been,” Marla said with eerie calm, “because she disappeared with him.”
7
Marla did not elaborate on Albert’s and the bank teller’s disappearance as no details were known. She did report that Tony was in a state of shock. He kept saying, “We have to make everything look normal. This is just a glitch. The work got to him. He’s just holed up in a motel with the girl. Maybe they’re in the Caymans.” The partnership would not immediately go under; they had a small escrow account as well as modest equity positions in Medigen and other companies. “It’s going to be okay,” Marla said Tony kept repeating like a mantra. “We just have to believe it’s going to be okay.”
This was not the case at the Furman County Sheriff’s Department.
“I don’t know how the cops reacted to the 1929 crash,” Tom told me as he patted an appreciative Jake that night. Tom shook his head. “But it couldn’t have been much worse than the way Shockley is handling this. He calls Prospect every hour on the hour. He calls the Denver P.D. every hour on the half, to see if they’ve found that teller yet. He’s handling the Missing Persons on Lipscomb himself.”
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