Forty Thieves

by Thomas Perry

  As Ronnie stood in the shower she thought about Sid. In his career as a cop he had worked with all kinds of people in rough situations. Each time he’d moved on, just about everyone had been sorry to see him go. He was tough—a lot tougher than Kapp had been. But he had gone into police work believing that people were worth risking his life for. He had walked away from the department twelve years later with approximately the same belief, just a century older and with lower expectations.

  Hers were probably even lower. Seeing the things people did to each other had been a shock to her. And Sid had missed out on Ronnie’s personal vulnerability on the police force, her sex. Every woman had to prove over and over again that while she couldn’t be as big or as strong as a male cop, she could be good at the job. She learned to be an expert at talking desperate people out of doing things that were sure to cause them pain and sorrow. She trained herself to be one of the best at using the tools—the laws, the gun, the handcuffs, the baton—to keep the peace. Later, when she was a detective, she acquired encyclopedic knowledge of techniques of detection and the psychology of suspects, witnesses, and victims.

  She’d also made sure that no cop who worked with her had ever needed to wonder how she would behave in a fight. She had gone first through a lot more broken-in doors than she should have, just to keep that question from entering anybody’s mind. When she and Sid had both gotten about as good as they could get, built reputations as among the finest of the finest, they had given notice and then left.

  They had wanted to work together, after years of seeing each other for only a couple of hours between the end of his shift and the beginning of hers. They had been happy enough since then, and they’d managed to raise two children to adulthood. The kids were hardly images of their parents, and not even people she and Sid agreed with very often, but they were okay. And she and Sid had solved a lot of cases, in spite of the fact that most of them had come to their attention after they were essentially over—already worked to their limits and abandoned for lack of progress.

  The murder of James Ballantine was another one. The case had turned dangerous as soon as they started looking into it, but the danger had revealed nothing. Now, at last, Ronnie was beginning to see some progress. Ballantine had been a difficult victim at first—impeccable history, no vices, no vulnerabilities, no enemies, no friends. But now she and Sid had found an opening, a way in. The way in was the women.

  Emily Prosser opened the door of her apartment as soon as Sid’s knuckle touched it. She was a tall, slim woman with pronounced Asian features and long, straight black hair. “Hi,” she said. “You must be Mr. and Mrs. Abel.”

  “Yes,” Sid said. “And you’re Miss”—his eye caught the rings on her left hand—”Mrs. Prosser?”

  “Mrs. Emily Lin Prosser,” she said. She raised her left hand so they could both see the rings, and smiled. “I guess you’re detectives, all right.”

  “We’re just getting started this morning,” Ronnie said. “We’ll be quicker later in the day. Thanks very much for making time to meet with us.”

  “Yes,” said Sid. “Thank you.”

  “Come on in. There’s coffee. Want some?”

  “That would be terrific,” said Ronnie. “Can I help serve it?”

  “Follow me.”

  Ronnie and Emily Prosser walked off into the kitchen, and while Sid stayed in the living room he used the time to look around. The room was dominated by high bookshelves that contained the sorts of books that weren’t decorations. There were oversize textbooks in various areas of science and engineering, a number of shelves full of books in various languages, a few shelves holding great novels, mostly of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

  Part of one bookcase held perfectly aligned, identical issues of art periodicals, and another held jewel boxes of computer disks. Everything in the big apartment had an unpretentious, utilitarian quality. It was all used, all intended to function in service of crowded, active minds. There was a shiny baby grand piano in a corner, and it had a score open above the keyboard with pencil notations on it.

  The women returned to the room with the coffee, and he and they sat around a large coffee table. Emily Prosser said, “So you’d like to talk about Jim Ballantine.”

  “Yes,” said Ronnie. “This has been a tough case for the police, and now the Intercelleron Corporation has hired us to take a second look. The police officer who had been lead investigator, Detective Kapp, died a few months after the investigation began. We’ve looked through some of his notes and the records and reports in the case, and now we’re trying to fill in some of the blanks.”

  “I’m one of the blanks?”

  Sid said, “Detective Kapp followed standard procedures. When anyone is murdered, the police have to begin with the crime itself—the physical evidence, the crime scene, the body. In this case, the physical evidence was very slight. The victim was in the water so long, the crime scene was never located, and anything that went into the water with the victim could have been washed away. The second source of information comes from witnesses. There were none. The third source is the people who knew the victim—his friends, relatives, and co-workers usually know things that help. That’s the phase where we are right now.”

  “We’ve examined the notes from the interviews that Detective Kapp conducted,” said Ronnie. “Frankly, he didn’t find them much help, and neither did we. Everybody seems to have said Mr. Ballantine was a smart chemist, a nice man, and a reliable employee. So we’re going around asking a few questions, to get an idea why somebody wanted to murder a man like that.”

  Emily Prosser frowned. “What those people said was true, as far as it goes. Jim really was smart and personable and pleasant. And he did do his job the way he was supposed to.”

  “I wonder, though,” Sid said. “Everybody has some people who like him and some who don’t. There are strong human emotions—envy, anger, and in this case, maybe racism. And he was a single man in a business that included women, married and unmarried. Do you think he might have raised some jealousy?”

  Emily Prosser shrugged and gave her head a shake. “He never mentioned anything like that.”

  Ronnie said, “May I ask how well you knew him?”

  “I was probably closer to him than anyone,” Emily Prosser said. “He had been at Intercelleron for about three years before I met him. He didn’t have what I would call close male friends, but he said everybody was cordial and easy to get along with. And he had no relationships with women until I came along.”

  Ronnie’s face didn’t betray anything, but she spoke again quickly to signal Sid that she wanted to skip past that assertion. “What about relatives? Did he have any family nearby?”

  “No,” she said. “He was from the Midwest. If you listened to Jim, you’d think that people could never be pried away from there.”

  “Had he ever been married?”

  “Yes. He was married briefly, when he was in grad school. He said it was one of those marriages that happen before either person is mature enough to be ready, and it ended almost automatically when they grew up and became different people.”

  “Any children?”

  “No, thank God. They would be so sad now.”

  “Do you know the wife’s name?”

  “I don’t think he ever mentioned her by name,” Emily said. “If he did, it was in passing, and I forgot.”

  “How long did you date him?”

  “Just after I met him at Intercelleron, until he died. That made it about two years. But we were much closer than that sounds.”

  “What did you do at Intercelleron?” asked Sid. “Did you work closely with him?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “I’m an architect and interior designer. I was hired to redesign the offices, the labs, the public spaces. I started out by spending a few days looking at the facility and making drawings, and right away, Jim came to see me. He was in the process of designing his own ideal living space. He knew that he needed to lea
rn something about design. That was what he was like. Nothing—including his own limitations—was a permanent obstacle. If he found out he needed to learn a new language or a special fabrication process or modify a dozen computer programs to get to the next step, he would.”

  “He was redecorating his apartment?” asked Ronnie.

  “No,” she said. “He was thinking about his house.”

  “He had a house?”

  “He was planning to build one. He was looking for the right property to build on. I approved of that. People often come to me and ask me to transform what they’ve got into something completely different. They want their perfectly simple, respectable California bungalow recast as a French chateau or a Spanish adobe. They don’t see that you have to respect the natural setting. He did. He knew he had to begin with the right piece of land and build what the land called out for, to complete it. Otherwise you have to use bulldozers to destroy the character of the land and every living thing on it, move and distort the ground to make room for something that doesn’t belong.”

  “Did you ever go out with him to look at lots?” Sid asked.

  “A few times, when he thought he might have found the right property. I remember one at the beach, and one on a hill above Echo Park.”

  “How long had he been searching for the right piece of land?”

  “Maybe all his life. He had never had a house before.”

  “Interesting,” said Ronnie. “You were dating him for about two years, and he never found the right spot in that time.” As though it were an afterthought she asked, “Was he dating any other women during that time?”

  “No. He said that since he’d arrived at Intercelleron he hadn’t dated anyone, and we became serious about each other pretty quickly.”

  “Was marriage a possibility?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “If he had asked, I would have accepted his decision. He was very wise, and I would have trusted his judgment.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. It’s fairly common for people to say somebody has an old soul. I don’t believe in the idea literally, but I can see why people use that image. He was like that. He seemed too wise to have developed in fewer than forty years.”

  Ronnie said, “I don’t know how else to ask this, but were you—”

  “Sleeping with him? Of course. We were in love. When he died, I probably would have too, except that I knew he would have been disappointed in me for thinking that way. He believed in taking everything as it comes and getting the most out of each day.”

  Sid said, “Did you and he ever discuss finances?”

  “Money?” she said. “No. It wasn’t a very interesting topic for either of us. He worked for a good company, and I like to think my company is a good one too, since I’m the only employee. I suppose we would have had that conversation if we had decided to get married, but otherwise, why bother?”

  “How about in reverse? Did he ever ask you about your business?”

  “Nothing more than ‘How was your day?’ I probably gave him a longer answer than he really wanted, because I talk about things like that too much. I told him all about whatever project I had been working on. But he was sweet about it.”

  Ronnie looked at her watch. “I guess we’d better let you go in a minute. You’ve gotten married. I assume that was since he died?”

  “Yes. The wedding was only about two months ago. Life brought a suitable husband. I wasn’t looking for him or expecting him, but there he was. So I accepted him. Maybe Jim taught me that.”

  “You seem pretty happy.”

  “Very happy. A person has to move on when it’s time.”

  “Yes,” said Ronnie.

  “Well,” said Emily. She looked at her watch and stood up. “I hope I’ve told you what you need. If not, feel free to call me, and we can talk some more. Right now I’m afraid I have to get to the meeting with my client.”

  Sid and Ronnie stood up. Ronnie said, “That’s just fine. We may take you up on your offer, but we’re good for now. Thanks very much.”

  On their way down the hill to their car Ronnie said, “Ballantine certainly rolled out the bullshit machine for her.”

  “He was grooming her for something,” Sid said. “He probably got killed just in time to save her.”

  “Since he studiously avoided talking about money, that’s probably what he wanted,” Ronnie said.

  19

  Ronnie could hear the occasional rustle on the other end of the phone line as Selena Stubbs moved papers from one pile into another. Occasionally she heard her pick up a pile in both hands and shuffle it vertically so it hit the desk surface three times to make all the loose sheets neat. She said, “When James was fired from his job at the University of Indiana, his pay went to zero. When he got the job in California it went up again.”

  “May I ask how much?”

  “I think it doubled, approximately. I remember hearing him say something about how he was making twice as much, and so on, but it was a rough figure. We’re not talking about a whole lot of money here. Assistant professors don’t make much. But the money from the new job made a difference. We had to maintain the house in Bloomington, where the kids and I lived, and James’s apartment in LA, and cars and insurance in both places. And we had to spend a lot of money for James to travel back and forth across the country every week or two. We were already in serious debt from our eight years of student loans, the mortgage, and all the expense of his year of flying around for job interviews.”

  “We need to get a sense of his situation after the divorce, when he was employed and living in Los Angeles. Do you think he could have been saving money at that point?”

  “I don’t have to think about it,” said Selena Stubbs. “I know. I was still keeping track of our money until the divorce was final. At the end of the first year we had spent more than he made. The debts had grown, and a lot was on credit cards. We were paying plenty of interest.”

  “How about the second year?”

  “I wasn’t doing his bookkeeping at that point,” she said. “But I would have to guess it wasn’t a fast transformation. He was making progress, catching up on missed payments from some of the student loans, and trying to pay off credit cards. That didn’t leave much room for savings. And James was paying off the divorce lawyers and trying to pay the child support ordered by the court. We still hadn’t sold the house in Bloomington, so when the deficit got to be big enough he just signed the place over to me so I’d be stuck with selling it, and insisted that it took him off the hook.”

  “You accepted that?”

  “Yes. By then he was the new James. He had already realized that nobody was going to do anything to him if he stopped paying child support, so he was about to stop.”

  “There are people whose job it is to—”

  “It was an Indiana divorce decree, and the plaintiff had moved to Texas and the defendant to California. If I took him to court, he was ready to make a case that he couldn’t afford that much. There really wasn’t a lot of money to fight over. He still hadn’t paid off the debts. He had bought himself a nice car, but he was paying for it on time. By then I was here in Houston making good money in the oil business. It felt better to me to be free of any dependence or even expectations. That was what he wanted, so I gave it to him.”

  “Is it possible that he was hiding money?”

  “He lived in Los Angeles for three years after I last saw him. If he made a lot of money in secret, I don’t know what he did with it. When he died there was a bit over seventeen thousand dollars in his bank accounts, and that was about what I had expected.”

  “How about the debts?”

  “They were smaller than they had been, but by no means gone. I used all of his money and a bit of my own to pay the last of them off. I imagine between that and all the women, he didn’t have much left of his paychecks.”

  “Would you know why he would be out searching for a house to buy?”

  “With seve
nteen thousand dollars in Los Angeles? I don’t see any way that a bank would have approved him for a mortgage unless he came up with a big down payment. Maybe one of his lady friends was going to pay for it.”

  “You mentioned his new car,” said Ronnie. “Do you happen to have any information about it? An old registration or anything?”

  “I know I have that. I had to sell the car, so I’ve got the paperwork. I’ll scan it and send it on to you after we hang up.”

  “Thanks,” Ronnie said. “And you just reminded me of another thing I wanted to ask you about. How did you go about compiling the list of women he dated? Did James tell you, or was there an address book or something?”

  “I’m afraid that’s not a question I’m going to answer.”

  “Would it be possible to tell me why?”

  “I’m not going to talk about the subject at all.”

  “All right,” said Ronnie.

  “Here. I’ve found the papers for the car. It was a Lexus. And there’s a photograph of it too. I posted that online when I put it up for sale. Do you want the picture too?”

  “That would be great, thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. It’ll be in your e-mail. Anything else?”

  “No. And thanks,” Ronnie said. “We’ll try not to bother you again.”

  “To tell you the truth, I’m not so worried about that anymore,” said Selena. “I really hope that you do find out what happened to him and make whoever did it sorry.”

  Ronnie hung up and turned to Sid. “It’s definitely videos. Probably like the one he showed to Linda Bourget.”

  “You could tell that?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I could tell she watched at least some of them to be sure, and probably felt like killing herself, then and for a while after. She won’t say anything about it. And by the way, there was no money.”

  “What about his car?”

  “She sold it, but she had to pay off the loan he’d taken to buy it. Still no money.” She thought for a moment. “We should see if the police know anything about where the car has been.”