EASY GREEN

by Bill WENHAM

  ‘U.T’, the caller, was, of course, Willoughby’s Uncle Tom, a long time member of the crime organization’s executive board. No longer just gangs of cutthroats, organizations like these were run just like regular businesses.

  It was just their methodology of achieving their desired results differed quite considerably. Or maybe not!

  Willoughby had, since his involvement in Easy Green, been passing a good percentage of the money he was skimming from the company’s corporate funds to Uncle Tom and today it had all come to an abrupt end.

  The code they used was simplicity itself. A reference to a matter of life or death, even if cancelled in the following breath, meant exactly what it said. Do it. Do it now – or die!

  ‘Something has come to light’ meant one or the other of them had been rumbled. ‘Be sure to pack all your bags’ meant for the call receiver to get out with as much of his fortune as he could either carry or safely transfer.

  Next was the matter of the destination of his flight. There were only two choices. If the caller said ‘Bulgaria’, then the initial destination was ‘Bogota’ as interpreted by the receiver. Only the first and last letters were used. This would be followed by another code word somewhere in the message to indicate the final destination. No cell phones or other traceable devises would ever be used after the initial warning call.

  In the case of Willoughby’s message, ‘Lexington’ meant ‘London, England’ and the reference to him catching some Zs told him that ‘Zurich, Switzerland’ was his final destination. Uncle Tom would join him there as soon as possible.

  As it turned out Uncle Tom would get to his final destination quite a lot sooner than his nephew.

  Willoughby walked past Cheryl and locked the office door. He explained the call and the need to get away quickly to her. Although she wasn’t a party to everything or to the code, she already knew Willoughby wasn’t the legitimate business man he appeared to be.

  By 9.30 a.m., through a series of preplanned transactions via the Cayman Islands, the bulk of Willoughby’s personal fortune and all the corporate funds of the Easy Green Garden World Corporation had been electronically transferred to a bank in Zurich.

  Another part of Willoughby’s escape plan, should he ever need it, was a small Cessna four seater aircraft he owned and used for recreational flying as well. He and Cheryl had used it on their recent ski trip. It was parked at a private airstrip just outside Saginaw.

  Once they were aboard, with their hand luggage stowed, Willoughby took off. They headed southwest, taking a line north of Lansing and Kalamazoo and out over Lake Michigan and on towards Chicago.

  By noon, they’d landed at another small airstrip just to the south of the city of Chicago. The Cessna, although properly parked, was abandoned there. Willoughby would never need it again and with the money he had transferred, he could easily buy another.

  From the small airstrip, they took a cab to O’Hare Airport for a flight to London. Both Willoughby and Cheryl had only the clothes they stood up in plus a flight bag each. This in itself would have been a dead giveaway to any interested observers. What international traveler ever boarded a transatlantic flight with only hand luggage?

  The security staff at O’Hare asked exactly the same question. Willoughby explained to them that he and his cousin were flying over to London in an emergency and they hadn’t had time to pack. Cheryl managed to squeeze out a tear or two as Willoughby explained that his father was in hospital, dying, and was asking for him.

  In actual fact, his father was in a high security prison serving a life sentence for multiple homicides and would never ask for him. He had abandoned the girl he was living with, Charlene Willoughby, as soon as she had told him she was pregnant.

  Willoughby and Cheryl submitted to a thorough search of their bags and themselves and were passed on through.

  The five board members in New York sat around the table awaiting the arrival of the sixth man, their Chairman, Max Torrance. Finally, ten minutes late, he arrived, trailed by the organization’s two hard faced enforcers.

  “Good morning to you, gentlemen,” he said genially as he took his seat at the head of the table. “As you are well aware, Robert’s Rules of Order and the other normal corporate requirement for a quorum to be present, do not apply to us for obvious reasons.”

  He gave an almost imperceptive nod to one of his enforcers who took a couple of steps forward.

  “Consequently, I have an organizational change to announce this morning. As of today, our board will consist of me and just four other members….”

  Torrance paused and glanced around the room. “…. since one of you has elected to leave our organization today.”

  He stopped speaking again and allowed his gaze momentarily on each member present before continuing. All of the board member’s faces wore puzzled expressions, each of them wondering who was leaving and why.

  Torrance continued, “In an organization such as ours, and particularly if it is as illegal as ours, trust and dependence upon each other is an essential element. Without it, none of us would escape the electric chair or the needle for very long, would we?

  Yet, despite that, one of us present here today has decided, of his own free will, to betray that trust and the rest of us with it…..”

  He paused as Lawson, one of his enforcers, removed a length of piano wire from his pocket. It had a short piece of wooden dowel attached to each end of it. He moved forward to stand behind one of the chairs.

  Torrance continued to talk in a conversational tone as Lawson dropped the garrote over the head of the man sitting in front of him.

  “Consequently, Tom Dalton will be leaving this organization, this room….”

  He paused again, nodded, and watched as the enforcer tightened the garrote around Uncle Tom’s neck.

  ‘….and this world right now.”

  Tom Dalton struggled only briefly and then collapsed forward, face down, on the table. Then Lawson released his garrote.

  Lawson and his partner, Maxwell, lifted Dalton bodily from his chair and carried him out of the room. He would be found later that night in an alley in the Bronx.

  The Chairman looked around at the remaining four men.

  “He and Willoughby were the skimmers - the thieves, gentlemen. Unfortunately for them, Willoughby’s office recorded all of his and Factor’s incoming calls, calls which have always been forwarded on automatically to me. They included a warning one from Tom to Willoughby, who was his nephew, by the way.

  Willoughby has temporarily flown the coop, but, as it happens, he has also taken with him a means for us to easily track him down.

  I want you all to know that what you just witnessed wasn’t just about money either. It was a matter of professional pride and for the maintenance of our organizational security.”

  He looked at all of them severely.

  “A betrayal of us such as this will never, ever happen again. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”

  The other men in the room all nodded. None of them were in the least bit squeamish and death just came as part of the package but up until today the death had never been one of theirs.

  Hardened criminals as they all were, it still came as a shock to them to watch one of their own number being garroted to death right in front of them. They all believed a shot in the head was always a much more acceptable, if somewhat messier, solution to most of their problems.

  Torrance said abruptly, “If there is no other business, gentlemen, this meeting is now adjourned.”

  Without another word to any of them, he left the room. As far as he was concerned, his form of ‘corporate’ punishment had been administered quite satisfactorily.

  Willoughby and Cheryl Morton were not even halfway across the Atlantic before the now deceased Tom Dalton was relieved of his wallet in a filthy Bronx alley.

  “Guy’s dead an’ don’ need money no more,” the thin, filthy and drug addicted man mumbled to himself as he counted the wad of notes he’d just luc
ked out on. “Ain’t gonna need t’ be tellin’ no time neither,” he added, as he removed Dalton’s gold Rolex from his wrist. He searched the body but took nothing else and decided he’d been lucky enough for one day.

  Torrance had told his men to leave Dalton his wallet because he wanted him identified quickly. But thanks to a drug addict’s desperate need the dead man would now end up as just another John Doe in the City morgue.

  As soon as they had dumped Dalton, Lawson and Maxwell headed for Saginaw’s Midland/Bay City International airport to complete their next assignment in Switzerland.

  Chapter Twelve

  Willoughby and Cheryl Morton arrived uneventfully at London’s Heathrow Airport, Terminal 3. He was traveling on a false passport which he’d used successfully for several years. Since they’d only recently begun their relationship and Willoughby hadn’t anticipated any problems at Easy Green, there’d been no time to get Cheryl a false one as well. Consequently, she was traveling under her own name – Cheryl Mary Morton.

  That one small mistake was the undoing of Willoughby’s escape plan and one that would ultimately cost him his life.

  The organization knew a search for Willoughby could be both difficult and time consuming. Torrance realized, too late, that he should have obtained Willoughby’s whereabouts from Tom Dalton before he sent him off to meet his maker.

  So Torrance didn’t even try to locate him. The word went out to all his contacts – find the lady – and find Torrance’s missing millions at the same time.

  When Willoughby and Cheryl left the Arrivals Hall at Heathrow, passed through with raised eyebrows by the Customs official at the ‘Nothing to declare’ exit, with only hand luggage, they were immediately spotted.

  Several of the organization’s European personnel were interspersed throughout the welcoming crowd of meeters and greeters. A couple of them carried white cardboard signs with fictitious names on them, but all of them had electronically transmitted photos of Willoughby and Cheryl to compare to the faces of the arriving passengers.

  It had taken almost no time at all for Torrance’s New York staff to determine that one Cheryl Mary Morton had boarded an American Airlines flight from Chicago to Heathrow and to arrange for her reception committee to keep track of her.

  Willoughby gave a casual glance around and was convinced no one was aware of their arrival. He and Cheryl made their way to the exit to take the shuttle bus over to Terminal 1 to catch the next available flight on Swissair to Zurich.

  Neither of them noticed that someone in the meeting and greeting crowd had followed them and had also boarded the shuttle. They walked over to the Swissair ticket desk to book the next available flight to Zurich. Willoughby paid cash for their tickets with American dollars. Their Zurich flight was due to depart in just under two hours.

  During their somewhat apprehensive wait, they hadn’t noticed anything unusual, which wasn’t really surprising. The man following them had called from the bus to have a replacement take over in Terminal 1.

  Willoughby and Cheryl walked over to the check-in counter directly opposite and in stood in line with their hand luggage, tickets and passports. This time, just hand luggage wasn’t so noticeable because many people made short trips within Europe these days.

  They were still a few people away from the counter when a heavyset man bumped into Cheryl, knocking her flight bag out of her hand. He picked it up, handed it to her, apologized profusely in heavily German accented English and moved off into the crowd. It didn’t appear to be intentional and neither Cheryl nor Willoughby thought anything of it.

  They completed their check-in and headed for security and the Swissair departure lounge but they didn’t go alone. The German, in his brief encounter, had placed a miniature tracking device on Cheryl’s flight bag.

  The German dialed a number on his cell phone and surveillance from then on would be switched to Zurich where the fugitives would be tracked again. It was planned that Willoughby and his girl friend would be overpowered in their Zurich hotel room. Cheryl would be tortured in front of an immobilized Willoughby in order to obtain the Swiss bank access codes.

  If Willoughby elected to take the ungentlemanly course of giving up the girl rather than the money, the torturing would then switch to him anyway.

  There was only one certain outcome of this encounter. Only the money would return to the States. Willoughby and Cheryl would soon find out that their visit to Switzerland had been a trip to die for.

  The following day, the organization in New York was advised that all of the stolen money, plus Willoughby’s private fortune, had been transferred back to the States. The corporate funds had been returned to Saginaw and Willoughby’s own money was now in Torrance’s own private account.

  Torrance was also advised his instructions had been carried out to the letter and that Willoughby and Miss Morton were no longer a problem.

  He made a call to arrange for a bonus to be paid to all those responsible and requested photographic proof be sent to him.

  On the following morning, the battered and gunshot body of an American female and the naked and horrendously mutilated body of an American male, also gunshot as well, were discovered by a hysterical maid who came to clean their room.

  Police were immediately called in, but apart from the blood and the bodies, there was nothing else for them to find.

  The murders made the headlines of the early papers and were flashed news items on all the European television channels.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Factor had no option but to go along willingly when Streeter took him into custody. The body was found on his boat, but apart from that, without knowing who it was, the police had no immediate case against him and after making a statement in front of a judge, he was released without any charges being laid against him.

  Some time later, Streeter drove him back to the marina to collect his own car, but only making rather stilted small talk along the way.

  Then, another two days later, Factor was brought back to the station, to once again help the police with their inquiries.

  The autopsy on the plastic wrapped body had been completed and, via DNA collected earlier, on the night of the fire, the partially decomposed remains were identified as those of Delilah Factor.

  The pathologist stated that the body was been completely frozen over the winter and she continued on to say that, in her opinion, Mrs. Factor had died many months previously of a broken neck. She also believed the body had been inside the boat for the entire winter.

  Factor had been brought to the police station in a police cruiser but Streeter decided to drive him back home after he was advised the victim had been his wife, Dellie. Anyone could see Factor was terribly shaken and distressed by his loss. Streeter believed the emotion he was displaying now was genuine, because, as she’d told him before, he just wasn’t that good an actor.

  Once Streeter had dropped him off, Factor shut himself up in his house with only several bottles of Kentucky bourbon to keep him company. The only food he ate was any that only required heating in the microwave and even that was very little. He bolted all the doors, drew every drape in the house, sat alone in the darkness and drank. Up until today, Dellie’s death had only been a possibility. Now it was a fact and getting absolutely paralytic drunk was the best way he could think of for him to deal with that fact.

  He saw no one and, with his phones and television turned off, he was out of touch with the outside world for over a week. Everywhere he looked there were reminders of Dellie and he took yet another swig of bourbon straight from the bottle.

  Periodically he heard, through his drunken stupor, the sound of people banging on his doors and windows. He ignored them all and most times he slept wherever he’d collapsed. Sometimes he even made it on to the chesterfield but he just couldn’t handle going into their bedroom.

  Slowly he came to his senses and realized he smelled abominably. He realized he’d vomited all over his clothes and had obviously not made it to
the bathroom on at least a couple of occasions during the week.

  He’d been completely unaware of any of that until now.

  At 9 a.m. on Wednesday morning, Mrs. Harris, Factor’s cleaning lady, showed up for her once a week dusting and vacuuming of his house. She put her key in the lock, watched by the ever present media. The key turned but the door wouldn’t open. Both she and her observers now immediately realized that the doors of the house were all bolted from the inside.

  The media present then speculated that Factor had probably left by car before any of them had arrived. They couldn’t see through the garage windows either and finally, one by one, they packed up and left.

  If Factor had watched his television at all that week he would have seen the newscasters speculating there was more to the discovery of Dellie Factor’s body than met the eye and Factor just had to be involved.

  As the week progressed, other news happened to take over the headlines and Factor was left completely alone.

  Only one newscaster, believing he was being supportive of Factor, said that no one in his right mind would murder his wife and store her body on his own boat. It was meant to be supportive but it actually had exactly the opposite effect.

  The next blaring headlines read,

  “Is Dean Factor, the Millionaire Murderer, a raving lunatic as well?”

  Factor was unaware of any of this or anything else that had been going on, especially at Easy Green.

  He finally managed to shake himself out of his drunken depression, mainly due to the fact that he’d finished off every last drop of any form of alcoholic beverage in his house.

  He looked ruefully around at the room in which he’d held himself prisoner of the bottle for over a week. This room needs to be completely gutted and refurnished, he thought. But this time around there would be no Dellie or decorator to choose and arrange the furnishings. It was now just a house. It was no longer a home. Actually, it never had been, he thought sadly.