Show Me the Money

by Connie Shelton

  A young assistant wearing an impeccable dark suit and silk tie led them up a staircase with elaborate iron railings to an office behind a heavy mahogany door. He tapped discreetly, waited for a response, and announced them in rapid French.

  Sandy stepped forward and shook the hand of the man behind the ornate desk. He was nearly six feet tall, with graying hair, a sharp nose, and a ready smile. “I’m afraid my French lessons never went beyond high school,” she said. “I was pleased to receive your emails in flawless English.”

  “It is all part of being an international banker,” LeBlanc said. He turned to Pen, who introduced herself. “Please, sit. How may I assist?”

  Sandy went through most of what she had already told him by mail, that they were investigating a theft from an American corporation and had evidence that the thief had transferred the money from a bank in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to his bank here in Paris. She had written down the series of routing and account numbers, along with dates and dollar amounts.

  “We believe the account was set up either in the corporate name of Blandishment Inc. or in the personal name of Cody Brennan.”

  LeBlanc turned to a slim computer screen angled on the corner of his desk, as he pulled out a narrow tray that held a keyboard. Glancing at Sandy’s notes, he entered account information and studied the screen, which was angled precisely to obstruct those across from him from seeing anything.

  Two wrinkles formed between his brows. He looked back and forth from the note to the screen twice more, verifying his information.

  “I see that you are correct. The money you have noted was indeed deposited, approximately three weeks ago. And it was entirely withdrawn yesterday. The account is closed.”

  “Yesterday?” Sandy’s voice squeaked slightly on the first syllable.

  “Oui, madam.”

  Pen spoke up. “Can you tell how the money was paid? Dollars or euros? Cash or cashier’s check?”

  “Oui, of course. Normally, we would close an account using our own currency, the euro, but it appears the client requested dollars—in cash. After the conversion fee and transaction costs, the amount was …” He tapped the digits on a small calculator Pen hadn’t noticed before. “In dollars, $9423.12.”

  The women exchanged a glance. What was there to say? Cody could legally carry that amount on an international flight home, with no one the wiser. He’d beaten them to the bank by a day, but they might be able to catch him at the apartment before he could pack up and go.

  They thanked LeBlanc for the information and left. It didn’t explain the several hundred thousand still unaccounted for, but they didn’t need to say so to the French banker.

  Chapter 29

  They walked the route on the map given to them by the concierge, strolling through the huge Tuileries and along the Seine into the neighborhood where Amber’s notes seemed to converge. Once there, they followed a few false leads but eventually came to the building shown in one of Amber’s vacation photos. Number 12. It was definitely an upscale building, with a burgundy awning and an elderly doorman standing guard.

  Sandy showed him one of the selfies Amber had taken of herself and Cody.

  “Ce jeune homme? Oui, je me souviens de lui.”

  Sandy got a blank look and shook her head.

  “He remembers Cody,” Pen said. “Let me see if I can—” She paused, thinking. “Il vit dans cet immeuble?”

  “Non, c’était l’invité d’un propriétaire.”

  “Il est … là maintenant?”

  “Je ne l’ai pas vu depuis deux ou trois semaines.”

  Pen turned to Sandy. “He was staying as a houseguest of an owner. At least I think that’s what he said. But our friend has not seen him in two or three weeks.”

  Sandy nodded with a wry grin. “All I got from it was the part about two or three weeks.”

  Pen asked the doorman if there was a manager or someone who spoke English. “I’m running out of my knowledge of French, I’m afraid.”

  The doorman led them inside, to the first apartment on the ground floor, where he politely tapped the brass knocker on the door. A dark-haired woman answered, dressed as Pen imagined a housewife of the 1940s would, in a shirtwaist dress and sturdy shoes. She gazed suspiciously at them until the doorman explained in rapid French what the two strangers had been asking about.

  “Do you speak English?” Pen asked. “I’m afraid my French is limited.”

  “Yes, some,” came the answer.

  “This young man,” Pen said, holding up Sandy’s phone with the picture on it. “We understand he was here as a guest of a resident? Is he still here?”

  The woman sighed. “Most unusual. He come, he give the penthouse owner name. He have their key. Say something about watching their home while they are away.”

  She went into an explanation that included the word Barbados before she switched back to English. “I do not like this. But I no control what residents do.” She gave a large, shoulders-touching-ears shrug.

  “The young man—how long did he stay?”

  The corners of the woman’s mouth turned down, her eyes moving side to side as she thought about it. “A week? Two week?”

  “When was the last time he was here?”

  Another shrug, more offhand this time. “Two weeks, maybe more.”

  The doorman had stood by, watching the whole exchange, and he nodded at this.

  “Could you let us see the apartment?” Pen asked. “Accompanied by you, of course.”

  The woman took a step backward, looking as though she meant to close her door to them.

  “We only want to be sure our young friend really did move out,” Sandy said. “What if something happened to him in the apartment? What if he is up there—ill? Or worse.”

  The prospect of explaining that to a returning homeowner was apparently worse than taking the chance of letting these women see inside. The manager held up an index finger, asking them to wait while she found a key.

  It was a very quiet elevator ride to the fifth floor, and the woman didn’t speak as she applied the key to the lock. She stepped inside first, calling out a name, audibly sniffing the air. Pen supposed it made sense. If some harm had, indeed, come to Cody Brennan his corpse would be very ripe by now.

  The apartment proved to be free of dead things. However, there were things seemingly out of place for a couple who had left on vacation. Dirty dishes in the kitchen sink, a robe thrown over a chair, a couple of takeout food boxes in the trash.

  The manager’s hands went to her face and she said something that probably meant, oh crap, I’m in trouble now.

  Still, there was nothing to prove Cody had been the one inside the apartment. The place was, if not precisely clean, at least neat enough to indicate there’d been no wild parties, no trashing of the rooms or furniture. Pen and Sandy exchanged a look, then thanked the manager and left the apartment, beating a path to the street where they could speak more freely.

  “Do you think it fits with Amber’s story?” Sandy asked, once they were a block away.

  “It could. I thought of snapping some photos to show her, but with the woman standing right there …”

  “Yeah, not cool to do that.”

  “Let’s give our feet a break,” Pen suggested. “There’s a patisserie where we can sit down and get a coffee.”

  Sandy couldn’t resist the macarons so Pen went along with the choice. With a cup of strong coffee and a cookie each, they settled at a table on the sidewalk.

  “Well, we struck out all around, didn’t we?” Sandy said after her first sip of the fragrant drink.

  “He obviously beat us to the bank, and by such a short time. I wonder if he’s still here in the city somewhere.”

  “Not staying at the same apartment, obviously.” Sandy made a swooning sound when she bit into the macaron.

  “No, and I suppose he could be nearly anywhere. If he knew his visit to the bank would be successful, he might actually be on a plane back to the US by n
ow.”

  Sandy chewed thoughtfully. “This seems like a lot of extra expense and effort to remove money from a bank account. He could have done an online transfer in five minutes’ time.”

  “But to close the account? Wouldn’t he need to be there in person?”

  “Some banks require an in-person visit, others don’t. I should have thought to ask that while we were there.”

  “No matter. It’s done now.” Pen sat quietly, contemplating the shops and pedestrians around them for a few minutes. “So, what now? We’ve come all this way for nothing.”

  “We still have the information Amber retrieved about the other deposits. There was money going to England and Scotland, as well. Maybe we can get to one of those before he clears it out. Wouldn’t it be cool if we were there when he walked in? We could nab the sucker.”

  Pen laughed gently. “I’m not certain our authority extends to personally ‘nabbing the sucker’ but I’d be willing to give it a try.”

  Sandy set her cup aside and flexed her feet. “Meanwhile, I vote that we take a taxi back to the hotel, rest our bones or take a soak in the bathtub, and once it’s a decent hour in Arizona we call Amber. She may have come up with some other ideas since we’ve been away.”

  “That’s the perfect idea.” Pen stood, adjusted the strap of her purse, and stepped to the curb where a taxi almost immediately pulled to a stop.

  Chapter 30

  Cody closed himself inside his hotel room at Orly and pulled off the fake eyeglasses. They always made him feel faintly nauseated, but it was important to keep the disguise intact as long as he could possibly be caught on the security cameras that seemed to be everywhere in the city now. The Cody Brennan look was especially important for his appearances in the banks.

  Yesterday had gone smoothly, showing up at Banque Internationale, smooth talking a young clerk and her supervisor, walking out with his nine thousand-plus after chafing a bit at the exorbitant fees to convert it and hand it over in US dollars. And even though his flight to England wasn’t until late tonight, he was fine with that. He had hours to do as he wished.

  The temptation was to go back to his old neighborhood, to enjoy a leisurely lunch at the street café where he’d taken Amber, to stare up at the penthouse apartment he’d used to impress her. One thing was certain—he didn’t want to hang around a generic airport hotel room all day. But he was faced with the dilemma of carrying around nearly ten thousand in cash or leaving it in the room. Neither was exactly a safe option, considering the gypsies who freely roamed the streets, watching for tourists to rob.

  He remembered a gift shop near the hotel’s breakfast room. Donning his suit coat and the black-framed glasses once more, he rode the elevator down and set out on a mission. The shop carried all the typical things: outrageously priced packets containing one dose of aspirin, earplugs to drown out airplane noise, bags of snacks—both familiar names and strange ones. He found what he was looking for, a pouch to wear concealed under one’s clothing. Precisely what he needed to stash the cash. He purchased it, along with two magazines and three bags of salty snacks. Pop had taught him to make his significant purchases less memorable to a clerk by adding extra items. Plus, he loved those mixtures of salted nuts.

  Back in the room, he packed the money into bundles as flat as he could make them. Probably should have bought two of the pouches. But he got most of it in, leaving only a few hundred to spread out between his pockets and his wallet.

  Then he changed from his suit to casual clothing—jeans, sneakers, and a bulky pullover sweatshirt—put the glasses in his inside shirt pocket, and arranged it all so the money pouch wasn’t noticeable. In the bathroom, he ran his fingers through his neatly combed hair, mussing it stylishly and sticking it that way with plenty of gel. It took five or ten years off his age, looking trendy instead of business-like. Pop had taught him ways to pass for any age from seventeen to thirty, depending on how he dressed and how he moved. He smiled at his younger image in the mirror.

  Backtracking yesterday’s route, he caught a shuttle to the nearest Métro stop and headed toward the city center. He was having fond thoughts of Paris, he discovered, almost as if he actually had lived there. It would be fun to revisit some spots, to catch a couple of the famous sites he had not visited. It wasn’t as if he would ever come here again. If he were to skip out of the US, it wouldn’t be for a city that turned rainy and cold in the winter; his ideas were far more tropical.

  The Métro deposited him at the Louvre-Rivoli stop. He and Amber had popped in at the famed museum but had covered a bare fraction of the exhibits. He could go there again. But he decided not. Art wasn’t really his thing—he’d gone with her because it was a thing all tourists did, and he had been playing the local guy who wanted to show his visitor around. It was a quick walk to the Tuileries Gardens, romantic with your arm around a girl, no big wow to somebody who didn’t care about linden trees or old statues. So he ended up just walking the streets, window shopping at the places they’d gone together.

  He strode right past the Vuitton shop, in case the clerk who had accepted his bribe to have Amber’s carry-on bag modified should spot him. That had been somewhat of a challenge, using Google Translate to put together enough French to communicate the idea of what he wanted. He’d used the app to come up with a repertoire of phrases to get him through whenever he was out with Amber and wanting to impress her.

  He crossed Place Vendome and walked facing the one-way traffic that was coming around the rectangular loop around the old fashioned bronze statue in the middle. In front of the Ritz, two women were getting out of a taxi, one tall and stately with gray hair in a smooth bob, the other shorter and blonde, a little on the pudgy side. Nothing about them said French—they were either American or British, and he guessed the former. He turned sideways and pulled out his phone, looking like every other twenty-something who couldn’t stop staring at a screen.

  From the corner of his eye he saw that they went inside the swank hotel. A chill went down his spine, the kind of premonition Pop would call bad juju.

  Chapter 31

  The furniture delivery men had set the larger pieces in place late yesterday afternoon. Now it was up to Amber to create some kind of order and make the spare room into her home office. She stood in the middle of the space, staring at the boxes and equipment she’d basically done nothing with since she moved in here.

  “Well, it’s time,” she declared to herself and the houseplant, which she’d brought in to take better advantage of the light in here and to brighten her desk.

  She started by placing her laptop on the desk and her new chair behind it. Those simple moves made the concept feel more real. Over the months, she’d already dug into various boxes, so she began with those which held her most-used supplies. Books and her few paper files could come later. She’d come to a large zipper bag of pens and markers, half of which she knew were so old they should have been thrown away ages ago.

  The phone rang and she saw that it was Pen’s number. “Hey, you’re not back already, are you?”

  “Oh no, this is just a report. Sandy and I are kicking off our shoes in the hotel room, then we plan to enjoy the spa facilities until we have to leave for our flight to London.”

  “Any luck?” Amber grabbed a scratchpad and began going through the writing instruments, scrawling large doodles, tossing the first marker when it didn’t work.

  “I’m afraid not,” Pen admitted. “It seems Cody got to the bank ahead of us. We changed our flight—it was meant to be tomorrow—in hopes we can get to the British bank before he does.”

  “Do you have all the information? Account numbers and such?” Amber asked, trying a blue gel pen next.

  Pen apparently had put the speaker on because Sandy piped up. “Yep, we did fine at the bank here, as far as identifying the account. It was just that Cody got here a day earlier and had already closed it.”

  “How is everything there?” Pen asked. “No more calls from your employer?�
�

  “Quiet. Probably too quiet,” Amber admitted. She rummaged through the cardboard box at her feet and came up with an old souvenir mug she liked to keep the pens in. “But I’m using my time well, getting my home office set up. And of course my parents are still checking in every day. Dad thinks I should be out applying for different jobs. Mom doesn’t get it that I can’t just pack a few things and go stay with them.”

  “No word directly from Cody?” Sandy asked.

  “Nothing. It’s so weird. He was so attentive in Paris, and I really had begun to think we had something. I guess it really was just a fling.”

  “That’s okay,” Sandy said. “Better that he vanishes than to be around if he gets you involved in some illegal shenanigans.”

  Amber laughed at the old-school word. “You’re so right. I think if I were to see him today, I’d … I don’t know. I’m tempted to say I’d kick him where it hurts or throw a drink in his face, or something like that. But I don’t know if I’m the type.”

  “I doubt you are,” Pen said, “but it might make you feel better.”

  “What would make me feel better would be to get myself out of this jam, to stop worrying that the police are watching me, and to catch whoever has caused me all this trouble. And if that turns out to be Cody, well, I don’t think I’d have any problem watching him go to jail.”

  “Good for you,” Sandy said.

  “Well, our spa appointment is in ten minutes,” Pen told her. “I’m going to soak my aching feet, get a massage, and then sink into my seat for the flight tonight.”

  “Have fun and call me if you need any other info,” Amber told them.

  She turned back to her task and made good progress with the bookcase and desk drawers. By noon she had a stack of boxes to flatten and take down to the complex’s recycling bin. Her printer was set up and working, and she’d checked in with each of her social media accounts where she posted chipper messages about how great it was to work from home. What she left unsaid was the simple fact—she was bored.