The Heir Hunter

by Chris Larsgaard

  Arthur Gordon wasn’t surprised. He sat to Arminger’s side and remained silent during the discussion, deferring to his deputy. The conversation he was quietly witnessing was only adding to an already splitting headache.

  “What did you say this attorney’s name was?” asked Arminger.

  “Lloyd Koenig.”

  “Start from the beginning. You approached Koenig and . . .”

  “When I showed him the warrant and asked for the file, Koenig was clearly uncomfortable. After stalling for a minute or so, he broke down and admitted he didn’t have it. By then he was practically shaking.”

  “Where did he say the file was?”

  Agent Hanson looked to a small notepad. “He said he loaned the file to a private investigator from Albany named Alex Moreno, who was there on behalf of a San Francisco company called Merchant and Associates. He said he also passed on a copy to a PI firm in Los Angeles called General Inquiry. He claims these were the only two firms he had spoken with.”

  “Did you get a contact at General Inquiry?”

  Hanson handed over the notepad. “The name’s circled, sir.”

  Arminger read it as Gordon finally spoke.

  “Agent Hanson, did Koenig say why he was giving this file to these investigators?”

  “He said they were interested in looking into the estate for the purpose of finding heirs.”

  Gordon nodded.

  Arminger thought for a moment, then rose to his feet. “That’ll do for now.”

  Agent Hanson nodded and left.

  Gordon waited for the door to shut before he leaned back in his chair and exhaled loudly. Now his head was hurting too. “Why are private investigators interested in Jacobs?”

  “What do they know that we don’t?” asked Arminger, not hiding his frustration. He looked to the pad again. “Alex Moreno, Lawrence Castleton. Merchant and Associates and General Inquiry.”

  “Have you ever heard of these outfits?” asked Gordon.

  “I don’t care who they are—I want to know why they’re getting involved.” He hit his intercom. “Carol, I need background checks on two individuals. Alex Moreno, out of Albany, New York, and Lawrence Castleton out of Los Angeles. The names are spelled just like they sound. I want full bios on their companies as well.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The names are General Inquiry and Merchant and Associates. They’re in Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He clicked the intercom and nodded at his chief. “This Jacobs business is getting interesting.”

  “Not for me,” replied Gordon, looking steadily at him. “You’re getting too wrapped up in this. I don’t want you going beyond these background checks until we get more answers.”

  Arminger frowned defiantly. “I don’t like being kept in the dark.”

  “Nor do I. I agree that it’s time we were briefed. I’m going to arrange a meeting back in Washington.”

  “I think it’s time, Arthur. We need to know. Ten or fifteen minutes, we’ll know exactly who these PI’s are.”

  “I’m delighted. But both of us need to be careful until I know more.”

  CHAPTER

  7

  ALEX HATED THE look. She used to draw it from him in college. It grated on her, that look of thinly veiled skepticism. After all those years, it still made her mad.

  “Don’t give me that little smirk, Nick.”

  “What are you talking about?” replied Nick, no longer smirking. He was leaning back on her kitchen countertop. “Why would I be smirking?”

  “You do it when you don’t believe me.”

  “Why would anyone follow you, Alex? Other than trying to get your phone number, I can’t think of any reason.”

  “It’s GI. They know we’re on this and they’re trying to see what we’re up to. You were probably being followed yourself—you just didn’t notice.”

  “As if that’s something I’d miss. Hey, I don’t necessarily see it as a bad thing if they were following you. Indicates to me that they’re as clueless on Jacobs as we are.”

  “I don’t like being followed.”

  “Take it as a compliment. If it’s them, they’re showing us respect. Too much, I’d say.”

  “What if it wasn’t them?”

  “Who would it possibly be if it wasn’t them?”

  Alex turned away, angry that she had no answer. She noticed the kitchen table behind Nick was covered with several small stacks of paper.

  “What’s all that?” she asked, pointing.

  “Jacobs’s mail. I grabbed it from his mailbox when I was looking around his house.”

  “Anything good?” she asked, taking a handful of letters.

  “Zero. About as boring as my mail.”

  She began to look through the little piles. “Did the neighbors know anything?”

  “Nope. Jacobs was the neighborhood outcast. Never talked to anybody.” He picked up a piece of mail. “I ran into the GI investigator out there.”

  “With the car, I hope.”

  “No such luck. Impression he gave me was that they weren’t exactly setting the world on fire either. Jackass made some smart quip: ‘You’ll never solve it.’ Like he was trying to bait me or something. I laughed in his face and drove off.” He dropped the envelope back on the table. “How’d it go with Bonnie?”

  “Not too well. She knew things, but she wouldn’t come out with them. I pushed her a little too hard and she threw me out.”

  “What do you mean ‘she knew things’? What was her relationship to him anyway?”

  Alex pulled a bottle of mineral water from the refrigerator.

  “A friend. She knew him for two years. She kept talking about the IRS, how much she hated it. She got all bent out of shape when I asked her if Jacobs was connected to them somehow. Said she’d promised him she would keep her mouth shut. Then she started talking about his enemies. Next thing I knew she wanted me out. I’m talking massive mood swings here.”

  “Sounds like she definitely knows something.”

  “I’ve got it taped. She said that he mentioned a sister once.”

  “That’s great. What about this sister?”

  “She said they were sitting around drinking one night and he just came out with it. She didn’t press him for more because he didn’t like to talk about his family. She didn’t know anything about her.”

  “Well at least we know he does have family. Nothing else?”

  Alex took a swig of her bottled water.

  “She said he had a German accent. He told her his father was Austrian. That’s the bulk of it, Nick. She wouldn’t tell me the good stuff.”

  Nick did a slow, thoughtful pace about the kitchen. “So we have an extremely wealthy old man with a German accent. An Austrian, supposedly.”

  “Maybe he was a Nazi,” said Alex. “That might explain his money.”

  Nick gave a bemused smile. “I was thinking the same thing. What the hell would an old Nazi be doing in Hudson, New York?”

  “Same thing they’re all doing—hiding out, I guess.”

  “It’s a pretty crazy theory. Being a wealthy old man with a German accent doesn’t make you a damn Nazi.” He thought for a moment, then looked up at her quickly. “I want to hear this Bonnie conversation.”

  Alex found the recorder and placed it on the kitchen counter. Nick rubbed his chin and listened silently as she continued going through the mail. He didn’t speak until the tape ended.

  “She knows things, all right. Think it would do any good to have me go talk to her?”

  “I doubt it,” replied Alex, studying a Jacobs bank statement. “You heard how stubborn she was.”

  “Don’t bother with the mail,” said Nick, reaching for his notepad. “We’ve got thirty-four pieces. Twenty-five pieces of junk mail, seven bills, one bank statement, and a statement from a mutual fund company. No family information at all.”

  Alex frowned and took a seat. She was stil
l feeling irritable about being followed.

  “One strange thing I did find in the mail,” said Nick, handing over a stapled set of papers. “Look at this and tell me what you think.”

  Alex recognized it immediately. A phone bill. She glanced over all six pages. The charge was over two hundred and fifty dollars for the month. “He liked to blab on the phone.”

  Nick pointed to the list of long-distance calls. “Look at those calls. What do you see?”

  “Lotsa 202 area codes.”

  Nick nodded. “Washington, DC. Look at all these different numbers, Alex. I called some of them. I got the Justice Department, FBI headquarters, the Pentagon message center, for Christ’s sake.”

  Alex placed her fingernail on the phone bill. “Look at this. On August 25, he called this one number at 8:10 P.M., then again at 8:12, 8:14, 8:16, 8:19, 8:21 . . .”

  “I noticed that too. There’s a bunch of patterns just like that.”

  She shrugged. “So he was probably one of those wackos who thinks the government planted a computer chip in his head or something.”

  “I agree—he’s probably nuts. But maybe not. We’ve been wondering where this guy got twenty-two million. Could be he was involved in something big, possibly with some sort of government agency.”

  “Probably so,” said Alex. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he had something to do with the JFK assassination.”

  He gave her an irritated look. “Ha-ha. I’m trying to be serious here.”

  “Who cares what he was involved in,” she said, spreading her hands in the air. “We need to find some family.”

  “Well, we’re doing a pretty crappy job at the moment.” He slowly shook his head. “I can’t remember a case where we had so many key documents and so few clues. I wonder if—”

  The phone rang. Alex got to her feet and answered it. “Hi, Rose . . . really . . . hold on a second. . ..” She covered the receiver. “Rose, Nick. She says she just got a strange call. Go pick up the line upstairs.”

  Nick jogged upstairs and found the phone. “Hi, Rose.”

  “You guys, I got a really weird call a minute ago.”

  “What was it?” asked Nick. His secretary’s voice sounded excited and shaky.

  “I’m not sure. I just got off the phone with some screaming attorney in New York by the name of Lloyd Koenig. Said he needed you to return the Jacobs file to him immediately. He claimed it was absolutely urgent that you get that back to him today. He said some pretty nasty things—”

  “What was he so upset about?”

  “He said an FBI agent had just been in his office asking about that file—”

  “What?” said Nick, nearly crushing a pen in his hand.

  “He said that this agent wanted the Gerald Jacobs file and names of all the people Koenig shared it with. He gave him your name, Nick. Yours too, Alex.”

  “What else did he say?” asked Alex.

  “He said the agent told him that he would be back for the file and that if he was lying about anything, he’d regret it. He was very rude—”

  “Did you tape it?”

  “Just the tail end. Hold on a second . . .”

  A winding noise could be heard, then a sound of humming static. Rose’s voice suddenly rang clear.

  “—do for you, sir?”

  “Just get hold of your goddamn boss, lady. Tell him to call me immediately! I need that file back today! I got goddamn FBI breathing down my neck. Tell him I need that file back now or I will have his ass! I’ll drag his ass down with me—!”

  “I’ll pass along the message, Mr. Koenig.”

  “I better hear from him soon!”

  “I’m sure you will. He’ll be checking his messages.”

  “I’ll be waiting!”

  Nick could feel the fear in Koenig’s voice. He felt a bit shook up himself all of a sudden. “Okay, Rose, thanks for the call. If anyone else besides Doug calls for me, just say I’m out of town and there’s no number to reach me at.”

  “Okay. Be careful, you two.”

  He placed the receiver down and rubbed his chin. When Koenig had handed over the file, he knew he had been taking a minor risk, a one-in-a-thousand chance, but for ten thousand tax-free dollars, he had opted to take that chance. The roulette wheel had landed on his number now, though. In all likelihood, he could kiss his cushy little career with the government goodbye.

  “Why is the FBI getting involved in this, Nick?”

  Alex stood in the doorway. She was rubbing her arms up and down, a nervous habit from college that Nick remembered well. He shrugged and tried not to show his own concern.

  “Wish I knew. Maybe my ideas aren’t so crazy anymore, huh?”

  “This isn’t good.”

  “No, it isn’t. It matches with what we were just talking about. Jacobs must have been somebody special, maybe in the witness protection program or something. That might explain the money.”

  “Koenig’s in big trouble.”

  “He knew the risks, Alex. We’ll send the file back, but I don’t think it’s going to help him too much now.”

  She nodded slowly. “Do you think the FBI will come after us?”

  “For what?”

  “We bribed him, Nick.”

  “They won’t bother us,” he said with more confidence than he was feeling. He twirled a pen in his fingers. “Koenig’s in enough trouble as it is. If he tells the feds we offered a bribe, he’ll be admitting that he took it, right? He’s looking to save his skin. He’s not going to add to whatever charges he’s already facing by admitting his role in a bribery.”

  “So what will he say—he just gave us the file?”

  “As lame as that sounds, it would be the smartest thing he could do.”

  Alex’s face was skeptical. “They’re going to call us. Watch. I guarantee they’ll call.”

  “Hey, they might. I don’t know what they’ll do.”

  “I don’t like this, Nick.”

  “You think I do? I don’t want to mess with the feds. But until I’m given a valid reason to stop what I’m doing, I intend to keep working on Jacobs. The entire investigation may soon be a moot point anyway at the rate we’re moving.” He rose and walked by her. “I need some lunch. What do we have to eat around here?”

  She followed him downstairs into the kitchen.

  “Maybe that person following me today wasn’t with GI, Nick.”

  “I don’t know who it was. I really don’t think it’s anything to worry about.” He peered inside the refrigerator and made a face. “What’s with all this fat-free stuff?”

  “Forget your stomach for a second, okay? I’m concerned about this.”

  He pushed the refrigerator door closed and leaned back against it.

  “I understand that, Alex. I just don’t think this is cause for panic.”

  “I’m not panicking—I just don’t like being followed.” She turned away from him. “This case is weird, Nick. There’s something else going on here.”

  Nick stuck his hands in his pockets. The FBI’s involvement undoubtedly confirmed his partner’s statement. “We need some fresh air,” he said. “Feel like going for a drive?”

  “A drive? We need to sit down and talk about Jacobs.”

  “That’s exactly what we’re going to do, gorgeous. I’ve got an idea.”

  Edmund Arminger paced the carpet of his Manhattan office and considered the latest information. He didn’t know exactly what it all meant yet, but at least he knew part of the story.

  The bio sheet on General Inquiry was enlightening. The company was a licensed private investigation firm established in 1956 by Lawrence Milton Castleton. The company specialized in “asset recovery and estate research.” Their main source of revenue was heir finding—the locating of persons entitled to unknown assets for a fee consisting of a percentage of those assets. The company employed thirty-eight researchers and was enormously profitable.

  “Heir finders,” he said, in Gordon’s direction. “Th
ey find heirs to estates. They sign them to legal contracts which stipulate a percentage of the inheritances to their companies.”

  “Now I’ve heard of everything,” said Gordon as he read the sheet.

  “Sounds like a shady racket,” commented Arminger. “Jacobs must have died with some bank accounts.”

  “So what do we have on the other company? What was the name again?”

  “Merchant and Associates. We’ve got nothing yet on the girl—too damn many Alex Morenos in the database. The company’s main office is in San Francisco. Nothing much is coming up on the system, although it does show them as having a PI license. Seems to be kind of a fly-by-night operation. Much smaller than General Inquiry, but they’re in the same business.”

  “So these companies bribed the attorney to get this file before their competitors did.”

  “I assume there was bribery, yes. Apparently the official release date of that file isn’t for another week or so. So they bought themselves a weeklong head start on their competition.”

  Gordon rubbed his chin slowly. “More complications . . .”

  “I wonder if there are any heirs to be found,” said Arminger. “I guess we’re going to find out.”

  “Guess again,” said Gordon. “We’re calling both of these companies right now and ordering them off Jacobs. Last thing we need are some meddling PI’s sniffing around where they shouldn’t be.”

  Arminger nodded and took his seat. He liked looking down at Gordon from the higher perch behind his desk. Not too much longer . . .

  “So how do we want to do this?”

  “Secure a line and make the damn call. Just be firm.”

  Arminger took the bio sheet of General Inquiry and reached for the phone. The president of General Inquiry was on the line almost immediately after the deputy director identified himself.

  “This is Lawrence Castleton.”

  “Mr. Castleton, this is Deputy Director Edmund Arminger with the New York City office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. How are you?”

  “Just fine,” answered Castleton, after finding his voice. “What can I do for you?”

  “An important matter crossing my desk this morning has made this call necessary. Do you know a Lloyd Koenig out here in Columbia County?”