by David Wind
I raised a thumb. “Because, Scotty never stopped looking for him.” I raised a finger. “Two—because Scotty had files on a lot of eight and nine year old girls with blonde hair who disappeared in the same areas.” I brought up my third finger. “Because Scotty found a connection to him and the man found out. If he’s a politician, he wouldn’t take the chance of losing what he’s built over the years because Scotty found evidence. Either he broke into the apartment, when Scotty was working, or Scotty let him in. They argued and he killed Scotty.”
“I liked Lia Thornton for it.” Femalé complained.
“No.”
“She’s involved, somehow. I feel it.”
“What you feel is what we know about her. You’ve dug up all the bad parts of her life and are basing everything on that. Yes, she’s involved, but on the other side. She was abused. She may not have been abducted, but her father was a predator none-the-less, and she has all the scars—physical and emotional, to prove it. And Scotty knew it.”
Femalé took my words under deliberation and, a moment later gave a reluctant. “So what’s the plan, boss?”
She was learning. “The Kiss strategy.”
One eyebrow arched high over her right eye. “Excuse me?”
“KISS—Keep It Simple, Stupid. I’m going over to the phone right now, call the eight-hundred number, and make an appointment with Mr. Rice.”
“And you think Rice will go for that?”
“In a heartbeat: He’s shot at me, and had me shot at. He’s tried to blow me up and missed so yeah, he’ll want to talk to me when I tell him I want to deal. His history shows he makes deals.”
“And then what?”
“When I hang up the phone, I’ll see if I can find an all-night barber shop to get my hair to look less like some throwback punk rocker and more like me.
Chapter 52
It turned out there were no all-night barbershops and even if there had been I didn’t need one. After making the call to the eight-hundred number, and laying it out to the answering machine almost the way I’d planned, Femalé announced to both Gina and I that she could cut my hair, seeing as she’d cut her brothers’ and sisters’ hair all through school.
Which is why I ended up sitting on a stool in the middle of my kitchen, while Femalé, armed with an old pair of scissors from my desk drawer and a comb, hacked away at what was left of my hair.
There have been a few situations in my life where I’ve been truly uncomfortable, and not being able to see what harm she was wreaking on my sore head was one “I need a mirror.”
Gina broke out a big smile. “Just like you told the paramedic, ‘Not a chance’. Stop whining.”
“The cutie, the one with the dimple in his left cheek?” Femalé asked, the scissors chopping above my ears.
“You know him?” Gina asked.
“The paramedics are in the building a few times a week—heart attacks and whatever. I’ve seen him a few times. But he’s married.”
“Oh, isn’t that just too bad,” I said, certain the sarcasm would be lost on the pair “Concentrate on leaving me something besides scalp.”
“If you don’t stop moving around you won’t have scalp left either. Boss, I think it would be easier to shoot you than to cut your hair.”
“This was your idea.”
“You think he’ll call back or just show up when you’re not expecting it?” Gina interrupted.
Already sure of what he’d do, I hesitated a moment to let Gina believe I was considering her question. “He’ll call to set up the meet. He’ll need to think he’s in control.”
“So you told him that since he wanted an all-out war, you were going to give it to him, but if he wanted to deal that could be arranged as well. Is giving him a twenty-four hour ultimatum the way to make sure he’ll call you? Or is it a way to make sure he puts a sniper on the roof across the street? And, Jesus, Gabe, don’t you think that metaphor about starting a war is wearing thin?”
“Gina, you don’t understand.” Femalé jumped in. “It’s a macho thing. Both boys have their toys, and they’re going to see whose is bigger.”
Gina and Femalé laughed and when they finished I pulled out from under Femalé’s fingers and stood to face them both. “He needs to find out what I know, and who else knows. He wants to make a judgment call on whether a deal will work because he can’t afford to take me out until he knows he and his boss and anyone else involved are clear. And by the way, mine’s bigger.”
Femalé looked at Gina with a raised eyebrow. Gina had the good graces to smile.
Having had my say, I sat back down to let Femalé finish her work. “Go easy on my head, it hurts like hell.”
When she was done, I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. The me who looked back had a modified crew cut, maybe an inch longer than an army cut and, while the hair on the top was threatening to stand on end, it wasn’t half-bad. A month or so and it would be back to normal. I turned from the mirror, but moved too fast. The fatigue I’d been fending off hit me hard, reminding me I’d been up for twenty plus hours, seven of them in planes, had been shot at and then had a bomb do its best to decapitate me.
And now my muscles were giving up the fight by going tight and painful. With these wonderful things happening, I returned to where the ladies waited.
Femalé and Gina were talking. They stopped when they saw me. Gina’s face went from relaxed to aware. “You okay?”
“It shows?”
“It shows.”
“I guess my macho needs some rest.” I worked up a smile for Femalé. “The cut looks great. Why don’t we call it a night and meet here in the morning? We’ll work here until the office has a door. You could bunk on the couch if you want.”
Femalé looked at her watch. “I’ll be back in five hours.”
Gina favored me with one of her piercing Italian stares. “Not a chance. Someone has to keep an eye on you.”
Twenty minutes later, Femalé was gone and I was in bed with Gina giving me a gentle rub down to ease the aches road mapping everything except the soles of my feet.
As her hands moved over my skin, everything around me began to recede and the waiting nymphs of sleep embraced me.
<><><>
The smell of coffee woke me. My usual dreams had not haunted me; rather, there had been several different dreams—akin to edited scenes from different Tarantino movies. In one scene, I had been talking to Scotty and telling him not to worry because I would have his killer soon. Another dream sequence had me pulling a dead Margaret Ann McNickles out of the Hudson River, only to have her change into eight-year-old Elizabeth Granger who then changed into Lia Thornton, who opened her eyes and told me it was time to go to lunch.
In the last scene, I was kneeling over Streeter, whose glazed dead eyes began to blink. “You think they got me…. They didn’t get me…. They got you!”
Like I said, they were segments of weird dreams to which I decided not to pay any attention by flipping off the covers and swinging my legs to the floor. A low groan slipped out as I walked stiff legged to the bathroom.
I spent the next ten minutes stretching every muscle in my body until the stiffness and muscle aches began to ease and then hit the shower and soaked under the steaming hot spray. When I shut off the water and stepped out, Gina handed me a cup of coffee.
“Feeling better?”
“Then what?”
“Then you did, wise-ass. Femalé will be here in ten minutes so you’d better get dressed.”
“Yes ma’am. Shouldn’t you be getting to work?”
“I called in and told them I’d be late. Now shut up and get dressed.”
“Yes ma’am.” I kissed her and grabbed a towel. “I’ll be out in five.”
I passed on a shave because of the tenderness of my skin, preferring instead to get dressed and get going. I hit the kitchen five minutes later. Femalé, true to her compulsions, was sitting on one of the stool, her lap top open.
“Mor
ning, boss, I called the building and the door will be done in a couple of hours. They have a crew cleaning up the mess in the reception area. I told them nothing was to be trashed, no matter how burned or messed up.”
As I’ve been saying all along, Femalé was seventy-five percent and I was twenty-five percent of Storm Investigations. “Then we’ll go in around twelve. What about the phones?”
“I had the phone company forward the main line to my cell phone. I got one call on my way here from Arnie. He said he needed to talk to you.”
I reached for the phone, but Femalé stopped me. “He’ll be here in twenty minutes.”
Gina set plates in front of us and filled them with scrambled eggs. We ate, each keeping our own counsel until the food was gone and we were drinking coffee.
Gina looked over her shoulder at the clock. “Well kiddies, as much fun as it’s been, I have to go to work so my keepers can watch over me.” She looked down at her clothes, smoothed out her blouse and pulled on the dark blue suit jacket. She wore the same dark blue suit as yesterday because she hadn’t gone home yet.
“Think I can get away with wearing it again today?”
“No raised eyebrows because you’re coming to work in the same clothing as yesterday?” asked Femalé.
Gina’s laugh was light. “Femalé, I’m an FBI agent, blue suits are my uniform. I’ve got a half a dozen of this suit’s sisters in my closet.”
“Cool.”
“Gabe.” Gina turned her big browns on me, “don’t do anything foolish. Call me if Rice takes your bait. You need backup and I don’t care what they say at the office.”
“Let me walk you out.”
She grabbed her purse and exchanged a look with Femalé, said goodbye, and hooked her arm through mine. “Okay.”
I kissed her at the door, waited until she disappeared into the elevator and returned just as Femalé was finishing a call.
“I’ll have him call you as soon as he comes in,” she said and closed the cell phone. “Lia Thornton wants you to call her.”
“She say why?”
“No, but I’m sure it’s to see if she’s off the hook with you.”
“I thought we got that straightened out. It’s not Lia Thornton.”
“It doesn’t mean she isn’t capable of murder.”
I didn’t think so—not of the brutality I’d seen in Scotty’s living room. “What happened while I was in Miami?”
“Not much. I’m still waiting for the information you asked for on Lia Thornton—school records and all. But you don’t want them anymore, do you?”
“Yeah, I do. They’ll help Amanda understand her background better and be able to help her. You find anything yet on Pennsylvania politicians?”
“That’s at the office, if it’s readable. If not I’ll do the research again. There wasn’t a whole lot of promising information, but a lot of hearsay on the blogs. It blows my mind to see all the dirt on these politicians who say they represent the people. There were several who seem pretty clean and a couple who almost squeaked, even on the Internet.”
“Those I want to see.” The downstairs buzzer sounded and I pushed the intercom button to let Arnie up. When he came in, the nervous aura emanating from him was almost visible. Then he looked at me and did a double take. “Jeez, Gabe, you look like you’ve been in a war.”
“Coffee?” I asked, ignoring the comment.
He shook his head, his glasses dropping lower on his nose with the jerky movement. “No. Had two and I’m seeing a client in an hour. I want to show you what I have.”
“Show me.” I cleared a space between Femalé and myself on the counter.
Arnie pulled his laptop from his attaché, opened it and hit a key. The screen came out of sleep mode. “Okay,” he said, pushing the wire rim glasses further up on his nose. “You already know Thomas Albright was the Thornton’s’ stock broker. I was able to trace the transaction records back over the last fifteen years –”
“Fifteen years…. How the hell did you get that?”
He peered over the rims of his glasses. “Don’t ask. Anyway, I pulled all the transactions, looking into any irregularities. What I found was a little strange. I had to go to two thousand-one to find the start of the trail, which was actually the end of it.”
He hit a few keys and the screen filled. “Because Mrs. Thornton didn’t change the account, I was able to get into the bank and into the archives. It wasn’t easy, but I got there.”
The numbers on the computer screen were indecipherable. “Why not just tell me what you found?”
Arnie’s head bounced up and down twice. “Sure. There was nothing hinky in any of the records since Thornton died, but before that, there were lots of hinky things.”
“Hinky? What the hell does hinky mean?”
“Strange, wrong, whatever you want it to. But I found out, for as long as the account was open, there were transfers to another account in a Cayman Islands bank, under the name of Brian Vandegroten. The amounts varied between eighty-five hundred and ninety-eight hundred dollars.”
I chewed on his information. “How often?”
“Every other month, and went back as far as I could track the records.”
There were unlimited possibilities to what he’d discovered: an extramarital affair; or investment dealings; payoffs, blackmail or even a relative whom he was supporting,—a lot of possibilities. But the offshore account added another layer. “What makes this ‘hinky’?”
Arnie gave me one of those ‘Gatcha’ smiles. “When I went into the Brokerage account, I found more transfers, of similar amounts, to the same account. That’s hinky.”
“This Vandegroten’s account?”
“Yes. Transfers were done every other month. But when I tried to get into the account, I couldn’t. Their security is too high even for me.”
“Sum it up, Arnie.”
“Soon…. There’s more. I slipped into the International Bank Jeremy Thornton ran, to see if I could get anything. I did. You do know the Banking Commission, SEC and IRS were investigating him because of discrepancies right?”
He waited for my acknowledgement before continuing. “From what I put together, he had pulled three million dollars out of the company—no record as to where it went so I’m assuming he took cash—and then on the day before he died, he pulled the same amount from his brokerage account and replaced the money at the bank.”
“Hinky,” Femalé said from the other side of Arnie.
“You got it! But I couldn’t trace what happened to the original money, because there were no records.”
“Have you been able to trace Vandergroten?”
Arnie looked crestfallen. “I tried but there was nothing. It was a complete dead end. I couldn’t break through the Cayman security.”
“Any suggestions?”
“You’re the detective. Find out who Vandegroten is, and I’ll find out whatever you need me to.”
“Fair enough. Thanks Arnie, I appreciate this.”
“No problem. Oh, I almost forgot. When I first started tracking the Thornton and Albright stuff, I came across one strange thing. Lia Thornton had withdrawn a million and a half dollars and two days later, the money showed up in Albright’s personal account. The money went out the following day to Granger Productions. That mean anything?” he asked as he put his laptop away.
The answer was written across my face. “Yeah, Arnie it does.”
“We have another problem,” Femalé added.
Arnie zipped the attaché closed and then looked at Femalé. “What?”
“Someone bombed our office last night and –”
“Holy shit! That was your place I heard on the news?” He looked from Femalé to me and back to her again.
“Yes.”
“Was it bad?”
“Bad enough. We don’t know what kind of damage was done to the network.”
“I’ll have one of the guys there today. What time will work?”
“Around n
oon,” Femalé said.
“He’ll be there,” Arnie declared, and then picked up the attaché case. “I’ll check in when he gets started.”
“Thanks Arnie” I said.
“He may need to bring some replacement equipment,” Femalé suggested.
“That’s no problem. Let’s see what got messed up first. I’ll talk to you later.”
Femalé walked Arnie out, came back and sat across from me. “I told you….”
“Told me what?”
“Lia Thornton is involved. She loaned Albright the money to invest. Everything she and Albright did points to it being…hinky.”
I stared at her for several seconds. “What Arnie found isn’t part of this. When I’d asked him to get this information, I was working on the theory it was someone involved with the play killed Scotty, but we know better now. But I’ll to talk to Lia anyway.”
Femalé drew her shoulders back. Her eyes filled with argument. “Maybe you’re wrong, but if not, why talk to her?”
“Because Scotty was her friend and he was trying to help her. If Albright’s got his claws into her, financially, I’ll help her break away. She’s spent most of her life being manipulated by men who used her for their own purposes. Scotty was one who wouldn’t and, if I can do that for him, it will make me feel better.”
The fight left her eyes. “What about Rice?”
“He’ll call at the last minute—he’ll want me to wonder if he’s going to call at all.”
“You’re sure all he’s going to do today is call?”
Chapter 53
I spent the next hour on the phone, first with Chris, learning what the bomb squad and the crime lab had uncovered at my office, which wasn’t more than I’d already guessed, and then with Mancuso in Miami. Then I spent ten minutes on the phone with Sonny Marks.
Since making the deal with Marks, he’d run down the connection between the Contes and Joey Parodi but wasn’t able to find out much. Marks had braced Parodi, sweated him for three hours at the precinct, trying to find out who the shooter had been at the Looker’s club.
