The Marlboro Man: A Moira McElvaney Mystery

by Derek Fee

  He put his arm round her. It felt good to hold her. He heard Carmichael enter the room and he removed his arm. ‘Give Brendan a call. If he’s available, ask him if he can come over. Maybe a fresh set of eyes can spot something we missed.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  B rendan had just finished a lecture. The adrenaline was still pumping in his veins. He was happy that he had returned to form so quickly and the enthusiastic faces of the students as they filed past him were enough to convince him that this is what he was born for. As an assistant professor, he was pulling in more students every year and the feedback was stellar so it was reasonable to hope that within the year he would be offered a tenured post. Life is strange and unpredictable. He had always been told that as soon as he finished college a place would be found for him in the family construction firm, but that wasn’t how things were going to work out. He didn’t start out with a career in academia in mind. In fact, he’d chosen criminal psychology as a major because he thought he wanted to be a cop, a typically Irish career. The more he studied and lectured the more he accepted the career path he was currently on. What would have happened if he had gone to engineering school and joined the family business like his brothers? The business has become a major player in Massachusetts, with plans to expand operations outside the state. His brothers currently earn a multiple of his salary, live in big houses and have cottages on the Cape. He consoled himself with the thought that maybe they weren’t really happy, but whenever they met he could see that they actually were happy and that his father and mother were equally happy that what they had built through their hard work was going to stay in the family. He knew though that he would never have been happy in business.

  It was the minds of the criminal classes that fascinated Brendan. He wasn’t just some academic closeted in his ivory tower. His work as a police consultant allowed him to put to the test many of the theories that he taught in his lectures. He wasn’t an amateur sleuth either. He was a professional psychologist who could spot and read signals that the average police officer missed. Besides his satisfying career, he was happy that things were back on track with Moira. He loved her so much but lived in fear that their tenuous relationship would not last. He’d been slow to recognise the inevitable consequences of the sacrifice she had made in coming to Boston, but the events of the past week, typified by their first real argument, had revealed the depth of Moira’s dissatisfaction with her new life. It was unfortunate that they couldn’t both be happy in the same place at the same time. He had viewed too many divorce mediations not to respect the right of either party to express their free will and to seek pastures new. What he didn’t appreciate was the havoc they generally created, which long outlasted their moribund relationships. Moira was already biased against long-term relationships because of the abuse she had suffered in her marriage. He had to respect that. He was ready to work through that bias with her because it was incompatible with his own desire for a long-term relationship.

  And then there was Frank Shea. Where did he fit into all this? Brendan had always thought of his friend as being asexual. He never saw Frank with a girlfriend during their years at college. But thinking as a psychologist, Frank had several attributes that women might find attractive, so it wasn’t really surprising that when they were thrown together Moira had been charmed. Brendan didn’t want to be the kind of guy who gives in to bouts of jealousy, but the positive emotions that he had been feeling after the lecture were dissipating.

  Back in his office, he sat at his desk and opened the right-hand drawer. The box containing the engagement ring was sitting where he had left it. There would be no need for the ring in the foreseeable future. He had finally understood that Moira was committed for one year and that after that all bets would be off. His phone rang and he smiled when he saw the caller ID. ‘Hi,’ he said.

  ‘Hi, are you busy for lunch?’ Moira asked.

  One of his colleagues had invited him for lunch, but he wasn’t interested in the faculty game of knifing competitors for the tenure track position in the back. ‘No, I have nothing planned. Is that an invitation?’

  ‘Absolutely, the team are meeting for lunch at Frank’s condo and, since you’re a team member, we’d love to have you along.’

  Brendan’s first reaction was to make up some excuse. He had just remembered a previous engagement with a colleague. But he knew it wouldn’t wash. ‘I’ll leave right away.’

  ‘Love you,’ Moira said, but she had the feeling that Brendan had already cut the line.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  A s soon as he was led into Shea’s living room, Brendan could feel the depressed atmosphere. Shea gave him what passed for a weak man-hug and then deposited himself on a couch, Moira gave him a chaste kiss and Jamie Carmichael simply looked up at him from her seat beside Shea. The fourth member of the team, a young southeast Asian man, ignored his entrance and continued tapping away at a laptop. Brendan was wondering whether the lunch had been organised as a wake for the investigation. ‘I’ve seldom see a sadder group of people. Where’s the coffin containing the corpse?’

  ‘That remark may be closer to the truth than we’d care to admit. The Gardiner investigation has hit the buffers in a big way,’ Moira said as she guided Brendan to a table where Justin had laid out an open sandwich lunch. ‘Try one of these wonderful sandwiches; nobody else appears to be hungry.’

  Brendan took a smoked salmon sandwich and bit into it. He wasn’t about to buy into the prevalent air of depression. He returned to the couch and sat beside Shea. ‘It’s not the end of the world, Frank.’

  Shea turned and looked at Brendan. ‘I was so sure we were going to find out what happened to Greg. I felt that we were getting close.’

  Brendan looked into the corner of the room and saw the whiteboard. Not just any old whiteboard but the Rolls Royce version. He could see that Moira had been busy trying to recreate the murder squad room at the PSNI station in Belfast. He finished his sandwich and made his way over to the board. Moira joined him.

  ‘Talk me through it,’ Brendan said.

  She pointed at the photo on the top of the board. ‘Gregory Gardiner, small-time accountant with an office in Concord. Plenty of clients, mostly mom-and-pop businesses.’

  Brendan pointed to a photo of Gardiner’s office in Concord. ‘That his office?’

  ‘Yes,’ Moira said.

  ‘What’s that shop below it?’

  ‘It’s one of those New Age places, all crystals, candles, statues of Buddha and singing bowls.’

  ‘Singing bowls?’

  ‘That’s what they’re called.’ She pointed at the text underneath Gardiner’s photo. ‘Family man, wife and two kids, one at college and one in high school, home every night, recently very excited.’

  ‘Mister all-American accountant, and then he disappears.’

  Moira pointed at the still taken from the video at Miami International. ‘This is the last shot of Gardiner taken from the CCTV cameras at the airport. A couple of seconds later the camera system went faulty. When it came back on line there was no sign of Gardiner. It was a real abracadabra moment.’

  ‘And the hypothesis is?’ Brendan asked.

  ‘That he was abducted. That’s the Miami PD hypothesis anyway.’

  ‘Which you agree with?’

  ‘It seems the most logical. He disappeared at the airport and he hasn’t been seen since.’

  ‘So the working theory is that he was abducted and killed?’

  Moira nodded.

  ‘By whom?’

  Moira pointed at the other side of the board.

  Brendan looked up and saw the name ‘Mr X’ with a question mark behind it.

  ‘So, who is this Mr X character?’

  ‘We have no idea. According to documents Gardiner left with Carmichael, he was a mystery client.’ She went on to explain Sami, the escrow accounts and the scheme to apparently import fake Marlboro cigarettes into the US. She showed him a hard copy of Sami’s analysis
of the documents.

  ‘And the twenty million dollars?’

  Shea joined them at the board. ‘In the wind, along with the mysterious Mr X.’

  Brendan returned to the table and selected another sandwich. He poured a can of soda into a glass and returned to the board. ‘I tend to agree that you’re right up against a buffer with nowhere to go. Mr X is gone and so is the money. A lot of already wealthy investors have lost money, but they won’t report it to the police because it is a small amount to them. And the man with his name on all the documents is possibly dead. It’s just about as clean as it could be.’

  ‘Thanks for confirming what we already know,’ Shea said, returning to the couch. He looked over at Brendan and Moira standing together at the whiteboard. Although he didn’t like to admit it, they looked good together. Moira was the first woman he’d been attracted to since before he’d entered Devens. It was unfortunate that she was the partner of one of his oldest friends, but he held with the old adage that all is fair in love and war.

  Brendan moved closer to the board and stared at the photo of Gardiner’s office in Concord. ‘There’s something wrong here,’ he said, thinking aloud.

  Moira moved close to him. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Gardiner is a small-time accountant with a crappy first floor office on the main street in a small town in Massachusetts. How the hell did this guy Mr X zero in on Gardiner? He obviously didn’t put ‘I am open to criminal activity’ into an ad in the local paper. Whoever put this con together knew what he was doing. So why Gardiner?’

  Shea stood up from the couch. ‘We’ve already been asking ourselves that question; so far we don’t have an answer.’

  Brendan kept staring at the whiteboard. ‘A mom-and-pop accountant wouldn’t be my first choice if I was attempting to pull off a twenty-million-dollar scam. There must be at least a million crooked accountants out there. How did Mr X settle on Gardiner? When you hit the buffers on one set of assumptions, it’s useful to change the assumptions and see what happens.’

  ‘What’s on your mind?’ Shea asked.

  ‘You and Miami PD are assuming that Gardiner was abducted and subsequently murdered. Nobody saw him being murdered and nobody has turned up. Turn that assumption around. Say that Gardiner wasn’t abducted or murdered.’

  Both Shea and Moira looked stunned. Brendan was challenging the whole basis of their investigation. ‘It doesn’t compute,’ Shea said after a moment. ‘Greg is a family man with a wife he adores, and two kids he thinks the world of. I can’t imagine a situation where he’s alive and choosing not to contact them.’

  ‘Perhaps he has,’ Moira said. She was royally pissed off. She was the police officer, and she should have thought of throwing the original assumptions out. She had allowed herself to get dragged into the groupthink that Shea and his cousin had developed. They obviously couldn’t imagine the ‘dad of the year’ being prevented from contacting his family.

  Shea had known his cousin Jean since they were small children. She was perhaps one of the most honest people he had ever encountered. It was inconceivable for him that she would have sent him on a wild goose chase. But what about Greg? Buying in to Brendan’s new scenario might be the only way forward. ‘Jesus, that puts us back to square one.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Brendan said. ‘You’ve already made fantastic progress on finding out what the scam involved. You just need to look at everything with new eyes. Turn everything on its head and see what falls out.’

  ‘It all started with the interview with Jean,’ Moira said. ‘Every question we asked or every photo we looked at was in the context that her husband had been abducted and possibly killed. We have to go back and talk to her again. This time we have to do it with the mindset that her husband might just have abandoned her and her children for his share of twenty million dollars.’

  ‘So, we’re still thinking that Mr X exists and planned this whole thing?’ Shea asked.

  ‘Let’s toss out one assumption at a time,’ Brendan said. ‘Can a mom-and-pop accountant put together such a complicated con? If that turns out to be the case, Gregory Gardiner is definitely going to be the star of one of my lectures. His background doesn’t correlate with that of a sophisticated conman.’

  ‘We’ll go back to Jean and ask the right questions,’ Shea said. He looked at Brendan. ‘This time I’d like you to accompany us. That is if you have the time?’

  ‘I’d love to.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  A n hour and a half later, Shea’s Audi A5 pulled into an open slot in front of the Gardiners’ house on 1st Street. As on their previous visit, Jean Gardiner had the door open before they had time to press the buzzer on the side of the door. They entered the hall and Shea immediately introduced Brendan as Moira’s partner and a professor at Harvard. Jean led them into the living room, where a coffee pot, four cups, a cream jug and a sugar bowl already sat on the coffee table. Although only a few days had passed, Moira noticed that Jean looked more like the woman in the photographs than the dishevelled figure she had first met on Martha’s Vineyard. She was wearing a floral print dress and looked like she had just stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting. She was obviously coming to terms with her new husband-less situation.

  Jean busied herself with pouring coffee for her guests before sitting down and looking expectantly at them.

  ‘We’ve made some progress.’ Shea looked at Moira hoping that she would carry the ball, but saw that he was to be their chief spokesman. ‘It appears that Greg was mixed up in a scam involving the supposed importation of fake cigarettes into the country.’

  ‘You’ve got to be wrong,’ Jean said incredulously. ‘Greg was never involved in anything shady in his whole life. Why, he never even received a speeding ticket.’

  Shea sipped his coffee. ‘We’ve uncovered evidence that he was one of the central figures in the scheme.’

  ‘You had no inkling that he was up to something nefarious?’ Moira asked.

  ‘No.’ The word was accompanied by an explosion of air. ‘I won’t believe that Greg was doing something criminal.’

  Shea explained about the documents on the USB and his own and Sami’s analysis. ‘There’s enough in those documents to put Greg behind bars for a hell of a long time.’

  Tears streamed down Jean’s face. ‘What are you trying to tell me?’

  Shea went and sat on the arm of her chair. He put his arm round her shoulder and could feel her body shaking. There was no way to sugar the pill. He decided it was a ‘good news, bad news’ situation and he would start with the good news. ‘We’re not sure that Greg was either abducted or killed.’ He could see the light of hope in her moist eyes. ‘We think he might possibly have gone on the run.’

  ‘Then he can come home,’ Jean said hopefully.

  ‘There’s twenty million dollars missing, Jean,’ Shea said. ‘If he comes home, he’s going to have a hell of a lot of explaining to do, and a hell of a lot of jail time to contemplate.’

  ‘The last time we were here,’ Moira said. ‘You told us that he was excited over the several months before his disappearance. How many months was that?’

  ‘Maybe six.’ Jean wiped away her tears with a tissue. ‘Before that, he never came home late and all his work could be done in Concord. Then he started to travel, maybe once a week.’

  ‘You mentioned before that he talked about moving away from Boston,’ Moira said.

  ‘Yes, that was strange,’ Jean said. ‘I found him one day looking up websites for property in Florida. He said he was searching for property in the Boston area but had ended up on the wrong website. He closed off the site when I went to look at it. He knows that I love living in Boston. There is no way I’d ever contemplate moving to Florida.’

  Moira made a mental note to ask Ricky if he could access some of the sites that Gardiner had been viewing without having his actual computer. ‘How are your finances?’

  Jean brightened. ‘Greg always managed the finances.
I never took much interest. I suppose it was because he was an accountant. I knew that we were well off, but it looks like we are a lot better off than I thought. The children’s college funds are in pretty good shape too.’

  ‘What about life insurance?’ Moira asked.

  Jean looked stunned for a second. ‘Gosh, I never thought about life insurance. I think Greg took out policies on both of us when the children arrived, but I have no idea whether they were updated. I don’t even know where the documents are.’

  ‘Have you ever met Jamie Carmichael?’ Moira asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You mean you never met your husband’s secretary?’

  ‘I took no interest in Greg’s work. I majored in art history at college and can’t get excited about spreadsheets and commercial accounts.’

  ‘But you have been to the office in Concord?’

  ‘No, I never had occasion to go there.’

  Moira made another mental note. Carmichael was hired about six months previously. Who was the secretary before her?

  ‘Can I ask why you got your cousin involved in your husband’s disappearance? Weren’t you satisfied with the police enquiry?’

  ‘Greg always told me that if anything happened I should get Frank to sort things out.’

  Moira sat thinking for a while. She finished her coffee and nodded at Shea.

  Shea kissed Jean on the cheek. ‘We have to go, but we’ll be in touch.’

  Outside, both Moira and Shea looked at Brendan. ‘Any observations?’ Moira asked.

  ‘She’s totally out of the loop. Despite the all-American family atmosphere, my guess is that she and her husband live completely separate lives. Maybe not in the sense that they live in different places, but they may be mentally divorced from each other. They don’t appear to have anything in common aside from the two children. Of course, I would need to meet the husband to confirm that, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that he had another life. But like I said, it’s difficult to form a concrete opinion on a short talk with one partner. There are a lot of questions I would have liked to have asked, but since they pertained to their sexual relationship I didn’t think them appropriate to your investigation.’