The Killing Green

by David Deutsch

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  The Endicotts didn't fare too much better for the remaining six holes. In fact, things got worse for poor Lee. I gave him the opportunity for double or nothing a number of times, and needless to say, by the end of our round, he ended up owing me a fair amount of money. So much, in fact, that I actually felt pity for the man. Because he was going to be writing me a large check, I agreed that we could have a serious conversation about his investment opportunity.

  Our foursome had some coffee at the clubhouse, and then Lee and I got down to business. I told him that I was still thinking about it and that two million was a large amount of money for anyone. He agreed but assured me that I could afford it. I was glad that he had such a firm grasp of my finances.

  He finally relented, and I was able to enjoy my second cup in relative peace. While we were talking, I was still thinking about the auction comment and Lee's interaction with Bill. Imogen had also gathered some information about Carl from Tori during the round. Most importantly, Carl was the number one guy after Lee himself at Endicott Financial. A trusted advisor and confidant of Lee's. And his death had been devastating for everyone at the company.

  After the Endicotts left the club, Imogen and I remained and had some lunch. We had invited Lee and Tori to stay, but Lee had some business back in Manhattan, so off they went.

  "That was a productive round," I said.

  "And a profitable one," Imogen said.

  I laughed.

  "Goes in the slush fund," I said. "Poor Lee. Golf really isn't for them."

  "Oh, he just wanted to get us to invest. He would have given you his Rolex if he thought it would get you to cut a check," she said.

  "I know. It's kind of sad," I said.

  "Sad as in desperate, or sad as in a futile attempt that he's too blind to realize."

  "Both."

  She sipped her water.

  "Dreadful."

  We finished our lunch and, after a rather short discussion, decided that we were going to pay John Carrington a visit. We had a lot of information to discuss with him, and I was hoping that he had something to discuss with me. Something like where the hell they were in their investigation. The guy hadn't made a peep about it since day one. As he had pointed out, we're colleagues. Well, kind of.

  We arrived at the appointed time at the old brick building in the middle of town. Imogen and I strolled in, and moments later we were in Carrington's office.

  "Detective," I said, greeting John.

  "Max. You in a formal mood today?" he asked, shaking his head.

  "Imogen," he said. "So what do you two want to chat about?"

  He directed us to have a seat.

  "Oh, the weather, the Yanks, you know, the usual stuff."

  "Max, I'm a busy man. Can we get to it?" he said.

  Someone was in a mood.

  "Sorry, John," I said.

  Imogen looked at me approvingly.

  "I wanted to see where you guys were with the Carl Westbrook case," I said. "We've been poking around, and I wanted to see if what we have jives with your info."

  John looked pleased. He sat back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, and relaxed in his seat.

  "What've you got?"

  "Bill," I said.

  John didn't seem impressed.

  "The golf marshal guy? What about him?"

  What about Bill? Was he playing coy, or was he really clueless? I was shocked.

  "Something's not adding up with him. For starters, we found the initials LE in his appointment book erased on the Carl Westbrook entry. There's nothing else erased in that entire book."

  John sat up straight in his chair and then put both elbows on his desk.

  "There's an appointment book?" he asked. "A private book?"

  He was clueless. He had no idea. Bill was not one of their suspects. That was, if there was a suspect at this point.

  "Yes. There's a handwritten book that sits in that shed. The computer printout should match up with the book."

  John looked like he was processing what I was saying.

  "And you found initials in that book?"

  "Yup, LE," I said. "I think they stand for Lee Endicott. I also found a business card of Lee's in the golf shed."

  "And how did you find that?"

  "I broke in and snooped around," I said.

  John smiled.

  "Bravo, Max," he said. "See, this is exactly why I hired you. These sort of investigative skills."

  "You mean I can search things that the police can't."

  "I didn't say that," John said, smiling.

  Now it all came together for me. We were John's para-police. Able to operate outside of the law. Breaking and entering without a warrant. Of course, if we ever got caught it would be my ass and Imogen's ass on the line. John got to walk away scot-free.

  "It doesn't have the best ending," I said. "He was onto me, and we sort of had a confrontation at Delmar."

  "Confrontation?"

  I was embarrassed to tell John what had happened.

  "Yeah, well, Bill kind of knocked me out by the valet stand."

  John laughed, hard.

  He shook his hands. "Max, I'm sorry. I don't mean to laugh. But, if I remember correctly, Bill was an older guy."

  "You remember correctly," I said.

  He was still laughing.

  "So you think Bill did it," John said, finally bringing the laughter down to a mild chuckle.

  "I don't know for sure, but I certainly think we need to look into it. One thing's for sure. He's covering something up."

  "I would agree, Max. We've done some work as well," he said.

  "I'm happy to hear that," I said.

  "It is my job, Max," he said. "It's interesting you mention Lee Endicott. Carl was his right hand man at Endicott Financial, and we have been trying to get ahold of Carl's emails. Apparently they are all on a secure server in the cloud, and Endicott's lawyer isn't too keen on giving us access. He's tying things up. We really need to see those emails."

  I knew what John was asking me to do. He wanted me to hack into the server and take a look through the emails. See what I could find, then report back to him.

  "I understand. There could be some important files on there," I said.

  John looked at me and then pushed a piece of paper across the desk. It was Carl's email address and an IP address.

  "I'm glad you understand how important those files could be. We'll keep plugging away and see if we can make some progress with his lawyer."

  "Anything else?" I asked.

  "I'm going to think about the Bill angle. My gut is he's not our guy. Although he could certainly be involved. But that's all we've got."

  John stood up and made it clear that the meeting was over. We all shook hands, but Imogen also received a kiss on the cheek from John. We walked out of his office and then out of the station. It was clear what I had to do. I had to hack into Lee's servers.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  We drove home from the police station with a newfound purpose. Carl would tell us what had happened. Through his emails. Through his words. We were hopeful that somewhere in his thousands of work emails we would find the answer. The answer to this riddle. Who had murdered him. And maybe even why.

  "Can you do it?" Imogen asked.

  I didn't know if I could. I wasn't a professional hacker, but I certainly knew my way around a computer. I'd done it before. For fun. And not in an illegal way. Sometimes I would help some of my portfolio companies troubleshoot their security to reveal any vulnerabilities that might be lurking somewhere beneath their tens of thousands of lines of code. But I had never done it in a malicious way. Never illegally hacked anything in my life.

  "I'm certainly going to try," I said. "But I'm going to need a drink first."

  "Isn't that a given?" she asked.

  When we got into the office, I fired up the laptop and got to work.

  "I'm going to need that drink," I said.


  "You didn't say anything about me acting as your cocktail waitress," she said.

  "Do you want to get to the bottom of this or not?" I asked.

  "Not if I'm regressing to bar maid," she said.

  "Ginny, can you cut the shit, and fix me a drink?" I asked, typing.

  "Touchy, touchy," she said, walking to the bar.

  "Thank you," I said as she poured.

  She hand delivered the drink the five feet, sat down next to me, and sipped on her own drink that she fixed while over at the bar. She crossed her legs and watched.

  "So, how does this work?" she asked, staring at my screen.

  "I have to try to get onto their server. John gave me the server info. Now all I have to do is hack my way in."

  I typed in the information, and I was there at the Endicott mail server. Now I just needed a password. This was where it would typically get tricky. The password. That was the key to the whole gig. Without the password I couldn't access anything. But that was hard. Companies usually used tons of random characters strung together. Almost impossible to crack. The way in was usually though a third party. Someone who had access to the password but was careless. It was like a hole that someone with bad intentions could crawl through.

  When I finally got to the password portion of this hack I thought I would try some stupid random passwords like "password" before I tried plan B, running a password program. Plan C, the plan I didn't want to use, would require me finding that third party to try to trick into giving up the password.

  I took a sip of my Glenfiddich and typed password into the password field. Nothing. Then I tried Password. Nothing again. I tried a few more obvious choices and still no luck.

  "Now what?" Imogen asked.

  "We're about ready to run the password program," I said.

  "Try Endicott," she said.

  "Ok," I said and took another sip.

  I typed it into the password field. Nothing.

  "Didn't work," I said.

  "No, type it like you write it. Capitalize the E. It's his last name for God's sake," she said.

  So I did. And what happened next blew my mind. The screen changed, and a second later I was looking at the complete company directory of email addresses and files.

  "We're in!" I said.

  She smiled.

  "You're a genius!" I said. "You've got a future in hacking."

  "Not really. Endicott is an idiot. I've got a more complicated password on my cell phone," she said.

  She was right. Worst. Password. Ever. But, hey, don't look a gift moron in the mouth. I clicked on Carl Westbrook and then started reading through them, with Ginny over my shoulder, one by one starting with the emails written closest to the day of his death.

  Nothing of any importance for the first twenty or so that we ran through. Then we hit on one addressed to Lee that expressed his concern that the company was in some sort of financial danger. But it didn't contain any facts. It assumed that the reader, in this case Lee, knew what the concern was and that they had had a lengthy discussion about it at some point. So we kept going.

  "Financial concerns?" Imogen said. "I thought they were turning over profits quarter after quarter."

  "That's what Lee told me. That's what it said in the sales material that Eric gave me."

  An hour flew by as we read through Carl's emails. My eyes were getting tired, and Imogen had leaned back in her chair and stopped reading with me somewhere along the way.

  "You want another drink, Max?" she asked. "I'm fixing myself one."

  "How much longer are we going to keep at this today?" I asked.

  "As long as it takes," she said, pouring her drink.

  I guessed that we weren't going anywhere, including home or dinner, any time soon.

  "Sure," I said.

  Imogen brought over the drink then we clinked glasses and toasted the task at hand.

  "Back to it, ol' man," she said.

  I took a sip and continued to read. Then we hit on another email, also addressed to Lee, that again referenced the financial difficulties that Endicott Financial was facing. This time we gleaned a little more information. It appeared that Carl was worried about the sudden uptick in customers wanting to pull out their capital with their returns from Endicott Financial, and the company was running short on actual cash.

  "That's weird," I said. "Eric did mention that someone pulled out their cash, but he made it seem like that was a one time occurrence," I said.

  "It could make sense," Imogen said. "Maybe the investments aren't liquid. That could create a cash flow situation," she said. "Let me grab my computer, and I'll pull up his financial reports for the past few quarters. We'll see what they reported their cash position to be."

  She walked into her office.

  I kept reading. Looking for emails from Carl to Lee. I was going month by month, plowing through them. Every month or so there was another email from Carl to Lee about the cash position and the financial inconsistencies that he was finding. This had been going on for more than a year. Lee's responses were always some version of the same answer—don't worry. We have more investors on the way.

  I don't know how much time passed while I read through the emails. I was still knee-deep in the wonderful world of Endicott Financial and Carl's emails when Imogen reappeared with an empty glass and her laptop.

  "I found some—" I said.

  "Max, look at this," she said, interrupting me.

  She put her laptop down on my desk and pulled up a balance sheet.

  "Imogen, I don't even know where to start with this," I said.

  She pointed to the screen.

  "Do you see this line? That's the cash position for last quarter," she said.

  I looked. There were hundreds of millions listed.

  "I see," I said.

  She flipped windows and another spreadsheet appeared.

  "That's the quarter before," she said.

  "It's less than last quarter," I said.

  "Right. Their cash position has gotten stronger over the past three months," she said. "And it's the same for the past year."

  She showed me the other balance sheets, and she was correct. Each quarter Endicott Financial's cash position had grown, significantly. The only way there could be any trouble would be if everyone pulled out all of their money. But even if that happened there would still be plenty left. He had made money too, according to the balance sheets.

  "It doesn't make any sense," I said.

  "It does, Max. It makes perfect sense. He's running a Ponzi scheme."

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Lee Endicott, Principal of Endicott Financial, was running a Ponzi scheme. I heard Imogen say those words, but my mind was rejecting it. But she was right. It did make perfect sense. Why else would they be having cash flow problems? People wanted their money back with their returns, and Lee needed the cash to pay them. But when you don't have any money it is hard to repay people, so you need to find more. Find more investors to put more cash into the kitty to pay the investors. Borrow from Max, with promises of a high return, to pay Eric. Eventually, you run out of investors to support the scheme, and it implodes.

  We didn't know how much money they needed, but that explained why Lee was so keen on getting me to invest my two million. He needed it. Bad. And he would have done anything to get it. But that still didn't explain why Carl was dead. Would Lee have murdered Carl to keep him quiet?

  "You're right, Ginny. He's running a Ponzi scheme," I said.

  "Plain and simple. And this is a big one. No telling how many people will be affected."

  "And they're all friends of friends. They trusted Lee and each other. Jesus. This is going to be bad."

  "Quite bad indeed," she said. "The ol' boy is going to wind up in prison."

  "When he's caught. And all of the investors are going to wind up with nothing," I said. "Well, less than they had before. Do you think Lee killed Carl to keep this a secret?"

  "He very well might have. But C
arl was probably on his way to prison too when the authorities caught up with them. Which could have taken a little more time. At least until Lee started defaulting on the payouts."

  We weren't sure if Lee had it in him to kill Carl, but he was definitely a suspect.

  "While we're in the email server, what do you say we take a look at Lee's emails?" I asked.

  "Let's."

  So we started going through Lee's emails in the same order that we tackled Carl's. Lee's correspondence would prove to be much more exciting.

  All the business emails that Lee sent were always positive. Always towing the company line. Touting its success. Preaching that everything was perfect and that investors were flying in the door while they were turning record profits. But then we stumbled onto something quite different.

  The first email that we found of interest was from a woman. DirtyGirl. The email wondered if the two of them would be able to get together for lunch later that day. The reply explained that he would love to and that they should meet at their regular spot at the regular time.

  I immediately searched for all emails from DirtyGirl. The correspondence stretched back for five years. We read through them. Some were provocative, some were innocent and sweet, but they all revealed one thing for certain. Lee Endicott had a girlfriend.

  "Poor Tori," Imogen said.

  "Do you think she knows?"

  "I don't know. She didn't mention anything about them being unhappy," she said.

  "Maybe she's not unhappy. Maybe she's doing it too."

  We needed to find out whom he was seeing. As we were debating the pitfalls of cheating on your spouse, in came an email from DirtyGirl. I watched as Lee opened it. Then I read it.

  From DirtyGirl: Late dinner tonight?

  "Perfect," I said.

  "What?" Ginny asked.

  "Let's see what he answers. He's reading the email as we speak."

  From L. Endicott: Other is here.

  "Damn," I said.

  "Who the hell is other?" Ginny asked.

  "Maybe Tori?" I said.

  From DirtyGirl: :(