Dreams in the Key of Blue

by John Philpin

  I ignored his question. “If you didn’t kill anyone, you know who did.”

  “I don’t know anything.”

  “Wendell Beckerman,” I said. “Seconds before I found his body, you raced out of town in your Jag.”

  “You’re going to get us both killed,” Gilman yelped, his eyes darting around the room, his face a damp, full-fidget mess. “Clea wanted me home that night. I came home.”

  I waited until his breathing grew less ragged, then asked, “Why the payments to Amanda Squires?”

  Gilman staggered to his feet and lumbered across the living room, one hand still over his nose, the other reaching into a desk drawer.

  I leaned against the drawer, jammed his hand, then grabbed his wrist. Gilman shrieked.

  “Ten thousand a month,” I said, removing his hand from the drawer and retrieving the .32 caliber pistol he was after.

  “Don’t say another fuckin’ word. I want a lawyer. I want the cops.”

  Gilman’s red-streaked, vibrating face was a mask of terror. I was tempted to dump the drunk in Norma Jacobs’s lap, but he had information that I wanted.

  “What about Stanley Markham?”

  He looked at me, rubbing his hand. “The killer? What about him?”

  “He’s dead, shot with the same gun that killed the others.”

  As comprehension dawned, Gilman’s eyes shifted from useless to semifocused. His face flutteringmess status.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  Compounding Gilman’s fears had the desired effect, so I applied more pressure.

  “I guess that proves your point, Stu,” I said with a deep sigh. “If someone can find Markham and kill him, that person can certainly find us and do the same. We shouldn’t discuss this any further.”

  I walked to the door.

  “Where are you going?” Gilman asked.

  “Back to my hotel. Then I’m going home.”

  “No cops?”

  I shook my head, pocketed the cartridges from his revolver, and placed the gun on a table.

  Gilman shot wild glances in a wide arc. “You can’t leave me here.”

  “Stu, you live here,” I said, stepping onto the porch.

  Gilman stumbled after me. “Come back inside. Please.”

  “Why did your wife leave?”

  Tears ran from Gilman’s eyes down his bloodied cheeks. “I told her…some things.”

  “She was frightened?”

  “Furious too. She said she wouldn’t stay here another night, wouldn’t let the kids stay here, and if I had any sense, I wouldn’t stay here.”

  Gilman shivered in the cool night air. “I’m cold.”

  We stepped inside. Gilman secured the door, peeked out at the night, then led me into the kitchen where he fumbled with his Mr. Coffee. His hands trembled, and he could not separate the filters.

  “I don’t know where she put the fuckin’ scoop. Clea usually does this.”

  “You sit down,” I said. “I’ll make the coffee.”

  “Wine always gives me a fucking headache,” he complained.

  My head throbbed where “Nort” had hammered me. I had no sympathy for Gilman.

  I found the scoop inside the can. “What did you tell Clea?”

  He shook his head. “What’s going to happen?”

  “When you’ve talked for a while, maybe I can tell you that.”

  Gilman gazed around the kitchen at walls decorated with his kids’ drawings. Refrigerator magnets held school bus and soccer schedules, photos of two young girls modeling their Halloween costumes, a list of performances at a local theater, and a small message pad—“gal 2%, yogurt (non-fat), waxed mint d. floss.”

  “We tried to live on seventy-five thousand a year in Boston,” he said. “Money was always tight. MI offered me one hundred and twenty thousand, the house, the car, the chance for my kids to grow up in a safe place with good schools. What would you have done?”

  “Grabbed the opportunity,” I said, giving Gilman the answer he sought.

  “Damn right.”

  I joined Gilman at the kitchen table. “What went wrong?”

  “Nothing is the way it appears,” Gilman said bitterly. “Not a fucking thing.”

  I waited, listening to Mr. Coffee gag his way to the last drop.

  “We needed the money,” he said, rolling and unrolling a napkin. “I wanted to feel important. I didn’t want to spend my life as a clerk for a fucking insurance company.”

  Gilman breathed deeply. “I went to a professional placement service in Boston. I filled out the forms, gave them my résumé, took some tests. Two weeks later, they called me with MI’s offer.”

  He held up his hands, palms out, as if expecting a reprimand. “I know I should have suspected something. There weren’t any interviews, no tour of the company, nothing. I drove up here on a Saturday and stopped at the office. It was like they expected me. I met Melanie Martin, had lunch with a couple of board members. They even had an office with my name on the door. God, I’m stupid. They knew how I thought, what my reactions would be. The tests I took in Boston told them everything they wanted to know.”

  MI’s thoroughness and planning were like something out of The X-Files. I poured two mugs of coffee and returned to the table.

  “My title is Vice President and Manager of Accounts. The job description includes the college, and all the Maine properties. The only account group that I manage is Mexico. I didn’t know it, but all the companies are dummies, places to park money. Every cent that moved through those accounts came from Tijuana.”

  “Drug money,” I said.

  Gilman sipped his coffee. “That’s what I finally decided. Well… Jaycie figured it out.”

  “She worked for you.”

  “Ten hours a week. She was a smart kid. I had her handling deposits, wire transfers, offshore accounts. Twice a month I flew to San Diego. She took care of things while I was gone.”

  “Who killed her?”

  “I told you before. I don’t know who killed anybody. I thought Markham killed Jaycie and her roommates. How many mass murderers are roaming around?”

  Too many, I thought, but ignored Gilman’s question.

  I was convinced that Jaycie Waylon was Norma Jacobs’s informant. The student did not break off her contact with the Portland police. She was dead.

  “Tell me about Paul Crandall,” I said.

  “I didn’t like that from the start. The explanation they gave me—”

  “Who gave you?”

  He shrugged. “It was in a memo.”

  “Melanie Martin?”

  “God, no,” Gilman said with a short, bitter laugh.

  “I don’t get it.”

  His eyes met mine. “She’s seldom around. Clea’s running joke is that I work for a ghost. Martin has a cottage on Monhegan Island. She developed the business and made herself a millionaire several times over. On paper, she holds the power, but she’s never here.”

  “Who makes the decisions?”

  “Norton Weatherly. That’s where the Crandall thing originated. Doing business as Crandall Management didn’t bother me. You can DBA anything you want to. As long as you pay the filing fee, it’s perfectly legal. The memo packet included personal identification papers for Paul Crandall, but they had my photo and date of birth. I knew that wasn’t right, so I went to see Weatherly. He minimized it, said the company had used that sort of arrangement dozens of times.”

  “You collected rent,” I said.

  Gilman stared at the backs of his hands and shook his head. “I can’t do this. People are going to die.”

  “They’re already dying faster than grave diggers can open holes for them.”

  He pushed himself from the table and struggled to his feet. “I have to find Clea and the kids.”

  “Amanda Squires shot at a friend of hers tonight,” I said. “Squires wasn’t at her place on Danforth. She’s armed and wandering around out there. The cops are looking for her, but maybe you’ll r
un into her before they do.”

  Gilman hesitated only a second before crumbling into his chair.

  I refilled his coffee cup. “You were about to tell me about playing slumlord.”

  He looked at me. “You sonofabitch.”

  “I have to amend your appraisal, Stu. I am a pissed-off sonofabitch. It’s been a long night. I’ve been shot at, hammered across the face, and I’m tired of fucking around with you.”

  He nodded, sighed, and sipped his coffee. “This is where things get unreal. I would deposit twenty thousand dollars in the Crandall account, and the slip would show a balance of half a million or more. The next month, there might be nothing in the account but the rents. Jaycie tracked transaction numbers. Somebody regularly made deposits in San Diego. That money flowed through here. I wired it to banks in the Bahamas.”

  “Why didn’t the local bank get suspicious?”

  “Crandall Management has two subsidiaries. Grand Bahama Real Estate Investment Group, and Crandall South in Miami. That’s where the money ended up.”

  It made sense that money flowing from Portland, offshore, then to Miami, would not attract attention in South Florida, where drug and money routes typically involved Central and South America. If the DEA did track the money, they would run into a legitimate real estate and investment business.

  “How does Squires come into this?” I asked.

  Gilman took a deep breath. “I handle all of MI’s ‘special projects.’ That’s what Weatherly called them. I was the new guy, so I got stuck with the job. He told me to write the checks and mail them to Squires. I asked him how I should record the expenditure. He said it didn’t matter, that the checks would never be cashed.”

  For nearly two years, Gilman mailed the checks.

  “It got so that I didn’t think about it. Then Jaycie made her discovery. I got paranoid about everything to do with MI. I didn’t feel that I could go to Weatherly. So I wrote Squires’s check, but I didn’t mail it. I drove to Danforth Street. It was like walking into a tomb. I’d been to all our properties except that one, and the units were always rented. The Danforth building was empty. Squires lived there alone.”

  “Did you talk with her?”

  “She wasn’t there. I slipped the check under the door and left. The place spooked me.”

  Gilman was a bit player in what impressed me as a grand theatrical production. As he had suggested, not much was real.

  “If each department at MI moved only half the value of the Mexican accounts,” he said, “three hundred million in profit would be a conservative estimate.”

  Gilman had grabbed a dream, achieved position and a modicum of wealth. The dream had soured.

  “Steve Weld was a threat to the operation,” I said.

  “So was Beckerman, but I doubt that he knew it. His mother was on the MI board of directors. She died a few months ago. Beckerman inherited everything, including a set of computer tapes. No one knew how she got them. They were duplicates of everything MI kept at Harbor College.”

  “All the illegal activity,” I said.

  “Weatherly called them ‘off-book’ transactions.”

  “Who is Edgar?” I asked.

  “Jesus. Everything is falling apart. Edgar Heath. Weatherly said he hired Heath as a driver, but I think the guy is more than that. I met him only once, and he was armed. I think he’s a bodyguard. Heath’s another mystery. He gets paid to play nursemaid to Amanda Squires. I don’t think there’s any such person as Amanda Squires. I think they’re all fuckin’ fakes. I don’t know who anybody is.”

  JAWORSKI DRANK COFFEE AND STARED AT THE Weather Channel. “We’ve got a hell of a storm moving up the coast,” he said. “Gale-force winds, heavy rain, tides three to five feet above normal.”

  He glanced at his Styrofoam cup. “Why is it that hotels make better coffee than I do?”

  “You been up all night?” I asked.

  “I napped. You?”

  I knew that the sore muscles and muddy thinking of sleep deprivation would soon get me, but adrenaline held them at bay. “I’ll catch up later. Jacobs call?”

  “You ain’t gonna like this,” he said, climbing out of his chair. “I’d just gotten off the phone with Jacobs when Jasper called. Squires showed up at my P.D. after she left Mellen Street. Demanded to see Jasper and wouldn’t talk to anyone else. The two of them talked and drank tea.”

  “Don’t tell me that Jasper let her walk.”

  “She didn’t have anything to hold her on,” Jaworski said.

  “What ever happened to attempted murder? Squires tried to blow away Gretchen Nash.”

  “News still travels slow around here,” he said, “when it moves at all. Jasper didn’t know about the shooting. Squires said she’d stay at the Clear Skies and be available for further questioning. I called the motel. She isn’t there. Never checked in.”

  “Of course she never checked in!” I roared. “What was Jasper thinking?”

  “I ain’t the psychiatrist,” Jaworski said, “but I figure Jasper can’t picture a woman committing these crimes. Some of it’s the contradictions we’ve got in the evidence. Mostly I think she can’t imagine doing something like this, so she can’t imagine any woman doing it. Then you’ve got Ms. Amanda. Either she’s damn convincing, or you’re wrong about her.”

  Amanda Squires had appeared from nowhere, left her mark on Portland, then zipped up the highway and run her scam on a Quantico-educated state detective.

  I collapsed into a chair. “I’ve been wrong,” I said. “I went to Squires’s Danforth Street apartment. She has a collection of snakes in aquarium tanks and a stack of uncashed checks signed by Paul Crandall. The whole thing is a prop. The rest of the building is empty.”

  “Jasper says it ain’t Squires’s voice on the tape log.”

  I rested my neck against the back of the chair. My eyes wanted to close and dissolve all thought into the deepest sleep. Perhaps adrenaline would lose this one.

  “Squires isn’t the only player,” I said. “When I was at Danforth Street, a guy showed up. He knocked me on my ass and took off.”

  “I read through the notebook,” Jaworski said, pointing to Lily Dorman’s journal. “I’d wonder about anybody who didn’t fall to pieces after growing up like that.”

  “We’re fortunate that not everyone who lives through hell takes up murder,” I said, struggling to fight off the urge to sleep. “I stuck Stu Gilman in a room. He is Paul Crandall.”

  “Lucas, Jasper and the feds want you in Ragged Harbor today. Hubble Saymes wants me there.”

  I forced myself to get up. I needed an extra charge to break from my inertia, and Jaworski had given it to me.

  “Things are happening too fast, Herb. There’s no time to get an army up to speed. We need to pay another visit to Martin International. This time we take our own vice president with us.”

  AS WE MADE THE SHORT DRIVE TO MI’S CORPORATE headquarters, Gilman dozed in the cruiser’s backseat. His night of blood, sweat, and wine had taken a toll. He smelled bad. I was far from floral, but fairly certain I was not wearing eau de sleeping wino.

  Jaworski radioed Portland P.D. for a records check on the licence plate NORT. It was a mystery that should not have been; the plate came back to Norton Weatherly.

  “I could’ve told you that,” Gilman mumbled.

  “Why the fuck didn’t you?” the chief snapped.

  The first change at MI since our last visit was apparent when we drove into the parking lot. There were no cars.

  “Ain’t no holiday that I know about,” Jaworski said, pulling and pushing his bulk out of the car and unwrapping a stick of gum.

  I poked Gilman awake, and the three of us walked to the gate.

  “Where are the dogs?” Jaworski asked.

  I gazed along the fence. There was no sign of the menacing shepherds. I grabbed the chain-link barrier and shook it, creating a metallic din. Still no dogs.

  “That’s strange,” Gilman said. “They’re
always on the grounds.”

  “How do people get in and out of the place?” I asked.

  “The dogs wear electronic collars. These two, Mark and Twain, don’t respond to voice commands. They remain on alert until they receive a radio signal from inside.”

  Gilman slipped a plastic card through a black box on the gate. Nothing happened.

  “Huh,” Gilman grunted. “The signal lights aren’t on either.”

  “Power’s off,” Jaworski said, gazing up at MI’s flags snapping in the brisk wind. “Probably a tree blew down on some wires.”

  “We have our own generators,” Gilman said. “They start automatically if there’s an outage.”

  “No way I’m climbing over that sucker,” Jaworski said, retreating to his cruiser and opening the trunk. “Does the V.P. authorize forced entry?”

  Gilman shrugged. “I don’t know if I can do that. I guess so.”

  In seconds, Jaworski returned with a crowbar. “You’d be amazed at the uses I’ve found for this thing,” he said, and worked the gate lock. “Bought it at the local hardware for a buck-seventy-five, forty years ago. Best investment I ever made.”

  The gate popped open. “When those dogs get their collar buzz,” Jaworski said, “do they restrain the intruder or shred him?”

  “I don’t know,” Gilman answered helplessly.

  Jaworski gave me the crowbar and slipped his gun from its holster. “Let’s go,” he said, pushing through the gate.

  Bulbous black clouds rolled across the leaden sky. When we reached the main door, Jaworski watched for Mark and Twain, Gilman stood with his hands in his pockets, and I added to my résumé of authorized illicit entries.

  “You’re good at that,” Jaworski said when the door squealed open.

  “I watched you at the gate,” I reminded the chief.

  “Bullshit. You could be your own one-man crime wave if you ever set your mind to it.”

  He had no fucking idea.

  We stepped into Martin International’s entry hall, a vast cavern of exposed beams, slate floor, and a massive abstract marble sculpture. Skylights allowed shafts of the day’s dim illumination to descend at angles into the room. The effect was similar to the sally ports in jails that I have visited, except that this foyer smelled considerably better.