A Penny for Your Thoughts

by Mindy Starns Clark

  “This is so awful,” I said. “Not to mention incredibly illegal. How can we tell who authorized all of these transfers?”

  Harriet shook her head, pointing to the list of transfers that was nearly a page long—the small transfers that added, in total, up to nearly $250,000.

  “You want names connected with the actions?” she asked. “These days, it’s all done electronically.”

  “There has to be a record somewhere. I’m going to need that in order to prove any of this.”

  “My suggestion,” she said, “would be to get into the Smythe’s electronic banking setup and see if it has a history field. There’s usually a code assigned to each transaction.”

  “Okay, let’s do it.”

  “It’s not that simple,” she said. “I can’t do that here. You need access, code numbers, the right software—”

  “In other words, we need to get over to the Smythe offices and do it from there?”

  “Exactly.”

  I hesitated, knowing the last place I wanted to be was back on the road, much less at a familiar place where my tail could once again pick me up and make roadkill out of me. I felt sure we’d be safe in the Smythe offices, though once we left there I wouldn’t have taken money on our odds of making it back to the train station in one piece.

  There was also the little matter of the cops looking for me. If the Feed the Need receptionist was on the alert to watch for me, I knew the jig would be up the minute we walked into the door. Then this day would be lost for sure, and poor Harriet would end up trapped in Philadelphia just like me.

  “Harriet,” I said, standing up. “I need you to take off every single item you’re wearing that isn’t absolutely necessary.”

  “What?”

  “Come on,” I said. “Scarf, jewelry, blazer. Let’s go.”

  She did as I asked, stripping down to nothing more than a pair of slacks and a sleeveless shirt. I gave her my navy jacket. Because it was a bit small for her, she hung it down her back and tied the sleeves around the front of her neck.

  I, in turn, tied her colorful silk scarf over my hair, loaded on her clunky bracelets and necklace, and slipped my arms into the sleeves of her big purple jacket, buttoning it down the front. Then I grabbed the pile of napkins from the catering tray and began balling them up one by one and stuffing them into my clothes. When I was finished, I stepped back and modeled my new look for Harriet’s approval. After a moment’s hesitation, she pulled off her rhinestone glasses and slipped them on my nose.

  “Oh, goodness,” she said, grinning. “From a distance, no one would ever recognize you.”

  “I hope not,” I replied. Though I knew I couldn’t carry off this look for long, at least it should get us in and out of the Smythe building without incident.

  We quickly loaded up all of our stuff and signed out at the desk. Then we ran to the rental car in the parking garage across the street, climbed in, and headed for Smythe Incorporated.

  Stepping from the elevator, I led Harriet to the left and into the Smythe offices instead of to the right and into Feed the Need. The first goal was to get to Gwen’s office, which spanned the two companies near the back.

  “I’m here to see Gwen Harding,” Harriet said, just as I had instructed her in the car. “But don’t tell her. I’d like to surprise her if I could.”

  The receptionist, a young man, seemed disinterested at best. He gave us directions to Gwen’s office, then returned to the magazine he had been reading when we first came in the door.

  So far, so good.

  “Swanky place,” Harriet whispered as we strolled quickly through the building, my hand at her elbow since she couldn’t see that well without her glasses. I was afraid we might run into Alan or Judith, but we made it to the door of Gwen’s office without incident.

  I turned the knob and swung open the door, stepping inside to find Gwen at her desk, typing away.

  “May I help you?” she asked, glancing at us without a break in her typing.

  We stepped closer, and I took off the glasses and the scarf.

  “It’s me, Gwen,” I said softly. “Callie.”

  Gwen stopped typing and stood, looking me over with a smile.

  “What are you doing?” she asked with a chuckle. “Is that some sort of disguise?”

  I handed the glasses to Harriet and walked toward the desk.

  “Someone tried to kill me this morning.”

  “What—”

  “Listen to me, Gwen,” I continued. “I don’t have much time.”

  “What’s going on, Callie? That nice Detective Keegan called here, looking for you. He said to let him know if you showed up.”

  “I know. It’s a long story. Here’s the short version.”

  “The police are looking for you?” Harriet squeaked, but I ignored her question.

  “I’m an investigator, Gwen. Usually, I just investigate companies, but this time I’ve been investigating a murder. Wendell’s murder.”

  “Oh, my.”

  “I know there was no building, Gwen. I know Wendell’s story about needing a fast $250,000 from the J.O.S.H.U.A. fund had nothing to do with buying some property and everything to do with straightening out the financial mess that had been made with Feed the Need.”

  Gwen seemed to pale, and she sat in her chair, nodding.

  “Talk to me, Gwen,” I said. “Tell me what happened here that last day.”

  I walked around her desk and sat on the edge of it, looking down on her. Though I felt a little ridiculous in the stuffed purple jacket, I knew she was intimidated nonetheless.

  “I don’t know that much,” Gwen said, tears springing to her eyes, “but I certainly know more than I told the police. It’s been eating away at me, like a cancer.”

  I glanced at Harriet, who had taken a seat against the far wall and was watching our interaction with rapt attention.

  “Go ahead,” I said to Gwen, my voice more gentle this time.

  “Oh, Callie, it was awful,” Gwen cried. “I don’t even know where to start.”

  “How about at the beginning?”

  She wiped her eyes, took a deep breath, and let it out.

  “It started about two months ago,” she said softly. “Because of his health, Wendell didn’t travel much any more, but he needed to go to our factory in Sri Lanka. He took Marion with him, and they planned to end their trip with a few days in Kauai. A little mini-vacation.”

  “Okay.”

  “They had a layover in Manila, where Feed the Need has a big district office. Since they had a few hours to spare, they decided to pay the office a quick visit. When they got there, they found that the office was closed down.”

  I had already heard this story from Marion and had already seen the sign Wendell brought home from Manila with him.

  “By the time Wendell got back here, he’d had a lot of time to think about things. He knew that if sneaky stuff was happening in his company, he was partly at fault because he’d been so consumed with his health that he hadn’t paid much attention to the business lately. He became obsessed with finding out exactly what was going on.”

  “What did he find out?”

  “That things were even worse than he thought. Five district offices had been closed. Three of the buildings had already been sold. Fifteen people had been laid off from the staff here. All sorts of things to cut costs, right under his nose. Derek was as clueless as his father. In fact, he’s still clueless, as far as I know.”

  I thought about Derek, so consumed with the problems in his marriage that he didn’t even see his company was being robbed blind. Suddenly, an idea began to form in my mind. Perhaps Judith had done all of those acts of vandalism against Sidra not out of some demented fury, but as a cold, calculated way to distract her brother from what was going on at his company.

  “Had this been a regular business,” Gwen said, standing so that she could pace back and forth, “heads would’ve rolled. Wendell could’ve tracked down the source of t
he problem and dealt with it swiftly and severely.”

  “But…”

  “But this was Feed the Need, Callie. This was a nonprofit. You can’t just announce to the world that people have been stealing money here. It takes years to build up the public’s trust and the efforts of thousands of people to make an organization like this work.”

  “I know, but—”

  “Understand something, Callie. Until this happened, our record was exemplary. We belong to different watchdog groups, and we’ve met all of the criteria, passed every screening with flying colors. When Wendell realized what was going on, he had a very difficult choice to make. Either he could blow the whistle and destroy the efforts of everyone just because of the destructive acts of a few individuals, or he could deal with it in his own way, quietly: Replace the money, repair the damage, eliminate the troublemakers, and keep our agency’s reputation intact. He was doing the right thing. He just didn’t have a chance to finish it.”

  I considered her words, knowing this was a conundrum I had faced often in my years with the J.O.S.H.U.A. organization. Many times I had found an agency or organization that was doing some wonderful things, yet at its core there were serious issues of ethics or improper use of funds. My experience had been that when problems like these existed, the trouble was most often found at the very top with enormous amounts of money going into the pockets of the principals. Just recently I had analyzed a nonprofit that was accomplishing some wonderful things—only to find that the man running the business seemed to have forgotten the “non” in “nonprofit” as he personally received more than a half a million dollars per year in salary and fringe benefits. Then, as always, I had asked myself the same question: Blow the whistle and risk destroying all the good they were accomplishing, or let it ride? Apparently, Wendell had decided to basically fix things and then let it ride.

  “This leaves us with one question, Gwen. Who was it? Who was stealing the money?”

  Gwen shook her head, her eyes moist.

  “I have my suspicions, but Wendell would never say. He told me only that he was dealing with the matter, and when all was said and done, those involved would be out of the organization.”

  “So whom did you suspect?”

  “Alan. And…” she hesitated.

  “Judith?” I asked.

  After a moment, she nodded.

  “Not until yesterday did I suspect Judith,” she said. “But then at the funeral it began to dawn on me. She was the only one who had the authority to make the kinds of financial transfers that Wendell had discovered going from Feed the Need into Smythe Incorporated. Only Judith or Derek could’ve done that. And I know Derek wouldn’t rob his own company.”

  “So tell me about Wendell’s last day.”

  “What can I say? He called me Sunday night and told me about his operation. He also told me he had found an outside source for some fast cash and that he had one day to make everything right. I spent Monday morning rescheduling all of his appointments. He spent the morning trying to redo all that had been undone in Feed the Need.”

  “But he was a wealthy man,” I said. “Why involve my foundation at all? Why didn’t he just put up his own personal cash? To someone like him, a quarter of a million dollars couldn’t have been all that much.”

  “Well, he didn’t keep that kind of money just lying around, if that’s what you mean,” Gwen snapped. “His personal fortune was tied up in his portfolio.”

  “What about getting a line of credit from the bank?”

  “It was all a matter of time,” Gwen replied. “In those last two days, every minute was important. Calling your boss to borrow some of his readily available cash was a lot quicker than trying to secure it other ways. Every minute counted, Callie. Wendell felt he was watching the clock tick away the final hours of his life, and he had to act fast.”

  I sat back, knowing she was right. The doctors had given him one day to get his affairs in order. He had scrambled to right these wrongs the quickest way he knew how.

  “Who killed him, Gwen?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she replied, allowing herself to fall back in her chair. “I’ve asked myself that a million times. I was right here. I should’ve heard something. I should’ve seen something.”

  “Do you think it was Alan and Judith?”

  She put her head in her hands.

  “I don’t know, Callie,” she sobbed. “I just don’t know.”

  Forty

  I let Gwen cry for a few minutes; then I handed her a Kleenex and told her that Harriet and I needed to sit down at a computer and go into Smythe’s online banking system without the knowledge of Judith, Alan, or Derek.

  “None of them are here today anyway,” Gwen replied, blowing her nose.

  “We have the list of bank transfers from Feed the Need to Smythe,” I said. “We just have to figure out once and for all who authorized them.”

  “Yolanda Washington can help you,” Gwen said. “I’ll take you to her office.”

  I tied the scarf back on my head, and Harriet and I followed Gwen as she walked us down a short hall until we came to a large cubicle. The woman at the desk was very heavy, in her late 20s, with thick black hair and a dark mole on her chin.

  “Hey, Gwen,” she said as we peeked into her office. “Can I help you with something?”

  “This is Callie Webber,” Gwen said, gesturing toward me, “and her associate Harriet Blanchard. They need to find some things out, and I think you’re the one to help.”

  “It’s something we need to get to right now,” I added quickly. “It’s very important. Can you help us?”

  Yolanda nodded her head.

  “Like what?”

  “Financial data,” I said, going around behind her desk and pulling a chair up next to hers. Harriet plopped her purse on the floor and looked around for another chair. Yolanda seemed startled. “Tell her we’re authorized, Gwen.”

  “Give the ladies any information they need,” Gwen said, coming around to stand behind us.

  I pulled a few pages of financial data from my briefcase and skimmed through them. Harriet disappeared into another cubicle and came back with a rolling chair, which she slid into place beside Yolanda.

  “You’re on a remote internet banking system, I assume,” I said to Yolanda. “Pull that up, please. We need to get a look at the history of some of your accounts.”

  “Okay,” she said, typing into the computer. A logo for internet banking appeared on the screen. “What accounts are you interested in?”

  I handed the page of numbers to Harriet, and she read off the first account number as Yolanda typed it in. The account came up onto the screen in confusing rows of figures. But Yolanda seemed to know what she was doing. I told her the first transaction I was looking for—a transfer into this account from another account in the same bank—and gave her the amount and the date. She found it quickly and was able to display the authorization code of the person who made the transfer.

  “There’s your culprit right there,” Harriet said, pointing to a number on the screen. “Person number two-zero-two-one. Who’s that?”

  “That’s Judith Smythe,” Yolanda replied.

  “Judith,” Gwen echoed in a whisper behind her.

  Harriet and I glanced at each other. Just as we’d suspected. I felt an urgency grow as Harriet read off the next account number.

  We worked that way for the next 15 minutes, verifying a series of transactions in the last two months that showed a total of nearly $200,000 coming into the Smythe accounts from Feed the Need. The first few transfers had been done by Judith; the rest seemed to have been done by Alan. Harriet had just read off yet another account number to Yolanda when she suddenly sat up straight and gasped.

  “Whoa!” she said, peering intently at the screen.

  “What is it?”

  “Hold on a minute.”

  She typed quickly into the computer for a few minutes while I watched over her shoulder, trying to figu
re out what she was doing. I looked at Harriet, but she just shrugged her shoulders. Finally, Yolanda spoke.

  “You see that?” she said, pointing at the screen. “We just pulled that account up a minute ago, and the balance was over $300,000.”

  “Yes?”

  “Now it’s under $10,000!”

  I sat back in my chair, wishing I knew a little more about banking and accounting.

  “Maybe a big check just cleared,” Gwen said, but Yolanda shook her head.

  “Look. The same thing just happened in this account here.”

  She typed in some more numbers and a new account flashed on the screen. The account balance was only a few hundred dollars.

  “The balance in this account should be about $30,000,” she said.

  “You’re right,” said Harriet. “When you had that account up on the screen a few minutes ago, it was $30,000.”

  Harriet and I stared at each other in surprise.

  “Where’s the money going?” I asked.

  Yolanda typed some more, then finally blew out a long, slow breath of relief.

  “I found it,” she said. “It’s just been transferred into a different account.”

  She brought up that account and we studied it on the screen. The balance was over a million dollars, and a long list of transfers had been made into it in the last two hours.

  “I don’t get this at all,” Yolanda said, watching the screen, chewing her bottom lip. “That’s Alan’s code number, but I don’t know why he’s doing things this way. I got a big check out on one of those other accounts that I know isn’t gonna clear if he doesn’t put that money back where he found it.”

  I sat up straight, my heart pounding.

  “Yolanda,” Harriet said. “Can Alan access the online banking system from outside the office?”

  “Sure, as long as he logs on.”

  “Unbelievable.”

  I reached for Yolanda’s phone and dialed the number for Detectives Sollie and Keegan. Though I told the operator it was an emergency, she still put me on hold—and a few seconds of that felt like an eternity. I was still waiting, the phone pressed to my ear, when I heard a disturbance from the front of the Smythe building.