Juggling Evidence (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery)

by Michael Monhollon

  “It seems indiscreet for Mrs. Nolan to have him in the house,” I said.

  “Especially since Mr. Nolan worked out of it,” Brooke added.

  “There’s a back way into the second floor—a wooden staircase up to the balcony off the master bedroom. The basement apartment only opens to the front of the house. If Derek…Mr. Nolan…came in the front door, there’d be plenty of time to slip out the back.”

  “Be easy enough to catch them at it, though, if Mr. Nolan became suspicious.”

  “He did catch them at it. Hired a detective and everything. He didn’t know who the boyfriend was until the detective found Steve-o’s cell phone.” Liz smiled unpleasantly.

  “Steve-o?” Brooke asked.

  “That's what Mr. Nolan started calling him after he found the phone. He was going to confront his wife with it.”

  “But evidently he didn’t,” I said. “At least not right away.”

  “He wanted the circumstances to be just right. He was engineering a showdown, was the way he put it.”

  I thought of the cell phone that had been in the right hand of Derek’s corpse. Maybe there had been a showdown, one Derek had engineered too well. The doorbell rang, and my heart jumped into my chest.

  Brooke looked at me; I looked from her to Liz Lockard, who was looking apprehensive. I wondered if we were about to meet the large and imposing Mr. Walker.

  Liz went to the door, but slowly. She didn’t charge at it this time. She opened it, and we heard voices. Liz came back in, and there were two cops on her heels, James Jordan and his partner Ray Hernandez.

  “Good grief,” Jordan said when he saw us.

  “Officer Jordan,” I said, getting to my feet.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I wasn’t getting copies of your reports, so I thought I’d better get out and do a little investigating of my own.”

  Liz was looking back and forth between us. “You mean she’s not one of you?” she said, looking at Jordan and jerking her head at me. “She’s not a cop?”

  “Did she tell you she was a cop?”

  “Sure she did. She…” Liz trailed off.

  “She said we were investigating the murder of Derek Nolan,” Brooke said.

  Hernandez said to Liz, “She’s the attorney representing Lynn Nolan and Steve Bruno.”

  Liz looked at me with sudden dislike. “Well, what I have to say doesn’t help her clients much.”

  “I appreciate your talking to me anyway,” I said.

  “I don’t have anything more to say to you.”

  Jordan said, “In that case, let me get the door for you, Ms. Starling.” He went to the front door and held it open. Brooke went out first. As I went by him, he said, “You’re playing close to the edge, Robin.”

  “What? I’m not allowed to investigate? Who made those rules?”

  He closed the door on us without answering.

  I looked at Brooke, and she shrugged.

  Chapter 11

  When we were back in my car, I said, “I think we’re down to two possibilities. Either my clients are guilty, or the murder is connected to Mark Walker’s embezzlement.”

  “If he was guilty of the embezzlement. ‘Some man’ could mean Steve Bruno.”

  “We should have asked where Walker lives.” I started the car and backed down the driveway.

  “The phone book might tell us,” Brooke said. “Or Derek might have a personnel file for him.”

  “It would also be nice to talk to the borrower who paid off early. He should be able to describe the man he gave the money to.”

  “Maybe we can get the name of the borrower from Nolan’s files.”

  I nodded. “Maybe. Are you up for a trip down to Church Hill?”

  “Sure.”

  “I think Matt Nolan is back home. He can let us in.”

  “Is he living there by himself now that his mother’s been arrested?”

  “I think so.”

  “That must be pretty hard on him.”

  She may have been right. When Matt answered the door at the top of the steps, his hair stuck up in front, and his cheek had parallel lines imprinted on it as if he had spent the afternoon sleeping on his face. He brightened when he saw us, though, and stepped back from the door by way of invitation.

  As we went past him into the living room, he asked, “Is there any news?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Oh.”

  “But I have talked to your mother. She seems to be holding up.”

  He nodded, his eyes moving back and forth between us. “For a moment I thought you were Melissa,” he said to Brooke.

  “Thicker hair, fewer freckles,” I said, describing Brooke.

  Brooke smiled at him. “Sorry.”

  He shrugged, and his eyes stayed on her face.

  “Nobody’s seen Melissa,” I said. “According to the police, she hasn’t been back to her apartment.”

  “What are they doing to find her?”

  “Harassing me.”

  He looked surprised.

  “Their theory seems to be that I’ve got her socked away somewhere because I don’t want her to identify Steve Bruno.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Her driving away in my car just before homicide got here is what gave them the idea. That, and they think I’m a loose cannon because of a few things I did in a previous case.”

  “What things?”

  “Nothing worth talking about. The reason we stopped by was to take a look at your dad’s office. Have the police finished with it?”

  “Call him Derek. I’ve started thinking of him that way. If he’s not my dad…” He trailed off.

  “You’d rather be Bruno’s son?”

  “I’ll never be anybody’s son, but at least I won’t be victimized any longer by Derek Nolan.”

  “You don’t find you’re missing him, just a little?”

  He laughed shortly. “The air in this place was always too thick to breathe,” he said. “It’s like a heavy cloud’s been lifted.”

  I gave him what I meant to be a sympathetic smile. “Your…Derek’s office?” I said. “Can we look at it?”

  He shrugged. “Sure. The police didn’t tell me to keep out when they left this time. I’ll get the key.”

  The office was as I remembered it, except that the high-backed desk chair was now standing upright and obscuring the computer monitor. As I approached the desk, I looked for blood on the floor beyond it, but there wasn’t any. No hint of a stain on the thick Persian carpet, nothing at all to indicate the police had been there, or a corpse before them.

  “Are you looking for something the police missed?” Matt asked me.

  “No. I’m looking for something the police never looked for in the first place. I want to know who the debtor was in the Walker embezzlement. You don’t know, do you?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think I ever heard the name. Liz would know.”

  “We didn’t get a chance to ask her.”

  “You’ve been to see her?”

  I nodded.

  “The police interrupted us,” Brooke said.

  I sat at the desk and opened the file drawer I’d seen open when we discovered Nolan’s corpse. Though the drawer was equipped with a lock, the lock wasn’t engaged, and the drawer slid open smoothly to reveal a neat row of manila folders nestled inside green hanging folders.

  “Those are his active loans,” Matt said. “The closed files are in that file cabinet.” He pointed at a five-drawer lateral file cabinet in the corner.

  “I guess the paid loan would be over there then.”

  He shrugged. “Walker didn’t mark it paid, I don’t think. That was the whole idea.”

  “But your…Derek had two weeks to move the file over.”

  “Except that he wasn’t done with it. He was going to prosecute or whatever.”

  I opened the desk’s middle drawer, where trays of pens, pencils, highlighters, paper clips, sciss
ors, and a staple remover were neatly arranged. “Only one model of pen,” I observed. “I’ve probably got a dozen kinds in my own desk.” I closed the drawer and opened another. It held a phone book. The one below it held legal pads and nothing else. Mr. Nolan had been a neat, methodical man with the world’s most uncluttered desk.

  My hypothesis, for the moment, was that Mark Walker had killed Derek Nolan and taken the incriminating file. If that were the case, I was looking for something that wasn’t there, which was going to make it difficult to find. “Who’s managing the loan files now?” I asked Matt.

  He shook his head. “Nobody.”

  “Liz Lockard?”

  “I haven’t seen her since…” He trailed off. “I haven’t seen her for a couple of days.”

  “You or your mother fire her?”

  “No, I don’t think so. She just hasn’t been coming in.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “She probably knows that neither mother nor I liked her much.”

  “Still, as far as we know, she doesn’t have another source of income. Even if she didn’t need the work, it would have been nice for her to offer her services.”

  Brooke said, “There was one thing I meant to ask her, but didn’t get a chance. She evidently worked the day of the murder. What time did she leave?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I nodded, my mind returning to the problem of collecting Nolan’s outstanding loans. “Has anybody contacted you today about making a payment? How is that going to work?”

  He shook his head. “Nobody’s come by, and this phone doesn't ring up in the house.”

  I lifted the phone’s handset and heard the stuttered dial tone that indicated voicemail. “Do you know Derek’s password?” I asked.

  Matt shook his head, and I frowned thoughtfully. “I’d better take the open files. I’ll send out letters to the debtors and let them know where to make their payments. We’ll keep track of the loans for you.”

  I got out a pen and a legal pad, then lifted a handful of files from the drawer. “They’re alphabetized. That will make it easier.” I started with the A’s, writing just the last name of the debtor on the legal pad until I got to Johnson, which required a Johnson, D., a Johnson, M., and a Johnson, S. When I got to the second page of the legal pad, I suggested that Brooke and Matt could carry the files up to the car while I finished. Matt looked at Brooke and nodded quickly.

  She gave him a smile. I smiled faintly to myself as I wrote “O’Sullivan, Parker, Peterson” in a column on the legal pad. There were, I thought, a lot of files, well over fifty.

  I finished the second page and flapped it back to get a clean sheet, wondering what Nolan’s average loan amount was. I opened the Peterson file and saw that the note, lying on top, had been made six months previously for 75,000 dollars. On the inside of the file folder was a column of dates with the amount $1520.73 written next to each. The last date was the fifteenth of this month, just over a week ago. Beneath the note was an amortization schedule, a financial statement for Michael Peterson, an appraisal of a building in downtown Richmond, and a photocopy of Peterson’s tax return. I flipped back to the note and saw it was secured by the downtown building.

  Brooke and Matt came back and stood waiting for me.

  “Just a minute,” I said. I counted the names I had written on my legal pad and the number of files I had left. There were fifty-eight. If 75,000 dollars was the average loan amount, then Nolan’s loan portfolio was…I scribbled my calculations in the margin…4.35 million dollars. Of course, part of the Peterson note had been paid off. There was only about sixty-eight or sixty-nine thousand dollars outstanding. I checked the amortization schedule. After six payments, the balance was just under 68,700 dollars. I multiplied 69,000 by 58.

  “A loan portfolio of about four million dollars,” I said.

  The interest rate on the Peterson loan was eight percent, which, multiplied by 4 million, yielded interest income of about 320,000 dollars per year. Of course, my calculations assumed that the Peterson file was typical of all fifty-eight loans in the active drawer, which was unlikely to be the case. Still, I thought I had some idea of the size of Nolan’s operation.

  Returning the Peterson file to the stack, I wrote Queen at the top of my new page and put that file on top of Peterson’s. When I was done, I put the last file on the stack and turned the chair toward the walnut credenza and the computer on it. I turned the computer on and waited for it to boot. Brooke picked up the short stack of files, and Matt followed her to the door. There he took the files from her, then moved his head to indicate she should go first.

  Uh oh, I thought, swiveling back to the computer. Matt was becoming infatuated, and him engaged to be married. On the other hand, his fiancée had disappeared, and Brooke looked a lot like her, though she was about five years older and in my opinion a lot prettier. I thought it might be what Freud called transference, though Psychology 101 was far enough behind me that I wasn’t entirely sure transference was Freud’s term and, if it was, what exactly he meant by it.

  A box came up on the screen telling me to press Ctrl-Alt-Delete to enter a password. I hit the three buttons and the password box came up. I typed in DEREK for the user name and LYNN for the password. It didn’t work, so I tried DEREK and NNYL — Lynn backwards — then FACTOR and NNYL, then NOLAN with Lynn’s name, both forward and backward. No luck.

  I turned the chair and waited for Matt.

  He came in behind Brooke, hanging back to let her go ahead of him, getting another smile in return.

  “Matt,” I said. “Do you know the password for this computer?”

  He shook his head.

  “Do you think your mother does?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s your birthday?” I tried several variations of that with the user names DEREK, FACTOR, and NOLAN, then I tried MATTHEW as the password, both forwards and backwards.

  “This isn’t going to work,” I said.

  “Try Derek-underscore-Nolan for the user name,” Matt said.

  “Okay.” I typed it in, then looked up at him.

  He hesitated. “Veronica Lynn,” he said. “All lower case, no space.”

  I raised my eyebrows as I typed it in. The combination of user name and password worked. I was in.

  “How many times have you been on this computer?” I asked, opening the My Documents folder.

  He shook his head. “When I was little, he had a notebook computer he let me play games on. It had the same password.”

  There was a folder named Promissory Notes. Inside it there were hundreds of documents. I opened one named “Adams P.” The document was a promissory note for 40 thousand dollars, prepared for the signature of one Paul Adams. It called for payments of one thousand dollars a month for two years with a balloon payment at the end.

  “The date is just over five years ago,” I said to Brooke and Matt, who were both looking over my shoulder. “I assume the note was paid off, but there’s no indication of that in the document.” I closed it and scrolled down to one named “Peterson R.” I double-clicked it.

  “Dated six months ago,” Brooke said, reading over my shoulder.

  “It was one of the files you carried out.” Though the note was still outstanding, there was no indication of that in the file. It was just a note, ready to be printed and signed.

  I closed the document and looked in My Recent Documents for an accounting file—something in QuickBooks or Peachtree. There wasn’t one. There wasn’t even a spreadsheet file.

  “I don’t think the computer’s going to be very helpful.”

  Matt said, “Liz kept track of payments and sending past-due letters and stuff on her computer.”

  I turned the chair and looked at the computer sitting on the smaller desk by the door. “Ah,” I said. I got up and moved to the other desk, and I turned on that computer. After a couple of minutes, the same box I’d seen on the other computer came up, telling me to press CTRL-AL
T-DELETE. I did, and the box expanded to give me a place to enter a password.

  “What do we do here?” I asked.

  “Try the same thing,” Matt said.

  “Derek-underscore-Nolan?”

  “Right, and Veronica Lynn.”

  It didn’t work.

  “Try Liz-underscore-Lockard.”

  “Then what?” I said as I typed it.

  “Same password. Veronica Lynn.”

  That didn’t work either.

  “Liz-underscore-Lockard.” He hesitated. “It’s going to be his password. He’s not going to let her lock up the computer with something personal to her.”

  “What’s your middle name?” Brooke asked.

  “Matthew. I’m James Matthew Nolan.”

  “We’ll try James Matthew,” I said, typing. “Eureka.” The desktop appeared, the wallpaper a nonrepresentational smear of color. I looked in My Recent Documents and found what I was looking for, a Peachtree file.

  “This is your department,” I said to Brooke. “Can you print out reports that show loans outstanding, recent payments, and that sort of thing?”

  She nodded. “I can do better than that.” She pulled a lanyard from her purse that had a flash drive on the end of it. “I’ve got Peachtree on my computer at home. I’ll just copy the file.”

  I gave her my place at the desk, and she made her copy.

  “Get a copy of the notes on Derek’s computer, too,” I said. “Then I won’t have to take it with me.”

  “What are you going to do with all of it?” Matt asked.

  “For one thing, there’s a business to manage. Somebody has to stay on top of this loan portfolio and see to it the money keeps coming in.” I was thinking of Brooke, who had an undergraduate degree in accounting and a master’s in information systems as well as a lot of practical experience. Not only could she do the Nolans some good, she’d just started out on her own and could use the work.

  Matt nodded.

  I said, “We may or may not be able to figure out which was the embezzlement file. If you could do a little looking around, it might prove helpful.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Something else I’m looking for is a personnel file on Mark Walker. I’m going to have to talk to him.”