by Leslie Leigh
"Jimmy."
"Just checking. Well, here you are. Fifty-three employees, each with twenty-four months' worth of archives. What's the name of the pers— huh...?" He squinted at the screen. "That's odd."
"What is it?" She rose and walked over to look over his shoulder.
"Oh, nothing, I don't— it's weird. You see this name here?"
He pointed at the screen to the name, Van de Kamp, Edward John.
"What about it?"
"Look at it. The name is grayed out. You click on these plus signs here to open up more information. Watch." He clicked on another name and a window opened up with a spreadsheet of personal and financial data. "You can click on any one of these items here and it will give you more info." He closed the window and clicked on the Van De Kamp name. "Nothing here. Look!" He laughed. "There's no social security number. It's like he's either dead or not a naturalized citizen. In the latter case he'd at least have something here identifying him as such. I forgot what the code is, but they put it there specifically to identify non-naturalized citizens with work visas. There's nothing here." He scrolled down to review the data.
And then sat back.
He spoke over his shoulder. "How much did you say your guy paid out?"
"Twenty-five thousand."
"Look."
He scrolled down Edward Van De Kamp's information over the past twenty-four months. "Fifty dollars a week for...well, since the beginning of the spreadsheet."
"Hold on," said Allie.
"How much you wanna bet there's five hundred paychecks here? That would add up to twenty-five large. Who really cares about fifty bucks a week? Some lazy accountant can take care of it. Scooch it away somewhere. What you're looking at here? It's a dummy account. There is no Edward Van de Kamp. Your guy probably got the name off a box of fish sticks."
"Wh— I— how? How do you set something like that up?"
"With ties to someone in the payroll department. Or maybe you can enter the information in at the middle manager level and then clear it with the higher ups. Like tell them it's a temp or something. If I had to guess, the fact that it's grayed-out like this probably means it's invisible to whoever checks this stuff on a regular or semi-regular basis. Like I said, in a multi-million dollar corporation with contracts all over the world, nobody notices fifty bucks."
"You sure nobody can see this page?"
"Yeah, pretty sure. You see, we’re looking at an exploited form here. All the edits can be seen and these bits of code here are...listen, it would take a while to explain it. Just trust me. I really don’t think they can see this stuff. Their computer, on the other hand, does see it and generates a check. Or it did. Looks like it stopped a couple of months ago. By the way, this was all done digitally. No paper. Here. Here's the account the money went into." He grabbed a pen and paper and jotted the number down.
"This is ridiculous. I can’t believe what I'm looking at."
"Look. Chittenden County First National."
"UN-believable," said Allie.
"To be honest with you, I don’t think your guy's ever set foot in there, except maybe to set up the account. Your guy, or whoever withdrew the money from the account for him, probably did it over the course of a long period of time, and from a variety of ATMs. Biweekly maybe. You know, the machines only give twenties. Anyway, that's how I'd do it, to cover my tracks."
"He got the company to pay his blackmailer."
"Blackmail, eh?"
"Yep."
"Yeah, well, looks to be the case. Pretty cool."
"No, it's not cool."
"From a hacker perspective it is. Let me get out of here."
He clicked a few keys and then swiveled his chair around.
"For this service I shall require a dinner and dessert. I want veal cutlets and mashed potatoes with buttermilk. String beans on the side, with slivered almonds. Peach cobbler and... Ben & Jerry's vanilla."
"Anything else?"
He looked thoughtfully at the ceiling. "You still going out with the cop?"
"I see him from time to time."
"Interesting. Whatever." He swiveled his chair around again to face his screen. "I'll call you about dinner."
"Thank you, Jimmy."
"Mmm hmm," he said.
As she walked down the steep driveway to her car, an eerie feeling dropped on her like a thick cloud. Bennett Reilly had used the company to pay for his blackmail, but the way he did it predated the blackmail note. Like he knew it was coming.
Or like the money wasn't used for blackmail at all.
9.
"What do you think it was used for?" said Sgt. Beauchenne, his breath misting on the chilly night air.
"I don’t want to say."
"This is a safe bridge," he said with a wink.
"It could've been used to pay a hitman."
"What else?"
Allie shrugged. "To pay a bookie, maybe? To pay off some old debt somewhere that he didn’t want his wife to know about?"
"Which is the most likely scenario to you?"
"Which is to you?"
"I asked you first."
"Are you serious?"
Beauchenne chuckled. "I'm serious. You tell me yours I'll tell you mine."
She thought for a moment. "Well, I think the hitman is the most likely scenario out of those."
"Why?"
"Because I have a feeling."
"That's not enough. Besides, hitmen don't get paid before a job."
She had trouble concealing her impatience. "Then what is your theory, wise one?"
"I think it was some illicit debt problem. Maybe gambling. Maybe drugs. Something he had trouble keeping under control. I think his wife was going to find out about it and he wanted to cover it up, so he came up with the blackmail story. Only he was sidelined by her actual murder. Look at the facts of the case." He began ticking them off on his fingers, which Allie found annoying, for it implied an authority that he possessed only in theory here. "You have these withdrawals from his account, fifty bucks a week every week for some time. Now, sure this fits a scenario of gathering money together for some purpose. But it also fits the scenario of a habit."
"He said he paid the guy."
"Any evidence of this?"
Allie found she couldn’t answer.
"Allie, you’re doing a good job here. You're able to access areas I could never access. Now, I promised I wouldn’t ask you about how you managed to come across all this financial information, but I have a feeling that however you got it, that method won’t stand up in court. To the contrary, it could create a big ol' loophole for the case to slip right through without any indictments. You have to come up with more evidence. Admissible stuff that corroborates what you suppose is the truth. Otherwise, you got nothing in the eyes of the law."
Allie mentally kicked herself. She knew he was right but had not wanted to admit it. This lecture he gave her was nothing more than a necessary scolding to remind her that she had to bring her 'A' game. Still, she didn’t appreciate his talking down to her like that. For that, he'd earned a lukewarm goodbye and a quick departure.
In the car she thought about how she now had to backtrack a bit. The thought of this was daunting, and brought back the feeling she'd had in the library, that feeling of wanting to go far off somewhere and stay there for a while, free from responsibilities.
But the same feeling she'd had before all this had started — the ennui that found her living the same old boring life from day to day without any excitement, without any challenges to her newfound affinity for puzzle solving — would soon return, she knew.
So she looked at her dashboard clock. 9:35 p.m. Still time to take a drive that would bring her closer toward the end of this mess.
10.
"Do you know how they say you can tell when you’re being conned?"
"Where are we going?" said Del.
"They say it's details. The person telling you the story — the con artist — pads the story with a lo
t of unnecessary details. Your brain picks up on this and attributes the detailed mental picture you're getting to an authentic account. But it's all horse hockey."
"Horse hockey? Can you tell me where we're going?"
"I'll tell you when we get there. Here. This will do fine."
She pulled the car into an alleyway off Cherry Street. They were in Burlington, and it was 11:30 at night.
It was perfect. A nice clean place between a laundromat and a café with two stories of apartments above it. A couple of cars were parked alongside the café. The alley let out at the far end with a space barely big enough for a bicycle to get through. She could see the dim view of another apartment complex through that. However, none of this implied company did anything to assuage the feeling of loneliness here. An alleyway at night was an alleyway at night. Apartments or no apartments.
She looked at her friend. "Ok. You ready?"
"Why not?" Del said lackadaisically. "Bring it on."
Allie handed her a blue baseball cap. "Put this on. You're going to do a little acting for me."
"Oh boy. Who'm I playing?"
"A little boy. Hmmm, about seven years old."
Leaving the car running, and with the headlights on, she exited, telling Del to follow her.
Outside, she positioned Del in front of the car. "Ok, cap forward. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. Now get down on your knees."
"Really? There's gravel and crap."
"Come on. This is important."
One of Del's strengths as an actress was that she knew how to take direction.
"Now what?"
"Now you hang on a second. Don’t move."
Allie walked about ten feet away and stopped. She closed her eyes and put her hand over them to blot away any previous exposure to the headlights. Then she turned around.
Del was a vague silhouette in front of the lights. Allie walked toward her. She stopped in front of her friend.
"It's hard to tell."
"What?"
"The color of the cap. Bennett said the kid had a blue cap on. With headlights shining in the face, you can sort of tell. But with all the stress of the situation, the strangeness of it, the appearance of a child to collect the money, would he really be focused on the cap?"
"Can I get up now?"
"Yeah, I guess."
"He could have a really good eye for detail," said Del.
"True. But he didn’t notice Dougie dyed his hair."
"Who?"
"Douglas the bartender dyed his hair and Bennett didn't realize he'd done it. That's not a very good eye for detail. And noticing dyed hair on a guy that you see all the time is a lot different than noticing the color of a kid's cap when he's standing in a strange alley in front of headlights."
"Wow."
"Exactly. Let's go. This place is giving me the creeps."
11.
"In order to figure out who could've murdered your wife, we need to find out who could have benefitted from her death. And that means we should take a look at her will."
They sat in Bennett Reilly's living room, sipping coffee in the afternoon glow of a bright, clear day.
"Oh, well, that's easy. I held power of attorney. I can tell you exactly who benefitted. There was myself and Sam Weller."
Allie started at the name. "Who is that?"
"There's a story there. How much time have you got?"
"All the time in the world."
"Ok, well... I don’t know if you know this, but when Honey was younger, she was sort of a free spirit. Your typical Burlington earthy crunchy type. You know what I mean?"
"I guess so."
"Well, that's what she was. She wouldn’t deny it, although she looked at those years with disdain. She became a diehard capitalist later on. Anyway, in those days – back in the 80s – there were a lot of causes for a progressive liberal. Reagan-era politics provided a lot of good fodder for those types. There were quite a few demonstrations in those days. Mostly peaceful. Right around the time of the Iran-Contra affair. Remember? With Ollie North and all that? It was a protest against that whole thing. Honey marched in it, right down Church Street, holding a picket sign she’d painted with paint she lifted from a hardware store owned by a conservative business owner. So there she was, marching peacefully, and right there in the middle of it all someone throws a rock at one of the demonstrators. As you can imagine, things suddenly got a little hairy. The crowd was able to subdue the guy – it was Burlington after all and the crowd wasn't exactly on his side — but Honey got scared and started to run. But she was wearing this long hemp scarf and while she ran it started to fall and the back of her sandal got tangled in the knit. Some of the marchers behind her tumbled over her, and all this time she's trying to free her sandal and stand up. All of a sudden a hand reaches in and picks off the scarf in one swoop, then takes her arm and helps her stand. And this guy who helped her whisks her away. He's an older guy, and he seems like a nice guy, obviously not a lecher or anything. So they go and sit in an ice cream place and they have sundaes, and he tells her all about his life. How he was in Vietnam and he was underground deploying bombs, and that when he got back he'd had a nervous breakdown because he never knew who he was bombing, if it was little kids or whatever. And they bonded there over ice cream. And they became close. He became like an uncle. Helped her straighten out her life. She never forgot him."
When he stopped, there was a heavy silence in the room.
"Anyway," he said, "that's it."
"Incredible," Allie said. "So where does this guy live?"
Bennett gave a chuckle. "I'm afraid you'll have to ask the probate office. We kinda lost track of him over the past couple of years."
"Hmm." She bit her bottom lip. Then, noticing the shelf of old books on the wall, she got up and walked over to them, inspecting the spines. "You get these at a thrift store?"
"No, those came from an antique store."
"You bought them?"
"Honey. I never bought anything on those trips. I was there to accompany her."
"Sorry. I guess I'm sort of a book nerd."
"You're very pretty for a book nerd," he said. "If you don’t mind me saying."
"I don't mind. But I'm no different than any other book nerd. We tend to be pretty," she said with a wink.
"Well, I suppose I've wasted your time. I've a great deal of work to do. I hope you don't mind."
"Not at all."
12.
The Creek Falls’ lunch special was prosciutto and fig spread on a baguette with arugula and asiago cheese. Allie and Del looked at each other when the waiter told them of it, and they nodded wide-eyed at each other, and then at the waiter, and there was nothing more said on the matter, except for, "peach iced tea."
Once he left, and once Allie was able to control the saliva that had previously been flowing prodigiously, she leaned over and said, "I think he was coming on to me."
"The waiter?"
"No," said Allie, "Reilly!"
"Get out."
"Told me I'm pretty for a book nerd."
"I hate him."
"Me too. There's something fishy about him. I want to say I don’t trust him. His wife's body is barely cold and he's flirting? Oh, and then there's the Sam Weller story."
"What's the Sam Weller story?"
"Sam Weller is named as one of the beneficiaries in Honey's will. Bennett told me this long-winded story about how Honey met this guy – and more about the name 'Sam Weller' in a second. Anyway, I don’t want to bore you with the details, so I'll give you the general gist of it: Honey was with a group that was marching down Church Street in Burlington, there was a disruption of the proceedings, something happened where she got tangled up, and Sam Weller pulled her out of it. Then they went to eat and they bonded and became good friends."
"Ok."
"You got that?"
"Yeah."
"Now I'll tell you about how Honey met our friend Arthur Chapman: Honey was with a group that w
as marching down Church Street in Burlington, there was a disruption of the proceedings, something happened where she got tangled up, and Arthur Chapman pulled her out of it. Then they went to eat and they bonded and became good friends."
"Oh my."
"I have a feeling Honey may have relayed this story to Bennett at some point at the beginning of their relationship. Maybe she left out names, who knows?"
"Yeah, but that's a little weird. Which story is the right one?"
"Chapman's of course! His was...more genuine. I guess because it had one aspect to it that no con artist can seem to master: real human emotion. There's only superficial emotion when it comes to Bennett Reilly. It's in everything he says and does."
The sandwiches arrived, and Allie and Del dove into them, pausing after the first bite to roll their eyes back in ecstasy and praise the gods of meat and cheese.
Del was the first to regain the ability to speak about anything other than how delicious the sandwich was. "So what about the name? You said there was something about the name."
Allie held up her finger while she finished chewing. "It's right out of Dickens."
"Really."
"The Pickwick Papers, to be exact."
Del looked at her incredulously.
"Uh uh," said Allie.
"What was I gonna say?"
"You were going to say it's a coincidence. It's not."
"Did you mention it to Reilly?"
"No."
"Uh huh."
"Stop! He made it up. That's another thing about con artists. They think they're smarter than everyone else. They don’t think anyone else can possibly pick up on their references. The book nerd thing went right over his head."
"You're creating facts about Bennett Reilly to suit your hypothesis."
"Excuse me?"
"You heard me. I've been hanging around you so long I'm beginning to sound like you. But I'm right in saying that."
Allie sat back and drummed her fingers on the table.
"Don’t get pouty on me now," said Del. "I was just making an important observation and keeping you in check.
"I'm not pouty. Just frustrated. Every time I get anywhere with this case, I get knocked sideways."