The Tenor Wore Tapshoes (The Liturgical Mysteries)

by Mark Schweizer

  "That would be great. By the way…"

  "Yes?"

  "Have you considered my…um…proposal?"

  "I'm thinking about it."

  * * *

  "Word's out," said Nancy, coming in from the cold. "I heard folks talking about it down at the Post Office. They stopped talking as I walked by, but I definitely caught the phrase 'I Sing a Song of the Saints of God,' and 'shepherdess on the green.'"

  "That didn't take too long," I said.

  "There's no proof, of course, but your name is mud all over town."

  "Yeah, I know. Pete called. The town council may be asking for my resignation and they're going to be asking the feds to investigate."

  Nancy nodded. "Dave off today?" I grunted in the affirmative.

  "I picked up the mail," said Nancy and tossed the rubber-banded collection of letters onto the desk. I slid the rubber bands off and absently started to flip through the stack. I stopped when I got to a typed envelope with a familiar return address. It was from Randall Stamps. I opened it and read it carefully. It was a copy of the report he had sent to Rob Brannon. Then I called Meg back.

  "Hi, again," I said. "Look at the report that Randall sent, will you? You have it?"

  "Yes, I have it."

  "The last paragraph. What does it say?"

  "Just what I told you. 'It is my opinion that the two Civil War stock certificates are worth about $500 a piece to a collector although possibly more to a person or group with specific ties to the bank in question. Sincerely, Randall Stamps.

  "That's all?"

  "That's it."

  "Nothing about the mention of another bond in a letter dated 1919 in the church's archives?"

  "No…"

  "Bring the letter by when you get a chance. Thanks." I hung up before the questions began in earnest. "Nancy," I said. "A clue has arrived and the game is afoot."

  * * *

  Meg walked into the office about four minutes later, just as I knew she would.

  "Come on in," I called from my office, "and bring Dave's chair with you."

  I placed the letter from Randall on my desk. Meg came in and handed me her photocopy of the letter that Rob Brannon had handed out to the vestry. They were identical except for the last paragraph, the one mentioning the letter dated 1919. There was also an enclosure note indicating that Randall had forwarded the letter to Rob as well.

  "Do you think he forwarded the original or do you think he made a copy?" Nancy asked. "I sure would like to get a look at that letter."

  "I'm betting it was a copy," I said. "But I'd also be willing to bet that the original is no longer in the archives."

  "Yeah," said Nancy. "He is, after all, the church administrator."

  "And the Senior Warden," said Meg, glumly.

  "Why don't you go back to Lester Gifford's folder?" asked a voice coming from behind my chair—a voice I recognized. I looked gingerly over my shoulder and saw a tall man wearing a gray suit and tie, a pair of round spectacles and a fedora pulled down over his eyes. Smoke from the pipe that he had clenched in his teeth circled his head like gray, transparent ivy.

  "You guys," I began, looking first at Meg and then at Nancy, "see anything strange?"

  They both looked up at me and shook their heads.

  "Let's go back to Lester Gifford's folder," I said.

  "I've gone through it five times," said Nancy.

  "Let's look again. Maybe we missed something."

  Nancy shrugged and went out to her desk to retrieve the folder. Meg leaned across the desk.

  "You okay?" she whispered.

  "Fine," I whispered back.

  "What's up?"

  "Raymond Chandler is standing behind me."

  Meg looked past me and then back again. "Can he help?"

  "Maybe."

  Meg nodded thoughtfully. "Good," she said.

  "You see," I said, still whispering, "this is why I want to marry you."

  "And this," she replied, "is why I said I'd think about it."

  Nancy came back into the office flipping through the pages. "I don't see how this will help."

  "Let's divide the pages and read through them. Check them, front and back, and look for anything out of the ordinary," I suggested. I peeked over my shoulder and saw Meg's eyes follow my quick glance. Raymond nodded and took another puff.

  Nancy handed a stack to me, another to Meg, and we settled back in our chairs to go through them yet again. Ten minutes later, Meg spoke up.

  "What do you think this is?"

  She was holding up a piece of paper so we could read it.

  "It looks like a foreclosure letter to Wilmer Griggs. Second notice," said Nancy. "I remember reading it."

  "Not that," said Meg. "This."

  She spread the page out on the desk with the backside up and smoothed it flat. On the back were a bunch of strange markings, smudged and indecipherable.

  "I can't make anything out," said Meg. "Just squiggles. And most of them are so light that they don't really show up."

  "It's backwards," said the voice behind me.

  "It's backwards," I said with a smile. "Sixty years of pressing against its neighboring document has left us with an imprint, however faint."

  "How are we going to read it?" asked Nancy.

  "Let's take it over to the copy machine," I said. "We can try a couple of settings. If that doesn't work, we can always send it off to the lab."

  Nancy, Meg and I crowded around the copier as I punched the enlargement button and adjusted the contrast and lightness. After about ten minutes, and twenty tries, we had a copy of the back of the letter on eleven by seventeen-inch paper, mostly gray but clear enough to make out a few sentences. Nancy brought in the mirror from the bathroom, set it on the desk and leaned it against the wall. Then we held the paper in front of it.

  "It's a bond," said Meg. "A certificate of deposit."

  "Can you make out how much it's for?"

  "No," said Meg. "But it's drawn on…what was the name of the bank Lester worked for?"

  "Watauga County Bank."

  "I think that's it. Look…here's the 'W' and the end of 'County.' The date is eighteen something.

  "There wasn't a certificate of deposit in the folder, was there, Nancy?"

  "No. There was not."

  "So we may presume that someone removed it."

  "We may."

  "And the only person who looked through this folder, other than you or me, was Mr. Brannon."

  "He was."

  Raymond nodded.

  * * *

  While Nancy and Meg went for coffee, I made a call to the Northwestern Bank in Asheville and asked for the president. After going through his secretary and waiting for about five minutes, Mr. Forsythe came on the line.

  "This is Chief Hayden Konig in St. Germaine," I said, identifying myself. "I wonder if you can answer a couple of questions."

  "If I can," said the voice on the other end of the phone.

  "I have a case up here involving a bond issued sometime in the late 1800's.

  "Funny you should mention that. I just had a request from the corporate office asking us to review the documents that were presented with an action filed to collect a bond issued in 1899. Just a moment."

  There was a rustling of papers and Mr. Forsythe came back on the line.

  "This is made out to St. Barnabas Church. That the one?"

  I answered in the affirmative.

  "The bond was issued for $75,000 at an interest rate of six percent, compounded quarterly. That was about a half point high, but not unreasonable for the time. There's a note written in pencil at the bottom indicating that it should have been cashed out in five years when it matured."

  "Can you tell me whose names are on the bond?"

  "As I indicated, the bond is made out to St. Barnabas Church. It was signed by Wesley Lynn, president of the Watauga County Bank. Northwestern Bank took over Watauga County Bank in 1937. It was one of the smaller acquisitions that h
appened at the end of the depression. There's another signature as well. Looks like Robert Brannon."

  "What would the value have been in five years?" I asked. "If the bond had been cashed in 1904?"

  "Interestingly, we show that it was cashed. But when we found the actual bond, it was obvious to us that the bond in our records is a forgery. It's not notarized and the signatures are different. But that wasn't your question. Hang on. Let me get my calculator," he chuckled. "It's been a while since I've had to do interest calculations."

  I flipped through Nancy's notes as I waited for Mr. Forsythe to come back on the line.

  "You still there?" he asked.

  "Still here."

  "In five years, the bond should have been cashed for a little over $100,000."

  "Since the bond wasn't cashed, is Northwestern Bank responsible?"

  "If the documents are authentic, then the bond will eventually have to be paid, although I think it will probably go through the courts."

  "How much was the bond worth in 1937 when the merger occurred?"

  "Hmmm…hang on… in the thirty-eight years from 1899 to 1937, the principal and interest had grown to $686,568."

  "That's a lot of money in 1937. Do you think that the acquisition of Watauga County Bank would have taken place if a debt like that had been identified?"

  "My inclination would be to say no."

  "And now for the sixty-four thousand dollar question, Mr. Forsythe," I said with a smile. "How much is the action to recover the bond?

  "More than a sixty-four thousand dollar question, Chief. The action is seeking the full amount. Principal and interest to total $34,054,704."

  "Wow! And who filed the action?"

  "An organization called The Sons of Richmond, LLC."

  "Would you fax me a copy?"

  "Be happy to. What's the number?"

  * * *

  My next call was to my friend, Michelle, at the Secretary of State's office in Raleigh.

  "Hi, Michelle. This is Hayden."

  "Hayden! How are you?"

  "I'm fine. Listen, can you do me a favor real fast? I need to know who the partners are in an LLC called The Sons of Richmond."

  "Are they incorporated in North Carolina?"

  "Either here or in Virginia," I said.

  "If they're here, I'll tell you in a second. Virginia might take me a couple of hours. Nope," she said. "They're here. No partners. It's a sole proprietorship registered to Robert Brannon with a Post Office box in Charlotte."

  "Thanks, Michelle. I owe you one."

  * * *

  As soon as Nancy and Meg returned, I filled them in on what I had discovered. We compared the faxed copy of the note and the image from the back of the letter. There was no doubt. They were a match.

  "I'm a bit confused," said Meg. "Can you lay it all out for me? From the beginning?"

  "From the discovery of the body?" asked Nancy, pulling out her notebook and jotting down notes from this recent discovery.

  "Nope," said Meg. "Starting in 1899."

  "Okay, here goes. In 1899, Robert Brannon, Sr.—presumably Rob Brannon's grandfather…"

  "Great-grandfather," I corrected.

  "Great-grandfather," continued Nancy, "left $75,000 in the Watauga County Bank in the form of a bond, payable to St. Barnabas Church and maturing in 1904, at which time the Watauga County Bank would pay St. Barnabas Church $100,000. The church had been destroyed in a fire and it seems likely that the sum was set aside for the rebuilding of the church. But Robert Brannon, the priest of St. Barnabas, and two parishioners were killed in a flood in March of 1899. So, in all probability, no one except the president of the bank knew about the bond, and he forgot about it over the years. That about right so far?"

  "So far, so good," said Meg. "Continue."

  "The bond was never cashed and so was not used during the rebuilding of the church in 1904. However, when the Watauga County Bank was getting ready to merge with Northwestern Bank in 1937, an audit was probably performed including trying to find the owners of accounts that had not been accessed for several years. It was in this audit that Lester Gifford found the bond and brought it to the attention of his boss—the owner of the bank—Harold Lynn, who was also the Sr. Warden of St. Barnabas. There's a little conjecture, I admit, but I think it will read well at my conferences," said Nancy.

  "Merely corroborative detail intended to lend artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and uninteresting narrative," I said. "To quote William S. Gilbert." Meg giggled. I love it when she giggles.

  "Harold Lynn was in a financial bind," continued Nancy, "which was why he was selling the bank. In addition, the note offered the interest rate…no, let me change that," said Nancy, scribbling with her pencil. "The princely interest rate of six percent - a half percent over what most banks were offering in 1899, but the president of the bank, Wesley Lynn—Harold's father—was a member of St. Barnabas and willing to do the church a good turn."

  "Nice touch," said Meg. "You should consider writing detective novels. I know where you can get a typewriter."

  "There was a bond issued and, since the money wasn't withdrawn, it had grown over the thirty-eight years to $686,568. In 1937, Harold Lynn, now president of the bank, didn't have the money to pay the bond if it had been presented. So Harold—never having seen the actual bond—forged a duplicate showing it was paid in 1904 and wiped the loan off the books. It was not a good forgery, but with no original to compare it with, it went unnoticed. He then went to St. Barnabas and set a fire to destroy the records."

  "Okay," said Meg. "But why did he kill Lester?"

  "When Lester was doing the audit for the merger, trying to find the owners of accounts that hadn't been accessed for years, he found the account and brought it to the attention of Harold Lynn. Lester knew about the account. And if Lester knew, he was bound to tell someone eventually."

  "Got it," said Meg.

  "The original bond is what Rob Brannon found in Lester Gifford's papers. Lester had gotten it from Jacob Winston, a Sunday School teacher at St. Barnabas who was also the church historian. I'm betting that Lester had asked Jacob to see if he could find anything about the deposit in the church archives."

  "That would be my assumption as well," I said, trying to put my meager stamp of approval on what was turning out to be a very good job by Nancy. She just smirked at me and continued.

  "Harold Lynn didn't know that Jacob had found the bond and given it to Lester. He probably thought that, if it still existed, it was with in church archives. He murdered Lester Gifford and placed him in the altar, then started the fire in the record room hoping to burn all the documents."

  "Then he planted evidence implicating Jacob Winston in Lester's murder," added Meg.

  "Exactly. Since Jacob was the church historian, Harold probably surmised, and rightly so, that Lester had already talked to him. Harold didn't know that Jacob had already given Lester the bond. And, surprisingly, Lester's dead body was never found."

  "Here's the funny thing," I said. "Harold never wondered why Lester didn't smell."

  Nancy jotted a couple notes and continued. "I'm sure that Harold made it clear to Jacob that he'd better keep his mouth shut or be tried for murder. Jacob kept quiet."

  "But," I said, "the altar had the unique property of being highly radioactive and served to keep Lester Gifford's body from decomposing over the years. Had they found Lester in 1937, Harold or, more probably Jacob, would have been sent to prison for murder and the bond would have been discovered."

  Meg nodded. "The merger wouldn't have gone through and the Watauga County Bank would have declared insolvency and gone out of business like a hundred other post-depression institutions," she added.

  "Exactly," I said.

  "Hey," said Nancy. "This is my paper. Don't be horning in…and if you do, at least give me time to write it down."

  "We don't know how Rob got hold of the bank records and found out about the forged bond, but once he discovered it, it
was obvious to him what happened," I said. "Then it was only a matter of getting the vestry to sign it over to him."

  "What!?" said Meg. "We did no such thing!"

  "Do you have the paper that the vestry signed?" I asked.

  "Sure. We just sold him the two Civil War stock certificates."

  "Let me see the paper." Meg handed it to me.

  "St. Barnabas Church agrees," I read, "to sell the two aforementioned stock certificates as well as any interest it may have in any pre-existing financial institution for the sum of $4500."

  "That little sneak!" Meg exclaimed. "It wasn't the Civil War stocks he wanted at all! He wanted the interest in the financial institution!"

  "Did any money change hands?" I asked.

  "Yes," said Meg. "Rob had a certified check from The Sons of Richmond. He gave it to Father George."

  "Smart," I said. "It's a done deal, then."

  "Wait a minute," said Meg. "What about the cinnamon roll and all the other crimes?"

  "All pointing to me," I said.

  "He needed Hayden out of the church and under suspicion," said Nancy. "He engineered being appointed church administrator as well as Senior Warden. The only person standing in his way was Hayden. If Randall hadn't forwarded a copy of that letter, we wouldn't have found out for several weeks. Northwestern Bank may have contacted us eventually, but St. Barnabas already signed over their rights to the bond."

  "Is there anything we can do?" Meg asked.

  "Maybe," I said. "It's time for a warrant. I'll call Judge Adams."

  Chapter 24

  I looked around the room like a hedgehog in a room full of badgers.

  "Everyone, calm down," I said, "or I'll never get paid."

  I don't remember who started shooting, but when it was over, it was clear that the Possum 'n Peasel would need a redecorator. Piggy was as cold as the pork salad in the walk-in, a bullet hole squarely in his short ribs. Alice was stretched out like a guitar string on a cello, as dead as a Presbyterian Revival. Kelly had sat down where he bought it, ending up, appropriately enough, sitting on the bun warmer. Marilyn didn't appear to be hurt and had retreated back into the freezer. Kit, always perky, was now, not.