The Alex Shanahan Series

by Lynne Heitman

  “Do you have any proof at all for what you’re saying, or is it all just conjecture?”

  “What do you think happened to the original of Ellen’s pre-purchase agreement schedule, the one that was in archives?”

  “I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.”

  “Ellen swiped it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “After she called me and I told her where she could find the files, she flew to Denver, went out to the archives warehouse, and took it.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “When the archivist couldn’t find the file, I took a ride out there just to make sure he knew what to look for. When my secretary made the request, all she’d given him was a reference number. When I described to him the schedule that I wanted and told him that it was in the merger files, he told me that Ellen had been there in person. In the flesh.”

  “Does he know her?”

  “He doesn’t get that many visitors, and he remembered her red hair. It reminded him of his sister. She asked him to show her where the merger files were. Who else could it have been? Something must have happened to make her think that it was going to come out and she needed to hide the evidence.”

  “Something like what?”

  “I don’t know. You found out about it, didn’t you? Maybe someone else up there knew about it.”

  “Lots of people up here seem to know about this,” I said, “but no one talks. It’s like the Irish Mafia.”

  “Maybe someone threatened to talk. Whatever…”

  I thought about the mysterious Angelo and whatever he knew and the fact that Ellen had fired him. I thought about Dickie Flynn and his deathbed confession. I slid down to the floor, where I could get back into my briefcase. “When was this trip to archives?” If Ellen had been in Denver, it would likely be on her list of secret travel destinations.

  “He said it was the first day he was back at work after the holidays.”

  The last trip she’d taken had been to Denver—United on December 29. It was right there on the calendar. She went out and back in the same day. Eight hours of flying and only three hours on the ground in Denver. You’d have to have a singular purpose in mind to do that. I felt so disappointed. Betrayed, even. “You didn’t even know her,” is what Bill had said to me, and he’d been right. And the package, maybe we couldn’t find the package because she’d destroyed it. “What about the hard copies of the invoices, the signatures?”

  “Gone, too, although no one in Accounting remembers seeing her there.”

  “I just can’t believe this about her. Can you, Matt? You knew her. Can you really see Ellen doing something like that?”

  “I think I have a way to find out for sure. What if I can find out who signed the Crescent invoices?”

  “Then you would be very clever, indeed. I thought there were no copies around.”

  “We had this admin support person on the task force, Hazel. She was viciously organized. It was scary. And she worked with Ellen a lot.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “She loved me. I used to bring her lattes in the morning just to stay in her good graces. I figure I’ll buy her another double-tall for old time’s sake and find out what she’s got. I doubt if she’d have copies of the invoices, though. The best she might have is some kind of record of who signed. That sounds like something she’d do. If Ellen signed them, then we’d know for sure.”

  I pulled myself up and wandered back to the window. “When do you think you might know something?”

  “I’ve already got a call in to Hazel. As soon as I get something one way or the other, I’ll call you.” There was a slight pause. I’d run out of things to say and was just waiting for him to run out of steam. “You haven’t commented on my theory, Alex. It’s pretty amazing, don’t you think, how all the pieces fit, and especially how I figured it all out?”

  “Very elegant, Matt. It’s a very elegant theory.”

  After I hung up, I stared down at the empty bleachers. Dan was long gone, and so was the blue sky. The overcast sky was so intense in its bland whiteness, it hurt my eyes. I was tempted to close the curtains, but I didn’t. If I was going to work, I needed light.

  Most of Ellen’s things were in and on top of her personal mementos box, which was back in the corner of the room. All in one motion I hoisted it onto the bed. Several items slipped off the top and fanned out over the sheets like a deck of cards. Pick a card, any card. I slipped a file from the middle of the stack, one that I’d already read twice. Armed with a bottle of water from the mini bar, I settled in on the bed and began to read it again. The next time I looked up, it was after five o’clock.

  I picked up the phone and dialed the office. There was no reason to think Molly would still be at work, but as the phone rang and rang, I was hoping. Please, please, please, please, please pick up. Finally she did.

  “Molly, did you ever get that password for the officers’ calendars?”

  Chapter Thirty-six

  When my eyes adjusted to the low light, I saw two people kneeling in prayer—a Delta flight attendant in the last pew to the left, and Dan in the first pew on the right. With his head bowed, he was on his knees below a statue of the Virgin Mary.

  I stood in the back and surveyed the windowless chapel. A single spotlight shone on a heavy wooden cross over the raised altar. The only other light came from rows of offertory candles along the walls. The design of the church was slick and modem, but the smell was ancient—of old incense and burning candles, oil and ashes. I hadn’t been inside a Catholic church for over fifteen years, not since my father’s funeral, but I still recognized that smell. This was a place where people brought their sins.

  When I arrived at Dan’s pew, I genuflected and made the sign of the cross. He saw me, crossed himself, and slid back in the pew, propping both feet up on the kneeler. Instead of his usual bouncing and fidgeting, he was still. “You’re Catholic?” he asked, his voice barely above a whisper.

  “Not anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  I looked at the gleaming white marble altar, hard and unforgiving. “The whole deal is presided over by aging, celibate white men whose job it is to tell you how to live a clean and pure life in a dirty and complicated world. It doesn’t make any sense to me, and I don’t need help feeling guilty. What about you?”

  “My kid’s always asking me if I go, so I do. Besides, it’s the only place on the field where it’s quiet enough for me to think.” His voice was so low that only the two of us could hear.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “My grandmother. She raised me.” He tipped his head back and stared up at the ceiling. “She used to tell me that men were put on the earth to take care of women.”

  “That’s quaint.”

  “She was a tiny Italian woman, but she was a pistol. Nobody messed with her. ‘Husbands are supposed to take care of their wives, and fathers are supposed to take care of their children,’ she’d say, ‘and that’s the only way it works.’”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “I believed it all my life. And now my wife has left me, my little girl sees me twice a month if I’m lucky, Ellen is dead, and you hate my guts.” He rubbed his eyes and focused on the offertory candles burning at the bare ceramic feet of the Virgin Mary. Most of the candles were lit, evidence that there were still people who believed. “I don’t think my grandmother would be proud of me.” His voice trailed off, and all I could hear was the sound of the flight attendant in back saying her rosary, the beads tapping lightly against the wooden pew. “Ellen knew,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Vic Venora told her about me, about locker thirty-nine. That was the last conversation I had with her. She did the same thing you did, she stormed off. Only that was the last time I ever saw her. Alive anyway.” He stared into the flames of the offertory candles and for a moment seemed transfixed by them, by the light of other people’s prayers. “I can’t s
top thinking that if she hadn’t found out or if I’d told her myself, she could have trusted me. She wouldn’t have tried to do this thing on her own. I could have helped her. But I never got a chance to explain it to her.”

  And just like that, it all fell into place. His obsessive pursuit, his endless rationalizing, his reckless disregard for himself: it was all driven by the most powerful and relentless of all impulses—guilt. “Explain it to me, Dan. I’d like to understand.”

  He stared down at his shoes, his face heavy and his eyes unseeing. He began slowly. “I was twenty-eight years old, still working as a ramper in Newark. I’d been married five years and was still living in my father-in-law’s house. I was working my ass off every day, and every night I was taking classes, trying to get into management. One day Stanley calls. Stanley Taub. You know him?”

  “He used to be the GM in Newark for Nor’easter.”

  “Right. He didn’t know me from a hole in the wall, but he calls me to his office and tells me he’s got a shift supervisor job open on the ramp. Asks me, do I want it? I couldn’t fu—I mean, I couldn’t believe it. I thought he was kidding. Then he says there might be a few things I’d have to do that I might not like. I tell him I’ll clean toilets if I have to. I’ll wash his car. I was going to make some decent money for the first time in my life, so I said, fine, sign me up.”

  Even now he couldn’t hide a hint of the excitement he must have felt. “Stanley wasn’t talking about cleaning toilets, was he?”

  He shook his head. “At first he’d ask me to do stupid shit, like drive him into the city and drop him off so he wouldn’t have to park. Then he started telling me without really telling me to stay out of certain areas on certain shifts. ‘I don’t think you need to be down in cargo tonight,’ he’d say, ‘I’ve got it covered.’”

  “And you stayed away?”

  “I didn’t know I had a choice. I thought the deal was to do what he said or go back to slinging bags, and there was no way I was gonna do that. The baby was already two years old, and if I had to kill myself, I was getting us our own apartment. I did what I was told.”

  “Where did Lenny come in?”

  His head hung so low, he was almost talking into his shirt. “Lenny needed someone to run these envelopes up to Boston from Jersey, and Stanley recommended me.”

  I stared down at my hands in my lap. “Envelopes full of cash?”

  “Swear to God, Shanahan, I never looked. My instructions were to fly to Boston and leave the envelope in locker thirty-nine at the Nor’easter terminal, so that’s what I would do, then turn around and go back home. I never knew who picked it up. I never heard of Crescent Security. I never even knew what the envelope was for. Didn’t want to.”

  I believed him. Not knowing or wanting to know would have been inconceivable to me, but it was as much a part of his character as loyalty to his boss. “How much money did you make for all this?”

  He put his hands beside him on the pew, rocked forward, and stared down at his shoes so that I couldn’t see his face. “I got paid extra overtime without working it. It came in my paycheck.”

  That couldn’t have been much, and it was so much like him to sell out at a price that was far too low. “Why did you stop?”

  “Michelle.” He tilted his head, looked at me, and couldn’t suppress the smile. “She was so beautiful, so perfect. One day she looked up at me with those big innocent eyes, and I saw myself the way she might see me and I got scared. I started feeling like I didn’t deserve her and that God was going to punish me, take her away from me. I decided I would never again do anything that wouldn’t make my kid proud, and I never took another dime.”

  “Lenny couldn’t have been too pleased.”

  “He told me I’d never get promoted as long as he was drawing breath, but what else was he gonna do? Fire me for not stealing anymore?”

  “You were in Boston by then?”

  “Yeah. You know, the whole time I was in the union working the ramp, everyone down there was sticking it to the company in every way they could. Every day I had a chance to do it, too, and I never did. I put on a shift supervisor’s uniform and I find out management’s stealing more than anyone and I’m thinking, If everyone’s sticking it to the company, who is the company?”

  He sat back with his shoulders slumped and his hands folded in his lap, looking as if he’d taken a pretty good beating from the world, and I realized that in his mind he had never lied to me. He never could have. Everything he was, everything he wanted to be, was right there on his face. If I had known him when he was scamming, I would have known he was scamming, the same way I knew now that he was telling the truth.

  “Did you tell Big Pete about John McTavish?”

  “On my grandmother’s eyes, I did not tell him.”

  “Do you know how he found out?”

  “No, but I’ve been thinking about it, and I remember now how I found out. Victor Venora. He made a point of tracking me down to tell me.”

  “That could have been Big Pete making sure that you knew. The real question is, How did those guys find out?”

  He looked all around the chapel and then back at me. “Why did you call me?”

  “Because I calmed down. I got a little perspective, and I decided I was a jerk for believing Big Pete and not giving you a chance to explain.”

  “Thank you.” he said, his voice hoarse, ragged.

  “My pleasure … and there’s more. I’ve spent the past five hours going through every piece of mail, every document, everything I have that belonged to Ellen, and I think I’ve figured some things out. I need to tell you about it.”

  “I’m on my way to meet Angelo. Come with me and we’ll talk on the way.”

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  “Can you believe this shit?” Dan guided the car into the bumper-to-bumper flow of Route 1A. “We’re never going to make it. Angelo’s gonna bolt before we get up there.”

  The exit to the Sumner Tunnel, the short way into town, was closed to all but taxi cabs and buses. It was a traffic-control measure that usually happened at the airport this time of night on Fridays. A trooper stood in the road with the lights of his blue-on-blue State of Massachusetts patrol car flashing and rain dripping from the bill of his cap. Using a flashlight, he’d funnel reluctant drivers onto the dreaded detour route. And there was no more reluctant driver than Dan at that moment.

  “Goddammit.” He banged the steering wheel, then banged it again for good measure.

  “Calm down. There’s nothing we can do about this. Where are we going?”

  “Angie’s worried about being seen with us. He’s got us going way the hell out to some dive in Medford or Medfield or some goddamned place.” He leaned forward and wiped the fog off the window with the sleeve of his jacket. When he had cleared a hole big enough, he craned his neck and peered up into the sky. “I don’t like the way it looks out there.”

  I made my own porthole. All I could see were sheets of rain falling on us from out of a pitch-black sky. “This is supposed to turn to snow later.”

  “I know. What’s the big discovery?”

  This wasn’t exactly the venue I had in mind for breaking the news, but it would have to do. I turned in my seat so that I could face him. “My friend Matt called earlier today.”

  “Finance guy Matt?”

  “He found a copy of the schedule of pre-purchase adjustments, the one Ellen was looking for.”

  As I explained about the seven hundred thousand dollars and the three payments and Crescent and everything but the part about Ellen being involved, he was riding the brakes, inching into the traffic, and I was mainly talking to the back of his head. “You’re not listening to me.”

  “I am listening,” he insisted. “There were three big payments from Nor’easter to Crescent, which is really Lenny, and he used the money to buy the contract. That’s your big news?”

  “The payments to buy the contract came from Majestic, not Nor’easter. That’s the big n
ews, Dan. Lenny—or someone—figured out a way to get Majestic to pay for the whole thing. But to make it work, he needed a partner on the inside at Majestic, someone on the task force to approve his fake invoices to Crescent.” I took a deep breath. “It could have been Ellen.”

  He hit the brakes abruptly, and we both slammed against the seat belts.

  “Son of a bitch.” For a split second I thought he was yelling at me, but his anger was directed at the driver of a panel truck who was maneuvering to merge from behind us. Dan deftly cut him off. “Who’s saying that about her?”

  “Matt.” I shifted around in my seat. My jeans were starting to feel tight. “And me, Dan. I think it’s possible that she was involved.”

  “This is a joke, right?” He glared at the driver of the truck in the rearview mirror. “I can understand that fucking pisshead finance guy thinking something that stupid. What is he, like twelve years old? But you, Shanahan, what is that? You’re mad at me so Ellen’s dirty, too?”

  “Ellen and Lenny worked on the merger together. They were on different sides of the negotiation, but apparently they became close. That project lasted eight months.”

  He was stiff-necked, gripping the steering wheel and staring straight ahead. “That doesn’t prove anything, for chrissakes.”

  “I’ve been working on this all afternoon, going over and over every detail. I went through it all again—the box we brought down from her house, her letters, her files, her documents. I watched that dating video about a dozen times, and I went through a whole pile of her mail that had been forwarded to the airport—”

  “What did you expect to find?”

  “Some kind of a clue as to her motives. Why she was involved in all this.”

  “She was involved because that cocksucker Dickie Flynn got her involved when he sent her that package.”

  “I think she was involved before she got that package. Think about it. She could have turned that package over to the feds, or Corporate Security. She didn’t tell anyone what she was doing. She was sneaking around on other airlines. And I found something in her files. She requested and received extraordinary signature authority while she was on the task force.”