Hidden River (Five Star Paperback)

by Adrian McKinty

  “Well, this isn’t the sort of thing I would want to discuss over the phone, but what I’m hearing from the DA is that their whole case is based on that license. Pretty thin stuff. They say he picked the lock but there were no scratches on the outside. They say he shot her because he panicked. But Hector’s a big guy, he could have just knocked her out. It’s weak, very weak.”

  “I’ll bet you money that Hector’s firm did the moving in the CAW building. That’s why Victoria had his license. She found it there. Or even better, someone else picked it up, used it to frame Hector.”

  There was a long pause on the line.

  “Now that you mention it, it’s so plausible,” he said finally.

  “Well, look, can you find out for me by Monday?” I asked.

  “Of course, I’ll ask him. This could be very helpful.”

  “Mr. Monroe, you’ve been very helpful. I’ll look forward to meeting you.”

  “Thank you, I’ll see you then.”

  I hung up. Typical overworked immigration lawyer, and I’d learned from bitter experience that you only believed half of what a defense attorney said. But even so. Maybe the murderer had found this poor guy’s Mexican driving license, knew he was almost certainly an illegal immigrant with no credibility, maybe even chatted to him, found out that he had a criminal record, decided to set him up. It would be very interesting to talk to Hector Martinez, could be he’d met the murderer or at least come into close physical contact with him. And it pointed again to that Boulder office.

  It was noon. I was so tired. The temperature hovered around ninety degrees. Being five thousand feet up didn’t seem to help cool things down. I decided to skip lunch and walk over to the CAW building, which was just off the main pedestrian mall.

  The narrow building sat on an empty lot with construction all around it. Four floors, built in the fifties, air conditioners jury-rigged in most of the offices. Maybe this was one reason CAW was moving out. Now that Boulder had become rich this was prime real estate, whoever bought the building would probably demolish it and build a new, much taller, more modern office block.

  I put my tie back on and went through the swing doors.

  An empty reception desk on the first floor. A large sign that said

  CAW call Denver 303 782 9555.

  Not an expert on fonts, but that looked like New Courier to me. I stood in the lobby for a minute or two.

  “Hello?” I said.

  No answer.

  I walked to the elevator and pushed the button for the second floor. When the elevator doors opened on two the lights were off, the floor empty, no one around. I got back on and tried three and finally four. Here the lights were on and I could hear the sound of a photocopy machine. The whole floor had been stripped down to a stained white carpet, deserted except for one corner where a man was working at a computer. He was surrounded by boxes, a photocopier, a few black filing cabinets, a chrome filing cabinet, a minifridge, a shredding machine, and black plastic bags. He didn’t see me walk up to him.

  “Hello,” I said.

  He stood. Six five. Pale, thin, tall, balding, saturnine, around forty-five years old. The sort of lived-in face that hinted at experience, though once he spoke you saw that it wasn’t experience, just years of rage, you could take your pick why: thwarted ambition, unhappy marriage, poor health. His nose had a network of dying capillaries. A bit of a drinker, too.

  “You shouldn’t be in here,” he said sharply, advancing toward me like a huge praying mantis.

  “My name is, uh, Jones,” I said, still for some reason reluctant to give my real identity.

  “We’re closed, we’re done here. The whole organization has moved to Denver, there’s just me and Margaret and a couple of students and they left this morning and I’m supposed to be gone too. You have to take up your business with the Denver office, it’s already opened. How did you get in here, anyway?”

  “I just walked in.”

  “Well, walk out.”

  “Listen, uh, Mister…”

  “Name’s Klimmer, vice president in charge of operations. How did you get past Margaret?” he said accusingly.

  “I didn’t see anyone,” I said.

  “Hold on,” he said, and picked up a phone. He dialed a number. No one picked up.

  “She must be getting me lunch, ok, well, what do you want? If it’s about leasing the floor space you can forget it, this building’s coming down,” he said.

  “I wanted to speak to someone about Victoria Patawasti,” I said.

  “What?” he said, visibly shaken. He backed away from me and sat down.

  “It’s about her murder. I’m a private investigator, sent by her family.”

  “Uh, oh, ok. Um, yes, of course. Ok, you better sit, look, there’s a chair over there, you can move that box. What did you say your name was?”

  “Jones.”

  “Jones, and her family sent you, from Ireland?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, well, well,” he said with a half smile.

  “Did you know her?”

  “You want a Coke? I have a cooler full of Coke,” he said, crossing his long legs.

  “No. Thank you.”

  “You’re very lucky to catch anyone here. I’m finishing up, today, at the latest tomorrow. We’re closing the office here completely, moving everything to Denver.”

  “Did you know Victoria?” I asked.

  “Did I know her? I knew her very well. Very well indeed.”

  “Did you work with her?”

  “Yes. She was a bit of a floater between departments. She worked for me and the brothers. Supposed to be getting her own secretary when we moved. Much bigger building, accommodate more staff.”

  I looked at him for a moment. He had said all this very quickly. Cheerfully. It was a little suspicious.

  “How many people worked here?” I asked.

  “At CAW we had about twenty-five employees. A dozen full-time staff, a dozen campaigners. Something like that. We’re a very small organization. Before the move we let most of the campaigners go. CU students. Of course, some of them will come to the Denver office. It’s only a forty-five-minute commute, if you avoid the rush hour. I do it every day. Bus, easy.”

  “So you don’t live in Boulder?”

  “No, almost none of us did. That’s why the move is good. I live in Denver, Victoria lived in Denver, the Mulhollands. Boulder is a very expensive town.”

  “What does CAW stand for again?” I asked, although I knew the answer.

  “The Campaign for the American Wilderness.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “We’re a nonprofit organization, we lobby government to get changes in environmental policy, we have a membership, a growing membership, we’re a very young organization, one of the youngest, in fact. Charles and Robert founded it just three years ago.”

  “Charles and Robert?”

  “Mulholland. Ryan Mulholland’s boys,” he said significantly.

  I gave him a blank expression.

  “You’ve heard of Ryan Mulholland?” he said.

  “No.”

  “No. No, why would you? You’re from Ireland. Yes? Well, Charles and Robert are the boys from his second marriage.”

  “Well, who is he?”

  He’s a banker, a financier. He runs the Mulholland Trust. Rich guy. One of those. You know the type. Fortune 500.”

  “His second marriage?”

  “Yeah, one girl from the first marriage, Arlene, the two boys from the second. He just got married for the third time. Wife’s expecting, the boys are pissed, I could tell.”

  “How old are the boys?”

  “I suppose they’re not really boys. Robert’s thirty-two or thirty-three. Charles is about thirty-eight or thirty-nine, something like that.”

  “Why are you moving to Denver?”

  “More space, higher profile, closer to the networks. We’re growing very fast, we need a bigger building. Boulder City
Council wouldn’t let us expand. You don’t have to be a genius to see that that would be a clash of temperaments. They call it the People’s Republic of Boulder up here. We’re a right-of-center organization. Boulder is slightly to the left of Che Guevera. Also, in terms of media coverage Boulder might as well be on the moon. Denver’s a better fit. It’s the state capital, HQ of all the media outlets, new airport, new library, fastest-growing city in the West next to Vegas and LA.”

  “And what do you do here?” I asked.

  “I’m in charge of mass mailings and, for my sins, this big move we’re doing,” Klimmer said with a trace of annoyance. I inched my chair a little closer to him.

  “How long did you know Victoria?”

  “Nearly a year,” he said hesitantly.

  “And you said she worked for you?”

  “She worked for me and she worked for Charles and Robert, she had virtually no administrative experience at all. Actually, she’d been working for one of Ryan Mulholland’s companies in England. They head-hunted her. She was very intelligent, very gifted.”

  “What did she do for you?”

  “Oh, well, everything’s been upside down for the last couple of months, she’s been helping me coordinate the move. It’s very complex, you know. The two cities are only a few miles apart, but, my God, you wouldn’t believe the crap we have had to deal with.”

  “What sort of crap?”

  “Well, the new building, the lease, putting in the phones, that kind of thing. Also the company that owned this building, Hughes Developments, owned several apartments in Denver that CAW leased. Giving up the lease on this building meant giving up the Denver apartments, too. Mine, for one. So several of us have had to look for new apartments in the middle of all this. You wouldn’t believe the hassle.”

  “Was Victoria one of the people who had to look for a new apartment?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, I think she was,” he said, his eyes narrowing with the recollection. He dabbed at a bead of sweat on his forehead. He got up and grabbed a Coke to conceal how tense he was. I was glad when he sat that big skinny frame down again. He opened the can and drank little sips.

  “When did the rest of the organization leave for Denver?” I asked.

  “More or less everyone was gone by the tenth. I know that because it was Robert’s birthday and they had the party at the new building in Denver. So neither Peg or I were there, although you would have thought it was bad taste having a party in light of what happened,” he said a little angrily.

  “Victoria’s murder,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “So everyone was gone by the tenth?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “And it’s just been you here since then?”

  “No, myself, Margaret, two of the CU students, Julie and Anne. But I was put in charge of winding things up. We needed a senior person for that.”

  “What’s the command structure? Where are you in the hierarchy?”

  “Why do you need to know that?” he asked.

  “I’m just curious.”

  “Oh, ok, well, Charles and Robert at the top, joint presidents, and then myself, Steve West, Abe Childan are vice presidents. I know what you’re thinking—three vice presidents for a permanent staff of twelve, but we plan to grow and—”

  “Did Margaret, Julie, or Anne know Victoria?”

  “Well, it’s a small organization, everyone knew everyone.”

  “Let me put it another way. Did they know her well, were they confidantes?”

  “Uh, I really don’t know.”

  “So, Mr. Klimmer, for the last ten days you’ve been more or less running the show since the move to Denver?”

  “At this end, yes.”

  “And Victoria was killed right before the move?”

  “That’s right. A very difficult time.”

  “On June fifth. Just days before the move,” I said flatly.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s interesting, isn’t it?” I said.

  “What is?”

  “That she was killed just before she got a new apartment in Denver, a whole new set of circumstances. If someone was going to murder her at her old apartment they were running out of time. They had to strike soon.”

  “I suppose,” he said, again taking tense sips from his soda.

  “What was the name of the moving company that you used to relocate from Boulder to Denver?”

  “I can’t quite remember, it was a Spanish name, I could find out pretty easily. I can ask Charles when I talk to him.”

  “Yeah, I’d like to know. Tell me, Mr. Klimmer, where did you go to college?”

  “Cornell University.”

  “Good school. Charles and Robert?”

  “They went to Harvard. Why do you want to know that?”

  “If you’ll bear with me.”

  “Fine,” he said submissively.

  “Did you have access to Victoria’s personnel file?”

  “What are you saying?” he asked, again a trace of irritation in his upper lip.

  “Did you have access to her personnel file?”

  “Yes, but what’s that got to do with anything?”

  “What about Margaret and the students, would they have had access to it?”

  “Of course not. It’s confidential.”

  “Ok. Let me ask you something else. I see you don’t have a printer here. If you wanted to print out a document, where would you print it out?”

  “What?”

  “If you could answer the question, please,” I said.

  “All the printers have been moved to Denver. Margaret has one at her desk, I believe. What exactly is the relevance of that question?”

  “Could I see Victoria’s personnel file?”

  “Again, most of the personnel files have been sent on to Denver,” he said, but from his tone I knew that Victoria’s had not.

  “But not hers, because she’s not personnel anymore,” I said.

  He nodded and put down his soda. For some reason he had kept the file. And of course he knew exactly where it was. He stood, unlocked the big chrome filing cabinet, reached inside, and handed it over without another mutter about it being confidential or none of my business. He smiled weakly, sadly. Victoria had clearly meant a lot to him.

  “Did you know her back in Ireland?” he asked. The question threw me a little.

  “No, I didn’t,” I managed.

  “Oh, she was really a wonderful person. Not just beautiful, clever, too,” he said absently, putting the filing cabinet key back in his pocket.

  The cream folder contained six sheets of paper. I scanned them, checked that she had written “Tiny Taj” as part of her home address. Of course she had. I gave the folder back. He put it carefully back in the file cabinet. I looked at him for a moment. He and three other people could have sent the anonymous note. It was postmarked June 12 and by then everyone else had left for the Denver office. He worked closely with Victoria. I would have to check out Margaret, Julie, and Anne but my gut told me it was him. He was educated, at a very good university, pretending in the note not to be. A secretary might not have thought to do that. But a secretary would have had time to reprint a letter if she was interrupted. A boss using the printer, say while the secretaries went for lunch, would be in a rush, possibly making do with a faded copy. Most telling of all, only he of the four people here could have found out Victoria’s home address in the personnel file. Probably he sent the note. It all fit. Why? Why did he do it? Because he liked Victoria? Why not go to the cops? Was he afraid of something? Someone? Frightened for his own life? If Hector Martinez had dropped his driver’s license here at CAW, the murderer had picked it up to frame him. Someone here. Someone in CAW. Perhaps Klimmer was the murderer himself and this was his oblique confession.

  “What’s the difference between CAW and Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth or the Sierra Club or whatever?” I asked.

  “Oh, we’re quite different,” he said.r />
  “How so?”

  “Well, we’re in favor of a policy called Wise Use.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a more balanced approach to the environment. We’ve become very successful at counteracting some of the more biased approaches to environmental policy foisted on us by the media.”

  “Who do you think killed Victoria?”

  Klimmer blanched for a second. It was standard cop procedure to throw a lot of secondary questions and then hit the person with the big question. Standard procedure, but it often worked.

  “I—I don’t know,” he stammered, telling me, incredibly, that he did know. Or at the very least he didn’t buy the story about the burglar. Hector Martinez killed Victoria Patawasti. The police had him in custody. It was an open-and-shut case. Or so it appeared to be. Unless you had a different piece of evidence. Unless you thought you knew who really did it. The phone rang.

  Klimmer picked it up.

  “Yes… oh, yes… uh-huh, it’s been very busy.”

  He put his hand over the receiver.

  “Mr. Jones, I am extremely busy, perhaps we can meet here again in a few days or maybe early next week.”

  “You said you would be gone by the weekend.”

  “Oh, oh yes, sorry, yes, well… here, take a card, and give me a call and we can talk, this isn’t a good time.”

  I shook my head. I didn’t want to go, I felt I was right on the verge of a breakthrough. I remained in my seat.

  “I have a few more questions,” I said.

  Klimmer suddenly stood, towering above me, his face paler.

  “I said this isn’t a good time, give me a call and we can talk,” he said more forcefully, almost angrily.

  “It will just take a minute,” I said, wanting to push him a little.

  “No, I’m on the phone, I’m busy, it will have to be another time,” he said, his voice rising half an octave, becoming more aggressive.

  I didn’t want to upset him that much. He was important to the case. I nodded, took his card, walked back to the elevator, left the office. When I got outside I dialed the number on the card. The operator informed me that this number had been disconnected.

  It didn’t matter. If he didn’t send the note, then at the very least he knew something that he was having a hard time trying to hide. I would have to see him again.