Hidden River (Five Star Paperback)

by Adrian McKinty

  I sat for a minute in the pedestrian mall. A busker came up to me and began singing Phish songs. I got the bus back to Denver, returned to the motel. John appeared, haggard, out of sorts. He hadn’t been able to get into Victoria’s building to interview the neighbors. Because of the murder, they had beefed up security, you needed the code to enter.

  “John, you just press all the buttons and someone will buzz you in,” I said, exhausted now.

  John was chagrined, but excited by my news. His voice poured in my ear and I listened to him.

  “Alex, we should press our advantage, we should see him tonight, as soon as possible, crack him, you’ve rumbled him, see? You did it, mate. We’ll go over there together, sort it out, make him come with us to the peelers, free an innocent man, get the investigation on the right track. Crack the case, get a big bonus from Mr. Patawasti.”

  John spoke and I stared, tired, through the windows. The sun in the sky, heavy, loitering. Planes. Helicopters.

  Oh, take from me this day. Unmake it. Please. All it needs is for me to say, no, John, tomorrow will do. All it takes is for me to say no. In Irish there is no word for “no.” Maybe that’s the trouble. All I have to do is refuse and none of the bad stuff goes down.

  But I didn’t say no. I was knackered from the rave and the sleepless night. I was weak.

  I said nothing.

  I took the easy way.

  “Come on,” John said and helped me to my feet.

  Another of those wee things that fuck you up. Little things with big consequences. Paul of Tarsus has a fit and Christianity is born. Franz Ferdinand’s chauffeur turns left instead of right and a hundred million Europeans die.

  Poor John. I will not be there at your tide burial. Tractors and the cries of seagulls will wing you to your resting place. Seagulls a thousand miles from the ocean, in the landfill on the road to Kansas, your body rotting there under earth and garbage piles.

  Lead on chaos, pandemonium, death. And weary, I muttered:

  “Ok, eejit. Let’s go.”

  * * *

  We went to the bus station at three o’clock and took turns staking it out. I read the newspapers on John’s watch. Very different from the UK. In America, the main story wasn’t the Oklahoma bombing, which had taken place just two months ago and killed 168 people. No, it was all about a former American football player I had never heard of, O. J. Simpson, who apparently had murdered his wife and was now on trial in California.

  In Colorado the big story was the continuing drought, the bankruptcy of several ski resorts, and the dreary prospects for a long, hot summer.

  Klimmer showed up at the Denver bus station just after four-thirty. He was carrying a briefcase and didn’t look nervous in the least. John and I followed him. We were both wearing baseball caps and sunglasses. We didn’t stand out.

  He walked to the Sixteenth Street pedestrian mall and cut up through the park next to the hideous central library.

  It was our first chance to really see Denver in the daylight. It looked ok. Dead grass in the parks, granite government buildings, a world trade center, office towers, a university building, several imposing masonic lodges within a block of the state capitol, which must have given conspiracy theorists food for thought.

  Klimmer resided in a large apartment building overlooking Cheesman Park in the Capitol Hill section of Denver. John pointed out that he lived only a couple of hundred yards from Victoria Patawasti’s building, though whether this meant something or not, I didn’t know.

  We waited outside his building for about fifteen minutes until he was settled, then we buzzed his apartment.

  “Mr. Klimmer?”

  “Yes?” he said through the intercom.

  “Mr. Klimmer, it’s Peter Jones from this morning, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind answering a few more questions.”

  There was a long pause on the intercom but finally he said:

  “Come on up. It’s apartment 714.”

  He buzzed us in, we took the elevator.

  “Remember, my name’s Jones,” I told John.

  “Why did you tell him that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, my name’s going to be John Smith then,” John said.

  “You can’t have Smith and Jones, for God’s sake,” I muttered.

  “Well, what then, we’re nearly there,” John said in a panic.

  “You’re Wilson, now you just shut up and leave the talking to me, ok?”

  We got off the lift and walked to 714. Klimmer answered, wearing flipflops, sweatpants, and a thin cotton T-shirt. He was drinking from a large brandy glass. It wasn’t his first one, either. His breath stank of booze, and he’d been home only fifteen minutes. I’d forgotten how tall he was too, taller than even John, and that was something I didn’t see much.

  “Mr. Klimmer, allow me to present my partner, John Wilson,” I said.

  Klimmer nodded, looked John up and down thoughtfully.

  “Delighted to meet you. Why don’t you all come in,” Klimmer said demurely.

  We stepped inside. The apartment was bare, save for a sofa and a few lounge chairs. It was a big space with a balcony that looked west toward the mountains. Doors to bedrooms. Boxes with shipping labels on them.

  “Spartan, I’m afraid, everything else in transit, I’m moving just across the park. Bigger, of course, but I’ll lose the sunset,” Klimmer said.

  “You’ll get the dawn,” I said.

  “The dawn’s nothing. Can I get you fellows anything to drink?” Klimmer asked.

  “Whatever you’re having.”

  Klimmer went to the kitchen unit, came back with two more large brandies.

  “This is the good stuff,” he said, giving John a wink.

  “Oh aye?” John said. Klimmer grinned and patted John cheerfully on the back.

  “Let’s sit on the balcony,” Klimmer said. “When the sun sets behind the front range, it’s really quite spectacular, the light’s diffused because it’s so dry, so much dust in the air, ash, too, from wild fires, quite lovely, you’ll see what I’m talking about.”

  We moved to the balcony. It was narrow, with barely room for the three wicker chairs. I put my hand on the safety rail, which was only as high as my waist, and it came back covered in a thick layer of dust or possibly ash. Everything was coated in this thin red film, the chairs included.

  “Very dry summer,” Klimmer said apologetically, attempting to wipe my chair before I sat on it.

  He seemed relaxed, not at all surprised to see us, not irritated by our visit. Unusual behavior, I would have said, in a busy man organizing his firm’s move from one city to another while he himself is getting a new apartment.

  He sat there and waited for me to begin. They always did that. It was as if the last half year had never happened. I was back in the old routine. They wait for you to start. On television or in books, people are always doing something interesting while they’re being questioned, but in real life, they sit there, patient, ready, marshaling their thoughts. How to begin? How to approach the conversation? Start off with chitchat, build up slowly like this morning, or hit him with what I knew and get him to deny it?

  “Mr. Klimmer,” I asked, “why did you write Victoria Patawasti’s father an anonymous letter stating that the police had arrested the wrong man in connection with her murder?”

  Klimmer’s smile evaporated. His face had become instantly gray, nervous, he was no poker player, that’s for sure.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said calmly and finished his brandy.

  “I’ll lay it out for you in easy steps. The letter was postmarked from Boulder on the twelfth of June. By someone who knew Victoria’s home address. None of her neighbors knew her home address, so it had to be someone at work. Crucially, only someone with access to her personnel file could know that her house was called the Tiny Taj. Victoria never told anyone that. You and three others were the only ones left at CAW. You were the only one with acces
s to her personnel file. There was a partial print on the inside of the envelope itself, and I’ll bet if I took it to the police they’d find it matched your fingerprints.”

  “That’s impossible,” Klimmer said angrily.

  “It’s impossible that there was a print on the envelope? Impossible because you used gloves? Is that right, Mr. Klimmer? Perhaps we’ll let the police decide that.”

  Klimmer groaned. The bluff had worked. He wasn’t used to this sort of thing. He was no informer, or blackmailer. He really thought that he had screwed up somehow and left a print. He frowned in disbelief.

  “Shit. Shit, shit, shit. I should never have sent that letter, I should never have got involved,” he said, putting his head in his hands.

  John opened his mouth to speak, but I shook my head at him. We had to go very carefully now.

  “Mr. Klimmer, I feel you wanted me to find you. You wanted this. The mere fact that you postmarked this in Boulder. That you sent it at all. You wanted someone to come looking for you, to investigate. Please, Mr. Klimmer, tell me what you know,” I said.

  “Oh, God, I don’t know anything, not really, not anything,” he said.

  “Mr. Klimmer, you liked Victoria and you seem to know that the man the police are holding didn’t kill her. You think you know who did kill her, so tell me. You sent the note because you didn’t want him to get away with it. Tell me who did it, tell me what you know. I’ll take care of everything, you won’t have to be involved.”

  Klimmer looked at me and then at John, went to the kitchen, took a drink, and came back with another full glass of brandy. His eyes suddenly bleary, red, tired.

  “What if I ask you to leave right now?” he said.

  “We’ll go straight to the police,” I said.

  “Damn it,” Klimmer said, taking a gulp from his glass. “I am so stupid, I’ll be next. He’s killed two people. I’ll be next. What was I thinking? I should have stayed out of it. I should have stayed on for a couple of months and then resigned. It would have been ok. Work till Christmas, say I don’t like the new atmosphere, quit. I had to stick my stupid nose in.”

  “Who has killed two people?” I asked.

  “Are you taping this?” he said suddenly, his eyes wild. He stood up awkwardly. He came over to John and patted him down, then he lurched to the other side of the balcony, did the same to me.

  “No wire, your word against mine,” he said with triumph, his tall frame blotting out the sun.

  “Mr. Klimmer, take a seat, we’re not taping you, we want to help. Now tell me who has killed two people?” I said very softly.

  “One of them. One of them,” Klimmer muttered, sitting, wiping his mouth.

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “One of them, one of the brothers,” he said with irritation, his knuckles white around his brandy glass.

  “The Mulhollands?”

  “Yes, the Mulhollands, of course the Mulhollands, who else? Either Charles or Robert, I don’t know which one, but it is one of them, that’s the only possibility.”

  I sipped my brandy and remained silent. I had to go easy, tease out the information, slowly, deliberately.

  “Mr. Klimmer, why don’t you start at the beginning? Tell us everything.”

  “The beginning. Ha. You don’t know,” he said, smiling sadly.

  “Tell me about Victoria,” I said.

  “Victoria, oh, God … She was charming. We got on wonderfully. She couldn’t sleep. Woke up a lot at night. I bought her a Go-to-Sleep Sheep. It played ‘Beautiful Dreamer.’”

  “Ok, go on, please.”

  “I suppose I was almost jealous when the brothers wanted her to work for them, too, coordinating the move, before that, you see, she worked for me. She was sweet. Charles and Robert probably just wanted her around. She didn’t have the experience to do all that stuff with the move. She did mass mailings for me.”

  “She was killed because one of them was in love with her?” I asked.

  “No, why don’t you listen? Robert wasn’t interested and Charles’s wife is Amber Mulholland. Have you seen her yet? Amber Mulholland. Believe me, he wasn’t going anywhere. Very beautiful. Drop-dead gorgeous. Even put Victoria in the shade.”

  “So what if she’s beautiful?” John said. “That never bloody stopped anyone before. People cheated on Marilyn Monroe.”

  “No one cheats on Amber Mulholland, but anyway, this is way off the point. We’re not talking about an affair. No one had a goddamn affair with Victoria,” Klimmer said testily.

  “How can you be so sure?” John said, and I glared at him.

  “No, no, no, if you would just listen. It was the stupid move to Denver. Victoria would never have seen the accounts. She’d be alive today,” Klimmer said with marked irritation. He was a little spiky now, jumping out of his skin. Pale, sweating.

  “Mr. Klimmer, take it easy, you’re going to tell me everything very slowly,” I said.

  “I need a drink,” Klimmer said, draining his glass.

  “John, get the man another brandy,” I said, giving him Klimmer’s glass. “Just a small one, John.”

  John went, made a large one, brought it back. Klimmer took it greedily.

  “There we go, the sun’s setting, now we’ll see some stuff,” Klimmer said.

  “Just start at the beginning,” I said again softly.

  “The beginning again. Ok. Victoria kept a computer diary. The only people who had access to her office were Charles, Robert, and myself. I didn’t kill her, so it had to be one of them. You see?”

  “Or both of them,” John said, looking at me. I shook my head at him again. I didn’t need him bloody interrupting.

  “Tell me more,” I said.

  “Victoria was helping me coordinate the move. She had a lot of new responsibilities. One of them was to close down our bank accounts in Boulder and open new ones in Denver. We were with the Bank of Boulder, it was too small, anyway. We should have done that years ago.”

  “Mr. Klimmer, back to Victoria,” I said.

  “She noticed some sort of discrepancy, a payment problem. Victoria was discreet. It had come from an account owned by CAW but only accessible to Charles and Robert. They’re not as rich as you would think, did you know that? Obviously millionaires and their father is a billionaire, but their trust income is tiny. CAW pays them a good salary and Charles is a partner in his firm, but clearly it wasn’t enough to pay Houghton. You see?”

  “I don’t see, who is Houghton?”

  “He probably thought they had more money than they really had. Everyone does. It’s part of their image. Look at Charles. He’s a successful lawyer, but that doesn’t put him in Bill Gates territory. Right? You understand now? Not if he’s being asked to pay millions.”

  “Who’s paying millions?” I asked, desperate for Klimmer to slow down a bit.

  “One of the brothers. Maybe both, I don’t know. The point is, they’re wealthy, but not wealthy enough. But that’s fine, you see, because obviously they began tapping the CAW accounts, get it? You see what I am saying?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Klimmer, but I don’t see. Who’s Houghton? What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “You should pay attention then. It’s ok for Charles or Robert to take money from the CAW account for purposes related to the organization, but those sums have to be itemized, accounted for. CAW is a charity, not a slush fund. The thing is, these payments didn’t show up in the accounts. Money had been withdrawn and not entered as expenditure and, worse, it had been paid not to an institution but to an individual named Houghton. Victoria tracked the payments over two years. It was more than a million dollars. It worried her. She came to me, I was her boss.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I told her to forget it. I told her it was none of her business. I told her it was none of our business. That CAW was Charles and Robert Mulholland’s baby and if they wanted to pay their contractor or their fucking driver or gay lover or whatever out of CAW mon
ey, it didn’t matter. I said that she was very young, and she had a lot to learn and she should concentrate on her job and forget she ever saw those payments. I meant it too, I was only looking out for her.”

  “What did she do then?”

  “She took my advice. She took no further action, but Victoria was a smart girl and she wanted to protect herself.”

  “How?”

  “She said she was going to keep a journal so that if we ever got audited or investigated she’d be in the clear.”

  “What did you say to that?”

  “I hit the ceiling. I told her that she couldn’t leave a paper trail, that that was how they fucking got Nixon.”

  “And what did she say?” I asked.

  “She told me it was the only way she could stay at CAW,” Klimmer said sorrowfully.

  “And you wanted her to stay, you liked her, you liked her very much.”

  “I wanted her to stay. I said fine, keep your journal, but not on paper, encrypt it on your computer and leave me out of it and never mention it to me or anyone else again.”

  “And what then?”

  “She was murdered,” Klimmer said, fear creeping into his voice and eyes.

  “That doesn’t prove Charles or Robert did it,” I said.

  “Don’t you listen? Only Charles, Robert, and myself had access to her office.”

  “The cleaning lady? The secretaries. The sandwich delivery boy. I’m sure there were more people in her office than that.”

  “Yeah, sure, the sandwich boy did it, Mrs. Mulholland did it when she was playing secret Santa. The electrician fixing the lights decided to risk his job, break into a stranger’s computer, read Victoria’s journal, brutally kill her, and frame a Mexican for it. Listen to me, you idiot. Only Charles and Robert had access to the private bank account records. Only Charles and Robert could have accessed her computer journal. Don’t you see?”

  “Frankly, I don’t,” I said.

  Klimmer pursed his lips, bit his tongue, stood, sat down again. He was exasperated. Angry.

  “Why can’t you understand this? Whatever brother was making the payments must have noticed that someone had been looking into the private bank account. I don’t know, an access log, a trace back. In any case, it could only have been Victoria. He must have found that she’d been looking at the account, checked her computer, and then discovered her journal. Killed her. Fraud on this level would mean jail time, public disgrace.”