Headlights shone in through the window in the back door, then blinked out. A moment later, Kim’s face appeared near the glass. She waved when she saw me. I hustled over to open the door.
“Is everything all right?” she demanded, peering around me.
“Huh? Oh, yeah, everything’s fine. Here at least. Tim Arquette’s just checking out the place for me. Did you hear about Franco?”
She nodded. News traveled fast here. “Is he going to be okay?”
“I think so. Maybe a broken arm, possibly a concussion. You hungry? I just realized I never ate lunch and I’m famished.” We could hear doors opening and closing upstairs. Tim was being thorough, which I appreciated. My room wasn’t quite as neat as it could have been, but I consoled myself with the thought that he’d probably seen worse.
“I wouldn’t say no,” Kim said, unwinding her long fringed scarf from around her neck and hanging up her coat. “Pete’s gone to a Rotary event tonight. I was just going to heat up a Lean Cuisine.”
“How about a burger?” I said. “There are rolls from Kelsey’s Bakery in the freezer. It’ll only take a few minutes to defrost and toast them up.”
“Sounds heavenly.” Kim inclined her head toward the hallway that led to the dining rooms. She dropped her voice. “He won’t be much longer, right? I’ll tell you what I found after he’s gone.”
Seemed like a smart plan. The beneficiaries of the trust, my mother and Liza, my friend and distant cousin, didn’t even know yet that the trust was basically empty. No need to give it a chance to leak out now. The timer dinged. I fished out the eggs with a slotted spoon and set them inside their icy bath.
I turned on the flat-top grill to preheat, then pulled out some ground beef and set about forming a couple of patties. I added salt, pepper, and a sprinkle of our house Greek seasoning to the meat, pressing the spices lightly into the top and bottom surfaces.
“Can I help?” Kim offered.
“You want wine?” When she nodded, I sent her down to the bar to choose what she liked.
By the time she came back, I’d washed my hands, sliced up some tomatoes—which didn’t look too bad, considering they were now out of season—and added some prewashed romaine lettuce to a small platter. The rolls were wrapped in foil and heating in the oven. She came back at almost the exact moment as Tim.
“The place checks out, Georgie,” he said. “Just make sure you arm your alarm system before you go to bed.” His eyes moved from the raw burgers to the plate of simple fixings.
“Should I put one on for you?” I asked, hoping, inhospitably, he’d say no. Curiosity about what Kim had to tell me was growing.
He sighed. “I wish. But my mother-in-law’s making her special split pea soup tonight and my wife ordered me to be there on time.” The way he said “special” made me think his dinner might not be all that special to him. Tim left.
I slapped the burgers onto the hot surface, where they hit with a sizzle. Much as I loved Greek food, on a night like tonight, with a storm coming in, there was nothing like the hearty smell of American beef. I began to peel the eggs, as Kim set a water glass of merlot in front of me. Nothing fancy, which suited me fine.
“So,” I said, pausing my peeling and chopping to sip the wine. “Did you find something?”
Kim sat down on a stool on the other side of the counter. “Let me start by saying that I didn’t have time to do a full analysis.”
“You know I didn’t expect that, and I still don’t.” I resumed chopping the egg until it was in a tiny dice. Although I had planned to pay her for her time—or even better, I could have Moneybags Melanie pay her. I was spending other people’s money with abandon lately.
“No, no, I was intrigued. I wanted to see what hundred-year-old financials looked like.”
I wiped my hands on a clean kitchen towel, retrieved the bowl of Thousand Island dressing I’d prepared earlier, and folded in the egg.
“There’s only five or six thousand dollars left, right? Out of millions. How does that happen?” I flipped the burgers and pulled the rolls out of the oven. They sent up a yeasty fragrance like a genie emerging from a bottle, ready to grant my every carbohydrate wish.
“That’s what the bottom line says. So as you know, the trust was funded with about ten million dollars. I didn’t do the calculations, but in 1900 money, that was a lot.” Her face was thoughtful as she swirled her wine around in her glass.
“It’s a lot now. But I know what you mean. My however-many-great-grandfather cut down a bunch of trees,” I said. “He was probably speculating in other businesses too.” I sliced the rolls and set a burger on each bottom half. “You like Thousand Island dressing?”
“Of course. Load ’er up.”
I put a big dollop of the dressing on each burger, then piled on lettuce, tomato, and the top of the bun. I sat down on my stool, and Kim reached for her plate. We each took a bite.
“This is heaven, you know that, right?” Kim said.
It was pretty delicious, if I did say so myself. The burger was juicy, seasoned just right, the bread was everything the aroma had promised, and the dressing . . . was good, but didn’t taste quite like what I’d had at Franco’s. I pulled the spoon out of the bowl of dressing and tasted, then set the spoon down on my plate. Something was definitely missing. Had I forgotten an ingredient? The Worcestershire. That was it. I’d add it next time.
“So what do you think happened to the money?” I asked. “I figured mismanagement. Bad investments.”
“I’m sure there was some of that. The MacNamaras have not been Warren Buffetts. The portfolio took a dive with the stock market in 1929, as you’d expect, but fortunately wasn’t completely wiped out. Whichever MacNamara was in charge of it then shepherded it back into a steady climb through the war years, until it reached a peak during the Reagan Administration. At that point the money was mostly in mutual funds, and it was valued at over a hundred million dollars.”
I nodded. “That’s more like what my mother expected to be there. But from what I could see, the balances started dropping again until we get to now, when it looks like there would be just about enough to cover the legal fees of dissolving the trust.” My mother had told me that she was leaving her entire estate to my daughter, Callista, which was fine with me. But it was my daughter, and the charities, that were being cheated. And that stuck in my craw.
Kim chewed and swallowed. “After we eat, I’d like to take a look at your original documents.”
“The scan wasn’t clear? The originals are still at MacNamara’s, by the way. I only have photocopies.”
“Well, I’d like to take a look anyway. I want to know if I’m seeing what I think I’m seeing.”
Our eyes met. “What do you mean?
“I think,” Kim said, “the trust financials have been altered.”
“Altered?” I set my burger down and let Kim’s words sink in. “What do you mean altered?”
“I’ll show you when we look at your copies. But something isn’t right.”
FIFTEEN
We finished our dinner and cleaned up in record time. Kim was just as eager to show me the documents as I was to look at them. Since the prep counter was still covered with Gladys Montgomery’s recipes, a project that looked like it wasn’t going to get completed anytime this winter, we spread out the financials in date order on the counter we’d just eaten at.
Kim pointed to the earliest ledger. “Here’s the inception of the trust. The numbers, labels, and notations are all handwritten, as you’d expect. There were typewriters back then, but not everyone was using them for accounting.”
“Okay, I see that.”
“By the 1940s, they’d switched over to the typewriter. This must have been some tedious work for the typist. Not to mention annoying. Every time she—or he, though I’d guess it was mostly women doing this kind of work then—m
ade a mistake, she had to fix it manually.”
“Pain in the butt,” I said. “Every typewriter has its own signature, right? Like rifling on a gun barrel, or fingerprints.” Watching all those cop dramas over the long Bonaparte Bay winters was definitely paying off. “Here’s where they got a new typewriter. You can tell because the font looks different.”
Kim nodded. “Keep going. I want to see if you come to the same conclusion I did.”
I studied the ledgers. Every few years the font changed, presumably because the office got new equipment. By the 1980s, the records were kept individually, one year to a page or pages, instead of in a running tally, and there was an unmistakable switch to a dot matrix printer, so the records were now being generated with a computer, probably stored on floppy disks. In 1986, the font changed again, this time to clearer, darker, more uniform letters.
I continued to flip through the pages, then went back to 1986. “This is where the balances start declining,” I said. I flipped some more, going all the way to the last page, which showed the paltry six-thousand-dollar-and-change balance. “How long,” I wondered, “has Jim MacNamara been practicing law?”
Kim nodded. “He joined his father’s practice in 1982. But his father died—”
“Let me guess—in 1986.”
“Yup. Pete and I bought the accounting business ten years ago, but the prior owners had been doing taxes and payroll for the MacNamaras for decades before that. We inherited all the records, so those dates were easy enough for me to check.”
“Okay,” I said, thoughtful. “So Jim MacNamara was young and inexperienced, and he made bad investments. Lost the money over the course of the years.”
I thought back to the genealogy Sheldon Todd had shown me. By the mid-1980s, the only beneficiaries of the trust—great-great-grandchildren of my nasty ancestor, Elihu Bloodworth—were pretty young, including my mother. And if Jim conveniently didn’t send statements to the beneficiaries, if they didn’t know about the trust, or know enough to ask about it, they couldn’t monitor the balances.
I thumbed through the last few dozen pages again, then looked up at Kim. She was watching me expectantly.
“The fonts,” I said. “From 1986 on, they’re all the same. They look like they were all made on the same printer.”
She nodded. “That’s what I thought too. And what office keeps the same printer, and uses the same font, for more than thirty years?”
“You said you thought the financials had been altered. You think somebody went back to 1986 and retyped all the information—inserting new, reduced figures?” It made some sense, but there could be other reasons. A recent attempt to standardize the files, make them look nice and uniform, without altering the numbers? But Kim clearly hadn’t told me everything yet, because she was eyeing me over the rim of her wineglass.
“Yup,” Kim said, taking a sip of her wine. “And the only reasons to alter the documents would be—”
“To cover up mismanagement. Or theft.” Jim MacNamara. I had a feeling she was right, even though the documents in front of me were hardly proof. “So which do you think it is?”
“In his personal life, Jim was a good investor. Had a nice, diverse portfolio making a more or less steady positive return, at least from what I could see from his tax records. So I think it’s unlikely he didn’t know what he was doing when it came to the Bloodworth Trust.”
Damn him. “Which leaves us with theft. He was skimming the trust money, then he produced these fake financial reports, probably recently, since the trust would be dissolving—expiring—in a couple of months and he knew he was going to have to give Melanie and Liza, the beneficiaries, something.” Still, this was all just speculation. There was no real evidence here, nothing I could take to the police.
Kim seemed to have read my mind. “We need more, though. It might help if we could see the original documents these photocopies came from.”
That made sense. We’d have a lot better idea if the records since 1986 were a single printout. “I could ask Lydia, who’d have to clear it with Ben. But I’m not sure how I’d do that without letting them know why. Not sure I’m ready to start casting veiled accusations against Jim.”
“I agree. But I do have something. I looked up one of these supposedly failed mutual funds, and guess what? It was actually making money during the time period where these financials show a loss. So I’ll do some more digging on the other funds and get as much as I can for you. That’s solid information.”
Now, maybe, we were getting somewhere. “Yeah. Go ahead. Keep track of the hours you spend on this and get me a bill. I’ll make sure somebody pays it.” Me, my mother, Liza—maybe we could bill MacNamara’s estate? “But even if we find fraud, what do you think the chances of us actually recovering any money are?”
Kim set down her glass and looked me in the eye. “Impossible to say. He could have spent it, given it away, diverted it to some anonymous foreign bank account, converted it to cash and stuffed his mattress—”
“Mattress.” The word made me think of Jennifer Murdoch and the affair she’d been having with MacNamara. Was she mixed up in this somehow? Was MacNamara stockpiling money so he could run away with Jennifer? Maybe she was putting pressure on him? Did he need money to put the Silver Lake real estate deal together? Maybe. But he’d been skimming for years, if our theory was correct, and Jennifer and Silver Lake had only come up recently. Still, it bore consideration.
And how much did Jim’s son, Ben, know? He’d said his father always handled the trust himself. They’d needed a locksmith to open the filing cabinet. I supposed Ben could have staged that, but it seemed like overkill.
There was another question that needed to be asked, not that I expected Kim to have an answer. “Do you think Jim’s death had anything to do with the money?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But money is a powerful motivator.”
Didn’t I know it. Suddenly, I wished I was back in my nice, safe cocoon of a few months ago, neatly dividing my life between the tourist season and the off-season, mothering my daughter, being Sophie’s daughter-in-law and Spiro’s wife, at least on paper. I’d never heard of the damned Bloodworth Trust. And people didn’t die because of it.
But there was a little thing—okay, a big thing—called justice. I’d never really thought about it till now. But figuring out what was going on here, then taking it to the police, was the right thing to do.
And I was done with people messing with my family. Fed up with dishonesty and greed and violence and death. Tomorrow I’d light a fire under Sheldon, the genealogist. The sooner I confirmed what was in the legal file about the descendants of Elihu Bloodworth, the sooner I could check that, at least, off my mental list.
My cell phone rang, pulling me out of my thoughts. Across the prep counter, Kim was picking up the documents we’d laid out. I connected the call. “Hello?”
“Georgie? This is Marielle Riccardi.”
Franco’s daughter. “Yes. How’s your father?” My heart rate began to tick up. I hoped she had good news.
“He’s got a concussion and a dislocated shoulder. He’ll be all right. I wanted to thank you for helping him. And to ask you a favor.”
“Of course.” I realized, too late, that I probably should have waited to hear what the favor was before agreeing to it.
“We’re still at the hospital, and they’re going to keep Dad overnight. I don’t want to leave until he’s settled for the evening. Would you mind going to the Casa di Pizza and putting a note on the door that the restaurant is closed for two weeks? There’s not enough business this time of year to justify trying to find a temporary cook to take Dad’s place so we’ll just close up.”
“I’ll do it tonight,” I said. I’d ask Kim to accompany me, on the off chance Deputy Tim Arquette was wrong about the assaulter not still being in town. “Is there anything else you’d like m
e to do? If you’re going to be shut down, someone should go over and clean the perishables out of the fridge and straighten up, at least, so anybody looking in the window doesn’t see the mess and look at it as an invitation to break in.”
“Would you?” Marielle sounded relieved. “Dad will probably be discharged tomorrow. I’ll be bringing him home with me and I need to fill prescriptions and get extra groceries and get my house set up. And, oh yeah, run my business.”
“Not a problem,” I said. “I’m happy to help.” It wouldn’t take long, and I was pretty sure Franco would do the same for me.
“I’ll drop the keys off in the morning, if that’s okay. And Georgie, thanks.” She clicked off.
I filled in Kim about Franco’s condition. We packed up the trust documents and she followed me to my office, where we typed up a sign and printed it off. I located a plastic sheet protector and some duct tape, then we bundled up, checked and double-checked the alarm, and headed off in Kim’s car for the Casa.
The wind was even colder than it had been just a couple of hours ago, a thing I wouldn’t have thought possible if I hadn’t lived through a few decades’ worth of North Country winters. Snow from the recent storm we’d had blew up in a white whoosh against the car as we pulled up in front of Franco’s restaurant. I envied Sophie—and my daughter, Cal—in Greece right about now. I wondered when Cal was coming home. She was supposed to call when she got her flight, but I hadn’t heard from her yet.
“Want me to help?” Kim said.
“No sense both of us freezing our butts off. Keep the heater running and I’ll be right back.” I braced myself, then opened the door.
Tearing off the four pieces of tape required me to take off my gloves, and my hands were numb by the time the sign was on the door. I jammed my hands into my pockets and looked in the window, but it was too dark to see anything. I returned to the car, shut the door, and leaned forward in my seat to put my hands over the heating vents, which were blasting precious hot air.
A Killer Kebab Page 12