I held the young man’s gaze a moment and then said, “All right. But I expect you to share with me in here.”
“It’s nuthin’, Pops. Really.”
ALONE IN MY OFFICE, with the reinforced door locked and cops on the job back at my home, I was almost comfortable. Antoinette Lowry found me attractive but unintelligent. Katrina believed that, after all these years of discord, she had been unfair to me. I was in love with Aura and she returned the emotion. Putting all that together, I irrationally figured that it was time for a break in the case.
“Call on line six, Mr. M,” Mardi said over the intercom.
“ Who is it?”
“He said his name is Plimpton.”
“MR. PLIMPTON?” I said into the phone.
“I got a call from Ms. Lowry this morning,” he said.
“That Antoinette gets around.”
“She wanted to know how Mr. Brighton’s assistant, Claudia Burns, got hired and by whom.”
“I don’t have the answer to that question. Maybe you wanna try HR.”
“Lowry said that you believe Miss Burns has something to do with the heist eight years ago.”
“That’s going a little far. I said that someone believes that she was involved. Or maybe they want us to think so.”
“And who would that be?”
“ Why are you calling me, Alton?”
“ What do you know about Miss Burns?”
“She married a man named Quick,” I said.
“Do they have anything to do with the robbery?”
“Some people think so. I doubt if they do.”
“ What is that supposed to mean?”
“Why are we talking, man?”
“Do you believe that Claudia Burns was involved in the robbery?”
“And murder,” I added.
“ What?”
“One of your guards was murdered. That’s a crime too.”
“And do you believe Miss Burns or Quick or whatever was involved?”
“I think that the person who hired her was involved.”
“But not her?” he asked.
“I doubt it.”
“ Why?”
“ What are all these questions about, Mr. Plimpton? Does Rutgers want to hire me?”
“Are you available?”
“I have a job right now but no one is paying me. If you have the same interests as my client I could possibly bring you in on a twofer.”
“Can you prove that the person who hired Claudia was involved in the robbery?”
“If I’m given proper access, I believe that I can—yes.”
“ What if I were to hire you?”
“Out of your own pocket?”
“This theft is the worst single event that has ever happened to Rutgers,” Alton Plimpton said with deep gravity. “It is a perpetual thorn in the side of the corporation. If I could solve the crime, maybe even recover some of the money, I would assure a promotion and maybe even a bonus.”
“You might even get that one-point-five percent reward,” I suggested.
“No. No. Employees aren’t allowed to get any reward offered by the firm.”
“But I could get it and split it with you on the side.”
“I never considered that.”
“No?”
“No.”
Silence descended on our electronic connection. Maybe Alton was considering the possibility of sharing the reward with me. Maybe he’d just run out of words.
“ Why did you call me, Mr. Plimpton?”
“I think I know how Claudia Burns got hired.”
“Tell Ms. Lowry.”
“I don’t trust her.”
“You think she’s involved somehow?”
“No. But she works for the higher-ups. I don’t believe that she will have my best interests at heart.”
“You think that she’ll take all the glory for herself.”
“Can I hire you, Mr. McGill?”
“Sure you can. But it’ll cost ten thousand dollars.”
“Ten thousand!”
“That’s my corporate rate.”
“I don’t have that kind of money.”
“Can you borrow it?”
“I’m not a rich man, Mr. McGill. I’ve worked for Rutgers my entire life but I have an ex-wife and two children near the end of high school. If I put out that much money, I’d have to have guarantees that you will produce.”
“Guarantees come with washing machines, Alton, and even they have time limits.”
“Are you sure that the man who hired Miss Burns was involved with the heist?”
“I can’t see it any other way.”
“ Why?”
“Am I hired?”
The floor manager didn’t answer immediately.
For that moment I fell into a waking daydream; in that reverie I was set upon by a boa constrictor. I was fast. I’d grabbed its head but it’d looped its tail around my left leg. With my free hand I got it by the tip of that tail but then it encircled my neck with the central bulk of its slithering scales.
That snake was my unwanted case. It was both my telephone cord and my fault.
Fault: Responsibility, and also a natural material flaw. I was wrong no matter what way you looked at it.
“All right, Mr. McGill,” Alton Plimpton said. I’d almost forgotten that he was there. “I’ll pay you. But it’ll take me a few days to come up with the money. I’ll have to borrow it.”
“Great. Come by my office with the cashier’s check or the cash and I’ll get right on it.”
“ We can’t wait on this, Mr. McGill,” Plimpton said. His voice had become brittle.
“You expect me to help you without some kind of assurance?” I smiled at my use of the last word.
“You could, you could start to investigate and only turn the information over after I paid,” he suggested.
“Okay,” I said. I shouldn’t have agreed. If I were advising Twill about the business, I would have said that people don’t call you on the phone and throw information at you like that. As a matter of fact, if I was anyone else instructing my son, I’d have never suggested PI work.
“Okay,” I said again. “ Who is it that hired Claudia?”
“That’s a difficult question.”
“ With a two-word answer.”
“Johann Brighton is the reason she was hired but it was Seth Marryman that completed the paperwork.”
“Not Harlow?”
“No. Leonard has nothing to do with it.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Seth died three months ago,” Alton said. “It was a heart attack, completely unexpected. I knew his family and was asked by Human Resources to help with anything they needed. I’ve been with the company for so long that I’ve done that with other unexpected deaths. Seth’s wife, Virginia, told me that he had papers from the company in a trunk in their attic. Removing any information from the workplace is strictly forbidden. I should have told somebody but that might have affected the monies his family received so I took them to my place and asked her not to tell anybody else.”
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll bite.”
“He had a file on Claudia Burns. It was her employment assignment and a letter he’d signed recommending her. He was very specific in stipulating that she be assigned to Brighton. He even had Brighton’s previous assistant promoted to make the job available.”
“That’s not much to go on,” I said, “him being dead and all.”
“There was also a document detailing a Swiss account with eight hundred and eighty-two thousand dollars in it. It’s a numbered account. Seth made less than I did. There’s no way he saved up that much. The deposit goes back eight years, just nine months after the robbery.”
“Explain something to me, Alton,” I said.
“ What’s that?”
“ Why didn’t you tell anybody about this?”
“If I turned those files in, his wife might have lost that money and m
aybe his retirement too.”
“But the timing.”
“ When I discovered it I had no reason to think that Claudia and the money had anything to do with each other. It’s not enough to have come from the heist; I mean, that would be millions. There were no other accounts. It’s only when Agent Lowry asked about Claudia that I became suspicious in a larger sense.”
“But you still aren’t going to the company,” I said.
After a significant pause Plimpton said, “It’s a lot of money.”
“Yes,” I said, “it is.”
“The man you want is Johann Brighton,” he said then.
“How did you come to that conclusion?”
“There’s a request from Brighton for Seth to hire Burns. It’s just a note with the words personal and confidential written in red across the bottom.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Yes, I am.”
“But what could any of that have to do with the robbery? I mean, if Zella is innocent, and I believe that she is, what could Zella’s boyfriend’s girlfriend have to do with anything?”
“ What are you talking about?”
“Claudia Burns is Minnie Lesser.”
“ Who?”
“The woman that was with Zella’s boyfriend when she shot him.”
“Oh.” He sounded really surprised.
“So how could she be involved with the heist if Zella wasn’t?”
“I don’t know,” Alton said, “maybe this Burns woman found out something about the evidence, proving that Grisham had been framed. All I do know is that Seth received nearly nine hundred thousand directly after Claudia was hired.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll accept your argument for the moment. But even if that’s all true, what can we do but tell Antoinette and her bosses?”
“You get Brighton to confess to you,” he said. “Maybe you can even get him to pay you off. Then you can tell the higher-ups that I hired you because I suspected something I couldn’t prove and I was afraid that if I brought it in-house that Brighton would find out.”
“So you just want me to go to his office with Marryman’s name and see what he does?”
“No. No. They won’t let you in the building now. Harlow has made sure of that. But Brighton has a meeting with a man named Furrows this afternoon at an apartment we own in Tribeca. I’ll cancel Furrows and you can go instead. Confront him with the information and get him to confess and maybe pay you off.”
“You can do that?” I asked. “Cancel a private appointment for a VP like Johann?”
“It’s all computerized,” he said. “You just have to know what codes to enter.”
53
I’D NEVER HAD a case like that one: a looping snake looking you in the face and attacking from below and behind at the same time.
Leaning way back in my office chair, I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the interconnections.
There had been two thefts committed, Nova Algren attested to that. Bingo and his men were blamed for taking fifty-eight million but they only got twelve. There was at least one inside man, Clay Thorn, the guard. He and someone—Brighton or maybe this Seth Marryman—had removed forty-six million before the robbery went down. Clay was double-crossed by his inside confederate. Bingo killed Clay and then hired Stumpy to find a fall guy, Zella. Then Stumpy goes to Harry and gets him to drop out of sight and connect his girlfriend with a job at Rutgers.
Why?
Maybe Seth Marryman wanted to set up Brighton in case an internal investigation found that Thorn wasn’t working alone. That was just stupid enough to make sense.
On the other hand Brighton could have been setting up Marryman.
Zella was innocent. I knew that much. Or did I?
Gert was the contact point on the job, not I. She was the one that told me Stumpy wanted to frame someone. She also pointed me at Zella. That was why I had switched the wrappers and used counterfeit locks on the storage unit. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Gert. But I wanted to make sure that Stumpy couldn’t come back and pull a trick on her—and me. I didn’t trust anybody in those days.
What if Harry and Zella were involved somehow? No. She would have turned him over . . . I spent more than an hour going over the possible scenarios. None of them made much sense. The only thing I could come up with was that no one and nothing could be trusted—not even my own memories of events.
In the middle of this morass I took out a moment to make an insurance call. There are times when the only people you can trust are your proven enemies.
AT TWELVE FIFTY-SEVEN the buzzer to the outer office sounded. Mardi was at her post so I left that up to her. A few seconds later she spoke to me through the intercom.
“There’s a man I don’t know at the front door,” she said.
I pulled open the bottom drawer of my desk, revealing four video monitors attached to the same number of hidden cameras recording my front door from various angles. When I saw who it was I pressed the intercom button and said, “Get Twill to answer it and to bring our guest down here to me.”
YOU KNOW that it’s bad when you welcome in one trouble just so that you can ignore another.
There came a knock at the door and I said, “Come in.”
Twill pushed the door open and ushered Shelby Mycroft over the threshold.
“You come in too, boy,” I said when it looked as if my son were going to leave. “Have a seat, Mr. Mycroft.”
Twill waited for our client to pick his chair and then he settled in the other. This was a new experience; on-the-job training for my son while being reamed out by an irate client.
“I’m not happy with you, Mr. McGill,” Shelby said.
“I can understand that.”
“Is that all you have to say?” There was a threat in the timbre of his question.
“Your son is a criminal,” I said. “The police arrested him. You can’t hold me responsible for his crimes.”
“Mirabelle tells me that your man Mathers here is actually your son, Twilliam.”
I shot Twill a look and he shook his head, denying having given up that information.
“ Where’d she get that?” I asked.
“From Kent. He recognized the boy.”
“Yes,” I said. “He is my son. So what?”
“He’s a criminal himself,” Shelby said, trying to attain some kind of moral parity.
“ What is it you want exactly, Mr. Mycroft?”
“Your son is a free man,” he said. He paused then, expecting me to connect his dots.
“This is not your boardroom, brother,” I replied, the man of the streets rising under my skin. “Spell out what you mean or walk away.”
“I’ve asked around about you,” he said. “It’s said that you’re specialty is altering evidence in order to contaminate criminal investigations.”
Glancing at Twill again, I saw a kind of boredom glazing his eyes.
“I have an appointment, Mr. Mycroft.”
“Cancel it.”
“You got two minutes to say something to me or I’m gonna come around this desk and kick your ass . . . hard.”
I put my hands on the desk. I have big scarred hands.
This physical display impressed the billionaire.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll tell you. Either my son finds his way out of this predicament or you make me and all of my money and influence your enemy.”
I won’t lie. I considered shooting him. I did. But Twill was sitting there and I knew my anger came from other sources.
“Excuse me,” Twill said.
“Shut up,” Shelby Mycroft said to my son.
That got me to my feet.
“Stand up, man,” I said.
“Pops,” Twill said in a most diplomatic way.
“ What?”
“Mr. Mycroft don’t wanna hear from me but I could still tell you what I got to say. He can listen or he can leave.”
“Go on,” I said, sitting down again.
“The problem starts in the womb but the story begins with a eighteen-year-old girl named Velvet,” he said. His words reminded me of the way I often spoke. “This girl Velvet was wild and kinda confused. She used to kiss Kent in the laundry room and then fuck his father on a yacht on the Hudson.”
All I Did Was Shoot My Man Page 25