Her desk sign told me that; she didn’t. She was sound asleep.
I cleared my throat, and her head came sluggishly up from her desktop.
She was a round-faced blonde in her early thirties, large framed, and her eyes were dull with fatigue. She blinked and absently dragged her fingers through her hair. “Uh, I’m so sorry. I must have … May I help you?”
“No problem. Late night?” I showed her one of my more charming smiles, to go with my relaxed, easygoing nature.
She nodded and yawned behind her hand. “I’ll say. It was after midnight before I finished the payroll; then I had to take the checks to all the stores and … Who are you? Should I be telling you all this?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “Rafferty. I’m investigating Mr Krandorff’s, er …” I hadn’t worked out yet exactly which lie to tell her, so I wasn’t sure whether to say “homicide” or “reported death” or “unfortunate demise.”
“Oh,” she said and blinked again. “For the insurance company?”
“That’s right. The keyman policy. So, I’d like to ask you a few—”
“Who put in the claim? I haven’t seen any paperwork on it, and I’ve done everything else around here.”
I got out my pocket notebook and frowned seriously while I read last week’s grocery list. “Well, I do these routine investigations on a contract basis; I’m not from head office or anything like that. But according to my notes, a Mr Carl Drysdale—”
“Dresden,” she said. “Carl Dresden, but—”
“—advised the head office. Ah, through his attorney, apparently. Hmm.” I grinned at her sheepishly. “Actually, that may have been his accountant. I didn’t quite get …” You foxy devil, Rafferty.
Sharon nodded and seemed relieved. “Oh, right,” She said. “That makes sense, then. Neville Compton—he’s our accountant—has been a lot of help since … since this horrible mess started.”
“Good,” I said. “Now, is Mr Dresden in?”
“Well, no, he’s not,” Sharon said. She straightened her desk blotter and shifted a paperweight an inch to the left, then moved it back to its original position. “He’s out of town on business.”
“Uh-oh,” I said.
“Is that a problem?” She was defensive now.
“Well …”
“Mr Rafferty, believe me, I can tell you anything you need to know. I’ve been with Mini-Maxi for years. Even Mr Dresden says they couldn’t get along without me. That sounds immodest, but it’s true.” She set her jaw and nodded, so there.
“Now that you mention it,” I said, “it might be easier this way. Because claims on a keyman policy can be so sensitive.” I had drifted into a whiny kind of persona I didn’t like very much, but it seemed to be working. Not easy, this racket.
I stopped talking and tried for a reluctant, concerned look. Eventually Sharon prompted me with, “Sensitive in what way?”
“Well, the questions I have to ask. They sound like I don’t believe what happened, like I’m trying to trap someone. Which is not true, not at all. I get paid to make a report and, let’s face it, we all have our little hoops to jump through, don’t we?”
“Of course,” Sharon said. “I understand how you feel.”
She smiled and motioned me toward a chair at the nearest desk. I sat down and smiled back. Talk to me, I said with my eyes. Tell me everything you know about this wacky outfit.
She did.
Over the next hour Sharon told me how Dresden had started with a single store ten years ago. Max Krandorff was a relative newcomer; he came in as a partner four years back. Almost immediately Mini-Maxi Food Barns took off. Krandorff was a street-shrewd wheeler-dealer; Dresden was good with boring but critical things like state licenses and reports, taxes, insurance plans, and employee-training programs. The way Sharon Palmerston told it, Carl and Max were perfect candidates for a keyman policy. They were dynamite together, but either one alone would need a miracle to keep the business afloat.
“Not that things have been easy,” Sharon said. “Especially with Number Three.” She sighed. “I feel so sorry for them. Number Three looked so good on paper, and it was so important that it do well, but believe me, everything has gone wrong with that location. The latest problem is kids.”
“Shoplifting?” I said. “Vandalism?”
“No, no. Oh, some of that goes on everywhere, but Number Three’s no worse than the others. The thing is, these kids started hanging around the store. Really hoody kids, you know? Mean-looking. And they drove customers away.”
“Didn’t the police help?”
“Well, they didn’t drive people away, like poking knives at them; I didn’t mean that. It’s just, well, women won’t go into a store with a gang out front, will they?” There was a touch of Valley Girl in her tone and grimace when she said gang. Well, gag me with a switchblade.
I said, “Why was the third store so important?”
Sharon leaned confidentially across the gap between the desks. “I’m not sure of the details, but I think Mr Krandorff had talked Mr Dresden into expanding too fast. They used to fight a lot about the loan payments. Mr Dresden said, what with property values slipping, they’d overcapitalized the site. He said the asset value was below the indebtedness. Cash flow was down too. Once, we had to slip the payables back two weeks. And darn it, just when things looked better at Number Three, those rotten kids—oh, my God, listen to me. Hey, when I said fight, I didn’t mean … Mr Dresden and Mr Krandorff argued, that’s all. A little bit. Everybody argues sometimes.”
“I understand, Sharon.” I smacked my lips and said, “Is there a coffee shop around here anywhere?”
She jumped up immediately. “Oh, no, no. I’ll make some.” Over her shoulder, while heading for the back room, she said, “How do you take it?”
“Black.”
“Only be a minute,” she called from out of sight.
Rafferty’s Rule Twenty-nine: Don’t steal evidence in front of witnesses.
The empty desk, the one neither of us was using, had to be Dresden’s. There was a picture of Dresden’s wife beside the blotter. And there was also a big office diary there, too. I grabbed the diary, opened the front door, and threw the diary into the front seat of the Mustang parked out front.
I was sitting down again, smiling vaguely, when Sharon poked her head out of the back room and said, “Ready in a second.”
“Thank you.”
She went away again, but I didn’t have time to do much more than paw through Max’s desk drawers. There didn’t seem to be anything important, though I didn’t have enough time to be certain. I might have to burgle this place yet.
Then Sharon was back with two steaming mugs of coffee and more of the Mini-Maxi saga.
Max Krandorff was a bachelor and a wonderful man; Carl Dresden was a wonderful man, too, but, you know, kind of vanilla; had I met Mrs Dresden yet, and wasn’t she simply the nicest lady ever?
I said, “It must have been a shock when Mr Krandorff was—”
“Please,” she said, shaking her head rapidly. “Let’s not talk about that. It’s too … I don’t believe it yet. I—” She bit her lower lip and waved vaguely at the paperwork crowding her desk. “—I don’t have time to cry now. There’s so much to do.”
“One more thing,” I said. “About Mr Dresden. Doesn’t it seem strange to you that he hasn’t come back yet?”
Sharon started to speak, but her lip quivered too much. She bit down on it for several seconds, then said, “I’m worried sick about that. He must be ill, or maybe he was in an accident, or who knows what. Why, he could be in a hospital unconscious and we wouldn’t know!”
“If you like, I could speak to some of my friends on the police force about that,” I said, and immediately wished I hadn’t. It wasn’t necessary to con her about sensitive things like that. Sometimes I go too far.
“Oh, thank you. That would be very kind.” She seemed genuinely grateful.
I left after that, draggi
ng my tattered self-respect along behind me. Sharon shakily smiled good-bye from her desk and dived into a pile of wholesale grocery invoices. I decided if I ever needed a secretary, I’d try to steal Sharon from Mini-Maxi.
I drove across the street and pulled into the drive-in two slots down from the MacTuff cop still gallantly watching the Mini-Maxi office. I grinned at them and waved. They glowered at me and kept glowering while I drank coffee and flipped through Carl Dresden’s desk diary.
Isn’t it depressing to see public servants with an attitude problem?
Chapter 41
Dresden’s diary was a large one, with a full page for each day, plus all the usual crap in the front that tells you the summer temperature range in Vladivostok and what time it is in Dubai.
Leafing through the diary, I didn’t expect to find a notation like “11:30—hire Joe Jones to kill Max,” though that would have been nice. The nearest thing to it was Tony Cordington’s phone number on the page for the day before Dresden had phoned her apartment looking for Eagle.
Dresden also used his diary as a scratch pad; if he hadn’t filled a page with things-to-do-that-day, he went back and used the blank space for odd notes and calculations and doodles. Not every past page was that way, but many were. There was no order to them, not that I could see. Apparently he just flipped back to an empty spot and scribbled away.
There were several such pages crammed with figures, vaguely similar to the calculations we’d found in his house. Again, his personal shorthand made them difficult to interpret, but I began to think the numbers were units of thousands; they concerned the business; and they were attempts to figure the way out of a bad cash-flow period. Part of that feeling came from the only obviously identifiable calculation in the diary. That entry worked out the difference in monthly loan payments if the principal amount was suddenly reduced by three hundred thousand dollars.
I bet myself I now knew the face value of Mini-Maxi’s keyman insurance policy.
But aside from that, the diary left me with more questions than answers. Questions like: Had Dresden hired someone other than Bert Cannon to hit Max? If so, who? And if so, why did he keep Bert—and me, because of his confusion about us—on the string? And why did he pay me? Aside from because he thought I was Bert.
From there the questions became even hairier. If Dresden didn’t hire someone else, then who killed Max? Could it have been a real robbery that simply happened at a time and place where it had confused everyone? Or was there a thrill-killer somewhere chuckling over the fun he’d had listening to Max plead for his life?
Or was the answer something entirely different, something I had missed all along? Or hadn’t thought of yet?
How bewildered could I get? Step closer, my friends. See Rafferty think so hard, his brains melt and run out his ears. Getcha tickets here …
Hell with it. I gave up before I hurt myself and went looking for a phone book. A pay phone two blocks north had the front half of the business pages still intact and, yes, Neville Compton, CPA, would see me in thirty minutes.
So I drove to the Lemmon Avenue address Compton’s secretary gave me, not so much because I honestly thought I would learn much, but because everyone has to be somewhere.
Neville Compton was round. He wasn’t fat, not grossly so. He was only plump, with round pale eyes and round spectacles and a bowling ball skull and rounded shoulders and a button nose and a small, round mouth. He was an amalgamation of circular shapes, and he was also perhaps the calmest man I have ever met.
“I’m truly sorry, Mr Rafferty,” he said, “but I cannot divulge details of my clients’ business dealings.” He spoke slowly and smiled apologetically and seemed to be saying that if it were up to him, why, certainly …
“The problem is,” I said, “that half the Dallas police department is working overtime to prove your clients—and maybe you, for all I know—are drug dealers. I’m trying to stop that. Well, not specifically to stop it, but the effect will be the same. You really should help me.”
“How extraordinary,” Compton said without raising his voice. “Why don’t you tell me about it?”
I told him. I left out the part about Dresden wanting to kill Max, and I exaggerated Kevin Noonebury’s ability to prove a drug case, and I implied I was working for a secret DPD investigative group. But I told him enough of the truth to make it sound logical. What the hell, it’s an imperfect world.
When I’d finished, Neville Compton said, “Amazing,” the way anyone else would say, “More coffee?”
“Now it’s your turn,” I said. “And I’m prepared to deny I’ve ever been here.”
“Yes, I think that would be wise. Well, well, where shall begin?” He leaned back in his chair and propped his elbows on the arms of his chair. His fingers met in a steeple shape in front of his face and ruined his round look. I felt like telling him to do something else with his hands.
Compton said, “I see the problem, of course. And, like Sharon, I am concerned about Carl’s long stay in Houston. I trust he is well. Forgive me, I digress. Now then, Carl and Max are—or were, which is perhaps the appropriate word at this juncture—quite different people. I’ve always seen Max as the quintessential trader. Sometimes a profane man, often crude, but shrewd and exceedingly numerate. Not in the sense of formal accounting, of course. He even claimed to be baffled by double-entry bookkeeping, though I believe that was an affectation.
“Max knew about business. He knew how to buy and how to sell, and he knew his profit to the last half cent per unit.” Compton beamed fondly. “I like to think of Max as a Viking. The Norse were actually traders and merchants, you know. That bloodthirsty Viking-raiding-party image is largely made up.”
“What about Dresden?” I said. Vikings, schmikings.
“Carl is, as I say, very different. He’s quite a nervous man. Meticulous in his approach to business, which is, I believe, a way to assuage his personal anxieties. Carl is a conservative man; it goes without saying. He is often fearful of the, oh, call it the swashbuckling attitude toward business that Max preferred.”
Compton sat and smiled gently to himself. He was so relaxed and peaceful, he might have been an old man rocking on a sunny porch, daydreaming about his grandchildren. “Two intriguing men,” he said, “who complemented each other nicely. A good business team.”
“I gather there were problems with the third store.”
He nodded slowly. “Yes. That was an unfortunate location, I believe. Max insisted it would be profitable, but he may have been mistaken. Perhaps on that occasion Max sank his own longboat, to use a Viking analogy.
“At any rate, there was a squabble about the third store. Carl didn’t like the location; Max insisted. Carl finally acquiesced, but by opening time, the project was grossly over budget. Max ordered new signs for all three stores, for one thing, and there were delivery delays on, um, the roof trusses, I believe. And at the best of times, the Mini-Maxi Food Barn standard building represents a sizable capital expenditure. The buildings are distinctive, they draw a great deal of traffic, they win awards, but on a square-footage basis …” Compton shuddered gently.
“But forgive me,” he said, “It is not my place to criticize such things. The significant fact is, the third store opened much further in the red than budgeted. And the first-quarter trading losses were very bad. Recently Max said he expected a new scheme to recoup those losses. I believe it was to be a grand marketing ploy, though I have no idea of the details. It would have been imaginative, I’m sure. It was certainly needed. That location, for some reason, attracted a rather, ah, unfortunate class of young customer. The young people spent very little but their presence degraded the ambience.”
Compton shrugged slowly. “Whatever Max had in mind, it’s too late now. He’s gone. Marketing is not, I fear, Carl’s forte. I doubt very much if that store can ever trade its way into the black.”
“I don’t understand these things,” I said. “How bad is that? Are we talking about closing the
store or no year-end bonuses for the staff or what?”
“Closing the store would shave the monthly operating, but it would also cut gross sales for the chain.” He frowned. “And there are certain long-term agreements with suppliers. Also, the building construction, fittings, and advertising costs are all liabilities incurred long ago. They won’t disappear from the books. There has already been one refinancing. The bank may approve another, but it would certainly insist on operational restrictions.”
Compton thought about it, then said, “I would say the entire Mini-Maxi operation—that is, all three stores—is less than two months from Chapter 11.”
“Chapter …?”
“Oh, sorry,” he said. “Bankruptcy.”
Chapter 42
I left Compton’s office at one-thirty and went to Houston.
Not directly to Houston, exactly. First I went to the cop shop and talked to Ed Durkee. When I told him what I had in mind he gave me a photo of Carl Dresden. He wouldn’t tell where he got it.
“Look out, Kevin Noonebury,” I said. “The brown bombshell is on the move.”
“Get out of here,” Ed growled. “But keep in touch.”
Next I went to Gardner’s Antiques. Hilda was behind the desk, doing boss-lady things. “Tell you what,” I said, “if a good-looking broad took the rest of the day off, she could be my main squeeze on a trip to Houston.”
She put down her pen and thought about it. “More information,” she said.
“Jet to Houston with a handsome dude at your side. Stay at the Holiday Inn with a handsome dude at your side. Shop at the Galleria while the handsome—”
“Sold!” Hilda said.
By the time we packed, got to the airport, caught a Southwest shuttle and cabbed to the Holiday Inn, it was almost six before I started showing Dresden’s picture to Holiday Inn desk clerks.
“Excuse me for a moment, sir,” the second one said. “I’ll just double check with the assistant manager.” Which meant I got shuffled off to the hotel security people. We killed another forty-five minutes establishing I was me, not a blackmailer or hotel burglar looking for a fat mark.
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