by Leslie Leigh
"Oh, but she did give me permission to try and crack it. You know, I once read a story about a guy who would crack people's safes just by interviewing them. He'd use psychology to figure out how they might program their combination. Larry, I figured you for a materialistic man. You made your wife sign a pre-nup agreement. You have had a lot of self-interest goals. And you continue to have them. You see your wife as just one of many material acquisitions, don’t you?"
"That's a lie."
"Is it, now? You show her off like a trophy. Too bad for you she's so strong-willed. You almost had yourself the perfect woman there, in your eyes. She does have the right figure though. So that's a plus. I asked her what her measurements were, hope you don’t mind. She didn’t. She proudly told me. The safe opened on my first try."
Larry Gordon's face went from beet red to starch white.
Allie held up a ledger. "I found this in there. Molly said I could look at it. Isn’t that true, Molly?"
Molly nodded her head determinedly.
"I thumbed through it, Larry. It's an entirely different ledger than the one you keep in your top desk drawer. Oh, I forgot to tell you: Molly gave me permission to look in your top desk drawer. Thank you, Molly. No, this ledger in my hands here is a curious piece. Want to know what makes it so? It tells the truth. All the figures in here are, best as I can tell, exact."
She riffled the pages.
"Yep. It's all here. What you've spent and what you've earned. And it has one other thing: It has the real reason you go to Panama every so often. Once every couple of months, I gather. That's so you can withdraw money. Swiss banks have gotten such a bad rap just in popular culture alone that the banks have been steadily tightening their restrictions for years now. Not so with Panamanian banks. Complete and total anonymity. Banco Ahorros. That's your bank. It says so right here on the first page. You have it abbreviated as BA for the rest of the pages."
Larry's jaw had dropped. He seemed utterly speechless. He was no longer looking at Allie and had begun to sink in his chair.
"Now, why would a successful businessman want a bank account that he hid from U.S. authorities? Hmmm." She held up her finger as if she'd just thought of an idea. "Ah ha. I know why." She thumbed through the ledger. "It's here somewhere. Ah yes. There were a number of payments received from one Bertie Sommersville. Some of these were pretty recent. Funny, because although Bertie liked to appear as though he was well-off, he was, in fact, not so well-off. So how could he afford to make these payments, and why? The answer to both is the same: Bertie Sommersville was a fence, a middleman between thief and customer. When criminals needed to sell their ill-gotten goods, Bertie was a guy they could go to. Of course, one cannot advertise such a position..."
At this point, with her peripheral vision, she caught Del rolling her eyes. She could hear her friend now: You've got the Oscar, you can retire now. But Allie Griffin was enjoying the role immensely.
She continued, "So, one so inclined needs to build one's reputation by word-of-mouth, and by whispers at that. My guess is that Bertie Sommersville had one client and one client only: Larry Gordon. You keep terrific records, Mr. Gordon. Impeccable. So complete, so detailed. Larry smuggled stolen items through international shipments, gave the items to Bertie to sell, Bertie took a cut, gave money to Larry. Larry took his cut, deposited the cash in a Panamanian bank account that actually belongs to Larry's main guy in China, a Mr. Hong, am I right? Reading this ledger it's pretty easy to discern how he avoided auditors: He overcharged some of his customers in order to pay for excess shipping costs. Shipments from China are easy to justify when you're a computer manufacturer. Provided, of course, you grease the palms of a few key folks in customs. That's all accounted for here as well. Spectacular record-keeping here, Larry."
"This is...nonsense," Larry Gordon said with a feeble voice.
"Nonsense? Perhaps. There are a lot of assumptions here. Or shall I say, there would be a lot of assumptions here, if I didn’t come across this."
She flipped open a third book.
"This is a copy of The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. I sort of spaced out during breakfast yesterday, but I did manage to overhear Brother Al mention this work, and I heard Molly say she detested Hemingway. What better way to hide something from your wife than putting it inside a book she hates? Too bad Brother Al had to mention that he was looking through the book in front of you, Larry. He might still be alive today if he hadn't. I can’t figure out how you did it. Maybe forensics will find the mark of a syringe somewhere. Oh, almost forgot. Here's what was inside the Hemingway."
She flipped the book to a page toward the end and took out a neatly folded piece of white paper.
"This is a note written from Bertie Sommersville to Larry Gordon. I'll let you save your voice, Larry dear."
Allie cleared her throat and began:
"Risk increasing. Feds on my tail. Need bigger cut. Otherwise have no choice but to tell Interpol about Hong."
"So, Bertie demanded a bigger share for the risk. Then threatened Larry that he'd tell Interpol and/or the FBI about the mysterious Mr. Hong if he didn’t get it. Bertie was the first one here the other day. Tensions were already high once Rachel arrived. You and Bertie were probably, uh, shall we say, talking business beforehand?"
Larry was silent and still, his head bowed down as if in prayer. Slowly, he picked it up, and then said in a hoarse voice, "That letter isn’t addressed or signed."
"No, but I bet you have an envelope or fingerprints or something."
Larry shook his head. "You can’t prove it's from him."
"No? Hmm. You know, funny thing about this letter. It was written on a typewriter. Leave it to Bertie Sommersville to mail someone a typewritten letter. They certainly don’t make them like him anymore."
The room was so silent Allie could hear the ticking of the key-wound clock on the mantle.
She picked up the package of breath strips. "Tincture of oleander applied with an eyedropper. Cooked in a pot taken from Chef Michaud's kitchen. Pot and eyedropper shall be discovered in due time."
She walked over to Larry and bent down to face him eye to eye.
"It was your footsteps Jürgen heard in the hallway. Small footsteps, not from small feet, but from someone treading cautiously on tiptoe. You weren't jiggling the bathroom doorknob, you were locking the door. Bertie went back to his room, took a lethal breath strip, and then died in the bathroom while searching in vain for a remedy. The poor guy knew you might try something like this. I don’t know how he knew, but he did. Perhaps criminal minds naturally suspect one another of the worst. He changed his room as an attempt to foul up your plans. You immediately went up there to find his luggage and spike his breath strips. It's too bad the beta-blockers he was taking have a habit of inhibiting the adrenal system; his body wasn't able to respond to the poison with even a fighting chance. You knew that, having spent so much time with him, just as you knew he had a compulsive habit of taking a breath strip after meals, especially ones as heavily laced with garlic as Chef Michaud's dressing. That was some fine menu planning on your part. Don’t think I didn’t hear Michaud telling your wife that he works for you, not her."
"And the soup was too salty," interrupted Jürgen.
"You heard the man, Larry. Tell him to use less salt next time."
Some moments passed. Rachel Forrester got up and walked over to the bar. She poured several drinks and placed them on a tray, which she then brought over and distributed them accordingly. Larry didn’t take his when offered, so Jürgen said he would take it as a chaser.
"To Delaney Collins," Rachel said, "the best improv acting coach the world has ever known."
"Hear, hear," said Jürgen.
"Indeed," said Molly Townsend.
Allie took a swig. Not bad. Needed a hit of Fresca. "Sorry, Larry," she said with a shrug. "I needed a diversion. I couldn’t take the chance of you leaving the room and coming across anyone not in the know. I had to let them all in on it."<
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"You were that sure," said Larry with a snarl.
Allie nodded.
And at that moment, a sound.
Sirens.
Del's message in the snow had worked.
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Table of Contents
Part I
PART II
PART III