“Okay.”
“Because,” said Quinn, “Dave and I may want to come back again someday, and we’ll need some peace and quiet.”
“I’ll be a married man by then, but I think Dave will be welcome anytime he wants to come. I don’t know about you, Quinn. Zee may want me to start mixing with a better class of people.”
“Nonsense. Zee loves me. The only reason she’s marrying you is so she can be sure I’ll keep coming around.”
I had a thought, and took the paper from his hand. I read the Arts and Entertainment section through. There wasn’t any rock and roll concert in Boston the coming weekend. Hmmmmm. I also read the story about the murder. There wasn’t much. Name withheld until notification of kin. Room had been rented by the woman, who had been seen entering it with the man. She was missing. An investigation was under way. I was glad I had given up being a cop.
“You look pensive,” said Quinn. “While you’re in that mood, I’ll give you the results of my latest investigative reporting.
“When Denise Vale first went to college, she lived in a dorm. But during her sophomore year, she and another girl got in a brawl over some mutual boyfriend, and Denise belted the girl with a flat iron and put her in the hospital. After that, Denise lived in an apartment. All that’s from her mom, by the way. While I was chasing that story down, I went after some more names in this case. Guess who also attended NYU? Cecil Jones and Marilyn Grimes. Everybody involved in this caper went to the same college at about the same time. Interesting, no?”
Interesting, yes. “Were you able to find out where Cecil and Marilyn went after they graduated? Did they come to Cape Cod, for instance?”
“According to the notes you gave me, they’re over there right now, running this phony-looking salvage company.”
“Yeah, but we know that the guy who calls himself Glen Gordon is the same guy who calls himself Cecil Jones. He can’t really be both of them.”
Dave looked first at Quinn and then at me.
I rubbed my sore back. I didn’t like it being sore. “If the real Marilyn knew the real Cecil and the real Glen Gordon at college, and if the real Marilyn is the person making deposits and withdrawals from the Zimmerman bank, and if she’s not a crook herself, it means that the treasurer of the salvage company is the real Cecil and is just pretending to be Glen Gordon in his other life. But that’s not likely, because the real Glen Gordon has been working for Frazier Information Systems for five years, and I’m sure that FIS must have checked up on Gordon’s identity before they gave him the job. That means that the guy Marilyn knows as Cecil is really Glen, which means that either she didn’t know Glen or Cecil in college, or she knows the man she’s working with isn’t the real Cecil, which means she’s a crook, too.”
Quinn nodded happily. “Yeah. And the two other names in this case, Denise Vale and Kathy Ellis, are NYU people, too, and we know they knew each other and that both of them knew Glen Gordon. All these people seemed to know each other. I think I’ll give the Alumni Office a call, and see if I can get current addresses for Cecil and Glen and Marilyn. This witches’ brew is getting complicated.”
“Now, let me see if I’ve got this right,” said Dave. “You’ve got one guy who calls himself by two names, and a woman who works with him when he uses one of those names, but who knows that it’s a false one. They run a company that may be a fake, but have managed to get two hundred thousand dollars from the checking accounts of two island girls each of whom had no business having a hundred thousand dollars in her checking account, but who withdrew that money in checks made out to cash that were deposited in the Zimmerman bank by the guy with two names; then later the money was withdrawn in cash from the bank by the guy or the woman who knows one of his names is false.”
“You have a good memory,” I said. “Now I understand how you can play all those songs without ever looking at the music.”
“And one of the island girls is now dead.”
“Yes.”
“And nobody really knows where Glen Gordon or Cecil Jones or whatever he calls himself is?”
“We know where he isn’t,” I said. “He’s not in Boston attending a rock concert, like he said he was going to be.”
“That means he might be over here on the island. I think I’d be careful, if I were you. And I think that Denise Vale should be careful, too.”
I thought about that, and decided that Dave might be right. Before I left the house, I dug out my old police revolver and stuck it under my belt. To hide it, I wore my Black Dog sweatshirt. Deadly but stylish, that was me.
— 25 —
At a quarter to twelve I went into the Fireside. The place was loud, and the crowd was younger than the noon bunch. The smells of liquor and grass and sweaty bodies filled the air, and music blasted from the jukebox while voices tried to speak over it. I got a beer from Jackie, the bartender’s wife, who clearly remembered the fight with Miles and wanted me to be happy. Down at the other end of the bar, Denise was earning her keep.
At midnight, Jackie rang a ship’s bell, and service stopped. People who had finished their drinks and could get no more began to drift out. People who still had drinks stayed where they were. Denise took off her apron, got her purse, and ducked out under the bar. I finished my beer and met her at the door. We went out together.
She barely looked at me. “You have a car?”
“I have an aging Land Cruiser.” I pointed up Circuit Avenue. From other bars, noisy patrons were coming out onto the street.
“We’ll take that. There’s a housing development off the County Road. It never got finished. Nobody will bother us there, and we can talk all night if we need to, and we might.”
We walked up the street and got into the Land Cruiser and went out of the back of town. When we got to the County Road, she pointed left and we headed toward the airport. She said nothing more until we came to a dirt road leading to the right. Then she said, “Turn here.”
I turned, and we drove over the bumpy road, passing branch roads that were more overgrown than the one we were on. It was dark as the pit.
We got to a circle at the end of the lane, and she said, “This will be okay.”
I drove around the circle until the Land Cruiser was pointed out again, then stopped and killed the lights and engine.
“Let’s get out,” she said. “I can use some air.”
We got out. I got my flashlight and found us a log to sit on. The moon was thin, and it was very dark. The flashlight showed beer cans and other garbage around us.
“Kids come here,” she said. “Nobody bothers them. Nobody can hear them. If they could hear them, they’d bother them. That’s the way people are. You have a cigarette?”
“No. I don’t smoke.”
I flicked off the flashlight, and the darkness fell in on us. Gradually, my eyes adjusted. We were in a clearing cut out of the woods. At one time, some developer had spent a lot of money (someone else’s, probably) to make himself rich, and instead had made himself and his backers poorer. He probably had plans for lots of houses back here in the woods, each on a dead-end road with speed bumps, each one snazzier than the next. But as had happened to more than one land developer on the Vineyard, his plans had gone awry, and all there was to show for his dreams were these overgrown dirt roads.
Denise’s voice cut through the darkness. “You said you haven’t told the cops anything.”
“Not yet.”
“I don’t want them on my case. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know, but I don’t want the cops on my case. How many other people know what you know? How many other people do I have to worry about?”
“A girl died in my driveway. That’s why I’m here. I’m not a cop. I got into this thing because of the girl. Your friend Kathy. If she’d died somewhere else, I wouldn’t be here, but she died on my land. I found out she had a hundred thousand dollars in her checking account and it all ended up in a bank over in Hyannis. The same thing is true of you. Women your age d6n
’t generally have that kind of money in their checking accounts. And if they do, they don’t work in places like the Fireside.”
“How’d you find all this out?”
“Luck and a long nose. Besides, money makes noises that a lot of people eventually hear. Two hundred thousand dollars may not be a fortune to John D. Rockefeller, but it is to most people. It’s hard to move that kind of money around and not have anybody find out about it, so I think that whoever is running this particular scam is pretty good, because so far he hasn’t gotten himself arrested. Maybe he never will be. Anyway, now I want to hear your side of it.”
“It’s a long story.”
“It’s a long night.” She didn’t say anything. I was conscious of my sore back. After a while I said, “All right, let me tell you what I think, then you can tell me how wrong I am and what’s really going on.”
“Don’t bore me.”
I looked at her through the darkness. She was holding her purse in her lap with both hands. Her knees were together, and she was looking at me. Her face was dim and cold.
“Stop me when you’ve had enough. I think that Glen Gordon is in the middle of it. He’s a math and computer guy, and after college he got a job with Frazier Information Services, an outfit that does accounts for a lot of businesses including banks. He’s a good worker and soon became very trusted. Since a lot of banks are converting to their own computer systems these days, they don’t need FIS to do that work for them anymore, so FIS guys work with bank guys to help transfer accounts to the new system.
“I imagine that Gordy did that sort of work down in New York and was good at it. I think he probably started thinking about how to steal some money while he worked there, but, being the systematic type, took his time setting things up. Getting identity papers for himself and the people he’d need to help him, and that sort of thing. Probably he got the ID’s the usual way: checked for deaths in the paper, then later sent for copies of the birth certificates of the dead people and used them to get drivers’ licenses,. Social Security cards, and the other ID stuff that he’d need.
“Before he went to work for FIS, he had a fling with you. And then, a couple of years later, another one with Kathy Ellis. Told her he was still in college, so she wouldn’t get her folks worrying about their little girl getting involved with an older man, I imagine. Anyway, both of you fell pretty hard for him, I figure. Kathy Ellis, at least, was the loving sort who would do anything for her man. Not a bad deal if you’re the kind of guy who likes a love slave, and a very good deal if you needed a couple of people who’d do anything for you, even shady stuff. His only problem was that you and Kathy were both going to be working on the Vineyard during the summers. What to do?
“Well, God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform. One day Gordy hears from a guy working on the Cape that the Vineyard Haven National Bank is going to convert to its own computer system. The guy wants to come to New York, and Glen wants to get close to his girls and to the bank. FIS, being the flextime sort of place it is, makes it easy for the guys to trade places.
“Now Gordy’s got everything he needs- a gang, a bank, and the ID’s to hide the money trail. He sets up a company called the New Bedford, Woods Hole and Nantucket Salvage Company, with Cecil Jones as its treasurer and a woman named Marilyn Grimes as Jones’s assistant. They’re both authorized to take money out of the company checking account at the Zimmerman National Bank, over in Hyannis. Jones is actually Gordy himself, more or less in disguise. He probably learned about makeup when he used to do theater work in college, just like you and Kathy Ellis did. As a matter of fact, that’s where Gordy met you both. In college theater.
“Anyway, once Gordy had a legitimate account where he could put money he planned to steal, he had you and Kathy Ellis open checking accounts at the Vineyard Haven National Bank. You were both glad to go along with him because he told you there was no way you’d ever get caught, because you loved him and would do anything for him, and because you were both going to make some money that you needed, more money than you can earn bartending in the Fireside, for sure.
“When everything was ready, Gordy got to work on the transfer of accounts to the bank’s new computer system. He was a ringtailed wonder, often working alone all night long, supposedly so he could take advantage of FIS’s flexplan system to get beach days off, but really so he’d be left alone to do his business with the accounts.
“What he did, I think, was something that he could only do when these sorts of account transferals take place. I think it was probably the only time one person would have access to all the computer systems, including the security systems that would normally prevent people from getting into unauthorized files. It worked something like this.”
I tried to remember what Matt Jung and Helen Fine had told me. “The system they’re using is called Demand Deposit Accounting. Every customer has an account number and a balance is maintained in that account. If a check is cashed, the money is subtracted from the account and if a deposit is made, money is added. Everything has to balance.
“Now here’s the interesting part. Customer accounts are split up into cycles of about a thousand accounts each, and the cycle, like individual accounts, has to balance. If it gets out of balance, say by somebody taking money by means other than a legitimate withdrawal, it would be noticed right away. What Gordy did, I think, was to figure a way to shuffle the money from a dormant account with a couple hundred thousand in it to your account and Kathy’s. It’s not uncommon for a dormant account to have that much money in it, and for the account to be unused for months, so nobody would notice that the money was missing. And because Gordy made sure that your accounts and the dormant account were in the same cycle, the cycle was never out of balance. The only withdrawals were legitimate: the checks that you and Kathy wrote. Since there was supposedly no activity involving the dormant account, the computer didn’t pay any attention to it. No wonder, since Gordy was programming it.
“So Gordy put the money in your accounts and you wrote checks and, I imagine, gave them to Gordy, who, as Cecil Jones, deposited them in the salvage company account. A week or so later, after the checks had cleared, he or Marilyn Grimes withdrew the money in cash. Voilà! Lots of money for Gordy. How am I doing so far?”
“You’re sharp as a tack, you are.”
“You want to take it from here?”
“No. You’re so smart, you keep going.”
“High praise for a man with a permanently unbalanced checkbook. Okay. I think that Gordy probably knew he only had a certain amount of time to get this job done and to disappear with the dough. There’d be an audit, probably, as soon as the transfer was complete. Something like that.
“Anyway, about this time, things began to go wrong. Maybe Kathy Ellis began to get cold feet. That sort of thing happens among thieves. The cops get a lot of people just because other people crack and begin to talk. Anyway, Kathy Ellis ate something she shouldn’t have, and Gordy looks like a likely source of whatever it was she ate. But Kathy’s death created danger that wasn’t there before, since an odd death always interests the police, and once the police start to nose around, they begin to find out things. Anyway, I figure that Gordy decided he couldn’t afford to wait the time it would normally take to have you write checks in amounts less than ten thousand dollars, the kind that don’t attract the government’s eye, but to have you write the big one for a hundred thou. You did and he deposited it.
“I think maybe he told you to bring it over to him in person, so he wouldn’t have to go to the island. I think maybe that’s why you pulled your disappearing act. You say you were in New Bedford with a new lover. Maybe so, and maybe if you were, it saved your life since you were just another girl who knew too much. I know that I, at least, was worried about you being the next one to die. When I told you at the bar that I was glad to see you back, I was telling you the truth.”
“Gee, a smart guy who’s nice, too. Lucky me.”
“Once Gordy
had the second hundred thou in his salvage company account, all he had to do was wait for the check to clear, draw out the cash, and disappear. He got a jump start on the disappearing part by working nights so he could get four days off, presumably to go to Boston to a rock concert. But there’s no rock concert in Boston this weekend, which means that after Marilyn Grimes drew out the cash yesterday, Gordy and Marilyn probably split with the money. Or maybe he split from Marilyn, too. Or maybe Marilyn is lying in the woods someplace on Cape Cod.
“Or, to be fair, maybe none of this happened. Maybe I’m just full of shit.” I turned to look at her. “What do you think? Any additions or deletions? Any editing or criticism? Speak up. The podium is yours.”
“I’ll tell you one thing,” she said. “You may think you’re a smart bastard, but you’re more stupid than smart.”
In the dim light, I saw that Denise had a hand in her purse and was fumbling around. When her hand came out, there was a small revolver in it. She aimed it at me and shot me in the stomach.
— 26 —
I was rising when the bullet hit, and I felt as if I had been struck in the belt buckle by a hammer. I fell backward over the log, spilling the flashlight from my hand. I heard another shot, but it passed above me as I fell. I remember thinking very clearly that Denise must have been blinded by the muzzle flash of the first shot.
I hit the ground and rolled away as Denise shot again. She should have taken her time, but like some other killers she was overanxious. I was afraid I’d be too weak to escape her, but when I tried to get up I succeeded beyond my dreams. I was on my feet in an instant and running into the trees. She fired after me, but it’s very hard to hit someone with a pistol when you’re impatient and the night is dark. I was instantly in the trees, branches whipping at my eyes, clutching at my clothes.
A Case of Vineyard Poison Page 19