The Marlboro Man: A Moira McElvaney Mystery

by Derek Fee

  Moira closed her legal pad and put it into her tote bag. ‘We need to talk to her and we need access to the office.’

  Jean started moving to the door. ‘I have her number and Greg keeps a spare set of keys in his study. I’ll get them for you.’

  As soon as Jean left the room, Moira turned to Shea. ‘Where the hell have you been? I took this fool’s errand on because you were supposed to work with me.’

  Shea was nonplussed by her aggressive tone. ‘Calm down, partner. I was getting a recommendation for a good restaurant to eat at tonight. Have you ever tried Cambodian food?’

  Moira raised her eyes to heaven and opened her mouth to speak but said nothing.

  Shea smiled, showing a perfect set of pearly teeth. He opened his arms wide. ‘OK, I was joking, but I did get a recommendation for a good Cambodian restaurant and you’ll see why when we get there. Call Brendan and tell him we’re eating out tonight.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ‘W e need to set some ground rules,’ Moira said as Shea drove away from the Gardiners’ house.

  ‘As in?’

  ‘As in if we are going to be partners in this investigation, you can’t just disappear on me without both of us agreeing on whatever it is you’re up to. The one thing we have to be is methodical. You’ve never done this before, but you have managed projects, right?’

  ‘I have managed projects.’

  ‘Then you understand that it’s important that everyone follows the plan. There are no free electrons in an investigation.’

  ‘I just thought that since I already know everything about Greg and Jean and their family I might usefully spend my time elsewhere.’

  ‘So what did you get up to?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  ‘This is not some kind of game. We either do this thing properly or we don’t do it at all. We both need to know the information. It’s not a hide-and-seek situation. Now what the hell were you up to?’

  They had arrived in Back Bay and Shea was making a production of looking for a parking space. Eventually he found a spot on Boylston Street.

  Brendan was already seated when Moira and Shea arrived at the Khymer Kitchen. The restaurant was on the ground floor of a four-storey apartment building. It was modern and well-appointed with a well-stocked bar on the left of the entrance. The art adorning the wall could have been a fit for any Southeast Asian restaurant, as could the music.

  Moira was encouraged when Brendan smiled as they approached.

  ‘Hi.’ Brendan didn’t bother to rise. ‘What were you guys up to today?’

  Moira bent and kissed him on the cheek. ‘I spent the day finding out about the life and times of Gregory Gardiner. I have no idea what Frank was up to, but he’s promised to reveal all.’

  Shea dropped nonchalantly into one of the chairs and smiled. He was happy that he had already created a mystery.

  ‘So why Cambodian?’ Brendan asked.

  ‘We’re here to meet someone,’ Shea replied. A waiter appeared at his side and deposited three menus and three glasses of water. ‘Ricky around?’ Shea asked.

  The waiter looked from one to the other of the people at the table. His face was the definition of inscrutable. ‘No Ricky here.’

  ‘I’m a friend of his uncle, Makara Sin,’ Shea said. ‘He told me to ask Ricky what I should eat from the menu.’

  The waiter stared at Shea for a moment. ‘I come back for the order.’

  ‘Looks like we’ll have to choose for ourselves.’ Brendan opened the menu.

  They were still examining the menus when a skinny kid of about seventeen came and sat at the table. He stared at Shea. ‘I’m Ricky Sin. You the one who’s the friend of Uncle Mak?’

  ‘I was in Devens for three years.’ Shea put down his menu. ‘Mak speaks highly of you.’

  ‘Cut the bullshit. What do you want?’

  ‘We need someone who can access some databases that we can’t. Mak tells me you’re the man we need.’

  ‘How big is the score?’

  ‘There’s no score,’ Shea said. ‘We’re looking for a guy who has disappeared. We need to find out why. So we need access to his accounts. He was in business. We’re going to need access to his IRS records.’

  Moira had quickly caught on to the subject of the conversation. ‘We need to know everything about this guy,’ she cut in. ‘The cops have given up on finding him and we don’t have the resources they have.’

  Ricky kept his eyes firmly on Shea. ‘If you were in Devens, how come you’re in private investigation? I thought you guys are banned from occupations like that.’

  Shea returned the stare. He hadn’t expected Ricky to roll over at the mere mention of his uncle. They were asking him to commit a felony that could put him in prison for a long time. ‘The guy we’re trying to find is my cousin’s husband. The lady here is a police officer from Ireland taking a year off and the guy sitting beside her is a criminology professor at Harvard. We’re just a bunch of people trying to find a guy.’

  ‘So, there’s no score. What’s in it for me? Other than the risk of jail time.’

  ‘How does ten thousand dollars sound?’ Shea said.

  Ricky smiled. ‘Ten thousand sounds just about right.’

  ‘You better be as good as your uncle says you are,’ Shea said.

  ‘I’m the best. Uncle Mak used to be the best until he got caught. But things have moved on since his time.’ He looked at Moira. ‘When do you need the information?’

  ‘Yesterday,’ Moira said.

  ‘Give me what you have on the guy and I’ll do the rest. Shouldn’t take me more than a day to give you everything you need. IRS is a piece of cake. So are the banks. How long has this guy been missing?’

  ‘Just over two weeks,’ Shea said.

  Ricky whistled.

  ‘We know,’ Moira said. ‘It doesn’t look good. We need to know whether his credit cards have been used in the past month and if he set up any accounts that we don’t know about.’

  Ricky stood up. ‘Try the Crevettes Kep Sur Mer, the Khar Saiko Kroeung and the Mee Siem.’ He looked at Moira. ‘You know what I need. Have it ready before you leave.’ He turned back towards the kitchen.

  ‘So that was what you were up to,’ Moira said as soon as Ricky had gone.

  ‘Like I said,’ Shea picked up the menu. ‘I have friends with most of the skills we haven’t got ourselves.’

  Brendan laughed. ‘And I bet most of them are sitting in Devens.’

  ‘What kind of other skills do you think we’ll need?’ Moira asked.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  T he offices Gregory Gardiner leased were located on Main Street in the historic town of Concord, twenty-one miles west of central Boston. The accountancy practice took up the upper floor of a renovated two-storey building whose modesty was totally consistent with the practice’s clientele of small local businesses. The ground floor was a retail space housing a commercial establishment. Moira and Shea left Boston about nine o’clock and arrived at Gardiner’s office thirty-five minutes later. Moira had been phoning Jamie Carmichael at various intervals over the preceding evening and that morning without success. The door at the side of the retail unit bore a simple brass plaque, ‘Gregory Gardiner CPA’. It led to a small hallway with a set of wooden stairs on the right. At the top of the stairs was a door with an opaque glass panel on which the same legend as the door below had been stencilled. Moira used one of the keys to open the door and she and Shea entered the suite of offices.

  The space directly inside the door was obviously Carmichael’s domain. A circular desk on which a computer and office telephone sat was directly facing the door. Behind the desk were several filing cabinets and to the side of the cabinets was a table on which there was a relatively new office LaserJet printer. There was a door to the right of the desk and another to the left. Shea immediately went to the right but found the door locked. Moira fiddled with the bunch of keys until she located the right one and opened the door. Gr
egory Gardiner’s office was consistent with the character of the man. It gave the impression of order and solidity. The space was tidy to a fault. A large wooden desk on which there was an Apple desktop computer, one generation old, dominated the room. A family photograph in a silver frame stood beside the computer. An ergonomic office chair was behind the desk and two wooden visitors’ chairs with leather-covered seats were located on the door side of the desk. The rest of the expansive office was taken up with filing cabinets. Moira moved behind the desk and switched the computer on. It warmed up slowly.

  Shea was checking the filing cabinets, but they were all securely locked. He joined Moira in front of the computer. ‘The filing cabinets all have electronic keypads on them. We’ll need to find the codes to get inside.’

  A small box had appeared on the computer screen asking for the username and password. Moira typed in ‘Gardiner’ in the user name box and ‘Jean’ as password. The box shivered and the message ‘Invalid username or password’ appeared. ‘I could be at this all day and I wouldn’t find the password. We may have a second job for your young Cambodian friend.’ There was only one possible shortcut. She took out her mobile phone and called Carmichael’s number again. No answer and no messaging service. She was getting pissed off with Jamie Carmichael. ‘Check the desk. We need to get the code for the filing cabinets, otherwise we’re going to be obliged to do a bit of breaking and entering. I assume one of your friends from Devens would supply us with a suitable contact.’

  Shea smiled. ‘I learned some skills in that direction myself, but they may be of a more brutal nature.’

  Moira went back into the secretary’s office and tried the door on the left of the desk. It opened easily. She entered and found herself in what passed for a conference room. The room was large, taking up more than half the space of the upper floor, and dominated by a sizeable table and eight chairs. A small kitchen with tea and coffee making facilities and a washing-up sink was in one corner of the room beside a door with ‘Toilet’ stencilled on it in black letters. She opened the cupboards under the sink and saw that they contained cups, saucers and small plates. Several packets of cookies were on one side. There was nothing to learn by searching.

  ‘Ricky’s on his way.’ Shea was already in Carmichael’s office when Moira re-entered. ‘He’ll be here in about half an hour. He’s got some kind of gizmo that might work on the keypads. By the look of things we’ll be here for the day.’

  ‘There’s nothing to see in there, it’s just a conference room.’ Moira sat behind Carmichael’s desk and tried the drawers. They were empty. There wasn’t so much as a paperclip left behind. There was also nothing on the desk. There is no secretary alive that doesn’t have a physical diary somewhere on his or her desk, she thought. Electronic diaries are all right, but when you’re on the phone the old paper version open in front of you does the job more efficiently. She was worried that there was no sign at all here of Carmichael. The woman could have been a ghost for all she’d left behind. ‘I’m going to check the shop downstairs. Will you see if anything in this bloody place is open? You’d swear these people worked in Fort Knox.’

  ‘That’s just Greg. He always did take the client confidentiality bit to the extreme.’ Shea watched Moira drop her satchel and head back down the stairs. He hadn’t felt so alive since the day they’d taken him in handcuffs out of the offices in central Boston that housed the Prometheus hedge fund – he had deliberately named the fund after the Titan from Greek mythology who was mankind’s greatest benefactor.

  Shea had no idea what Greg had gotten himself mixed up in, but he was sure of one thing: Gregory Gardiner is probably dead. Another thing he knew for certain was that Moira was one smart cookie. He smiled to himself. She’d called the investigation a fool’s errand. Perhaps she was right. Why had he started the whole ball of wax in the first place? It was evident to him that Greg had moved out of his comfort zone somehow and gotten himself killed. They were not going to be able to reunite Jean with her husband because he was most likely holding up a new section of turnpike or encased in someone’s foundations. He was uncomfortable with the idea of giving Jean hope. She deserved better than that, especially from him. Jean had stood by him when the rats were deserting the sinking ship that was Frank Shea. So what the hell was he up to? Why was he fucking around with all these people when he already knew the result?

  Boredom. He was born to trade and when they took away his business and forbade him to play the financial markets again they’d taken away his life. In Devens, he’d built a whole new persona, but he hadn’t managed to change the part that counted, his need to be constantly challenged. He’d been offered a job teaching on the MIT MBA programme, but he wasn’t a Brendan Guilfoyle. When he first heard about Moira, he got the feeling that she was a fellow traveller, another restless soul. Now he knew he’d been right. Her resistance to the investigation into Greg’s disappearance had been a sham. From the moment he mentioned the possibility, he had seen a different light shining in her green eyes. He recognised that light. When he ran Prometheus, he’d seen it every day when he looked in the mirror.

  Moira closed the front door of the office and looked in through the window of the commercial unit. The produce on sale was a mishmash of crystals, figures of Buddha, copper singing bowls, pan pipes and other assorted bric-a-brac. She walked into the store.

  ‘Hi.’ The woman behind the desk at the side of the store stood up and smiled. It was a first-customer-of-the-day smile. ‘What can I do for you today?’

  Moira smiled back. The woman reminded her of her own mother. A maze of grey hair flowed from her head and across her shoulders. A colourful native Indian skirt hid her rotund figure and her face was chubby and open. She was sallow skinned and very beautiful and would have been more so forty years ago. She had the air of being one of America’s last flower children; a carryover from Woodstock and the Summer of Love. A tag on the left side of her shirt just above her breast said ‘Faith’. Moira wasn’t sure whether it was her name or her motto.

  ‘Hi, Faith, I’m looking for your neighbours upstairs. There doesn’t seem to be anyone around.’

  The smile faded from Faith’s face. Moira was a no sale. ‘Yeah, I noticed that the traffic had died off. There was a time when people were goin’ up and down those stairs like it was an escalator.’

  ‘Do you know Jamie Carmichael, the secretary?’

  ‘You mean the tall black lady?’

  Moira had no idea of the ethnicity of Carmichael but she decided to take a chance. ‘Yes, the tall black lady.’

  Faith thought for a moment. ‘I haven’t seen her in maybe two weeks. The last time I saw her, she was parked right in front of the store. She wasn’t supposed to do that on account of the fire hydrant. She brought down a large cardboard box and put it in the trunk. Then she drove off. Yeah, I ain’t seen her since then. You with the police or somethin’?’

  ‘No.’ Moira gave her most engaging smile. The last thing she wanted was to explain what they were doing to the Concord police. ‘I’m working for Mrs Gardiner. Her husband’s ill and she’s decided to close the office for a while. We’re just helping get things in shape.’

  Faith frowned. ‘He’s a nice man. I sure hope that he’s better soon.’

  ‘And I really wish I could buy some of these beautiful things that you’re selling, but we’re really quite busy. I’ll try to come back when I’ve got more time.’

  They both laughed.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Faith said. ‘I enjoyed the company.’

  ‘So did I.’ Moira left the shop. It looked likely that Carmichael had already decamped. The question was why? Finding Carmichael had suddenly moved up the priority list.

  ‘No sign of our skinny friend?’ she asked as soon as she returned to the office.

  Shea was sitting in Carmichael’s chair, which he had tilted back. His feet were on her desk. He glanced at his watch. ‘He’ll be at least another fifteen minutes. I cleared Greg’s desk –
pens, pencils, bottles of ink – nothing of any consequence. Totally fits the profile of the man.’ He dropped his feet from the desk and flicked the chair forward. ‘There’s nothing we can do here. Let’s get a coffee and you can tell me what you found out below that has accentuated your frown lines.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  W hen they returned to the office fifteen minutes later, Ricky Sin was outside sitting side-saddle on an expensive-looking motorcycle.

  ‘Nice Harley.’ Shea stood back to take the view of the bike in. ‘A fat boy if I’m not mistaken.’

  Ricky stood up and slipped a messenger bag over his head. He handed the bag to Moira. ‘First, here’s the stuff you asked me for last night.’ He turned to Shea. ‘I didn’t have you pegged as a motorcycle dude.’

  ‘I had my Harley phase. Used to ride a Sportster 880.’ The two men high-fived.

  ‘Now that you guys have bonded, can we get on with business?’ Moira tossed the strap of the bag over her shoulder and started unlocking the door of the office.

  ‘I’ve been on the clock since I left Boston.’ Ricky locked the bike and ascended the stairs behind Moira and Shea.

  ‘In there.’ Moira pointed at Gardiner’s office as soon as they had entered the outer office. ‘Open the computer, and Shea says you have some sort of gadget that can open the keypads on the filing cabinets?’ Ricky just smiled. ‘When you’re finished in there, open this computer.’

  Ricky mimicked a bossy schoolteacher as he made his way into Gardiner’s office.

  ‘So what can I do?’ Shea asked.

  Moira smiled. ‘As soon as he opens the filing cabinets, I can just imagine the endless hours of pleasure you’re going to have examining all those files.’

  ‘And what will you be doing?’ Shea asked.

  Moira held up the bag. ‘Let’s see how good Ricky really is?’ She sat behind the desk and removed a sheaf of paper from the bag. The first page had a small plastic bag stapled to it containing a USB that Moira assumed held digital versions of the paper files. She flicked through the pages. At first glance, Ricky had certainly lived up to his billing. The majority of the files were from the Internal Revenue Service and Social Security. There was every tax filing made by the Gardiners and by the business that Gregory managed. They would need to be analysed in detail, but a cursory examination showed that the Gardiners were punctilious about their filings. A second set of documents had the headings of various government departments on them. Again, Moira would have to examine them in detail.