by Peg Herring
Tori waited impatiently as Carmon prepared for bed. The feminine preparations she once would have approved seemed to take forever: the application of softly scented lotion, brushing of teeth and hair, and the choosing the next day’s outfit and assuring it was pressed and accessorized.
Carmon’s home was in the southwest part of the city, wedged into a small space between other aging two-story buildings. Although her friend had once stated flatly she didn’t encourage visitors because the place was “a mess,” Tori saw it was merely old, one of a row of 1930’s era homes that had suffered neglect from past owners. There had been recent attempts to improve it: a fresh coat of paint, new windows on the first floor, and a re-enforced front porch. Inside, the furniture was mostly secondhand, although Tori noted a flat-screen TV, an up-to-date kitchen, and an array of sporting equipment that was obviously not Carmon’s in the tiny foyer. Tori knew she had a brother, had met him once when he came to the office, but he was apparently not at home tonight. The reason became clear when Carmon made a call and spoke with the young man, who assured her Leon’s parents were indeed home and, yes, he was working on his math assignment. Carmon obviously wasn’t the sort to assume a teenager went where he said he was going, even though fondness for her brother came through in her thoughts.
When the room was finally dark and Carmon’s breathing slowed, Tori spoke softly. “Seamus?”
“Yeah.” Seamus’ voice wasn’t actually sound, but a sensation of communicated meaning. He got right to business. “Does the name Allan Cartwright ring a bell?”
“Not right off. Let me think about it.”
“Okay. Tell me about this Daryl guy.”
Tori was impressed to hear that Madison had learned about Daryl. “I never met him. He worked for Mr. Falk before I came and was fired for some things he did that weren’t ethical.”
A pause. “Falk’s hard to work for.”
Tori paused, loyal from old habit, but the time for that was past. “Very.” She recalled her first encounter with Falk’s temper. “Once a woman called who said she was his client. I had no listing for her, and she demanded to speak to Mr. Falk. It turned out to be nothing, a mistake, but he kind of insinuated I’d done something wrong.”
“Like what?”
“He didn’t put it into words, but it made me uncomfortable. Most people at work avoid Falk when they can. I was always terrified I’d goof up and he’d have me fired like he did Daryl.”
Seamus jumped on that statement. “Did he have Daryl fired or did somebody else?”
“No one ever said exactly. Why?”
“When Madison talked to Falk, it sounded like Falk uncovered the guy’s mistakes and got him fired. But Pollard made it sound like he did it.”
“Mr. Pollard would’ve done the actual firing. It’s his responsibility to see we all comply with laws and company policies.”
“I need the full story. It could be important.”
“Maybe you could get Madison to interview Daryl Talbert.”
“Already did,” Seamus said dryly. “The guy’s dead.”
Tori was aghast, both at the news and at Seamus’ casual tone. “That’s terrible! How did he die?”
“Got drunk, blew away most of his head. Left a note, ‘Sorry about what I did.’”
A siren wailed in the distance as Tori digested the information. “You think Daryl paid Judd Simms to kill me?”
“The note wasn’t specific.” Seamus sounded doubtful. “A guy has to wonder about a suicide that comes just in time to head off questions from the police.”
The thought of Talbert’s death reminded Tori. “Jennise, the office manager at PLK, died last night in a car accident. That’s four dead—” She gulped before finishing, “—including me.” Carmon rolled over in her sleep, probably restless due to the disturbance in her head.
“Five if we count Cartwright.” Seamus evidently had already decided to. “Something stinks at your old place of employment.”
Carmon turned fitfully again. After a pause, Tori recounted Abe’s story of his hiring at PLK.
“Madison heard it different. Pollard claims he knew the family and gave the son a job as a favor. Now maybe Pollard and Loomis both knew Abe’s parents, but the old man was holding something back. Madison thinks you and Gougeon had something going.”
“That’s not true. We were friends, but there was nothing more between us. He came to my desk sometimes to chat, but he was more interested in learning the business than in socializing.”
“He asked about clients?”
“Sometimes. We talked about Carmon some. I think he likes her. But he wanted to know about the office, you know, how things were done, who was responsible for what. I think he talked to Erica about that stuff, too.”
“Maybe your friend Abe wanted to see if he could make a little extra money.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look, this Cartwright guy was a client at PLK once upon a time. Suppose he finds out something isn’t right with the firm. He starts asking questions, and he takes a fall down the stairs.”
“But I thought he had closed his account.”
“What if he didn’t know that? Think how much easier it would be to fiddle with a guy’s money if he was no longer on the books.”
“Someone closed his PLK account without his knowing?”
“I think someone leads the company to believe certain clients have left the firm, but those clients don’t know it.”
“And you think it’s Abe?” Tori was incredulous.
“Possibly, along with Daryl Talbert. How long do you think they could run a scheme like that?”
She considered it. “Indefinitely, unless a client got suspicious.”
“Like Allan Cartwright did.”
“I guess so.”
“And if the client reported his suspicions to someone higher up the chain of command, what then?”
“PLK would probably start contacting everyone who left the firm within the past year or so.”
“So Gougeon has to get what he’s going to get and disappear, because things are unraveling.”
“I don’t believe it.” Tori was resolute. “Abe isn’t involved in anything illegal.”
The pause before Seamus spoke again hinted at his doubts about the judgmental powers of young women concerning attractive males, but he left it alone. “Okay. You and I can keep looking, but Madison is focused on Gougeon right now.”
“What does he intend to do?”
“He hasn’t decided yet, but I hope he’s careful,” Seamus responded. “Somebody’s scrambling to cover his tracks, and the body count is rising fast.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Give to the Winds Your Fears
Carmon felt lethargic and heavy Friday morning. Sleep had been fitful, and her brain functioned slowly, as if the synapses were shunted to alternate routes rather than their accustomed connections. She was glad she only had herself to get ready, although she called to make sure Cory and Leon got up in time to make it to school. It never hurts to check, she thought as she imagined Cory rolling his eyes at her persistence.
Tori’s memorial service was the trouble, of course. She dreaded accepting the fact her friend was gone forever. Elizabeth had chosen two p.m. for the ceremony and immediately afterward would return to Seattle and her children. Carmon would then pack up Tori’s apartment and dispose of her things, as she had offered to do. Cruel as it was, life went on, and the building manager wanted to get the cleaners in so the place could be rented again.
Elizabeth wasn’t interested in her sister’s belongings. She’d have simply hired a service to come in and dispose of everything, but Carmon wanted to deal with the task as a final service for her friend. There was the problem of the cats, Mani and Dee. Elizabeth wrote them off easily. “The Humane Society will take them.”
But it wasn’t that simple. Tori had loved those goofy cats, and they were the last connection Carmon had to her. She decided to take them, even thoug
h she had never thought of herself as a pet person. Maybe they would grow on her. Such minor concerns kept her from thinking about burying her only friend today.
Madison didn’t attend Tori Van Camp’s memorial and wondered why cops did that in the movies. Was somebody supposed to collapse with remorse at the graveside and confess to the murder? He had plenty to do besides wait for an event that unlikely, and he headed to work in a drizzling mist. At least the discovery of Daryl Talbert’s corpse allowed him to stay focused on Tori’s murder. With the rising body count, a connection to PLK was almost a certainty, and he intended to find out why the pretty blond had died.
In his own mind, Madison had ruled out the possibility Tori was involved in crime. She had died for some cause she had no part in. Why he had come to this conclusion he couldn’t say, except that a voice in his head seemed to whisper “No!” each time he tried a scenario in which Tori did something dishonest. Besides, it was hard to believe a woman who volunteered at Special Olympics and walked the dog of a crippled old man would cheat at work.
At the office, Jaime was preparing to return to court, rereading his notes on the year-old arrest one more time. After completing some work on other cases, assembling his notes for an upcoming court date of his own, and sorting some completed files into his vast reservoir of paper, Madison paged through his notes on the Van Camp murder, ignoring the squeak each time he shifted in his chair. When the phone rang beside him, he picked it up without taking his eyes off the page. “Madison.”
He listened for a few seconds, thanked the caller, and replaced the phone, raising his brows at Jaime. “Jennise Bowdlin died in a car accident Wednesday night.”
“The office manager you thought knew more than she was telling?”
“Right.”
“What happened?”
“Her car hit an abutment along a freeway exit. No seat belt, so her head got smashed. They called it an accident at first, which is why we weren’t alerted, but now some odd things have come up.”
“Like what?”
“A guy who stopped to help was pretty shook up that night. Yesterday morning, when he calmed down, he remembered this other motorist who was first to the car. The guy said he’d call it in, but nobody heard from him again.”
“Could be someone who didn’t want to chat with the police, someone with a blood alcohol level equal to the victim’s.”
“Yeah, but accident investigation says it looks like she was sideswiped. Just a little hit, but enough at that speed to send her into the wall. And the M.E. says her fatal injury should not have happened. The air bag deployed, but her head still hit the steering wheel full force.” Madison tapped his pencil on the coffee-stained blotter. “People die in accidents all the time. Still, this makes three PLK dead, if we count Daryl.”
“And Judd Simms connects too, at least tangentially.”
“Tangentially? You signed up for Vocabulary-Word-of-the-Day?”
DeMestrie threw a wad of paper at him as Madison reached for the phone, dug in his notebook, and dialed the number given him by the cop who had called about Allan Cartwright. “Detective Yates, please.” Twirling an ink pen on his blotter as he waited, he said to Jaime, “This Cartwright guy is a possible fifth victim, if we knew how he fit in.” When Yates answered, he put the phone on speaker so Jaime could hear. “Madison from GR here with my partner, Jaime DeMestrie. What have you found out about your Mr. Cartwright?”
“Not much that’s concrete,” Yates answered. “The son gave us his papers, but it turns out the old guy kept everything from his 1992 summons to jury duty to Publisher’s Clearinghouse letters, filed in supermarket bags.”
“Paper or plastic?” Madison grinned at Jaime.
Yates chuckled. “Plastic, if it matters. He might have known what was in which bag, but this poor schmuck has to sift through a dozen of them.”
“So it’ll be a while.”
“If I had help it might go faster, but that isn’t going to happen. Street festival this week. Everyone’s up to his neck in purse snatchers and traffic jams.”
“I know how it goes. Anything relating to PLK yet?”
“Actually, I might have found something, but it’s pretty vague. Written on the back of an envelope from the gas company is this scribble. It says—hang on so I make sure I get it right— ‘A.G. Thursday 2:00 pm. Fix money mess.’ I thought maybe he contacted PLK and someone was supposed to visit. Thursday night, the son found Cartwright at the bottom of the stairs.”
“A.G., huh? But no direct reference to PLK.”
“Right. I called and asked the receptionist if they had an A.G. She connected me with a guy named Gougeon, but he had no idea who Cartwright was. Said that he was in a college class that afternoon.”
Madison’s eyes met Jaime’s for a moment before he said to Yates, “We wonder if Mr. Gougeon always tells the truth.”
Yates was quick on the uptake. “Do you want to follow up or should I?”
“I’ll do it. We’ve had more deaths here since we spoke. The guy who killed our first victim overdosed, the office manager at PLK died in a car accident, and a guy who used to work there shot his own face off.”
“That’s a lot of corpses.”
“Uh-huh. If I worked at PLK, I’d run. It’s apparently unhealthy to be anywhere near the place.” Madison wrote a quick note, tore off the sheet, and stuck it on his computer screen. “Let me check with Grand Valley to see if Abe really was in class that day. Then I’ll talk with him and call you back.”
“Should be interesting. Thanks.”
The call to the university brought no concrete answer. Although Abe had been enrolled in a Thursday afternoon class, no one was able to say if he actually attended. “The instructor thinks he was there,” he told Jaime, “but he doesn’t sound like the type who keeps close track of such minor things as attendance.”
Madison tapped a fingernail against his teeth, letting the available facts float through his mind in the hope they would form a theory. How did anything in Yates’ case shed light on the death of Daryl Talbert? How, if at all, did the deaths of Allan Cartwright and Jennise Bowdlin figure in? Five dead, each connected somehow to PLK. Way too much for coincidence, he thought.
Jaime leaned back in his chair, thinking along the same lines. “You think Gougeon went to Cartwright’s house and helped him down the stairs?”
“Hard to say. No one saw anybody.”
“Maybe Simms went there and pushed the guy down the stairs while Abe got himself an alibi in class.” Jaime checked his watch, grimaced, and stood to go. “Simms might even have killed Talbert and made it look like a suicide. He’d been dead a while, you said.”
Jaime checked to see that the notes in his jacket pocket didn’t ruin the line of the fabric. “Why don’t you call and see if Parks has anything for us yet on his newest corpse? I’d do it, but the old grouch doesn’t like me.”
“He said not before tomorrow, and it’s nothing personal. Parks hates everybody who’s still alive and unavailable for dissection.”
Jaime chuckled as he slid a Rollo in another pocket for emergencies. “What have you got so far on Talbert?”
Madison rolled his chair to a file cabinet and returned with a folder of crime scene information. “Daryl Talbert had no current job, but in his apartment we found several expensive suits, a state-of-the-art phone system, and a notebook computer with all the current bells and whistles.” Before Jaime could ask he said, “No prints but his on either of them.” Tossing the folder onto the desk, he concluded, “I think Talbert had a scam at PLK that got interrupted by his firing. Somehow he kept it going.”
“He rents that ratty apartment.”
“Conveniently close to the firm.”
“And someone at PLK helps him.”
“Yeah. Fielding calls, maybe, and giving him the documents he needs to falsify accounts.”
“A.G.?”
“I’m going to take another look at everybody, but his name keeps popping up.”
Jaime checked the weather, found it still cloudy but not wet at the moment, and folded his coat over one arm. “What’s the scam exactly?”
“Do I look like an investment broker to you?”
Jaime laughed. “You don’t even look like an investment broker’s brother-in-law. Now me, I could pass for that, at least.”
“You don’t quit eating so much you’re going to look like an investment broker’s Hummer.”
Suddenly Jaime remembered something. Digging into his shirt pocket, he came up with a handwritten note. “I almost forgot. Just so you don’t think I deserted you entirely, I thought I’d check with cab companies for fares around the approximate time of death they estimate for old Daryl. Not many calls at three in the morning, but a cab did pick up a guy outside a bar a block from Talbert’s place.” Jaime frowned as Madison’s chair squeaked yet again as he leaned forward. “When you gonna oil that thing?”