by Lee Perry
Henry continued to glare, “I work in a bank.”
“And what do you do there?” Jordan inquired politely.
He hissed through clenched teeth, “I’m a teller.”
“And when was the last time you all spoke to your mother?”
“We talk every day.” Chloe managed before sobbing again into a fresh wad of tissue.
Claude draped his arm around her, “We all did, we were very close.” He gave his sister a squeeze, “Weren’t we? Especially after dad died.”
“And she didn’t mention anything to you? No trouble or problems with a friend or neighbor?”
Henry shook his head slowly from side to side, “No, never, everyone loved our mother.”
“Thank you for your time,” Jordan took the pad and pen when they finished and tucked the items back in her bag, “Every little bit helps.” She pulled some business cards from her jacket pocket, “I’ll call if I need to ask anything else. This is my card, please call or email me if you have any questions or just want to check in…” She handed one to Henry and he took it, “Alright?”
New York City, NY
She heard the soft knock, “Hey there, this a bad time?”
Catherine’s eyes darted from her screen to the open office door and she smiled, “Mattie! Hi!” She shook her head, “Not at all, come in, have a seat…”
“I was going to call but I opted to get out of my office and get a couple minutes of cardio taking the stairs. I understand you’re the best when it comes to copying entire hard drives and extracting their secrets?”
“By extracting do you mean finding corrupted files and the like?”
“I think so…” She grinned, taking a seat next to her desk, “you’ll have to tell me; I need you to examine the hard drives at Helga Lynch’s Fifth Avenue apartment. The more I read the more I suspect the computer her assistant Gary Tauscher uses to track her inventory has been manipulated.”
“Sure, is he a suspect?”
“He’d have to be, but he also appears quite loyal. He’s earned a nice salary and Helga did write him some personal gift checks over the years. It can’t compare to what her nurse got, but still,” she gestured helplessly, “why blow that? But every time I find an inconsistency in his records he just…” she shook her head, “he just looks guilty; does he feel bad because he sold off some of Helga’s missing art collection and pocketed the cash? Or did he make some innocent screw-up he feels bad about but is too afraid to say anything? I don’t know, that’s why I need you.”
“No problem,” Catherine assured her, “I can do it as soon as Jordan gets a warrant.”
“Great,” Mattie checked her tablet, “and could you check your email before I go? I sent you a copy of an interesting letter I found in a box of correspondence in the apartment…”
Catherine turned back to her workstation, her fingers flying over the keys as she accessed her email account, “Okay, I got one here…”
“Thank god for my wand-scanner, in Bellosantuario alone I scanned over a thousand documents.” She leaned back in the straight-backed chair and crossed her legs, waiting while Catherine opened the attachment.
“Jeez,” she sympathized, “there has to be a quicker way to do that…” Her eyes flicked over the letterhead, “Oh… yeah…” she nodded as she read, “Jordan found Helga’s accountant in the FBI database as a registered sex-offender…”
“Right,” Mattie jabbed a finger at her screen, “and then he wrote this letter to Helga.”
Catherine read aloud, “Dear Miss Lynch, this letter acknowledges that I met with you last Friday to explain my legal situation regarding my plea to certain charges pertaining to the utilization of a computer in an attempt to communicate with minors online. They were in fact not minors but undercover police officers. I maintain that I did not break any laws and only accepted a plea to spare my family and friends undue embarrassment and to avoid incurring high legal costs. The judge ruled this arrangement will not interfere with my ability to continue to serve my clients. By signing below, you are indicating you wish for me to continue as your accountant, representative, Executor, Trustee, and in any additional capacity you choose. Sincerely, Carroll Campbell.” She rolled her eyes to look at Mattie, “Wow, what a bunch of bullshit.”
“You can say that again,” she snorted, “and see the date on the letter?”
She turned back to the screen, “Oh… he met with her and wrote this letter a year and a half after his conviction?”
Mattie nodded, “Yeah.”
“Why? Why wait so long? Why have a meeting with her and write this at all?”
“Good question, Doctor Bernard, and I have a couple more for you; did you know Helga owned two apartments in her building on Fifth Avenue?”
“You mean when she bought the second apartment on the top floor and combined them into one?”
“No…” Mattie shook her head, “I mean she owns that apartment on the twelfth floor and another that takes up the entire ninth floor, apartment 9A.”
Catherine looked genuinely surprised, “Really? Why didn’t her assistant tell us that when Jordan and I were there about the Rodin?”
Mattie sighed, “I wouldn’t know, but I imagine it could be because he’s been living rent-free in that apartment for the past twelve years.”
Westport, CT
She had called Catherine and gotten something she could eat in the car while she made the hour drive back the way she came, this time heading to Westport, having arranged to meet with the caretaker who discovered Hannah’s body. Her phone rang and she pressed the button on the Bluetooth in her ear, “Mattie?”
“Hi Jordan, Catherine told me you’re on your way to Helga’s empty mansion in Westport, so I’m calling to give you some background on the place, unless you got that already.”
“Thanks, I don’t know anything other than the body of Helga’s private nurse was found there…”
“Yeah, can’t wait to hear how that went down. Anyway, I got most of this from reading Helga’s private correspondence and Catherine’s financial program helped fill in some blanks, okay?”
“Okay, shoot.”
“So… Helga’s mother, Elizabeth Ann Labelle Lynch, urged her to buy this place in Westport back in 1952 as a refuge in case the Russians invaded New York…”
“Wow,” Jordan snorted, “really?”
“Well, it was during the Cold War, North Korea had invaded South Korea. People freaked out back then just like they did after 9/11 over the Anthrax scare and bought up all the Cipro.”
“I remember that.”
“Me too, anyway, she bought this place and some more land around it to maximize the distance from her neighbors and ended up with more than fifty acres total. She called it Chateau Donjon; it means Castle Keep. She made some renovations, the mansion has twenty-one rooms and sixteen thousand square feet of space, but she never stayed there.”
“Ever?”
“Nope, she never moved in, the place has been vacant and unfurnished since she bought it more than sixty years ago.”
Jordan’s jaw dropped and she stared hard through the windshield at the white road, “Seriously…”
“Yes, seriously.”
“Her lawyers tried to get her to sell it repeatedly over the decades and she agreed when she turned a hundred. She had an offer for twenty-six million but she turned it down because the appraisal was higher and then the market crashed and some other deals fell through. At this point it’s still officially for sale at thirty-four million, but even if there was an offer the surrogate couldn’t accept it with the giant mess going on right now.”
Jordan shook her head to clear it, “I’m still trying to wrap my head around buying a mansion then never staying in it.”
She could hear Mattie sigh, “It’s just mind-numbing isn’t it?”
They chatted about meeting to compare notes and Jordan signed off when the navigation system announced her destination was ahead. She slowed and clicked on her turn s
ignal, pausing to verify the number on the mailbox constructed, Jordan guessed, as a small replica of Chateau Donjon. She turned onto the driveway and stopped the car, feeling engulfed by the dense woods pressing in from both sides and above. Amazing. She let her foot off the brake and drove slowly, occasional glimpses between the unrestrained shrubberies indicated the winding private road was once wide enough for two-way traffic and more, but now the freshly snowplowed pitted asphalt was only wide enough for her bureau car, made narrow by the overgrown bushes and trees.
A deer trotted across the drive and she slowed the car to a crawl, stopping completely when three more trotted across and she smiled when one paused to look at her with large brown eyes. Amazing… and beautiful. She continued slowly, captivated by the wild snow-capped woods, untamed and un-manicured. Certainly can’t confuse this place with Bellosantuario. When she emerged from the trees, she followed the paved road through a small meadow, heading toward two small identical single-story brick buildings. An older man appeared from behind the building on the left and she rolled down her window, slowing to stop alongside him,
“Hello, I’m Agent Hawkins,” she held up her badge wallet, “are you Louis Becker?”
“I am.” He nodded and shook her hand through the window, “Why don’t you pull around the front of the house here on the left to park?”
“Okay.” She drove slowly around the brick structure, Wow, he sure is muscled for an old guy, he has to be in his mid to late sixties. She parked and shut off the engine. She grabbed her briefbag and when she propped open the door she spied an old Chesapeake Bay Retriever walking slow toward her, tail wagging while a younger dog bounded at his side, a Chihuahua mixed with something Jordan couldn’t identify. “Well, hi there,” she grinned, patting and petting both dogs, “Now you’re the kind of guard dogs I love.”
“That’s old Toby and Max.” Louis told her as he rounded the house, “They know a good person when they see one.”
Jordan exited the car and shut the door behind her, “Thanks for your time today…” She held up her cell phone, “Mind if I make an audio record of this? It’s just so I don’t have to write notes.”
“Sure,” he shrugged, “you wanna’ see where I found the body?”
“Yes,” she nodded, “and I have a lot of questions about this place, could you give me a tour after and let me pick your brain a little? There’s a lot of concern over Miss Lynch’s estate since her passing.”
He gestured to an older model jeep parked alongside the building, “Let’s go in that, we’d have a pretty cold walk otherwise.” He opened the door for her and then opened the back and helped the dogs inside, “They like car rides…” he explained and shut the door. “I guess I can start with this part of the property.” He gestured to the brick structure as he climbed in the driver’s seat and started the engine, “These are both caretakers’ houses, two bedrooms in each. They’re twins of each other. I live in this one.” He drove back down the driveway, “I’ll show you the site from the road, then I’ll take you back for a tour of the main house.”
“Okay… So how long have you been the caretaker here?”
“I got here in ‘95, the previous caretaker died and I answered an ad in the newspaper for the job. I was a boxer back in the day and a trainer after that… but I was also a drunk,” he shrugged, “plain and simple. My third wife divorced me when our son Bobby was just two years old. I drifted for a long time, when I got this job I got my act together, been sober since I got here. It was real good for me.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, Louis…”
“You can call me Lou.”
“Okay,” she grinned, “Lou, how old are you?”
“I’ll be eighty this July.”
Jordan’s brows arched high, disappearing under her bangs. “You sure don’t look it.”
He gave a half shrug, “This place has kept me in good shape. I get a lot of hiking done checking the property.” They got to the end of the driveway and he turned left onto the road, “The property runs about a quarter mile along here; I was comin’ back from the store in town when I thought I saw the bottom of a shoe up on the wall.” He made a u-turn and pulled off onto the shoulder in front of a collapsed section of the natural stone barrier, “There’s a lot of falls like this,” he gestured at the break, “the house was built back in ‘34 and the wall here and on the west side was built back then too. So between age and the weather and the occasional car accident, parts of it have been coming down for some time.”
Jordan got out of the car and he followed, “So the shoe was left on the wall?”
“No,” he said, preferring to stand by the front of the jeep, “I only saw the bottom of the shoe on the wall there,” he pointed, “but it was still on the person’s foot.” He averted his gaze, looking up the road, “The body was upside down on the other side.” He shook his head, “I was afraid it was a kid…”
“Yes…” Jordan estimated the wall was five feet high and the broken section created a six-foot wide, two-foot deep gap at the top. She stood looking over the gap at the trampled snow and shrubbery made by the coroner and paramedics when they removed the body. “Given the victim’s small stature it would have made sense to think a child had been hit by a car and flung over the wall.”
He nodded, finally looking at her, “I’m not proud to say I felt relieved when the coroner told me it wasn’t a kid but a woman in maybe her fifties.”
“There’s no shame in that,” she assured him, “I’d have been relived too.”
“I’d only been here a couple years when my ex got real sick with cancer… Bobby was just eight when he came to live with me.” He nodded at the shrubbery and the road beyond, “I’d walk him to the school bus stop a half mile up the road everyday…”
“He grew up here?”
“Yeah,” his smile was both shy and proud, “when I asked Mister Stiger, Miss Lynch’s lawyer, for permission to let Bobby come live with me…” He paused, “Uh… did you need to know anything else about what happened here?” he gestured at the wall.
“No, I’ve seen what I need.” She walked back to the jeep, “Want to head back?”
They got back inside and he turned on the engine, “Anyway, when Mister Stiger asked Miss Lynch if it was okay she said yes.” He pulled back onto the road, “And do you know she paid for Bobby to go to a private school?”
“Really”
“Yeah, boy, that was something else. She set up an account for his schooling right up ‘til college, then she set up a trust account for that too. Her lawyer said she wanted to get it done before she died.” He turned back onto the driveway and slowed down, “But that was years ago now…” he looked over at her, “Do you know when she died?”
“A couple of months ago now…”
His brows hiked up his forehead, “Really?” he sounded surprised.
“You didn’t know?” Jordan asked.
“I never met or spoke to her; my paychecks came from the lawyer, Mister Stiger, everything was always done through him.” He took his foot off the accelerator and fished his wallet from a back pocket, “I saw this in the paper...” He thumbed through a thick wad of papers in a side compartment and handed her an aged piece of folded white paper, “a long time ago now…”
She opened it and when a yellowed newspaper article fell out, she fumbled to catch it, “It’s about the sale of a Renoir… for twenty-six million dollars?”
He pointed at the clipping, “See where it says, ‘from the estate of Helga Lynch’? It was right after the trust accounts had been set up for Bobby; I thought for sure she was dead all these years.”
“Uh… no,” Jordan quickly used her phone to take a picture of the article, “she was alive right up until a couple of months ago.”
“Man,” he shook his head, “how old was she?”
“A hundred and nine.”
“Well,” this time he nodded, “may she rest in peace… I just hope she had some peace while she was in this world t
oo.” He slowed the jeep for a cottontail rabbit that hopped across the drive, “She was sure in it a long time.”
“So your son’s in college?”
The smile returned, “He was, he’s a veterinarian now. While he was growin’ up here we learned how to take care of all kinds of animals, but he really took to it. He always said when he grew up he wanted to be a vet, and thanks to Miss Lynch, he is.” They had returned to the caretaker houses, he drove past them and they disappeared into the woods again. He briefly interrupted himself to point over the steering wheel, “The drive up to the house is pretty short… Anyway, he and I rehabbed raccoons, rabbits… deer. Stanley the goose had a broken wing so he and the two chickens that blew in from some farm around here …”
Jordan chuckled, “Chickens?”
“Oh yeah, Rosie and Louise, they’re his girlfriends and they spend nights in a heated aviary we built in the garage.”
“Sounds nice.”
“You’ll see ‘em when we get back. My son named Louise,” he shot her a grin; “he thought that was real funny since my name is Lou. Anyway, the property has gone wild over the last sixty years, around here we get turkeys, three kinds of owls, two kinds of hawks and once I saw a bald eagle. Box turtles my son says are rare, and red and gray foxes and yellow-spotted salamanders.”
“Sounds like paradise.”
The jeep abruptly exited the woods and he pulled into a cobblestone courtyard, “You know what?” He sounded thoughtful as he parked in front of the mansion’s front doors, “When I look back on it, it sure feels that way.”
Chateau Donjon resembled a French chalet; It must have been looked quite grand when she bought it… They got out of the jeep and she took in the façade and the white paint peeling away from the red brick and shuttered French windows.
“She did spend a pile of money on repairs when I first got here,” he said, fishing a set of keys from his pocket, “But since then, outside of my salary I only get enough to maintain an old tractor I use to shovel the driveway clear of snow and fallen trees and whatnot.” He opened the door and they walked inside.