No Cats Allowed

by Miranda James

  The process would have taken a few days, if not a week or two, I thought. That argued premeditation on the killer’s part, because it took time to set up the apparent motive for Peter’s suicide.

  The whole thing was cockeyed, a bizarre smokescreen created by the embezzler in order to hide his—or her—theft. I had yet to prove there had been theft, but investigation by the proper authorities into the Global Electronic Resources company would prove it was a fake. I was sure of that.

  It was set up cleverly, though, and it had to involve more than one person. Whichever librarian was responsible—Cassandra, Lisa, or Delbert—had to have an accomplice in accounts payable. The vice president of finance had given me a quick lesson on how the college paid for such things as library resources. The vendor had to be set up in the accounting system. Otherwise there would be no payment issued. To be an approved vendor required certain paperwork, and someone had to have filled it out. The likeliest accomplice was therefore a person in accounts payable.

  The only person I knew there was Melba’s friend, Margie Flaxdale, and I had met her only the once. I didn’t know how many other people worked in accounts payable, but the embezzler had to be working with one of them.

  Peter Vanderkeller was the first murder victim. Oscar Reilly was the second. Why was Reilly murdered?

  Because of his background in finance, I had to assume. He was made interim director because of the budget problems, and he presumably had the smarts to figure out something was fishy about the purchase orders and invoices. Had he then figured out who was responsible?

  He must have. Being the man he was, perhaps he’d tried to blackmail the embezzler, and extort the ill-gotten gains from that person. The embezzler decided to kill again, to avoid exposure and to keep what he or she had stolen. Reilly was lured to the basement, probably knocked over the head, and then pressed to death between the shelves.

  Okay, that made sense, even though my argument was still built on a series of ifs. I tried not to think too much about the method of Reilly’s murder.

  The third murder victim—Porter Stanley. How did he fit into the picture?

  The best I could come up with was that he either witnessed the murder, or Reilly had told him about the embezzlement scheme and had named the perpetrator. Stanley had then contacted the killer, no doubt expecting that with his size and intimidating personality, he could easily take over with Reilly out of the way.

  Except that Stanley was shot to death, and there was no sign of his sister’s jewelry anywhere. Had he recovered it from Reilly? If Reilly actually had it. I figured he must have. I wouldn’t put anything past him, least of all stealing from his ex-wife and her wealthy family. I was sure he felt they owed him that much.

  I spent nearly two hours getting all my thoughts organized in an e-mail to Kanesha, and when I finally clicked Send, I was ready to take a long, hot shower. Maybe the tension in my neck and shoulders would ease without my having to take more aspirin.

  Dressed and ready for work, having breakfasted, I made the decision to leave Diesel home today. Haskell was still on guard duty, and Azalea was there, too. Between them, they would give him attention, and maybe he wouldn’t be too upset with me. I was worried about what could happen on campus today, and I felt better knowing he was safe at home.

  He meowed reproachfully—that’s how it sounded to me—when I told him he couldn’t come with me. I almost changed my mind because of the sad look in his eyes, but then I steeled myself. “No, sweet boy, you need to stay here today. Tomorrow, you can come with me.” Surely this will all be over by then.

  Melba was at her desk when I arrived. “Coffee’s made. I’ll get you a cup.”

  I thanked her and went into my office. She had unlocked the door for me. Always thoughtful. I had to guard my tongue around her today, because I couldn’t tell her about Peter, not until the news was made public. She would be annoyed with me, but I had my orders. I set my briefcase down and logged in to the college network. On the way to work I had thought about the files Reilly had on that thumb drive. I hadn’t double-checked those yet, and I needed to see if there was something I missed.

  Melba came in with my coffee while I was scanning the list of folders and files. She set the coffee down on the desk.

  “Where’s Diesel? Surely you didn’t forget him?”

  “No, I knew I was going to be really busy today, and I thought it was better for him to stay home with Azalea.”

  “Well, I’ll miss him, but you’re probably right. I kept worrying yesterday he was going to slip out of the office, and I wouldn’t be able to find him.”

  I looked up and nodded, smiling, then went back to staring at the screen.

  “I never did finish telling you about me seeing Margie at the grocery store last night,” she said.

  “No, you didn’t,” I replied. I knew I’d have to let her tell me the story or she’d be annoyed with me the rest of the day, if not the whole week. I kept my eyes on the computer screen, though.

  “Margie’s always had a thing for jewelry. That’s one thing we have in common. Like me, though, she hasn’t had a lot of money to spend on it, although she has had a boyfriend for a long time. Never does talk about him, though. I don’t even know who he is.” She laughed. “Whoever he is, he must have a few bucks, because you should see the ring he gave her. She wasn’t going to let me look at it, but I made such a fuss when I saw it, she had to. It looks like it belongs in a museum, old-fashioned really, but gorgeous. This huge sapphire, surrounded by diamonds. Whoever the boyfriend is, it must be serious, let me tell you. Wish I had a man that would give me presents like that.”

  I hadn’t really been paying close attention, trying instead to find out whether Reilly had had copies of the GER invoices on his thumb drive. Finally, however, a few words got through. Huge sapphire, surrounded by diamonds.

  Surely not, I thought, as a memory surfaced.

  I looked up at Melba. “I want to show you something. Come around here so you can see my computer screen.” I located the files of the jewelry pictures, and I clicked on the first one. I thought it was the sapphire ring, and it was.

  “Did the ring Margie has look like this?”

  “Exactly like it,” Melba said. “Where did you get a picture of it? I don’t understand.”

  “All I can tell you at the moment is that I think the ring belonged to Reilly’s ex-wife. I don’t know how your friend got it, but I have to let Kanesha know about this.”

  “Oh my Lord,” Melba said. She stumbled around the desk to a chair and sank into it. “Oh my Lord.”

  “You can’t breathe a word of this. Don’t go near your friend today.” I speed-dialed Kanesha on my cell phone.

  She picked up right away, and I related Melba’s story to her. “She works in the finance department. Accounts payable.” I paused for her reply. “Yes, it fits perfectly. The boyfriend is the obvious culprit, I think.”

  I listened for a few moments longer, as Kanesha adjured me to stay in my office and out of the way. Things were going to start moving quickly, and she wanted me out of harm’s way.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m staying right here. You’re welcome to take the ball and run, run, run.” I ended the call.

  “Charlie Harris, what in thunderation is going on?” Melba looked frightened.

  “I’ll explain everything later, I promise. You’ll simply have to trust me for now.” I paused for a deep, steadying breath. I could feel my heart rate pick up. “Also, we both need to stay here in our offices until I hear back from Kanesha, okay?”

  Melba now looked even more frightened. “Dang, I wish I’d brought my gun with me.”

  “I don’t think you’ll need it,” I told her. “The campus police officer is still on duty.”

  Melba expelled a pent-up breath. “Yes, thank the Lord, he is.” She rose on slightly shaky legs. “I reckon
I ought to try to get a few things done. Holler if you need me.”

  “You do the same. I won’t be going anywhere, except to the men’s room.” I smiled in an effort to lighten the tension.

  She nodded and walked out of the office on legs that were no longer shaking.

  I turned back to the computer screen and continued my search through Reilly’s files. It took me a few minutes, but I found the folder in which he had scanned copies of the GER purchase orders and invoices. I also found a brief document in the folder with several bullet points, the import of which was that this company needed to be vetted to make sure it was legitimate.

  There was the proof that Reilly had at least been suspicious of these expenses.

  I kept going through the folders and files, looking for any other indications that Reilly had found expenses he considered suspicious but came up with nothing. If there were other bogus items, he obviously hadn’t found them yet.

  Over the next few hours, until I heard from Kanesha again, I thought off and on about Delbert Winston. I had a hard time seeing him as a cold-blooded killer. An embezzler, perhaps, but not a killer. He had to be the one, though. How else would Margie Flaxdale have ended up with the ex–Mrs. Reilly’s family heirloom? She had told Melba her boyfriend gave it to her, and Delbert was the only male among the three chief suspects.

  When I finally did talk to Kanesha, I learned that Margie had lied to Melba about the boyfriend. There was no boyfriend.

  There was, however, a girlfriend—Cassandra Brownley.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  On the Sunday after the arrests of Cassandra Brownley and Margie Flaxdale for the murders of Peter Vanderkeller, Oscar Reilly, and Porter Stanley, my family gathered at my house for our weekly meal. I had also invited Melba and Haskell Bates to dine with us. I knew everyone was curious about many of the details of the murder investigation, and I was prepared for a barrage of questions. I insisted, however, that the questions waited until we had finished our meal.

  We adjourned to the living room, and everyone found a comfortable spot. Helen Louise sat beside me on the sofa, and Diesel stretched out over both our laps, his head resting against Helen Louise’s stomach. Dante, now full of turkey, zonked out in Stewart’s lap. I think we all felt a bit sleepy after a full and lively meal, but I had to concentrate to get my thoughts organized when I would rather be taking a nap.

  “Did you suspect Cassandra Brownley all along, Dad?” Laura asked. “She sounds like a truly awful person, and a bully.”

  “I did, though I tried not to let my dislike of her color my judgment,” I said. “She’s a bright woman, but she let her evaluation of her own intelligence unbalance her. She thought she could bulldoze her way over anyone who stood in her path.”

  “She did do that for a long time,” Melba said. “Until Charlie got in her way. She finally met her match.” She chuckled.

  “When Cassandra was first hired at Athena,” I said, “the director was elderly and, frankly, no longer really up to the job. The salaries for librarians were low, and Cassandra wasn’t happy. It wasn’t long before she came up with the scheme to embezzle from the library budget.”

  “She had to have help, though,” Helen Louise said. “And that’s where Margie came in, right?”

  “Yes, her plan wouldn’t work unless she had an accomplice in accounts payable to make the fake company look real. I don’t think she even thought of the scheme until after she and Margie met and became close.”

  “How did they get around the IRS? Even a fake company has to report earnings,” Sean said.

  “Margie did do tax returns, but she underreported the income, of course. They paid enough tax to look reasonably legitimate, but only just.”

  “How do you know all this?” Stewart asked. “I presume one of them must have talked.”

  I nodded. “Yes, Margie. Otherwise it would take Kanesha a lot longer to get at the truth. Kanesha is working with the IRS fraud investigators to uncover the full extent of their embezzlement.”

  “You mean it wasn’t just the one thing?” Laura asked. “How much did they get?”

  “That’s the only one we know about,” I replied. “There could be more, however. From the one fake line item, though, they managed to steal over one point seven million dollars over the course of a decade.”

  Frank whistled. “What I don’t understand is why it took so long to figure out something hinky was going on.”

  “I know how you feel,” I said. “But there are a couple of things to keep in mind. One is that Cassandra went to great pains to make this so-called resource look legitimate. She created fake usage reports to make it seem like the e-books in this phantom collection were used enough to make them worthwhile.”

  “That’s pretty slick,” Sean said.

  “It is,” I replied, “because nobody thought to question her on the statistics. Peter probably never did. He basically went with whatever his department heads advised him to do. With his own money he was parsimonious, but that frugality didn’t extend to the college’s funds.”

  “What was the other thing we should keep in mind?” Helen Louise asked.

  “The fact that librarians, by and large, are not trained to be businesspeople, even though, in a sense, we do run a business. Most library schools, at least back when I went through one, taught a management course, and a course in statistics, but we didn’t have courses in budgeting or finance of any kind.”

  “Opening the way for a smart woman like Cassandra Brownley to take advantage of the general cluelessness of her coworkers,” Alex said.

  “Exactly,” I said. “The problem for her little scheme was that, unbeknownst to her, Peter had been given instructions to trim the library budget for the next fiscal year by about fifteen percent. He apparently was reviewing resources and somehow stumbled on the fact that maybe these e-books weren’t worth what they cost.”

  “Since Cassandra was the one responsible for the biggest chunk of the library’s budget, he must have said something to her,” Melba said.

  “I have access to his e-mail,” I said, “and I found a message from the first of December when he sent her a list of resources he thought should be canceled. Guess what was number one on the list?”

  “Global Electronic Resources. Poor Peter.” Melba shook her head.

  “Yes, because that was probably when Cassandra started planning his murder. She wasn’t about to let her cash cow be canceled.” I sighed. “She came up with the scheme to get rid of Peter and then make it look like he resigned in embarrassment because he had overcommitted the budget by nearly half a million dollars.”

  “Didn’t anyone think it strange that he would suddenly do such a thing?” Helen Louise asked.

  “Yes, but no one dug any deeper because he simply walked off the job, or so they thought. Peter hated ever cutting resources because he truly believed in providing access to all the resources that our students and faculty need for their work. That was certainly one thing I admired in him.

  “Cassandra arranged to be invoiced for several journal back-file collections and an e-book collection, knowing they would put the library way over budget. She apparently told the sales reps that Peter had authorized the purchases. The invoices were sent to her, and she created the purchase orders and signed them with Peter’s name. Then she sent them to Margie in accounts payable.”

  I paused for a breath. “Cassandra couldn’t risk the purchase orders getting to Peter, or the red flags would really have gone up. So she waited until the weekend that she and Margie killed Peter to do it, and then signed them the following day, the Monday when Peter didn’t show up for work. They sent his e-mail resignation from his computer at home, because he was actually logged in to the campus network when they went to his house to fake his suicide.”

  “Stupid of her to have written the wrong date,” Laura said.

  “It was cer
tainly careless,” I said, “but it’s the kind of thing one does automatically most of the time. She slipped up there, and analysis of the signatures on those purchase orders will probably prove that Peter didn’t sign them.”

  “With Peter out of the way, they must have thought they were in tall cotton then,” Melba said. “But along came Reilly.”

  “Right,” I said. “Reilly, who was a finance person. He evidently caught on to the fact that something was hinky, to use Frank’s term.” I smiled at my son-in-law. “Instead of going to the president or to the VP for finance, he decided to try a little blackmail.” I recalled the incident I had witnessed, when Cassandra came storming out of his office. I figured that was when he tried to put the pinch on her.

  “In the middle of it all, the ex-brother-in-law shows up,” Sean said. “Looking for the family heirloom jewelry that Reilly stole.”

  “That man really was a piece of work,” Alex said, her nose wrinkled in disgust.

  “Amen to that,” Melba said in a decided tone. “Honey, you just don’t know how nasty he could be.”

  “He paid for it,” I reminded her. “Porter Stanley forced him to turn over the jewelry, of course. He had been shadowing Reilly for several days. Melba noticed him sitting in a parked car on the street in front of our building. Reilly never saw him, until I brought them face-to-face.”

  “Why did they kill Stanley?” Helen Louise asked.

  “Because he knew they’d killed Reilly,” I said. “He followed Reilly into the library that night and saw the murder. I don’t imagine Stanley shed any tears over the dead brother-in-law, but Reilly had evidently boasted to him about his blackmail scheme. With Reilly out of the way, he attempted to carry on with the blackmail for himself.

  “Cassandra went to meet him at his hotel and shot him. She found the jewels and took them, but she made the mistake of giving Margie one of the rings.”

  “And Margie let me see it,” Melba said. “Really silly of her.”

  “They didn’t know anyone else knew about the jewels, you see,” I said, “but it was still a dumb thing to do.”