“Talk to me about malicious mischief,” Rick said.
Chris looked at him. “Those charges were so bogus,” he said. “The first building I bought? It was this little one-story in Washington Heights. Some Dominican dude who it turns out was just fucking with me.”
“So you fucked with him?”
Chris frowned. “No, man. I was naïve—it was my first deal. The guy told me he’d signed the papers and sent them to his attorney. So I thought the building was as good as mine, and I went in there to start rehabbing. I cleared out all the trash and started knocking down walls. Dude comes in, goes ballistic on me.”
“And?” I asked.
“He didn’t want to sell. He was just trying to hold up his tenant for higher rent. When he saw I’d started tearing the place apart, he called the cops. I paid to have everything fixed, and the judge gave me a suspended sentence.”
“And the second time?” Rick asked.
“Another asshole. I was buying this fourplex in Jackson Heights, in Queens. One of the units was vacant, and somebody broke in, to use it as a shooting gallery.”
He looked at us to make sure we knew what he was talking about. I’m sure Rick did, but I had no idea why someone would try and set up a gun range in an abandoned apartment. “For drugs,” he said. “That’s what they call them. These abandoned buildings where the junkies hang out.”
He leaned back on the sofa. “There wasn’t a shred of evidence to connect me, but somehow the asshole got in that I had a prior, so the judge thought I was just trying to knock the price down. He gave me a hundred hours of community service. I could have fought it, but it was easier just to go along.”
“What did you have to do?” I asked. Rick shot me an angry glance, but I was curious.
“I worked with Habitat for Humanity,” he said. “Fixing up properties in Bedford Stuyvesant. It was pretty cool. I still help them out when I can.”
I looked over at Rick, and he shrugged. I knew the fingerprints didn’t connect Chris to the shell casing, and Karina’s theory that his psychopathic behavior had begun with killing Caroline’s puppy was beginning to look flimsier than Jeremy Eisenberg’s research paper on Ecstasy, which had represented it as a happy kind of drug, what pot was to the sixties.
“You ever let Karina borrow your car?” Rick asked.
Chris frowned. “She drives like shit. But yeah, I let her sometimes. She works for this fast food place; she’s the one goes out to look at new locations, and sometimes it’s too far for a cab and there’s no other way out there but to drive. But I try to have excuses whenever I can.”
“She borrow your car back in March?” Rick asked.
Chris thought about it for a minute, and then recognition dawned in his eyes. “You mean, like when Caroline—no way, man. Karina can’t shoot a gun for shit. I know—I’ve been to the range with her. Plus, Caroline was like her friend, almost her only female friend. She’d never have shot her.”
“Not even over you?” I asked.
“Especially not over me,” he said. “I admit, I’ve been bouncing back and forth between them. Never at the same time, you know. But I’d break up with one of them and then see the other, and we’d hook up for a while. Then break up again.”
“And which were you hooked up with when Caroline was killed?” Rick asked.
“Neither,” Chris said. He started counting off on his fingers. “Last year, New Year’s, Caroline stopped by my place on her way home from her aunt’s. I hooked up with Karina once, a few weeks later, but then I met this girl on Valentine’s Day and the two of us were going hot and heavy for like, months.”
“So Karina had no motive to kill Caroline based on your relationship with her?” Rick asked.
He shook his head, then pulled his Palm Pilot out of his pocket. “When was Caroline killed?”
I told him the date and time. He plugged it into his calendar. “I was in Connecticut that week,” he said. “I can prove it, if I need to. Guys I met with and so on. That day, I had a dinner in Westport. There’s no way I could have driven down here, shot her, and gotten back to Connecticut for dinner.” He closed the PDA. “And I had the car with me, the whole time. So Karina couldn’t have borrowed it.”
“She could have rented,” I said.
“But she wouldn’t have done it,” Chris insisted. “I mean, I know she’s a bitch. But her and me—and Caroline—we have this bond, you know? Had, I guess, when it comes to Caroline. The whole military brat thing, Korea. You know.”
“We spent our whole childhoods here in Stewart’s Crossing,” I said. “Rick and me both. But I’ll take your word for it.”
Chris left a little while later. “Do you believe him?” I asked Rick.
“In general, yes. Unless he’s a hell of a good liar. I took this course a while ago, on how to read body language. He wasn’t doing any of the things liars do. His whole body language was open, like he had nothing to hide.”
“What he said did make sense,” I admitted. “But doesn’t that knock out your two main suspects?”
Rick grimaced. “If they weren’t guilty, it’s good to get them knocked out,” he said. “Lets me focus elsewhere.”
As Rick was getting ready to leave, I mentioned that I had pulled Caroline’s cell phone bill from her mailbox. I remembered how Rochester had knocked it off the table, and wondered if he’d done it deliberately.
A couple of times, it had seemed like he was pointing me toward clues. He’d alerted me to the break-in at Caroline’s, he’d found the shell casing and Caroline’s PDA, and he’d sniffed out the box that had all Caroline’s Korea souvenirs. Was there something in the cell phone bill he wanted me to see?
Rick asked for the bill, and I went upstairs to get it. While I was there, I picked up the list I’d made of who the numbers belonged to, as well as the unknown ones. Something was familiar about one of them, and I closed my eyes, trying to place it. Like my own cellular number, it began with a prefix I knew was unique to my carrier. But there was something more than that; where had I seen it before?
I grabbed my cell phone and opened it to the call log. Melissa’s was a match for one of the unidentified numbers on Caroline’s bill. For a minute I was confused—hadn’t I already figured something out about Melissa’s number? Then I noticed Edith’s Quaker State Bank paperwork—and made the final connection.
Melissa had used her cell number when she opened the account at Quaker State Bank. Caroline must have discovered that, and called her.
Wow. That was a revelation. I carried the paperwork downstairs and showed it to Rick. “I need to write this down,” he said, pulling his pad out. “All right, so we know Caroline promised to help Edith sometime in March. And then we have a call that Caroline made to the phone number on the account.”
“They’ve got to be connected,” I said. “Caroline’s death and the fraud on Edith’s account.”
“But how?”
“Caroline started looking into Edith’s account. She called Melissa and confronted her. Four days later, Caroline was killed.”
“Why wait the four days?”
I shrugged. “They had to figure out who she was and where she lived, and then they had to track her for a day or so to figure out how to kill her.”
He nodded. “But why kill her? All Caroline had was a phone number.”
“But she worked for the bank, and she had the power to shut down the account,” I said.
While he made some notes, I went upstairs to the bathroom, and on my way back I noticed the student papers I had collected from the freshman comp class. Gingerly, I picked up the pile and carried it downstairs.
He’d put his pad and phone away and was ready to leave. “Can you pull fingerprints from paper? Even if lots of people may have touched the same paper?”
“I can try. What’s up?”
“I might have fingerprints from Melissa and Menno.” I pointed at the papers. “You could match them to that print you pulled off the shell casing. And
then you can arrest both of them, and get Edith’s money back, and get the chief off your back. That’ll be a story for the Boat-Gazette.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Rick said, but I could see he was pleased.
If all my problems could be solved so easily, I thought, as he packed up to go. Maybe I could get a job with the Stewart’s Crossing police department-- but they probably didn’t hire convicted felons. Oh well, another career option down the drain. I’d have to get back to work on my tech writing business plan—and fast.
26 - Show Me The Money
Late Saturday morning, Rick arrived, followed quickly by Edith and Irene, and we sat down to focus on how much of Edith’s money was missing. “OK, in a nutshell, Walter did some good things for Edith, and some bad things,” I said. I looked over at Edith. “Sorry, but it’s the truth.”
“You say what you have to, Steve,” she said.
“First of all, every place that Walter did business with allows account holders to set up online access. Whoever has been stealing Edith’s money didn’t do that, but I did.” I held up a sheaf of papers. “These are printouts of the activity on Edith’s accounts.”
I held up a different set of papers. “I was able to do the same thing with the account at Quaker State Bank, so we have a paper trail of how the money left Edith’s accounts and went into, and out of, the account at QSB.”
“You can just do that?” Irene asked.
“Well, I had all of Edith’s information,” I said. “These online accounts are secure—but only so far. If you have someone’s social security number, account number, date of birth and so on, you can set up the account, and establish your own password. If the thief had done this already, I wouldn’t have been able to get in without knowing her password. And then I’d have had to get in touch with the institution. But because no one had set the online access up already, I was able to do it pretty easily.”
I handed Rick the paperwork from QSB. “What we don’t know is where the money went once it passed through the account at Quaker State Bank in Easton.” I looked at Edith. “Right now, all I can see from the online access is that ‘a check was issued’ or ‘a transfer was made.’ I can’t see who the checks were made payable to or where the transfers went.”
“I’ll put together a subpoena for the records,” Rick said. “It may take a few days, but then the bank will be able to tell us that information.” He looked at Edith. “If they handed money out in cash, it’s as good as gone, frankly. But if they transferred money to some other account, at another bank, for example, and we can find that account, then there’s a good chance we can get some money back for you.”
“All right,” I said. “Let’s get started. The good news is that Walter left Edith a lot of money. The bad news is that he left it in a dozen different investments, making it hard for her to keep track of it all.”
“For instance?” Rick asked.
“OK. You have an IRA, don’t you?”
He nodded. “So did Walter. As you probably know, once you turn sixty-nine and a half, you can take money out of the account without penalty. As a matter of fact, you have to start taking money out then.”
Everyone looked like they were following along.
“As of the last paper statement I have, December 31, Edith had $95,000 in an IRA Walter left her with an investment group called Trust Options, out of New York. Some time after that, someone contacted Trust Options and changed the address on the account to the same post office box used on the paperwork for Quaker State Bank.”
I pulled out the printout I’d made. “On March 1, Trust Options issued a cashier’s check, payable to Edith Passis, in the amount of $90,000, leaving the account open with the minimum balance of $5,000.”
I passed a pile of papers over to Rick. “These are the records of the fraudulent account at the QSB branch in Easton. Can you follow as I point stuff out?”
He nodded, and started looking at the first page. After a minute of evaluation, he said, “A $90,000 deposit was made into the account on March 5.”
“And withdrawn when?” I asked.
He frowned. “It’s not so clear. There are so many different deposits, in different amounts, and then withdrawals in different amounts. The bottom line is that the money is no longer in the account.”
Irene gasped. “Oh, dear,” she said. “Edith, you poor thing.”
“Unfortunately, there’s more,” I said. “Walter had a $10,000 CD with Countryside Bank and Trust in Doylestown, which matured on February 15. The account was closed at that time, and the money transferred to the account at QSB.”
Rick looked at his paperwork. “Yup, I see the transfer.” He looked up at Edith. “I don’t need to keep saying this every time—there’s only about a thousand dollars in this account at the moment. So everything Steve says went in also went out.”
Irene got up and walked to my kitchen, returning a moment later with a box of Kleenex. She handed a tissue to Edith, who had begun to cry.
“This is not your fault, Edith,” I said. “And we’re going to make it right. Aren’t we, Rick?”
“We’re going to do our best.”
“I hate to keep pounding away, but Rick needs to know exactly what has gone missing,” I said. “Walter had a stock account with a discount brokerage called Cheap Trades. Again, some time in February, someone changed the address to that post office box in Easton, and the dividend checks Edith had been receiving monthly were diverted to that address.” I ran through a series of amounts, and Rick verified that the dividends had all gone into the QSB account.
There were a couple of other small accounts like that, and we got through them quickly. “Now, this is our final account, but it’s a big ticket item,” I said. “Edith, did Walter ever mention someone to you named Nancy Fancy?”
“Is she a friend of Turkey Lurkey and Henny Penny?” Rick asked.
“Hey, you’re supposed to be the professional here,” I said. “Edith?”
She pursed her lips and thought for a minute. Finally her eyes brightened. “I know! We used to have a cleaning lady named Nancy Rodriguez, and she married a man named Jim Fancy. I guess that makes her Nancy Fancy.”
“Well, Nancy borrowed $400,000 from Walter six years ago,” I said.
“Oh, my. That’s a lot of money.”
“You’d be surprised,” I said. “It barely buys you one of those big split-level houses in Annie Abogato’s neighborhood. Apparently, from some notes Walter left, Jim had some bad credit, and even though he had a good job, it was hard for them to get a mortgage. Walter loaned them the money to buy a house, with a balloon payment after six years.”
I could see from the look in Edith’s eyes it had already been a long afternoon, and she wasn’t following everything. “When the bank gives you a mortgage, generally you pay principal and interest every month for a set period of time—say thirty years—and at the end of the term you’ve paid off the loan. With a balloon payment, you pay interest only, for a period of time. And then you pay off the principal in one big payment.”
“Who would take out a loan like that?” Irene asked.
“I’m guessing that after six years, Jim Fancy’s credit was in good shape again, and he and Nancy could jointly qualify for a conventional mortgage. It looks like that happened, and they paid off the balloon note at the beginning of April.”
Rick looked at his paperwork. “Yup. The deposit went through.”
“What did they do with all that money?” Irene marveled. “Walter invested it all over town—but did they do the same thing? Or do you think they just spent it?”
“I just don’t know, Irene,” I said. “They were college kids, and kids spend money without even thinking about it. Electronic gadgets, CDs, maybe even drugs. But Rick and I did figure something out yesterday.”
“What?” Irene asked.
I pulled out a calendar. “Edith asked Caroline for help figuring out her financial problems in March. Since Caroline worked for Quaker
State Bank, we think she did some investigating that led her to Melissa and the cell phone number she used when she set up the account. On the Friday before she was killed, Caroline called that number.”
Edith and Irene both gasped. “Melissa must have known that the $400,000 mortgage was coming due on April 1, so she had to keep Edith in the dark until after that happened.”
Gently, Rick said, “We think Caroline was killed to prevent Edith from finding out what was going on until after that mortgage check came through.”
That was the last straw for Edith. She began crying openly. “That poor girl,” she said. “I had no idea. I should have gone directly to the police. This is all my fault. If I wasn’t such a silly old woman, Caroline would still be alive.”
“This is not your fault, Edith,” Rick said. “You didn’t even know a crime had been committed when you talked to Caroline, and if you’d come to me instead of her, I would have told you I couldn’t do anything—that you should just get yourself a good accountant.”
He frowned. “You’re just as much a victim here as Caroline was. And I guarantee you, we will find out who did this to you and make them pay.”
I told Irene about how Edith knew my student, Melissa, through her work-study job at the music department, and how Melissa had recommended her boyfriend, Menno, as Edith’s handyman.
“I’m glad I never asked him to do anything for me,” Irene said tartly. “Although if he was here now I’d certainly give him what for.”
“Any luck on tracing Melissa or Menno?” I asked Rick.
He shook his head. “Yesterday afternoon, I had deputies go to the dorm at Eastern, Birthday Hall. Her roommate hasn’t seen her since Thursday morning, though she hasn’t moved her stuff. I called her parents in Massachusetts, and they haven’t heard from her.”
“You think she’s on the run?”
“I don’t know. The street address that the college has on file for Menno Zook is the same one that was used on the application to start the fake account in Edith’s name—and as you and Edith discovered, that address doesn’t exist. His father has a record, so I tracked him through his parole officer. He says Menno doesn’t live with him, and he hasn’t seen him in a couple of weeks.”
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