Death of a Bankster (19 page)

“So, Gibby? He left how long ago?”

“About three hours I’d say. Said he had to see a dude. That he’d be back in tomorrow night. I told him I had a date tomorrow night. He said he was leaving town day after tomorrow. Hey, that’s Gibby. He shrugged and said, ‘See ya sometime.’ I said. ‘Whenever.’”

“You got a phone for him?”

“Didn’t ask. Like you said, he’s always changing phones. I’m not surprised the number you had for him was crap. That’s Gibby. The way he talked I don’t expect to see him for weeks, but with that man you never know.”

“Look, how can I find him? It could be worth three hundred to you.”

“No. No. I don’t take money from friends.”

“You aren’t. This is expense money I got from the guy me and Gibby will be working for. You got a good address? I’ll give it to you now. Right now. I need some help here. Gibby’d want this job. It’s top pay. For him and me on this one, it’s gotten to now-or-never time. I want Gibby, but I need somebody. The boss on this is pushing me to get started. I wait any longer and I’ll blow it for both me and Gibby.”

* * *

True to Peg’s description, the apartment house Bennie Gibbons lived in wasn’t much. Ryan hoped she had been as accurate about the address. Peg said Gibbons was holed up in unit seventeen. Ryan checked the parking lot, a Harley leaned on its kickstand in the space stenciled unit seventeen. Things looked right enough that Ryan decided to go with it.

It was a little past two-thirty when he found a good spot to park, a spot that would allow him to see Gibbon’s hog, or what he assumed to be Gibbon’s hog. Ryan turned on his laptop and got the time the sun would rise tomorrow, or what was later today actually, and then set the alarm on his watch for fifteen minutes before sunrise. That would give him a few hours sleep. Whenever he had been around Bennie Gibbons the man had always been an early riser, pretty much with sunup. Ryan figured that when Bennie was not in-country, he might sleep later, but not much. He always woke with the sun and with an enormous appetite.

Four hours later, Ryan’s wrist alarm went off. He wanted to get to Gibbons before he was fully alert. You could know Gibbons, he could even like you, but you still didn’t want to turn your back on him if you had him pissed or even inconvenienced. Special Forces taught Bennie to kill, well, to shoot. Special Forces did not intend for him to take to it like it was a hobby. Playing jacks, shooting marbles, playing mumble peg, and, oh yeah, shooting people. Gibbons had left Special Forces at their request, but kept up his boyish charm and his lethal hobby.

Eleven minutes later, the sun started peaking over the horizon and brightening the sky more directly than it had when Ryan first woke. After all the beer he had put away the night before, his mouth tasted like a flannel shirt. He needed some water and he knew where to get it, in apartment seventeen.

He rang Bennie’s doorbell. Then knocked, and then rang twice more. Gibbons opened the door, blinked, ran his hand through his hair, blinked again, and then lowered his eyebrows to squint one of those early-morning squints. Through it all, Gibbons kept his right hand behind his back, he was holding. Then he smiled. Gibbons still had that neighborhood paperboy smile that had been tipping over women in bars as long as Ryan had known him. He opened the screen and stuck out his hand. Ryan shook it. Gibbons’ handshake was always limp, that hadn’t changed, neither had Ryan’s dislike for the man. Gibbons killed for money and the joy of killing. That had never set well with Ryan. He went inside. Gibbons had put on a few pounds, but his talents never required that he run all day or engage in much hand combat. It wasn’t that he couldn’t, in fact he had better than a passing grade in hand combat, but that was not the thing that had built the demand for the man’s services.

“What are you doing here, Captain?”

“We need to talk. First, I need some water, I’m really thirsty. Please.”

“We can talk over breakfast? As usual, I’m famished.”

He hadn’t changed all that much. The man could eat all the time and never put on much weight.

“Is there a Mimi’s Café around here?” Ryan knew there was but would let Gibbons direct him until they got there.

“Make yourself at home, Cap’n. Give me about ten. I need to shower and change clothes.”

When Gibbons went into the bathroom, Ryan went into the kitchen and drank water, swishing some around his mouth and forcing it between his teeth the way we all did with Jell-O when we were kids. It was far from a brushing, but it would have to do. When the shower water started, Ryan searched Gibbons’ room. He found weapons in his closet, and some fake identification in a drawer. He made a mental note of the names on three false passports and one Nevada driver’s license.

By the time Gibbons came out, Ryan had wiped his prints off everything and was standing at the window on the far side of the living room. Just off the kitchen, the ceiling fixture indicated the area had been designed to be a dining room, but there was no dining table. The view was a street of residential single family homes. The one directly across from the window, a rental house with a bedroom upstairs had a one-person sized balcony, and a yard populated by tall weeds and scattered trash. The screen on one of the front windows, partially torn free, reached out over its small porch.

On the way to the restaurant, Ryan noticed that Gibbons kept glancing at him. Likely trying to figure why he had come to see him, what the problem was, or if Ryan might have brought an opportunity for some work, rather than a problem. Gibbons would likely have pressed anyone else, but having been in the military, he did not confront Ryan Testler, a man he knew as Captain.

“If you can stick around Cap’n, we could make a day of it.”

“I need to get out of Phoenix no later than tomorrow morning. I was planning to leave tonight.”

“You have a ticket yet?”

“No. I’ll call or just head over there and take what I can get. I need to be in DC tomorrow night.”

“Well, if you can hold off and leave in the morning, I’ve got a lady coming by my place tonight at ten. I can order up one for you too. Remember our last night in Saigon?” While Gibbons had said, remember, he had shaken his open hand, fanning his fingers as if they were burnt.

“That night packed in some great memories,” Ryan said. “The thin ladies of Saigon were amazing. Tell me about this woman you got coming over.”

“Don’t know. She’s from a service I use here. Sometimes it’s just easier than going through the meet and seduce ritual. I ordered a blonde, you know the way I like ‘em. Long hair. Big knockers. Shorter’n me. I hate looking up at boobs. I can have it set up before we have breakfast.”

“That’d sure be fun. And Lord knows I could use a treatment. That’s for damn sure. Let me think on it, work through my schedule of what has to happen between now and tomorrow night. I’ll let you know. What’s your cell number?”

“Just got a new one.” Bennie gave Ryan the number.

Twenty minutes after they left the apartment, Gibbons was buttering his french toast, then poured on syrup. Ryan had ordered two eggs, coffee, and an English Muffin.

“We appear to be in conflict on a job we’re each doing,” Ryan said.

Gibbons’ boyish face feigned innocence. “I got no idea what you mean, Cap’n.”

“I’m looking into something for the agency. It involved the man you put down for the count.”

“When was this, Cap’n?”

Ryan squeezed some catsup onto his over-easy eggs and got too much. “Don’t you hate these damn new catsup bottles which have the top on the bottom?”

“Never thought much about it,” Gibbons said. “It’s cool you don’t need to shake the bottle so much to get the catsup out.”

“That’s true enough, but if the catsup has set very long before you use it, the water ingredient comes out first and soaks your food. Then when you squeeze you get more catsup than you want.” Ryan pushed the excess catsup to the side of his plate and went about eating.

“That’s probably why they package it that way. You use more. They sell more. Everybody’s trying to fuck everybody else. It’s the way of the world. Now, what’s this conflict you mentioned? When did I supposedly do this?”

“A week ago Thursday. Late. You took the guy out in his own doorway. He came home in a cab that brought him from the airport. You waited until the cab pulled away from the curb to take the shot.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Cap’n. Pass me the salt and pepper.”

Ryan did. “Come on, Gibby. You cased the job by taking up with the target’s neighbor, a nurse named Carla Roth. I saw a picture of you and that neighbor taken by the victim’s wife. You were in the backyard of this Carla Roth. Listen, you were making a living. That’s of no consequence to me.” Ryan looked around to make sure no one was looking or could hear before he continued. “You putting Sam Crawford down complicated things for me, that’s all. But you can square that by telling me who paid you to do it. That information does play into my assignment.”

“I got no clue, Cap’n. You know me. I don’t want to know who pays. I don’t wanna know why that person bought a bullet for the guy. The only thing that matters is the money and the target, because the size of the target affects the size of my fee. I’m like the guy who rotors out your clogged drains. He don’t care who clogged the drain, only the fee he gets for cleaning it out. I’m the rotor man for human clogs.” Again the boyish grin and a chuckle that told what Ryan had always known about Bennie Gibbons, the man didn’t suffer at all from dragging around a conscience.

The waitress came to the table. The two men paused while she cleared plates and refilled coffee cups. “Gibby. Bennie. Come on, man. I need to know this. No reason for you not to tell me.”

“Can’t give what I don’t got, Cap’n. You know I would. This one got arranged so they don’t see me. I don’t see them. No middle man either. They came to me. I got no idea how they got onto me.”

“Tell me how the arrangements went down.”

“Sure. I find an envelope in the compartment on my hog. It’s got ten thousand in it and a throwaway cell. An hour later, I get a call on that cell. To boil it down they gave me a name, an address, and said I had two weeks to get it done. That when it was done, I should enter a personal ad in that column in the local paper. I was to say precisely this: 'I know you read this column everyday auntie M. Thanks for a wonderful visit on,' followed by the date I took him out. If so, I’d get another twenty-five thousand left in my hog two nights after I did the job. That made payday on a Saturday. That I should go down at two a.m. Sunday morning and get it, but not go down before. That I’d be watched, that I didn’t want them as enemies.”

“The voice, a woman or a man?”

“They had monkeyed with the voice. I couldn't tell. That's why I referred to the caller as they. I got no clue, Cap'n.”

“So, they know who you are, you just don’t know them.”

“That’s it Cap’n. Just like that. Part of their message was, ‘we know who you are. Do what you’re told and get paid, or screw it up and get dead.’ I took care of it as instructed.”

“The rest of your money?”

“It was there two days later. No envelope this time.”

“Thanks, Gibby. Appreciate you’re being square with me. Here’s my cell. If you think of anything further or are contacted again, I wanna know it right away. Okay?”

“Sure, Cap’n. Sure.”

“Tell me about how you met up with Maxwell Norbert?”

“Who?”

“The big banker.”

“Don’t know the guy. Never heard of ‘im.”

Gibbons’ body language seemed right for his answer. “Okay, Gibby. Good seeing ya.”

“Are we square, Cap’n?” Gibbons picked up the check. “No problems here?”

“No problems, Gibby. Like I said, I had a plan B. Frankly it’s looking better than the Sam Crawford angle. It may play out that you did me a favor. Thanks for breakfast. I appreciate it.”

Chapter 20

Maddie decided to brainstorm the Sam Crawford shooting, asking Lieutenant Harrison to join her and Detective Martin. “Thanks, Lieutenant.”

“I don’t know what I can contribute. My view of the case is cursory at best.”

“You bring a fresh mind, not to mention your experience. See something we’re too close to see or too familiar. Hey, you’re a resource. My main man as they say on the street.” They all laughed.

“Sergeant, why don’t you give the lieutenant an overview to get him up to speed, and I’ll get us something to drink.” Maddie and Adam Harrison nodded toward Sue Martin who asked, “Lieutenant, how do you like your martinis, one olive or two?”

“That sounds just right. Unfortunately, I’ll have to settle for black, just a half cup. … No. Skip the coffee. Make mine a soda, ginger ale if we have it. I’ve had more than enough coffee today.” Maddie held up two fingers.

When Sue got back carrying three ginger ales, the lieutenant was reasonably current. “Okay,” he said, “give me the suspects, with the whys for each of ‘em.”

Sue looked at Maddie, a look that said, “I got to hear this too.”

“In random order,” Maddie began, “the suspects appear to be the wife with or without an accomplice or accomplices, Sam Crawford’s boss at the bank, some unidentified mobster, and maybe the victim’s mother-in-law.”

“Gimme the rundown on the mother-in-law first. I always assumed if I ever got married and ended up murdered it would be my mother-in-law who did it.”

Maddie smiled. “Is that why you’ve never married?” Truth was Lieutenant Harrison came close to marrying a year ago. The woman had been killed. A far as Maddie knew, he had nothing on the romantic front since. “I apologize, sir, I didn’t mean that to sound insensitive.”

“I know you didn’t, Maddie. Please continue. The mother-in-law, you were saying?”

“We don’t have much of anything there. Not enough to ever mention outside this room. When Sue and I first met with Paige Crawford and her mother, we got odd vibrations from the senior woman.”

“Vibrations, Sergeant? We’re now detecting based on vibrations? Do you agree with this mystical stuff, Detective Martin?”

Sue nodded. “It’s just a feeling, sir. But we both had it.”

“Okay. I guess this intuition stuff comes with having girl detectives, as the world turns. Or, in this case, as the police department turns.” The lieutenant gently shook his head. “Who’s next?”

“Vibrations were likely a poor choice of words,” Maddie said. When Adam Harrison pinwheeled his hand, Maddie moved on. “The widow Paige Crawford had met with a divorce attorney the day before her husband was shot. Nothing was filed. This was a first meeting, just exploratory discussion.”

“Why would she meet with an attorney to discuss divorce if she planned to knock him off? Seems that would accomplish nothing other than to move her up your suspect list.” He opened his mouth wide and wiped his index finger and thumb against the corners.

“Someone else said that recently,” Maddie said. “I admit if the wife did kill her husband, and given the complexity of how this was done, stealing his body, etc., this murder had to have been planned over days, probably weeks. With that going on, why bother with a divorce attorney? Play the happy housewife and grieving widow, not the unhappy wife considering divorce.”

“Sounds like you just talked yourself away from that possibility, Sergeant, absent some evidence to the contrary.” Lieutenant Harrison spread his hands like a preacher. “Do you have any such evidence, Sergeant?”

Maddie scrunched up her mouth and shook her head. “To our knowledge, the wife has no lovers, nothing at all suspicious in her life.”

“You say she had a witness, her neighbor who was there with her and saw the whole thing. If Paige Crawford killed her husband, the neighbor would have to be involved. No shot from a distance. They’d plug ‘im in the back of the head from up close, and then practice their story about mysterious agents, and the M.E. coming for the body when in fact they buried it up in the hills somewheres. The problem with that scenario, the experts tell us Crawford was shot from a considerable distance. Another problem is that the guy’s body reappeared right where it should have been, in the morgue. We got anything that says the wife or neighbor is a marksman who could hit the back of his head from a distance? Not to mention sneak his body into the morgue.”

Maddie shook her head, then said, “The wife won a rifle shooting contest at age nine, but we got nothing that shows she’s continued her shooting. She says no.”

Sue said, “I’ve shown the wife’s and neighbor’s pictures at the local shooting ranges and the gun shops. Nobody recognizes either one of them.”

“The mother-in-law’s a shooter,” Maddie stated. “The wife’s uncle is an Olympic medal winner in shooting. But we’ve verified they both were at a political fundraiser during the hours that Sam Crawford was shot.”

“So,” the lieutenant continued, “if the wife killed ‘im, she had another accomplice in addition to the neighbor and that shoe best fits the neighbor’s boyfriend, this Benjamin Gibbons.”

Sue spoke up. “If, for the moment, we assume Paige Crawford again honed her shooting skill, these two ladies with no criminal experience would still need to make up a whopper of a story, and somehow arrange for the printing of a fake FBI card. But I doubt they could have defeated county security to secret the body into a refrigerated bag in the ME’s office? For my money, that’s too big a leap.”

“Love can conquers all, Detective,” Adam Harrison said.

“Sue and I can’t see it going down that way.”

“You mentioned the bank where her husband worked, or some of our state’s infamous smugglers. Flesh those out.”

Maddie put the toe of her foot on her bottom desk drawer. “This entire line of thinking started with the imposter FBI agents who approached the house, searched it, and took the victim’s body.”

“To check it into the morgue while they were closed,” the lieutenant offered.

“Yeah,” Maddie said, “as it turned out. The fake FBI agents, if there were in fact any fake FBI to begin with, claimed they had Sam Crawford under surveillance for money laundering. We certainly have our share of human and drug traffickers in Arizona. They could tie in to that angle. We checked with Digger. He had heard nothing, but he agreed to make inquiries. He called a short while ago to say no dice. Nothing he can find.”

“Laundering and counterfeiting, if the money was funny, that stuffs a federal beef. You checked that angle?”

Maddie nodded. “They got nothing. I checked with the FBI and got a firm no. We checked with the Secret Service and got a second no. There appears, at least officially, to be no federal case in process against Sam Crawford or Nation’s First Bank & Trust.”

When Maddie paused, Sue chimed in. “And no record of any FBI agents with the names that were used.” Sue leaned forward, extending her hand with the fake FBI card with the name, Agent Dennis Powell.

“I’ve seen it,” the lieutenant said, waving off actually taking the card. “You got anything about this laundering angle other than supposed statements by the phony feds who came to her door?”

Maddie shook her head. “Not a thing.”

“So this could be nothing more than a ruse to take control of the house, get the widow out, and search the place.”

“In all likelihood, but without money laundering or smuggling, why did they search the house?” Maddie asked rhetorically. “What was so important that they risked being seen in order to remove it? And did they remove whatever that was?”

Sue spoke again. “They could have referred to money laundering because he was killed by drug and human smugglers who didn’t want to make reference to their own activity. In any event, they certainly meant to remove his body. They did that. What else they removed, if anything, we don’t know. On a broader view, why did they elect to kill Sam Crawford to begin with? Right now, we lack a motive.”

“Murder gets exceedingly hard without a motive,” the lieutenant said. “Not to mention prosecution in the event you come up with a suspect.” He turned toward Maddie. “Anything else, Sergeant?”

Maddie looked to Sue, then back to Adam Harrison. “Yes. There is another thing that points me toward the banker.” Harrison raised his eyebrows. “The Crawfords held a safe-deposit box at Nation’s First Bank & Trust. Paige Crawford said she went down there after her husband’s death. With her key missing from where it had been kept in her home, the bank drilled the box. When she opened it the box did not contain the quarter-million dollars she claims had been there before her husband’s death.”

Lieutenant Harrison whistled and held it until his breath gave out. “A quarter mil of cash, what did the bank’s sign-in sheet show?”

“No one had been in the box since the prior time the wife had, when she swears the cash had been there.” The lieutenant started to speak. “I know. I know,” Maddie said. “That can’t happen. Not with a safe-deposit box. Still, the widow says it did. She figures the only one who could have pulled it off was the bank CEO.”

“Sounds more likely the widow’s lying.”

“I agree, sir. However, a few minutes ago you used logic to establish that if Paige Crawford killed her husband, it would be foolish of her to go see a divorce attorney the day before. That same logic applies here. Assuming for the moment that Paige Crawford killed her husband, why would she announce her safe-deposit box held what she admitted to me to be a quarter-million of ill-gotten gain? According to the bank records, no one could have removed it other than her. So, why reveal its existence at all?”

“Unless it was never there to begin with,” Sue Martin said.

“If it had never been there to begin with, Paige Crawford would have no cause of action against the bank. All it does is raise the specter that her husband or she had been involved in nefarious dealings. Under our current hypothesis, he’s dead by her hand, so why would she want to have that kind of thinking brought up at all? No. To the contrary, the same kind of logical thinking which supports no divorce attorney would support no claim of the existence of the cash. If it had ever been there, the bank records establish that only she could have removed it. So, if she has it, and it’s illegal, why would she mention it at all?”

“Unless, there was money laundering,” Lieutenant Harrison said. “That could explain the killing of Sam Crawford, the invasion of his house by phony FBI agents, the stealing of his computer and cell phone, even this disappearing money. All of it fits in when one assumes money laundering by either Sam Crawford without his employer’s knowledge, or by Sam Crawford as an agent for his superiors in the bank.”

“Yes, sir. A lot makes sense when we accept that premise. This is why, despite laundering having been mentioned only by FBI agents who don’t exist, money laundering lurks in the shadow of this case. However, we have no proof there was ever any money in the box or any laundering. The only evidence we have establishes there was no money. And, let’s not forget, all the appropriate federal agencies deny any case of laundering or other action involving Sam Crawford.”

“I see the fake FBI agents as being part of the wife’s story,” Detective Martin said. “I see all that as misdirection to help obfuscate a genius plan by a woman who murdered her husband. Now, before you ask, I have no idea how Paige Crawford, likely with the help of Carla Roth, got her husband’s remains inside Dr. Conner’s medical examiner’s office. That’s one of several big potholes in the road to my theory. And that’s without mentioning how she got the shot taken from a distance.”

“You’re correct,” the lieutenant said. “It is only Mrs. Crawford, supported by this Carla Roth, who claims the existence of the agents, their statements about surveillance, claim of money laundering, and that they took control of the home. All of that rests squarely and solely on the veracity of the wife, Paige Crawford. All of that could be misdirection as you state. But why does she claim the quarter mil of cash? If there was no laundering, as you are postulating, where did all that cash ever come from? Or if that cash never existed, what tactical benefit does the killer-wife get by claiming that it did exist?”

“The booty, sir,” Sue Martin said. “With money laundering, there would be payoffs. That suggests a horde of kickbacks did exist, some of which she claims have now disappeared. That scenario could argue Sam Crawford had been killed by mobsters or, I suppose, his wife. If she is crafty enough to figure how to get his body under refrigeration in the county office, she could be crafty enough to figure how to get the money out of the bank safe-deposit box without a record of that. May I continue?” Sue asked. With nods from Maddie and the lieutenant, she did. “If we go back to the bit about her seeing the divorce attorney, she did that to get the result she got. The cops deciding she wouldn’t see a divorce attorney, if she was going to ice her old man.”

“Sergeant,” the lieutenant said, “what Detective Martin lays out, despite its obvious holes, ties up neater than some of the other possibilities we’ve discussed.”

“Get’s too complicated, sir,” Maddie said while shaking her head. “Just too damned complicated.”

“In what way?”

“If it was all a hoax to focus investigation away from her then her neighbor had to be an accomplice. Carla Roth says she was there. That she heard and saw everything Paige Crawford claims she heard and saw: the murder, the FBI agents, the search of the Crawford home, and the third person claiming to be the medical examiner. That would make Carla Roth a strong, active accomplice.”

“What do we have on Carla Roth?”

“She’s a straight arrow,” said Sue. “Clean. Just like Paige Crawford. I know that argues against my thesis, but that part’s fact.”

“I’m sorry, Lieutenant,” Maddie said. “The explanation Sue is offering means two women with no criminal record and no expertise in murder and running cons would have to not only stitch together a wild-ass story, but know how to defeat security at the morgue so they can slip in and leave the body. Then, to top that, they wrap up their caper with an invisible robbery of a bank safe-deposit box. And even this ignores who took the kill shot from distance.”