Dying to Tell (23 page)

fifty-three

Cal and Bear decided
to split up to cover more ground. Bear went looking for Marshal while Cal stayed behind to research William's business journal and follow up on the hunt for the bank robber and Karen Simms. The search for Karen was looking more like a search for a body—the crime scene boys were able to verify with the hospital that the blood at her apartment was the same type as hers. And so far, a tristate search for the Fiat she was driving turned up nothing.

I stayed with Cal hoping for a break. Besides, Bear was in a foul mood and wouldn't be much fun.

Cal opened the investigation file on his desk and looked over his notes. I read over his shoulder. It wasn't polite, mind you, but it was necessary. Cal couldn't see or hear me, and thus he wouldn't tell me what he was doing, thinking, or reading. I'd have to do all that on my own.

Sometimes being dead is a pain in the ass.

The first thing we came across was the annotation on the secret bank account William had Karen Simms open at the bank. Cal only had the account number Karen provided and Bear had to find Marshal and get access to the full account. If Marshal balked, a warrant would follow.

“Hey Cal,” I said, even though he couldn't hear me. “You've got the business journal and the account number. Maybe William's journal has the passwords to get into them online. You know, like he had the safe combination in there.” I put my hand on his arm and repeated what I'd said very slowly, trying to will my words into his head.

Cal just read his notes.

“Okay, let's try something else.”

Then Cal did a funny thing. He reached across his desk and turned on a small MP3 player, disconnected the headphones, and plugged the player into his computer. He turned on the player to some Duke Ellington hits from the 1940s. Then he went into Bear's desk and rummaged around the papers stacked there. When he returned, he had the photocopies of William's business journal in his hand. Next, he went on the Internet and typed in the URL to the First Bank and Trust of Frederick County.

“Hey, Cal,” I said. “Do you hear me? Are you listening to me or what?”

Nothing. Not even a smile.

“Sure you are. You're just shy. Don't worry, pal. Just like Bear, you'll come around.”

Cal navigated the bank's website to the accounts section and stopped at the entry for account number and password. Then he fanned out the copied journal pages on his desk and went to work. He found one page with columns of letters and numbers side by side. The column on the right had two numbers and one special keyboard character on the other—accounts and passwords was my
guess. It was Cal's guess, too, and he scanned down the columns looking for a pattern or sign of the secret bank account number.

“William was an old dude, Cal. He'd use a real simple code of some kind, right? How about an
alpha-substitution
code?”

An
alpha-substitution
code, or whatever the real pros call it, is simply substituting the letter A for the number 1, B for 2, C for 3, and so forth. Sometimes, it's in a different order, but the concept remains the same. Some substitution codes could be tricky and more sophisticated, but others were not.

Oddly enough, Cal did what I suggested. He started by substituting numbers for the letters beginning with A and the number 1. Still, none of the column's numbers matched up to the account number we had. Then, he reversed it—Z was 1, and Y was 2, and so forth. When he applied the substitution, the fifth entry from the top of the first column was a hit; the substituted number matched the bank account number.

Next Cal turned to the second column of numbers and special characters. He started with 55 and the percent symbol with it. He tried the reverse, substituting letters, but nothing seemed to make sense. No password would be only two or three characters, whether it was numbers or letters. After a long time, he sat with the pages spread out in front of him again. For another hour, he tried every conceivable combination of letters, numbers, and symbols he could find in the journal using the columns. Nothing worked.

He was at a dead end.

I wasn't. “Cal, what about simple stuff he wouldn't forget? Try
Cairo, Egypt, 1944,
and
Kit Kat Club
. Heck, even try the names of
his pals.”

Cal rubbed his eyes and gathered the papers up and laid them aside. Before I could say another word, he went to work.

Kit Kat. Cairo 1944. Kit Kat 1944
. He even tried
Seth 1944
. But it was after running Holister and Gray's names that I thought he reached the end. Until he entered the last one.

He typed in
Hekmet Fahmy 1944.

The administration page of an account belonging to Nostalgia, Inc. appeared. The account listed a local Winchester post office box for an address. According to the information on the screen, the account was opened the first week of February this year. When Cal clicked on Account Details he nearly fell out of his chair.

The account balance began with a deposit of $155,000 and was followed by smaller deposits of $25,000 to a little over $60,000—significantly over the $10,000 threshold Karen told us about. They were all wire transfers. And all the deposits were transfers from the Amphora Trading Company. Then the account changed. In May, withdrawals of cash and cashier's checks began to be made the same day or the day after each deposit. The withdrawals were all under $9,000, just as Karen had said. Even with money moving out of the account, the balance steadily grew until one week ago, when it reached $521,511.22. A nice,
not-so
-round number. Then, just two days ago, the account was closed and the money transferred to an offshore account.

Cal jumped up from the computer. “Holy shit, man, Bear's gonna love this one.” He performed screen saves of each of the account's pages and copied them onto his computer. Then he printed the account transaction reports.

It struck me that other than the withdrawals that accompanied each deposit, there were no other transactions. No checks drawn. No online bill payments. Nothing you would expect from a normal business account. Someone had been moving money around—transfers of large amounts in, small cash amounts out. That sounded like trouble to me—money laundering, drugs, and a list of other crimes ran through my head. And if I was right, whoever took their cut from each deposit might have made someone very, very mad.

Had William been skimming money from a
money-laundering
scheme involving Nostalgia Inc.? Is that why he was murdered? Or was the scheme his, and someone cut themselves in and decided to kill him to take the whole thing?

I said as much to Cal, but he wasn't listening. He had accessed the online Frederick County business records and had looked up the Nostalgia company records. He examined Nostalgia Incorporated's records and made notes on the company officers, incorporation date, and business filings.

“Holy shit, I thought so,” he said. “I wonder …” His fingers flew across the keyboard until he found the Washington DC business records for Amphora Trading. The records listed several corporate officers—all Egyptian names—none of which were familiar to either of us.

Then he called Bear.

“Just tell me what you found, Cal.” Bear had lost his patience halfway through Cal's explanation of
how
he found the information. Then, when Cal got to the punchline—$521,511.22—Bear's patience got a second wind. “I'm at the bank now and Marshal's not here. I'm heading over to his place. Meet me there with those printouts. I want to see Marshal's reaction to all this—firsthand.”

Cal hung up and scribbled some notes on his pad. Then he gathered up his papers, stuffed them into his investigative file, and slipped the file into his ballistic nylon briefcase.

“Nice work, Cal,” I said. “I never knew you were a numbers guy.”

“We did okay, didn't we?”

fifty-four

Marshal Mendelson was at
home, sitting in his den at an antique cherry desk in northwest Winchester. One hand lay on the handwritten note in the center of his desk blotter and the other hung at his side. He was slumped in his leather desk chair with his head to one side. In his right temple was a jagged bloody hole and a piece of his skull was gone from his left. The gun lay on the floor beside him where it fell after dispensing the single round that ended his life.

Marshal couldn't take the guilt and shame over what he'd done—or so his note said.

Bear stood in front of the desk. His eyes worked the scene right to left, back, forward, right to left, like a typewriter clicking away on a report. I'd seen him work this way before and my own method wasn't so different. Stand still and just
see
.

No speaking. No guessing. Just observe and record.

After several minutes and his fifth time performing the technique—I'd already done the same thing when I arrived ten minutes ago—he took out a fresh pair of latex gloves, pocketed the ones on his hands, and slipped the fresh ones on.

I said, “Looks like suicide, Bear.”

“Looks like. But I don't like it.” He walked around the side of the body—the side without the blood and bone fragments—and read the suicide note for the third time. “He doesn't admit to killing William or Simms. All he says was he couldn't live with the guilt and shame. That could be anything.”

“Or it could be two murders and embezzlement. Did you really expect him to wrap this all up in a nice little letter for us?”

“It would have been nice.”

“Marshal was a pain in the ass even at the end.” I looked around his home office but didn't see so much as a paperclip out of place. “No signs of a
break-in
. No signs of a struggle. Just his body, a note, and a lot of goo to clean up.”

“I've got uniforms canvassing the neighbors. Marshal told everyone he was working on William's arrangements …” Bear lifted his nose a little. “Do you smell?”

“Excuse me?” I stopped poking around Marshal's desk. “What kind of a question …”

“Do you smell? You know, can you smell things?”

Oh, sure. Okay. “I've been smelling smoke all day. You thought I was nuts.”

“This time I smell it.”

He was right. So did I.

“Burnt paper.” Bear walked over to the fireplace and knelt down. “I wasn't sure when I came in—the body was already putrefying—but I smell it now. Look.” He picked up the fireplace poker in his gloved hand and pulled back the
chain-link
fireplace screen. “He burned something.”

Inside the fireplace was a small pile of fresh ash that had fallen below the center of the grate. The rest of the fireplace was clean and
ash-free
.

Bear stirred the ashes and pulled out a half dozen pieces of unburnt paper from the bottom of the ash pile. He carefully laid them on the hearth and examined them with a penlight from his pocket.

“They're some kind of serialized papers.”

As Bear examined them, Cal walked in carrying a leather notebook. He stopped in the doorway, staring at Marshal's body across the room. He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Ah, shit. What the hell is going on in this town, man? Now Marshal?”

“You got me, Cal.” Bear pointed to the charred pieces of paper on the hearth. “But I found something. Take a look.”

Cal knelt down beside him, set the leather notebook down, and examined the papers. “Let me see a couple of these.” He gloved up his hands and took out a piece of blank notepaper from his notebook. Using a pen from his pocket, he maneuvered the charred papers from the hearth onto his blank piece of notepaper, where he could examine them easier.

“I know what these are,” Cal said. “They're cashier's check receipts. Marshal destroyed evidence, Bear.”

I looked over his shoulder. “He's right.”

The remains of the paper were a fine, translucent onionskin paper. The few numbers still left along the bottom of the papers appeared to be MICR numbers—Magnetic Ink Character Recognition numbers—that identify the bank.

I said, “Check the printouts from the secret account and see if anything matches.”

Bear repeated me and Cal took out the papers we'd printed from William's account back at the office. He handed Bear the collection of charred papers still on the paper from his notebook.

“Bear, read off the last few numbers of each one you can.” Cal held up the printed papers. “I'll check them against William's account.”

Bear flashed his penlight on the papers and began reading the numbers out loud. As he did, Cal scanned through the printouts. “Oh yeah, man. We got him. Read a couple more.”

A few minutes later, the remaining numbers printed on six of the charred papers matched up against the withdrawal entries on William's secret account.

Cal said, “Marshal didn't want us tracing these, did he?”

No, he didn't. That was bad news for someone. Back at the office, Cal had run Nostalgia Inc. through the Frederick County business records database. The result was the list of corporate officers—and now those names were on top of the suspect list.

Bear looked at the printouts in Cal's hand. “I'm running short on crime scene people. We'll have to wait a while to get this place processed. Seems like Marshal siphoned money from William's account. Maybe Karen knew, too. He killed her and it all got too much for him. What do you think?”

“You think Marshal embezzled from William's Nostalgia account?” Cal asked. “You think he'd screw over his own father?”

Bear shrugged. “Got any better ideas? If you're right and these are cashier check receipts, then it fits. Why else would he be burning them?”

“He had a lot of gambling debts, Bear,” I said. “To the tune of a quarter million dollars. And his credit cards were over a hundred K. That's a lot of motivation for taking chances with Nostalgia. And a hundred K is enough of a reason for somebody to send a message by killing William—pay or you're next.”

“You're saying somebody kills William and that sets Marshal up to be in control of the bank. And in control means access to more money to pay his gambling debts or for other uses?”

Maybe. “Or … maybe Marshal helped himself to get in control of the bank. He whacks daddy and takes over the bank. A few months later after the dust settles, he's in control and can play with all the money he wants. Solves all his problems, right?” I said.

“Son kills dad over gambling debts. Head teller knows too much and son kills her. Remorse sets in and he kills himself, too. Pretty evil—I like the theory.” Bear turned and looked back at Marshal's body. “Okay, we can check to see if he paid bills with these cashier checks and try to trace money wherever we can. But my guess would be he cashed them out and paid his bookies in cash. That's gonna be tough to trace.”

“Why not just take the cash out of the account directly?” Cal asked. “Wouldn't that be easier? After all, it's his bank.”

“Marshal or William taking cashier checks already got Karen Simms's attention. But one of them taking big sums of cash all the time would draw everyone's attention. Someone would have reported him.”

Cal reminded him of the details from William's secret bank account, ending with, “Looks like someone was skimming money and was into something very illegal. Then they moved all the money to an offshore account I can't get to.”

Bear started pacing. “William got deposits from Amphora Trading. But for what? Then the money disappears offshore. And someone skimmed off the top after each deposit. Maybe that was Marshal.”

I thought about that. “Why didn't Karen just tell us?”

“Maybe Karen found out Marshal was skimming,” Bear said. Then his eyes darkened. “Or maybe she was the one skimming and that's what got her killed. Either way, all three of them were involved.”

I walked over to Marshal's body. “Nostalgia's involved, Bear. There's no way around that—and Poor Nic's on the corporate filings as a company officer. But I cannot believe he'd kill William and Simms. It would lead right to him. What about Hawkins from Nostalgia?”

“Damn.” Bear's face dropped and he stood staring at nothing. “Okay, Cal, we gotta go talk to Nic Bartalotta—then Keys Hawkins.”

“Ah, shit, man,” Cal asked, “every damn time there's a body, Nic is on the list. It never fails.”

No, it didn't. But, that's what happens when you're a retired mob boss and you
are
involved in every murder in town.

Bear pulled out his cell phone and called for more uniformed officers to secure the area and wait on the crime scene team. When he hung up, he pointed at Cal.

“You stay here until the uniforms arrive.” Bear headed for the door. “Then meet me at Poor Nic's.”