Dreams in the Key of Blue (31 page)

I walked to the fireplace and glanced at the family photos arrayed on the mantel. “Nice kids,” I said.

“You don’t know what you’re dealing with.”

“Educate me.”

Gilman sat upright, the handkerchief pressed to his face. I stared at his drunken eyes, now clouded by something more than an alcohol daze. Fear.

“Call the cops,” he said.

“Who are you afraid of?”

He shook his head and stared at the floor.

“Okay, Stu. I’ll talk. Harper Dorman was the superintendent of a Martin International building managed by Paul Crandall, a.k.a. Stuart Gilman. Thirty-six hours after somebody left Dorman in pieces, the same somebody killed three Harbor College students. MI owns the building where they were murdered, and you are MI’s main
squeeze on campus. One of the students, Jaycie Waylon, was an MI intern.”

Gilman winced when I mentioned Waylon.

“You never bothered to tell me that. Then there’s Steve Weld, college faculty member and federal agent investigating MI.”

Gilman’s head snapped up. “I didn’t know that. Oh shit. I swear to Christ I didn’t know he was a cop.”

“Should I take that as an admission of guilt?”

“Take it that I didn’t like the prick. I didn’t kill anyone. Jesus.”

“That’s right. Your thing is prowling through backyards and peering in windows.”

“Trespassing,” he yelled. “I was taking a shortcut. It was a misunderstanding. How the fuck do you know about that?”

I ignored his question. “If you didn’t kill anyone, you know who did.”

“I don’t know anything.”

“Wendell Beckerman,” I said. “Seconds before I found his body, you raced out of town in your Jag.”

“You’re going to get us both killed,” Gilman yelped, his eyes darting around the room, his face a damp, full-fidget mess. “Clea wanted me home that night. I came home.”

I waited until his breathing grew less ragged, then asked, “Why the payments to Amanda Squires?”

Gilman staggered to his feet and lumbered across the living room, one hand still over his nose, the other reaching into a desk drawer.

I leaned against the drawer, jammed his hand, then grabbed his wrist. Gilman shrieked.

“Ten thousand a month,” I said, removing his hand from the drawer and retrieving the .32 caliber pistol he was after.

“Don’t say another fuckin’ word. I want a lawyer. I want the cops.”

Gilman’s red-streaked, vibrating face was a mask of terror. I was tempted to dump the drunk in Norma Jacobs’s lap, but he had information that I wanted.

“What about Stanley Markham?”

He looked at me, rubbing his hand. “The killer? What about him?”

“He’s dead, shot with the same gun that killed the others.”

As comprehension dawned, Gilman’s eyes shifted from useless to semifocused. His face flutteringmess status.

“Jesus Christ.”

Compounding Gilman’s fears had the desired effect, so I applied more pressure.

“I guess that proves your point, Stu,” I said with a deep sigh. “If someone can find Markham and kill him, that person can certainly find us and do the same. We shouldn’t discuss this any further.”

I walked to the door.

“Where are you going?” Gilman asked.

“Back to my hotel. Then I’m going home.”

“No cops?”

I shook my head, pocketed the cartridges from his revolver, and placed the gun on a table.

Gilman shot wild glances in a wide arc. “You can’t leave me here.”

“Stu, you live here,” I said, stepping onto the porch.

Gilman stumbled after me. “Come back inside. Please.”

“Why did your wife leave?”

Tears ran from Gilman’s eyes down his bloodied cheeks. “I told her…some things.”

“She was frightened?”

“Furious too. She said she wouldn’t stay here another night, wouldn’t let the kids stay here, and if I had any sense, I wouldn’t stay here.”

Gilman shivered in the cool night air. “I’m cold.”

We stepped inside. Gilman secured the door, peeked out at the night, then led me into the kitchen where he fumbled with his Mr. Coffee. His hands trembled, and he could not separate the filters.

“I don’t know where she put the fuckin’ scoop. Clea usually does this.”

“You sit down,” I said. “I’ll make the coffee.”

“Wine always gives me a fucking headache,” he complained.

My head throbbed where “Nort” had hammered me. I had no sympathy for Gilman.

I found the scoop inside the can. “What did you tell Clea?”

He shook his head. “What’s going to happen?”

“When you’ve talked for a while, maybe I can tell you that.”

Gilman gazed around the kitchen at walls decorated with his kids’ drawings. Refrigerator magnets held school bus and soccer schedules, photos of two young girls modeling their Halloween costumes, a list of performances at a local theater, and a small message pad—“gal 2%, yogurt
(non-fat),
waxed mint d. floss.”

“We tried to live on seventy-five thousand a year in Boston,” he said. “Money was always tight. MI offered me one hundred and twenty thousand, the house, the car, the chance for my kids to grow up in a safe place with good schools. What would you have done?”

“Grabbed the opportunity,” I said, giving Gilman the answer he sought.

“Damn right.”

I joined Gilman at the kitchen table. “What went wrong?”

“Nothing is the way it appears,” Gilman said bitterly. “Not a fucking thing.”

I waited, listening to Mr. Coffee gag his way to the last drop.

“We needed the money,” he said, rolling and unrolling a napkin. “I wanted to feel important. I didn’t want to spend my life as a clerk for a fucking insurance company.”

Gilman breathed deeply. “I went to a professional placement service in Boston. I filled out the forms, gave them my résumé, took some tests. Two weeks later, they called me with MI’s offer.”

He held up his hands, palms out, as if expecting a reprimand. “I know I should have suspected something. There weren’t any interviews, no tour of the company, nothing. I drove up here on a Saturday and stopped at the office. It was like they expected me. I met Melanie Martin, had lunch with a couple of board members. They even had an office with my name on the door. God, I’m stupid. They knew how I thought, what my reactions would be. The tests I took in Boston told them everything they wanted to know.”

MI’s thoroughness and planning were like something out of
The X-Files.
I poured two mugs of coffee and returned to the table.

“My title is Vice President and Manager of Accounts. The job description includes the college, and all the Maine properties. The only account group that I manage is Mexico. I didn’t know it, but all the companies are dummies, places to park money. Every cent that moved through those accounts came from Tijuana.”

“Drug money,” I said.

Gilman sipped his coffee. “That’s what I finally decided. Well… Jaycie figured it out.”

“She worked for you.”

“Ten hours a week. She was a smart kid. I had her handling deposits, wire transfers, offshore accounts. Twice a month I flew to San Diego. She took care of things while I was gone.”

“Who killed her?”

“I told you before. I don’t know who killed anybody. I thought Markham killed Jaycie and her roommates. How many mass murderers are roaming around?”

Too many, I thought, but ignored Gilman’s question.

I was convinced that Jaycie Waylon was Norma Jacobs’s informant. The student did not break off her contact with the Portland police. She was dead.

“Tell me about Paul Crandall,” I said.

“I didn’t like that from the start. The explanation they gave me—”

“Who gave you?”

He shrugged. “It was in a memo.”

“Melanie Martin?”

“God, no,” Gilman said with a short, bitter laugh.

“I don’t get it.”

His eyes met mine. “She’s seldom around. Clea’s running joke is that I work for a ghost. Martin has a cottage on Monhegan Island. She developed the business and made herself a millionaire several times over. On paper, she holds the power, but she’s never here.”

“Who makes the decisions?”

“Norton Weatherly. That’s where the Crandall thing originated. Doing business as Crandall Management didn’t bother me. You can DBA anything you want to. As long as you pay the filing fee, it’s perfectly legal. The memo packet included personal identification papers for Paul Crandall, but they had my photo and date of birth. I knew that wasn’t right, so I went to see Weatherly. He minimized it,
said the company had used that sort of arrangement dozens of times.”

“You collected rent,” I said.

Gilman stared at the backs of his hands and shook his head. “I can’t do this. People are going to die.”

“They’re already dying faster than grave diggers can open holes for them.”

He pushed himself from the table and struggled to his feet. “I have to find Clea and the kids.”

“Amanda Squires shot at a friend of hers tonight,” I said. “Squires wasn’t at her place on Danforth. She’s armed and wandering around out there. The cops are looking for her, but maybe you’ll run into her before they do.”

Gilman hesitated only a second before crumbling into his chair.

I refilled his coffee cup. “You were about to tell me about playing slumlord.”

He looked at me. “You sonofabitch.”

“I have to amend your appraisal, Stu. I am a pissed-off sonofabitch. It’s been a long night. I’ve been shot at, hammered across the face, and I’m tired of fucking around with you.”

He nodded, sighed, and sipped his coffee. “This is where things get unreal. I would deposit twenty thousand dollars in the Crandall account, and the slip would show a balance of half a million or more. The next month, there might be nothing in the account but the rents. Jaycie tracked transaction numbers. Somebody regularly made deposits in San Diego. That money flowed through here. I wired it to banks in the Bahamas.”

“Why didn’t the local bank get suspicious?”

“Crandall Management has two subsidiaries. Grand Bahama Real Estate Investment Group, and Crandall South in Miami. That’s where the money ended up.”

It made sense that money flowing from Portland, offshore, then to Miami, would not attract attention in South Florida, where drug and money routes typically involved Central and South America. If the DEA did track the money, they would run into a legitimate real estate and investment business.

“How does Squires come into this?” I asked.

Gilman took a deep breath. “I handle all of MI’s ‘special projects.’ That’s what Weatherly called them. I was the new guy, so I got stuck with the job. He told me to write the checks and mail them to Squires. I asked him how I should record the expenditure. He said it didn’t matter, that the checks would never be cashed.”

For nearly two years, Gilman mailed the checks.

“It got so that I didn’t think about it. Then Jaycie made her discovery. I got paranoid about everything to do with MI. I didn’t feel that I could go to Weatherly. So I wrote Squires’s check, but I didn’t mail it. I drove to Danforth Street. It was like walking into a tomb. I’d been to all our properties except that one, and the units were always rented. The Danforth building was empty. Squires lived there alone.”

“Did you talk with her?”

“She wasn’t there. I slipped the check under the door and left. The place spooked me.”

Gilman was a bit player in what impressed me as a grand theatrical production. As he had suggested, not much was real.

“If each department at MI moved only half the value of the Mexican accounts,” he said, “three hundred million in profit would be a conservative estimate.”

Gilman had grabbed a dream, achieved position and a modicum of wealth. The dream had soured.

“Steve Weld was a threat to the operation,” I said.

“So was Beckerman, but I doubt that he knew it. His
mother was on the MI board of directors. She died a few months ago. Beckerman inherited everything, including a set of computer tapes. No one knew how she got them. They were duplicates of everything MI kept at Harbor College.”

“All the illegal activity,” I said.

“Weatherly called them ‘off-book’ transactions.”

“Who is Edgar?” I asked.

“Jesus. Everything is falling apart. Edgar Heath. Weatherly said he hired Heath as a driver, but I think the guy is more than that. I met him only once, and he was armed. I think he’s a bodyguard. Heath’s another mystery. He gets paid to play nursemaid to Amanda Squires. I don’t think there’s any such person as Amanda Squires. I think they’re all fuckin’ fakes. I don’t know who anybody is.”

JAWORSKI DRANK COFFEE AND STARED AT THE
Weather Channel. “We’ve got a hell of a storm moving up the coast,” he said. “Gale-force winds, heavy rain, tides three to five feet above normal.”

He glanced at his Styrofoam cup. “Why is it that hotels make better coffee than I do?”

“You been up all night?” I asked.

“I napped. You?”

I knew that the sore muscles and muddy thinking of sleep deprivation would soon get me, but adrenaline held them at bay. “I’ll catch up later. Jacobs call?”

“You ain’t gonna like this,” he said, climbing out of his chair. “I’d just gotten off the phone with Jacobs when Jasper called. Squires showed up at my P.D. after she left Mellen Street. Demanded to see Jasper and wouldn’t talk to anyone else. The two of them talked and drank tea.”