MURDER on the ROCKS (Allie Griffin Mysteries Book 2) (7 page)

              "There was some tension between you at one point?"

              "Yeah, he was on my case about quality control. I told him what he could do with that clipboard of his."

              Allie chuckled. "Ok then."

              She looked at this large man's hand as he dabbed daintily at his mouth. And she looked at his ring finger.

              "So you didn’t have an affair?"

              He chuckled. "Now, why would I wanna do that?"

              "She
was
attractive."

              "Maybe to some."

              "You know," Allie said, "you look a little familiar. Where did you go to high school?"

              He put the napkin to his mouth and spoke around his food. "St. Augustine in Ludlow. But I dropped out."

              "Really. Why?"

              "I don’t know."

              "Catholic school?"

              He nodded.

              "Did you find it too rigorous?"

              "Listen," he said flatly, "I had a lot of trouble all my life with learning. School and me don’t mix. I got trouble with letters. I mix 'em up."

              "Dyslexia."

              "Yeah, I guess that's what they call it. Plus... I didn’t get along in Catholic school."

              Allie studied the man's face, his features, and his gentle, polite way with the napkin. "You know, you're a pretty big guy. I bet the other guys don’t give you much trouble."

              He shook his head and smiled. "Nah."

              "They're probably afraid of you. I know I'd be."             

              "You got nothin' to be afraid of."

              "Well, I know one thing: If I worked here I'd be sitting in this very spot all day, just staring at this gorgeous view, thinking and daydreaming."

              He smiled and took a sip of his soda.

              "I'd probably think a lot about my life — how it didn’t go the way I’d wanted it to. You know, my parents wanted me to be one thing, but I wanted to be another. And it's hard, you know, when you grow up with that."

              He nodded. "Yeah, it sure can be."

              "You get sorta stuck in a rut, you know? And then pretty soon, before you know it, you've become that thing that they wanted you to be, even though you know it's a lie."

              He was no longer eating or drinking, but focused on her.

              She continued, looking him straight in the eye.             

              "I know that if I worked here. I'd be thinking the whole time, 'How the hell did I get here?' and I'd feel like I had to put on airs. I mean, I wouldn’t fit in at all. After all, I bet it's all boy talk here."

              He kept her gaze in his. "Pretty much."

              "Anyway, after a while, you start thinking about what a shame it is that you could never be that thing you wanted to be. Instead you're in this fake zone. That's what would be on my mind. And then you see a woman like Honey Reilly, that superficial, on the surface femininity, and you say, 'that's what men want.' And for a moment you forget about what you are and become what everyone wants you to be. I wouldn’t want to live like that, but I guess some folks have to. Around me, people don’t have to live a lie that way. That's all I'm saying. Anyway, I've talked enough. And I think I've got enough information to set the record straight."

              She got up and offered her hand. He took it, as though he were about to kiss it.

              The Creek Falls café was jumping as usual at lunchtime. Allie sat with her favorite, the number three: Grilled pears and brie on focaccia. Opposite, Del sat before a salad of frisée and apricots, raking through it with her fork as if there were some hidden treasure within.

              "It wasn't Matson," said Allie.

              "How can you be sure?"

              "I'm sure. It wasn't Matson. Just take my word for it. I mean, although he's a high school dropout and dyslexic, which would make a good match for the spelling errors in the note, he's not the one."

              "If you say so." Del sounded skeptical.

              "Listen," Allie said, lowering her voice a notch, "you're in theater. You know how some folks are..." she looked around at the other patrons, "comfortable...with people knowing their...preferences..."

              Del's eyes lit up with recognition. "Say no more. Ok. So it's not Matson."

              "You cannot breathe a word of that to anyone."

              "Who would I tell?"

              "Just don’t breathe a word of it."

              "Ok. Not breathing. So where are you with this thing?"

              "Back to square one, almost. The only thing I have to go on is the fact that someone knew enough about Bennett's schedule to know he wouldn’t be home that night. That's only if Honey was the intended victim. If Bennett was the intended victim...oh God. I am back to square one, aren’t I?"

              Del put down her fork, evidently in frustration after not finding anything worthwhile to dig out of the greens. "Let's change the subject and talk about possible murder weapons."

              This sudden dramatic burst, so characteristic of Del, drew suspicious looks from neighboring tables.

              Allie mouthed a silent shush and kept her own voice low. "I was thinking about that. If it was someone from the quarry, he could have used a rock."

              "Of course," said Del. "Then he could just toss it back into the pit."

              "Right," said Allie. "Or on a scrap pile. Or, and I don’t even want to think about it, shipped it out to a client for use in a building or something. Can you imagine? The cops would have a helluva time finding it, wouldn’t you think? I mean, you should have seen the size of this place. It was like the Grand Canyon. No way you could find a specific rock among millions in that place. And no way, with how busy the place was, could it be traced if it was thrown into a delivery truck and hauled off somewhere."

              "You're forgetting something," said Del. She sounded apologetic. "Didn’t you just tell me the foreman guy said he couldn't imagine anyone there having an affair?"

              Allie jolted up with sudden remembrance. "He paid him! Oh my God, I forgot! Bennett paid the guy!"

              More looks from the other tables.

              "Who? He paid who?" Del said with mock astonishment.

              "The guy who wrote the blackmail note. Bennett said he paid him in cash. He met the guy in some alleyway."

              "So we just have to look for some guy down at the quarry throwing money around."

              "If he
is
from the quarry. And no, Bennett said the guy wouldn’t be stupid enough to be throwing his money around, and I believe him. But listen. Frank Beauchenne told me about a convergence of evidence. If there isn't evidence of someone down there throwing money around, maybe there's other evidence that would point to someone having received a large sum."

              "Like what?"

              She thought for a moment, and then felt a sense of elation taking over. "Maybe someone cancelled paycheck withholding for benefits or 401K. Maybe there was a garnishment that's not there anymore."

              "You'll have to go talk to your friend the foreman."

              "No. He doesn't handle that stuff. He said it himself. He's able to talk to those guys the way he talks to them because he directly impacts their jobs. The paychecks come from up above somewhere in the ether. The pencil pushers, the calculators, and the clipboards – none of them impacts their physical jobs that they do every day. It's only the end result. Paychecks come from the parent company, and that's located in Montpelier."

              Del flicked at the straw in her water glass. "Good luck getting paycheck information. It's probably crazy protected."

              "I know."

              Allie felt a nervous twinge turn into a full flurry of anxiety in her as she considered once again, like she'd done in the past, breaking the law in the name of catching a murderer.

              It was a qualm of conscience easily overrun when she considered that somewhere out there, Detective Harry Tomlin was clutching a fistful of files on her husband's death, trying to connect the dots back to her. Easily overrun indeed.

              "You'll have to excuse me," she said to Del, dropping a twenty on the table. "I have to go see an old friend about some stuff. Catch you later."

              Jimmy Welles's yellow Volkswagen Beetle with the one blue fender was sitting atop the mountainous driveway of his apartment, located in the home of Mrs. Virginia Needleman, age eighty-three.

              Allie's leg muscles screamed when she got to the top. She rubbed her calves a few times and climbed six more aching steps to the door.

              Mrs. Needleman answered with the same huge, gracious smile she always reserved for Allie Griffin. Now, the smile was held with even greater admiration.

              "I saw you on TV!" she said. "There you were, pretty as ever! You’re a celebrity now."

              "A local celebrity. Nobody knows me outside of Verdenier."

              "Well, we’re all proud of you. I suppose you want to see Jimmy?"

              "If he's not busy."

              "I don’t think so." She went to the bottom of the stairs. "Jimmy!"

              From a room at the top, "What!"

              "You're friend Allie is here!"

              There followed a series of thuds on the ceiling.

              "He's coming," said Mrs. Needleman, who then added urgently, "I have to make him a fruit cup!" She disappeared into her kitchen and Allie waited for Jimmy Welles to come downstairs.

              He came down, looking hastily dressed, unshaven, unshowered, and like a nervous puppy that’d done something terrible and couldn’t remember what it was. In other words, he looked exactly like Jimmy Welles.

              "Hey there. I was sleeping."

              "It's ok. Late night?"

              "I got a job writing for
Wired
."

              "Get out! Congratulations!"

              "And I've been writing code for a-a project that my friends and I are working on."

              "I don’t want to know." She leaned in and whispered. "I need another favor."

              "She can’t hear you."

              "You say that and yet she hears everything."

              "I'm stone deaf," said Mrs. Needleman, who'd entered with a TV tray with a picture perfect cup of freshly cut fruit. "Say anything you want. Would you like one of these?"

              "No, thank you," said Allie, who smiled graciously and then quickly followed Jimmy up to his room.

              Every trip to this den of technical wizardry was outdone each time she came here, for there was always more stuff, more wires, more hardware, and that burning chrome smell in the air from a ton of high-powered, humming equipment.

              He closed the door and sat down at his desk without looking at her. "Shoot," he said, wiggling his computer mouse to wake up the machine.

              "There's this guy, ok? And I think he may have paid some guy who works at his job a large sum of money. But the thing is, I don’t know who. So, I need to..." She thought of how to choose her words carefully. Somehow, "hack into the company's payroll records" wouldn’t roll off her tongue easily.

              "I need to look at...the files...like, paychecks to employees, because I want to see if one guy is exhibiting behaviors that someone who’s received a whole lot of money would exhibit; am I making sense?"

              "Yeah, you want me to hack into the payroll records."

              She rolled her eyes. "Yes."

              He thought for a moment. "So you want to look at one guy's info."

              "Right."

              "Are you sure your guy really paid out?"

              "What? Yeah, I think so."

              "How do you know?"

              "He told me."

              Jimmy turned to his screen. "Uh huh."

              "Jimmy, I know what you’re thinking. But if we hack into this man's account, we won’t see anything. He didn’t want his wife to know. He paid his guy in cash."

              "How'd your guy get the money?"

              She was getting frustrated. "I don’t know."

              "Uh huh." He took a deep breath. "Ok. What's the company?"

              "Verdenier Granite."

              The boy pounded furiously at the keyboard for several minutes. His lips became pouty and his eyes narrowed to points as he exhibited the air of a master chef or sculptor, complete focus and concentration.

              "You call that a firewall?" he said under his breath, shaking his head. "When are these people going to learn?"

              After a couple more minutes, he said, "I'm in. Turns out they got an employee access only site where their employees can log in to see their information. The company sends updates and notifications via a mailing list. There's a loophole there I'm exploiting. It's pretty easy to get in, actually. You may want to say something. Just kidding. My God, please don’t say anything."

              "Jimmy."

              "Just checking. Well, here you are. Fifty-three employees, each with twenty-four months' worth of archives. What's the name of the pers— huh...?" He squinted at the screen. "That's odd."

              "What is it?" She rose and walked over to look over his shoulder.

              "Oh, nothing, I don't— it's weird. You see this name here?"

              He pointed at the screen to the name,
Van de Kamp, Edward John
.

              "What about it?"

              "Look at it. The name is grayed out. You click on these plus signs here to open up more information. Watch." He clicked on another name and a window opened up with a spreadsheet of personal and financial data. "You can click on any one of these items here and it will give you more info." He closed the window and clicked on the Van De Kamp name. "Nothing here. Look!" He laughed. "There's no social security number. It's like he's either dead or not a naturalized citizen. In the latter case he'd at least have something here identifying him as such. I forgot what the code is, but they put it there specifically to identify non-naturalized citizens with work visas. There's nothing here." He scrolled down to review the data.

              And then sat back.

              He spoke over his shoulder. "How much did you say your guy paid out?"

              "Twenty-five thousand."

              "Look."

              He scrolled down Edward Van De Kamp's information over the past twenty-four months. "Fifty dollars a week for...well, since the beginning of the spreadsheet."

              "Hold on," said Allie.

              "How much you wanna bet there's five hundred paychecks here? That would add up to twenty-five large. Who really cares about fifty bucks a week? Some lazy accountant can take care of it. Scooch it away somewhere. What you're looking at here? It's a dummy account. There is no Edward Van de Kamp. Your guy probably got the name off a box of fish sticks."

              "Wh— I— how? How do you set something like that up?"

              "With ties to someone in the payroll department. Or maybe you can enter the information in at the middle manager level and then clear it with the higher ups. Like tell them it's a temp or something. If I had to guess, the fact that it's grayed-out like this probably means it's invisible to whoever checks this stuff on a regular or semi-regular basis. Like I said, in a multi-million dollar corporation with contracts all over the world, nobody notices fifty bucks."

              "You sure nobody can see this page?"

              "Yeah, pretty sure. You see, we’re looking at an exploited form here. All the edits can be seen and these bits of code here are...listen, it would take a while to explain it. Just trust me. I really don’t think they can see this stuff. Their
computer
, on the other hand, does see it and generates a check. Or it did. Looks like it stopped a couple of months ago. By the way, this was all done digitally. No paper. Here. Here's the account the money went into." He grabbed a pen and paper and jotted the number down.

              "This is ridiculous. I can’t believe what I'm looking at."

              "Look. Chittenden County First National."

              "UN-believable," said Allie.

              "To be honest with you, I don’t think your guy's ever set foot in there, except maybe to set up the account. Your guy, or whoever withdrew the money from the account for him, probably did it over the course of a long period of time, and from a variety of ATMs. Biweekly maybe. You know, the machines only give twenties. Anyway, that's how I'd do it, to cover my tracks."

              "He got the company to pay his blackmailer."

              "Blackmail, eh?"

              "Yep."

              "Yeah, well, looks to be the case. Pretty cool."

              "No, it's not cool."

              "From a hacker perspective it is. Let me get out of here."

              He clicked a few keys and then swiveled his chair around.

              "For this service I shall require a dinner
and
dessert. I want veal cutlets and mashed potatoes with buttermilk. String beans on the side, with slivered almonds. Peach cobbler and... Ben & Jerry's vanilla."

              "Anything else?"

              He looked thoughtfully at the ceiling. "You still going out with the cop?"

              "I see him from time to time."

              "Interesting. Whatever." He swiveled his chair around again to face his screen. "I'll call you about dinner."

              "Thank you, Jimmy."

              "Mmm hmm," he said.

              As she walked down the steep driveway to her car, an eerie feeling dropped on her like a thick cloud. Bennett Reilly had used the company to pay for his blackmail, but the way he did it predated the blackmail note. Like he knew it was coming.

              Or like the money wasn't used for blackmail at all.