Winter House (28 page)

Rags awoke with a start and flapped his wings. „What?“ He came out of his cage on the run and squawking. Even the bird could see that something was wrong with his mistress.

C
harles Butler and Robin Duffy had retired to the more comfortable furnishings of the private office across the hall, where the furniture was not made of cold steel, where a humidor was stocked with Havanas and the whiskey was single malt.

When Riker returned with a take-out meal, his partner was standing before her cork wall, studying the yellowed papers of financials from an era of filing cabinets.

„For the first twelve years, the trust fund outlay should never have exceeded the interest earnings.“ She glanced back at her glowing monitor screen and its display of more recent data. „Today the trust is only worth forty thousand dollars.“

Riker lit a cigarette and took a long contemplative drag. He did his best thinking when he smoked. „Figure cost-of-living increases, more money for each new kid, and you still can’t spend it all, not with a cap on the draw.“ And now he dealt with the greater problem of finding something to pass for an ashtray. He settled on a metal cup, dumping its stash of paper clips out on the desk blotter. Experimentally, he dropped in his burnt match, and his partner did not hurt him.

He exhaled.

Mallory walked half the length of the wall, then stopped to tap one sheet of pinned-up paper. „Here, right after the massacre. This is when it starts.“ She moved on down the wall, then paused again. „Twenty percent of the money was drained in a period of two years. The firm wrote it off as poor investment of capital.“

„You mean they stole it. I’m betting the guardian helped with that,“ said Riker. „Good old Uncle James. I say he hired Stick Man for the massacre.“

„Him or Sheldon Smyth’s father. My guess is collusion. Nedda went to brunch with the Smyth family on the day of the massacre – conveniently out of harm’s way.“ Mallory walked back to her computer and tapped the keys to change the document on the monitor’s screen. „I found the money, only now it’s well over a hundred million, all in personal brokerage accounts for Cleo and Lionel.“ She printed out a sheet. „This is their investment history. They took a bath in the nineties and again with the tech-stock fiasco. Now their holdings are zero risk, hardly any growth. But they show a deposit income of one million a year that doesn’t derive from stocks and bonds. And I know where it came from.“ She split her screens to pick up an item she had flagged on the law firm’s financial data. „The law firm has a payout of one million every year. It’s listed under client settlements.“

„Lawyers paying clients?“

„Not that simple.“ Mallory spent a few quiet minutes following the money through cyberspace, switching screens, diddling keys, and robbing banks via their databases. „I’ve got a memo to purchase bearer bonds. The dates and the amounts add up on both sides. Lionel and Cleo cashed in those bonds to make their yearly deposits.“

The screen changed again, and Riker turned away the moment he saw the logo for Mallory’s latest invasion, bypassing lockouts to enter Internal Revenue files. It always made him uncomfortable to witness a crime in progress.

„They don’t pay any taxes on the yearly million,“ said Mallory. „The tax is paid to the IRS by a check drawn on an offshore account for a bogus corporation.“

„I feel a headache coming on,“ said Riker. „Who’s doing who?“

„Best guess? It looks like Lionel and Cleo busted the Smyth firm for embezzlement. But simple restitution wouldn’t require money laundering on this scale. What if they nailed Sheldon Smyth’s father for hiring a mass murder?“

B
itty had left the bolt undone, and it had taken some time for this little horror to settle in. Her mind was slipping.

So sleepy.

And her limbs felt like cement. She struggled to make the short trip from her bed to the door, shuffling, unable to lift her heavy feet from the carpet. She slid the bolt home so no one would intrude upon her, not until her aunt returned. Bitty sat on the floor, her back propped up against the door, listening, waiting for rescue. Aunt Nedda should have been here by now. She must come very soon. She must. Bitty called Charles Butler’s office number again.

M
allory continued to scroll down the lists of investments. Riker watched her run calculations of large figures on a split screen. She was so good with the math of money motives. The assistance of a forensic accountant would only have slowed her down.

„I can access trades back to the early eighties,“ she said. „Allowing for dividends paid out and reinvested, market booms and dives, I’d say this stock portfolio was built up from the law firm’s yearly payouts over at least forty years. The Smyth firm is paying back the stolen money, but not to the trust fund. It all goes into Lionel and Cleo’s personal accounts.“

„Proof of embezzlement,“ said Riker, „motive for a massacre. And people ask me why I hate lawyers. I guess murder runs in the family, first the father and now the son. Sheldon’s gotta be the one who hired Willy Roy Boyd. He had to kill Nedda before she started asking questions about the trust fund.“ The detective crushed out his cigarette. „I love this case more and more every minute.“

„This financial arrangement works better for Lionel and Cleo. Instead of a lifetime draw on the trust fund, they have access to all of the money. And now, they’re part of the embezzlement. The restitution money should’ve gone back into the trust.“

„If Nedda dies, they get to keep it.“ And now he understood the elaborate money laundering. „Those two still don’t know that the will and the trust were never valid.“

Mallory nodded. „Because the Winters’ attorneys have always been Smyths.“

C
harles poured a drink for Robin Duffy and ignored the telephone on his office desk. One of Mallory’s machines would pick up the call at the reception desk. Before entering into a business partnership with her, he had never been an answering-machine sort of person. If calls had gone astray, he had always assumed that people would call back. So simple. And, in case of emergency, they would send a telegram to the door. Should he be out of town when people called, well, that was their hard luck and one less hassle to deal with.

Now he could not escape his callers. The machine seemed to work for their convenience and not his own. Machines were always conspiring to strip all the charm from his life. Once, he had tried to disconnect the device, and all of the phones had gone dead. Mallory’s wiring was not to be trifled with. He had never attempted another such insurrection.

The phone stopped ringing.

R
iker sat on the floor with the emptied-out contents of another carton, searching for a lost child among the papers. „You’re right, Mallory.

Sally Winter never attended a private school, either. No tuition payments.“

„I don’t think she lived long enough for kindergarten,“ said Mallory, leafing through her own stack of files. „There’s no record of payouts for nannies after the toddler years. Lots of medical bills. There was a live-in nurse. After Sally Winter turned four, the nurse’s paychecks stopped.“

„So the kid was sick,“ said Riker. „Maybe she died of natural causes. I can’t see any motive to kill Sally.“

„Then why would Lionel say she’d run away when she was ten years old? You know that was a lie. And why isn’t there a death certificate on file with the city?“

„Sally could’ve died somewhere else. Maybe it was a case of neglect. Uncle James wouldn’t want anyone to know he was an unfit guardian, not before he’d finished milking his cut from the trust fund.“ Riker turned to the open doorway to see Charles and Robin walking down the hall toward the reception room. A moment later, that distant door opened and closed. He guessed that they were making a deli run for food and wondered if they would remember to bring him a beer.

Mallory was sifting through the smallest carton, the one that had belonged to his grandfather. She began to pin the old man’s diagrams of the massacre to the wall.

„Hey,“ said Riker, „you don’t want Charles and Robin to see that stuff.“

„They won’t be back. They’ll be playing poker all night.“

C
harles Butler entered his apartment behind Robin Duffy, who headed straight for the library, and now he heard Edward Slope call out, „It’s about time!“

Upon entering the book-lined room, he could hardly fail to notice an old gaming table surrounded by his new club chairs, and three of those chairs were filled by the charter members of the weekly floating poker game.

„Oh, it’s a beauty,“ said Robin, admiring the ornate carving and the touches of gilt and inlays.

Indeed, it was a good piece of furniture, in the sense of being solid and made of good hardwood, but it was too ornate, not the graceful antique of Charles’s dreams. This table had obviously been constructed in the twentieth century, and one might even call it gaudy.

„The provenance,“ said Edward, handing a sheet of paper to Robin, whose eyes went round. The doctor turned to Charles, saying, „It’s a gift from Mallory. It once belonged to Bugsy Siegel.“

A mobster and a brutal killer, but Charles let this slide, for it was so rare to receive a present from Mallory that did not require an electronics manual to operate.

„Oh, Bugsy.“ Robin Duffy ran one hand over the tabletop, caressing it with real love in his eyes. „Bugsy Siegel, the man who invented Las Vegas. It just doesn’t get any better than this.“

Indeed, there were smiles all around the room. Even the rabbi approved. And now Charles realized that the other table, the one linked to a former president, would never have made them so happy. Mallory had found the magic that he had been searching for, a history of smoke-filled-rooms and high-stakes players, a table with a provenance on the wild side.

He sat down in a chair and smiled at this company of friends. He had inherited all of them from Kathy Mallory’s foster father. Charles’s other bequest, a seat in this poker game, was also an ongoing treasure. But the game had represented so much more to the late Louis Markowitz, that crafty, manipulative good man – that stellar card shark.

Charles had heard all the players’ war stories of watching Kathy Mallory grow up in the Markowitz household, and he had heard all the theories for why Louis Markowitz had taken a young child to the weekly poker game. Edward Slope had once espoused the idea that Louis was teaching his semireformed street thief to steal in a more socially acceptable manner – rather than going straight for a victim’s wallet or ripping off cars. David Kaplan had been closest to the truth with the theory of playtime, for young Kathy had never had friends her own age. She had always frightened normal children.

But these three men had never understood how truly devious their late, great friend had been. The policeman’s profession was prone to sudden death, and Louis had been a farsighted man. He had forced these men to love his only child over the years when she was learning to cheat them and beat them all at cards.

And they loved her still.

Though she had long ago outgrown their company and deserted their game of penny-ante stakes and wild cards, these men would never desert Kathy Mallory. They were family now.

Canny Louis.

„
L
ionel and Cleo were in the park that day.“ Mallory had pinned up all the old diagrams of Winter House. „But Stick Man didn’t know they were missing. I think the original plan was to kill everyone in the house but the baby and Nedda. It had to look like a psycho on a killing spree instead of a hired murder.“

„But, as long as they had Nedda, why would they need the baby?“

„The draw on the fortune goes to Nedda and her siblings. That’s a lot of money to ride on the life of one child. Suppose they always planned to stash Nedda somewhere else?“

„Like an asylum?“

„Right. They can produce her if they have to. But, even if she dies in a hospital under an assumed name, the lawyers can still keep her alive on paper, and the money rolls on. But James Winter has to be established as the legal guardian of a surviving child. This was what I got from the DA’s office. They say the court would’ve assumed guardianship for a missing child, and the court could’ve declared Nedda dead after seven years. So this is the only way that James can get his share of the money. Even if he’d had the brains to contest the original will – “

„He would’ve been a murder suspect with a huge money motive,“ said Riker. „Okay, but Sally was a bad choice. The kid was sick.“

„She was a baby, no friends, no school connections. If Sally had been the only survivor, they probably would’ve replaced her with another kid when she died. I don’t think anyone minded that Cleo and Lionel weren’t in the house that day. That was an accidental bonus. Two spares.“

N
edda Winter carried a plate of sandwiches into the library and set them on the game table amid the beer bottles and ashtrays filled with smoking cigars. Charles held a chair for her. „You’ll play, of course.“

„I might watch for a while, but I’m not much good at card games.“

„Good.“ Edward Slope opened a fresh deck. „At last, Charles has someone he can beat at poker.“

„You’re one to talk,“ said Robin Duffy. „When Kathy was eleven years old, she cleaned you out once a week.“ He turned his wide smile on Nedda. „Poor litde kid. She used to list to one side with the weight of all of Edward’s money in her pockets. And Lou laughed so hard he cried.“