A Catered St. Patrick's Day (19 page)

Read A Catered St. Patrick's Day Online

Authors: Isis Crawford

BOOK: A Catered St. Patrick's Day
8.29Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
“Go on and ring,” Bernie said to Libby. “It was your idea.”
Libby hesitated for a moment. Then she put her hand up and pressed the bell.
Chapter 22
 
S
ean looked up at Orion standing in front of him. To say Sean was surprised to see Orion standing there like that was putting it mildly. Especially since he’d just gotten off the phone with him less than twenty minutes ago.
Orion unzipped his jacket. “You look surprised,” he said.
Sean put his coffee mug down on the side table. “That’s because I am.”
“But you said you wanted to talk to me when I spoke to you on the phone just now, that you wanted to hear what it was I had to say.”
“And I do.” Sean sat up straighter in his chair. “I just never figured you for popping up here. I figured you’d want to talk somewhere else. Somewhere ...ah ... a little more neutral.”
Orion shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Hey, if you don’t want me here I understand. I’ll be happy to leave.”
“No. No. It’s fine with me. But let’s just say that Libby would most definitely not like seeing you here,” Sean told him, indicating the flat with a nod of his chin. He was surprised at how much he still disliked the guy. Even after all this time. But business was business and in this case that came first. After all, over the years he’d talked to lots of people he didn’t like in order to get the information that he needed.
“Don’t you think I know that?” Orion said. “Give me some credit. Why do you think I don’t come in the shop anymore?”
“Because you’re afraid of being poisoned?” Sean asked, breaking the tension between the two men.
Orion laughed. “She would, wouldn’t she?”
Sean grinned despite himself. “Let’s just say I wouldn’t be eating anything Libby offered me if I were you—although to be fair she’s not as rabid as she once was—so maybe she’d just make you really sick instead of dead.”
“Whew.” Orion passed the back of his hand across his brow in a mock gesture of relief. “That makes me feel so much better.”
“Figured it would,” Sean replied.
Orion scratched behind his ear, then put his hand down by his side. “The only reason I’m here is that I was passing by right after I spoke to you and I saw Libby and Bernie going out, so I figured why not come up and save you the bother of meeting with me.”
“Very thoughtful of you.” Sean looked Orion up and down. “You seem to be doing well for yourself.”
“I’m not doing badly,” Orion allowed.
Sean pointed to Orion’s shoes. They were brown and cream-colored saddle shoes. “Aren’t they like the ones Mike Sweeney was wearing when he was killed?”
Orion glanced down at his feet. “I don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they were. Lots of the guys are wearing things like that now.”
“So what does a pair of those cost?” Sean asked.
“Five hundred dollars a pair, give or take a couple of bucks. What. Sheem">
can I say, Mr. Simmons?” Orion continued, catching the expression on Sean’s face. “The market has treated me well.”
“Evidently.” It amazed Sean that those shoes would go for that much. He remembered his mom trying to get him to wear saddle shoes when he was in high school, but he’d absolutely refused. Too preppy. “I’ll say this,” Sean continued. “You’re certainly doing a lot better than you were doing when you were with Libby. You didn’t even have a job half the time. No. Scratch that. You almost never had a job. Most of the time you didn’t have enough money to put gas in your car and here you are buying five hundred dollar shoes. Nice to know that the American dream is still alive and well.”
“It has been for me.” Orion looked down at the floor, then back up at Sean. “The time I was with Libby was a bad patch in my life.” He spread his arms apart. “I treated a lot of people very badly, Mr. Simmons. I acted in ways I’m not proud of.”
“Like stealing Libby’s car and picking up Suzy and going down to New York City for the weekend?” Sean said.
“Yeah. Like that,” Orion said. “But then I got off the pills and got my mind back. You know I
did
try and talk to Libby. I
did
try to apologize to her, but she wouldn’t talk to me. Maybe I should have written her a note, Mr. Simmons.”
“She probably would have torn it up,” Sean said. And if she hadn’t I would have, he added silently.
“That’s what I figured. Do you think she’ll ever forgive me?” Orion asked.
“Doubtful,” Sean said, thinking back to the way Libby had reacted to the mention of his name not that long ago.
Orion hung his head. “I really did treat her horribly, Mr. Simmons.”
“Words are cheap,” Sean told him. “Especially coming from you.”
“I mean it,” Orion protested.
Sean wasn’t sure whether Orion did or didn’t, but did it really matter? Not really. The trick was not to allow himself to get sidetracked by the past and to focus on what he needed to know. And he fully intended to do that. After he said one more thing.
Sean folded the newspaper he’d been reading and laid it on the side table next to him. “You know,” he informed Orion after he’d taken a sip of his coffee, “for about a year or so I wanted to hurt you really, really badly for what you did to my daughter. And if I were younger and in better shape, I might have done that, but I’m not.” There he’d said it.
“I can understand,” Orion said.
“No,” Sean said, contradicting him. “I don’t think you can. And I don’t think you will either until you have a daughter of your own some day. But she’s doing all right now, no thanks to you.”
“Marvin’s a good guy,” Orion observed.
“Yes, he is,” Sean agreed.
Orion looked around. Then he said, “It feels funny being here after all this time.”
“I would imagine,” Sean said dryly.
“And Libby is happy?”
“Yes. I think she is.”
“That’s good.”
The conversation came to a standstill. “Like I said when you called me,” Orion offered after a moment had gone by, “anything I can do to help, I will. It’s the least I can do.”
“I appreciate the sentiment,” Sean said. “But you s ӀBaftll understand if I don’t ask you to sit down.”
Orion nodded. “Totally.”
“I guess,” Sean said, “even though I know what happened wasn’t all your fault, that Libby had something to do with it as well, the bottom line is that I don’t like you very much, so why don’t you tell me what you have to say and then leave.”
Orion nodded his head again. “I totally value your honesty.”
“This isn’t a sales call,” Sean told him. “You’re not selling me financial instruments. So do you have something to tell me or not?”
“I do,” Orion replied. “But the whole thing is very technical.”
“Simplify it for me.”
“Okay.” Orion rubbed his hands together. “To begin, the whole group—”
“The Corned Beef and Cabbage Club?”
“Yeah. Those guys have been running a kind of a Ponzi scheme.”
“Was Duncan involved?”
“You betcha, along with the other chowderheads. See, everyone was getting along fine and then everyone started losing money and then suddenly they weren’t getting along so fine, and Sweeney was the person that lost the money for them.
“Rumor has it that not only did all of them lose a lot of money, but that the feds were coming in and Sweeney was about to hand his friends over to them in return for minimal jail time. But that’s just a rumor and there are plenty of rumors floating around and most of them aren’t true.”
“Do you think this one is?” Sean asked Orion.
“I don’t know,” Orion told him. “I really don’t.”
“So what were these guys doing?”
“This is where it gets technical... .”
“I’m sure a bright guy like you can translate it into English,” Sean said.
“I’ll try,” Orion told him as he rocked back and forth on his heels.
“You do that,” Sean said.
Orion thought for a moment and then began. “Okay,” he said. “The bottom line is this. People were trading back and forth with one another, kiting up the prices of financial instruments, financial instruments that mostly consisted of insurance packets. Insurance policies that were taken out on people and then sold to other people.”
“They can do that?” Sean asked.
“Oh yeah. People have been doing it for years. It’s perfectly legal.”
“So I can take out a policy on Libby and sell it to someone else?” Sean asked.
“Or,” Orion replied, “even better. You can take a policy out on someone and not tell them.”
“And if they die, I’m the beneficiary?” Sean asked.
Orion nodded.
“Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me,” Sean said. “Could someone have written a policy on Sweeney?”
“They could have,” Orion told him. “But since he was murdered it wouldn’t pay off. I mean if they’d wanted to do that, they’d have to find some less obvious way to kill him. As in, he’d have to be a heroin addict and OD.”
“Someone did that?” Sean asked.
“Last year in DC.”
“Someone actually sold a life insurance policy on an addict?”
Orion shrugged. “It’s a strange, strange world out there, Mr. Simmons.”
“Is there any way to check and make sure about Sweeney?”
“I can’t,” Orion said. “Aside from it being extremely difficult, I’d have to get into the system and check and I’m not authorized to do that. Besides, these policies are written in one place, then sold to someone else, then rebundled with other policies and sold to yet another person and so on down the line. It would take weeks to untangle all the strands, months if the person who did it didn’t want to be found.”
“And you can’t do it?” Sean asked.
“Absolutely not, Mr. Simmons.”
“Is it that you don’t have the ability or the desire?” Sean asked him.
“Both, Mr. Simmons. I don’t have that kind of technical know-how and I don’t want to lose my job and land up in jail.”
“Do you know anyone who could?”
Orion shook his head again. “You’re talking about a real geek here and I don’t know many of those.”
“So you’d need a subpoena to get to the bottom of this,” Sean said, a subpoena he was positive the DA wouldn’t issue.
“I’m guessing that you would.”
Sean didn’t reply immediately. He was distracted by the sound of the rain on the windows. The weather channel had warned that a nor’easter was on the way. It looked as if it had arrived.
“And anyway,” Orion continued, “I don’t think it’s true. It’s just too far-fetched. I can’t imagine any of those guys doing something like that. Kicking someone in the head, yes. Doing this, no.”
“You may be right,” Sean said. Sweeney’s death had seemed to him to be a crime of impulse brought on by anger and alcohol, not a carefully planned, bloodless, staged scenario. He shifted his weight around in his chair. He’d been sitting too long and would have to get up soon. “So how does Liza tie in with all of this?” Sean asked Orion.
Orion shrugged. “As far as I know, she doesn’t.”
“No word about her at all?” Sean insisted.
“No. She was a trader groupie.”
“Trader groupie?” Sean repeated.
“Yeah. Like the cop groupies. She was one of those girls who liked trader action instead of cop action—it turned her on—so she hung around with the traders. She made the rounds, although I understand she was with Duncan before she died. Maybe he got fed up and did her.”
“Maybe,” Sean said. “Did you hang around with her?”
“No, Mr. Simmons. I didn’t,” Orion said.
Sean thought he might be lying, but he wasn’t sure. “And who was Liza with before Duncan?” Sean asked.
“I think she was with Patrick. Or maybe Connor. I don’t know. I have trouble keeping those guys straight. They all look alike to me.”
“What do you hear about Duncan?” Sean asked, changing the subject.
“In what sense?”
“In any sense.”
“Not much really. He hung with the other guys. He trades in derivatives. He likes to gamble—does a lot of options and puts—and lost lots and lots of money with Sweeney. Way more than he can afford. He’s about an inch shy of declaring bankruptcy, but then so are the other guys for that matter. Do you want . DI knme to ask around?”
Sean nodded. “That would be helpful. Anything else to tell me?”
“That’s about it.” Orion glanced at his watch. “Well, if that’s the case ...”
“Go on,” Sean said. “Get out of here before Libby and Bernie come back.”
“Thanks.” And Orion turned and went down the stairs.
Sean could hear Orion closing the bottom door behind him. He sat for
a while and watched the raindrops beating on the windowpane and tried to make sense out of what Orion had said, but it really didn’t seem to go very far in explaining what had happened. He had the distinct feeling that he was missing something, something big.

Other books

The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow by Green, Anna Katharine
The Last Exile by E.V. Seymour
Enid Blyton by Mr Pink-Whistle's Party
All Your Pretty Dreams by Lise McClendon
Guadalupe's Tears by Angelique Videaul
Faint Trace by M. P. Cooley