By the Time You Read This (14 page)

23

R
OGER
F
ELT.
C
ARDINAL HAD
not thought about Roger Felt for at least five or six years. Roger Felt had been a stockbroker/financial adviser/investment analyst for the Algonquin Bay office of Fraser, Grant. He had enjoyed a reputation for being a local Midas with growth stocks.

Like just about every other financial adviser in town, Felt’s bread and butter lay in mutual funds. He took people’s nest eggs and savings accounts and rainy day funds and put them into more or less conservative allocations of five-star funds. But he had not been satisfied with that sort of program for his own retirement planning. Too many years of reading the financial press had filled his head with profiles of financial wizards who made killings and retired with sailboats and ski mansions and houses in the south of France. You weren’t supposed to end up with a ranch-style split level in Algonquin Bay and a cottage on Mud Lake.

And so Roger Felt had embarked on an ambitious scheme to make the big leagues. He moved his own portfolio into the riskier stocks, the testosterone market, and he started betting on margin. And when the first margin calls had come in, he rapidly paid them off with his own cash.

Of course, this cash was also supposed to pay for his wife’s retirement, not just his own. It was meant to cover assisted living for his mother-in-law and the educations of their three kids, who were all heading off, seriatim, to university. No problem. When the market turned around, as his economic savvy told him it must, he would be so rich he could pay for all of those things with pocket money.

Many losses and many margin calls later, Roger Felt found himself in the uncomfortable position of having drained not just his own accounts but those of his wealthiest clients. In Algonquin Bay, these “wealthiest” were not millionaires, but retirees with plump pensions and paid-off houses who had a little extra cash. Roger Felt “borrowed” liberally from their accounts to pay off his margin calls and to place bigger investments, with the intention, he later told the court, of paying everybody back—with interest, of course.

Dreams of luxury on the Côte d’Azur began to fade, and dwindled into dreams of paying back the funds he had pilfered, dreams of restoring his own family to financial health, dreams of staying out of jail.

It was not to be.

One of his clients, a Mrs. Gertrude M. Lowry, wished to consolidate all her funds with another firm. When she tired of Felt’s evasions, she called the police. Cardinal got the case and, since he was no financial wizard, Delorme was soon put on it too. She had been just a few months short of an MBA when she joined the police and had spent half a dozen years chasing white-collar criminals.

They arrested Felt on charges of fraud, misappropriation of funds and breach of fiduciary duty. He was found guilty on all three. His lawyer, Leonard Scofield, made an eloquent request for a minimum sentence that the judge received coolly. He could do little else after hearing from the parade of witnesses: men long past their prime who had been forced to go back to work, young people whose dreams of owning a house had come to nothing, angry couples who had lost their homes, and tremulous old women now working at menial jobs to keep their heads above water. Roger Felt was banished to a medium-security prison for eight years, from which he had been paroled after serving five.

Cardinal rolled up in front of the address Desmond had given him. It turned out to be an apartment above a fabric store on Sumner. To get to the downstairs door, Cardinal had to squeeze his way through a passageway so narrow that he was forced to turn sideways.

The door had been decorated by consecutive generations of graffiti artists, the least imaginative of whom had written
I Love You
in raspberry-coloured letters a foot tall. Cardinal buzzed the intercom and waited, looking around the alley with its crushed soda cans, its fly-away sandwich wrappers, even a laceless, soggy tennis shoe. All in all, a long way down from the lakeside property Roger Felt had owned when Cardinal and Delorme had arrested him. He had been swinging in a hammock with a rum and Coke in his hand at the time.

A voice caused the intercom’s torn speaker to flap and buzz. “Who is it?”

“Courier.”

“Hold on, I’ll be right down.”

Heavy footsteps on the stairs within, and then the door opened.

Prison had done nothing good for Roger Felt’s appearance. He had always been a squarish man, not graceful, but expensive suits and a regular squash game had combined to make him look like a person you might call sir. But now he was squat and trollish. His shirt looked as if it had not been ironed for decades, and there were rings of sweat under his arms. He reeked of cigarettes, and was wheezing from the stairs.

“Are you from Alma’s?” he said, naming a Main Street restaurant. “I’m not really expecting anything.”

Cardinal held up his shield. “Surprise.”

Felt peered up at him through thick lenses. “Oh, no.”

Cardinal pushed the door open. “Mr. Felt, we have reason to believe you are in breach of your parole. I need to come in and take a look around.”

“Let’s see a warrant first.”

“You’re a convicted felon on parole, Mr. Felt, and I have reasonable grounds to suspect you are in breach. No warrant required.”

Cardinal pushed his way past him and went up the dark stairwell. The door at the top opened onto a cramped, lopsided kitchen lit with one of those fluorescent rings beloved of penny-pinching landlords. A cigarette sent up coils of smoke from an ashtray. Beside it there was an adding machine, a stack of files, a battered-looking laptop and a small printer.

Cardinal pulled a sheet of paper from its out tray.

It was an invoice from Beckwith and Beaulne addressed to Nautilus Marine Storage and Repair. The capital
Ns
and
Rs
had lines running through them. Cardinal usually stayed pretty cool when it came to arresting criminals. But now, as Roger Felt came huffing into the kitchen, he felt a surge of rage. Immediately, some other part of his character locked this rage away. He pointed to the adding machine, the files, the columns of figures on the laptop screen.

“The terms of your parole are that you not be employed in the financial sector. Clearly, you are performing accountancy services. May I speak to Mr. Beckwith?”

“He isn’t here.”

“And Mr. Beaulne?”

“He’s not available either.”

“Beaulne and Beckwith are fictitious entities, aren’t they?”

“It’s just a name. It sounded good.”

“You’re running a fictitious company, Mr. Felt. For purposes once again of duping the public.”

“I need clients. The name sounded good. You can’t expect me to live on the income from a job in a sandwich shop.”

“With your record of fraud and breach of fiduciary duty, I think a judge is going to be very interested in the fictitious Mr. Beaulne and Mr. Beckwith.”

“Please don’t do that. I can’t go back to jail.”

“Get your shoes on, Mr. Felt. That’s exactly where we’re going.”

24

R
OGER
F
ELT WAS BOOKED
and, after being allowed to call his lawyer, was placed in a holding cell. Cardinal alerted the Crown attorney and the parole office. He wrote up his notes, finished the rest of the paperwork and carried the boxes of material he had removed from Felt’s apartment into the boardroom.

The boardroom was the quietest and most respectable-looking place in the station. The long oak table and handsome chairs gave it the feel of the headquarters of a small but prosperous corporation. Cardinal opened the first box and lifted out the adding machine, the laptop, the printer. He opened the second box and removed stacks of files and stationery.

Staff Sergeant Mary Flower came in. Mary was the kind of woman for whom the harsh word
broad
must have been originally coined. No more than five foot three, but big of chest and voice. She was protective of her uniformed brood, but if she suspected a street cop of slacking, she could deliver a reprimand so fierce that the place reeked of brimstone for weeks. Over the years she had nursed a crush on John Cardinal, a fact he had occasionally used to shameless advantage in prying favours out of the uniformed division.

“Listen, John.” They had been colleagues long enough to be on a first-name basis when out of earshot of her troops. “You’re gonna tell me it’s none of my business, but—”

“It’s none of your business, Mary …”

“But it is, sorta. Because it goes to proper conduct of business in the shop, and that goes very much to my bailiwick of training the juniors. But that’s not why I’m bringing it up. I’m bringing it up because you’re a friend and I respect you enough to tell you when I think you’re making a mistake.”

“I make lots of mistakes. Which one did you have in mind?”

“First of all, honey, you shouldn’t be back here yet. You’re still hurting, and you’re gonna be hurting for a long time. The cop shop is no place for a broken heart.”

“She didn’t dump me. She, uh …”
Died
. He would never be able to say that word. Not in connection to Catherine.

“I know that, John. So allow yourself to admit that you’re human. Allow yourself to admit that your judgment might be off, that you might be prone to mistakes at a time like this. I’m not a detective, I’m not gonna second-guess your investigative work.”

“He’s been breaching parole. Conditions either mean something or they don’t. You can’t have it both ways.”

“See, right there, that doesn’t sound like you. You’re not usually an all-or-nothing, black-or-white kind of guy.

I’m just asking you to take some time off. You’re not running on all cylinders here.”

“You done?”

“Momma Mary is done, honey.”

“Good. Because I have some actual work to do.”

It turned out that Wes Beattie was Roger Felt’s parole officer. Although they talked on the phone quite often, Cardinal had not actually seen Beattie face to face for more than a year. He had grown a big bushy beard since then, and was uncharacteristically formal in dark suit and tie.

“Gee, Wes,” Cardinal said. “Did you arrive here in a limo?”

“You’ve interrupted me in a night at the opera,” Beattie purred. “Thus ruining my yearly attempt at culture.”

“Algonquin Bay doesn’t have an opera.”

“This evening it does. The Manhattan Light Opera Company is at the Capital Centre for exactly one night, and you yanked me out of it.”

“Felt’s lawyer’s on the way, and we’re also waiting for the crown.”

“No point holding your breath,” Beattie said. “I’ve spoken to the crown, and he doesn’t want to pursue this unless I do, and I have to tell you, John, I really, really don’t.”

“Roger Felt is in breach of parole, Wes. He’s running a financial operation under false pretences. He’s been sending me threatening and harassing letters—which you might want to see before you make up your mind, let alone the Crown attorney’s mind.”

Beattie was one of those large men who seem to give off a kind of calm that is hard to resist. He stood before Cardinal, rocking gently back and forth on his heels as he listened. The whole time, he was nodding sympathetically. A parole officer—besieged by judges, criminals, victims, lawyers, not to mention highly aggrieved cops—learns to be a good listener or he goes insane.

“Can we sit down somewhere and talk?” he said quietly. His understanding tone suddenly made Cardinal feel like a ranter.

“Yeah, sure.”

Cardinal took him back to the boardroom, where Felt’s accounting equipment was spread out.

Cardinal held up a sheet of letterhead. “You realize Beckwith and Beaulne is a fictitious organization?”

“Strictly speaking, John, it isn’t. It’s a bookkeeping operation run by Roger Felt, essentially a home business. Beckwith and Beaulne is just a name—it doesn’t matter that they’re not real entities. Merrill and Lynch have been dead a long time too.”

“Merrill and Lynch were real people who founded a company.”

“John, you’re not going to make the fraudulent part stick. Roger does in fact provide the bookkeeping service that he promises. Nothing more, nothing less.”

“He’s doing people’s taxes for them. That involves tax advice, which is financial advice, which his conditions of release strictly prohibit.”

“I disagree and so will the court, John. He’s not doing accounting, he’s doing bookkeeping. That’s simple record keeping and arithmetic. He has no access to accounts, no fiduciary duties. It’s a worthwhile service and an effective use of his skills.”

“The court may see it differently.”

“John, I ran it by a judge before I gave Roger the go-ahead. He didn’t have a problem with it. And the crown doesn’t either, which is why he isn’t here.”

“You were out of bounds heading him off, Wes.”

“I’m trying to do you a favour. Believe me, you don’t want this to get to court. Roger is a changed man. His crime cost him everything he had, and I mean everything. Not just his money. You saw where he’s living. His wife left him shortly after he went to jail. Two of his kids want nothing to do with him. He lost his friends, you name it.”

“And you think he’s a changed man.”

“I know it, the parole board knew it. He rediscovered his faith in prison—he’s a Catholic—and while I usually don’t pay the slightest attention to claims of that sort, in Roger’s case it seems to be true. He’s very involved in the Church now.”

Cardinal pulled out several blank sympathy cards from the box.

“I found these next to his laptop.” He opened his briefcase and pulled out the cards he had received in the mail. “And he sent me these. Go on. Take a look at them, Wes. Take a look at them, and then tell me what a changed man he is.”

Beattie went over the cards carefully. They were open, sheathed in plastic. He held each one for a few seconds, turned it over and let it drop to the table.

“You think he sent you these cards?”

“He used a computer so I wouldn’t see his handwriting, but there’s a printer flaw in the capital letters. You can see it with this.”

He handed Beattie a magnifying glass. Beattie looked at one of the cards, then looked at the invoice Cardinal had received from the funeral home. He compared it with the other two cards. Beattie tapped a finger on the cards.

“John, I’m sorry you received these. It must have been very upsetting.”

“Upsetting is not the word. My wife is—you know what happened to my wife. The coroner may think she killed herself, but I don’t. Suppose you killed someone and made it look like suicide. That might give you the idea to write a note like this, don’t you think?”

I’m losing it, Cardinal thought. I know I’m losing it. It was a mistake to mention his suspicions about murder, but he couldn’t stop himself.

“Six years ago I arrest Felt for stealing people’s savings. Like you say, it destroys his reputation, costs him his friends, his kids, his wife. Life as he knew it is over, and he has five years in jail to work up a hatred for me for nailing him. He figures if I hadn’t stopped him, he would’ve been able to make that killer investment that would have made him rich and would have covered all he stole—
borrowed
, as he liked to put it.

“How does he get even? By killing me? No, it’s too simple, too direct, and it doesn’t really make it as revenge, either, because I wouldn’t suffer the way he’s suffered, knowing his wife left him. So he kills
my
wife to get even, then writes those cards to rub my face in it. He’s scum, Wes. He always has been.”

Even to Cardinal’s own ears, it sounded like the shriek of a wounded animal. And now he had to suffer the awful look of compassion on Wes Beattie’s bearded face. Beattie actually put a hand out and gripped Cardinal’s shoulder.

“John, what are you even doing here? You should not be back at work yet.”

“Why are you trying to make a case for the guy, Wes? He’s already got Scofield working for him. You think it’s impossible he wrote these notes?”

“No, I can see the flaws match on the cards and the invoice. I know Felt handles the billing for Desmond’s Funeral Home. I can put two and two together. I can even see him writing the notes, sick as they are. The man has devious tendencies, no question. But he’s the least violent guy you’re ever likely to meet, so any suspicion that he hurt anyone is way out in left field. John, you don’t even have a finding of murder. Take some time off. See a grief counsellor.”

“Even putting this in its best light, we have a parolee who’s sending threatening, harassing letters through the mail. That’s enough to put him back inside.”

“The notes are nasty. The notes are unpleasant. The notes are mean. But do they constitute ‘harassment’? I don’t know. It’s debatable. But ‘threatening’ is a stretch. You’ll never get a judge to buy ‘threatening.’ Answer me this, John: if you accepted that the finding of suicide was correct, if you had no suspicion of murder, would you even be bothering chasing down these cards?”

The door banged open and Leonard Scofield was standing before them, with a calfskin briefcase in one hand and a letter-size document in the other. Scofield’s suits always looked as if he had just come back from an appointment in Savile Row, and his shoes as if they had never been worn before. Here it was ten-thirty at night and he shows up in a dark pinstripe and a snow white shirt and a deep burgundy tie.

Scofield also had a sonorous voice—a newscaster’s tonal authority that made even his weakest arguments sound reasonable. Cardinal had managed to put two or three of Scofield’s clients in jail, but never for as long as they deserved.

As if all this were not irritating enough, Scofield was also a decent human being. Cardinal, like most cops, had an innate suspicion of lawyers, even though he was smart enough to know it was unfounded. But Scofield was a guy you had to respect, even when he was tearing your case to shreds in court. He was always amenable to pretrial discussion, always receptive to rational argument, and, even while defending his client ferociously, managed to convey a sense of absolute decency. Cardinal had often wished he would run for office.

In short, Cardinal was always dismayed to see Scofield on the other side of a case.

“Gentlemen,” Scofield said, “I can’t tell you how upsetting it is to be summoned at this unconscionable hour.”

“If you’re representing Felt,” Cardinal said, “you’re going to wish you weren’t summoned at any hour.”

Scofield had dark eyebrows—very expressive, and very useful in court for conveying silent but eloquent scepticism and a wide array of other, more subtle, emotions, such as, in this instance, friendly concern.

“Detective Cardinal,” he said, “let me say how sorry I was to hear about your wife.”

“Thank you.” Scofield was either a man who was bullshit-free or able to fake sincerity with Hollywood’s finest.

“And let me give you this.” Scofield handed over several documents, and then proffered copies to Wes Beattie. “This is why I was late. I stopped off at the cathedral and talked to Father Mkembe. I know he’s a priest and you probably wouldn’t require a sworn affidavit, but here it is anyway. Father Mkembe swears that Roger Felt was at the cathedral’s fundraiser the night of Tuesday the seventh, from eight p.m. until eleven p.m. The other affidavits are from a deacon and from Sister Catherine Wellesley, also swearing that Roger Felt was in their presence at that time. It seems he was keeping track of the takings from their annual flea market and auction—a service, I note for the record, for which he did not charge.”

Cardinal was not a self-righteous man. Having been born and raised a Catholic, he had entered adult life fully equipped with an oversize sense of guilt. He knew that he was capable of doing things of which he was ashamed, even of breaking the law, so he was not a policeman who arrived at a crime scene on a high horse, ready to smite the evil who walk among us. Furthermore, the older he got—and the more distance he put between himself and his religion of birth—the less he trusted people who were given to righteousness: the righteous gang members who beat rivals to a pulp for trespassing on their turf, the righteous husbands who kicked and stabbed and sometimes murdered the wives who had “disrespected” them, the righteous cops who got in an extra knee or elbow when arresting those they saw as slipping through the cogs of the justice system. Cardinal spent his life in the cause of justice and had come to realize that much injustice was accompanied by just such righteousness.