Double Cross (26 page)
He wrung his hands. “I didn’t have fifty thousand dollars. In fact, I was already in debt up to my ears.”
Now Mom’s mouth fell open.
“It’s true. I’ve made some bad investments. And the oil industry has come up with new drilling technologies. My patents aren’t generating the money they used to.” He turned toward Mom. “I was going to talk to you about it.”
The color drained from Mom’s face. “When were you going to talk to me about it? After we got kicked out of our house?” She gripped the arm of her chair, as if on the verge of pushing herself to her feet. This was good. I was hoping she would lay into him. She relaxed her grip, though, and her voice got soft. “Where will we live?”
That one sentence, and the fear with which she delivered it, gave me more insight into my mother’s psyche than all of my experience with her since she stepped back into my life. At that moment I understood that there was one nightmare that trumped all others in her life. She had lived in the streets, and it terrified her. She had no intention of doing it again, and she would make any deal, strike any bargain, to avoid it.
He shook his head. “Don’t get all worked up, Hillary. We’ll lose this house. That’s almost certain. But the patents still have some value. They’re just not easy to sell. It will take time. Cash is the problem. We’re cash poor. Besides, I’m working on a project that will dwarf all the other patents combined.” His eyes brightened. So did Mom’s. “It involves coal—”
I rapped my knuckles on the desk. “Excuse me. Can we get back to the subject? Elise Hovden is dead. What did you have to do with it?”
He held up his right hand, like a Boy Scout. “I had nothing to do with that. I swear it.”
“Then what were you doing at her house the night she died?”
He wiped his forehead with his sleeve. “You were right, I was blackmailing Simon Mason. He wasn’t paying me, though, Elise was.”
“Did Simon know about it?”
“No. Not according to her, anyway. Two days after I talked to Simon, she called me—on the number you just called this evening. She must have gotten it off Simon’s phone. I set it up to be untraceable. I didn’t even want to have a phone for it. That’s why I got the laptop, just to receive the calls. Anyway, Elise said that Simon would never pay me. That he would let me ruin him. She wasn’t willing to let that happen.”
I tilted my head back and pictured Elise—the tight blonde curls always falling in front of her eyes; the turned-up nose that made her look so much younger than she was. I had never met a person whose looks were a worse indicator of her personality. Despite her perky exterior, Elise was an energy sucker. The moment she stepped into a conversation, oxygen seemed to leave the room and everyone began looking for an excuse to talk to someone else. I was sorry for her, and for the many times she must have been made to feel unwanted. No one should have to go through life like that.
I hadn’t liked her much, and I would have felt more guilty about that if she hadn’t hated me. The story Stanley was telling, though, made me think of her not just more sympathetically, but more kindly. She had loved Simon and had apparently been willing to sacrifice for him. I’d seen good men—Dad and Simon—make sacrifices for others. Sacrifice counted for a lot in my book.
Stanley took another drink from his water bottle. “Everything proceeded smoothly enough. She had paid me twice: thirty thousand in cash, total. She left it in places I prearranged. Then one afternoon she called me again, but this time she knew my name.”
“Thirty thousand? More than half a million was missing from the ministries’ accounts. And Simon told me the blackmailer demanded two hundred thousand.”
“I only asked for fifty.”
That didn’t add up, but I didn’t want to get in an argument over it. I wanted to hear the whole story. “You said you only got thirty thousand from Elise. I thought you needed fifty?”
“She was paying me in installments. It had to be that way. If you withdraw ten thousand or more in cash from a bank at one time, the bank has to report it to the government. So she took out smaller amounts over time and accumulated it. The third installment was due two days after she died. It would have been the last twenty thousand.”
“What happened to the other four hundred fifty thousand that was missing from the ministries’ accounts?”
“I had nothing to do with that. She was taking it on her own.”
Now, this was a wrinkle I hadn’t expected. Apparently I had been too quick to nominate Elise for sainthood.
He ran a hand across the top of his head. “She never told me how she identified me. What she did tell me was that she had been found out. She said she’d been embezzling the money to pay me. I hadn’t known that for sure, but it was the obvious explanation for how she was coming up with the cash. She offered me a deal that she said could save both of us.”
“What kind of a deal?”
“She said she had embezzled more than the amounts she was paying me. Much more. She had stashed the money in a numbered account in the Cayman Islands.”
“What was she planning to do with the money?”
“I don’t know. She said I could have it if I’d just leave the country and never come back. That way she could tell everyone the whole story. She would tell them she had only embezzled the money to pay me off, to save Simon Mason. I would be the bad guy, and she figured she would skate with the authorities since she hadn’t personally benefited. She said she had the information about the account and would give it to me, but I had to act fast.”
By this time Mom’s head was practically on his shoulder, and I could see that he was just about finished reeling her all the way back in.
“What did you do?”
“I had no choice. I agreed to the deal. I knew that if she gave my name to the police, the guys who were blackmailing me would kill me. Believe me, they are serious people, and they weren’t about to sit around and wait to see if I would talk.”
Suddenly Mom stood. “You were going to leave the country without me?”
I leaned back in my chair and smiled. It had apparently taken her a while to digest it, but she’d picked up on the one part of the story that most impacted her. Maybe she was going to spit the hook after all.
He reached over and touched her arm. “I was going to send for you as soon as I got the money and settled somewhere. If I brought you along at first, it would risk involving you in this whole mess. I love you too much to put you in jeopardy.”
She stood there for a few moments, then sat back down and put her hand over his. The hook was set again, and it was clear she would suck in anything he tossed in her general direction. I decided she was a lost cause. I needed to remain focused on getting the facts.
“Who were the people who were blackmailing you?” I said.
“I don’t know for sure. I never met them. I responded to messages they left for me at work. I did what they told me.”
“None of this required you to go to Elise’s house. So, why were you there that night?”
He crossed one leg over the other. It was apparent he was feeling more confident. “She insisted that I go there to pick up her laptop. She said it had the information about the account on it.”
I gave myself another mental pat on the back. So the missing laptop had been important. “Why couldn’t she just give you the account information over the phone?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she was afraid someone could listen in. All I know is that she insisted that it had to be done the way she instructed. She held all the cards. I did what she told me to do.”
He shifted his weight in his chair. “I went to her house at midnight. I had a plane ticket to Caracas, Venezuela for the next evening. You can check with the airline.”
“What happened when you got there?”
“It went just the way she planned. I told her I was flying to Venezuela. I showed her my boarding pass, and she gave me her laptop. That was it. I was only there about fifteen minutes. She was fine when I left. Early the next afternoon, I saw on the news that she was dead. I was stunned—there was no reason to think she was going to kill herself. But I admit I was also relieved. My problem had been solved. I canceled my flight to Caracas.”
“Where’s the laptop?”
He got up and walked over to the bookshelf. Kneeling, he opened one of a series of cabinet doors that ran from wall-to-wall beneath the shelves. He pulled out a few folders from the front of the cabinet and placed them on the floor. Behind them was a safe that was built into the wall.
“Where did that come from?” Mom said.
“It was in the house plans, dear,” he said, without looking up.
She screwed up her face but said nothing.
After dialing a combination, he opened the safe and pulled out a Dell laptop. He stood up and held it out to me. “Here it is.”
I got up and took it from him. “What did you do with the money from the Cayman Islands account?”
“There was no Cayman Islands account—at least not that could be identified from that laptop.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Your friend Ms. Hovden was apparently scamming me, too. There was a ten-digit number on the computer, but it didn’t match up with any account at the bank she identified. Or any other bank I could find in the Cayman Islands. It was just a random ten-digit number that didn’t correspond to any account anywhere.”
I couldn’t help but smile. I never would have given Elise credit for being that shrewd. “When did you find that out?”
“I checked on the account the next morning.”
I sat back down at the desk and placed Elise’s laptop in front of me. “It must have been a huge disappointment. You thought you’d just had a half million dollars dropped in your lap, huh?”
“I’ll admit that that amount of money would have solved a lot of problems for me.” He looked at Mom. “For us.”
Mom hugged her shoulders and didn’t respond. From the look on her face, it was apparent she was confused. Who wouldn’t be?
“So, what happened to Elise?” I said.
He shrugged. “I don’t understand the question. She killed herself. You saw her.”
I drummed my fingers on the desk. “No, that makes no sense. If she intended to kill herself, why would she bother to go through that whole dance with you?”
He closed the safe and the cabinet door. Then he stood and faced me. “Maybe she was depressed all along and she just wanted to be sure that her name was cleared, so people wouldn’t think she died a common thief. She assumed I was going to disappear, and everyone would blame it all on me.”
That made no sense either. She surely would have waited to tell everyone about Stanley before she killed herself. Or at least she would have explained things in the suicide note. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and began to dial.
“Who are you calling?” Mom said.
“Michael Harrison, at the FBI. Blackmail is a federal offense, so he’s just the person to handle this.”
Stanley held up a hand. “Wait!”
I lowered the phone. “Wait for what? You don’t think we’re just going to forget about this, do you?”
“Don’t be rash, dear,” Mom said. “If you ruin his life, you’re ruining my life, too.”
“I’m not ruining anyone’s life. Your husband blackmailed Simon Mason and was at Elise’s house the night she supposedly killed herself. I don’t think that’s something we can just keep as a family secret.”
Stanley lowered his head and said in a soft voice, “If you turn me over to the FBI, I’m a dead man.”
I swiveled my chair in his direction. “That’s a bit dramatic, isn’t it?”
He shook his head. “No, it is not. You saw what they tried to do to Katie Parst. If it becomes public that I was blackmailing Simon Mason, and I’m tied in with Elise Hovden’s death, they will kill me. I can assure you of that. They’re not going to wait patiently to see whether I tell the police what they were doing to me.”
Mom gave me a doe-eyed look. “Taylor, you can’t do this.”
Though I had to admit that the people who shot at Katie Parst were dangerous, it seemed to me that if they had been professionals, she would be dead. Besides, I couldn’t stand to see Stanley use the danger that he, himself, had created, to try to wiggle out of this. I waved a hand in the air. “Mom, nobody’s going to kill him. He’s just trying to save his skin! Can’t you see that?”
He sniffled and looked at Mom. “Hil, I’m telling you as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow morning that these men will kill me.” He blinked twice, for effect. “They’re evil.”
I leaned back in my chair. “Oh, good grief!”
Mom got up, walked over to him, and put her arm around his shoulder. “No, Taylor, you need to listen to him. They’re bad people. You know that.”
“Mom, we don’t even know who they are! In fact, we don’t even know if they exist! He may be making this whole story up just to try to worm his way out of trouble.”
He looked at me as if my suggestion hurt him. “How could I make up such a story?”
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