Killer Crab Cakes (20 page)

A new voice said, “I think that would be a terrible mistake, Mrs. Newsom.”

Over the sound of the wind and the waves lapping against the pilings below, Phyllis hadn’t heard anyone else approaching, and she and Sam and Oliver had all been concentrating on one another, not the other people on the pier.

She turned now and saw Charles Jefferson standing there, along with the lawyer Roger Fadiman. Suddenly she began to feel surrounded.

And it was indeed a long way down to the water, she thought as she glanced past the wooden railing at the choppy surface of the bay.

J
efferson must have seen the sudden apprehension on Phyllis’s face, because he lifted both hands, palms out, and went on, “I didn’t mean that to sound threatening. I just meant that you might cause considerable trouble for some innocent people without even intending to.”

“By innocent people, do you mean you and Mr. McKenna here?” Phyllis asked.

Jefferson shook his head. “No, I’m talking about the stock-holders in both of our companies.”

“Be careful, Charles,” Fadiman advised. “We can’t be sure how much she knows.”

Jefferson frowned and snapped, “For God’s sake, Roger, if she’s got those documents, she must have read them. She knows that Jefferson-Bartell was about to take over McKenna Electronics, or else she wouldn’t have called Oliver and tried to blackmail him in the first place.”

Phyllis was beginning to lose her patience. “I’m not trying to blackmail anybody!”

“Nonsense,” Jefferson said as he turned back to her. “How much do you want? If the news of the takeover leaks prematurely, McKenna’s value could plummet and it might even have an effect on Jefferson-Bartell stock. It’s well worth a tidy chunk of change to me in order to keep things quiet until we’re ready to finalize the deal. Say, twenty thousand dollars?”

Fadiman closed his eyes, shook his head, and backed away as if he were washing his hands of this discussion.

“You’d better not be expecting me to contribute to that payoff,” Oliver said. “I don’t have that sort of money.”

“Of course you don’t, Oliver,” Jefferson said, “otherwise you wouldn’t be selling your father’s beloved company to me even though he hated the idea.”

“Wait a minute,” Phyllis said. “Ed McKenna didn’t want you to buy his company?”

“Not at all. The deal was struck between Oliver and myself. But we had enough leverage to make Ed go along with it, although it would have been better if he hadn’t found out until the deal was done.”

“Talking too much,” Fadiman said through gritted teeth.

“
Will
you be quiet,” Jefferson said. “You know how I do business. Straight ahead.”

“And damn the torpedoes,” Sam said.

Jefferson jerked his head in a curt nod. “Exactly. No bullshit, if you’ll pardon my language. I want McKenna Electronics, and I don’t want anything to interfere with the acquisition.” He held out his hand. “So if you’ll give those documents, Mrs. Newsom, I’ll be glad to write you a check for twenty-five thousand dollars.”

“You said twenty thousand a minute ago.”

Jefferson made a face and shook his head. “Five thousand here, five thousand there, what does it matter? You want fifty? I’ll give you fifty.” His voice hardened. “But I want those papers.”

Phyllis’s brain was working as fast as it possibly could. “Ed McKenna found out about the deal you and Oliver were working on and brought the documents he discovered with him when he came down here.”

“That’s right. Who knew the old geezer would be capable of hacking into Oliver’s e-mail account and swiping the file with the merger agreement in it? Who knew he would even suspect such a thing?”

“He wouldn’t have,” Oliver said. A pained expression suddenly appeared on his face. He slapped himself on the forehead.

Sam glanced over at Phyllis and said, “People actually do that when they think of somethin’?”

Oliver ignored them. “Son of a—Oscar! It had to be Oscar. Dad could barely retrieve his own e-mail. I had to show him how to get the program back up after the screen saver came on, for God’s sake! But Oscar could have done it. He found out about the deal and ran straight to Dad with it.”

“I thought he couldn’t stand your father,” Jefferson said.

“Oh, he hated Dad for booting him out of being co-CEO with me,” Oliver said. “But he could have thought that stabbing me in the back would get him back in Dad’s good graces and out of the research department. I’m sure Dad came down here to try to think of some way to ruin the whole thing for us, just the way Oscar intended.”

Roger Fadiman couldn’t stand it anymore. He said, “Will you just
stop talking
? All you’re doing is telling these people that you both had reason to want Ed McKenna dead!”

“They’re not cops,” Jefferson said with a negligent shrug of his shoulders, “and anything they tell the cops will be nothing but hearsay. Our hands are clean, Roger, and for good reason: I had nothing to do with Ed McKenna’s death.” He looked calmly over at Oliver. “I’m not sure everyone here can say the same thing.”

Oliver’s face reddened. “That’s slander!”

“Not really,” Fadiman said. “This isn’t a public forum. No one heard what Charles just said except us. Also, he made no specific claims or accusations—”

“Shut up, you . . . you
lawyer
.” Oliver turned to Phyllis. “I can’t offer to pay you off, but I can promise you this: Turn those papers over to me and I’ll see to it that my brother and sister and I won’t file any sort of lawsuit against the bed-and-breakfast over my father’s death.”

“There’s no grounds for a lawsuit anyway,” Phyllis insisted. “No one who’s connected with Oak Knoll had anything to do with what happened to poor Mr. McKenna.”

“You don’t know that,” Oliver pointed out. “The police are still investigating his death. What if that cook is to blame? She had more opportunity to poison Dad than anyone else.”

Phyllis knew that wasn’t strictly true. Quite a few people in the bed-and-breakfast had had just as much opportunity as Consuela to slip the poison into those leftover crab cakes. But admitting as much wouldn’t do anything to help her position, so she kept quiet about that.

“We can ruin your cousin’s business,” Oliver went on. “We can drag things out in court until she’s bankrupt.”

“Don’t be too sure of that,” Charles Jefferson said with oily glee. “I’m not sure but what the bed-and-breakfast is in a stronger position financially than McKenna Electronics is. You might be cutting your own throat if you get involved in a lengthy, expensive lawsuit, Oliver.” He looked at Phyllis again. “My offer is still on the table, Mrs. Newsom. Fifty thousand dollars for the documents.”

“What does it matter which one of you has them,” Phyllis asked, “as long as they’re not made public?”

“It really doesn’t matter, I suppose,” Jefferson replied with a shrug. “But considering the lack of security on Oliver’s part that put us in this precarious position to start with, I’d prefer to have the papers in my possession, just so I’ll be sure that they don’t leak out.” He thought for a moment and added, “For that matter, here’s an alternative proposal: Take the documents out of your purse right now and throw them in the bay. I’ll still pay you the fifty thousand dollars.”

“But you’d want to examine them first, to make sure of what they were.”

“Of course. A pig in a poke, and all that.”

Oliver said, “I don’t care anymore. I’m sick of the whole thing.”

“You’ll care when your company goes under without Jefferson-Bartell to bail you out,” Jefferson predicted.

“You’re not bailing us out. You’re taking advantage of our bad luck to gobble us up. You’re nothing but a damned shark!”

“I’ve been called worse,” Jefferson said with a smile. “A shark is a very efficient killing machine.”

He and Oliver both turned toward Phyllis and waited to see what she would do.

After a moment she said, “You don’t believe I’d be foolish enough to bring the documents here with me, do you?”

“Where are they?” Jefferson asked in a soft, apparently casual manner.

Phyllis shook her head. “A very safe place, with someone who’ll go straight to the police if anything suspicious happens to me.”

“Ooh, you saw that in a movie, didn’t you?” Jefferson asked.

Sam said, “Mister, I sure don’t like your attitude.”

“Well, I don’t care for that beachcomber look of yours, either.” Jefferson ignored the angry glare on Sam’s face and went on, “All right, we’re getting nowhere here. You know where I stand on all this, Mrs. Newsom. I’ve made my position very plain. I’m going to put my trust in you. You have no reason to try to damage my business, so I’m going to assume that you won’t. If you cooperate, you should come out ahead in the long run. That’s all I have to say.” He jerked his head at Fadiman. “Let’s go, Roger.”

As they turned to walk away, Phyllis thought that she ought to just let them go. Somehow, she had managed to bluff her way through this and find out quite a bit of potentially valuable information in the process.

But she couldn’t stop herself from saying, “You’re forgetting one thing, Mr. Jefferson.”

He stopped and looked back at her, wearing an apparently amused smile. His eyes were chilly and unamused, though, as he asked, “What have I forgotten?”

“The police took Mr. McKenna’s computer. What if the documents were on there? The police may already have them.”

“I suppose that’s possible. Ed always struck me as being aggressively old-fashioned, though. A printout sort of fellow, if you will. Anyway, if Oliver’s right and his fool of a brother is the one who tipped off Ed, Oscar probably just gave him the printouts of the e-mails, not the files themselves.”

“You’d risk fifty thousand dollars on that chance?”

“I’ve risked more than that on longer odds. That fifty grand was just to increase the odds on my side.”

Having never earned more than a teacher’s salary, Phyllis couldn’t understand that cavalier attitude toward money. She supposed that to a man who dealt regularly in millions, fifty thousand dollars really didn’t amount to much.

Jefferson and Fadiman walked toward the shore. Oliver McKenna lingered on the pier for a minute, saying, “Do the right thing, Mrs. Newsom. It’s not going to help you to ruin everything for me. And I can promise you, it’ll be better for your cousin if you don’t make an enemy of me.”

“Just don’t blame me if the police find out about the deal anyway . . . or already know about it.”

“For everyone’s sake, let’s hope that doesn’t happen.”

He stalked off then, too, casting occasional hostile glances back over his shoulder at Phyllis and Sam almost until he reached the shore.

“Folks around here sure are fond of makin’ veiled threats,” Sam said. “And some of ’em aren’t so veiled, at that.” He looked at Phyllis and shook his head in admiration. “You were runnin’ a bluff that whole time, just standin’ there and lettin’ those two compete to see who could spill his guts the fastest.”

“The possibility that a retired schoolteacher might be outsmarting them would never even occur to men like that,” Phyllis said. “We know now that Oliver was trying to go behind his father’s back to let Jefferson-Bartell take over their company. But Mr. McKenna found out about it and might have tried to stop it.”

“Meanin’ that Oliver is Suspect Number One now. That makes a lot more sense than thinkin’ that his murder was tied in somehow with the hanky-panky Leo Blaine had goin’ on.”

Phyllis nodded. “The problem is that Oliver would have had to come down here from San Antonio, get into the house, poison the crab cakes, and get back out again without anyone knowing about it. Either that, or pay someone to do it for him.”

Sam nodded. “Either way sounds a mite far-fetched, all right. If he couldn’t raise twenty thousand dollars, I wouldn’t think he could afford to hire a killer. He doesn’t seem to have enough spine to do the deed himself. Not impossible, but it just doesn’t seem likely to me.”

“But Leo was already right there in the house.”

“Yeah, but we don’t know for sure that McKenna knew about those naughty pictures of Bianca. Dang, it just goes around and around, doesn’t it? In some ways it looks like Oliver’s guilty, and in other ways it seems like Leo ought to be the killer.”

“I’d rather see either of them turn out to be guilty than Consuela or Tom or one of their girls.”

“Yeah, me, too. Can’t forget Jefferson, either. He’s just about the slimiest one o’ the bunch.”

Phyllis nodded as she pushed her hair back again. “I guess we might as well go back to Oak Knoll. We’re not going to accomplish anything else out here.”

“Not without a rod an’ reel,” Sam said with a smile.

 

Phyllis asked Sam to drive on down into Rockport and stop at the Wal-Mart there. Even with everything else that was going on, she hadn’t forgotten that the Just Desserts competition was coming up, and it had occurred to her as she and Sam were walking in from the long pier that it was actually less than forty-eight hours until the judging. She needed to make up her mind what she was going to bake. She had already downloaded the entry form off the Internet, filled it in, and would send it back as soon as she decided on her entry. She also needed to remind Carolyn that today was the deadline.