Partners In Crime (28 page)

"What are all those papers attached?" Auntie
Lil demanded.

"It's fascinating," T.S. said, thumbing
through them. "It's just as Mr. Peabody said. He has the proof
carefully saved."

Auntie Lil slapped her hand down on the
surface of a small side table. "Damn it, Theodore. Stop teasing me.
Let me see those papers."

"We'll look at them together." He removed
the chaotic piles of papers from the coffee table and sat on the
couch. Auntie Lil joined him and they unclipped the many documents
and envelopes from Patricia Kelly's file and spread all of the
items out in front of them.

It was a varied mixture of letters,
postcards and photographs addressed to different partners. The
earliest were dated 1958, but some of the newer letters and cards
were dated as late as 1972.

"My god," Auntie Lil breathed. "This is so
sad."

T.S. could do nothing but agree. The
collection represented years of physical and mental deterioration.
The earliest letters were addressed to Robert Cheswick. Several
months later, John Boswell, Edgar Hale and Stanley Sinclair were
added to the mailing list. Still later, she had included Ralph I.
Peabody, Frederick Dorfen and three or four other partners as well.
All of the letters held a common theme, expressed in various
sentiments but quite clear in their thrust.

"Listen to this," Auntie Lil said sadly. She
held up a small blue notecard. The handwriting was neat, precise
and flowery. The kind T.S. instantly recognized as Catholic school
script.

"Dear Robert," Auntie Lil read. "There is
room in my bed here at the hospital for at least nine more. Even
the sheets are hot. Won't you come meet me for a margarita at
Magritte's ? I long to see my tiger again. You could always bring
your friends. They seem like so much fun. I looked around the other
day and found that I was gone. What do you think of that? Love
always from your sensuous Patty. "

They looked at each other in silence. The
words were bad enough on paper, but read aloud they were sad and
pathetic.

"Bingo on the margaritas and Magritte's,"
Auntie Lil said.

"That's pretty tame stuff compared to this."
T.S. stared down at a piece of notebook paper. The woman's careful
script had deteriorated into an angry scrawl. The letter was
peppered with various sexual suggestions, and a crude drawing of a
woman being attended to by a sexually aroused man dominated the
page.

"Who is that addressed to?" Auntie Lil
demanded. "How very ghastly."

T.S. peered at the envelope attached and
sighed. "This one seems to have been sent to Edgar Hale. But look."
He held up a batch of similar pages stapled together. "She's gone
and sent carbons to at least five others."

"Look at this." Auntie Lil held out a
reproduction of an early French pornographic postcard. A dark and
bored- looking woman with a drooping body and heavy face lay on a
couch, dressed only in a pair of beaded panties. She was pinching
the nipple of each breast artfully between her fingers and smiling
at the camera. The postcard was addressed to John Boswell and the
sender had written in a flowery hand: "Come and get it. Soup's on.
Hot and Spicy. Sweet and Sour. Come and get it like you like it,
hour after hour. Meet me for a margarita at Magritte's?" This time
there was no signature. Auntie Lil paged through the pile and
pulled out several similar postcards.

"Oh my," T.S. said. "Look at this." He held
out a photograph nearly identical in pose to the French postcard.
It showed a slightly heavyset woman lounging on a modern sofa,
dressed only in what looked like the bottom of a leopard-skin
bikini. She was garishly made-up in heavy mascara and lipstick, and
her hair had been teased high in the fashion of the early 1960's.
She wore a pair of high heels and her legs were thrown uncaringly
over one arm of the couch. She, too, was pinching her nipples in
the stylized fashion of the earlier photograph. She smiled gaily at
the camera but her eyes reflected a vacant, almost unseeing stare.
The picture was framed oddly, as if someone had set the shutter on
automatic timer without bothering to check the frame.

Auntie Lil placed both hands over her lips
and made a clicking sound with her tongue against her teeth. "Oh,
Theodore. The poor woman."

T.S. tossed the photograph back on the pile.
"The poor woman? She may be going around killing people." He held
up a carbon of a neatly typed list. "Oh. My. God." He pronounced
each word slowly and distinctly. "Under any other circumstances, I
might have enjoyed this list." He stared down at the paper.

"A list? With names? They may be in
danger."

He showed her the list and they scanned it
together. Ten names appeared. The first three were Robert Cheswick,
John Boswell and Stanley Sinclair. They were followed by Edgar
Hale, Frederick Dorfen, Ralph Peabody and four more names.

"Are all of these men partners?" Auntie Lil
asked.

"No. Just Cheswick, Boswell, Hale and
Dorfen." He looked the list over carefully. "Sinclair and Peabody
you know about. Two others retired early. Very early." He stared at
Auntie Lil. "The other two left Sterling to work for other
companies."

"What's the date on that list?" She peered
at the smudged paper.

"It doesn't say."

"What does it say?" She leaned over to read
the handwritten notes that appeared next to each neatly typed name.
"Oh, my." She sat back and looked the other way.

T.S. looked down at it again. "Performance
Evaluations" was typed neatly at the top. This was followed by the
list of names. Each name, in turn, led to a line or two of
handwritten comments. He read the first few entries:

"1. Robert Cheswick—Average. They say the
first is always the best—unless the first doesn't know what to do
with it. Better at bonds than bed, Bobby?

2. John Boswell—Needs Improvement. If only
he were as good as he thought he was. With all that practice, you’d
think he would have learned.

3. Stanley Sinclair—Needs Improvement. You
really wanted mama, didn't you, little boy? But I guess if you
weren't so little, you wouldn't be such a boy.

4. Edgar Hale—Satisfactory. And you thought
you were the only one? You weren't even the best, just the one who
wanted it the most.

5. Frederick Dorfen—Superior. They say an
older man knows just what he's doing. I say that practice must make
perfect. How about it? Ready, Freddy?''

"I don't think I can read any further," T.S.
said.

"To your great credit. But what's it say
about Ralph Peabody?"

T.S. scanned the list and steeled himself to
read the next entry:

"6. Ralph I. Peabody—The Best. Because when
you think about it, he screwed me to the wall without even coming
near me."

Auntie Lil stared at a wall without comment.
T.S. dropped the list back onto the table.

Auntie Lil coughed politely and he raised
his head to look at her. "Two things come to mind, Theodore," she
said briskly.

"What two things?"

"Number one—I'm glad to see you're not on
that list. Number two, that's a carbon. Where is the original?"

They searched the pile but found no other
copies of the list.

"I guess this is it," he said, holding it
carefully between two fingers as if it might bite or, at best,
smell bad.

"That's it, all right," Auntie Lil replied
grimly. "Right down the line. And if she was still using carbon, it
was probably written no later than the early seventies, wouldn't
you say?"

He stared at the collection of obscene
correspondence. "That's right. It would have been before 1973 or
surely I would have seen these before. I don't know how Peabody
kept them from me." He touched the pile of correspondence with his
hand. "This is so pathetic. It makes me ashamed. Of what, I'm not
sure."

"Yes, poor woman." Auntie Lil sighed again.
"And yet, Theodore, I can't help wondering …"

Her voice trailed off and he was forced to
prompt her. "Wondering what?" he asked.

She placed a hand on the pile of letters and
patted them gently. "How much of what she says is true."

Patricia Kelly's file left no doubt in even
Auntie Lil's mind that it was time to turn the matter over to
Lieutenant Abromowitz. After much discussion, they decided that
T.S. should reveal the killer to him and Edgar Hale at the same
time, thus improving his own reputation in one fell swoop. It
seemed more practical than Auntie Lil's idea to demand an audience
with the chief of police.

T.S. felt it was a lucky coincidence that,
as soon as he arrived at work on Thursday morning, Sheila informed
him both men were waiting for him in the same conference room where
Cheswick's murder weapon had been originally displayed. He gave
Sheila instructions to locate Patricia Kelly's old medical file
and, if possible, her present whereabouts. Sheila stared after him
with a disturbed look on her face as he hurried to meet the
men.

Edgar Hale had shriveled up even more since
T.S. had last seen him. With Stanley Sinclair dead, he was left
without a scapegoat and this seemed to have taken the wind out of
his sails. He sat quietly, a remarkable event, with his hands
clasped and his mouth drawn in a tight, unsmiling line. His tie did
not even remotely match his suit and his wrinkled shirt was further
evidence of his despair.

"I heard you wanted to see me," T.S. said
without preamble. No sense wasting polite chitchat on these two.
Abromowitz stood in a far corner of the room, as if banished there
due to his own shameful actions.

"We're ruined," Hale said. "It wasn't
Sinclair. The police say he could not have killed himself. The
angle and distance are all wrong. He was murdered by Preston
Freeman."

"I beg your pardon?" T.S.
was shocked.
Preston Freeman?
He wouldn't leave his work long enough to murder
somebody.

The old man sighed. "Sterling & Sterling
is ruined. The police have Preston Freeman in custody. They say
he's the one."

"That's absurd," T.S. said, blinking at the
idea of the junior partner committing violence of any sort. "All he
ever thinks about is mergers. Murder would be the last thing on his
mind." T.S. thought back to the meeting when John Boswell's death
had been announced so spectacularly by Mrs. Quincy. It was true
Freeman had remained calm at the news—but was he ever ruffled about
anything?

"The gun that killed Sinclair was definitely
John Boswell's. So it has to be someone close to both of them,"
Edgar Hale interrupted. "And they have concrete evidence that it
was Preston Freeman."

"Not exactly," Abromowitz corrected in a
rather smug tone. "But we're close. I can't divulge the details,
but suffice to say that my original hunch was right."

"Forget hunches," T.S. said, receiving a
glare in return. "What's the evidence? I'm talking about
fingerprints, hair samples, witnesses. Not hunches. You can't
arrest people without evidence."

"We've pieced together an airtight theory."
The lieutenant folded his arms in front of his large stomach and
smiled at T.S.

"A theory? Theories aren't airtight. Let me
guess—it's the IRS."

The lieutenant stared at him. "For your
information, we've uncovered letters in John Boswell's files from
clients complaining that Cheswick had been mishandling accounts. We
believe he hoped to cover his mistakes by generating enough money
through inside trading to replace the lost funds before anyone
noticed. Cheswick enlisted Preston Freeman's aid in obtaining
illegal takeover and merger information, but came to regret his
actions. He planned to confess all, but Preston Freeman, worried
about his own career, tried to stop him. Cheswick refused and was
killed. Cheswick's personal files are missing. We believe Freeman
stole them at the time of the murder because they might have
contained evidence of his and Cheswick's wrongdoing. But Cheswick
had already confessed to Boswell, and Freeman killed him to silence
him as well. I'm confident we'll discover evidence during our
searches of Freeman's homes."

"Oh, come on," T.S. said. "There's evidence
Cheswick was preoccupied and making some mistakes, but that's about
it. It's not like he was embezzling."

"Give us time," the lieutenant said
confidently. "The evidence will turn up. Preston Freeman is a proud
and arrogant bastard. He'd kill to save his own reputation."

Translation: Freeman had not been
cooperative with Abromowitz and he was getting his chops busted as
a result. "Then why is Stanley Sinclair dead?" T.S. asked.

Edgar Hale sighed and spoke. "We think he
discovered what was going on when he checked the partners' personal
financial records. That he tried to blackmail Freeman and, when he
heard about Boswell, panicked and ran. He was hiding out from
Freeman, but bungled it, as usual. Everyone knew he had that summer
house, including Freeman."

T.S. stared at the lieutenant's nose, which
appeared to be suffering from an exotic skin rash, then glanced at
Edgar Hale. The old man looked more tired than anything else. The
anger fueling him was now squelched in hopelessness.

"Why would Cheswick go to Preston Freeman
for help in the first place?" T.S. demanded. "Freeman is the last
person I'd ask to break the law."

"Cheswick was blackmailing Freeman into
giving him insider information," Abromowitz answered stiffly.

"Blackmailing him based on what? Oh,
wait—don't tell me. Preston Freeman had murdered before!" T.S.'s
imitation of a sarcastic Lieutenant Abromowitz was wasted.

Edgar Hale raised his head. "Preston was
arrested for manslaughter when he was in college. There was a large
fight among a number of drunken students and someone fell and hit
his head on concrete and died. He was charged and got probation
because no one was really sure which one of three students had
actually delivered the fatal punch."