A Place Beyond Greed (Part 3)
The detective visits Lottie Richardson-Pryce at her home for an interview and uncovers something suspicious.
Don’t get spoiled! Read Part 1 first!
Frank Richardson banked at a well-known international firm. The tellers there are funny people. You ask them to do the very simple thing of getting a manager to help with your problem, and they get fussy and sour and want to help you instead. Soon as you show them your badge, they vanish like smoke out a window. All that help offered for normal people, but none for the boys downtown.
The bank manager had an inconsequential, forgettable, banker-like name. He declined to show me Frank’s safety deposit box without a warrant, but freely allowed me to access who had come and gone to the deposit box in the past year. Three trips had been made, all by Frank. They hadn’t heard he died, so I didn’t tell them. I told them I was also investigating check fraud and needed to know if any checks under Frank’s account cleared recently. The manager gave me the same warrant routine.
I drove to Lottie’s house for a visit but she wasn’t in. Coincidentally, she was at her bank. I was told I could wait for her to come back if I wanted. I kept my feet in the living room and my behind on the couch. The only thing I bothered with was a printing of Robinson Crusoe with deckled pages.
I was just searching for my prison file to put it out of its misery when the doorbell rang. Another man had come to see Lottie. He was fat with thinning hair and wore round glasses. He struck me as the kind of man who ran PTA meetings a little too well. He looked surprised to see me, but he gave me a polite nod anyways, and took his seat in one of the armchairs. We sat in silence for a little while. I turned the book over in my hands a few times.
“It’s not so bad,” I said.
“What?”
“Crusoe. For a three-hundred-year-old book, it’s not so bad.”
He smiled and nodded and looked uncomfortable. I casually took out a piece of gum and waited. He sighed in less than half a minute.
“I was never a reader,” he said. “Not even as a kid.”
“No? Well, what ticked your clockwork?”
“Numbers. It’s why I became a…” He trailed off and cleared his throat.
I waited for him to continue, but he didn’t. I was one for four on that old trick, now. “Want to play a numbers game while we wait?” I said.
“Oh, no. I couldn’t.”
“You got something else you plan on doing?”
That seemed to sell him. He smiled and bent forward and waved at me to ask him a question. I gave him a few questions, some of which I made up as he was solving the last. I tried to frame them in some interesting scenarios. We passed about an hour that way and even got to talking a little. It never went very deep. He was careful and almost skittish. He didn’t even tell me his name.
Lottie came back unexpectedly while we were in the middle of discussing a number puzzle related to the prisoner’s dilemma. She walked through the door with her sunglasses on and nearly dropped the fabric bag in her hand when she saw me.
“Detective?” she said.
“Detective?” my new friend said, whirling on me.
“Where?” I said. “I’ve got priors. I can’t be seen by the police.”
“I wasn’t expecting you today,” Lottie said. “Is everything alright?”
“Me? Oh I was just stopping through. Had some simple questions to ask, is all. Everything alright with you?”
Lottie had regained some composure. “I had a meeting at the bank. If I had known you were coming—”
“I can see you have company, so I’ll keep it brief.” As I stood, I regarded the horrified look on the other man’s face. “Just a few questions, if that’s okay.”
Lottie nodded and we stepped outside. I kept thinking about that man and how funny he looked. I tried to glance inside the bag she was holding, but it was zippered closed. Whether she saw me or not, Lottie put the bag on her other shoulder, away from me. I tried to remember my lines.
“This is hard to believe,” I said slowly, “but I think Frank owed people money. Bad people. And I think that is what got him killed.”
“What?” she nearly gasped. “Really?”
“You sound like you don’t believe it.”
“No, well—dad wasn’t like that. How?”
“We’re not sure,” I said. “He must have been hiding it well. What did he usually do to pay people?”
“Direct deposit,” Lottie said.
“He ever use checks? Ever send anything in the mail?
“No, no. Everything was through the bank.”
“Birthday gifts, Eddie’s paycheck, endowments for the arts—did he ever cut checks or send cash for anything like that?”
“Direct deposit, always. He had his affairs set up that way. Dad didn’t like ‘fiddling with electronics’, as he always said. So once he had something set up, he let it go or visited the bank to fix it.”
I took a moment to think but it was hard to keep things straight, especially with my own lies mixed in. Here were the facts: Frank didn’t owe anyone. Nothing in his accounts had been flagged as unusual activity. He didn’t send cash or checks to anyone. And yet his house was robbed and he was shot. No witnesses. Valuables taken. It all had the appearance of a true opportunist robbery and coincidental murder. And yet ringing in my head was that call Frank made to 911. “I think someone is here to kill me.” My gut told me they weren’t robbing the place at all. They were looking for Frank, and they found him.
“If you find anything that can help,” I said, “give the department a call.”
“And likewise, detective, please call next time before you arrive.”
“Why?”
That either hurt or annoyed her. “Because it’s very difficult to see the man working on my dad’s case without knowing when he’ll arrive.”
“I’d think you’d want to see me anytime. I might bring good news.”
I knew that was pushing my luck so I apologized, and then promised to call next time. I drove ten minutes down the road with my brain still firing, though all my ideas were stalling out. What was she doing at her bank, and what did that man want with her? It probably was nothing. Maybe it meant something. He didn’t seem like a blackmailer, but I’d known very few myself.
I drove aimlessly for a while longer, then decided I needed to know more about that man. I went back to Lottie’s and parked up the road without passing by the house. The man’s car was still there. So was Lottie’s.
Another few minutes passed and the man lumbered out of the house. He had Lottie’s fabric bag under his arm. He got into his car and trundled away, heading east. I had just reached for the ignition when Lottie bolted out a second later. She got into her car and peeled out heading west. I didn’t think twice about it. I followed her instead.
Lottie drove to the interstate and exited in the middle of the city, west of Winter Park. She crept down a narrow street and I went past, then circled back around looking for her car. It was parked in front of a metalsmith’s joint in a four-store strip plaza. Her blue sedan stuck out like only money can in places it shouldn’t. I parked in the rear and lingered in the neighboring shop waiting for her to leave. It took half an hour, and then she was gone. I waited another fifteen before going into the metalsmith shop. This time I didn’t hesitate to show my badge.
“I need to see what that woman just brought in,” I said.
The thin man working the front happily dashed to the back. He returned with a hand-sized eagle statue.
I stared at it for a solid ten seconds without speaking. My ideas were stalling before; now they were completely choked. I took the statuette back to my car in dead silence. I spent the rest of the day driving around trying to piece out what was giving me a stomachache. Nothing settled it down. I slept badly with that statue in my bedroom.
Early the next morning, a phone call woke me up. It was Bailey.
“We got him,” he said. “We got the bastard.”
“Who?”
“Frank’s murderer. Found a set of prints on the safe. Matched them to one Eddie Ramirez, Frank’s former caretaker. The guy also happens to own a 9mm, which matches the bullet in the wound. We busted his house, found the gun, and—get this—found something freshly buried in his garden. Want to guess what it was? A few thousand dollars in petty cash and a handful of jewelry.”
“There’s no way,” I murmured.
“Yeah, you’re telling me. The boys just cuffed him. You should have heard what he was saying. It’d have made your ears bleed.”
“I want to talk to him.”
“You better hustle. I’ll bet he’ll lawyer up once he calms down.”
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With the last part, and this one, I am on the edge of my seat. If I had the habit of chewing my finger nails, they would be mangled.