The Man Who Risked His Partner

  “We need a lever. We can’t match his muscle and resources. And you don’t want us to go to the police. We need some way to make him back off. A threat of some kind.” Her detachment didn’t make her especially persuasive. Maybe she didn’t really believe what she was saying. “We need that laundry.

  “I want all the documentation you can get your hands on. Copies, addresses, account numbers, all of it. I want it today. First we’ll show him we have the same information you do. Then we’ll convince him it’s protected. The cops and the DA will get it if anything happens to any of us.

  “And then”—her tone remained distant, but her eyes nailed Haskell—“we’ll find out just how dependent on violence he is.”

  He didn’t look happy. When she was done, he shook his head. “That won’t work. I told Axbrewder I can’t prove anything. It’s all inferential. It wouldn’t stand up in court.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” she replied. “What matters is what we can make el Senor believe. As long as he thinks we can prove it, he’ll have to pay attention.”

  If I were Haskell, the way her mind worked would’ve cheered me right up. But he didn’t seem to get any pleasure out of it. Maybe it wasn’t enough like cowboys-and-Indians.

  He stared out at the bank for a long minute. Then he said, “I’ll try.” Gleaming, irresistible Reg actually sounded morose. “I might not be able to do it today. I don’t have regular access to all those files and records.”

  Ginny let the acid back into her voice. “Give it your best shot. You’re a walking dead man until we have a lever.”

  “All right.” He didn’t enjoy being talked to like that. “Pick me up at four thirty.” Swinging the door open, he got out and slammed it behind him.

  As he walked toward the bank, he looked like he could feel the sky leaning down on him.

  I turned around, got both arms over the back of the seat. Knotting my fists in Ginny’s coat, I pulled her to me and kissed her.

  She didn’t know whether to kiss me back or get mad. There was too much going on. When I let her go, she leaned back against the upholstery. Tension stretched the skin of her face taut and pale. “Someday,” she muttered, “you’re going to meet a woman who isn’t scared blind by your sheer size, and she’ll break her hand trying to slap you.”

  I almost laughed. But I was distracted by a car pulling into the space beside the Continental. I’d seen that car before. It was driven by a woman dressed like a daisy.

  “With your permission,” I said to Ginny. Mock deference. Every once in a while, I’m faster than she is. A second after Eunice Wint closed the door of her car, I got out of the Continental.

  She was in a hurry—late to work—but my sudden appearance stopped her. She gave me a quick smile. “Mr. Axbrewder.” She still had the radiant look of a puppy in love. I would’ve felt sorry for her if I’d had the time. “You’re early. We don’t open until nine.”

  I met her smile with my harmless-galoot grin. “No problem. Just one question. Mr. Haskell forgot his briefcase. Left it at home. Do you think we should go get it for him?”

  Poor Eunice. She never had a chance. She was too happy and young, and maybe just a little slow. Haskell seemed to like women who didn’t exhibit what you might call penetrating intellect.

  “Oh, no,” she said promptly. “Don’t worry about it. He doesn’t need it.”

  Then she realized what she was doing.

  The way her skin burned was painful to watch. Even the sides of her neck blushed. Without meaning to, she told me more than I thought she knew.

  Lamely she tried to cover herself by saying, “He only takes work home over the weekends.” But it was too late for that.

  I did what I could to let her off the hook. “He’s a lucky man,” I said. Trying to make my grin suggest more than one kind of envy. “That saves us a trip. Thanks.”

  With a wave for her benefit, I climbed back into the Continental.

  “Someday,” I growled to Ginny, “one of us has simply got to poke him in the eye with a sharp stick. She knows exactly why he carries an empty briefcase.”

  Softly Ginny asked, “Do you think she’ll tell us?”

  “You ask her. I’m sick of picking on children.”

  Ginny didn’t react to that. Instead she pointed across the street at a restaurant called Granny Good’s Family Food. “Let’s get a cup of coffee.”

  Snarling inane obscenities to myself, I started up the car and stroked over to the restaurant. This way Haskell might think we were going to leave him alone.

  Inside the restaurant was identical to every other so-called “family-style” joint in the city, with bright vinyl-covered benches, waitresses so young that they could hardly spell their own names, and a menu larded with pancakes, hamburgers, and leather steaks. I took a booth while Ginny went to use the phone. When she came back, she seemed more brittle than ever. Her nose was too pale, and her cheeks were too red, and the muscles around her eyes were tight with strain. She worked on this case because I wanted her to, but her fear hadn’t diminished any.

  With her left forearm stuffed protectively into the pocket of her coat, she sat down opposite me. We ordered a pot of coffee. She swallowed a few more vitamins. I stared out through the window at the bank, watching the weather congeal. The heavy clouds and the threat of snow made the ice cream parlor look like a loony bin—the kind of place where ax murderers and presidential assassins are locked up for their own good. It was probably the most successful bank branch in the whole city.

  We didn’t have to wait long. Ginny still knew how to get results over the phone. No more than five minutes after our coffee arrived, a tall thin man wearing an immaculate banker’s pinstripe left the ice cream parlor. She’d gotten his attention, all right—he wasn’t even wearing a coat. Hunching his shoulders against the cold, he crossed the street in our direction.

  I waved at him through the window. He came into Granny Good’s and found his way to our booth.

  Jordan Canthorpe, Eunice Wint’s fiance.

  Up close, the prim way he carried his hands seemed about right, but his face looked too young for the suit. His hair was so blond and fine it was almost invisible, and his mustache was self-effacing to the point of nonexistence. His soft smooth skin wouldn’t age well. In about ten years, people would think he was his wife’s son—if he ever succeeded at getting married. On top of that, he was doing his best to age himself with worry, and it showed. His pale eyes had a harried cast.

  Nevertheless, he felt too much internal pressure to be easily handled. “Ms. Fistoulari?” he asked in a high voice, as tight as a wire. “I don’t like phone calls like that. I have work to do. The bank opens in eighteen minutes. Why can’t you come talk to me normally in my office?”

  Neither of us stood up. Ginny gave him her woman-of-steel look. “If we did that, Reg Haskell would see us talking to you.”

  I smiled and offered him a seat beside me. “Want some coffee?”

  Automatically he said, “No, thank you.” For a moment his gaze shifted back and forth between me and Ginny. Then, abruptly, he folded himself into the booth.

  “Reg Haskell is our chief accountant,” he said unsteadily. “He does excellent work, and has for years. We’re fortunate to have him. You have no business asking me questions about him. I shouldn’t talk to you at all.”

  It was Ginny’s turn to smile. It didn’t soften her gaze.

  “Mr. Canthorpe, Reg Haskell is in danger. He hired us to protect him. Somebody wants to kill him.”

  Canthorpe stared at her. If he could’ve seen himself, he would’ve cringed at the way his mouth hung open. His voice almost cracked when he said, “I don’t believe it.”

  Conversationally—and still smiling—I said, “Last night they blew up the car we were using. This morning they tried again. I don’t think they’ll keep missing much longer.”

  He looked at me, gulped a little air, turned a face full of distress back toward Ginny. “I don’t believe it,” he rep
eated. But he believed it, all right. He’d probably given more than a little thought to killing Haskell himself.

  We watched him and waited while he thought himself into a sweat. A few seconds passed before he started to look horrified. Then he said, “I don’t know anything about it. Why would I?” His long clean hands hugged each other on the tabletop. “Why do you think I know anything about it?”

  Left to myself, I would’ve said, He’s screwing your fiancé. That girl’s never going to marry you now. Not after she’s had a taste of irresistible Reg. Why wouldn’t you want him dead? But Ginny was smoother.

  “This is a complicated case, Mr. Canthorpe. Mr. Haskell is in serious danger, but we don’t know from whom. That makes our job difficult.” Old master-of-understatement Fistoulari. “We have to investigate every lead we can find.” As she talked, she began to let herself sound less formal. “If we can, we want to get at his enemies before they get at him.

  “What we need from you is information. There are two crucial points we have to track down. You can help us with both of them.”

  Canthorpe squinted at her. He didn’t seem to notice that she hadn’t answered his question, but he controlled his dismay anyway. Very carefully, he said, “Ms. Fistoulari, surely you realize that the private lives of our people are just that, private. They deserve confidentiality. And I certainly can’t discuss the bank’s business with you.”

  She didn’t so much as blink. “Before you refuse, don’t you think you should hear what we have to say?”

  Now he remembered that she hadn’t answered his question. He took a tighter grip on himself and nodded slowly.

  I leaned into the corner of the booth to watch. The seats in restaurants like Granny Good’s are deliberately designed to be uncomfortable so that people will eat fast and get out, make room for other customers. Nevertheless I kept my kindly-uncle smile glued on my face and tried to be stoical.

  Staring at him was part of my job. Make people nervous while Ginny talks to them. It’s surprising how nervous they get when a man my size just sits there and smiles at them.

  Vaguely I wondered what story she was going to tell him. She certainly couldn’t tell him the truth. Professional ethics didn’t countenance lapses like that.

  She has more scruples than most private investigators, but she wasn’t wearing them where Canthorpe could see them. “As I say, Mr. Haskell has hired us to protect him. We’re licensed by the state for this kind of work. Naturally we need to know why anybody would want to kill him.

  “He tells us he can only think of one reason. During the past few months, apparently, he’s stumbled onto what he calls a money laundry, a way to conceal sources of illegal income. He believes one of Puerta del Sol’s leading criminal figures is using your bank to process his profits from gambling, prostitution, and drugs.” She spread it on thick. “Through a series of dummy accounts and companies, he makes his income hard to trace, disguising his involvement in criminal activities.”

  She hadn’t reached the point yet, but Canthorpe couldn’t resist a banker’s question. “How is it done?”

  She told him what Haskell had told me.

  “That’s quite possible.” He nodded to himself, thinking furiously. When he didn’t watch what they were doing, his hands made little stroking gestures along his mustache. “But it’s highly unlikely that such a laundry would be discovered by accident.” He wasn’t used to this kind of reasoning. It took him a moment to catch up. “Hasn’t Haskell gone to the police?”

  Ginny shook her head. “He says he doesn’t have enough proof.”

  “But if he lacks proof, and he hasn’t made his findings public”—Canthorpe was getting confused—“then this criminal can’t know about them. Why would he try to kill him for knowing something he doesn’t know he knows?”

  She didn’t waver. Making it up out of whole cloth, she said, “Mr. Haskell thinks somebody at the bank found out what he was doing and ratted on him.”

  I went on smiling. In the privacy of my head, I gave her a round of applause.

  Canthorpe gaped at her. “That’s preposterous!”

  She put a little more bite in her voice. “Mr. Canthorpe, are you telling me that if Mr. Haskell stumbled on a money laundry and began to trace it, nobody else would be aware of what he was doing? That nobody else could be aware of it?”

  “Well, no.” Her tone made him retreat a step. “I don’t mean that precisely. Logs are kept. Access to files is limited or supervised. He would have to go rather far afield from his normal duties. Someone might become suspicious. Especially someone with prior knowledge of the laundry’s existence.”

  Apparently Canthorpe wasn’t stupid. For a second there, I wondered if Ginny would be able to get around him.

  Gathering indignation, he added, “But that in itself is preposterous. No one who works for the First Puerta del Sol National Bank would ever—”

  “Oh, spare me,” Ginny cut in. “I’m sure everybody who has ever worked for any bank anywhere is pure as the driven snow. But there’s only one way to be sure, isn’t there?”

  “To be sure?”

  “Trace the laundry yourself. Find out who might’ve been in a position to realize what Haskell was up to.”

  If I’d said that, it would’ve sounded like I was reading it off a cereal box. But from her it made a queer kind of sense. For him, I mean. For me, there was nothing queer about it. She was just trying to verify Haskell’s story. And to set Canthorpe up for what she really wanted.

  From a banker’s point of view, however, her suggestion only held together by force of personality. “That might be possible,” he said slowly. He didn’t have any idea what he was getting into. On the other hand, Haskell was a subject he couldn’t leave alone. “It would be easier,” he went on, “if you gave me a name.”

  Ginny nodded fractionally and glanced at me.

  Softly, so that I wouldn’t sound too much like I was swearing, I said, “Héctor Jesús Fría de la Sancha.” El Senor.

  Fumbling, Canthorpe pulled a notepad and a silver pen out of his breast pocket and wrote the name down.

  She had him where she wanted him. When he finished writing, she said, “That’s one of the points you can help us with. The other is much easier.”

  He looked at her like he was going to be sick. This was all too much for him—which was exactly what she wanted. He couldn’t have walked out on us then to save his soul.

  “We have to investigate every possibility,” she said. “It’s Mr. Haskell’s idea that somebody found out he was tracing Senor Fría’s money. Personally, I consider that farfetched.”

  She could afford to admit it now. Just made her sound more plausible. Now he’d probably never figure out that he’d been lied to.

  “It’s more likely, I think”—her eyes were hard, but she didn’t give him any warning—“that somebody he knows, somebody he works with, wants him dead for personal reasons.”

  Canthorpe’s whole body went rigid. We were back to the subject that got his attention in the first place. Holding on to the edge of the table with both hands, he said, “What personal reasons?”

  It was my turn. I didn’t have any trouble making my smile look sad. “We’re just trying to do our job. You know what personal reasons as well as we do. We saw Haskell leave your fiancée’s apartment this morning.”

  He had the opposite problem Eunice Wint did. When something hit him that hard, all the blood rushed out of him. He turned so pale that he looked like he might evaporate. For a moment he shoved the heels of his hands into his eyes. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d started to cry.

  But then he dropped his hands back to the table. They left red marks under his eyes like scars on his white skin. His voice shook, but it wasn’t because he was in danger of crying.

  “I’m a conservative man,” he said. “Banking is a conservative profession. I earn a good income. I value traditional things. Honesty, family, security, fidelity. Kindness.

  “Reg Hask
ell has no moral sense at all.

  “He considers himself some kind of sexual buccaneer. For two or three years now, he’s cut a swath through our staff of tellers and receptionists. He has them standing in line. No amount of promiscuity satisfies him, and he makes the women around him promiscuous simply by smiling at them.

  “I thought Eunice would be different. She seemed too pure for him.” Even though his voice shook, he spoke with dignity. “I had no wish to fall in love with one of his discards. A man like that has no business working in a bank.”

  “A man like that,” Ginny said quietly, “must’ve hurt a lot of people. Were any of them hurt badly enough to want to kill him?”

  Any of them besides yourself, Mr. Canthorpe?

  The clarity of his anger was fading. “That’s the terrible part,” he said with more self-pity. “His women don’t act hurt. They’re grateful.” Then a spasm of memory twisted his face for a second. “Most of them.”

  “Most of them?” Ginny asked.

  “There was one who wasn’t.” The quiver in his voice resembled disgust. “About six months ago. She took it to heart—the way Eunice does. But I’m afraid she wasn’t very stable. We had to let her go. We try not to impose our standards on the private lives of our employees, but the way she dithered around after him affected her work. One day, she made a scene in the lobby.” His face twitched again. “We had no choice.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Gail Harmon.” Remembering her made him distant. He didn’t seem to realize what he was implying about her. “The other tellers called her Frail Gail. She was beautiful in such a fragile way.”

  “Do you know where we can find her?”

  Without thinking about it, he gave us the address, a number down on Bosque in the South Valley. Right in the middle of Puerta del Sol’s barrio. He said it like he’d been meditating on it for hours, using it for some kind of mantra.

  That surprised me. Your typical bank branch manager has better things to do with his time than sit around memorizing the addresses of people who don’t work for him anymore. But I thought I understood it.