The Moneychangers
Avril said, “You’re not to open it here. Wait till you’re away.”
He seized the opportunity and checked his watch. “I shall have to go anyway, my dear.”
“Me, too. I’m flying back to New York tonight.”
They said goodbye in the suite. There could have been an awkwardness at parting. Because of Avril’s practiced savoir-faire there wasn’t.
She draped her arms around him and they held each other closely while she whispered, “You’re a sugarplum, Rossie. We’ll see each other soon.”
Notwithstanding what he had learned, or his present tiredness, his passion for her hadn’t changed. And whatever the cost of “my time,” he thought, one thing was sure: Avril delivered value in return.
Roscoe Heyward took a taxi from the hotel to First Mercantile American Headquarters Tower. In the main floor foyer of the bank building he left word that in fifteen minutes he would require a car and driver to take him home. Then he rode an elevator to the 36th floor and walked through silent corridors, past deserted desks, to his office suite.
At his desk he opened the sealed envelope which Avril had given him. In a second package inside, interleaved with tissue, were a dozen enlarged photographs.
That second night in the Bahamas, when the girls and men had bathed naked in Big George’s pool, the photographer had remained discreetly invisible. Perhaps he employed a telephoto lens, possibly was screened from view by shrubbery in the lush garden. He had certainly used a fast film because there had been no betraying flash. It scarcely mattered. He—or she—had been there just the same.
The photos showed Krista, Rhetta, Moonbeam, Avril, and Harold Austin undressing and unclothed. Roscoe Heyward appeared with the naked girls around him, his face a study in fascination. There was a view of Heyward unfastening Avril’s dress and bra; another of her kissing him, his fingers curled around her breasts. Whether by accident or design, only the back of Vice-President Stonebridge could be seen.
Technically and artistically the quality of all photographs was high and obviously the photographer had been no amateur. But then, Heyward thought, G. G. Quartermain was accustomed to paying for the best.
Notably, in none of the photographs did Big George appear.
The photos appalled Heyward by their existence. And why had they been sent? Were they some kind of threat? Or a heavy-handed joke? Where were the negatives and other copies? He was beginning to realize that Quartermain was a complex, capricious, perhaps even dangerous, man.
On the other hand, despite the shock, Heyward found himself fascinated. As he studied the photographs, unconsciously he moistened his lips with his tongue. His first impulse had been to destroy them. Now he couldn’t do it.
He was startled to find he had been at his desk for nearly half an hour.
Obviously he couldn’t take the photos home. What then? Carefully repacking them, he locked the envelope in a desk drawer where he kept several personal, private files.
Out of habit, he checked another drawer where Mrs. Callaghan was apt to leave current papers when she cleared his desk at night. On top of the pile inside were those concerning the additional Q-Investments loan. He reasoned: Why delay? Why vacillate? Was there really any need to consult Patterton a second time? The loan was sound, as were G. G. Quartermain and Supranational. Removing the papers, Heyward scribbled an approved and added his initials.
A few minutes later he came down to the foyer. His driver was waiting, the limousine outside.
14
Only rarely, nowadays, did Nolan Wainwright have occasion to visit the city morgue. The last time, he recalled, was three years before when he identified the body of a bank guard killed in a robbery shoot-out. When Wainwright was a police detective, visiting morgues and viewing the victims of violent crime was a necessary and frequent part of his job. But even then he had never grown used to it. A morgue, any morgue, with its aura of death and charnel house smell, depressed him and sometimes turned his stomach. It did now.
The sergeant of city detectives, who had met him by arrangement, walked stolidly beside Wainwright down a gloomy passageway, their footsteps echoing sharply off the ancient, cracked tile floor. The morgue attendant preceding them, who looked as if he would soon be a customer here himself, was wearing rubber-soled shoes and shambled ahead silently.
The detective, whose name was Timberwell, was young, overweight, had unkempt hair and needed a shave. Many things had changed, Nolan Wainwright ruminated, in the twelve years since he had been a city police lieutenant.
Timberwell said, “If the dead guy is your man, when was the last time you saw him?”
“Seven weeks ago. Beginning of March.”
“Where?”
“A little bar across town. The Easy Over.”
“I know the place. Did you hear from him after that?”
“No.”
“Any idea where he lived?”
Wainwright shook his head. “He didn’t want me to know. So I played it his way.”
Nolan Wainwright hadn’t been sure of the man’s name either. He had been given one, but almost certainly it was false. As a matter of fairness he hadn’t tried to discover the real one. All he knew was that “Vic” was an ex-con who needed money and was prepared to be an undercover informer.
Last October, on Wainwright’s urging, Alex Vandervoort had authorized him to employ an informer to seek out the source of counterfeit Keycharge bank credit cards, then appearing in disquieting numbers. Wainwright put out feelers, using contacts in the inner city, and later, through more intermediaries, a meeting between himself and Vic had been arranged and a deal agreed on. That was in December. The security chief remembered it well because Miles Eastin’s trial had taken place the same week.
There were two other encounters between Vic and Wainwright in the months which followed, each in a different out-of-the-way bar, and on all three occasions Wainwright had handed over money, gambling on receiving value for it later. Their communications scheme was one-sided. Vic could telephone him, setting up a meeting at a place of Vic’s choosing, though Wainwright had no means of contact in return. But he saw the reasoning behind the arrangement and accepted it.
Wainwright hadn’t liked Vic, but then had not expected to. The ex-con was shifty, evasive, with the perpetually drippy nose and other outward signs of a narcotics user. He exhibited contempt for everything, including Wainwright; his lip was permanently curled. But at their third meeting, in March, it seemed as if he might have stumbled on a lead.
He reported a rumor: A big supply of bogus twenty-dollar bills of high quality was ready to be spread out through distributors and passers. According to still more scuttlebutt, somewhere back in the shadows—behind the distributors—was a high-powered, competent organization into other lines of action, including credit cards. This last information was vague, and Wainwright suspected Vic might have made it up to please him. On the other hand he might not.
More specifically, Vic claimed he had been promised a small piece of the action with the counterfeit money. He figured that if he got it, and became trusted, he could work his way deeper into the organization. One or two details which, in Wainwright’s opinion, Vic would not have had the knowledge or wit to invent, convinced the bank security chief that the main thrust of the information was authentic. The proposed plan also made sense.
Wainwright had always assumed that whoever was producing the fraudulent Keycharge bank cards was likely to be involved with other forms of counterfeiting. He had told Alex Vandervoort so last October. One thing he knew for certain: It would be highly dangerous to try to penetrate the organization and an informer—if discovered—was dead. He had felt obliged to warn Vic of this and was rewarded for his trouble by a sneer.
After that meeting, Wainwright had not heard from Vic again.
Yesterday a small news item in the Times-Register, about a body found floating in the river, caught his attention.
“I should warn you,” Detective Sergeant Timberwell sa
id, “that what’s left of this guy isn’t pretty. The medics figure he was in the water for a week. Also, there’s a lot of traffic on that river and it looks as if some boat propeller cut him up.”
Still trailing the elderly attendant, they entered a brightly lighted, long, low-ceilinged room. The air was chill. It smelled of disinfectant. Occupying one wall, facing them, was what looked like a giant file cabinet with stainless steel drawers, each identified by a number. A hum of refrigeration equipment came from behind the cabinet.
The attendant peered shortsightedly at a clipboard he was carrying, then went to a drawer midway down the room. He pulled and the drawer slid out silently on nylon bearings. Inside was the lumpy shape of a body, covered by a paper sheet.
“These are the remains you wanted, officers,” the old man said. As casually as if uncovering cucumbers, he folded back the sheet.
Wainwright wished he hadn’t come. He felt sick.
Once, the body they were looking at had had a face. It didn’t have any more. Immersion, putrefaction and something else—probably a boat propeller, as Timberwell said—had left flesh layers exposed and lacerated. From the mess, white bones protruded.
They studied the corpse in silence, then the detective asked, “You see anything you can identify?”
“Yes,” Wainwright said. He had been peering at the side of the face where what remained of the hairline met the neck. The apple-shaped red scar—undoubtedly a birthmark—was still clearly visible. Wainwright’s trained eye had observed it on each of the three occasions that he and Vic had met. Though the lips that had sneered so frequently were gone, without doubt the body was that of his undercover agent. He told Timberwell, who nodded.
“We identified him ourselves from fingerprints. They weren’t the clearest, but good enough.” The detective took out a notebook and opened it. “His real name, if you’ll believe it, was Clarence Hugo Levinson. He had several other names he used, and a long record, mostly petty stuff.”
“The news report said he died of stab wounds, not drowning.”
“It’s what the autopsy showed. Before that he was tortured.”
“How do you know?”
“His balls were crushed. The pathologist’s report said they must have been put in some kind of vise which was tightened until they burst. You want to see?”
Without waiting to be told, the attendant pulled back the remainder of the paper sheet.
Despite shrinkage of the genitals during immersion, autopsy had exposed enough to show the truth of Timberwell’s statement. Wainwright gulped. “Oh, Christ!” He motioned to the old man. “Cover him up.”
Then he urged Timberwell, “Let’s get out of here.”
Over strong black coffee in a tiny restaurant a half block from the morgue, Detective Sergeant Timberwell soliloquized, “Poor bastard! Whatever he’d done, no one deserves that.” He produced a cigarette, lit it, and offered the pack. Wainwright shook his head.
“I guess I know how you’re feeling,” Timberwell said. “You get hardened to some things. But there sure are others that make you think.”
“Yes.” Wainwright was remembering his own responsibility for what had happened to Clarence Hugo Levinson, alias Vic.
“I’ll need a statement from you, Mr. Wainwright. Summarizing those things you told me about your arrangement with the deceased. If it’s all the same to you, I’d like to go to the precinct house and take it after we’re finished here.”
“All right.”
The policeman blew a smoke ring and sipped his coffee. “What’s the score about counterfeit credit cards—right now?”
“More and more are being used. Some days it’s like an epidemic. It’s costing banks like ours a lot of money.”
Timberwell said skeptically, “You mean it’s costing the public money. Banks like yours pass those losses on. It’s why your top management people don’t care as much as they should.”
“I can’t argue with you there.” Wainwright remembered his own lost arguments about bigger budgets to fight bank-related crime.
“Is the quality of the cards good?”
“Excellent.”
The detective ruminated. “That’s exactly what the Secret Service tell us about the phony money that’s circulating in the city. There’s a lot of it. I guess you know.”
“Yes, I do.”
“So maybe that dead guy was right in figuring both things came from the same source.”
Neither man spoke, then the detective said abruptly, “There’s something I should warn you about. Maybe you’ve thought of it already.”
Wainwright waited.
“When he was tortured, whoever did it made him talk. You saw him. There’s no way he wouldn’t have. So you can figure he sang about everything, including the deal he had with you.”
“Yes, I’d thought of it.”
Timberwell nodded. “I don’t think you’re in any danger yourself, but as far as the people who killed Levinson are concerned, you’re poison. If anyone they deal with as much as breathes the same air as you, and they find out, he’s dead—nastily.”
Wainwright was about to speak when the other silenced him.
“Listen, I’m not saying you shouldn’t send some other guy underground. That’s your business and I don’t want to know about it—at least, not now. But I’ll say this: If you do, be super-careful and stay away from him yourself. You owe him that much.”
“Thanks for the warning,” Wainwright said. He was still thinking about the body of Vic as he had seen it with the covering removed. “I doubt very much if there’ll be anyone else.”
PART THREE
1
Though it continued to be difficult on her $98 weekly bank teller’s wage ($83 take-home after deductions), somehow Juanita managed, week by week, to support herself and Estela and to pay the fees for Estela’s nursery school. Juanita had even—by August—slightly reduced the debt to the finance company which her husband, Carlos, had burdened her with before abandoning her. The finance firm had obligingly rewritten the contract, making the monthly installments smaller, though they now stretched on—with heavier interest payments—three years into the future.
At the bank, while Juanita had been treated considerately after the false accusations against her last October, and staff members had gone out of their way to be cordial, she had established no close friendships. Intimacy did not come easily to her. She had a natural wariness of people, partly inbred, partly conditioned by experience. The center of her life, the apogee to which each working day progressed, were the evening hours which she and Estela spent together.
They were together now.
In the kitchen of their tiny but comfortable Forum East apartment, Juanita was preparing dinner, assisted—and at times hindered—by the three-year-old. They had both been rolling and shaping Bisquick baking mix, Juanita to provide a top for the meat pie, Estela manipulating a purloined piece of the dough with her tiny fingers as imagination prompted.
“Mommy! Look, I made a magic castle!”
They laughed together. “¡Qué lindo, mi cielo!” Juanita said affectionately. “We will put the castle in the oven with the pie. Then both will become magic.”
For the pie Juanita had used stewing beef, mixing in onions, a potato, fresh carrots, and a can of peas. The vegetables made up in volume for the small quantity of meat, which was all Juanita could afford. But she was an instinctively inventive cook and the pie would be tasty and nutritious.
It had been in the oven for twenty minutes, with another ten to go, and Juanita was reading to Estela from a Spanish translation of Hans Andersen, when a knock sounded on the apartment door. Juanita stopped reading, listening uncertainly. Visitors at any time were rare; it was especially unusual for anyone to call this late. After a few moments the knock was repeated. With some nervousness, motioning Estela to remain where she was, Juanita got up and went slowly to the door.
Her apartment was on a floor by itself at the top of what had once been
a single dwelling, but which long ago was divided into separately rented living quarters. The Forum East developers retained the divisions in the building, while modernizing and repairing. But redevelopment alone did not amend the fact that Forum East generally was in an area notorious for a high crime rate, especially muggings and break-ins. Thus, although the apartment complexes were fully populated, at night most occupants locked and bolted themselves in. There was a stout outer door, useful for protection, on the main floor of Juanita’s building, except that other tenants often left it open.
Immediately outside Juanita’s apartment was a narrow landing at the head of a flight of stairs. With her ear pressed against the door, she called out, “Who is there?” There was no answer, but once more the knock—soft but insistent—was repeated.
She made certain that the inside protective chain was in place, then unlocked the door and opened it a few inches—all the chain allowed.
At first, because of dim lighting, she could see nothing, then a face came into view and a voice asked, “Juanita, may I talk to you? I have to—please! Will you let me come in?”
She was startled. Miles Eastin. But neither the voice nor the face were those of the Eastin she had known. Instead, the figure which she could see better now was pale and emaciated, his speech unsure and pleading.
She stalled for time to think. “I thought you were in prison.”
“I got out. Today.” He corrected himself. “I was released on parole.”
“Why have you come here?”
“I remembered where you lived.”
She shook her head, keeping the door chain fastened. “It was not what I asked. Why come to me?”
“Because all I’ve thought about for months, all through that time inside, was seeing you, talking to you, explaining …”
“There is nothing to explain.”
“But there is! Juanita, I’m begging you. Don’t turn me away! Please!”
From behind her, Estela’s bright voice asked, “Mommy, who is it?”
“Juanita,” Miles Eastin said, “there’s nothing to be frightened about—for you or your little girl. I’ve nothing with me except this.” He held up a small battered suitcase. “It’s just the things they gave me back when I came out.”