The Banker, page 4
The spring weather made for a pleasant walk back to the office and, except for what I was thinking about, it was enjoyable. There were no messages on the machine. An espresso and pipe were just things that would help me clear my head.
I set up the espresso machine and then packed tobacco into the pipe while waiting for it to brew. I was able to light the pipe with a single match, and it was drawing nicely by the time the tiny cup was filled with the dark, bitter brew. I opened the office window, letting the smoke out and the street noises in. I decided to call Brock. I was sure he was up to his eyeballs in cops right now, but I was getting squirrelly.
I dug my address book out of the desk drawer. When I found Brock’s number, I pulled the phone closer and dialed. I listened to his office number ring and ring. Finally, it went to an answering machine that stated that the bank was closed due to an emergency. That made sense, it wouldn’t do to have the bank open the day after an employee was murdered in it. I hung up and, after consulting my address book, called Brock’s home number.
This time he answered after a few rings. ‘Hello.’
‘Brock, it’s Andy Roark. I saw the news in the Globe.’
‘Oh. You don’t think it’s connected to why I hired you?’
‘No. At least I don’t think so. It seems very unlikely, but …’
‘But what?’
‘It’s just a bit of a coincidence, happening so soon after.’
‘Mr Roark, I was with the police going over this all day. I can’t see how any of this would be connected. Banks get robbed all the time. That’s why we have an armed guard.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘Two men came in, and before Chet could do anything, they hit him over the head. Knocked him out cold. Chet isn’t a spring chicken, and I am not surprised they got the better of him. He’s been retired from the local police department for almost twenty years now.’
‘I see.’ I knew plenty of guys who had traded a cop’s uniform for the pale imitation of a security guard’s. The pay usually wasn’t great, but it was a nice way to augment a pension.
‘They were waving their guns around. Yelling at the tellers to empty the drawers and that if anyone tripped the alarm, they’d start shooting.’
‘How did Cosgrove get in the mix?’
‘He stood up, started to say something. I think he was trying to calm them down. One of them just shot him. No warning. No nothing.’
‘Didn’t say anything at all?’
‘No. He just fired once and Frank was dead. Just like that.’ Brock’s voice sounded a little detached, and I started to wonder if he had a drink or three when he got home from the cops. I couldn’t blame him. Seeing someone you know and work with every day cut down in front of you was tough.
‘That’s tough. How’s everyone taking it?’
‘Taking it? How do you think we’re taking it?’ he snapped.
‘Easy, Brock.’
‘Sorry, it’s just upsetting seeing someone shot in front of you. I’m just a banker, for Christ’s sake, I’ve never seen anyone killed before.’
‘It’s hard to take in. I get that. I was just wondering if there was anyone in the bank who didn’t act shocked?’
‘Not that I can think of. I mean, it happened so fast.’
‘What about afterwards?’
‘After, I think we were all in shock, and then the police were there in no time.’
‘OK.’
‘Why are you asking? I thought you had closed the investigation?’
‘Well, I didn’t see any indication that anyone was living above their means, which was what you hired me to do.’
‘I hired you to find an embezzler.’
‘You don’t think this recent string of crimes, like your bank getting robbed, is a little odd. You know, timing-wise?’
‘I don’t know, Mr Roark. Like I said, banks get robbed all the time. All that cash attracts a lot of felons with guns. Some of them think that a smaller branch in a smaller town is an easier target. Small town cops and not a lot of security, that type of thing.’
‘They do, but …’
‘Look, Mr Roark, I hired you to find an embezzler and you came up short. If you think I’m going to pay to keep looking into it when you left after a couple of weeks because it was boring, you’re mistaken.’
‘Listen, Brock, you hired me to—’
‘I know what I hired you to do, and you didn’t do a good job of it. Now one of my employees is dead and you’re looking for more money.’
‘Brock …’
‘Good day, sir,’ he said and he hung up.
I sat in my chair with the handset in my hand, the dial tone unpleasant and a bit harsh, not unlike how Brock had been. I put the handset in the cradle and couldn’t decide if I wanted another espresso. It didn’t seem particularly appealing, or maybe my mood had just gone sour. I decided against more coffee.
‘He actually said, “Good day, sir,”’ I said to the empty office in mild disbelief. I pulled one of the many yellow legal pads I have on my desk over to me. I took out a felt-tip pen and started writing down the names of everyone involved in the Amesbury Community Bank, starting with Brock, the three names he put forward for being potential embezzlers, and lastly, Chet, the unfortunate security guard.
The smoke from the pipe filled the office, and I tapped my blue felt-tip pen against my desk. Then I added ‘Bank Robber 1’ and ‘Bank Robber 2’ to the sheet. I decided since one of them had to be it to add, ‘shooter’ next to ‘Bank Robber 1.’ I thought about it some more and added, ‘Getaway Driver?’ to the page. If repeated viewings of Charley Varrick had taught me anything, it was that any bank robbery team required a getaway driver.
I tapped my pen and doodled on the pad trying to think of more relevant things to add to the legal pad. It was frustrating to have so little to show for a couple weeks of surveillance work. Or maybe I was annoyed with myself. Brock wasn’t wrong, I had been bored with the case and I wasn’t sure that I could say that I did the best job on it. That had nothing to do with Cosgrove’s murder, but it still irked me.
What if I had still been on the case? Would I have realized a robbery was going down? Rushed over to stop it with my .38 or called the cops? Getting in a shootout in a strip mall in the afternoon didn’t seem like the smartest idea. Too many people around to catch a stray bullet. It wasn’t worth playing hero with those odds.
I stood up and pushed the legal pad away from the desk. I tapped my pipe bowl down against the bottom of the ashtray, knocking out the ash and a small wad of unburnt but useless tobacco. There wasn’t much point in staying at the office anymore. I grabbed my jacket off the hook on the coat tree, let myself out of the office and locked the door behind me.
It was late afternoon and nearing the point when a certain type of person slips out of the office early to go to a bar for the first much needed drink of the day. I wanted to join them, and my old friend Danny Sullivan would be sure to be in a bar not far from my office, but I was meeting Angela for dinner at my place. Needless to say, that was a much cheerier prospect than a drink or five with Danny.
Danny was a defense attorney. A good one and, like all the good ones, expensive. His clients tended to be mafia types who didn’t like the idea of going to federal prison, or any prison for that matter. I couldn’t blame them for that. Danny had once sent a case my way and then was indiscreet about it, which almost got me killed. I was angry about that, and in the Grille at the Ritz Carlton, I had told him I would kill him if he crossed my path again. It was the anger talking.
The walk home helped ease some of the annoyance I was feeling. I had half-assed the case because it bored me. But that didn’t mean that I was wrong in not finding signs that Cosgrove, Marti or Lintz were spending lavishly. The case was a dog that didn’t hunt. Maybe I had missed something with Cosgrove? That’s what was nagging me.
I kept going over it in my head. If he had been embezzling, robbing the bank and murdering him just seemed like too much effort. There were a lot easier ways to kill someone that would draw a lot less attention from the law. If anything, now that the Feds and the State Police were involved, it might lead to the embezzlement being uncovered that much sooner.
I let myself into the apartment and was greeted by Sir Leominster’s plaintive wails. It didn’t matter how long I had been out, the minute I walked through the door he demanded food. Attention was a secondary concern, but he was very pragmatic and associated food with love. I didn’t bother petting him until after he had eaten. At least he was up front about it.
After I hung up my jacket, checked the machine for messages and couldn’t bear his wailing anymore, I went to the kitchen. He followed me at a trot, increasing the frequency of his wailing in anticipation of my opening a can of his foul-smelling cat food. He stomped back and forth while I twisted the handle on the can opener and almost had a stroke while I dumped the whole fishy-smelling mess into his dish. He finally stopped wailing at me when I put the dish down on the floor and he buried his snout in it. He ate like he hadn’t eaten since winter.
Once that cat was appeased, I went to wash my face and make myself presentable for a dinner with Angela. We’d been seeing each other since the new year and were at the point where we were comfortable around each other but not too comfortable. No one was leaving a toothbrush in anyone else’s apartment yet, but neither of us was seeing anyone else either.
I wasn’t rushing anything. My last few relationships hadn’t worked out well and a couple had almost been the death of me. Most of them ended with me in an empty apartment with a surly cat and a drink in my hand. At least with Angela, things seemed to be going well.
The intercom buzzed at six thirty, and after hearing the tinny version of Angela’s voice say, ‘It’s me,’ I buzzed her in, and shortly after, there was a knock on my door. I opened the door and Angela stepped in. She put her arms around my neck, and after a longish kiss, she stepped back and said, ‘Hello, Roark.’
‘Nice to see you.’ It was. She had changed from her usual clothes for work as clerk in District Court into clingy blue jeans, a cream-colored silk blouse and light sweater over it. Even with the low heels she was wearing, she had to stand on her tiptoes to kiss me.
‘You too. I have had a day. I’m hungry and in need of a drink. Provide me both and you will be handsomely rewarded.’
‘I was pretty sure that was the plan?’
‘What gave me away?’
‘Besides the passionate greeting, the overnight bag was what we call in the trade, a clue.’ I didn’t bother to point out the expertly applied make-up or the perfume that smelled mildly intoxicating. No point in being a showoff.
‘Very observant of you.’
‘I am a trained detective.’
‘True. How about you tell me all about that after you get me a drink.’
‘Martini or something else?’ I asked, confident what the answer would be.
‘Martini.’
She went to drop her overnight bag in the bedroom while I went to fix her drink. We had already established on previous visits that she preferred her drink being made over my taking her bag. I think both were equally hospitable. By the time she joined me in the kitchen, I was shaking the martini shaker for all it was worth until the outside of it was covered in frost and my hands felt like I was outside in Vermont during winter.
‘How was your day?’ I asked while pouring the contents of the shaker into two martini glasses.
‘Ugh, I had to listen to lawyers argue back and forth about nonsense. Some days I think they get paid by the argument. How was yours?’
‘Do you remember that surveillance job I had up in Amesbury a few weeks back?’
‘Yes, the really boring one.’
‘That’s the one. Well, today I found out the bank was robbed yesterday, and one of the people I was looking at was killed in the robbery.’ I handed her a martini.
‘What?’
‘Shot in the robbery. Cheers.’ We clinked glasses, which I managed to do without spilling more than a few drops of mine. There wasn’t much sense in wasting valuable space in the glass with air.
‘Cheers. Just like that?’
‘Yeah, just like that. Dead.’
‘Do you think it’s related?’
‘Probably not, but something about it bothers me.’
‘What?’ She took a sip which was a pleasure to watch, something about the delicate way she held the glass, and her lips just grazed the surface of the drink. Martini glasses made me feel afraid that I would snap the delicate stem in my hand.
‘I don’t know. Timing is odd. Plus, Amesbury doesn’t strike me as a hotbed of crime.’
‘Banks get robbed all the time.’
‘True. I also called Brock, my old client.’
‘How’d that go?’
‘Not well. He accused me of half-assing the case initially and sucking around for more money now.’
‘Ouch.’
‘I know. But you know, he is only half wrong. I was bored with the surveillance and couldn’t wait for it to be done. Maybe I should have dug into it more.’
‘You were hired to watch them and see if anyone was living larger than they could afford.’
‘Yep.’
‘And did you see any sign of it?’
‘No.’
‘Did you write a report?’
‘Yes.’
‘So, in short you did your job?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK, stop worrying about it and tell me about dinner.’
‘How does steak sound?’
‘It sounds good,’ she said with enthusiasm.
‘Baked potato and salad to go with.’
‘Perfect.’
‘How is the Judge doing?’ Angela clerked for the Honorable Ambrose Messer, who had been my client on a thorny blackmail case a few months before.
‘He’s doing OK. He wasn’t himself after the case wrapped up. I think he felt bad about how it turned out.’
‘I can see that.’
‘The trial is going and that is keeping him busy.’
I checked the two potatoes that I had put in the oven forty-five minutes earlier. Then I took two petite filet mignons out of the refrigerator and liberally sprinkled both sides of them with salt and pepper. I put those aside for a minute while I put a pan on the stove to heat up.
When the pan was hot, I dropped in a big pat of butter, and when it foamed, the steaks went in. I listened to Angela and the sounds of the steaks sizzling. I flipped them after three minutes, by which time the kitchen was smoky and the smoke detector was making a racket. When the steaks had a nice crust on each side, I put the pan in the oven with the potatoes.
I pulled the pan out of the oven and took the steaks out, letting them rest on a plate. Resting the steaks is the key. I took the potatoes out of the oven and put one on each of two plates. After the steaks had rested enough, I put one on each plate. Then I put some butter in the pan, added the juices from the steaks and plenty of ground black pepper. The result was a decent black pepper sauce that went over our steaks.
‘Do you want to stick with martinis, or do you want to switch to red wine?’
‘Martinis,’ she said definitively.
We ate slowly, enjoying the meal and each other’s company.
Later, lying in bed, Angela said, ‘You’re going up there, aren’t you?’
‘That obvious?’
‘With the exception of recent activities, you’ve been a little distracted.’
‘Distracted?’
‘When we were on the couch, allegedly watching TV.’
‘Well, maybe the TV part, not the rest of it.’
‘No, of course not. But instead of watching one of your movies on the Movie Loft, you were OK with watching Falcon Crest.’
‘Well, I was just being a good host. I knew you didn’t want to sit through The Conversation.’ I love Gene Hackman’s quiet, meditative essay on paranoia and surveillance. I loved that it proved the point that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean you’re wrong.
‘You hardly said five words to me until we came in here.’
‘Oh, that bad. I’m sorry.’
‘It’s OK. You were paying attention when you should have been.’
‘It would have been hard not to.’ It wasn’t just that Angela was pretty. There was something about her I noticed when she first walked into Jakie Wirth’s last December with her boss, the judge, to hire me.
‘Good. My feelings would have been hurt.’
‘Would never happen. Plus, if I am going to be distracted, during Falcon Crest is the perfect time to do it.’
‘Good point.’ It was fair to say that I was about as interested in the Ewing clan as she was in watching Gene Hackman play his saxophone in his destroyed apartment. Thankfully before Dallas came on, we met in a mutually satisfactory middle ground. Bed.
THREE
The next day was Saturday. We spent a lazy morning in bed and then a leisurely breakfast with the paper. The afternoon was spent checking out the shops on Newbury Street. I resisted the urge to drag Angela over to the Brattle Book Shop. If she thought I had been distracted thinking about the goings-on in Amesbury, then she would have been shocked by how distracted I can get in a good bookstore. That night we went out to a new restaurant that Angela wanted to try, and Sunday at noon we kissed goodbye on my landing as she headed home to get ready for the workweek ahead.
I went back into my apartment which both felt lonelier and also more like itself again after she had gone. Outside it was raining, not the unrelenting rain of November but the steady drizzle of spring that helps wash the pollen off the cars. I sat on the couch, smoking a Lucky and thinking about what my plan of attack was going to be. I didn’t have a client; I didn’t have a case. I was just going to go up to Amesbury and watch people. Maybe poke around and ask some questions. It wasn’t much of a plan, but more often than not, that was how I operated.
