Firm Ambitions (23 page)

“I don't really want that picture. I want something else.”

He glanced at me with a wince. “What?” he said in a constricted voice.

“I don't know whether you can get it for me or whether the police can. That's a problem for me. Who do I go to? You? The police? I decided to start with you. I have eleven other shots of you, Leo. Some with Pete Ricketts, some just of you. All taken last night. Very nice shots. Clear. In focus. Perfect for a jury, if you catch my drift, Leo. Right now the negatives are being held by my lawyer. He has instructions to give them to the police tomorrow unless I tell him otherwise before then. In a nutshell, that's my problem, Leo.”

“What do you want?” he said. His eyes darted toward me and retreated back to his knees.

“I want the name at the top, Leo.”

“Of what?”

“Of your little fencing operation.”

Beaumont said nothing.

“Pete's obviously not running anything. Neither are you. Who is?”

Beaumont mopped his face again. “I can't tell you that.”

I made a tsk-tsk sound. “That's too bad.”

“No,” he said anxiously, “I don't mean it like that. I can't tell you because I don't know. I thought I knew, but now I don't.”

“What do you mean, ‘now I don't'?”

He looked around the room furtively. “Because
he's
dead. He's dead, but it's still running.”

“Who?”

“That horrid exercise man,” he blurted.

“Why did you think he was running it?”

He shook his head, eyes down.

“Why?” I repeated.

“The tapes,” he said tensely.

“What tapes?”

“His tapes.”

“Andros?”

He nodded.

“What kind of tapes?” I asked.

He mopped his face with the handkerchief. I could smell the sour odor of his sweat.

“What kind of tapes?” I repeated.

He shook his head vigorously. “I can't. You don't understand.” He looked up, terror in his eyes. “These people are animals. Carnivores. I've said too much already. I'll never do that kind of thing again. Never.” He was starting to plead. “I promise you. The money was easy. I was weak. I'll give the money away. I promise. I'll give it to any charity you name. I'll give it to you.” He smiled tentatively at me. “But of course. You can have it all. Please don't give those photos to the police. I'm begging you.”

“Then tell me about the tapes,” I said evenly.

He banged his thigh with his fist. “I can't!” he cried. His face was collapsing before my eyes, like a Madame Tussaud wax figure under a sunlamp. He moaned. “These are bad people. That man last night—he's a thug. A hyena. He'd kill me in a minute. If I tell you, he'll know. They'll know. They'll kill me.”

“Who are they?” I asked.

“Please,” he pleaded, his eyes wide with fear. “Just find the tapes. That's all you'll need. But, dear God, please don't give those pictures to the police. It's a death sentence. I implore you.”

He started weeping. Head in his hands, sobbing, his entire body heaving. I stood up, staring at him. He was shaking his head from side to side.

I backed out of his office and closed the door.

Chapter Twenty-five

The police inventory was seventeen pages long. There were twenty-seven CDs and thirty-nine LPs on the list, but no audiotapes. There was duct tape, masking tape, Scotch tape. There were nineteen videotapes, all store-bought, including five workout videos and fifteen titles that sounded distinctly X-rated:
2069: A Sex Odyssey, Rear Entry HI, Star Whores, Riders of the Lust Ark
.

Benny and I were at my office studying the police inventory of the contents of Andros's apartment. We had come there after my encounter with Leo Beaumont.

I stood up and walked over to the window. “I don't see how any of those videotapes could have anything to do with a fencing operation,” I said. I peered through the blinds. Two women on roller blades zoomed past on the sidewalk.

“Well,” Benny said with a shrug, “we could always force ourselves to watch them.”

I looked over with a wan smile and shook my head. “Only as a last resort. We'd have to get them from the police. My credibility with them is already lower than…lower than…” I shrugged.

“Whale shit.”

“Something like that. Look, if I'm actually able to develop something coherent out of this Mound City fencing operation—something that will actually point them some where other than Ann—I don't want them to blow me off as some silly snatch, which is exactly what they'll do if I go over there and ask them to let us watch twenty hours of X-rated videos because we think there just might be a clue in one of the movies.”

“Actually,” Benny said, rubbing his chin judiciously,
“Star Whores
is pretty good for a skin flick.”

“Right. And Rudolf Hess is pretty good for a Nazi.”

He crossed his arms and raised his eyebrows in an exaggerated manner. “Well,
excuse
me, Phyllis Schlafly.”

I put my hands on my hips and shook my head. “For your information, outside the realm of those movies there is no woman in America whose idea of making love includes having the man ejaculate in her face.”

“Not an aficionada of the cum shot, eh?”

“Don't get me started. Look, if we can't find any other tapes, then
maybe
I'll ask the police to let us watch them. But not until then.”

“What about the Firm Ambitions space?” Benny asked. “You were in there.”

“I didn't see any tapes, video or audio. Just CDs.”

“So where'd he keep them?”

“If
he kept them.”

“His car?”

I shook my head. “None on the car inventory, either.” And then I remembered. “However…” I turned toward the safe in the corner.

“What?” Benny asked as I kneeled down and spun the combination dial.

“Wait.” I finished the combination, yanked the handle on the safe, and pulled the door open. I removed the Lands' End attaché.

“Who does that belong to?” Benny asked.

“Andros,” I said as I placed it on the desk and opened it.

“How the hell did you end up with his briefcase?”

I pushed the Polaroid Impulse camera and the vibrator to one side of the bag and poked around. “This is one of the special little surprises that keep our relationship sizzling.” I looked up and gave him a wink.

“What?”

I lifted out three microcassette audiotapes and put them on the desk. Each had a hand-printed title on the stick-on label:

DANCE ROUTINE
LOW-IMPACT WORKOUT
HIGH-IMPACT ROUTINE W/JAZZ STEPS.

Benny looked at me with a dubious frown. “So?”

“These are audiotapes,” I said. “Like the kind you use for dictation.”

Benny read off the names. “Sound like exercise routines,” he said.

“Maybe. Probably. But they're the only homemade tapes we know of.” I opened my desk and pulled out my portable dictaphone. “Let's hear one.”

I tried to insert the microcassette, but it wouldn't fit.

“Wrong size?” Benny asked.

I nodded, looking at the tape. According to the label, it was a Leuwenhaupt Model 5400. I looked at my dictaphone. It was a Pearlcorder Model 5804, manufactured by the Olympus Optical Co. of Japan. I opened the drawer and took out one of my dictation microcassettes. It was a Model MC-60, also manufactured by the Olympus Optical Company. My micro-cassette was maybe an eighth of an inch shorter and narrower than the ones that were in Andres's attachè.

“These things aren't standardized,” Benny said. “Remember when they switched portable recorders back at Abbott and Windsor? They had to buy a whole new set of tapes to go with them.”

I put the three microcassettes into my purse. “Come on,” I said. “Let's go to an office supplies store.”

“Huh?”

“We'll borrow one of their models and listen to the tapes.”

***

According to the nametag, his name was Bob and he was eager to help. But when he came back from the stockroom carrying a folded slip of paper, all he could do was shake his head.

“I'm sorry, ma'am. We don't carry any Leuwenhaupt products. None of our St. Louis stores does. I don't think they have any retail outlets in town.”

“Are they out of business?” I asked.

“No. My boss says they're a specialty electronics manufacturer. Located in Belgium. They market to certain professions, usually at trade shows or through office consultants. They have two U.S. manufacturer's reps, one in Boston and one in Chicago.” He handed me the slip of paper. “Here's their Chicago number.”

I thanked him and removed one of the microcassettes from my purse. “Do you have any other dictaphones that take this size tape?”

He studied it with a frown. “Well…” he said as he looked down at the three rows of portable recorders in the glass case.

He didn't. We tried all twenty-three of them, and none were the right size for a Leuwenhaupt Model 5400.

I dialed the Chicago number from a pay phone outside the store. It was answered on the fifth ring:

“You have reached the Midwest regional office of the Leuwenhaupt Corporation. Our business hours are seven-thirty a.m. to three-thirty p.m. Monday through Friday.” I checked my watch: 4:12 p.m. “If you are calling from a touchtone phone and would like to receive our current product catalogue, please press one—”

I hung up and turned to Benny. “Closed for the day. I'll try first thing tomorrow. When do you leave for Chicago?”

“Tomorrow around noon.”

“I may have a place for you to visit when you're up there.”

***

My mother and I had dinner that night with a much less feisty Tex Bernstein, who'd come back to stand guard with his sleeping bag and shotgun. The boarded-up picture window was visible from the breakfast room, and occasionally during dinner I caught Tex furtively glancing toward it. We gave him an extra slice of cherry pie with a scoop of Cherry Garcia, and that seemed to cheer him up some. The Cardinals were on TV, and that made him even happier. He watched the game as we cleaned up.

“He's a good man,” my mother said softly.

I nodded. “It's sort of nice to have him around.”

The phone rang and my mother answered it. She looked at me quizzically and held out the receiver.

“Hello?” I said.

“This is Kimmi Buckner. I want you to leave me alone.”

I was surprised to hear her voice—and relieved to know she was alive. “Where are you?” I asked.

“I'm not telling you, Miss Gold. I've taken my things and I've left. I didn't like St. Louis anyway. And I want you to stop bothering me.”

“I didn't mean to bother you. All I did was leave you my business card.”

“Sure,” she snorted.

“Really,” I said. ‘That's all I did.”

“Well, someone's been looking for me, and I don't like it one bit.”

“All I wanted was to ask you one question.”

She paused. “What question?”

It took me a moment to recall. “Mound City Mini-Storage. I wanted to ask what you knew about it.”

Another pause. “Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing. Now leave me alone.”

“One more thing,” I said quickly. “When we talked, you told me that one of your duties was typing letters for Andros.”

“So?”

“Did he dictate those letters to you?”

“Some.”

“Did he use a machine?”

“Huh?”

“Did he dictate it into a machine, into one of those dictaphones?”

“No. I take shorthand. He dictated, I took it down, then I typed it up.”

“Did you ever see him use a portable dictation recorder?”

“No.”

“You're sure?”

“I don't know nothing about no recorders, okay? You leave me alone.” There was a click at the other end, followed by a dial tone.

I hung up the phone and sat down with a frown.

My mother came over and sat across from me. “Why are you obsessed about those dictation tapes?” She sounded dubious.

“Let me show you,” I said as I reached for my briefcase and lifted out the computer printout.

“What's that?”

“It's the Firm Ambitions accounts payable ledger.”

“What's an accounts payable ledger?”

“A list of everyone that sent Firm Ambitions a bill. Everyone from the electric company to the outfit that services the copy machine. The printout goes back three years.” I flipped to the third page. “Look at this,” I said, pointing at the entry for Leuwenhaupt.

My mother leaned over to see.

“That's the company that manufactures the microcassettes,” I explained.

“One hundred and twenty-five dollars,” my mother read.

“That has to be for more than just a set of microcassettes.”

“Of course it is, Rachel, dear. You told me yourself that you have to have one of those dictation machines from that company to record the tapes, right?”

“Right.”

“So that must be the bill for the machine.”

“That's my assumption, too, Mom.”

My mother leaned back and gave me a puzzled look. “And that's what makes you suspicious?”

I nodded. “I have the police inventory for his apartment, for his car, and for Firm Ambitions. And I have the attache bag that Eileen took from the hotel. Guess what isn't on any inventory and isn't in his bag?”

My mother mulled that over. “So maybe it broke. Maybe it broke and he threw it away.”

“Maybe. Or maybe someone else took it when he died. Maybe someone didn't want the police to find it.”

“Who?”

“Whoever arranged for that guy to take those paintings from the Mound City Mini-Storage space to Leo Beaumont's gallery the other night, that's who.”

“But why?”

“Mom, assume that there's something incriminating on those tapes. If so, then whoever was involved wanted to make sure that the police never found the tapes or the portable recorder. Presumably, they knew where Andros kept the equipment. When Andros died, they broke into his house or his car or wherever he kept the stuff and took it. They got everything—except, of course, what he was carrying with him in that attache' bag.”

My mother frowned in concentration. “You really think so?”

“I don't know what to think, Mom. The fat man at the art gallery said that the tapes were the key. These are the only tapes I've been able to find.”

“Did you learn anything from that woman on the phone?”

I shrugged in frustration. “I'm not sure. She took his dictation in shorthand. She said she never saw him use a dictaphone. If he had, she would have needed one of those transcribers, anyway.” I gestured toward the printout. “A hundred and twenty-five dollars might be enough for a portable recorder and some microcassettes, but it sure isn't enough for a recorder
and
a transcriber.”

My mother shook her head angrily. “Have the police arrest that fat man. Maybe they can make him talk.”

“Not after he calls his lawyer. You saw the pictures I took. At best, they're circumstantial evidence of a fencing operation. What do I have so far? Pictures of Pete Ricketts going into the storage space at Mound City and then coming back out with three things shrouded in sheets. Pictures of him carrying those things into Leo Beaumont's gallery at two in the morning. At most, we can say that one of the three things looked like a painting, at least from the corner of it that was visible when Beaumont lifted the sheet. But what paintings? Which paintings? Whose paintings? Those pictures don't even prove that the three things in sheets that Ricketts removed from the Firm Ambitions storage space are the
same
three things in sheets that he brought into the art gallery. Assuming that we could ever convince the police and the prosecuter to file charges in the first place, a good lawyer could get them dismissed.” I stood up and walked over to the window. I stared out at the backyard. “We don't have anywhere near enough, yet.” I turned to face her. “That's why I'm so obsessed about these tapes.”