Hangman's Root (25 page)

"That's good," he said, obviously reUeved. "I tell you, I'll be glad to get this off my chest. Ever since it happened, I've walked around knowing that there was a land mine out there and that someday it was going to blow up in my face. It would ruin my family." His glance went back to the photograph. "I wasn't even married at the time."

"I understand," I said, wondering what the hell we were talking about. "Can you be specific about the embezzlement?"

He picked up a pencil and began to tap it on the desk. "I was working in the accounting office. My job involved setting up grant accounts, establishing the appropriate procedures for monies to be moved in and out of the accounts, and monitoring the process until the monies were fully expended for the purpose for which they were granted."

Talk about gobbledygook. I guess every profession has its own brand.

Ruby looked confused. "This has something to do with Dr. Harwick?"

"Yes," Long said. He sat back and used the pencil to tap his teeth. "Dr. Harwick was hired in September of that year. He brought a grant with him from a San Antonio company called Cosmetech, not a large grant, more on the order of start-up money. He was doing animal experiments to measure the toxicity of cosmetics, something like that."

Once he got started on his story. Long kept at it in a well-organized fashion, explaining how the grant account was set up, how requests for expenditures—for equipment, supplies, and salaries—were made, and how the purchases were paid for. "It's all very orderly, you see," he said, still tapping. "A very good system."

"But any system can be manipulated," I remarked, "by a person who knows how to use it."

"Yeah." He tossed the pencil on the desk and sat up. "There

I

wasn't any monkey business with the original grant. That went by the book. It was a grant that came the next spring. A gift, actually."

Something clicked. "For the lab?" I asked.

He looked at me. "You know about that?"

"I know that the company that sponsored Harwick's research promised to give the university a small amount to set up an animal research unit. But Revlon bought the company out, and Revlon had a research link with a different university. So the money went there instead."

Long shook his head. "No, it didn t. That was the story we floated. The money came to CTSU just before the buyout. And it wasn't a small amount, either. It was a quarter of a million dollars."

I long ago schooled myself not to be surprised by anything a client told me, but I'm out of practice, and anyway. Long wasn't a client. I whistled under my breath.

The orange rose on Ruby's hat bobbed excitedly. "A quarter of a million!" she exclaimed. "That kind of money ought to build a pretty nice lab."

"It didn't, though," I said, thoughtful. "It didn't build any lab at all. What happened?"

Long looked even more uncomfortable. He cleared his throat. "What happened," he said, "is that I set up an account and arranged the payout procedure as I normally would. But the money didn't go for expenses in the normal way. Over a period of eleven months, it went into the computerized bank deposit system."

"Which is?" I prompted.

"Which is the direct-pay system normally used to deposit a paycheck into an employee's bank account. I'm sure they've changed the procedure by now because it was too easy to manipulate. But back then, once the thing was set up, it was practically invisible. The computer just kept on cutting checks until the money in the account was exhausted. And since I created the account after the fiscal year began and closed it out just before the

fiscal year ended, it didn't show up in the normal end-of-year audit of deposit accounts."

"Nobody in your office kept an eye on the system?"

"There was nobody between me and the computer—during the fiscal year, anyway. End of year, that was a different story. If the state auditors had happened to drop in during this time, of course, they might have stumbled onto it. But that was a slim chance. I could have cut off the deposits when I learned they were coming."

I'd heard of some computer scams in my time, but this one sounded more creative—and less risky—than most. "Not a bad setup," I said.

He nodded. "The biggest problem was actually at the other end. Pecan Springs is a small town. If we used our bank accounts, somebody at the bank might question why the university was putting this money into our accounts, on top of our regular paychecks. So we set up a fictitious company—Blue Star Scientific Supply Company—with a EO. box address in Houston. Naturally, we used a Houston bank."

I did a quick calculation. "So you were dumping nearly twenty-three thousand a month into the Blue Star account." I looked at him. "From there, I presume, it came back to you?"

He colored swiftly and shook his head. "I didn't get the bulk of it. All I got was ten percent." The red spread along his jaw and his mouth took on a bitter twist. "Enough to incriminate me. Enough to buy my silence. Enough to allow me to start my own accounting office. But not enough to make it worth the risk." His eyes were pulled back to the photograph. "At least not now. I've got too much to lose. I'm afraid that if Claire found out, she'd leave me and take the kids."

Ruby frowned. "If the lab never got built, why didn't the company that gave the money make a fuss about it? Why didn't they ask whatever happened to this great project they funded?"

"That was the beauty of it," Long said. "Cosmetech's officers were sacked after the buyout, so the company lost its corporate memory. You know what happens to the internal accounting systems when a business changes hands—it's like Hurricane Andrew. Everything's wiped out. Nobody knows anything. Anyway, the grant to CTSU was small change, as far as Revlon was concerned. The officers who took over, if they ever heard about it, would naturally assume that the grant was an outright gift. No strings attached, no follow-up necessary."

"So you took your twenty-five thousand," I said, summing up, "and Harwick pocketed the rest." Two hundred twenty-five thousand. Not a bad piece of small change.

He shook his head. "No. The two-twenty-five got split fifty-fifty. Between the two of them."

"The two of them?" Ruby asked, confused. "Harwick and— who?"

He looked from one of us to the other. "Didn't I say? The third party to this transaction was the department chairman. Frank Castle."

I stared at him, nonplussed. "But I thought Castle was really gung-ho on his animal research unit, even back then. Why would he steal the money that was supposed to build the lab? And for that matter, why would Harwick do it?"

Long shook his head. "I can tell you why / did it and how it got done," he said. "But Castle will have to tell you the rest." He reached into his pocket for a handkerchief, folded it, and wiped his shiny forehead. "Harwick can't, of course."

"You were seen at Harwick's house," I said. "What was your continuing connection with him?"

He sighed. "Harwick and Castle controlled the Blue Star account. We agreed that we'd leave the money there and take it out a little at a time, rather than calling attention to ourselves with a sudden windfall. I had to push Harwick to get my share. I haven't

seen Castle since we set up the original plan. But I heard from him just a few days ago. He phoned me."

My antennae went up. "What did he say?"

Long took off his glasses again and wearily rubbed his eyes. "He was terribly nervous. It had something to do with a letter, although he wasn't clear on the details." The corner of his eyelid twitched. "It was a . . . well, a blackmail letter. Harwick apparently received it, but not Castle. He wanted to know if I had gotten one. I told him no."

I leaned forward. "What did the letter say?"

"I didn't see it. But Castle said that somebody had found out about the embezzlement. He said the letter threatened to take the story to the newspaper if Harwick didn't lay off some experiment he was doing." He put his glasses back on and pushed them up on the bridge of his nose. His eyelid was still twitching.

"I see," I said. When Harwick got the blackmail letter, he must have thought first of the embezzlement—not of Tad. He had gone running to Castle with the letter. At the time, neither Harwick or Castle apparently had any idea who wrote it. But Castle must know now that it had come from Kevin. Cynthia Leeds had told him yesterday, while he was still in Boston.

"You must have been pretty shocked," Ruby said under-standingly. I glanced at her, remembering that I hadn't told her about the letter. And of course, she had no idea who had written it, or why.

"Shocked is right," Long said. "I was totally freaked. I told Castle I hadn't received any threats. He said the blackmailer must think Harwick was the only one involved in the scheme, and I should forget he had called. That was the end of it. That is, until I read that Harwick was dead. Then all I could think of was the way Castle had sounded over the phone." His eyes went to the picture and the sweat stood out in beads on his forehead. "I don't want to end up dead, too," he said, in such a low voice I could hardly hear him.

Suddenly I understood. Yes, Long was afraid of the law, afraid of being called to account for what he had done ten years ago, afraid of losing his wife and kids.

But he was even more afraid of the man he thought had killed Harwick.

He was afraid of Frank Castle.

"Well!" Ruby said breathlessly. ''That puts a different face on things, doesn't it?"

"It sure does," I said, getting into my car. I didn't want to tell her whose face the killer had worn just the hour before, or what color hair she had. Of course, it was still possible that Amy and Kevin had killed Harwick. But they were no longer the only suspects.

"Shall we meet back at the shops?" Ruby asked.

"Yeah." I closed the car door and rolled down my window. "Congratulations, Ruby," I said with total sincerity. "Your detective work has helped to clear an innocent woman." Possibly two innocent women. And one innocent young man. If Kevin and Amy were innocent. Were they?

"Thanks," Ruby said, looking modest under the brim of her floppy black hat. "I didn't do anything Harriet Vane wouldn't have done."

I had to smile. Suddenly her costume made sense. "I doubt that Harriet Vane ever thought of putting paprika in her henna." I started my car, wondering how Dorothy Sayers would resolve this. What would Lord Peter say if he sauntered onto the scene right now? Would he put his finger on Amy and Kevin, or on Frank Castle?

Ruby got back to Pecan Springs quicker than I did, partly because she pushes her Honda to the Hmit while I baby my decrepit Datsun, and partly because I stopped at the Shamrock station on the way out of New Braunfels to call Beulah Bracewell. Her line was busy again, which wasn't surprising. There's a lot of phone traffic in Personnel. I also tried to reach The Whiz, but she was still out of the office. I was just as glad. The half hour it would take to get home would give me time to chew on the facts of the case before I reported to her.

Chew on them I did, although by the time I pulled up in front of Thyme and Seasons I still wasn't clear about several important things. I was seeing the situation from Long's point of view, which gave it an entirely new slant. I could understand why Long was afraid of Frank Castle. But there was a problem in timing. The embezzlement had taken place so long ago that the statute of limitations had run out, for Castle and Harwick as well as Long. If Castle had wanted to get rid of Harwick, he could have done so at any time. Why now.^

I had hardly framed the question when I began to turn up possible answers. What if Castle and Harwick had jointly invested the money in some nefarious scheme and had a falling out? Thieves do. Or what if Harwick had repented of his thievery, decided to turn himself in, and pressured Castle to join him.^ Long hadn't known about the statute of limitations; Harwick and Castle probably didn't, either.

Or what if the lab grant wasn't the only cooking of the books that Castle and Harwick had been involved in? What if they had continued to dip into other grants Harwick brought into the department? That might mean that they weren't protected by the statute. And in any event, the statute didn't protect them from the dark frown of academic censure. Tenure or no tenure, when CTSU found out what they had done, both of them would be out of a job before you could say "misappropriation of funds."

But a gut feeling told me that the best answer was none of the above. It was the blackmail letter, which accused Harwick of an unspecified crime that had taken place ten years before. / knew that the writer or writers—Kevin or Amy or both—were referring to Harwick's criminal abuse of their brother But when he showed the letter to Castle, Harwick had assumed that it referred to the embezzlement. Castle, who didn't know about Tad Scott, shared that assumption—that's why he called Jim Long. And when he found out that Long hadn't gotten a letter. Castle figured that the blackmailer knew about only one embezzler: Miles Harwick. With that information. Castle's next step was clear: Do away with Harwick and leave the blackmailer holding an empty threat.

Working on those assumptions, it wasn't hard to reconstruct the crime. Castle knew Harwick's work habits. He expected his victim to be in the office on Wednesday evening, so he came equipped with what he needed for the job. He knocked at Harwick's door, Harwick admitted him, and the two talked and drank coffee until Harwick was groggy—too groggy to protest when Castle strung him up and caught a plane for Boston the next morning. It was spring break, and Castle might have counted on the body not being discovered for several days at least. Suddenly I recalled the ashes in Harwick's ashtray. Castle might have burned the blackmail letter on the spot. And then I thought of something else. When Castle learned that Rose had discovered the backup copy on the computer, he could have gone immediately to the Boston airport and got a flight home in plenty of time to fake a break-in of the biology office.