In Dog We Trust (Golden Retriever Mysteries) (23 page)

The cheery, bright-colored signs advertising credit cards, free checking accounts and other services looked small and out of scale with the rest of the room. A series of stanchions and a black rubberized rope slung through them kept the customers in line while they waited. There was a long line, even though there were three tellers working, and a half dozen people sat on orange vinyl chairs waiting for one of the loan officers.

“Is this the only bank in town?” Edith asked.

“Sure looks like it,” I said. We walked over to the reception desk, and a young African-American woman in a blue suit with a bright green scarf asked if she could help us. We asked for the manager, and I explained that we thought fraud was being committed on Edith’s account.

“Just a moment, please,” she said, and she got up and walked over to an young-looking guy in a white shirt and a tie the same shade of green as her scarf. After a whispered conversation, she brought him back to meet us.

His bright red hair didn’t help in the overall impression he made, which was of a junior high school debater. “I’m Alvin Jesper, the branch manager,” he said. “How can I help you?”

He reached out to shake our hands as we introduced ourselves, and then he stood there, holding his arms close to his chest, his wrists folded down like the paws of a kangaroo.

I explained again about the fraud. “Are you an attorney?” he asked me.

I shook my head. “Just a friend, trying to help Edith out.”

We followed him to his desk, where I laid out the details I had—that we believed an account had been established in Edith’s name, and that someone was using it to steal from her.

“How do you know this isn’t another customer with the same name?”

I explained that the social security number on the account was Edith’s, and that I had been able to establish online access to the account using that number. “I was able to answer all the questions using Edith’s personal information,” I said. “Date of birth, mother’s maiden name, and so on.”

“I’m not sure that was legitimate,” he said. “You created online access to someone else’s account.”

“To an account in Edith’s name, with her permission,” I said.  The last thing I needed was to get in trouble with Santiago Santos over unauthorized internet use.

I showed him a printout I’d made of the transactions on the account. “Here’s the first of the fraudulent transactions. Someone changed the address on Edith’s brokerage account, so that her statements and dividend checks are being mailed to a post office box here in Easton. I can match the checks that were issued over the last four months to deposits into the account here.”

He scanned the paper. “It could all be coincidence.” He shrugged. “Let me see what we have on the account.” He turned to his computer and began typing.

He made humming noises as he scanned the screens, then stood. “Let me check some records.” He walked through a door to the vault.

“This isn’t going well,” Edith said. “I was sure the manager would be much more cooperative.”

“He looks like he’s on a high school internship,” I said. “I doubt he’s been working here more than five minutes.”

I said some more encouraging things to Edith while we waited. Alvin returned from the vault, carrying a couple of pieces of paper. He sat back down and pushed the first over to me. “This is a copy of the driver’s license and social security card that was used when the account was established.”

The picture was gray and fuzzy, of a much younger woman than Edith. She produced her own driver’s license and social security card, and the numbers on both matched what had been submitted. “We had no way of knowing that the person who presented us with this documentation was not the real Edith Passis,” Alvin said.

He seemed a lot more cooperative once he had come back from the vault—maybe because he realized how much trouble the bank could be in. “I shouldn’t show you this, but you seem like such nice people,” he said.

Yeah. He probably thought the fake Edith Passis was pretty nice, too.

 He pushed another piece of paper across to me. This was a copy of the account application, using all of Edith’s information, though the preferred address was a post office box in Easton, and the secondary address was in Easton as well.

The other information that didn’t match was the phone number on the account. Looking over my shoulder, Edith spotted the discrepancy and pointed it out.

“We don’t verify phone numbers,” Alvin said.

“I’m going to verify it,” Edith said, pulling out her cell phone.

“Wait, Edith,” I said. “Let Rick do that.”

I turned back to Alvin. “Detective Rick Stemper, from the Stewart’s Crossing Police. He’s investigating the fraud on Edith’s behalf.” I held the two pieces of paper in my hand. “Can we get a copy of these for him?”

“You can keep those,” Alvin said. “I’m going to have to open an internal security investigation.” He looked like he might cry.

Kids. They wear their emotions so close to the surface.

“Do you have this detective’s phone number?” he asked.

I pulled out my cell phone and retrieved Rick’s work and cell numbers. Alvin turned back to his computer and typed for a while. “I’m putting a freeze on the account, so that any transactions will have to be approved by a manager,” he said, when he turned back to us. “We see this kind of abuse too often. A lot of older people just don’t keep track of their finances very well.”

Considering how young he was, I’ll bet he counted anyone over thirty in that category.

“Thank you very much for your help,” I said. We all stood up and shook hands, like adults, and I’ll bet Alvin Jesper was very glad when we walked out the big glass doors.

“I can’t thank you enough for coming up here with me,” Edith said, as we walked back to the Beemer. “I never could have done this myself.”

It was late afternoon by then, and shadows stretched across Northampton Street. “I’m happy to help, Edith,” I said. I was a little disappointed; though we’d set some wheels in motion, it wasn’t like I’d done much to help. “I’m sure the post office won’t tell us who is registered to the P.O. box,” I said. “Rick can get it, though.”

I thought for a minute. “Why don’t we drive past that street address on our way home? We won’t stop or go inside, but we can tell Rick what we see.”

I didn’t know much about Easton, but I figured out that the numbered streets began at the Delaware and ran west. We were looking for an address on North 24
^th
Street, which seemed like a pretty straightforward proposition, since Northampton Street was the dividing line between north and south. I pulled out of the parking space and headed west.

There was no North 24
^th
Street. There was a South 24
^th
, but it dead-ended into a park on the north side of Northampton Street. “They used a false address,” Edith said.

“I’m not surprised. If the bank manager had been old enough to have a driver’s license he might have recognized it was a fake.”

“Steve, that young man was very nice.” We argued, in a genial way, over the bank manager’s youth, and within about forty-five minutes we made it back down the river to Leighville. I dropped Edith at her car, and then made a quick stop at the English department to fax the paperwork Edith and I had picked up to Rick Stemper.

Thinking of Rick made me think of Caroline. What hadn’t we seen? Was there a clue in front of us that we weren’t noticing?  Part of the thrill of hacking came from thinking outside the box, from looking at a problem and coming up with a creative approach. Why couldn’t I do that with this problem?

The question I kept coming back to was motive. Why would someone kill Caroline Kelly? All the usual avenues had led us nowhere—family, friends, coworkers. As I pulled into my driveway, I looked once again at Caroline’s house.

The break-in. We hadn’t thought about that. I had to assume that her death and the break-in were connected. From the damage done, it was clear that whoever broke in was looking for something. They’d torn through her office, dumping out the contents of her filing cabinet.  Was it paperwork they were after?

Again, I wondered if her death had something to do with her job. Suppose she’d found evidence of corporate malfeasance—money laundering, stock fraud, something like that. That evidence would be on paper, and if she had the only copies then the crime might go undetected.

How could I look for what the burglar wanted, when I didn’t know what it was, or if the burglar had found it? While I was walking Rochester, I called Rick from my cell phone and asked if anything unusual had happened at Caroline’s office.

“What do you mean, unusual?” he asked.

“What do you think the burglar was looking for at Caroline’s house?” I asked.  “Maybe they looked for it at her office, too.”

“Evelina Curcio got her office,” Rick said. “I asked her if she noticed anything missing or anything unusual, and she said no.”

I juggled the phone as I bent over to grab Rochester’s poop with a plastic bag, and almost dropped it right into the steaming pile. Rochester seemed to find that very funny.

“Did you pick up fingerprints at Caroline’s house?” I asked Rick.

“Didn’t match anything in the database. It’s possible that the burglary is unrelated to her murder. We’ve seen cases where somebody breaks into a dead person’s house, or breaks in during the funeral.”

“But an ordinary burglar wouldn’t tear the house up,” I said.  

“You know about burglary?” Rick asked, and my heart skipped a couple of beats, wondering if he was making some oblique reference to my unfortunate incarceration. Before I could think of a response, he said, “Gotta go,” and disconnected.

Later that night, I tried Googling the phone number the fake Edith had used when she set up the account. No luck. I had a feeling it was a cell phone, but it might just have been unlisted. I sat staring at the computer when Rochester came into the office and rolled over on his back, waving his legs in the air like a dying beetle. “I guess you want me to rub your belly, don’t you?” I asked.

I got down on the floor next to him and obliged, rubbing my face against the soft, downy hairs of his stomach. “Who’s a good boy?” I asked. “Rochester? Is Rochester a good boy?”

We rolled around for while, him trying to scramble on top of me, me scrambling out from under him. They say that a few minutes each day of petting your dog can raise your serotonin levels; I think rolling around on the floor with him works just as well.

The next morning I went over to The Chocolate Ear so that I could focus on grading my mystery fiction papers without a big golden dog nuzzling me. Rick was at the counter as I walked in, holding an extra-large coffee and talking on his cell phone.  “Hold this for me, will you?” he asked, thrusting the coffee at me.

As soon as his hand was free, he pulled a notebook from his pocket, and cradling the phone against his ear, started to write.  “Uh-huh. Yeah. Nobody noticed? I thought you had a flag on the account.”  He listened.  “Even new employees should know the rules,” he said. “You have surveillance tapes I could look at?”

I raised my eyebrows at him, and he shook his head. “What? How can the recorder be broken, Alvin?” His body tensed even further, and his mouth set in a grim line.  “Well, thanks for nothing. You’d better get the recorder fixed pronto, before anybody else finds out.”

He snapped the phone closed.  “Somebody closed out the fake Edith’s bank account at the QSB in Easton this morning,” he said. “But the bank was busy when the customer came in, and the employee who closed the account was new and didn’t realize what the flag meant. And on top of it all, the digital recorder that collects the information from the cameras is broken, so they don’t even have a visual on who closed the account.”

He shook his head.  “And people wonder why crimes don’t get solved.”

He took his coffee back from me and stalked out of the café. I forced myself to sit down and start grading papers, though my attention kept straying back to Edith, and then from her to Caroline.  Those were just two of the unsolved crimes that were dogging Rick, and I knew there were many more.  The chances of finding Caroline’s killer seemed to get smaller every day.

By Friday afternoon I’d finished grading all the mystery fiction papers, and I had no choice but to face my business problems. By searching jobs posted online, I’d gotten two new clients, but the loss of the client who I figured had discovered my background left me with a net gain of one. One job was quick, but the other client was paying me just $200 to revise a 200-page manual, which left me with a net hourly wage equivalent to working in a sneaker factory in Southeast Asia.

But it was a client. I hadn’t spent much time on the project yet, because of all the time I’d spent researching Caroline’s friends and Edith’s money problems. I spent some more time online that evening, bidding on jobs and sending out resumes.

When I took Rochester out for his walk around eleven, he made a point of peeing on the “For Sale” sign on Caroline’s lawn. As usual, he tried to get me to take him up the driveway and into the house, and as usual I manhandled him on down the street.

It was a cool, clear evening, a scattering of stars strewn across the dark sky. As I’ve done since I was a kid, I wished on the first one I saw. It was a habit I’d lost, living in New York and then the suburban maze of Silicon Valley where Mary and I had bought the house we thought we’d live in with our children. Since coming home, though, I’d started again.