By then I’d been inside maybe fifteen minutes, had not picked up any vibes on my Ryan memory, and was starting to feel edgy.
So moving right along, what about their overhead? Rodney’s statements contained numbers in some of the categories, but honest
ones? Not what he was known for. I moved out into the communal clutter where the two women who did clerk-type things sat and
I opened a couple of file cabinets. Utility bills, folders and folders of them, going back years; I came up with two that
had year-end summaries, because of the interest charges. Mortgage statements. It took too long for comfort to find any pertaining
to a loan, and then it was only the newest one, taken out in 1993. Another cabinet yielded a bonanza: payroll lists with yearly
running totals. My pants pockets were overstuffed and tight. Had I gotten enough for Skip? There must be more on the debt;
they had at least one other large loan out somewhere. I assumed corporate tax filings were under lock and key. As would be
an accurate analysis of their debt picture, if one existed. Realistically, what I already had was about as much as I could
expect to find. There was only one more area to check—then I was out of there.
Ryan’s office was semiprivate—it had a back wall, side walls, and an open front. He’d stacked up file cabinets on both sides
to narrow the entrance. I stood in it. Did any of his files need checking? I decided not. Given Ryan’s mania for secrecy,
anything worth looking at would be well secured. His rectangle was not much deeper than it was wide, with a tall window in
the outside wall, which was on the front of the building. He’d had room to move around—the desk and those stacked file cabinets
were his only furniture except for a utilitarian visitor’s chair and a waist-high, yard-wide three-shelf wooden bookcase.
Accounting textbooks occupied most of it; there were also the American Horticultural Society’s
Encyclopedia of Gardening
(for show, I could only imagine) and a couple of technical nursery-business titles. The walls were undecorated—not a picture,
cartoon, map, or memo. Except for the exposed computer monitor, his desktop, normally tidy, had become small bulges covered
with spread newspapers. His telephone was on the floor, his Rolodex transferred to the windowsill, next to—
That was it! My out-of-character vision. I’d idly glanced in one day on my way to somewhere else, and there was Ryan, on his
knees, doing something to his tall, leggy rubber plant. Tell me what’s wrong with this picture? Ryan had zilch interest in
plants—it was remarkable that he suffered one in his office. This was not a good-looking specimen, and its pot was two or
three sizes too large. It would be hard to think of a good reason for a plant lover to be playing around in its soil. Why
had a non–plant lover been doing that?
Moving into the room, I pulled the drapes across the window—not a perfect closure, but my light would be shining down, away
from it. I knelt where Ryan had, illuminated that area of the pot. The surface looked uniform. When I started probing beneath
it near the pot rim, the soil was bone-dry, its texture much lighter than you’d expect. Sure enough, six inches farther in
toward the center things felt normally dense and slightly moist. My probing fingers found the upright barrier—plastic, I deduced—topping
off a couple of inches below the soil surface and traced its curve. No wonder the pot was so large—he’d made himself a sizable
side pocket.
Digging deeper, trying not to spill dirt, I touched the top of and soon extracted a flexible zippered pouch, maybe nine by
twelve and expandable. It was made of some high-tech material—light, shiny, and presumably waterproof. Eagerly, I opened it.
Inside was a bundle of triple-folded papers and a journal, of the financial rather than literary sort. Slipping off the rubber
band I leafed through the papers. All of them were quarterly statements, from two different brokers, the last pair dated July
1. Over a nine-year period he’d accumulated close to $60,000.
The journal consisted of page after similar page of entries in Ryan’s precise, small hand, dating back to his late-teenage
years. The story of his life, in a way, at quick glance a pretty dull one. Coming to the last page, I let out an involuntary
“Shit!” loud enough to startle myself. It was for the previous February. In the light from the flash it looked like a genuine
last page, but to be sure I peeled off my right glove and ran a finger along the spine—that kind of binding, you can never
get the pages out entirely clean. The line was smooth as could be.
Conceivably Ryan had kept Book 2—it would have been, after all, a work in progress—in a more easily accessible place. Conceivably
he’d decided to go with some other form of record keeping—there’s lots of computer software around to make that type of data
much more fluent, and they’ll do your math for you, besides. Or else Book 2 had, until recently, resided with its predecessor
in that shiny packet, and I hadn’t been the first to check out a curious observation of Ryan and his rubber tree.
My vote went to possibility number three, but in terms of practical considerations it didn’t immediately matter. My vision
of handing Baxter a neat package of answers had turned into a bitch of a pass-along problem.
Frustrated, I set the journal and papers down and rummaged deeper into the soil. I was still trying for neatness, though extracting
the packet had already sprayed small globules of soil onto the carpet. I soon established that there wasn’t any other sizable
object down there. Doing a fine sift, I sprinkled handful after rejected handful of soil back on the surface, away from Ryan’s
pocket. I’d almost run out of anything to sift when I felt it. Small, metallic—I couldn’t really tell it was a key until I
pulled it out and looked. The first thing that came to mind was it would fit a suitcase lock. Maybe a safe-deposit box? The
one to my box was a lot heavier. A locker, a padlock, a post office box? Any of those, possibly. I could rule out our local
post office, the key was the wrong shape, but I knew from experience there were different vintages of boxes, with different
specs.
My speculations were aborted by a banging from farther along the front of the building—the store entrance, it sounded like.
I must have gotten incautious with my light. Dousing it, I grabbed up the journal, statements, and packet and bumped my way
along the walls to the side door. Taking a deep breath, I opened it. There was no one in sight. Before that could change,
I sprinted across the wide driveway and crouched behind a grown-together row of mugho pines. It couldn’t have been more than
half a minute before a cop in a sheriff’s department uniform came around from the front, tried the side door, and, finding
it unlocked, cautiously stepped into the building.
It might be a long time before I’d have a better chance. A little spurt and I was around the corner of the Garden Center lot
and back on the side street. From there I forced myself to walk. It felt much, much longer than it had coming the other way,
but I made it uneventfully to the Bronco, started it, and got the hell out of there. Unnoticed, as far as I could tell.
Not that this was likely to matter. Back home, taking inventory, I found the flaw in my escape, what I ought to have had two
of but didn’t. I could visualize exactly where I’d left the other one. If Baxter was as observant as I’d pegged him to be,
I’d probably be seeing him soon.
Opening a beer, I assembled the Garden Center financial papers and scanned them, drawing only one mildly surprising conclusion:
for all Kate’s positive claims, the store was still losing money. I went on to study the contents of the journal and brokers’
statements more carefully; I got out my files to do a couple of comparisons. That finished, I put everything away and just
sat there for a few minutes, aimlessly waiting. Maybe he’d missed what I’d left behind, or failed to recognize it? Maybe I
could try for a good night’s sleep? I didn’t believe that strongly enough to undress, but it wouldn’t hurt to lie down.
• • •
Roxy and I both woke up to somebody pounding on the kitchen door. I dragged myself out, not a bit eager to learn who was making
the racket, let alone why.
Baxter, clad in unadorned royal blue Hanes sweats, looked more awake than I must have but not one iota happier. “What the
hell were you doing at the Garden Center tonight?”
I went for the sleepily confused sound. “The Garden Center?”
“It’s well past midnight. I am not Prince Charming and you are not Cinderella. You don’t need to try on the damn glove—I saw
you wearing it Friday night.”
“Do you want to come in? The moths are congregating.”
He strode past me into the dining room. “You haven’t answered my question.”
“It’s booby-trapped.”
“Look, we can continue this discussion down at my office.”
I stifled the “Fine with me!” He did have a right to be pissed, along with good enough reason to drag me to a building that,
in addition to assorted offices, contained several holding cells. “I went there for two reasons,” I said, spacing the words
to calm myself. “One, to gather information about their finances and two, to try and jog that out-of-focus memory I had about
Ryan. You did imply earlier this evening you needed all the help I could provide?”
He pulled out a chair and sat down. “I was not suggesting breaking and entering.”
I sat too. “Since when is using your keys breaking in?”
“How about when you’re no longer authorized to have them? I can call the Etlingers and get their take on that. They’re probably
still awake.”
“All right. I went there on my own initiative. Nobody pushed me, and I knew the Etlingers would not approve. This was the
most promising, lowest-risk way I could think of to maybe find out why Ryan was killed, which I am convinced has to do with
money. Does that satisfy you?”
“It’s a beginning. What financial information are you talking about? Since I wouldn’t let you look at the books, you decided
to reconstruct them on your own?”
“Not exactly. I stopped by to see Skip Boyles on my way home from Speculator. He knows a lot about the Garden Center’s financial
history. If I could fill in some of the blanks, he thought he could come up with a pretty good idea of how things should look
now. To compare to the official books. He did not in any way suggest that I do something illegal.”
“Were you able to find what he needs?”
“I don’t think I’d better answer that.”
“What my deputy said, when he woke me up, was he thought he saw a light inside the Garden Center. So he stopped and checked
the two front doors, went around to the side door, which was unlocked, and entered. He look a quick look around, but didn’t
see anybody or anything that seemed wrong. Given that an employee had recently been murdered, though, he thought he’d better
call me over. I told him to notify the senior Etlingers, too. As far as the four of us could tell, the only thing that happened
in there was somebody or something had attacked a potted plant.”
“Something?”
“Cats do that, though they usually aren’t very good with locked doors. There are several cats around the place, and once in
a while one of them gets shut in the building overnight. And maybe an employee forgot to lock the door— Eleanor said that’s
happened occasionally. The two of them looked around a little to see if anything was missing. Everything appeared to be okay.
Maybe tomorrow, when they have time to look more closely?”
“I think that’ll be all right.”
“Then I’d have to say that if Skip wants to work up an assessment of how the Garden Center finances should read, I’ll be happy
to hand it to our auditor and let him make comparisons.”
“Thanks.”
“But I do want whatever you found in that pot.”
I fetched the packet from the kitchen drawer where I’d stashed it; the key I left where it was. He hesitated briefly before
picking up the packet, probably concluding that the surface was hopelessly corrupted already for fingerprinting. Like me,
he leafed through the papers first, then opened the journal. “Would you like a synopsis?” I offered.
“Why not.”
“Some people use words to record their lives—Ryan apparently went with figures. His journal reminds me of the records I used
to keep back when I was starting out on my property rehabs. It’s very detailed, very easy to follow. Literally down to the
penny he entered what he earned, what he spent, what he saved, what he transferred from one type of savings to another. At
the end of each month he did totals and comparison charts; end of each year, the same thing.” I took the journal from him
and opened it at random. “In 1995, to give you an example—”
“Didn’t you say synopsis?”
“I was just establishing my credentials. Okay. With his first paycheck he started putting aside $100; when it got to $500
he opened the first of two brokerage accounts. As his salary increased, so did the monthly investment portion; at the Garden
Center it was $400. By July 1 of this year he had close to $60,000 in those accounts.”
“I’m not much into stocks. Was he doing well, would you say? Maybe too well?”
“Reasonably well. He was pretty conservative. I have accounts that did better for the period but not immensely better. When
he left his last job in Watertown there was a $20,000 payout. This could have been profit-sharing, severance, pension contribution,
who knows? What’s unusual is that Ryan didn’t identify it, nor did he indicate where it went. This is the only oddity I could
find anywhere in those figures.”
Baxter thumbed slowly through the journal till he reached the last page. He put his index finger at the bottom and looked
up at me. “Are you ready to bring me the continuation?”
“I wish I could.”
“Val—”
“Tell me something. Did Ryan keep plants in his apartment?”
“I don’t remember any. What’s that—?”
“Ryan had no interest in plants. That was my memory: him kneeling beside that ugly rubber tree in his office. Reaching in.
So I did the same. I found the packet, pulled it out. Contents, what you’ve got there and only that. I was pawing through
the rest of the walled-off area in the pot to see if whoever had been there before me missed anything when your guy started
banging on the front door. There was no time to tidy up.”