The Turquoise Lament (19 page)

"I have to know relationships," Hisp said.

"I was friendly with Ted Lewellen. I went on one of his excursions with him. You remember Meyer, who came to see you with authority from Pidge to find out from you the status of her father's affairs?"

"Yes. I do remember him. A most acute interrogator."

"He is my best friend. I know Pidge well. I saw her in Hawaii in early December."

"You did! I sent funds to her there. We'd been holding them in an interest-bearing account because she'd been out of touch. She didn't want the entire accumulation. Just a few-"

"Who are these people you're talking about?" Charity asked.

Lawton Hisp's neck seemed to grow longer. "My dear, you are welcome to sit in on this discussion, but in the interest of saving time, I believe you can wait until Mr. McGee is gone. Then I will answer any questions you may have."

He kept staring at her until she nodded agreement. He turned back to me. "So you are acting as a friend. You will have to explain to me exactly what you mean by hanky-panky."

"Ted Lewellen conducted original research to unearth documents regarding the location of sunken ships. As a result of the several salvage projects he undertook he was able to leave a handsome motor sailer and almost a million dollars' net estate to his daughter. His daughter knew, and I knew, and Meyer knew, and another mutual friend knew that Ted had eight or nine more projects. He was getting geared up to head out on one when he was killed in the rain in traffic."

A lot of rigidity seemed to go out of Lawton Hisp. "Oh, that again. I can assure you that a most careful search was made by Mr. Collier and by me. We couldn't find any trace of his research records."

"Did you decide they didn't exist?"

"How do you mean that?"

"You must have had long conferences with Dr. Lewellen when he was setting up the trust for his daughter."

"Of course!"

"He would have had to tell you where the money came from and where future money would come from."

"I knew what line of work he was in, of course."

"Could he tap Pidge's trust fund if he went broke?"

"No. There was no way he could touch it."

"Wouldn't a banker think that sunken treasure is an iffy way of life?"

"It seemed very intriguing."

"Here is the question that the U.S. Attorney can ask the Federal Grand Jury Mr. Hisp. The reasoning seems clear to me. He will say, 'You have heard testimony to the effect that Mr. Hisp was advised by three different people on three separate occasions that Lewellen's research records were missing and that they were of great value, and very probably unique. Does it not seem odd to you that Mr. Hisp, aside from one routine search of the vessel Trepid, made no effort to find these records, nor did he report their loss to the authorities?'"

He frowned. "Almost anything can be made to look suspicious and ugly. It depends on how you phrase it."

"Then you phrase it for me."

"All I can say is that the estate has been and is being handled according to the specific instructions of the decedent."

"So Professor Ted left instructions about the dream book?"

"If I am ever going to be questioned about this, which I doubt, it is going to be by proper authority, Mr. McGee."

"You will be, friend. You will be."

He stood up. Dismissal time. "I guess we will just have to wait until it happens, won't we?"

"It's going to be triggered by Tom Collier. He tried to peddle the dream book to the wrong person. For a half interest."

He tilted toward me like an unsteady stork. Something happened to his face, and his mustache looked as if it had been borrowed and pasted on. "Wouldn't!" he said in a gargly voice. "We agreed…"

"You two agreed to some hanky-panky."

"No!"

"Then you better tell me, or I'm going to blow you out of the water."

"You better tell both of us." Charity said.

He sat down. "Shut up, dear," he said.

"We're both listening," I said.

He took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his big nose. "I have to explain to you some elemental facts of life as regards tax regulations. Tom Collier, Lewellen and I had several conferences on how best to handle the research information for estate purposes. There were seven more projects. He said each one represented a very good chance of recovery. He said they would represent from ten to fourteen years of salvage work, and would probably yield between two and five million dollars on a conservative basis, or eight to fifteen if his luck was good. Now then, had all the material for those projects been included in the estate, it would have been necessary to value them for estate purposes. There are no precedents. He died at just the wrong moment. Collier and I were trying to work out some sort of contingency sale arrangement, so that we would have a specific value, and a cash flow in that same amount. Suppose the research project papers had been listed and suppose the IRS had valued them at four million dollars and we had negotiated them down to two million. Can you see what the estate taxes would have done? They would have cleaned out the cash we needed on hand in order to leave the daughter what he wanted to leave her. And there was always the chance that the last seven projects would have been seven failures. There was no guarantee that they would ever pay off."

"Where was this stuff when Ted died?"

"Tom had the originals. He still has them. I have Xerox copies of all the pages and photocopies of all the charts and maps and overlays. As I said, we were trying to work it out when Ted was killed."

"His will left everything to Pidge."

"Yes."

"So she is the rightful owner."

"I certainly have never had any intention of depriving-"

"Then how come, if you knew of the existence of those records, you didn't, as coexecutor, put them in the inventory, dammit!"

"I told you! It could have bled all the liquid assets out of the estate to pay taxes on something that might turn out to have no value at all."

"And your concern for the daughter of your trust customer was so great that you decided to risk concealing specific assets from the IRS, that you signed false statements when you certified as to the completeness of your accounting?"

"Well, it seemed…" He recrossed his legs. "When you put it that way…" He stood up and looked around as if he had forgotten whose house he was in. "The way it seemed to us…"

"What in God's name were you two clowns going to do with Ted's future projects?"

"Well… Tom said that it would perhaps be best to wait and see how well the marriage thing worked out for Pidge. He said she had a certain amount of… instability. And maybe, if the marriage broke up, it would be good therapy for her to… to sort of reconstruct her father's plans, and then maybe on that basis, Tom could get a little investment group together to back an expedition."

"To reconstruct from memory?"

"There could be important things that might be left out of the research materials, Tom said. We'd have no way of knowing. We weren't competent to judge."

"And you were going to be asked aboard that little investment group, right?"

"There was… that implication."

"You two are the perfect friends for a girl who has just lost her father. She needed friends like you."

He stepped up out of the pit. "Damn you!" he yelled. "You just don't know. You don't know how… how a man can get boxed."

"And how did you get boxed, Brother Hisp?"

"I was going to list those records. I insisted on it. It's a felony to conceal assets on any pretext. He told me I shouldn't make any hasty decisions. And… he is a director of the bank. He said we had to have a talk. We talked in his office, after the secretaries had gone home. He had a file of documents about six years old. Not a thick file. About fifteen transactions that originated in my department. It was back when new issues of convertible debentures were coming out and selling in the aftermarket at big premiums. At first the documents looked okay to me. Then I figured out what had happened. Gary Lindner had been ordering new issues from a brokerage house on a pay-on-delivery basis. Delivery was a month to six weeks after the issue came out. That way he was able to order a sale of debentures and get the money before they ever arrived and he had to pay for them. A floor man was in collusion with Gary. He was holding the payment in a special cash account, and when the debentures would arrive, Gary would grab them and deliver them to the brokerage house for proper transfer to the new buyer, and they would be paid for out of the cash account. Then Gary would apparently pull all copies out of bank records. Mr. Collier's file was made up of photocopies of the brokerage-house records of each transaction, and my okay and initials were on the bottom right corner of every order."

"How could you be so damned stupid?" Charity yelled.

"Stupid? We were ordering those same issues for our trust accounts based on our investment advisory services, taking as many as we could get. Gary Lindner was negotiating a lot of purchases. I had to initial the orders. Most of them were legitimate. I can't be expected to remember all the TA numbers in the bank. These were fake."

"How much was involved?" I asked.

"Not an awful lot. Maybe about a thousand dollars a transaction, or a little more. Fifteen to seventeen thousand over a period of a year." He stopped pacing back and forth behind me and came and sat down once again, sighing and slumping.

"Where's Lindner working now? Still with you?"

"No. He got out of banking. He works for GeriCare International. It's something about hospitals, rest homes, insurance programs, and a line of special medications and diet foods."

"Did you get in touch with him about all this?"

"There didn't seem to be much point in it."

"What point was Tom Collier making?"

"He explained that it was possible that the National Association of Security Dealers might get around to auditing the local brokerage-office records regarding that period when there were a lot of abuses of the new-issue situation, and if that happened there wasn't much he could do for me. He said they would relay all findings to the FDIC, which in turn would notify the U.S. Attorney's office that there was reason to believe that I had been involved in a violation of the criminal code, and they would ask the FBI to investigate and report, and very probably they would indict."

"Do they indict people for stupidity?" Charity asked.

"Just tell me how I explain that I did not know anything was going on, that I didn't realize Gary was using the bank's buying clout to sweeten his own income?"

"How did Collier pressure you?" I asked.

"He said that he believed that there was a way, if he moved slowly and carefully, to get the original orders out of the dead files at the brokerage office and have someone who owed him a favor make photocopies of the originals with my initials masked, and put the copies into the file and destroy the originals. He said that for the good of the bank, and to save me and my family from the kind of publicity an indictment would bring, regardless of my decision on whether or not to let the Feds clean out all the liquid assets in the Lewellen girl's inheritance, he would go ahead and try to erase all traces of my involvement in the debenture swindle."

"Involvement?" Charity said.

"I should have checked every one."

"Do they get that picky?" she asked.

I nodded at her. "Yes. They get very, very picky. Collier was giving your husband a good reading."

Lawton Hisp said in a tired voice, "So I told him that he was asking me to perform a fraudulent act in leaving any tangible asset off the estate inventory. He said that as coexecutor and as the attorney of record, he would of course certify my inventory as being full and complete to the best of his knowledge. There were no threats, really. But in the end I left it off."

"And now that bastard owns you!" Charity said.

"Please, dear."

She jumped up. "Oh, boy. Mister Rectitude himself. The soul of honor and duty. I never could stand Tom Collier. Jesus, I don't even mind you turning tricky as much as I mind you being so damn dumb! Don't you see that Collier can cut you and that girl out of any part of this, and you can't do a thing? Don't you even see that this McGee person can say jump, and you'll have to ask him how high? Wow. You talked the good game of piety until you got into your first jam, and then you ducked your head and scuttled into a hole. I-I-I thought you were r-real!"

"Shut your damned mouth!" he roared.

I got up and walked out. I did not go on tiptoe. I could have been leaving on fire, hammering a gong and shooting off cherry bombs without slowing the argument a bit.

I backed out onto the street and paused for a moment and looked at that house again. It looked exactly the same, but it had fallen down. Those big boxes were emptier than ever before. There was no good way he could mend it. She knew and he knew and I knew that he should have gone directly from his talk with Collier to the authorities and explained what he was being asked to do and why. He shouldn't even have paused to pick up a personal lawyer to sit in. Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn't blow in the wind or change with the weather. It is your inner image of yourself, and if you look in there and see a man who won't cheat, then you know he never will. Integrity is not a search for the rewards for integrity. Maybe all you ever get for it is the largest kick in the ass the world can provide. It is not supposed to be a productive asset. Crime pays a lot better. I can bend my own rules way, way over, but there is a place where I finally stop bending them. I can recognize the feeling. I've been there a lot of times.