And One to Die On(13)
Bram had his legs crossed with one ankle on the other knee. His pipe was sending smoke signals up to the ceiling. Every time he looked at the paper Kelly had given him, he sighed heavily.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Bram said finally.
Kelly exploded. “I know it doesn’t make any sense, Bram. I know that. I was hoping for something a little more constructive.”
“How much more constructive could I be? Just look at this sheet, Kelly. Whole chunks of money just seem to go missing. Except for the daughter’s trust, of course. That’s intact.”
“That would have to be intact,” Kelly said. “It was administered by the Chase Manhattan Bank. They’re too damn high-profile a company to pull any crap.”
“Yes, well, the problem is, you couldn’t really say that anybody pulled any crap in this case. You couldn’t say much of anything. It never occurred to me before, but living without computers must have been heaven for con men and cheats.”
“Most people would say that living with computers has been heaven for con men and cheats.”
Bram waved this away. “That’s because too many of the people who are trying to catch the con men and the cheats don’t know how to run the computers. Remember what I’ve always told you. We get hit by a hacker, we don’t prosecute him, we hire him.”
“Yes, Bram, I know. You’ve told me this before.”
“If this had been done on a computer, we might be able to trace it.” Bram sighed. “But the way it is—do you think they were paying bribes?”
“What? Who?”
“Cavender Marsh and possibly Tasheba Kent. Wasn’t there a rumor at the time it all happened that Cavender Marsh had killed his wife?”
“The death was ruled accidental,” Kelly said.
“I know what it was ruled,” Bram said impatiently. “But look at this. Lilith Brayne died on a Wednesday, and when she did she had almost a million francs in her account in Paris. That’s what? About two hundred thousand dollars?”
“Something like that.”
“On Friday she had only eight hundred seventy-five thousand francs. That’s exactly twenty-five thousand dollars gone.”
“I know that. That’s the kind of thing that’s bothering me.”
“On the following Tuesday,” Bram went on, “the account went down to seven hundred and fifty thousand francs. Another twenty-five thousand dollars gone.”
“Yes,” Kelly said in a singsong voice, “and on the following Thursday there was another twenty-five thousand gone, and on the Monday after that there was another twenty-five thousand dollars gone. Five hundred thousand francs, one hundred thousand dollars, disappeared in the course of two weeks. Just gone.”
“I wonder how they got it.”
“That doesn’t worry me,” Kelly said. “Cavender Marsh was her husband, after all. He would have had access.”
“Maybe. But wasn’t there a lot of publicity about this thing?”
“Hell, yes. It wiped the Nazis off the front pages for six days.”
“Well, then. He couldn’t have just taken it, could he? He couldn’t have just walked into the bank and withdrawn money from a dead woman’s account without someone remarking on it. Especially this much money.”
“They use the Napoleonic Code in France, or they did then. In the Napoleonic Code, everything a wife has belongs to her husband.”
“I don’t care what some code says. It would still have been an enormous scandal. There aren’t any checks?”
“No checks,” Kelly said. “No paper at all.”
“And since this is the world before computers we’re talking about, no withdrawals from the side of the bank, either.” Bram shook his head. “Not that any bank would let you withdraw that much on a cash card. Ah, what a mess. Is this going to be significantly important to the work of the weekend?”
“It depends,” Kelly said. “There’s a daughter. Cavender Marsh’s daughter. It depends on what kind of a mood she’s in.”
“Cavender Marsh and Tasheba Kent had a daughter?”
“No, Cavender Marsh and Lilith Brayne had a daughter, about three months before Lilith Brayne died. She got sent to California to live with an aunt after all the fuss was over.”
“You mean they dumped the kid on an aunt and went off together? Cavender Marsh and Tasheba Kent?”
“Yup,” Kelly said.
“Good God.”
“So you can just see what kind of a mood she’s likely to be in. I’ve talked to that lawyer, Lydia Acken, and she says she’s tried to explain what it’s going to be like, to Marsh and Kent, but she just can’t get through. They think it all happened much too far back. They think everybody is as mellowed with age as they are.”