Of course, knowing Bennis, the mere suggestion that there might be a murder out there to investigate would leave her thrilled, and she wouldn’t care if the chief suspect were her own grandmother.
Gregor moved into his kitchen, put the kettle on to boil, and rifled through his cabinets for his jar of instant coffee. He and Tibor had both given up trying to make coffee from grounds. They were afraid they were going to poison themselves. Gregor put the jar on the kitchen table and got out two mugs and two small silver spoons. Then he sat down and waited for Jeremy Bayles to do the same.
“It’s not that I don’t want to help,” he said, “it’s just that I can’t see what I can help with. I’ve read the newspaper accounts of the way McAdam died—”
“It’s all much stranger than that,” Jeremy Bayles said quickly.
“—and I can’t see that there was any way for his death to be suspicious. And as for Jon Baird, I’ve been thinking about it ever since you mentioned his name. He couldn’t have had anything to do with McAdam’s death. He was in jail at the time.”
“Oh, I know,” Jeremy Bayles said. “We don’t think Baird murdered McAdam. It’s not like that at all.”
“What is it like?”
Jeremy Bayles coughed. The kettle was already spewing steam. Gregor had an awful feeling that he hadn’t put enough water in it. He’d ruined two other kettles that way in the past six months. He got up and poured water into the mugs anyway, and came up with just enough.
“Donald McAdam,” Jeremy said, “was under investigation by our unit because of his possible involvement in a green mail fraud at the Farmers and Mechanics Savings and Loan in Bimalli, Florida. We thought there might be a connection because he had the same sort of deal with a man named Robert Hannaford here in Philadelphia. Steve said he thought you were acquainted with Robert Hannaford’s sister?”
“I’m acquainted with Robert Hannaford’s sister.”
“Yes. Well. The deal went like this. McAdam would find a stock with a nice low price, call it Consolidated Widgets. He’d go out and buy a tremendous amount of this stock on margin, and then his confederate—in Philadelphia it was Robert Hannaford; in Bimalli it would be a man named Chester Evans who works for Tamm-Norwick Investments—anyway, his confederate, always a broker or an investment banker, would float a rumor that there was going to be a takeover attempt of Consolidated Widgets. Takeover attempts mean rising stock prices. Buyers would flood the market bidding up Consolidated Widgets. McAdam would sell out at the inflated price. And then the rumor, of course, would turn out to have been untrue. McAdam would have made a killing. His confederate would have received about fifty thousand dollars in cash for services rendered. And the ordinary buyers in the market would have been bilked.”
“Including a few savings and loans,” Gregor said.
“Including savings and loans, including insurance companies, including pension funds.” Jeremy Bayles waved his hands in the air, took a sip of his coffee, and grimaced. “Yes. Well. McAdam and his confederate would do well and the brokers would do well because they’d still make all those commissions, but what we’re talking about here is major fraud and McAdam did a lot of it. They had him testifying in more than three dozen cases at the time he died.”
“Good Lord,” Gregor said. “The man really did get around. You say you don’t think Jon Baird murdered him. Would he have reason to, by the way?”
“No,” Jeremy admitted. “No opportunity and no motive from what we can see. Baird’s company owned McAdam’s and McAdam had one of those impossible golden parachutes where it’s not worth it to fire the guy, but the day McAdam died, he signed an agreement with Baird clearing all that up.”
“From jail?”
“If you mean Baird, yeah,” Jeremy said. He tried his coffee again. He grimaced again. Gregor didn’t know what he was complaining about. Compared with Gregor’s usual coffee, this stuff was ambrosia. “I know it’s not supposed to be legal for federal prisoners to operate businesses from prison,” Jeremy went on, “but the fact is that we can’t deny them access to the phones as long as they’ve got anything going on appeal, and these guys are great at figuring out how to keep going at appeals until the day they’re released. I’m not kidding. Baird was running Baird Financial from his cell and there was this other guy who did a computer fraud on a bank out in Iowa and got out of prison with twenty-five million dollars waiting for him that we could never find.”