Feast of Murder(98)
“Maybe,” Jon Baird said easily. “If you find the envelope. Of course, Baird Financial is a very large company for the kind of company it is, and we have the usual high rate of turnover in support staff. Things get lost.”
“This didn’t get lost,” Julie Anderwahl said suddenly.
The rest of them swung toward her in a body, making her blush. Mark stood just behind her, holding her by the shoulder. For the first time since all this had started, Jon Baird looked wary.
Julie grabbed Mark’s hand and squeezed it tightly. “It didn’t even occur to me to think about the envelope,” she said, half-apologetically, half-mechanically. “Mark and I were going to tell you all about it because it was so strange. Especially after Charlie—after Charlie. It doesn’t matter. When you asked about envelopes this morning, I didn’t even think.”
“If this isn’t about the envelope, what is it about?” Jon Baird demanded. “I thought the question on the table here was whether Gregor Demarkian could send me to jail on the strength of an envelope.”
“If there really is strychnine on it, he can,” Mark Anderwahl said. “Except we thought it was the contracts he was trying to get rid of. We never even considered the envelope.”
“Who was trying to get rid of them?” Sheila Baird said.
“Why, Charlie Shay, of course,” Julie told them. It was right after McAdam died. You know what Charlie’s like—what he was like. He never stayed late at the office. Never. But maybe three or four days after McAdam died, there he was, when there wasn’t anybody there but me, and he was putting something in the pile for the shredder for the next morning. But he wasn’t putting something on the pile, on top of it, the way you normally would. He was lifting up a whole raft of papers and putting whatever he had under it. It was so strange. So I waited for him to leave and then I went down there myself and looked. And there were our two copies of the McAdam contracts and the envelope, and if I hadn’t taken them out myself they would have been confetti in the morning.”
“You took them out?” Jon Baird said.
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” Tony Baird said.
“I didn’t understand what was going on,” Julie Anderwahl said, sounding frightened. “I thought Charlie was—that he was sick or having a breakdown or something—and I took what I’d found to Mark and we talked about it and then I put them away in my safe, just in case. Just in case anybody ever needed them again, if you see what I mean. And if it turned out that it was just that nobody wanted to remember that we’d actually done a deal with McAdam now that he was dead, well, they’d be gone. I mean, after all, McAdam’s estate would have had to have a copy. It wasn’t as if shredding ours would be obliterating the deal.”
“Damn,” Jon Baird said.
“Damn nothing,” Tony Baird exploded. “It’s just a question of who gets to a radio first.”
With that, he launched himself toward the narrow passageway out of the bow, where Bennis Hannaford had been busily piling up lines and spools and stray boxes all through Gregor’s talk. That slowed him down, but it didn’t stop him. What did stop him was Mark Anderwahl’s flare.
“Don’t you dare move another millimeter,” Mark Anderwahl shouted, in his best swashbuckler-wanna-be fashion. “I’ll blow you right off this boat.”
He did not, of course, blow Tony Baird off this boat. He simply lit the very short fuse on his homemade flare, tossed it in Tony’s direction, and stood back.
It turned out he had used a great deal more baking soda than he should have.