Stacey went to the counter to buy coffee. Mark went to the desk and bought all the local papers.
“Here we are,” he said, throwing them down on the table so that they covered Gregor’s notebook. “They’re old news now, of course, but they’re all paying attention to us. To you, Mr. Demarkian, I guess. The Torrington Register-Citizen doesn’t like you.”
“The Waterbury Republican loves you,” Stacey said, putting the coffees down. “Does this sort of thing happen to you all the time? ‘The Touching Story of Gregor Demarkian’s No-Longer Unrequited Love.’ I mean, I know it’s at the bottom and everything, but it’s the front page.”
“They’ll have one of those features in the LCT next thing you know it,” Mark Cashman said. “Big picture of Gregor here. Big picture of Miss Hannaford. Big story about how fascinating his life is that he gets to look into all these murders.”
Gregor pulled his notebook out from underneath the papers. “Can we get down to business? Because the problem is, gentlemen, that although by now it ought to be perfectly clear who did it, I don’t think there’s any way to prove it. Not any way at all. Which does lead us to a certain amount of difficulty.”
Stacey and Mark looked at each other.
“I don’t know about anybody else,” Mark said carefully. “But it isn’t obvious to me. It isn’t in the least bit obvious to me. So maybe you just ought to tell us—”
“No,” Gregor said. “Pay attention for a while. Think. Kayla Anson died because of the money—”
“How can you know that?” Stacey demanded. “How can you possibly—”
Gregor held up his hand. “Think,” he said again. “Anything that ever happened to Kayla Anson happened about money. It almost had to. She inherited, what, a couple of hundred million dollars? Almost a billion dollars? Like it or not, for someone like that, the bottom line is always going to be about money. But in this case, Kayla Anson did something that rich girls are taught never to do. She loaned money to a friend. She loaned a great deal of money to a friend. A hundred and thirty thousand dollars.”
“She might have loaned it to a friend,” Mark Cashman said slowly, “but she might not have. The cashier’s check was in her name. She might have been paying a blackmailer.”
“A single payment of one hundred thirty thousand dollars? Have you ever known a blackmailer to ask for only one payment?”
“There may have been more payments,” Stacey said. “We don’t know until we check. Maybe she’d been paying blackmail for years.”
“She couldn’t have been paying it for years,” Gregor said. “She only recently turned eighteen. Before that, she wouldn’t have had access to very much, except for her allowance. But by all means check. I think you’ll find there was only the one check. The really significant thing here is that she had the check made out to herself, rather than to the person she was giving it to.”
“I don’t get that,” Stacey said. “Does that mean she had to get the money in cash and hand over bills?”
“No. She could have endorsed the check on the back and handed it over. It’s done all the time when people buy cars.”
“Then what difference would it make?” Mark asked.
“The bank would have a formal record—and Kayla would have a receipt she would need to hand over for her tax record—of the actual person to whom the check was made out. But when the check was cashed with the endorsement, the bank would simply file it away. There would be no way for Kayla’s lawyers, for instance, or her mother, to find out anything about the check except that she had it made out to herself. They couldn’t know just by looking who she had given the money to.”
“You mean she didn’t want anybody to know who was getting the cash,” Stacey said. “But why not? It was her money.”
“Maybe the person getting the cash didn’t want anyone to know,” Mark said.
“Very good,” Gregor said. “And there might have been some of that. But I think that the real reason was that she didn’t want to face ridicule, or censure, from her advisors or from Margaret. The person she gave the money to was not exactly a good credit risk. Among other things.”
“So this was six months ago,” Mark said. “What happened next? Was the money supposed to be paid back?”
“I think Kayla Anson decided she wanted to get the money back, yes,” Gregor said. “That she wanted it more or less immediately. I also think—do you remember what Annabel Crawford said? She asked Kayla about the money and all Kayla would say was that it wasn’t her problem anymore. If it wasn’t her problem, then it must have been somebody else’s. My guess is that she was intending to turn over collection efforts to her lawyers.”