The banker, p.1
The Banker, page 1
Contents
Cover
Also by Peter Colt
Title Page
Copyright
Praise for the Andy Roark novels
About the Author
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Also by Peter Colt
The Andy Roark mysteries
THE OFF-ISLANDER
BACK BAY BLUES
DEATH AT FORT DEVENS *
THE AMBASSADOR *
THE JUDGE *
* available from Severn House
THE BANKER
Peter Colt
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
First world edition published in Great Britain and the USA in 2025
by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE.
This eBook edition first published in 2024 by Severn House,
an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.
severnhouse.com
Copyright © Peter Colt, 2024
Cover and jacket design by Jem Butcher Design
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. The right of Peter Colt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-1071-5 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-1072-2 (e-book)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.
This eBook produced by
Palimpsest Book Production Limited,
Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland
Praise for the Andy Roark novels
“A smooth, atmospheric mystery”
Kirkus Reviews on The Judge
“A deft and gracious crime novel”
Booklist on The Judge
“Page-turning … the balance of plot and character is perfect”
Publishers Weekly Starred Review of The Ambassador
“A gritty whodunit that packs an unexpected punch”
Kirkus Reviews on The Ambassador
“Colt doesn’t pull any punches and plays fair with the reader before the satisfying reveal. Fans of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels interested in a grittier private investigator will be eager to see more of Roark”
Publishers Weekly on Death at Fort Devens
“Excellent … balances a gripping plot with further development of Roark’s character. Jeremiah Healy fans looking for a new Beantown hero will be eager for more”
Publishers Weekly Starred Review of Back Bay Blues
“A classical mystery with an honor-bound detective and a keen sense of place … Roark is genuinely likeable (not too tough, but not a patsy)”
The New York Times on Back Bay Blues
“Roark’s skill at his job is displayed amid a gift for self-conscious mockery … There’s plenty of room for detection and a blood-soaked finale”
Booklist on Back Bay Blues
About the author
Peter Colt is a 1996 graduate of the University of Rhode Island with a BA in Political Science and a 24-year veteran of the Army Reserve with deployments to Kosovo and Iraq as an Army Civil Affairs officer. He is currently a police officer in Rhode Island. He is married with two sons and two perpetually feuding cats.
Suzanne Marie Johnson July 25, 1942 – July 10, 2023
The only woman I ever considered my Aunt.
For Cathy, Henry and Alder.
Acknowledgments
I write the stories but there are a lot of people who make the manuscript into a book.
Cathy and the boys who put up with my spending so much time in the office.
CME who reads and edits the first draft so none of you will ever know how bad my spelling and grammar are.
My agent, the incomparable Cynthia Manson.
My editor Rachel Slatter.
Copyeditor Deborah Balogun.
And the many people at Severn House who work hard to get the book into your hands but never get a shout out.
ONE
The rain beat a tattoo against the roof of my battered Ford Maverick. It came down hard enough to have rivaled Art Blakey on good night. If Art Blakey had had a bad night drumming, I wouldn’t have heard the difference. It was April 1986, and I was parked across the street from the Merrimack Community Bank, in Amesbury, Massachusetts. Amesbury is the second most northern town in the Commonwealth. It was as close to New Hampshire as you could get without having to ‘Live Free or Die.’ Amesbury was a nice town, not quite affluent, but most of the people who lived there were strangers to things like welfare cheese and food stamps.
Amesbury had one of the oldest suspension bridges in America that crossed the Merrimack. There were also notable sights such as the Powwow River and Powwow Hill. It had a downtown area that was marked by three-story buildings with no shortage of nineteenth-century brick and stone. There was a historic Market Square and more colonial architecture around town than you could shake a stick at. Not to mention a couple of photogenic churches. If you were a movie producer looking for a classic New England city to shoot exterior shots in, Amesbury would be pretty high on the list. I might have enjoyed it, too, if I wasn’t stuck watching the front doors of the bank.
I was backed into a parking spot across the street from the bank. My wipers occasionally transited across the windshield and the heater was set to defrost. Normally on surveillance I would have kept the car turned off, but the rain and chill in the air meant that I had to have the car on so I could see through the windshield. It was hard to do surveillance through a windshield-sized cataract.
I was waiting for the bank manager, a man named Mark Lintz, to get in his Mercedes coupe. This one was a snazzy, silver Mercedes-Benz 450. Sadly, it wasn’t the type with the gull-wing doors that opened upward instead of the way the rest of the world opened their car doors. Even with that minor failing, it was still a pretty sharp-looking car. I couldn’t afford one, and unless I was following the country club set around, it would draw too much attention. I sat in my more modest Ford Maverick, wanting a cigarette, having car lust, waiting for my guy to come out of the bank.
A few days earlier in my office near Boston’s financial district, I had been sitting at my desk, staring across its expanse at Harry Brock. Brock was the president of the Merrimack Community Bank in Amesbury. He told me so with no small sense of pride when he called to make the appointment.
He had arrived on time, his eyes taking in the cheap furniture in my waiting room. He didn’t recoil, at least. In the office he saw my desk, the huge nineteenth-century safe I inherited with the office, and behind me the espresso machine that old man Marconi kept in his pizza joint. I had inherited it when he left for Italy to spend his last, cancer-ridden days in his homeland.
‘I don’t know anything about embezzling,’ I said.
‘Well, you don’t have to know much. It’s basically stealing by someone who has access to someone else’s money.’ Brock was in his late forties, bald more than balding, brown hair, dark eyes and a slight pot belly. He wore the regulation blue pinstripe suit that bankers were expected to wear and a tie with the crest of an Ivy League school I didn’t recognize. In these parts, it was Harvard or nothing.
‘I know that much,’ I said with mild exasperation.
‘Look, we have accountants. They tell me money is missing, and that it looks like a lot of money has been syphoned out of the bank.’
‘How much money?’
‘A little over two million dollars.’
I whistled. ‘That’s a lot of money. Where did it go? How do you even move that much money?’
‘There are a number of areas in which there is fluctuation in the value of certain assets. If someone had access to accounts and could time it right, they could steal quite a lot of money. But that’s why we have accountants.’
‘Right, I get that part. Weren’t they able to trace where it went?’
‘No, they weren’t. Whoever took the money was pretty smart about it. There’s no trail – or no trail that we can follow. What I need you to do is check around. Follow the people who have access to the money. See if they’re living above their means. We know the money is missing. We need to know who took it.’
‘I presume it is a short list?’
‘Yes, exactly three people long. Though I can’t believe any of them would do it.’
‘No, but it has to be someone. Money doesn’t just embezzle itself. Do you have anyone who is more likely than any of the others?’ I didn’t point out that he probably wouldn’t have hired them if he thought they weren’t trustworthy.
‘Mark Lintz.’
‘Why does he stand out?’
‘On the face of it, he doesn’t.’ Brock furrowed his brow. ‘He’s married, in his thirties, they have a son … but he’s the most likely. I don’t know, maybe he’s having an affair or it’s a gambling problem. That’s why I need you. Mr Roark, I need to resolve this as quickly as possible.’
‘Sure, but why not go to the authorities?’
‘We’re a small bank and the board of directors would blame me. I hired Lintz and promoted him. He’s a little young but he seemed – seems – very capable,’ he corrected himself. ‘I am responsible for the operations of the bank. In short, I could lose my job.’
‘We can’t have that.’
‘Please, Mr Roark, I need a detective who is discreet and gets results.’
‘I’m your guy.’ I almost believed it too.
‘Good. Their details.’ He handed me a manila envelope.
‘Who are the other two you suspect?’
‘Karen Marti, she’s my secretary. I might be the president but she runs the bank. I just sign the papers.’ He had told the joke often enough that it had the feel of old denim.
‘But you don’t think it’s her?’
‘No, I’ve known Karen forever. It’s just impossible.’
‘Then why is she on the list?’
‘Access. She has access to everything in the bank.’
‘OK, I will take a look at her, if only to rule her out.’ That was a bit of a lie. If it was Marti, it wouldn’t be the first time that someone got sick of taking orders and watching everyone else get ahead. Brock wouldn’t be the first guy to make a mistake because he believed the fairer sex wasn’t capable of doing all the nasty things men did. Recently I had been getting a lot of lessons in women’s capabilities.
‘The other is Frank Cosgrove.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘The assistant manager. He answers to Lintz, but he has access to everything too.’
‘What’s his deal?’
‘He’s in his late twenties. Good-looking guy. The women at the bank love him, and he’s great at convincing a lot of our female customers to open Christmas Club accounts.’
‘But he’s not your first choice?’
He laughed. ‘No, Frank’s just not the type. I think he’s pretty religious or something.’
‘OK, are their details in here too?’ I asked, holding up the manila envelope.
‘Yes. I also included pictures of them.’
‘That’ll help.’
‘I really wish it isn’t any of them. We’re like a family.’
‘Sure, sure.’ I didn’t bother offering him my opinion that it wasn’t betrayal if you weren’t close to them.
We talked about money and agreed to a fee. It was good to know that I wouldn’t have to contemplate drinking cheap whiskey for another few months. He took one of those zippered canvas bags that people use for cash deposits out of his inner pocket. He unzipped it, pulled a small stack of bills out and slid it across the desk to me. Like that, I was hired and a few days later ended up here, parked outside of bank in northern Massachusetts in my battered car.
It rained hard enough to remind me of monsoon season in Vietnam. At least the only threat I was facing in Amesbury was being bored to death. Watching a bank manager was a lot less scary than conducting reconnaissance on the Ho Chi Minh trail, which I had spent three years doing. I had grown up enough to appreciate the pleasure of being bored versus the excitement of being shot at.
Lunchtime came around, and I was waiting to see if Lintz was going to go out. My stomach rumbled, reminding me that breakfast was a long-distant memory. I tried to satisfy my hunger with a cup of warm coffee from my thermos, but it wasn’t falling for it. I was pretty sure that Lintz wouldn’t be going to lunch in this rain. I didn’t know who would venture out if they didn’t have to. Even in the car with the heat going, a raw chill managed to find its way down the back of my neck. I wanted a cigarette, but that would mean cracking the window, which meant even more raw chilliness. I could wait a little while longer.
I was on my third or fourth day of surveillance. Surveillance was boring at the best of times, and this stakeout was especially so. The days had started to run together. If it weren’t for the need to account for my time for billing purposes, I would have lost track. The problem with this type of job was that I was one man. A good surveillance operation would have a minimum of three people watching one subject instead of one guy trying to watch three people. I could spend weeks on the job, so I had to try and split my time between the potential suspects.
The other two people that Brock had identified as potential suspects weren’t that exciting as suspects go. Neither one showed any signs of living above or, frankly, below their means. Both seemed pretty solidly middle class, you know, the white picket fence, two kids and a dog type of people. It struck me that I had more in common with the North Vietnamese Army soldiers who spent three years trying to kill me than I did with the average American family man.
It was not that I was critical of them, or families for that matter. I just didn’t understand it. Getting up and battling traffic to go to some job at the office, the mill, the plant, etc. Coming home to a wife or having to go to dance recitals, Cub Scouts or parent-teacher conferences. That was all a foreign language to me. Maybe in part because my own childhood had been a bit different, being raised by my father on his own. He’d done the best he could after my mother had left. He met her while on occupation duty in Germany. He had jumped in on D-Day, fought his way into Germany and stayed longer than he should have.
He ended up with a war bride and, eventually, a son. His job at the mill was there for him when he came home, and one day his wife wasn’t. He had wanted to be a poet and had a taste of the world beyond South Boston (Southie). Then he was saddled with responsibility and disappointment. He was a good father and did his best to raise me well. Some of it took, but that didn’t stop him from drinking himself to death shortly after I came home from Vietnam. Maybe I had been trying to live up to him or make him proud, or maybe I was bitten by the urge that made me want to leave Southie and see the world. Who knows?
That was the downside of surveillance, you had all the time in the world to sit and think. Fighting off boredom any way you could. In the end, my mind wandered back to my dad. I snapped myself back to the present and was relieved to see the silver Mercedes was still parked in its spot. My stomach rumbled again, and I sipped the coffee, which was still a bit warm.
There was a deli a few doors down, and hunger won out over my desire to stay dry. I pulled my Red Sox ballcap down on my head, opened the door and stepped out into the rain. If it was all of twenty yards to the deli, I would be shocked. In the short few moments it took me to walk there, my coat from L.L. Bean’s started to soak through. In its defense, it wasn’t really a raincoat but some sort of wool-lined, nylon shell that was a sportier version of an army field jacket.
I opened the door to the deli and stepped inside just in time for the downpour to switch to a light drizzle. I contemplated the offerings and settled on a Reuben. They are a love or hate type of sandwich, but I love them – corned beef, Swiss cheese, sauerkraut and Russian dressing on grilled rye. If you thought about it, it should be disgusting, but the combination of unlikely ingredients worked well together. It was just what I needed to help me power through another few hours of boring surveillance.
I put my order in and waited, sitting, watching the bank parking lot across the street. Surveillance is ninety-nine percent boredom and one percent excitement when your subject does something. So far, after a few days, none of the bank people had done anything exciting. None of them ever seemed to do anything particularly interesting. They did regular life stuff – grocery shopping, putting a kid on the bus, waiting to get the kid off the bus in the case of the Lintzs. They went to work and went home. The closest thing that I saw to high living or gambling was Karen Marti going to Bingo at the local Knights of Columbus Hall. Not exactly an indicator of someone embezzling to pay for their gambling losses.
