Fortune hunters, p.19
Fortune Hunters, page 19
“It’s good.” There was admiration in her voice. “I’m no expert, but if I’m right, it’s the best I’ve ever seen. In fact it’s so good we should have Dee Dee check it with her guy just to make sure we aren’t wrong.”
“You’re not wrong,” he said. “You can see it with the small r’s in the names. Your eyes are younger than mine, but I see it too. It’s frequent enough that whoever did it must have gotten lazy. Maybe things were going so well that he or she got sloppy with overconfidence. When you compared the stream of signatures with some of the handwriting from the letters, it became a little more obvious. But you’re right. Check it out with Dee.”
“I’ll see her on Thursday just before I hit the road for Vermont.”
McBain rifled through a stack of notes on the table in front of him. They had made progress and could call it quits for the day and head back to the office.
“OK,” he said. “By the way, here is the list of hotels in the region that fit the profile and some of their credit card receipts over the last three years. You can use them as a starting point for your road trips. Along with Sarah’s picture, the few descriptions we have from the letters might help find someone who recognized her and any guests.”
“Fine. I’ll match up what I’ve gleaned from the letters with the hotels and restaurants and start setting up a patterned search. You have a profile of him yet?”
“Almost. Damn, Sarah took a lot of trouble to make sure she didn’t identify him. There are some things in here about him, but no description and not much detail. I still wonder if it wasn’t one of their friends. She writes like she is afraid they might be discovered. Maybe she was worried about her letters falling into the wrong hands, like the guy’s wife. I’m sure a divorce lawyer would kill for these. The woman should have worked for the CIA.”
“That would be a pattern, wouldn’t it?” Boston said as she shrugged. “You couldn’t get much closer than Abbott. Maybe that’s how affairs evolve. Isn’t that how it worked with Melissa?”
“Quite the opposite. I only wish she had cared enough about my feelings to be this discreet. Mel pretty much shoved it in my face in the end, like she was spiking the ball or something. And hard as it may be for you to believe, I have no experience from the other side, so I have no idea whether there is a common pattern.”
Boston leafed through the stack. “So why do I have receipts for both of them? That’s a lot of extra ground to cover, even for me.”
“Because they were lumped together in a mess, and I didn’t want us to miss anything by accident. And considering Ms. Baker’s newsflash about how flighty her parents could be about accounting, I figured they might use each other’s credit cards once in a while too. I separated them by hotel, date, and geographic category, not person. When I could, I marked them with a P or an S so you can skip over the ones that aren’t relevant. Besides, sometimes there are matches, which means they had both used their credit cards at the place at different times. You can ignore those for now. I may not know much, but if she was that concerned, I doubt she’d go to a place nearby that knew Phillip. You’ll just have to pick out Sarah’s in context and keep them in order as you go.”
She paged through the pile, shaking her head.
“For a college professor, she sure seemed to get plenty of time off to take extended trips. Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Nantucket, the Cape, the Berkshires. You’d think she was already retired. Nice work if you can get it. This could take a while.”
McBain grinned at his partner as he packed up his briefcase. “Well, you’ve been talking about taking a trip all winter. And how I’ve been getting on your nerves.…Bon voyage.”
Boston grabbed her own leather bag and patted her partner on the cheek with her free hand.
“What will you do without me when I retire?”
“Probably start drinking.”
****
Chapter Eighteen
Wednesday was turning out to be a profitable day. Boston and McBain had each collected a check from two outstanding investigations and filed the cases under Winners. A follow-up call to Drysdale Securities just before noon was about to lead to another satisfied client.
They were considering where they would celebrate over an expensive lunch when Boston took a call from her father.
“Thanks, Dad, we’ll be there at one.” She hung up.
“Where will we be at one?” McBain asked, his voice sinking.
“Down the street at the office. Dad is going to fill us in on the Lehmann investigation. He says he has some interesting background on the late doctor. So lunch will have to wait.”
McBain straightened his tie and pulled on his jacket. If they were going in to police headquarters, both of them were going to look professional and expensive. He wore a gray pinstripe, while Boston dressed in black cashmere and pulled her hair back in a ponytail.
They took a cab down Tremont to One Schroeder Plaza in time to pass through security and grab the elevator to Captain O’Daniel’s office in the Bureau of Investigative Services. The headquarters of the Boston Police Department was housed in a modern, white building on the edge of Roxbury, with state-of-the-art facilities and one of the leading crime laboratories in the country. After working his way up through the districts in the greater Boston area, Tom O’Daniel had been promoted to the role of a free-floating supervisor in the Bureau. In that position, his mandate put him in touch with the formidable resources the Boston PD deployed in any murder investigation, from homicide detectives to forensic science.
The two partners put on their game faces as they walked through the hallways and waited outside the captain’s office at 12:59. His office was not large, but it was busy. Although they both knew a number of the detectives on a personal basis, Boston and McBain were aware they were in new territory, and they merely nodded politely. None of their cases had ever involved violence, let alone murder. On this terrain, they knew to be all business.
A minute later, two hard-looking detectives sauntered out of the captain’s office. With a glance, his secretary urged the partners in. Tom O’Daniel was seated behind his desk, speaking on the phone. His uniform was immaculate, the tie notched in a perfect triangle at the top of a black strip that sat upon a crisp, white shirt. He pointed to the chairs across from him while he was talking. McBain had never been here, and he took the opportunity to glance around. One white wall was lined with shelves holding plaques with citations, trophies, and sports memorabilia or pictures with department personnel and city or state bigwigs. The other was covered with framed photos of the captain, Boston’s mother Margaret, and the five girls at various ages. It was easy to make out the youngest daughter in every picture—the one with energy exploding toward the camera. He always had a hard time reconciling the shots of Boston as a child with the woman he had grown together with over the past four years.
The captain hung up and leaned back in his leather chair, arms on the rests. There was a nice view looking north to Cambridge over his wide shoulders.
“OK,” he said, “what do you two have for me on Lehmann?”
Boston crossed her legs and flipped open her notebook.
“It’s what we don’t have,” she said. “We checked with the college in Saint Louis and our friends in Miami. There’s no record of anyone with his name graduating from med school. No one knows anything about the guy. Even the people and patients we talked to from the Baker case had nothing to add. No one seemed especially curious about him. Nobody had an inkling of his personal life or background. He was their doctor and an occasional social contact, but not close enough to anyone to generate questions. Nada. Which means he was probably a phony.”
The captain nodded. “Makes sense. Most of our checks into his background produced fraudulent credentials. We came to the same conclusion.”
McBain leaned forward. “I would have thought that if he was legit, we could have tracked him down through the Jewish community in the Miami area, but even down there, no one connected him to any of the families named Lehmann.”
“That’s because he wasn’t Jewish.”
“Who was he?” Boston asked.
“Doctor Lehmann, as he called himself here, was from Brazil,” the captain replied. “The detectives have started piecing things together from the records we found. They also contacted the medical boards and certification authorities here, in New York, and DC. It seems our man had good reason to move around so much. He had been caught practicing medicine without a license several times. I talked to one of the lead investigators in Washington who was very familiar with the man we know as Lehmann. He was intrigued to finally find out his guy had resurfaced here and what name he was operating under.”
McBain said: “For how long?”
“About twenty years all told, here in the States. Five in Brazil.”
Boston seemed less surprised than her partner. “Did you talk to anybody else about him?”
Her father’s lip curled up reflexively. “Like who, for example?”
“Like maybe anyone in Brazil?” she said. “Was he guilty of anything except medical malpractice, or whatever they call it? Any chance he was connected with any kind of scam or untimely deaths?”
“As a matter of fact, I did speak to a few other people, including some in Brazil. Apparently your man left the country in a hurry all those years ago. He has former associates down there who engage in some of those very unsavory practices you mention.”
McBain saw it. “And you think the boys from Brazil decided to visit their old partner in America. Why?”
The captain shrugged. “Too early to tell yet. Interestingly enough, when we took apart the file cabinets, we happened to find a file taped to the back of one drawer. Whoever went through the files missed that, since the cabinets were too heavy to move if you were in a hurry. The file contained some bank account numbers that we’re running down now. The guys are pretty sure they are offshore accounts. This may be the connection with your case. We should be into the computer files by this afternoon.”
Boston took her pen off the notebook.
“I don’t suppose our suspect Richard Roche has come up in any of your investigations yet?” she asked.
Her father shook his head. “No, and I wouldn’t count on it. It’s only been a few days, but this is beginning to look more and more like some kind of organized-crime killing, probably over money or some bad history down there. I had Roche checked out too, though, since he’s a money man. He looks pretty solid. Unlike the late doctor, his credentials are for real, and he’s squeaky clean with the securities regulators. Manages money and lives well, but not too well. You want to help me out, you can put your skills to work sorting out whether Lehmann was ripping off the Bakers somehow. Check out their medical bills or something for bogus activity. You know Medicare fraud better than we do. See if they loaned him any money, voluntarily or without knowing it…”
“…that he might have sent back to Brazil?” Boston said.
“Or not?” McBain added.
“Exactly,” O’Daniel replied. “And that’s it. Let me know what you come up with. Stay away from Roche. And don’t let me catch you at the airport. I’ll update you as I get more. Capiche?”
Boston smiled as they stood to go. She nodded politely. “Understood.”
The two left the building through the front entrance on Tremont.
“You heard him,” Boston said, buttoning her coat and arranging her scarf.
“Yep,” he nodded as he lit a cigarette. “I’ll see you at the Baker house for dinner.”
McBain waited for the market to close before calling on Richard Roche at his office on High Street. The financial advisor welcomed him in with collegial warmth, and the two eased into comfortable wingback chairs looking out over the harbor sipping eighteen-year single-malt Scotch.
“I appreciate the fact that you came by in person, Mr. McBain.”
“Not at all, Mr. Roche. I figured you saw the news, but I wanted to stop by myself since this was yet another person who knew the Bakers. And I thought maybe he was a friend of yours.”
“No, I wouldn’t say we were friends. Still, it does hit close to home when someone you know personally is killed, especially in their own home in a safe neighborhood. It’s not abstract, like watching the news.”
McBain sat back in his chair. “Oh, I thought maybe you and he were acquaintances. I came across someone who mentioned that Lehmann introduced you to the Bakers five years ago.”
“Yes, I knew Doctor Lehman for years. We met on a golf course not long after I moved to Boston. Come to think of it, he did introduce me to Phillip at one of their parties. But we were never close. Still, I wouldn’t have suspected anyone would have reason to kill him. I wonder if it was a robbery of some kind, perhaps drug related.”
McBain scrutinized Roche’s face for any sign of nervousness.
“It turns out it may be more complicated than that. It might even mean the end of your potential legal troubles with Christina Baker. I spoke to the police. Can I trust in your discretion?”
“Certainly.”
“There’s a chance the doctor was a fraud, and that he may have been involved with organized crime in Brazil. Did you know that’s where he was from?”
“Brazil? No. I thought he was from Florida.”
“That was a lie, like much about the late doctor. It seems he was practicing medicine without a license—that is, practicing to be a real doctor someday. Maybe practicing on the Bakers too, both medically and financially. The police are raising questions about his relationship with Phillip and Sarah. They’re going to begin looking at the financial angle with us to see if the man, whatever his name was, fleeced the Bakers somehow in connection with his ties to some crime gang. They may want to talk to you to see if you noticed any suspicious transfers or money movements out of the investment accounts over time. I told them I hadn’t seen any evidence of it, but, you know…”
Not a blink. Roche shook his salt-and-pepper head and sipped at his cocktail.
“This is incredible,” he said. “How could this be possible in Brookline? He seemed like such a stalwart member of the community.”
“It’s a good thing you weren’t close to the doc,” McBain said. He brushed lint off his pants. “If the police turn up anything bad on him, it’s going to reflect poorly on anyone associated with him. You’re right; a murder in Brookline is pretty high profile.”
“Yes, I’m sure you’re right.”
“Aside from the scandal, I’m interested in seeing if there is anything wider going on. If someone had the cojones to put a bullet into Lehmann in the middle of the night in Brookline, they won’t stop at cleaning up any other loose ends, if there are any.”
This time Roche walked his glass over to the bar and refilled it with a steady hand. To McBain’s eye he didn’t look nervous, but he didn’t look particularly comfortable either. He brought the bottle of Macallan back to the table and poured more into the investigator’s tumbler. He put the bottle between them.
“My God,” he said as he sat down. “They don’t really think this is some kind of conspiracy, do they? That there is some assassin on the loose in Boston?”
McBain shrugged. “I guess if we learned anything in the past few years in our business, it’s that anything is possible.”
“Of course,” Roche agreed. “Speaking of which, I discovered a bit more about you since we last met. It seems you’re not exactly a financial planner. Like a good trader, Mr. McBain, you were playing your position. I have to say you were being somewhat economical with the truth in our last conversation. You have your own thriving private business.”
The investigator smiled modestly. “Well, I’m also a financial planner.”
“I did an online search on you and didn’t find much.”
“I’m not on the web. Not exactly the kind of business that advertising pays off for. Word of mouth is fine. I’m sure you understand.”
Roche laughed as he dropped more ice in the glasses.
“I should have known Christina would have gone looking for the very best assistance she could find. I presumed it would have come in the form of an attorney, as she suggested here in this very office. And in a way, I’m flattered. From what I’ve heard, you appear quite successful at getting results for your clients. One has to respect that kind of reputation. But for the record, I assure you that our previous conversation regarding the Bakers’ investments reflects the full truth of the matter. I am quite happy to answer any questions you still have. However, my reputation also is a matter of public record, and I stand by it. And I assure you that my personal life is boring enough that you shall find little grist for your mill there.”
McBain had to give Cary Grant credit. He did his homework. He still felt warmly toward the guy, even if he wasn’t about to let him off the hook just yet. Christina Baker was right; Roche could really turn on the charm in the way McBain had seen countless slick Wall Street salesmen lure in trusting suckers. Unfortunately, most of those people actually were incredible bores, despite the size of their paychecks and egos. So unless Roche was somehow involved with the Brazilians, there probably wasn’t going to be much to use against him. On the other hand, that hadn’t stopped him before.
“Mr. Roche,” McBain said as he raised his glass, “if I thought you were even remotely responsible for what happened to the Bakers, or connected with anything unethical, I wouldn’t be here now. I’d have turned over all I’ve got to the SEC and the cops. This is a murder investigation, and the police are handling everything. I’m just here as a courtesy.”
“And I appreciate the consideration. It’s a welcome change at the end of another disappointing day in the market.”
They exchanged views on certain stocks and the economy, along with their expectations for the coming year, then McBain finished his drink and left.
He savored the taste of that good Scotch as he emerged into the lobby and the bustle of the rush-hour crowd. Shards of sunlight reflected off the glass atrium and filtered into the broad landscaped lobby. Shift change, he observed, as the nightly cleaning crew marshaled to replace the white-collar tide issuing from the elevators and heading home into the spring sunset. McBain smiled, made a mental note, and remembered how good it was to have a drink liar to liar. It was always good to remind himself why he was in this business.
