It was hard for him to say. His throat worked. It was something he didn’t like to swallow.
“Anyway, even being paid less than her market value, she was able to accumulate a substantial amount after living expenses and taxes. I had her tax returns done here in the firm. I tried to talk her into investing in private drilling programs with people in the industry, people she knew and respected. I told her it would be a good tax shelter for a single person with her income. But she was not interested in manipulating money and making it grow. She wanted to tuck it away and forget it. So three years ago I had her open a discretionary trust account at Houston Bank and Trust and empty her savings accounts into it. The trust officer, Phyllis DeMar, consulted with me about what we should recommend to Norma. We put her into growth stocks, because it was not appropriate for her to invest for income. And we put her into tax-frees. It made a suitable portfolio.”
“Very sound,” Meyer said.
Windham turned the folder to where both Meyer and I could see a page of columns of figures, and then he came around the table to lean between us and point to the appropriate places.
“This is a summary printout made by the Trust Department. It shows the contributions in this column, withdrawals in this, and the total value of the trust based on market value of the holdings, at the end of each month since the account was established.
“As you can see, the total value of the account reached a peak of three hundred and fifteen thousand, seven hundred and twenty-eight dollars and forty cents on the last day of February this year. There were no more contributions made after that date. In the period from March first to June fifteenth, three and a half months, the account balance was drawn down to this figure here, which is approximately what is in the account today, nine thousand three hundred and something.
“Though it was a substantial amount for her to have saved, it is but a tiny driblet of the money that surges through the banks in this city. In each case she authorized the sale of the securities, signed the authorization, and deposited the checks in the account she maintained at First National. Then she cashed a large number of checks over that time span. As she made me and the Houston Bank and Trust co-executors, I was able to get access to the checking account records. The summary is on this next sheet. This column here is normal account activity: charge accounts, bills, etc. These are the checks she cashed. One hundred and fifty-two, all in the fifteen-hundred- to twenty-five-hundred-dollar range. About ten a week. Two every working day. But because she was on field trips from time to time, the incidence had to be higher than that when she was in town. She went around to branch offices of the bank. She evidently wanted to accumulate cash without attracting any kind of attention. And it worked.”
“What do you think was going on?” Meyer asked. “Take a guess.”
Windham went back to his chair and slouched into it, leaning his chin on a steeple of long fingers. “My bias comes into the answer. Where did this Evan Lawrence come from? Maybe she married some kind of con man, or somebody given to harebrained schemes to make a million. Even though Norma wasn’t interested in money for its own sake, she was a very smart woman. She had a good mind. Could she have been cheated?”
“Probably,” Meyer said. “She was deeply in love. Trust becomes very important then. You suppress doubts for fear of offending the loved one. Her man and her work they were the important things in her life. If he asked for a loan, made a plausible sales pitch, she would have given it to him.”
“But why such stealth?” Windham said. “If she had doubts, she knew she could come to me for advice.”
“Tell him, Travis,” Meyer said.
I didn’t want to, because I knew it was going to have a very ugly effect on Roger Windham.
“It was a very violent explosion,” I said to him. “I read the reports. I know. Explosions are the big thing lately. How many school kids can you kill with a car bomb?”
“There were no identifiable remains. In fact, there were no remains at all. None recovered. Not of anybody aboard.”
“I read that-at least a hint of it-and I couldn’t believe it. Or understand it.”
“Nobody aboard ever knew what happened to them. Existence suddenly stopped,” I said.
“Her friends,” he said, “decided we’d have a memorial service for them in a week or so. For there to be a funeral, there has to be something to bury.”
“We had a little ceremony in the Atlantic off Lauderdale, out off the sea buoy;” Meyer said. “The other boats were there because of Captain Jenkins. But we brought our own wreath and floated it out on the tide at the same time. Our wreath was for Hack Jenkins and Norma and Evan Lawrence.”
“I’m glad that happened,” he said.
“But now,” I said, maybe too loudly, “Meyer and I are ninety-nine percent certain only three people were blown up out there-Norma and Hack and a harmless little guy who worked mate part-time.”
Windham shook his head and knuckled his tired reddened eyes. “What are you trying to tell me?”
“Evan Lawrence had some time to work it all out The happy couple were living aboard Meyer’s boat. In the Miami area you can buy anything in the world. Anything. A bazooka and a case of antitank grenades. Russian land mines. Persian whores. Chinese poisons. All you need is enough cash. He had access to Meyer’s professional files aboard the Keynes. He could have picked up enough about Chile to be able to fake the terrorist claim on the phone. We have identified the third person on the boat as the hired mate. Evan was handy enough so that Jenkins would never have hired the mate if Evan had been along to help with Norma’s tackle and bait. When they gassed up, Norma paid the hundred and something in cash out of her purse to the man at the pumps. Had Evan been there, she would have given it to him to give to the man. Had Evan been aboard, he would have been up on deck when they went out past the buoy into the wind and the chop. And what is more conclusive, Roger, is the way the money fits into the whole pattern.”
He didn’t say anything. He did a strange and touching thing. He bent over slowly, all the way over, to rest his forehead against the shiny dark wood of the conference table. His red hair was thinning at the crown. It gave him a vulnerable look.
We said nothing. In time he straightened up. “I guess I knew it somehow,” he said in a flat voice. “Maybe I knew it when he shook my hand. After the wedding. He pumped my hand and beamed at me and told me how happy he was. All that great warm grinning. She was right there, his big left paw resting on her waist in ownership. He looked at me in… in a jolly way, as if we shared some kind of joke together. I guess he was laughing on the inside at the way he’d gotten Norma to spirit the money out of the trust without letting her faithful old adviser know about it. Or laughing about how it was all going according to plan.”
Meyer said, “Maybe at that time he already planned to kill her in such a way it would look as if he had died too. But he wouldn’t have had the details worked out. They didn’t know they were going to live aboard my boat while I gave talks in Toronto.”
“But they seemed to be so much in love. Both of them,” Roger said wonderingly. “Do the police believe any of this?”
“There’s nothing yet to tell them,” Meyer said. “We’ve got no basis on which to try to trace Evan Lawrence. No personal papers. No fingerprints. Nothing. Just some little stories he told about his past. We’re going to look into his past, provided those stories weren’t lies.”
“If only Mr. Dexter hadn’t loaned her to Pemex,” he said. “You know, when I found out about the money, about her taking it out of the trust account, that’s when I knew why she was avoiding me after she married Evan Lawrence. I’d told her that she ought to come in and chat about the changes that ought to be made in their wills. But she was elusive. It wasn’t a matter of any great urgency, I thought. I just wanted to see her and talk to her. She was an honest person. She was doing something without telling me, taking that money out. She really didn’t have to tell me. It was her money, after all. But she didn’t want to come in and not tell me. Sorry about nattering around like this, thinking with my mouth open. I just have the crazy feeling I lost her three times, when she got married, when she died, and-now-finding out maybe she was killed. I really think she liked me. We always found a lot to laugh about together. I just didn’t make a move when I should have. And she happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and there was Evan Lawrence, grinning away, putting those big hands on her.”