‘You’re a genius,’ Ed told her. ‘A five-lever, armour-plated lock?’
‘They give us a pretty thorough training,’ Della explained, with unconvincing modesty.
‘You bet your investigative ass,’ said Ed, flippant, but also impressed. He’d tried to pick a padlock once, on Season’s diary, and he knew just how damned difficult lock-picking could be. He’d had to wait until Season had gotten around to telling him about her affair with Clive Harris of her own accord, and by then he hadn’t been really interested any more.
‘Come on,’ whispered Della. ‘And make sure you close the door behind you.’
They stepped into the office. It smelled of wine and cigar-smoke, and Shearson’s underarm sweat. Della switched on the green glass desklamp, and directed it away from the window, in case it cast any light across the gardens outside which could be seen from a balcony upstairs.
The wide oak desk was in chaos, heaped with scratch pads and graph paper and accounts books. It looked as if Shearson and Peter had finished their day’s work and then left everything exactly where it was, without bothering to clear up. There was even a half-smoked cigar in Shearson’s ashtray, and a congealing cup of coffee beside Peter’s chair. Ed picked up a yellow legal pad that Shearson had carelessly dropped on to the floor. On the top page, he had doodled an animated dollar-sign, with a broad smile, a big nose, and two little legs.
‘It seems like even dollars can walk,’ said Ed, throwing the pad down again.
‘Sure they can,’ said Della, who was busily leafing through the papers that Peter Kaiser had been working on. ‘They walk right out of the Blight Crisis Appeal fund, around the block a few times, double back around the next block, and then dodge in to Shearson Jones’s hank when nobody’s looking.’
‘I call that smart,’ said Ed.
‘I don’t,’ said Della. ‘I call it embezzlement.’
Ed looked around the office. The walls were clad with knotted pine, sanded and varnished. There were five or six photographs of Shearson making presentations to smiling wheat farmers in Kansas, and a misty early-American landscape by George Catlin. On the oak bookshelf beside the desk reclined a Victorian alabaster sculpture of an idealised Indian maiden, Pocahontas out of Wonder Woman, with feathers in her hair and bare breasts.
Della threw Ed a heavy pile of loose papers. ‘You can start on those. You’re looking for any financial movement out of the Blight Crisis Appeal fund. You’re looking for where it goes, who handles it, which banks are involved, account numbers, possible pseudonyms, that kind of thing. You’re looking for double entries and obvious laundering jobs. You think you can manage?’
‘Sure I can manage,’ said Ed, taking the papers across the room and spreading them out over a small side-table. ‘I mean, pinning down two expert embezzlers out of a whole mess of memos, that can’t be difficult.’
‘You don’t have to find anything specifically criminal. All we need is names, or account numbers. Anything that looks remotely unorthodox.’
‘Okay,’ said Ed. ‘This is your party.’
They worked their way through the papers for forty minutes. Most of the notes and jottings were indecipherable, crowded with notes about tax law – such as ‘Arizona acct exempt under Code Sec 501(c)3??’ and ‘trnsfr to cemetery company poss?’ – and then there were columns and columns of figures, hardly any of them annotated or explained.
But after a while, Ed began to detect a distinct flow of correlated figures from one page of all these scribbled accounts to another. He pulled the desk lamp nearer, and switched on Peter Kaiser’s print-out calculator, and after five minutes of intensive button-punching, he said, ‘That’s it. I think I’m on to something.’
Della came across and looked over his shoulder. ‘See here,’ he told her, ‘this figure of 1.72 million dollars has been ostensibly transferred into a holding fund, to accrue interest while the Blight Crisis Appeal fund management decide how best it’s supposed to be spent. It’s been split six ways, and invested under the perfectly legal terms of the holding fund into six different agriculture-related industries. But if you look at the figures on this page here, you’ll see that a real-estate development company in Fort Myers, Florida, has been lent by six different sources a stun of money that amounts to 1.548 million dollars, which is 1.72 million dollars less ten per cent. There are only two names jotted down here – “Olga” and “Jimmy” – but God knows who they are.’
Della quickly looked through the accounts. ‘It’s not much,’ she said. ‘But maybe it’s enough to point the FBI fraud people in the right direction. At least it’s something. Shearson Jones is usually so good at dusting over his tracks.’
She collected up the papers, folded them, and tucked them in the pocket of her robe.
‘Supposing Shearson notices they’re missing?’ asked Ed, replacing the desk lamp, and tearing the strip of paper off the calculator.
‘It won’t matter if he does. As soon as the Muldoons are up, and the alarms are switched off. I’m getting out of here, and fast.’
‘Where does that leave me?’
‘It leaves you right here. You’ll be safer that way. If Shearson thinks you’re implicated in stealing his personal papers, he’ll hang your guts on the outhouse door.’
‘You FBI agents have such a delicate turn of phrase.’ Della checked the office to make sure that everything was back where it was supposed to be. But she was about to switch off the desklamp when the door opened. Just like that, unannounced. And there, in a plaid cowboy shirt and BVDs, his eyes still blinking with sleep, was one of the Muldoon brothers.
For a moment, Muldoon stared at them both in total surprise, and they stared back at him, and nobody said a word. But then Muldoon turned back towards the passage and yelled out: ‘Calvin! Calvin, c’mere! And bring the gun!’
Ed made a rush for him. He managed to seize Muldoon’s right arm, and pin it behind his back, but Muldoon twisted around and punched him very hard in the ear. Ed said, ‘Shit!’ and lost his balance, banging his head against the door-frame.
Della unceremoniously pushed Ed aside, and struck Muldoon on the collar-bone with her elbow. Then she jabbed him straight in the throat with her rigid fingers, and he pitched backwards across the passage with a high whining sound, like a vacuum cleaner with its bag full.
‘Now – quick, for Christ’s sake!’ panted Della, and seized Ed by the hand.
Ed’s ear was still singing, but he jostled his way out of Shearson’s study, and down the passage, and across the living area. He barked his shin against a chrome coffee-table, and swore under his breath, but Della reached back and tugged at his sweatshirt to get him moving.
Calvin Muldoon popped out from a door beside the staircase, his pump-gun raised, his face white with surprise. Della snatched at the barrel of the gun, missed her grip, but chopped Muldoon in the kidneys with a short, vicious stroke of her right hand. Muldoon folded, and Ed hit him again, straight in the mouth. The gun dropped to the wooden floor with a clatter, and Ed reached down to pick it up.
‘Shearson!’ gasped Della. ‘He’s our only way out!’
Ed wasn’t sure what she meant, but he hauled himself up the staircase after her, and pelted along the landing just behind her, and they skated along the last few feet together and collided with Shearson’s double door at the same moment.
Della jiggled the door handle, but the doors were locked.
‘Shall I blow the lock off?’ asked Ed.
Della snapped her head around and stared at him as if he was mad. ‘Are you crazy? You can’t shoot locks off with a rifle! All you get is noise and smoke and bullets flying in all directions.’