“Maybe their last ransom note or call demanded a hundred grand, but she tells them she only has seventy-five left, an uneven number. Why? She’s trying to be smart for once, make it believable. She’s tired of the whole gig. She doesn’t want to do it anymore. She’s willing to try anything, so she lies and says that’s all I’ve got left, screw you.”
I said, “It’s plausible. It really is. But think about this finesse: Merlot’s right there with her the whole time she’s being blackmailed. He’s offering her advice, pretending to be her friend when, from the very beginning, he’s the one behind it. It’s his idea, he’s coordinating the whole thing.”
“That picture of him, man, that picture really got to you, didn’t it? Admit it.”
“I’ll admit I think the guy’s a user. I already said that. I think it’s possible that he had something to do with Gail’s withdrawing so much money.”
“Sure… I can see something like that happening. But if he’s behind it all, why didn’t he clean her out completely? He hates the ex-husband, so why not go for the kill?” Tomlinson came up with the answer before I could reply. “Okay, okay, he lets her keep a little money so he’s entirely above suspicion. He not only doesn’t want the cops to catch on, he doesn’t want the woman to doubt him even for a second.”
I was nodding. “Right, I thought of that. It’s one of the things that really bothers me. If he’s doing this crap for revenge, he’ll ultimately want her and Frank to know that he’s the one who conned them. It’s his final move, the way he wins. As in checkmate. The act isn’t over till he sees the hurt in Gail’s face and he hears the anger in Frank’s voice. So, if he’s taken precautions against Gail finding out, it means he’s not done with her yet. He has other ways he can use her.”
Tomlinson’s expression was grim. “The word checkmate in chess,” he said, “I hope it’s not appropriate.”
“What?”
“ Checkmate, the word: It comes from the Persian phrase Shah mat, which means ‘The king is dead.’ Jesus. That’s just so sick. He takes her money and he still wants to take more.”
Where did Tomlinson come up with this stuff?
I said, “Yeah, it’s a bad deal… if we’re right about the blackmail angle. But neither one of us knows for sure if we’re right.”
I told him there were other possibilities. We talked about them, batting them back and forth. I described two different cons that weren’t much better than blackmail. One, Merlot weasels his way into her confidence. She’s emotionally damaged, very vulnerable. Sleeping with her’s not enough. To get back at the ex-husband, he wants the woman’s money, too. That old saying that you can’t cheat an honest man is baloney. Honest, caring people are the easiest marks in the world and, according to Amanda, her mother was sensitive and caring to a fault.
“The guy knows she has money,” Tomlinson added. “All he’s got to do is find the right approach.”
Exactly. I kept going, thinking out loud, trying to put myself in Merlot’s place. With a woman like Gail, my guess was he either played on her sympathy or he leveraged the trust he’d very carefully built in her. One possibility? He goes to her and says he’s sick. Or a friend of his is sick. Or there’s a sick child and the only surgeon who can help has to be paid up front because it’s South America and insurance doesn’t cover it. Merlot’s not sure how much it’s going to cost, but she can start by sending forty grand.
Tomlinson was following along. “Yeah, I can see how that would get to her. One of the scenarios I came up with had her making these huge payments to keep some Colombian orphanage from being repossessed. Or an old persons’ home. A hospital maybe, it’s the same angle. Any variation would work. The big lie, man, the big lie. Honest people always fall for the big lie.”
I said, “I know. It’s infuriating, because it speaks so badly about how we’ve progressed as a species. Except for the predators among us. They’ve gotten better. They’ve gotten smoother. The predatory types, they’ve got an instinct. Frank Calloway said that about Merlot. They realize that emotionally troubled people are very pure in their motives. People who’ve been hurt want the hurting to stop. It’s as simple as that. People who are damaged want to be whole again. They tend to be very kind and without device and ready to give anything they have if it will help take the pain away. That’s what’s so damn sad about someone like Gail being nailed by a jerk like Merlot.”
Tomlinson looked at me for a moment. “You don’t even know the guy. Isn’t that what you told me earlier?”
“Okay, I hate the way he looks. His picture gives me the creeps. You satisfied?”
“Now you’re showing an empathetic side, too, man.”
“I’m just parroting you,” I said.
“Bullshit. You’re growing as a person, but you’re too damn stubborn to admit it. Hey… you know what we really need to do? To get a handle on this whole thing?”
Tomlinson said what we needed to do was read Gail Richardson Calloway’s E-mail. If I’d been right when I told him that their affair started through E-mail, then we needed to read the letters, get a feel for how he played her.
He said, “I guarantee you, if they wrote much, every trick he pulled is right there in black and white. I’ve been involved with E-mail for mucho years, man. People will say shit in E-mail that you seriously would not believe.”
I told him that Amanda had promised to go to her mom’s house tonight and track down the correspondence if she could. “We can call her cell phone number when we get back to my place, see how it went.”
The waitress was bringing the food on heavy platters. It looked good. The aroma of baked pompano is meant to mingle with beach air.
Tomlinson said, “I’m surprised she has her mom’s password, man. People don’t give out their passwords.”
I had the first stone crab claw off the plate and was tapping it with a spoon, creating fault lines in the heavy shell. The claw was shaped like a boxing glove, orange and white.
When I’d explained to him about Gail’s password, he told me “Yeah, well… if Merlot had the kind of control over her that we both think, he didn’t let her leave Florida without covering his tracks. You know that as well as I do. He would’ve made her change the password. Or dump the whole account.”
He had a point. “If the password’s been changed, does that mean we’ve lost all that information?”
“Nope. Just access. There’ve been whole civilizations lost out there in cyberspace, so the words of two little people don’t amount to a hill of beans. Poof! All gone.”
What the hell did that mean?
I looked across the table at Tomlinson. He’d brought his own chopsticks and was using them to pinch off the tentative first chunks of steaming pompano. I said, “You’re the only computer expert I know. If Amanda can’t get into her mom’s files, do you think you could do it?”
“Try to figure out some random password? I wouldn’t get your hopes up on that one. We’ve got a better chance of finding pearls in those claws you’re eating.” He continued using his chopsticks, but his eyes never wavered from mine. After a time, he said, “But there ARE people who’ve got access to software that can find passwords, track activity, recover just about any file that hasn’t been drowned or gobbled by some badass virus. Get on the horn to one of your old CIA buddies and they’ll know just what we need. They can send the program to my computer or Gail Calloway’s computer as an E-mail attachment; won’t even have to put it on a disk.”
I poured myself another glass of the Riesling. Why was I drinking wine when I wanted a beer? I connected with his eyes as I sipped the wine. “Some things you just won’t let drop. I’ll tell you again: I never worked for the CIA.”
His smile was not entirely sympathetic. “Well, if Amanda calls tonight and tells you she can’t access her mom’s account, my advice is get on the phone and contact whatever hot-shit-right-wing-deep-spook agency you DID work for and tell them what you need. If the bastards aren’t too busy fucking around, destroying some small country, I mean. Personally, I’d rather spend my day watching the weather channel and whacking off in a hanky than trying to guess someone’s password.”