“A father abusing a daughter?” I asked hopefully. But she wouldn’t go that far. “Perhaps-that’s the standard. But there are oddities, things I haven’t been able to quite decipher.” I sighed inwardly, disappointed, and backtracked a bit. “How about something you can be sure of?”
She pointed to one of the wedges. “The most prominent is in the fifth house; whoever this is craves solitude and being left alone, even at the cost of personal relationships. And there are a lot of secrets in this chart-secrets, sex, death, and taboos.”
Fuller came back to mind, as did the growing conviction that this whole conversation was going nowhere fast. I tried again, stimulated more by a loyalty to Gail than by any hopes of success. “But can you tie that in with anything I can use?”
She looked up at the tone in my voice and fixed me with a cool eye. “Lieutenant, you want this to be a mug shot. It’s not. It’s a map to somebody’s character, and as such, it can be a useful tool. Once you find whoever you’re after, you could get him to open up by making him realize you know more about him that he thinks you do. But it won’t help you locate some guy out of the blue.”
I realized I’d let my antipathy work against me. I stepped back mentally and tried to match my needs more realistically with what she could supply. “You’ve been at this a long time. Maybe our best approach would be for you to compare this chart with similar ones you’ve done in the past-ones where you know the people involved. If there are common traits among them, that might help us flesh out whoever’s behind the anonymous chart.”
She looked doubtful, so I pressed on. “Patterns are bound to be repeated. As you do chart after chart, things come around more than once; they become familiar. You end up knowing what you’ve got even before you go through the whole routine. That’s true for us when we do an investigation.”
She was thoughtful for a few moments, looking out the window, and then she let out a small sigh. “There is a risk of the tail wagging the dog-we could end up putting labels on this chart that shouldn’t be applied, even to identifying the person’s sex.”
I was about to argue the point, until I suddenly wondered if she wasn’t already way ahead of me. “You’ve thought of one, haven’t you? A chart that fits.”
She laughed and pretended to tear her hair in mock exasperation, further loosening the elegant pile on top of her head. “Yes, I do, but I’m extremely reluctant to mention it. It is just a single other chart. “
I shook my head. “Look, I know you’re trying to be conscientious, but I promise not to take what you tell me as gospel. Let’s just try this out, okay?”
“All right. The chart I thought of immediately-even last night-was of a homosexual client I once had.”
“A male.”
“Right. He had a terribly abusive mother and no father-at least none that he knew of. His chart revealed a lot of anger directed at his mother, just like this one.” She tapped the chart in her lap. “And both his chart and this one have the male sex sign over in this spot, with Pluto indicating a definite interest, maybe even a compulsion, for partners of the same sex, and Mars pointing toward that sex being male.”
She paused and looked up at me, her expression animated. Despite her earlier hesitation, she’d obviously become intrigued. “That’s about it for real similarities, but if, for argument’s sake, you do make this chart that of a gay male, other things begin to fall into place. Here’s the harshness to his representation of the female, for which you could read the mother figure. Also, you have Neptune highlighting a lot of imagery and flair in the way he expresses himself, like a painter or designer might have. And he has a lot of friends, but no solid partner, and there’s an implication of no children, which could fit a member of a male gay community. Some of that’s a little clichéd, but there it is.”
“Could the painter be a fancy gardener instead?”
She nodded unequivocally. “Oh, sure-there’s a strong connection to the earth here-very strong.”
“How about the mother-can you give me anything on her?”
At that, Billie Lucas closed her eyes for a moment, and I realized I’d overplayed the game. When she reopened them, she also stood up, placing her paperwork on the floor. Her voice had a new firmness to it. “No, we should stop this. It’s not proper, and it’s definitely not astrology. I give you high marks for persuasiveness, though.”
She took my hand and pulled me to my feet, leaving no doubt that she was throwing me out, albeit pleasantly. “I should have known what I was getting into when you called me last night. Gail had me do your chart some time ago.”
“She mentioned that,” I said over my shoulder as she gently propelled me toward the door. “She didn’t go into details, though.”
“You’re perfectly suited to your profession.”
I stopped on the threshold and faced her, risking the remnants of her good humor. “I’ve got to ask you one last question: You mentioned a house dealing with money. How does this guy look there?”
She paused and looked reflective. “That’s fair enough. There are two houses dealing with money. The second concerns personal finances, the eighth shared income. With Capricorn in the second house, he or she has a hard time getting hold of money. This chart’s big emphasis is in the eighth, though.”
“What does shared income mean? Do you mean that literally, as in a tax form?”
“It can be, but it means any money not your own in which you have a share, like a business or a marriage.”
“Or money you stole.”
She stared at me in silence for a couple of seconds, no doubt disappointed with the workings of my mind, and then she nodded. “Yes. Or money you stole.”
8
Harriet stopped me as I walked into the station. “Ron called from the SA’s office. Everybody’s running late, and they’ve only just started reviewing his evidence on the embezzling case. He’s supposed to be meeting Richard Schimke at the bank in ten minutes. Do you want me to put Dennis on it? He’s the only one around.”
I looked at my watch. “Doesn’t Ron have a file or something?”
She patted a folder lying on her desk. “A list of serial numbers, some photos J.P. took of the money, a couple of the bands that were holding the bills together, and a full breakdown of the dates on the bills, plus the names of the Federal Reserve banks that issued them.”
I scooped up the file as I headed back out the door. “Guess you know where you can find me.”
Vermont National Bank occupies the corner of Main and Elliot, across the street from Allen Rogers’s photo store. I asked for Schimke’s name at the information desk in the lobby and was told to take the elevator to the third floor.
The man who greeted me there was my idea of the small-town banker’s banker: average height, dark blow-dried hair, clean-shaven and pink-cheeked, a little on the chubby side, and blazingly affable. He was wearing an unremarkable dark three-piece suit and sporting an oversized college ring on his right hand and a wedding band on his left. Before I was led to his office, I was sure he’d have a diploma or two on the wall and a photo of his wife and kids on his desk.
But there I was wrong.
His office, at the end of the hall, had been rigged out as a Civil War museum, complete with broadsides, paintings, crossed swords, mounted pistols, and a tattered Confederate battle flag. Interspersed on the walls were framed displays of antique American paper currency-ornate, colorful, and running the gamut from smudged, hand-printed company scrip to lavishly detailed works of art, all dating back to the pre-greenback days when banks, states, and territories felt free to issue their own cash almost at will. I was so startled that I came to a dead stop on the threshold.
Rich Schimke looked back at me with a slightly embarrassed grin. “I guess it’s a little overwhelming at first. It’s just that I had all this stuff at home and never got to see it. I’m still not sure I won’t be told to take it all down; I’ve only had it here a couple of weeks, and I don’t think word has leaked upstairs yet.”