A Penny for Your Thoughts (29 page)

Thirty-Two

I sat up straight, giving Marion my full attention.

“You know I told you the other day that Wendell was concerned about Feed the Need, about the finances there?” Marion asked me now.

“Yes?”

“Well, it finally struck me to look inside Wendell’s office safe. I thought he might have some papers or something, but I never expected to find all that I did. It’s truly astonishing, Callie. I think once you’ve looked all of these things over, you might find our killer.”

I watched as Marion went to a large portrait of Thomas Jefferson on the wall. She swung the painting out on a set of hinges, revealing a wall safe behind. She deftly worked the lock, opened it, and removed a cardboard box.

By the time she had carried it to the desk and opened it up, my curiosity was definitely piqued. Together we pulled everything out, and then Marion went through the various things, showing me what she thought each one meant.

She held out a handwritten sign containing a word I didn’t recognize, and she told me that she remembered clearly the day Wendell found it.

“It was on a trip to the Philippines,” she said. “We had an unscheduled stop in Manila, with a layover extended by several hours. There was a Feed the Need district office there, so Wendell and I decided to taxi over from the airport, drop in, and see
everyone. Instead, all we found when we got there was this sign, written in Tagalog, hanging on the front door.”

“What does it say?” I asked.

“It says ‘closed.’”

“Like, closed for the night?”

“No, closed permanently. Out of business. The place was completely stripped, not a speck of furniture left, not a soul there.”

“Without your knowledge?” I asked “I don’t understand.”

“Neither did we. Wendell was so furious he tore the sign down and took it with him. Once our trip was over, he told me it was just a mix-up, that he had dealt with it. But now I’m wondering if that was the truth. I’m wondering how many other district offices were closed.”

I sat back, fingering the crude sign.

“Manila, you said?” I asked. Marion nodded, and I thought of my conversation with the attorneys’ office two days before when I was trying to find out about any real estate deals that were pending.
We’ve already closed on Taipei…Manila…and Tegucigalpa,
the woman had told me over the phone. I had asked her if Feed the Need had already paid in full.
Paid?
the woman had drawled.
Heck no, y’all sold. The people who bought the places paid
.

Was it possible that someone was closing down Feed the Need district offices? If so, then why? To cut costs? To channel the money for those programs into some other direction?

“Look at this,” Marion said, pulling out two file folders. “It took me a while, but I think I finally figured out what this is.”

She opened the first file to reveal the black-and-white photo of a small Hispanic-looking child. The girl had dark skin and big round eyes, and she wore a wrinkled, knotty scarf and sweater that brought to mind the people of the Andes. Behind the photo was a profile; her name was Rosa Parmenta, and according to the profile she lived in a small village in Peru.

“Now this,” Marion said, and she opened the second file. It held another black-and-white photo, this time of a group of
children—three dirty but smiling faces, the two boys bare chested, the girl in a light Mexican-style embroidered dress. The profile with this photo listed the children as three siblings—Javier, Luis, and Martina Gonzales—and it said that they lived in the Mexican city of Guadalajara.

“Are these the children people sponsor through Feed the Need?” I asked. I thought of Frank’s words at the wake, and I knew he was right—with these pitiful but adorable faces in front of me I definitely felt the urge to donate some money.

“When you agree to sponsor a child, you get a photo and profile, just like this,” Marion said. “We have a team that prepares these things, that carefully monitors the database, that makes sure we track the progress of the children through the district offices.”

“Okay.”

She pulled out another piece of paper full of scribbled notes and lots of arrows and circles.

“This is Wendell’s handwriting,” she said. “This is how he brainstormed, how he worked through problems.”

I tried reading the notes, but I couldn’t make much sense of it until Marion interpreted for me.

“Right here,” she said, pointing, “March 1, new database software. March 15, users trained, department reduced by 15.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means last March, Feed the Need bought some new database software that was so good it allowed them to let 15 people go from the child-tracking department.”

That sounded fishy to me; obviously, it must have to Wendell as well, because from that circle he had drawn several arrows with question marks and other notations.

“Spell it out for me, Marion,” I said. “This is too confusing.”

She pulled back out the two photos. She placed them side by side on the desk and then stood in front of me, her arms folded across her chest.

“Look at the pictures,” she said. “What do you see?”

It didn’t take long. The hair was different, the clothing was different, but the face was the same.

“This is the same girl!” I said, picking up the pictures of the two little girls. “Rosa Parmenta and Martina Gonzales are one and the same!”

“Exactly.”

My eyes met Marion’s, and she paused a beat before continuing.

“Think about it, Callie,” she said softly. “Field offices are being closed. The children’s photo records are being faked. Half the staff of the tracking department is laid off. All of this without the knowledge of the President or the CEO. What does that tell you?”

I hesitated a beat.

“That somebody somewhere is cutting costs. That somebody somewhere is up to something.”

That hung in the air for a moment, and I thought that “somebody” was most likely Alan Bennet, the person who was responsible for having me shoved into a grave, the person who had had his hands in Feed the Need’s finances for the last five months.

As far as I could tell, any way you looked at it, this was a man who was up to no good.

Thirty-Three

Upstairs, I turned on my laptop to check my e-mail. Sure enough, the home office in Washington, DC, had finally responded to my request for more information on Alan Bennet. I downloaded the file and opened another e-mail that was waiting for me from Harriet.

It was a response to my phone call of the day before when I gave her the plate number of the man who had been following me around town. She had run the plates and come up with a name: Mitchell Ralston. There was no other information, and the name certainly didn’t ring any bells with me.

I logged off and returned to my room before I opened the file and started reading. What I found was very disturbing. According to the research, the college Alan supposedly graduated from in the Midwest was now defunct. There was no way to check whether he
had ever actually been a student there. More importantly, the three clothing manufacturers that he had listed in his employment history also no longer existed. Apparently, they had at one time been legitimate companies, but eventually they had all been closed down through bankruptcy or merger or something else. The details were unavailable.

On a personal note, though Alan Bennet was currently single, he had been married three times. The first wife, an heiress, had died in a car accident. The second and third wives weren’t dead but merely divorced—with Alan receiving generous support payments in both instances! I thought of his dalliance with Judith Smythe and wondered if the stakes had been raised even higher now that she had inherited a large chunk of her father’s fortune.

I closed the file and pulled out my cell phone to call Harriet back at the home office in DC. As I waited for her to come on the line, I reached into the box Marion had given me and pulled out the heavy set of accounting records from inside. A groan escaped my lips at the surge of pain from my side; my fall into the grave still resonated within my aching muscles.

Finally, I heard a click on the phone and then the warm familiar voice of my friend.

“Callie?” she said, and I was surprised at my own sudden rush of emotion. Sometimes I became so tired of being surrounded by strangers.

“Hi, Harriet,” I said, sitting down on the bed. “Gosh, it’s good to hear your voice.”

We talked for a while. She caught me up on office happenings down there, and then I told her briefly about my work up here.

“I can’t believe you got stuck in that mess,” Harriet said, clicking her tongue. “Tom really got an earful from me. I let him have what for.”

I smiled, knowing that even a little “what for” from Harriet was a formidable thing.

“At least I think the end’s finally in sight,” I said. “But I need your help.”

“You got it.”

I gave her an abbreviated version of my discussion with Marion about the financial funny business at Feed the Need.

“I’ve got two sets of books here,” I said. “Looks like one is the public version and one is private, if you get my drift.”

“Oh, I getcha alright.”

“Do you think you can do your usual run-through?” I asked. “Sniff out all the discrepancies?”

“Like a bloodhound on the scent of a grouse,” she said, and I smiled. Harriet was from Texas, and every conversation with her was filled with colorful similes and metaphors.

She agreed to come up on the first train in the morning. She put me on hold while she made her reservation, and then she came back on the line, gave me the time, and told me to meet her at the front entrance to the Thirtieth Street station.

After disconnecting, I called and reserved a small meeting room for the morning at a downtown Philadelphia hotel that my old law firm had used from time to time. That was about the most anonymous territory I could think of. I didn’t want anyone to get wind of any of this just yet.

Once I had hung up the phone, I decided that it was time to get organized—first my thoughts, then my things. Now that Wendell’s funeral was over, I felt sure the house would be quiet the rest of the day; I knew it was a good time to pause and take stock.

I clicked open the database on my laptop and pulled out all of my notes and the file Duane Perskie had given me. It was time to brainstorm, time to come up with some real theories for all that had been going on.

This was how I worked best—by digging around, unearthing facts, then sitting down and sorting out my thoughts until I came up with some plausible ideas. In the process, I would let my imagination fly, playing with every possible motive I could think up, no matter how far-fetched some of them might seem. Eli had taught me this method; he was a strong believer in the
problem-solving power of the unconscious mind. “These things have been stewing around in your brain when you weren’t even aware of it,” he would say. “Now it’s time to let your ideas out.”

Following his lead, I typed in all of the information I had gathered thus far. Then I earmarked the names of the people I now suspected of killing Wendell: Alan Bennet and Judith Smythe. Because I couldn’t positively rule them out yet, I also highlighted Derek Smythe and Gwen Harding, though I doubted either one of them had done it. Apparently, Angelina had a pretty good alibi; at the time of the murder, she had been seen grocery shopping at a local store, and the checker confirmed her presence there. I made notes to that effect, but did check off her brother, Nick, as a possible suspect just in case his alibi wasn’t as airtight as the police thought. At the time of the murder, Nick had been in the city with Marion, helping her shop. Marion had been positively ID’d by a sales clerk, but I didn’t know whether Nick and Marion had been together the entire time, or if he could possibly have had a chance to slip away for a while and pay a visit up the back stairs to Wendell’s office. That left Sidra, who had the best alibi of all; she had been at a Bible study at her church, as attested to by her pastor.

To my mind, that left two strong suspects, Alan and Judith, and three weak-but-still-possible suspects, Derek, Gwen, and Nick. Wendell Smythe didn’t seem to have any enemies. His will had already been read and held no surprises—everyone had been treated fairly. So what was it, what could’ve made someone want to kill him? I created a new category—motive—then typed in my best guesses.