Deadly Interest (20 page)

“
Her son told me he can’t
get into the safe deposit box.”

“
He’s an asshole,” she
said. “Excuse my language. Came in here demanding to get into his
mother’s safe. Guess what? She didn’t have one.”

“
She didn’t?”

“
Nope. She never came down
here.”

“
Are you sure?” I
asked.

Bulging eyes hardened at my question. “I
know all my customers. Every one. I been doing this job for fifteen
years here, and Evelyn Vicks never once stopped in.”

“
I’m sure you’re right,” I
said, trying to soothe her quick anger. Despite Barton’s
overindulgence in his liquor the other night, he’d been clear on
the fact that there’d been a safe deposit box here under his
mother’s name, and I doubted he had the imagination to come up with
that on his own. “But, don’t you ever get relieved? I mean, could
she have come in when you were at lunch?”

I’d done it now. She rolled those big eyes,
clearly annoyed. “Well, of course, I go on lunch, but that doesn’t
mean I don’t know who has a safe deposit box and who doesn’t.” She
thrust an angry chin the direction she’d come. “Follow me, I’ll
show you.”

Back at the desk, she moved toward two
desktop filing cabinets that had about twenty skinny drawers, each.
The safe deposit area was separated from the rest of the bank by
the building’s lobby, an enormous, twenty-story atrium. The tellers
and customer service representatives were located in the
northwestern corner of the building. Here, facing a huge
window-wall that opened to streaming skylight, we were in the far
southeast corner of the building.

“
See,” she said. “These
are our signature cards. She pulled out one of those long skinny
drawers. Inside were at least fifty four-by-six orange index cards.
She flipped up the top one and the rest followed suit, like
dominoes in reverse. “Everyone with a box, has a card like this.
Evelyn Vicks isn’t in here.”

I noticed from the drawer tags, that the
cards were filed numerically. Over fifteen hundred boxes. “Do you
keep an alphabetical file?”

Her look told me she thought I was stupid.
“Of course,” she said.

Moving to the desk, she flung two fingers
toward another set of drawers, these holding vertical three-by-five
cards. “Here.”

I nodded, smiled.

Rolling her eyes again, she yanked open the
last drawer, and flipped to the Vs. “Vaci, Vandenberg, Vanekis,
Versale, V—” She stopped, then looked up at me. When she pulled the
card up, it was as though she needed to prove it to herself.
“Vicks. Evelyn Vicks.”

I waited while she stared.

“
When did she open this?”
Lorna asked rhetorically. Turning the card over, she read the date,
April sixth, twenty years earlier. “How did I not know this?” she
asked again.

I scratched my head. Her confusion didn’t
help me right now. The only things that interested me were Mrs.
Vicks’ accounts and her will. “Barton is pretty sure the will is in
the box,” I said. “But I guess that’s not possible.”

Her chin came up. I could tell the mistake
she’d made about Mrs. Vicks’ safe deposit box had thrown her, but
her face brightened at my question as though she was relieved to
have recaptured her expertise.

She shook her head. “Common mistake. Never
keep a will in a safe deposit box. Causes too much hassle.
Sonny-boy needs to work with the attorney who wrote it up. Whoever
that is, is bound to have a copy.”

“
I guess he needs to talk
with Owen then.”

“
Owen? You mean Mr.
Riordan?”

I nodded. “Mr. Dewars said he wrote up Mrs.
Vicks’ will, not that long ago.”

“
Makes sense I guess,” she
said with a shrug. “That’d be where I’d start if I was the
son.”

“
But she probably didn’t
put in the box,” I said. “If she hasn’t been down here.”

“
I’ll check.” Lorna shook
her head after pawing through more files. “Must have been when I
was on break, like you said.” Her eyes were clouded with self-doubt
when she pulled out the file. “She was in here just last
week.”

She followed me back to the tiny cave of a
room, still muttering about her error. I wasn’t quite sure how to
shake her, but a buzz from the front jerked her attention that
way.

“
Customer,” she said. “I
have to run. I’ll get ahold of Mr. Riordan for you now. Let’s see
what we can do about finding you a better space to
work.”

Not ten minutes later, a woman breezed into
my dank cave. “Hi,” she said in a breathless way, as though she’d
just run in from an adventure and couldn’t wait to tell someone
about it, “I’m Maya.” Her perfect teeth flashed brilliant white
against the ebony of her face as she dropped three legal pads of
paper and an assortment of pens on the table in front of me. I
could tell from her glance and slight hesitation that she’d noticed
my black eye, but she didn’t comment. “Maya Richardson.” Tall and
thin, her black hair was pulled back from her nearly poreless face,
and though the effect was severe, it was also quite elegant. She
wore small thick-banded gold hoop earrings and a cross pendant gold
necklace. Her taste in clothes was superb. I recognized the pink
and navy block suit from a display at Neiman Marcus that I had to
pass on after seeing the sticker price. She thrust out a perfectly
manicured hand and we shook. Firm grip. “Lorna called Owen, but
he’s out at a client’s, so I’m here to help you.”

“
I’m Alex St. James,” I
said.

“
You know, you’d think
they’d tell me that you were here. Not a word.” Maya maintained eye
contact while she spoke, whirlwind-fashion. “Lorna told me why
you’re here. Thank God they’re finally doing something. It’s been
what? A week already?”

“
One week
tomorrow.”

“
The longer it takes, the
less chance of catching the monster who did that to poor
Evelyn.”

“
You knew her?”

“
Very well. She was one of
my clerks.” Apparently realizing that I wasn’t familiar with the
bank’s reporting structure, she continued. “Owen and I run the loan
department. He handles all the corporate and foreign
transactions—you know all the important stuff.” She emphasized the
word and grimace-grinned conspiratorially. I could only guess that
there was a male-female competition involved. “I handle the
personal accounts. Lines of credit, home-equity, things like
that.”

“
Mrs. Vicks worked for
you?”

“
Ten years,” she said.
“The old management hired me straight out of grad school and within
two years I was running this end of the department,” she said with
pride. “If you have any questions about anything, you go ahead and
ask. If I can’t help you, I’ll find somebody who can.”

“
I thought she worked for
Mr. Riordan.”

Her brows furrowed over dark eyes. “That
what they told you?”

I nodded.

“
I guess technically
that’s true.” She grimaced again, less good-naturedly. “Two months
ago I got promoted to Senior Vice President. I still report to
Owen, because he’s Executive VP. That means that my employees are
still his employees, too, but Evelyn and I worked together every
day. She helped Owen occasionally, but not nearly as
much.”

She stopped herself, taking a quick glance
around the room. “Lorna was right,” she said. “This is miserable. I
can at least help out with this. Come on.” She grabbed the box
closest to her, and canted her head toward the hallway. “Follow
me.”

I scrambled to throw the paper and pens in
the other box before picking it up and heading out.

On the way, Maya chatted like we were old
girlfriends. The lunchroom apparently had an abundance of unused
space and she figured I’d be happier there. I followed her, keeping
up the brisk pace even though I still felt vague aches from my
recent tussle with the intruder at Mrs. Vicks’.

“
It might be noisy in
there sometimes,” she said, apologetically over her shoulder as she
led the way, “but it can’t be worse than that room
downstairs.”

Getting to the lunchroom meant an elevator
ride up to twelve, then wading through half-a-dozen offices where
busy people, mostly women, glanced up with curiosity as we passed.
One after another, like a wave of surprised eyeballs, their gazes
followed us on our path to the far reaches of the twelfth
floor.

“
Wow,” I said, pleased,
when we walked in. One wall boasted floor-to-ceiling windows and
though it offered only a bird’s-eye-view of Clark Street, the room
practically shimmered with cheer when compared to the ground-floor
vault area. Snow clustered in one corner of the windows and
stretched out icy patterns across half the expanse as though Jack
Frost had come by and been interrupted mid-task.

“
You like this better?”
she asked with in a hopeful tone.

“
Much better,” I
said.

“
Good.” She dropped her
box on one of the many empty tables. “Take your pick.”

I glanced at my watch. Nearly eleven
o’clock. “This is great,” I said, meaning it. “Thanks.”

“
Not a problem.” She
glanced at her watch, too. It was one of those black-faced ones
with no numbers, but with a sparkling diamond where the twelve
should be. “I have to run,” she said. “Busy day today.”

“
I have an appointment at
two this afternoon. Can I just leave these records here when I take
off?”

Maya thought for a moment. She raised an
index finger. “Hang on.” Within a minute she’d left the room and
come back again with a contagious sort of triumph. “Hand me a piece
of paper, okay?”

I did.

Maya wrote a quick note, and I was surprised
at her little-girl penmanship. Tiny proper letters in an almost
back-slant handwriting. Had I encountered the note before meeting
the woman, I would have come to the erroneous conclusion that Maya
Richardson was timid and introverted.

“
There,” she said, “Nina
Takami in bookkeeping will lock them up for you every day, I’ll
leave this on her desk to let her know. She’s right in the next
room.”

“
Got it,” I
said.

“
Great.” She started
toward the door and turned just as she cleared the threshold again.
“Listen, I mean it. You have any questions on anything, you see me.
Owen didn’t know Evelyn as well as I did.”

* * * * *

An hour later I knew nothing more than I’d
known before. I couldn’t imagine why David considered anything in
either box important. Mrs. Vicks had opened her accounts with
Banner Bank twenty-three years earlier, a few years after Barton
had left home. Flipping through the old documents, I found a
pattern of sorts. Paychecks automatically deposited every two
weeks, and a series of small dollar amount checks, some of which
were written with such precise repetition that I gathered Mrs.
Vicks had been on the budget plan for all her utilities. Every
month, however, she wrote one even-dollar amount check. No payee
listed on the statements. If I wanted to know who they were written
to, I imagined I’d have to look them up on antique microfilm
machines.

Interesting pattern. The checks were for two
hundred dollars for the first three years, then moved to
two-hundred-fifty. They stayed there for just over five years
before inching up to three hundred for about four years. They
zoomed to five hundred then and stayed at that amount for three
more years until ceasing completely.

Could be a savings plan. Retirement account.
Investment. David had told me that she’d accumulated over
fifty-thousand dollars. I made a note to research the checks’
payees as soon as possible. It was probably nothing, but if I was
going to be here anyway, what the heck.

Right now, though, it would have to wait.
Almost one o’clock. I wanted to get back to my office to check on a
few things before my meeting with Dr. Hooker at two. I boxed
everything back up and looked for Nina Takami.

* * * * *

When I walked through the glass doors of our
office, everyone looked up. Not used to such attention all at once,
I stopped in my tracks. Across the expanse of the hub, where the
entire support staff worked in low-rise cubicles, I saw Jordan
spring from her chair and make her way my direction.

“
What?” I
asked.

Her dark eyes scanned the corridor I’d just
left. “Come on,” she said, with a tug at my arm, “I’ll tell you all
about it in your office. We have to get you out of sight.”

I stood my ground. “Why? What happened?”

“
Nothing, yet,” she said.
“But Barton Vicks came by this morning. Early. Like eight-thirty.
Wanted to see you. Nobody else.” She spoke quickly, her eyes over
my shoulder as though he’d barge in any moment.

“
What about?”

She shook her head. “He wouldn’t talk to any
of us,” she said again, with asperity. With a glance to the side
and another shake of her head, she added, “No, that’s not true. He
talked to us plenty. Complained the whole time that we were hiding
you and that we were lying about you not being in. Wouldn’t talk to
Bass, wouldn’t talk to Gonzales. I told him I’d be happy to make an
appointment, but he said he’d just sit and wait till you showed
up.”

“
Where is he
now?”

“
About a half hour ago he
started screaming about being made to wait, about how his mother
was murdered, and how you were part of the conspiracy against him.”
She gave me one of her meaningful looks. “We called security and
had him escorted out, but I know he’s coming back. I’m afraid of
that dude, Alex. He’s creepy. And he knows where you live. Remember
that.”