Relatively Dead (29 page)

“Did you go to the police?”

Evan shook his head. “If I talked to the police I’d have to tell them about the syndicate, and I’ve been asked not to do that by Nelly, Marcia, and several other people. I don’t want to get anybody into trouble. For the same reason, I didn’t talk to Jason’s grandfather.”

“He knows about the syndicate.”

“Anyway, since you were very interested in Jason and seemed intelligent, I figured you were the best person to talk to. You didn’t have a stake in the syndicate or anything. I think you said something about being a reporter, but that didn’t help in tracking you down, so I figured it was bogus. I did finally figure out you’re the female cousin Jason mentioned he had but said he’d never met, because I vaguely remembered seeing you at his memorial service. He said you were supposed to be hot. That tied it together for me.”

“I suppose that’s better than being cold.”

“Worlds better. But back to Jason. He appeared to me to be nervous in the couple of weeks before he was killed. I’m sure it was something to do with the syndicate. He was always so cocky and self-assured, so it was easy to notice the difference, even in my, uh, mentally altered state.

“A couple of weeks ago, after I got cleaned up, I remembered his nervousness. I also remembered that a while back Jason suggested we rent a bank safe deposit box together to store some important stuff we didn’t want to lose, such as our birth certificates, passports, and Social Security cards. He said it would be too easy to misplace them in our apartment. I had sense enough to agree with him.”

“You’re right. When I had amnesia and didn’t have any of those, all of which are government-issued, by the way, I was a non-person as far as government was concerned.”

“I’m beginning to realize how scary government is. We had two keys to the box, which we hid in our apartment. Fortunately, I remembered where they were. One we kept taped inside the water closet of the toilet. I retrieved it and went to the bank and took all of Jason’s things out of the box.” Evan indicated a brown envelope he’d brought with him. “They’re in here.”

“They should probably be given to Jason’s grandfather.”

“Yes, but first I want to show you something that was in the box.”

Jason opened the clips and lifted the flap. He pulled a piece of white paper out of the envelope and handed it to me. It was folded in half.

“What do you make of this?”

I unfolded it. Other than that fold, it didn’t have any creases. There was black computer printing on it.

“Well, first of all, it doesn’t appear to be quite standard size.”

Evan smiled. “Ah. Very sharp. When you say standard size, of course you mean the size for letters
, magazines, forms, catalogs, laser-printer and copying machine output
we use here in the U.S. Eight-and-a-half by eleven inches. However, there is an international standard based on the metric system. This paper is known as A4.”

“I’m aware other countries use another size. Where did this come from?”

“The only place Jason traveled to recently outside the country is Northern Ireland for his cousin’s funeral.”

“You know about that.”

“Of course I do. He was my roommate. Apparently you do, too.”

“Yes. I’m guessing you haven’t told anybody.”

“Correct again, because the trip was related to the syndicate, as I suspect you know. His cousin was involved in it.”

“Timothy. He was my cousin, too, although I never met him. My cousins are dying like mayflies. Apparently Jason checked his email in Northern Ireland and printed it there. It’s from someone whose email name is Ironsides. It looks like gibberish. What does it mean?”

“Ironside was an old TV show starring Raymond Burr, and Old Ironsides was an American frigate in the War of 1812, but I would venture to say this person isn’t related to either of them. What do
you
think the letter means?”

Evan’s manner could be obnoxious. I liked him better when he was stoned. I examined the printing. The body of the email read like this:

Now Is the Month tO get youR houSe in ordEr.

XXXXXXXX

XXX

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

XXXXX

XXXXXXX

There was no signature line. I sipped my wine and looked at it for a minute, but nothing jumped out at me. I tried to put my first impressions into words.

“It could be a warning. Which means it could be from the killer. Presumably, email addresses can be traced. The most interesting thing about it is the capitalized letters in the first line that spell out NIMORSE. Either that or the sender doesn’t know how to type.”

Evan laughed. “See, you’re already beginning to work on it. Your brain is much more suited to this sort of thing than mine is. I suspect you have the math gene, just like Jason did. I mean, you’re his cousin, right? When I found you on the Internet, I read an article written for a newspaper in North Carolina that told some of your adventures while you had amnesia. Apparently, among other things, you won some money off a con man playing a mathematical game.”

I smiled at the memory. “A gay conman who also happens to be an ex professional football player. I try to stay away from him. What are you going to do with this?”

“I’m going to give it to you, along with the rest of the contents of the envelope, to dispose of as you see fit. That gets me off the hook, I hope, since I will be honoring my commitment not to talk to anyone about the syndicate, and yet no one can say I’m withholding evidence.”

“I can give this stuff to Jason’s grandfather. He knows about the syndicate. Of course, he’d like to keep it quiet since it affects the Boyd family honor, but perhaps solving the murder will be more important to him.”

I kept the page in front of me while we ate our dinner, glancing at it, occasionally, but this was not the kind of atmosphere conducive to solving puzzles. Evan and I chatted about various things. Now that he’d turned the information he had over to me he didn’t seem to be interested in trying to figure out what the email meant. However, he’d apparently turned his life around, just as he said. He was working in the food processing industry. I immediately thought of Tom Kelly, which sent a chill through me, so I didn’t mention him.

I declined an offer of dessert from our waitress, but Evan ordered some gooey chocolate concoction, claiming it was the last time he was going to do this. When the check came I took it, telling Evan I was thankful to him for the information. I asked him if there was anything more we needed to do together.

“Nothing, unless you want to go out with me.”

“Thanks, I’ll pass.”

“It never hurts to try.”

“Stick with Nelly. I don’t know whether her fiancé is real or a figment of her imagination. If you get rich maybe you can win her. I’ll do this with you. I’ll walk you back to your apartment and give you a hug.”

“That’s the best offer I’ve had all day.”

CHAPTER 31

It was getting late. Rigo had to work tomorrow. I’d called him from Venice Beach and told him I’d meet him at my motel about seven-thirty. It was closer to eight when I arrived. He was waiting for me in the parking lot. It was our first time alone together since I’d left for Edinburgh, and it was too short.

We’d made love and said sweet things to each other. Now he was getting dressed, and I was preparing to return to North Carolina. I told him a little about my meeting with Evan. Partly in an attempt to delay the inevitable, I pulled out the email Evan gave me and showed it to Rigo.

“I suspect this is some sort of a code. Perhaps a warning code to Jason concerning the syndicate. Of course, the real question is who sent it to him. I’m going to give it to the older Jason to see if he wants to give it to the police and try to trace the sender. The question is whether it’s more important to him to find the murderer or hide the fact that young Jason was involved in a Ponzi scheme.”

Rigo looked at the paper. “This is fascinating. Not. A bunch of X’s. X’s are more up your alley than mine, since X is usually a mathematical term. ‘
Now Is the Month tO get youR houSe in ordEr.’
If you take out the letters that are capitalized they spell NIMORSE.”

“Great minds think alike. That’s what I did too. What in tarnation, to quote my grandmother, is a NIMORSE?”

“Brainstorming. Morse is a code. Morse code.”

“Which is dashes and dots, right? Which X’s are dashes and which are dots?”

“Beats the hell out of me.”

***

Frances stared at the piece of paper with the code on it. “I’m good at finding people and analyzing old photos, but I’m not known as a code breaker. I appreciate your confidence in me, but I’m not sure it was justified.”

“You’re the only Ph.D. I know. I figured if anybody could crack it you could.”

My own brain hadn’t gotten any further with it. I was looking for ideas. I had a free day, because I wasn’t going to meet Jason until tomorrow. Frances was about to leave on one of her person-finding trips, which took her all over the world, so I figured this was the only window I’d have to show her the code. She studied it some more.

“What’s the name of the game you played when you scammed the scam artist?”

I laughed. “Everyone remembers that. I didn’t actually know the name when I did it, or more likely, I’d forgotten it, but I looked it up on the Internet. Of course, it’s not easy to look something up when you don’t know its name, but after trying various combinations of key words I found it. It’s called Nim.”

“Aha. Nim. Like the first three letters of this word, NIMORSE, that constitute the capitalized letters in the sentence.”

“Frances, you’re a genius. Why didn’t I see that? And it makes some sort of sense. Those rows of X’s could be a gigantic Nim game.”

“All right, let’s start with that assumption. When faced with a Nim layout like this, how would you proceed?”

We were now in my realm. “You have to determine the winning strategy. The game goes like this: Each player in turn deletes any number of  X’s from a single row. The object is to delete the last X. To figure out your strategy, first you count the number of cards, checkers, or in this case, X’s, in each row.”

We did that: 8, 3, 15, 22, 8, 26, 5, 7.

“Then you convert each of these numbers to binary.”

We wrote them down: 1000, 11, 1111, 10110, 1000, 11010, 101, 111.

“Now what?” I couldn’t see the next step.

Frances was unfazed. “Rigo suggested this might be a form of Morse code. The M in NIMORSE may be part of both NIM and MORSE. Doing double duty. Nobody said code constructors aren’t clever. For example, the ones in the numbers could be dashes and the zeroes could be dots.”

She got on the Internet and brought up a page showing the Morse code for each letter of the alphabet. Using her assumption, she converted the binary numerals to letters: B, M, ?, ?, B, ?, K, O.

When she was done she shook her head. “Too many unknowns. All right, let’s assume the ones are dots and the zeroes are dashes.”

That produced the following result: J, I, H, ?, J, ?, R, S.

Frances threw down her pencil in disgust. “Well, I tried.”

I’d been staring at the binary numbers. “All binary numbers start with one, because a leading zero is meaningless. It’s just like our base ten where you don’t start a number with zero. Maybe the leading ones are place holders. For example, the first number is one, zero, zero, zero. If you drop the one you have zero, zero, zero. If the zeroes represent dots you have—”

“An S.”

Frances caught my meaning. She quickly looked up all the numbers, assuming the leading ones didn’t count, and the other ones were dashes and the zeroes were dots. This is what she got: S, T, O, P, S, C, A, M.

I saw it. “STOP SCAM. Stop the scam. That’s it. It
is
a warning. A warning that could have come from the murderer. The timing suggests the same person killed Timothy and Jason. He’d already killed Timothy and was warning Jason.”

“Good job.” Frances was excited. “You have to take this to the police.”

“I will. As soon as I show it to Jason. I’m seeing him tomorrow.”

***

Wednesday morning dawned clear and cloudless. And warm for an April day. Which was a good thing because Jason had proposed we climb 10,800 foot Mt. San Jacinto when I talked to him on the phone. He said he’d often climbed it from the top of the Palm Springs tramway. That made it sound easy until he told me it was a 2,500 foot vertical climb and a 5.5 mile hike from the top of the tram.

Well, if he could do it I could do it. He said he didn’t climb all the way to the top alone anymore, because the last pitch was a scramble over large boulders, and if you slipped and hurt yourself there was no guarantee anyone would find you right away. He was always looking for hiking partners.

I questioned the time of year, having noticed the higher mountains we could see from the home of Rigo’s parents still had snow on them. He said if the snow got too deep we wouldn’t try to make it to the top.