Triple Witch (29 page)

“That’s where Kenny came in, I’ll bet,” Ellie went on. “He was taking it out to a bigger boat, and from there,” she finished triumphantly, “it went out of the country.”

“But for
what?
” I persisted. “Aside from us not thinking Ken had any money, usually when you send somebody millions of dollars you expect something
back
.”

The phone rang, and I jumped to answer, hoping that if Victor had been in an accident it had rendered him speechless; I knew from experience that Victor as an invalid was even more powerfully annoying than Victor when he was healthy.

But it wasn’t about Victor. It was Hargood Biddeford.

“Jacobia,” he said, “I’ve finally realized: you’re right. Buy low, sell high—why, it’s positively brilliant! And that’s why on Monday, as soon as the banks open, I’m going to buy
bhati
. Lots and lots,” he emphasized, “of
bhati.”

Well, he had the theory right. But buying
bhati
, which are the currency of Cambodia, in hopes that their value relative to the dollar will go up anytime soon is like buying straw in hopes of spinning it into gold.

“Hargood,” I said, “if you do that, I swear I’ll sue to have you committed. There is no upside to a load of …”

The obvious dawned on me. “Hargood,” I said, “I’ll call you back. Meanwhile, what I suggest you do is buy Toyota. The common shares.”

Then I hung up, secure in the knowledge that only Japanese citizens are allowed to buy Toyota, but Hargood would keep trying for quite a while, which would keep him busy and (I hoped) out of trouble until I could get back to him.

“Money,” I said when I got back to the kitchen. “He isn’t trading anything for all that cash. The cash
is
the trade. He’s just getting it out of the country. Which
means it’s dirty. That is, proceeds of criminal activities,” I explained.

She tipped her head. “Why would criminals like to get money out of the country?”

“To launder it. Willoughby’s broke, from paying fines and legal expenses. He can’t make money in the money business anymore because he’s barred from trading. But the crooks are probably rewarding him pretty handsomely because he knows how to help them get their own money back into circulation. Bottom line, besides not having to explain how they got the cash in the first place, it is a way of avoiding taxes.”

“They pay taxes on crime profits? So much for blackmail, so much for drugs, et cetera?”

“No, they don’t. And that’s a crime, too. See, it would work like this: you truck the money here, get it out onto a ship. The money goes overseas, into a cooperative bank in a country where the law protects depositors’ identities. Someone powerful there is in on the deal, so the bank will take the deposits in cash. Then it comes back, but not as income, just as an account transfer. It looks as if you already own the money, get it? And you don’t have to pay taxes just to move money, only when you earn it.”

“But Willoughby’s been in trouble before,” she objected, “and he’s so famous in the money world, somebody would probably know if he was doing that. Wouldn’t they?”

“Right,” I conceded. “But maybe that’s where the British guy comes in.”

I thought a minute. “Sure. All that electronic investing gear out at Willoughby’s place—that’s it. See, he’s not just getting it out of the country for them. He’s the brains. They’re investing it after they get it into the foreign account. Willoughby’s name is never on it.”

Ellie nodded. “So what’s he doing
here?
The British guy.”

“Could be his bosses want someone around to keep
him honest. Keep him from trying his old tricks, this time with their money.”

I laughed, remembering my old buddy Jemmy Wechsler, the mob’s banker. “Get your hand caught in the cookie jar with those guys, the next game is to see how slowly they can cut it off. That’s probably why Willoughby’s hell-bent on replacing the stash from Crow Island.”

A car pulled into the yard, but it was only Sam being given a ride home by Tommy Daigle, who in defiance of every possible Motor Vehicle Department rule and regulation—and several of the laws of physics—had not only gotten his old jalopy started, but was driving it around.

Ellie got up and poured herself more coffee, and offered some to me. “But what about Ike Forepaugh? Do we think he
didn’t
have anything to do with any of it, now?”

“I don’t know, anymore. Because I’ve been saying all along that Willoughby doesn’t like to get his hands dirty, and that’s still true. He’s not the physical type. He’s in cash because he doesn’t have a choice; it was the job that was available, probably, so he took it. And even though he has a weapon, he let his British pal take over the gun-waving duties last night until it looked like things might get out of hand. Now,
he’s
a possibility—”

In fact, if it weren’t for Ike Forepaugh, I’d have said it was a certainty. Once in a while you find a dead fish lying on the beach, its pale eye goggling coldly up at the sky, and the pallid gaze of our buddy from across the Big Pond put me irresistibly in mind of that fish—

A new thought struck me. “But you know,” I mused, “the most noticeable thing about Ike Forepaugh, lately, is his absence. I know Arnold is looking for him, but I don’t think he’s
digging
for him. And that is what may turn out to be necessary.”

The idea of someone lying dead somewhere sent me
back to the topic of Victor. “I wish I knew,” I burst out, “where that son of a bitch
went.”

“His car,” said Sam, “is on Water Street. He’s not in it.”

I hadn’t heard Sam come in.

“He’s not back in Manhattan, either. I called the super in his building. Could you please,” Sam added with stony politeness, “not call him names anymore until we find him?”

He tossed an envelope carelessly onto the kitchen table.

“Sam, I apologize. It’s just that your father and I—”

“Hey, he drives me nuts, too. But what am I gonna do? He’s my dad. It’s not like I can trade him in for a new one.”

I said nothing.

“Anyway, Daigle and I are going to ride around a little more, see if maybe we can spot him.”

He glanced up, a flash of apology in his eyes. “I’m sorry about that crack I made. It just popped out. I didn’t mean it the way it sounded.”

That I’d traded his father in on a better model, he meant. I nodded at him, letting him see that I understood, that of course I forgave his remark.

Which I was trying to, but what Sam said next wiped out all thought of it.

“This is my fault,” he burst out. “I didn’t tell you the whole thing. He didn’t just go out for no reason last night. After you guys left, I sat him down and told him I wasn’t going back to New York with him. That his college plan’s a bust, that I’ll never make it at any of those universities he wishes I could go to.”

His eyes narrowed unhappily. “I told him I’m staying here and if he gave you any trouble about it, he’d have me to deal with.”

So Ellie had been right about Victor coercing Sam, using me as emotional hostage. Sam had picked up on it, too. But then, while I was still trying to find the right
moment to trigger a nuclear meltdown, Sam had simply confronted his father, honestly and directly.

Whereupon Victor of course went immediately to Plan B: the massive guilt trip. And Sam didn’t understand that part of it.

Yet.

“What did he say when you told him?” I asked.

“It was weird. He didn’t say anything. He got up and walked out, and that’s the last I saw of him. I feel awful about this.”

Suspicions confirmed. Until you caught on to him, Victor could make you feel lower than worm droppings. He’d never tried any of this stuff on Sam before, though.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have told him. Maybe I even made the decision too fast. Anyway, I shouldn’t have been so hard on him.”

He looked up in appeal. “I’m going to tell him I’ve changed my mind, when he gets back. I mean, what could it hurt?”

The pain of giving up his own plans was visible on his face. “Only, if anything’s happened to him—”

“Sam. All you did was speak realistically to your father. I mean, about your actual chance of being admitted to an Ivy League school. Which you know is unlikely, and all the rest follows from that. You told him what you’re going to do in real life. The one, I mean, that you are actually living.”

Something proudly rebellious sparked in Sam’s eyes, as if for a moment I were the one bullying him. But then his look returned to one of misery. “It’s my fault,” he repeated.

I took a deep breath. This was it: truth time. Never mind that Sam wasn’t going to get admitted to college anyway. He had the right to make his own decisions without feeling guilty or pressured, and I wasn’t going to watch him dancing at the end of Victor’s strings, jerking any way that Victor yanked him.

“Sam,” I began gently, “do you remember when I gave your dad some bad news, too? When I told him I wanted a divorce?”

Sam nodded. “Yeah. And he almost had a heart attack over it. That’s another reason why I feel so—”

“Sam, listen. I never wanted to tell you this before. But your dad faked all that. I found the drugs he was using to bring on the symptoms and the irregularities on the cardiac monitor.”

Sam stared at me.

“I took the drugs away from him,” I went on. “That’s why he got better so fast. He was trying to make me feel guilty so I’d do what he wanted. And now—”

At Sam’s expression I decided that when Victor did show up, I would kill him myself. “Now,” I finished, “your dad’s doing it to you.”

Sam’s face grew still, but I knew what he was thinking. In six months of living with his father, he’d believed they’d come to some mutual accommodation, some kind of respect. He comprehended as well as any youngster can how things were between Victor and me. But he’d thought that between himself and his father, it would be different.

That was the way Victor always got you, at the beginning: by making you believe you alone were the different, special one.

Maybe in his heart of hearts it was what he believed, too.

At the beginning.

“I’m sorry, Sam,” I said. “I’m so sorry about all of this.”

“Yeah,” he replied. His voice was impassive, his look at me rejecting of any comfort, and he went out without saying any more.

When he was gone I sat down heavily at the kitchen table. “I feel like an axe-murderer.”

Ellie watched me sympathetically. “You thought it
would be easier, didn’t you? Having a big explosion with Victor would have been a lot less painful than this.”

“Right. This little moment. So quiet, and it went by so fast. All Victor was doing was softening him up, that whole six months.”

“He was going to find out sometime. Sam, I mean.”

“That he can’t make Victor into some kind of strange, quirky guy who although he may have a lot of odd behaviors, can still be a friend? I mean a real friend, someone Sam can trust not to use him and manipulate him and—”

A dull, familiar pain the size and shape of a thumbprint was starting behind my forehead. I got up from the table.

“Yeah,” I finished flatly, “he was. Going to find out. And he’ll get over it. Sam’s going to be just fine.”

I pushed my chair in, carefully not hurling it through the kitchen window. “It’s not the end of the world, finding out about Victor.”

But I was remembering the day I had.

As an afterthought I picked up the envelope Sam had tossed onto the table, only now noticing the return address and that the envelope had already been opened.

And how thick it was. The sheet covering the sheaf of papers inside was cream vellum with a rich-looking Yale University seal at the top.

Congratulations
, the letter began.

Something about swinging a wrecking bar always makes me feel better, so after reading Sam’s letter I went up to the third floor, where I put on my dust mask, safety goggles, and work gloves. The wrecking bar, a three-foot length of heavy tempered steel, smashed violently into the old plaster wall.

Chunks of plaster clattered down onto the bare board floor, which until recently had been covered with antique linoleum, not vinyl but the real stuff, made of
linseed oil and cork bits spread on burlap and allowed to dry.

This I had saved, intending to use it on closet floors if I ever managed to put in any closets; one of the benefits of living in a very old house is the way it cuts down on wardrobe expenses, there being nowhere to put nonessential clothing items.

At the moment, all I needed was sackcloth and ashes.
How
could I have believed no Ivy League college would want Sam, a boy who at age twelve had invented a gizmo that chased cockroaches not only from our otherwise fancy upper East Side townhouse but out of the whole building, back in New York?

More broken plaster clattered down. In the old days they put horsehair in it to make it stronger; now the hairs fell in tufts onto the floorboards. Ordinarily they made me think of long-ago green pastures, but now they only reminded me of glue factories.

What must Sam think of me, that I had sold him so short? And that I had as good as lied to him about Victor, or so he must believe.

Around me, the third floor of the house shimmered silently in the summer sunshine. These were the servants’ rooms, each with a makeshift mantel, a stovepipe thimble and a storage cubby with a tiny door like the door in a fairy tale. A long-ago chimney fire that broke through to the roof resulted in a flood here, once upon a time, and it was the wreckage of this that I had been working to repair.

I wondered if the servant girls were here then, if their few things were ruined. I wondered if, when they heard the alarm, they ran down the flights of stairs barefoot and weeping foolishly, to the kitchen, where the mistress of the house would scold them and order them silent, her own heart hammering dreadfully.

I wondered if Sam would ever speak to me again. His father’s illness had terrified him; probably he blamed me for that terror and for letting him believe things
about Victor that were untrue. Sam must feel a fool, I realized, and think it was all my fault.