Authors: marshall thornton
I sat at my desk for a few minutes. I wondered if I was wrong about Campbell. Maybe he didn’t kill Lenny. So far, I hadn’t found a reason for him to do it, while his fiancée had just told me she had a strong motive. I wondered if Lenny had had a similar confrontation, and how far Julie might have gone if he’d ignored her.
Julie was tall for a woman, but I doubted she’d have the upper body strength to force even a small man over the railing at Water Tower Place. Still, she had more than enough money to pay someone. Maybe it wasn’t about Campbell. Maybe I was following the wrong lead entirely.
I called the restaurant and a hostess answered. I took a chance and said, “Is this Jeanine?”
“Yes,” she said skeptically.
“I thought so. I recognized your voice.” I decided to do my best to imitate Bobby’s chatty demeanor. “It’s a nice voice by the way. Melodious.”
“Who is this?”
“Campbell Wayne’s secretary, Ted. Well, my friends call me Teddie. You called Campbell yesterday, didn’t you? Or am I mixing you up with someone else? Oh, God, if I am, I’m sorry.”
My impersonation of Bobby wasn’t especially good. I was a little stiff. But as long as she didn’t know what I was doing, it passed.
“Oh. What can I do for you?”
“Campbell wants a reservation for two. He’s bringing over his fiancée. Do you know her? I just got my first look at her. I’m not sure what to think.”
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Jeanine was silent for a moment. “So, it’s two at one o’clock?”
“Oh gosh, he didn’t say. Should I go ask him?”
“He always comes at one.”
“Thanks. You really saved my butt.” The whole company went to lunch at one. But she didn’t have to know that. “Come on, you must have an opinion. Ice Queen or Sexy Tiger... I can’t tell --
”
“She’s not his fiancée, she just thinks she is,” Jeanine spat, and then hung up. That told me something. Their relationship was romantic, at least on Jeanine’s end. Campbell seemed to have a way with the ladies... and, if his fiancée was right, the gentlemen, too.
After Campbell and Julie left to go to The Gold Mine, I took my little black address book out of my jacket, looked up Ross’ number, and gave him a call. He picked up the phone, and from the groggy sound of his voice, I could tell I’d woken him up. I apologized and launched into the reason for my call, “Did you ask Earl the thing I wanted you to ask him?”
“Mmm-hmmm.”
“Okay. What did he say?”
“The guy’s a fake. Pretends to come from money, but nobody knows his family. He throws a lot of money around. Picks up tabs everywhere he goes. Hands out coke like it’s candy.”
“He’s not dealing, is he?” That would explain where he was getting the money to throw around.
“No. Earl didn’t say that, and I think he would have. People are noticing that this guy spends a lot more money than he’s making. That’s really all he said.”
“Thanks, I appreciate it. Could you ask him to check out the fiancée, as well? There’s something not right there.”
“Sure, no problem.”
He was about to hang up when I stopped him. “You know, I didn’t say this the other night, but I hope you and Earl are really happy together.”
“Thanks, Nick.”
After my chat with Ross, I spent the rest of my lunch hour eating a sandwich I’d brought from home and poking around at the secretarial work I was supposed to be doing. It wasn’t hard work, but it did get in the way of investigating Lenny’s death. Campbell had been giving me check requests to type all week. I now had a stack of carbons that needed to be filed. When the clock hit two o’clock, I asked Terri if she’d watch my phones and headed into the file room.
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The room was small, narrow, and lined with four-drawer file cabinets. There were two cabinets for Campbell’s department, and the drawers that I needed were the top two of one of them. Each check request had two copies: one marigold and one green. The marigold copies were stapled to the original invoice and were to be filed by payment date. The green were to be filed by payee.
While still at my desk, I’d put them in proper order so it wouldn’t take me very long at all to collate them into the files.
The marigold copies were easy to file. For the most part, they slipped in behind the previous check requests. I did that, then went on to the green stack. I’d only filed a couple invoices when a thought hit me. Quickly, I flipped through the files to the L’s. Right at the front was LB Services.
I pulled out all the invoices for LB Services, nearly two dozen. I flipped through them. All told, they added up to about eighty thousand dollars. Each invoice had been sent within the last six months. The final invoice was for three thousand, five hundred, and sixty-four dollars.
All of the check requests were signed by Campbell Wayne -- except they weren’t. Or at least they didn’t appear to be. I compared the signature on the LB check requests to a random request.
The signatures looked similar, but were obviously different.
If it weren’t for Lenny questioning the LB Services deposit to his account, I’d say he was embezzling from JTM. But Lenny hadn’t been embezzling. It had been meant to look like he had, and that meant Campbell had to be behind it. I checked the LB invoice. The company’s address was a PO box. I couldn’t remember the number from the invoice, but it was probably the PO box that Lenny had rented. Or, rather, that Campbell had rented in his name.
Somewhere there had to be a holding account -- probably also in Lenny’s name. It was likely that Campbell had removed most of the money in cash. The only reason I could think to make the deposit to Lenny’s account was that Campbell was trying to make it look like Lenny was the guilty party. Something he’d obviously been planning all along. But then Lenny got the invoice for the PO box. He must have started trying to figure out what was going on. Then he’d noticed the deposit into his account. He began looking around, figuring things out, and figured out enough to end up dead.
Of course, this wasn’t the real scam. This was just the scam to support the scam. Campbell had been throwing money around to convince Julie and her family he was the kind of guy--
A click behind me told me that someone else had entered the file room. I turned around to see Campbell standing near the closed door. He pressed in the button that locked it. I moved my glance from the door handle to his face. He smiled. My face may have flushed a bit. I definitely felt like I’d just been caught with my hand in the cookie jar. Campbell didn’t say anything. I expected he’d ask what I was doing. Possibly grill me on why it was taking me so long.
Without taking his eyes off me, he reached down and unzipped his expensive slacks. He reached in and pulled out his dick. Even flaccid, it was impressively long and thick. Quickly, I went over my options. The other secretary, Terri, had picked up that I was gay. She’d probably spread it around, so it was likely Campbell expected me to jump on his dick lickety-split. If I didn’t, he
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might be suspicious. On the other hand, since I’d just figured out he was a murderer, sex wasn’t all that appealing -- not that you’d have known by my dick, which was hardening in my pants.
“I think we should keep things professional,” I said, and tried to move by him to get to the door.
He blocked me, reaching out and grabbing me by the cock. “This doesn’t seem very professional to me.”
Embarrassingly, I was harder than he was. I tried to think if there was an advantage to my having sex with him. Would I be able to find out more information if I did? Would he be more willing to share information? And is this what he’d done with Lenny? Did he try to control Lenny--
He had me out of my pants and was jerking me off with one hand while he jacked himself with the other. I stared him in the eye, barely able to breathe. His eyes were a warm brown; if I didn’t know better, I’d say they were kind. They seemed to search mine, questioning. I tried not to give anything away.
Holding our dicks together, he squeezed them tight with one hand and jerked them as one. He leaned over, ready to kiss me. I twisted my head away from him, letting him know I didn’t want to kiss him. He laughed.
I looked him straight in the eye, daring him to continue. He dropped to his knees and took me in his mouth. Placing a hand at the base of my cock, he licked his way around the head. He teased and nuzzled me. Slipped my dick into his mouth, sucked on it, then let it fall out with a popping sound.
He didn’t seem all that experienced. He was tentative and kept things very shallow. Losing patience, I pushed his hand away and pumped my cock deep in his throat. He gagged a little, and I told him, “Just relax.”
My hands in his hair, I moved his head back and forth on my prick. Looking down, I could see that his cock was hard and he was jerking it furiously. I closed my eyes and let my orgasm go in several thick bursts down his throat. I held his head down on my dick as my breathing returned to normal.
He moaned deep in his throat, and I looked down to see him coming over his fist. I pulled my cock out of his mouth and put it back into my pants. Campbell took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped off his fist. “Next time, you’ll have to be a little friendlier. It’ll be more fun.”
* * *
What I didn’t have was opportunity. Could I place Campbell in Water Tower Place at the time of Lenny’s fall?
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Campbell sat in his office, calmly going over some memos he’d gotten earlier. If I turned, I could look right at him. I didn’t turn. In fact, I did my best not to look at him. I suppose I could have walked out of there right then. Mrs. Borlock was paying me to find out what had happened to her son, and I was pretty sure I had the answer. But I was still enough of a cop that I wasn’t going to walk away without making sure Campbell paid for Lenny’s murder.
I spent a few minutes straightening up my desk while I decided what to do. My time card was sitting out. Carolyn had explained the simple form to me. All I had to do was write down my hours, sign it, and then at the end of the week have Campbell sign it, too. Then I was to give him one of the two carbons for his records. It hit me that that’s where Campbell got Lenny’s signature to forge. And the fact that he’d gone to The Art Institute made forgery a snap.
Campbell’s secretaries kept an appointment book for him. I flipped back to the day of Lenny’s death. According to the book, Campbell was in a meeting with Ed Sullivan from nine-thirty to ten-thirty, which covered the time of Lenny’s death. I closed the book and walked around my cubicle to Terri’s.
I lowered my voice. “Campbell’s working on this big memo. He’s trying to remember when he met with Ed last. His book says March fourth, but he thinks that meeting was canceled.”
After giving me a look, she flipped open her book. “That meeting was canceled. But they met a week later. Campbell doesn’t forget things like that.”
I shrugged and lowered my voice, “He dictated the memo to me. I can’t read my own writing.”
“March fourth is the day Lenny killed himself.”
“What was that like?”
“I don’t know. Kind of normal, I guess. I didn’t notice anything weird until Campbell came back from doing some wedding thing around ten-thirty and asked where Lenny was. I didn’t even know he was gone.”
“Ted!” Campbell called for me. I shrugged at Terri and left. It would be better if I could find a witness to Campbell’s being at the mall next door. But it helped that he wouldn’t be able to say he was sitting in his office.
It suddenly occurred to me that the person who could place Campbell at the mall was probably Jeanine. She was lying about what she saw. She could have seen Campbell there with Lenny --
he might have even given her some story about trying to save Lenny. Clearly, she was involved with Campbell in some way. She’d want to help him keep his name out of the newspaper. That was the nice end of the spectrum. It was also true that she might have seen the whole thing and had no scruples about lying for the man she--
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“I want you to sit in on the meetings this afternoon,” he said when I walked into his office. “Take notes.”
His demeanor was exactly what it had been before the incident in the file room. He had more design meetings that afternoon. The designers who’d been in before were bringing revised designs for Campbell to look at. I nodded and went back to my desk.
There wasn’t a good reason for me to be in those meetings. I could only think that Campbell wanted to keep an eye on me. He didn’t want me talking to Terri or anyone else. I wondered if he suspected me of anything. Part of me wanted to skip out of there and go next door to The Gold Mine, but then I remembered Jeanine didn’t work on Fridays, so it didn’t matter anyway.
The meetings were boring. I took enough notes to look like I had a reason to be there, but I didn’t bother doing it well. The likelihood that I was coming next week was pretty thin. Not to mention, I doubted Campbell would be on the job.
The last meeting went past five o’clock. When we said goodbye to the designers, everyone else on the floor was gone. I began to gather my things to leave when Campbell said, “I want to buy you dinner.”
“Oh, thanks. You don’t need to do that.”
“I know I don’t need to. I want to.”
“I sort of have plans.” I did, sort of. I wanted to go home and call Detective Harker, tell him all about Campbell.
“Cancel them,” he insisted.
I wondered what he’d say over dinner. Would he incriminate himself further? Would I be able to make the case airtight? Morbid curiosity took hold of me, and I agreed to go to dinner with him.
We took a cab up to New Town, and Campbell had the driver drop us off in front of Ann Sather’s on Belmont near the El station. The restaurant was a trendy spot for breakfast, but for dinner not so much. It was brightly lit and served heavy, Swedish-style dinners, making it an odd choice for a romantic Friday night.