“Look, mister, that was three, four months ago, you know?”
“Listen to me, Doc. This guy came in here for genuine paper; that means you had to produce a real birth certificate. What was the name on the certificate?”
“I’ll have to look it up.”
“Look it up where?”
Dunn nodded toward a big filing cabinet. “There.”
“All right,” Cupie said. “You walk over there and open the file drawer, and when your hand comes out of it, there better not be anything but a file in it, you hear me?”
“Listen, pal, all I want to do is give you what you want and get you out of here.”
“Fine,” Cupie said. “Give me what I want.”
Dunn went to the filing cabinet, produced a clump of keys from his pocket, and opened the top drawer. He rummaged through the files and came up with a manila folder. “I remember something now; this guy wanted a passport in his own name, the name he came in here with: Daniel O’Hara. I called a guy I know in Boston, where there’s lots of Irish, and he got it for me.”
Cupie opened the file and looked at the top sheet of paper. There was a Polaroid passport photo clipped to a
photocopy of an American passport, open to the page containing O’Hara’s personal information. There was a second sheet of paper in the file as well. “Who’s the lady?” he asked, pointing at a photocopy of another passport.
“She was with O’Hara,” Dunn replied. “A real looker, too. Dynamite.”
“Frances B. Kennerly,” Cupie read from the document. “Was that a special-order name, too?”
“Yeah,” Dunn replied, “but I couldn’t come up with the first name she wanted, so I matched the last name she asked for, and she was happy with Frances B., because the middle initial was the same as her first name.”
“What was the first name she wanted?” Cupie asked.
“Uh…” Dunn thought hard. “Betty—no…ah, Barbara. That was it, Barbara Kennerly.”
Cupie looked at the addresses; they were the same. “Stone Canyon, in Bel Air,” he read aloud. “Pretty fancy address.”
“Yeah. ’Course, it might not be a real address,” Dunn said, “but they were a pretty slick couple.”
“What else did you get for these people besides passports?”
“The works: driver’s licenses, social security cards, voter registration cards.”
“What address did you send them to?”
“They picked up the paper here.”
“You say these people were slick; tell me some more about them.”
Dunn shrugged. “Not much to tell.”
Cupie frowned. “You want to help me out, don’t you, Doc?”
“Oh, sure, sure. Let me see, well, they were slick, like I said; the guy was wearing a blue blazer that looked custom-made. The girl was wearing a low-cut black dress with a short skirt. Like I said, she was a real looker.”
“Any identifying marks?” Cupie said. It was a cop’s question, and Dunn looked at him sharply.
“Just one,” the photographer said. “The girl had a flower tattooed on one of her tits. I remember that; I couldn’t take my eyes off it.”
“Gimme something else,” Cupie said. He thought the photographer was dry, but it was worth trying.
“That’s all I can remember about them,” Dunn said. “I swear it.”
Cupie tucked the file folder under his arm and fished out the hundred-dollar bill. “Here you go, Doc,” he said. “You earned it.”
On the way home, Cupie considered trying to milk a little more money out of Ed Eagle, but he put the thought out of his mind. Eagle wasn’t his best customer, but he’d paid well and up-front. He stopped at a Federal Express office and overnighted the folder to Eagle.
E
d Eagle opened the Fed Ex package and removed the file. The face of James Grafton was becoming familiar now, and he read quickly through Cupie’s report, written in a surprisingly clear hand.
Eagle came to some conclusions: Grafton hadn’t planned to run—not unless he was forced to. The passport was for just in case; the driver’s license and social security card were for respectability and safety. It wouldn’t have done for Grafton to get stopped by the police for, say, running a stop sign, and not have a license; that way led back to a New York state prison. Something else: Grafton had ordered the documents in the name of Daniel O’Hara, the name he had been using in Los Angeles, so they were to support that identity instead of supplying a new one to run with.
Eagle looked at the second photocopy—the one of the woman’s passport—and his heart stopped. He looked at the photograph more closely, got a magnifying glass from a
desk drawer, and examined it minutely. It looked for all the world like Barbara with a blond wig, but Barbara had been in prison in late October, when Grafton and the woman had turned up at the photographer’s. It had to be Julia, but what about the name? Julia had specified the name and had nearly gotten what she asked for, and it was Barbara’s new name. His impulse was to go over to Santacafé, take Barbara by the throat, and shake some answers out of her. But did she have any answers? The phone rang.
“A Mr. Russell Norris for you, Mr. Eagle.”
“Hello, Russell?”
“Hi, Ed. I just got back. I would have called you from the airport, but there was a big rush to make the plane, and it was late when I got home.”
“That’s all right. What did you find out?”
“The Cayman account was in the name of a Frances B. Kennerly.”
“That fits with some other information I have. How much was in the account?”
“Three million six and change, but if I’d been a few minutes later, there would have been nothing.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that while I was sitting in the bank president’s office, a coded instruction came in to wire-transfer virtually the whole amount to a bank in Mexico City.”
“
What?
”
“Why does that surprise you, Ed? When people steal money they like to cover their tracks.”
“But Frances B. Kennerly, as she wanted to be known, is
dead
.”
“Then she gave somebody her account code—a friend, maybe.”
“A friend or a relative,” Eagle muttered.
“What was that?”
“Nothing. How was the account opened?”
“Through a proxy corporation set up in the Caymans. I didn’t dig into that, since you only hired me for the day, and anyway, it would have been extremely complicated and expensive. I don’t have quite the same influence with Cayman lawyers as with bankers.”
“What can we do about this account, Russell?”
“Everything we can do is already done,” Norris replied. He explained in detail his conversation with the banker.
Eagle slapped his desk in glee. “That’s wonderful, Russell, wonderful!”
“Well, don’t count on it until it actually happens; there’s still a lot that can go wrong. I wouldn’t tell your client about it yet, either—not until we know for sure.”
“Russell, I can’t thank you enough, but if this comes off, I’ll double your fee.”
“That would be much appreciated, Ed.”
“Were you able to find out anything more about the account holder?”
“No. If she had opened the account personally, they might have had a photograph, but as I said, it was done through a proxy corporation. All the bank had was a signature sample; I’ll fax that along to you, along with the coded wire-transfer order.”
“I’d appreciate that,” Eagle said. “It might help at some later date.” He thanked Norris again, then hung up.
Eagle waited by the fax machine until the signature sample and the wire-transfer order came in, glanced at them, then put them into his briefcase and left the office. “I’ll be back in an hour,” he said. He drove up to Wilderness Gate.
Wolf opened the door before he could ring the bell. “Hello, Ed. You look as though you might have some news.”
“Not as much news as I’d like, Wolf, but let’s sit down for a minute.”
Wolf indicated a chair at the kitchen table. “Would you like some coffee?”
“No, thanks. I want to show you what I’ve got here.”
“I’m anxious to see it.”
Eagle spread out the two photocopies on the kitchen table. “Is that a photograph of Julia?” he asked.
Wolf looked closely at the picture. “The photocopy’s a little fuzzy, but yes, that seems to be Julia. Who is Frances Kennerly?”
“I’ll get to that in a moment,” Eagle said. “First let me take you through what we know so far.”
“I’m all ears.”
“When Grafton broke out of jail, he headed straight for L.A., and he looked up an old prison pal there. The pal sent him to a man who can arrange for passports and other I.D. Around the end of October, Grafton and a woman turned up at this guy’s place of business, had their pictures taken, and paid for some documents. Grafton picked them up a couple of weeks later. That would have been a week or so before Thanksgiving.”
Wolf interrupted. “Meantime, Julia was rifling my brokerage account and wiring the money to the Cayman account.”
“Exactly, and the Cayman account was in the name of Frances B. Kennerly.”
“Kennerly is the name that Julia’s sister is using, isn’t it?”
“That’s right; Barbara Kennerly. Which is the name Julia wanted on the passport, but Frances B. was as close as the guy could come.”
“So she’s in on this?”
“I don’t see how she could be; she was in prison at the time. I met with her there, remember?”
“That lets her out, I guess.”
“It would seem so, except for one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Somebody, using the account code that Julia had established, sent an order to the Cayman bank to transfer the funds to an account in Mexico City. And that happened yesterday.” He handed Wolf the signature sample and the wire-transfer order.
Wolf seemed too stunned to look at them. “
Yesterday?
That means that somebody else is in this, doesn’t it?”
“I think it does, probably whoever killed Mark Shea. First of all, I’m surprised that Julia would give anybody else the code; from what I know about her, it just doesn’t sound like her. But she obviously gave the code to somebody, so it had to be somebody she trusted implicitly. That person waited until he—or she—felt the heat was off, then made a run on the money.”
“Well, Barbara Kennerly isn’t in prison anymore, is she?”
“No, she’s a free woman.”
“Then she’s got to be the one.”
“Maybe, but I’ve got some problems with that.”
“What problems?”
“Wolf, why would she come to Santa Fe and start a new life? She knew Julia was dead; she’d read about it in the papers while she was in prison. So if she had the bank account code and knew the money was there, why didn’t she just immediately transfer the money to a bank of her choice, take her new money and her new name, and disappear?”
Wolf thought about this. “It must mean that there’s something in Santa Fe she wants, something she has to have before she takes a hike.”
“But what? If she’s really in this, then all that’s in Santa Fe for her is the possibility of getting arrested and sent back to
prison. Why would she come out here and ask your lawyer, of all people, for a job? Why would she agree to take the witness stand in your defense? It just doesn’t make any sense.”
“I agree,” Wolf said. “It doesn’t.”
“Also, her every action since arriving here has been that of a person who was beginning a new life. She found a job and an apartment, she’s buying things for the place, and she bought a new car.”
“Where did she get the money for a new car? She’s just out of prison.”
“Perfectly reasonable explanation for that: When she was married, her husband bought her a lot of jewelry—I know that’s true, because I’ve seen it; it’s good stuff. She sold some of it to establish herself here.”
Wolf shook his head. “None of this makes any sense.”
“No, it doesn’t; but I’ve got a dinner date with your sister-in-law tonight, and I’m going to put her through the wringer. If she knows something about this, I’m going to find it out.”
Wolf turned his attention to the two documents before him. Then he stopped talking and stared at the wire-transfer order.
“What is it, Wolf?” Eagle asked.
“This order to transfer the money was faxed to the bank,” he said.
“So?”
“Look at the logo at the top of the page.”
Eagle looked at the page. “What do you mean, ’logo’?”
“You can set up a fax machine so that it has something to identify the sender at the top of the page.”
“Oh, sure. There’s no name, just a phone number.” His mouth dropped open. “Area code 505; it was sent from New Mexico.”
Wolf nodded. “From Santa Fe,” he said. “That’s
my
fax
number. This wire-transfer order was sent from
this house
.”
The two men sat and stared at each other.
“When?” Eagle said, grabbing the paper. “Here it is, stamped at the top: twelve-twenty today.”
“I went out to lunch,” Wolf said. “I left at just about that time.”
“So somebody saw you leave and came in here and used your fax machine?”
“Let’s double-check,” Wolf said, rising and heading for the study. He pressed a key, and the fax machine printed out a journal. “Here it is: a fax was sent at twelve-twenty.”
“Was the house locked?”
Wolf shook his head. “I never lock the place unless I’m going to be gone overnight.”
“Who knows about that?”
“Just about anybody who knows me well, I guess.”
“Would your cleaning lady have been here?”
“No, she leaves at noon sharp every day. She has another job in the afternoons.”
“All right,” Eagle said, “that means there’s somebody in Santa Fe who knew about the theft of the money before we did. Somebody Julia would have trusted.”
Wolf nodded. “And maybe the same person who shot Mark Shea?”
“And who spent the night before at his house. So it was somebody who knew both Julia and Mark well. Did Julia have any close friends in Santa Fe?”
“Monica Collins,” Wolf said.
“Yes, yes, yes,” Eagle replied, his eyes widening.
“She was the only person Julia was really close to here, and Monica knew Mark well, too. She was his patient.”