No Cats Allowed

THIRTY-FIVE

On the Sunday after the arrests of Cassandra Brownley and Margie Flaxdale for the murders of Peter Vanderkeller, Oscar Reilly, and Porter Stanley, my family gathered at my house for our weekly meal. I had also invited Melba and Haskell Bates to dine with us. I knew everyone was curious about many of the details of the murder investigation, and I was prepared for a barrage of questions. I insisted, however, that the questions waited until we had finished our meal.

We adjourned to the living room, and everyone found a comfortable spot. Helen Louise sat beside me on the sofa, and Diesel stretched out over both our laps, his head resting against Helen Louise’s stomach. Dante, now full of turkey, zonked out in Stewart’s lap. I think we all felt a bit sleepy after a full and lively meal, but I had to concentrate to get my thoughts organized when I would rather be taking a nap.

“Did you suspect Cassandra Brownley all along, Dad?” Laura asked. “She sounds like a truly awful person, and a bully.”

“I did, though I tried not to let my dislike of her color my judgment,” I said. “She’s a bright woman, but she let her evaluation of her own intelligence unbalance her. She thought she could bulldoze her way over anyone who stood in her path.”

“She did do that for a long time,” Melba said. “Until Charlie got in her way. She finally met her match.” She chuckled.

“When Cassandra was first hired at Athena,” I said, “the director was elderly and, frankly, no longer really up to the job. The salaries for librarians were low, and Cassandra wasn’t happy. It wasn’t long before she came up with the scheme to embezzle from the library budget.”

“She had to have help, though,” Helen Louise said. “And that’s where Margie came in, right?”

“Yes, her plan wouldn’t work unless she had an accomplice in accounts payable to make the fake company look real. I don’t think she even thought of the scheme until after she and Margie met and became close.”

“How did they get around the IRS? Even a fake company has to report earnings,” Sean said.

“Margie did do tax returns, but she underreported the income, of course. They paid enough tax to look reasonably legitimate, but only just.”

“How do you know all this?” Stewart asked. “I presume one of them must have talked.”

I nodded. “Yes, Margie. Otherwise it would take Kanesha a lot longer to get at the truth. Kanesha is working with the IRS fraud investigators to uncover the full extent of their embezzlement.”

“You mean it wasn’t just the one thing?” Laura asked. “How much did they get?”

“That’s the only one we know about,” I replied. “There could be more, however. From the one fake line item, though, they managed to steal over one point seven million dollars over the course of a decade.”

Frank whistled. “What I don’t understand is why it took so long to figure out something hinky was going on.”

“I know how you feel,” I said. “But there are a couple of things to keep in mind. One is that Cassandra went to great pains to make this so-called resource look legitimate. She created fake usage reports to make it seem like the e-books in this phantom collection were used enough to make them worthwhile.”

“That’s pretty slick,” Sean said.

“It is,” I replied, “because nobody thought to question her on the statistics. Peter probably never did. He basically went with whatever his department heads advised him to do. With his own money he was parsimonious, but that frugality didn’t extend to the college’s funds.”

“What was the other thing we should keep in mind?” Helen Louise asked.

“The fact that librarians, by and large, are not trained to be businesspeople, even though, in a sense, we do run a business. Most library schools, at least back when I went through one, taught a management course, and a course in statistics, but we didn’t have courses in budgeting or finance of any kind.”

“Opening the way for a smart woman like Cassandra Brownley to take advantage of the general cluelessness of her coworkers,” Alex said.

“Exactly,” I said. “The problem for her little scheme was that, unbeknownst to her, Peter had been given instructions to trim the library budget for the next fiscal year by about fifteen percent. He apparently was reviewing resources and somehow stumbled on the fact that maybe these e-books weren’t worth what they cost.”

“Since Cassandra was the one responsible for the biggest chunk of the library’s budget, he must have said something to her,” Melba said.

“I have access to his e-mail,” I said, “and I found a message from the first of December when he sent her a list of resources he thought should be canceled. Guess what was number one on the list?”

“Global Electronic Resources. Poor Peter.” Melba shook her head.

“Yes, because that was probably when Cassandra started planning his murder. She wasn’t about to let her cash cow be canceled.” I sighed. “She came up with the scheme to get rid of Peter and then make it look like he resigned in embarrassment because he had overcommitted the budget by nearly half a million dollars.”

“Didn’t anyone think it strange that he would suddenly do such a thing?” Helen Louise asked.

“Yes, but no one dug any deeper because he simply walked off the job, or so they thought. Peter hated ever cutting resources because he truly believed in providing access to all the resources that our students and faculty need for their work. That was certainly one thing I admired in him.

“Cassandra arranged to be invoiced for several journal back-file collections and an e-book collection, knowing they would put the library way over budget. She apparently told the sales reps that Peter had authorized the purchases. The invoices were sent to her, and she created the purchase orders and signed them with Peter’s name. Then she sent them to Margie in accounts payable.”

I paused for a breath. “Cassandra couldn’t risk the purchase orders getting to Peter, or the red flags would really have gone up. So she waited until the weekend that she and Margie killed Peter to do it, and then signed them the following day, the Monday when Peter didn’t show up for work. They sent his e-mail resignation from his computer at home, because he was actually logged in to the campus network when they went to his house to fake his suicide.”

“Stupid of her to have written the wrong date,” Laura said.

“It was certainly careless,” I said, “but it’s the kind of thing one does automatically most of the time. She slipped up there, and analysis of the signatures on those purchase orders will probably prove that Peter didn’t sign them.”

“With Peter out of the way, they must have thought they were in tall cotton then,” Melba said. “But along came Reilly.”

“Right,” I said. “Reilly, who was a finance person. He evidently caught on to the fact that something was hinky, to use Frank’s term.” I smiled at my son-in-law. “Instead of going to the president or to the VP for finance, he decided to try a little blackmail.” I recalled the incident I had witnessed, when Cassandra came storming out of his office. I figured that was when he tried to put the pinch on her.

“In the middle of it all, the ex-brother-in-law shows up,” Sean said. “Looking for the family heirloom jewelry that Reilly stole.”

“That man really was a piece of work,” Alex said, her nose wrinkled in disgust.

“Amen to that,” Melba said in a decided tone. “Honey, you just don’t know how nasty he could be.”

“He paid for it,” I reminded her. “Porter Stanley forced him to turn over the jewelry, of course. He had been shadowing Reilly for several days. Melba noticed him sitting in a parked car on the street in front of our building. Reilly never saw him, until I brought them face-to-face.”

“Why did they kill Stanley?” Helen Louise asked.

“Because he knew they’d killed Reilly,” I said. “He followed Reilly into the library that night and saw the murder. I don’t imagine Stanley shed any tears over the dead brother-in-law, but Reilly had evidently boasted to him about his blackmail scheme. With Reilly out of the way, he attempted to carry on with the blackmail for himself.

“Cassandra went to meet him at his hotel and shot him. She found the jewels and took them, but she made the mistake of giving Margie one of the rings.”

“And Margie let me see it,” Melba said. “Really silly of her.”

“They didn’t know anyone else knew about the jewels, you see,” I said, “but it was still a dumb thing to do.”

“I can’t imagine working with Cassandra and not wanting to bash her over the head with something,” Laura said. “How could she get away with being nasty to people for so long?”

“Because they were terrified of her.” I shared the incidents Melba had told me about, when Cassandra sought revenge on coworkers. “They were afraid, even as a group, if they complained about her, she would do something terrible to them. Poor Delbert Winston hemmed and hawed when I asked him to look for some files, and he told me later he was too scared of Cassandra to do as I asked.”

“Nasty,” Helen Louise said. “So she was the one behind the pranks against Reilly? And the threats to you?”

“Yes,” I said. “The woman couldn’t stand to be thwarted. She wanted to keep Reilly riled up, and then they decided he had to die.” I shivered suddenly. “I’m not sure whether they would have really come after me again, after that failed attempt with the gunshot, but I don’t want to think about it.”

Haskell finally spoke. “You were the only one who figured out the truth about Peter Vanderkeller, though.”

“The more I thought about it, once I started digging into the budget and all those invoices and so on, I just had this feeling that Peter didn’t go away voluntarily. I can’t explain it,” I said with a shrug.

“We’re all thankful, Dad, that you did figure it out before those terrible women could harm you.” Laura blew me a kiss. If she didn’t have trouble getting up and out of chairs, due to her advanced stage of pregnancy, I knew she would have come to hug me.

“I’m thankful, too,” I said. “Because I want to be around a long time. I’ve got grandchildren to spoil, after all.” I looked at Helen Louise. “And a beautiful woman at my side.”

Diesel sat up and meowed enthusiastically. We all laughed. Dante woke up in Stewart’s lap and barked.

Sean stood. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m ready for another round of dessert. Dibs on the cheesecake.”

“Not if I get there first.” Frank jumped up and headed for the kitchen. Sean took off after him. Their wives exchanged amused glances.

“I’ll go make the coffee.” Stewart handed Dante to Haskell. He turned to me. “By the way, Charlie, Haskell is moving in.” He winked at me, and Haskell’s face reddened slightly.

“Welcome to the family,” I said with a big smile.