Santa Fe Dead

25

DETECTIVE ALEX REESE of the Santa Fe Police Department read through the last of a stack of financial documents he had gathered from various sources, including Donald Wells’s business manager in Los Angeles, then he got up and went over to the D.A.’s office. The secretary told him to go right in.

“Morning, Alex,” Martínez said. “What’s up?”

“My background check on Donald Wells didn’t turn up much. He was born in a little town in Georgia called Delano, and he got his job at Centurion Studios through the chairman there, who is from the same town. He got arrested for domestic violence against a live-in girlfriend fifteen years ago, but the charges were dropped. He had a lot of parking tickets and a few speeding tickets when he was younger, but he seems to have calmed down the past ten years or so.”

“Have we got motive?”

“I’ve combed through all of Wells’s financials, and, in my opinion, there’s more than enough there for motive to kill his wife.”

“Tell me.”

“In short, Wells would have nothing, if he hadn’t married Donna. When they met, he was working for Centurion Studios as an associate producer, which is one notch up from gofer in that business. He meets Donna, then a couple of months after that her husband is dead, and a year or so later, they’re married. She loans him three million dollars to set up his own shop. He rents office space from the studio, pays himself half a million dollars a year, probably six times what he had been making, and starts acquiring books and magazine articles and having screenplays written from them. Out of the first half dozen things he produced, one was a big hit-a horror thing aimed at teenagers called Strangle. Within three years he had made enough back to repay his wife’s loan.

“The two houses he co-owned with his wife were bought entirely by her, but the deeds were recorded in both their names. This real estate co-ownership adds twenty million dollars to his net worth, as expressed on his financial statement. Apart from the houses, his net worth is under five million, and three million of that is expressed as accounts receivable from Centurion or his film distributors, and he has to perform to receive those funds, delivering scripts, mostly. Set those receivables aside and he’s worth less than two million bucks, not much for a supposedly successful film producer. His first benefit from his wife’s will is that her half of the real estate goes to him, nearly doubling his net worth. He does have a high income, though, from his company: an average of two and a half or three million a year.

“His wife’s will also leaves him five million dollars-more than enough for motive right there-but the fact that his wife and son died simultaneously leaves him in a much more favorable position, since her son was her principal heir. It’s only a guess right now- we’ll need to subpoena her financial records-but it looks like his inheritance could be in the region of half a billion dollars.”

“Wow,” Martínez said. “I’d certainly call that motive.”

“His alibi holds. I spoke to the manager of the Hassler Hotel in Rome, and he supports both Wells’s contention that he was in Rome when his wife died and that he received the phone call from his Santa Fe house when he said he did.”

“So, he would have had to hire somebody. Any candidates?”

“My best guess is somebody he worked with in the movies, either in L.A. or Santa Fe. He’s shot a couple of movies here. I’ve compiled a list of people who worked for him from the credits of his pictures. On the theory that anyone he knew well enough to ask to kill his wife would have worked for him more than once, I’ve come up with a list of thirty-one names of people who worked on two or more of his movies, and I’m running them through the New Mexico, California and federal databases for criminal records. I should have something by tomorrow that will give me the basis for interviews.”

“That’s good work, Alex. What if none of them pans out?”

“I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”

“Okay, let me know who in that list of thirty-one people looks good.”

“I’m likely to have to go to L.A. to question some of these people, so I’ll send you a travel authorization.”

“How long will you need there?”

“Probably no more than a week, but Wells isn’t going to be a flight risk. He’s going to sit tight and let the legal process work to get his wife’s will probated, which could take months.”

“Right. There’s something else I’d like you to look into, Alex.”

“What’s that?”

“Wells told us in his deposition that Mrs. Wells’s first husband was killed in a mugging in New York.”

“That’s right, he did.”

“I’d like to know if there’s any chance Wells had a hand in that. Call the NYPD and see if you can track down the detectives who investigated the killings and see if you can figure out where Wells was when it happened.”

“That’s a good idea, Bob; I’ll get on it.”

“Don’t talk to Wells about it just yet. If he was involved, I want him to think he skated on that one.”

“I won’t talk to Wells again until I’ve come to you first.”

“Good. I don’t want Ed Eagle to know how interested we are in his client, either.”

“Yeah, it’s interesting that when Wells got the kidnapping threat, he didn’t call the police but called a lawyer, instead.”

“Yeah, I find that very, very interesting.”