Chapter 6
6
W arren walked into the office and looked at Martha, who was at the reception desk. Alan was beside her desk in his Sphinx position. She said, “Mrs. Ellis hasn’t called. I would have let you know.”
“I figured you would, but I had to check.”
“Her monthly portfolio summaries are all scanned, so they’re available, and the originals are back in the safe.”
“Thanks, Martha.”
He called Mrs. Ellis’s number again. She didn’t answer, but the phone invited him to leave a message. He changed his tone slightly. “This is Charles Warren. Please call me, either at my office number, which is—” and he recited the number, and then added, “or my cell phone,” and then recited that number too. “If you use the cell number you can reach me at any time of the day or night. It’s very important that you do. This is not a matter that will wait. It’s urgent that I speak with you about your case.”
He hung up, turned to his computer, and typed in Tiffany Greene’s name. In a second, he was looking at the file for her divorce. He found her cell phone number and dialed it. He listened to a few rings and got another recorded speech and a chance to leave a message. He said, “Hi, Tiffany. I wanted to thank you for referring Vesper Ellis to me. I also wondered if you have another number for her, or know anything about where I might be able to reach her. I’ve tried both the numbers she gave to my assistant, Martha, with no luck.” Then he gave his office phone number, which she certainly had already, and his cell number, and hung up.
He turned to his computer and began scrolling through the column of emails in case he had missed one from Vesper Ellis. He hadn’t gotten very far before the phone on his desk rang. He snatched up the receiver and said, “Yes?”
Martha said, “Can you talk to Tiffany Greene on line one?”
“Sure. Thanks.” He heard the switch take place and said, “Tiffany?”
“Hi, Charlie. Got your message. When I heard your voice, I thought maybe you had found me more money my ex made disappear during the divorce. Did you?”
“No such luck,” he said. “I’ve been trying to reach Vesper Ellis, and it occurred to me that if she asked for your advice on a legal problem, she might be close enough to you to tell you if she was leaving town or something.”
“We’re close, but I’m afraid this time we’re both out of luck. I haven’t talked to her for a few days.”
“Do you know anybody else who might have seen her in the past twenty-four hours?”
“She’s always been somebody with a lot of friends, even before George died. She’s a great hostess, one of those women who knows how to make it look effortless. I could go look up some phone numbers and explain who they belong to and all that, but it’ll be quicker if I’m the one who calls. I’ll let you know what I find out.”
“Thanks, Tiffany.”
“Bye.”
He hung up the phone and went out to Martha’s desk.
“You’re good at sizing up clients. Did she strike you as somebody who would ask a lawyer to look over some suspicious financial records and then not return his phone calls, even after he left messages that it was urgent?”
“In other words, an idiot? No. She seemed to be serious and decisive, maybe more so because she had lost track of a few things that her husband used to handle before he died, and now she was taking charge.”
“That’s the way she struck me too.”
He went back into his office and spent the time while he was waiting for Tiffany Greene to call going through more pages of monthly reports, this time on the computer screen. He collected the rest of the names, titles, and phone numbers of the advisors who had controlled Vesper Ellis’s accounts, put them into a note file, and typed in as much of the contents of his lost notepad as he could bring back from memory.
Warren couldn’t help being reminded of what had happened to his mother’s money after his father died. When there was an accumulation of money in a widow’s accounts, it shouldn’t surprise him if somebody had noticed it and started devising strategies for taking it. He made a note to find out from Tiffany Greene whether Vesper Ellis had acquired a particularly enthusiastic and tenacious boyfriend over the past year or so.
He looked for more transfers of funds authorized by George Ellis, and he knew that he was also building a list of possible defendants in future prosecutions. The companies were some of the largest and, seemingly, most solid financial corporations in the country. If the men and women they had placed in charge of Vesper Ellis’s accounts had taken part in swindling her money, they would be eager to fix it before it came to the attention of the authorities.
He also spot-checked a few of the prices presented in the monthly reports against the records of the company whose stock it was to see if the numbers matched.
Warren saw one of the buttons on his phone light up and thought, “Vesper Ellis,” but it was Martha saying, “Detective Sergeant McHargue on line two.”
When Warren heard the transfer he said, “Hello, Sergeant.”
McHargue said, “Hello. I called because we found the Land Rover the two men used. It was abandoned at the curb of a street off the 405 freeway in Inglewood. The forensics people are going over it to raise a print or find any blood, since you might have left the one guy with some scratches, but I’m not optimistic. The inside of the car smells like ammonia, and you can see where a lot of the surfaces were wiped down, so if we find anything it just got missed in the cleanup.”
“I guess I was prepared for that kind of news.”
“Your car, on the contrary, has too many prints—yours, the valet parking guy’s, three smaller ones that are probably women, since the hairs in the car are all long, and about three men that have been sent in to see if they match anybody with a record.”
“Am I free to take my car to the dealer to get it repaired at this point?”
“I’m afraid so. You can have the repair shop pick it up any time. If your insurance company needs a copy of the police report, let me know where to send it.”
“Thank you.”
They both hung up. Warren looked at his computer screen with the columns of stock names and symbols and numbers. This didn’t seem to him to be the priority anymore. It was time to start concentrating on finding Vesper Ellis.