Chapter 14
The Palace: Act III
As I entered the lobby of The Palace, I headed for the shoeshine booth to find Billie Whitehall. I knew Mrs. Stanton was expecting me, but there were still holes in my theory as to what all was going on. There were two missing players, and they had to be here in San Francisco somewhere for all of this to make sense. I wanted to talk to Billie about who was around before last night. Mrs. Stanton had to be under surveillance by someone.
The problem with a lot of operatives doing surveillance is that they concentrate on not being seen by the people they're watching. They forget that someone else might be watching them. Billie was a very observant man, and my guess was he might have seen who was watching Mrs. Stanton. There are advantages to being invisible.
When I arrived at the shoeshine booth, Billie was finishing up with a customer. I waited and climbed into a chair. Billie looked up at me and laughed.
“You gonna wear out your shoes just gettin’ ‘em shined,” he said.
“Just buff and talk to me,” I said. “I need information, my usual rates.”
“I'll slap leather with a rag, you ask your questions and I see if I got answers.”
“Before last night, did Mrs. Stanton meet with anyone? Was anyone watching her?”
Billie whistled while he buffed my shoes, then he slowed down and thought for a moment.
“When she arrived, there was a three-piece with her carrying a briefcase, smelt like a mouthpiece, expensive too. He was reassuring her about something, but she wasn't having any. Something had her upset.
“Shadows, a man in the shadows, never really got a good look at him. He hung to the shadows. Until last night, if Mrs. Stanton was down here, so was he. Her first, though. Always her first. But he wasn't following her; he would usually show up from another direction.”
“I wish you could describe him. It's too bad there is no way to identify him,” I said.
“Never said I couldn't recognize him,” said Billie.
“You said he hung to the shadows and you didn't get a look at him,” I reminded him.
“Not him, his shoes. The man wore spats. Who wears spats these days except high society? Another thing, Spats met with Joseph last night just before he and the other two took off.”
“You didn't mention him last night,” I said.
“I didn't know. A maid saw them. In case you didn't know it, you now have this place wired. There are Invisibles all over this hotel.”
I gave Billie a sawbuck and told him to split it with the maid.
“Intend to,” he said.
I headed to the elevators and I was able to go straight p to the penthouse floor. I was now identified as acceptable.
The butler answered the door and admitted me. He showed me to the same alcove I sat in the last time I was here.
“I have kept the apartment on lock-down per your instructions,” he said. “The Missus is upset, but she has held up quite well. She is angry and wants to know what is going on. She does not like being kept in the dark. Coffee, sir? She'll be out in a moment.”
“Coffee would be great,” I said.
He left for the kitchen to get the coffee, and Mrs. Stanton appeared almost as if on cue.
“Would you mind telling me what's going on,” she said.
“You lied to me, Mrs. Stanton,” I said very matter-of-factly.
“I what?” she said indignantly.
“You knew your husband was dead and you hired me to find him,” I said. “Did you want me to find his body, confirm he was dead, or find his killer? It would have been helpful to know from the start that he was already dead. Or maybe you killed him and needed to know if you got away with it.”
I spoke sharply and pushed hard. She started shaking her head. She cried that she didn't know. She insisted she just wanted to know where he was. She just wanted to know what had happened to him.
“When he died?” I said harshly.
“Yes!” she snapped back.
I sat back in my chair and just stared at her.
The butler entered with a tray. “The coffee, sir,” he said.
He set the tray down on the table between Mrs. Stanton and me. He poured two cups of coffee and served them. Mrs. Stanton looked to him for support, but he performed his routine as the perfect butler and returned to the kitchen. She watched him go. Her eyes widened when he closed the kitchen door.
“Will no one help me,” she said.
“I will,” I said. “If you start telling me the truth.”
“I didn't know he was dead,” she said. “I suspected he was. Things didn't seem quite right after New Orleans.”
“Did he get the money back to his father?” I asked.
Her eyes got even wider, she looked really scared. She twisted around looking for specters, or a place to run.
“Relax, Mrs. Stanton,” I said. “No one else knows about his embezzling from his father's associates. Not even the ones who killed him.”
“He didn't embezzle the money, he stole it. How did you know?” she asked.
“Forensic accounting,” I said. “Not me, a National employee found it out, but even he doesn't know what happened. You want to start from the beginning. Before Miami?”
Suddenly Mrs. Stanton relaxed, I half expected her to collapse from the release of the stress. Then she straightened up.
“Martin Stanton was a pig,” she said. “How far back should I go?”
“Start with the truth about the first time he left,” I said.
“He had been working for his father, and he was bored. That's when he got less than discrete about his liaisons. I thought he was simply going to ask for a divorce. That would have been fine with me.
“But all of a sudden he got real secretive. He said he was headed out of town. He took a brief trip to Miami. When he came back, things seemed to get back to normal. Then he took another trip. At the time, I didn't know where. Then he was dealing with someone in Miami a lot. He set up a studio there. He always liked to paint. His first dalliances were with models. The funny thing was he seemed to be a pretty good artist. Anyway, he set up in Miami and would take trips to paint. Everyone, I included, assumed he was meeting with a model he was keeping down there.”
“Okay, that's the setup,” I said. “How did he break the news that he wasn't coming back?”
“He threatened me. He said he was going to leave the country. He had done something, and he needed three more months but he couldn't keep making trips back and forth, so I was going to have to help him. If I didn't...”
“I know about your son, Mrs. Stanton,” I said.
“No one knows...”
“Well, I do. I was looking for a reason you would cooperate with your husband. Love for someone else was the only thing that would have persuaded you to help him. You didn't care about the scandal. If you did you would have never married him in the first place. Of course, you did care about a scandal when you were a lot younger. You wouldn't have hidden your son from your family and the world otherwise.”
“You don't know my father,” she said.
“No, I don't,” I replied, “but the boy is what, six, seven? When this is over, and it is about to be, go home. Get your son and introduce him to your father. If the kid's last name isn't Parks, change it, trust me.
“So just what did Martin do, and what did you do for him?” I asked.
“He robbed a bank in upstate New York,” she said.
“What, in some small Podunk town?” I laughed. “What did he get, two or three grand?”
“A quarter of a million dollars,” she said.
You could have knocked me over with a feather. We're barely recovering from the Depression, and he scored a quarter of a million dollars? Then it all came together. His father, his father's business associates, National. It all made very scary sense to me now.
“He robbed a 'bank', not just some city trust and fund. He hit a mob bank!" I said.
Talk about committing suicide!
"And you knew!” I said.
“Not at first. I knew it was bad, but I didn't know the extent of it until I took the trip down to Miami. The men whose bank he hit didn't know it was him. He hit it at night. No one even knew that he knew that the bank was mobbed up. He was working late one night for his father. It was pure chance that he saw a piece of paper that hadn't been destroyed. Anyway, he became obsessed with it. He spent months working it out. He quit working for his father. They fought about him wanting to be an artist.
“His father always threatened to cut him off, so he planned for it all. The big problem was moving the money from where he had it stashed to Miami. Then he had to come up with a reason to have so much money.”
“He needed a way to launder it,” I said.
“His initial plan was to make it look like he was winning at gambling. He couldn't do that in New York, it too close to where he stole the money. The mob might be looking for something like that.”
“Then he realized that they might be looking for some kind of a similar scam in Miami,” I said. “So he decided to simply skip the country?”
“At first, yes. Then something funny happened. He had put some paintings on display in a gallery in Miami. Five of them sold. Not for too much, several hundred dollars, the asking price,” she said.
“Ah, but the birth of an idea,” I replied.
“Yes. He would buy the paintings himself, disguised of course. First, he jacked up the prices for his paintings. Thousands of dollars. The gallery owner said he was nuts, but since he had some small successes, and Martin was willing to pay to have a showing, the gallery owner went along with it.
“The show was a success in that it got a lot of press, and Martin had a couple of shills make purchases at the inflated prices. It would take a little time, but Martin now had a way to account for the fortune he was about to have.”
“So what happened?”
“At the end of the second month, Martin was to have bought ten of his paintings, about forty thousand dollars' worth. Only sixteen sold, but for over a hundred thousand dollars. A couple went to bid because several buyers were interested in his work. Several were from Europe and Martin was suddenly a sensation in the European art world. Of the ten Martin thought he was going to buy, he only got four.”
“That means his shills couldn't get the paintings, so they took off with his money.” I laughed.
“Martin couldn't do anything about it,” she said, “If he went after them, it would expose his whole plan. He was furious! Then he realized he had gotten more money than he set out to.”
I laughed again. Then I thought about it. Martin Stanton was in trouble.
“Except that his shills might figure out what he was doing,” I said, “Unless they were too scared that Martin might come after them. Martin had to change the venue. More importantly, he no longer had to launder money. He was legitimately making a fortune. He had to get the money back to the mob without them knowing he took it in the first place. They would still be looking for the thief, but not as hard, and if Martin could remain anonymous, he would be in the clear.”
I looked at Mrs. Stanton and wondered.
“Why did you go after him?” I asked aloud.
“That's just it, I didn't. He told me what happened in Miami at the gallery. He told me I could have a divorce as long as I didn't want anything from him. He was finally going to be out of my life. I was thrilled to be free of him.”
“What went wrong?” I asked.
“Initially, nothing. He still needed to get the mob’s money and get it back to New York. He planned to use his father as a go-between, anonymously of course. He decided to continue to sell paintings in Miami, then New York, and finally Europe. But someone found out about the bank.”
“Then why get National involved?” I asked.
“Martin needed to control the ruse; he had a friend at National. Everything was supposed to go through him. Martin had to be on the lam, so to speak. I would provide the red herring of his moving and sending him money through National.
“Martin went to St. Louis. With Martin's friend at National, we could set up a trail to New Orleans. Martin could lay low and paint in St. Louis while anyone interested would be looking for him somewhere else. By biding his time, Martin could get the mob back its money without anyone finding out he was the guy who robbed the bank, and Martin could eventually go live in Europe.”
“But you got a surprise from Martin,” I said. “He did go to New Orleans. From there he was supposed to head for South America, only he went to Los Angeles.”
“I didn't know what was going on. Martin's contact at National said something had gone amiss. He was trying to track Martin. He would let me know as soon as he had an idea of what was happening.”
“Except you got a bad feeling about the man from National and decided to cancel their involvement,” I said.
She nodded.
“I suspect he had already been murdered in New Orleans,” I said flatly. “Someone was able to tap into what was going on and decided to cut themselves in for a piece of the action. Martin refused to play along. He must have been successful in getting the mob back its money and felt there wasn't any threat to him anymore.”
I sat back and thought for a couple of minutes. The immediate threat to Mrs. Stanton was no longer active, but I needed to finalize a couple of details.
“You need to pack up and head for the next train back East,” I said.
I handed her Max's card.
“Here is the name of the cabbie to hire; no one else. He'll get you to the train station safely. When you get to Chicago, send me a wire, but you should be in the clear by then. Oh… Joseph will not be accompanying you; he's in jail. When you get to Boston, wire me three grand; our business will be concluded by then. Oh, and introduce your father to his grandson.”
I got up and said I would show myself out. I shook her hand gently and smiled. She was going to be okay. I hoped the same could be said for me. I had a murderer to catch, and he wasn't going to go gently into the night.
