Death of Mr. Putnam
by Anthony Lukas
She was blond…naturally.
She strode into my office,
enthroned herself in the
chair opposite my desk and said without a trace of sincerity, “Sorry to interrupt
your… lunch.”
I looked down at the remains
of Tuesday night’s moo
goo gai pan. She was right, it wasn’t much of a lunch. It hadn’t made for much
of a breakfast either. I dropped the plastic fork in the paper container,
folded the top closed and dabbed at my chin with a paper napkin while asking,
“And what can I do for you, Miss ---…”
“You can die, Mr.
Putnam.”
I looked up and into the
barrel of the .38 she held,
pointed laser straight at my chest. I
glanced at Gladys, hanging in her holster on the coat rack in the far corner of
my office. No chance there. I looked
back at her and she was smiling. “Go ahead, make a try for it.”
“I’m not a
fool, Miss--.”
She arched an eyebrow.
“I disagree, Mr. Putnam. And
the name’s Baxter, Millicent Baxter.”
Baxter? The
name rang a distant bell, but nothing about her did. And I would not have forgotten
the likes of
her, sitting perfect posture straight, dressed in a tailored suit, flawless
coiffure and expensive looking shoes at the end of long, very shapely legs.
Baxter?
She was sitting there,
waiting. Her ice blue eyes
slid over my desk and somehow her look made me aware of the piles of stuff on
my desk. Old magazines, notebooks, a
litter of old pens, some of which might actually still work, a candy wrapper or
two. Or three. I was suddenly
aware that they all seemed to
be a little dusty. Have to tidy up, I
told myself, if I’m still around to do it.
Baxter? Wait a minute,
those blue eyes…
“You related to
Calvin Baxter?”
She smirked. “Bravo,
Mr. Detective. My father.”
Calvin Baxter, the mini-Bernie
Madoff wannabe. He
was one of several partners in an private equity investment firm, Capitalist
Investments, that turned out to be nothing but a ponzi scheme, where new
investors’ money was used to pay older investors fabulous ‘returns on their
investments, but where, in truth,
precious little had been invested anywhere, mostly it was just money flowing
round and round and where she stopped had been with Baxter being found out.
One of the other partners
in the firm had contacted
me, quietly voicing suspicions and asking me to discreetly trace down the
alleged companies in which the firm had invested. Some didn’t exist, some did
but had never heard of Capitalist, some had seen some money from Capitalist but
had nothing like the returns that Capitalist was reporting to its investors.
I had reported to my client,
the D.A. had been
called and the whole scheme had come crashing down with several hundreds of
millions unaccounted for, and the dashing Mr. Baxter, with his piercing blue
eyes, standing trial, fingers being pointed at him as the architect of it all.
He denied it passionately
but was convicted and
sentenced to prison for a century or so.
That had been, what, three or four years ago? And now his daughter with
the same piercing
blue eyes sat opposite me with a gun that hadn’t wavered a fraction.
“I can understand
your feelings, Miss Baxter. But, I’m sorry to say, you’re father
has hurt
a lot of people. Killing me isn‘t going to get him out of prison.”
“He’s dead.”
“Dead?”
“Stroke. In prison.
Dead.”
I recited the banal, “I’m
sorry for your loss, Miss
Baxter,” and started to sweat a little bit more. “But the evidence against your
dad…”
She shook her head. “He
was framed.”
I sighed. “There
was a lot of testimony regarding
the losses…”
“Oh, Mr. Putnam,
you really are the fool. Testimony
from founding partners, all who had traded deals for testimony. And over the
last eight years they’ve all done their light sentences and where are they now?
Where are they now, Mr. Putnam?
And all of that money that has never been accounted for?”
I sympathized with her
hurt, but ... wait, eight
years. Had it been that long?
“The scheme
was beginning to crumble,” continued Baxter. “I’m told the economy had slowed a
bit, so that not enough new money was coming in to keep up with the high
returns that the clients were demanding.
The whole scheme was going to come tumbling down like a house of cards
caught in a breeze. A scapegoat had to
be found and…” and she left the thought there with a shrug of a shoulder and an
angry look.
“Miss Baxter, your
suggesting that the other
principals in the firm conspired against your dad. But that guy that had come
to me....ah,
Garfield, he was really shocked and appalled when I reported to him.”
“That would be Jeremy
Garfield, one of the founding
partners. Testified, short sentence in
prison, gone now, living quite well in Costa Rica. Wonder how he managed that? And did he ever say how he happened to pick you
for this investigation? You, looking
into some fairly sophisticated financial dealings? Something about your divorce
cases, nickel
and dime employee theft cases qualify you for that kind of work? You were played,
Putnam,” she said with a
laugh. “They waved a big fee in front of your muzzle and you were like a dog
sniffing after a Milkbone. You followed wherever they led you.”
I should have been angry,
but something about her
certainty gave me pause. Had I gotten it
wrong? No, the evidence was there. But…it
had not been that difficult to find.
Lots of legwork, yes, but not difficult to find. All the pieces had appeared
and fit in fairly easily. Maybe I had been thinking more of the generous
fee. The trail of the evidence….had I gotten it wrong? Had I been
set up, a patsy like Baxter was
saying her father had been?
No, I couldn’t have
been fooled. I was and am an
experienced investigator. I looked at the newspaper clippings I kept on the
office on the wall, cases that I had solved that had made the papers. But somehow
at that moment I noticed for the first time that the clipping were just a bit
yellowed with age. When had that happened?
Had I gotten it wrong?
She was staring at me,
saying nothing while thoughts
roared through my head. She was picture
perfect, she made my cramped office look shabby. No, no…it wasn’t
she who had made my office
look shabby, it was all the years that
had gone by, unnoticed. How had that
happened? I could remember starting out
with such high and confident hopes after retiring with twenty years as a cop,
opening my office some---and I suddenly had trouble remembering how many years
it had been.
But I had done some big
cases, glancing again at the
newspaper clippings and quickly looking away from their sallowness. I looked at
the open files on my desk…some teenaged employee suspected of stealing stuff
from a some electronics store, an unfaithful wife ---petty ass cases. I tried thinking back over the last few
years, trying to remember one case that was significant but saw only a long
line of cheating spouses and pimple-faced kids.
I turned my head and stared
out the window at the
high-rise office tower across the street. I remembered how I had looked at that
new building being built and thinking how while I was just starting here in
this old building, with small, cramped offices, that eventually I would move
across to that shiny new tower, with a staff and fine furnishings, with a
business built on first class investigators and investigations. But here I was
still just looking across the street.
I realized with a start
that I had forgotten about
Baxter, didn’t know how long I had been staring out the window. I looked back
at her, and saw that she was looking at me with a strange expression. And that
she no longer had her gun in her hand. She stood.
“I came here to
kill you, Mr. Putnam,” she said, looking
around at my office and then down at me again, “but now . . . I can see you’re
already dead.”
She turned and strode
out through the door, leaving
me with only the scent of her perfume and a stale smell that could have been
from the soy sauce.
END
“The Death of Mr. Putnam” originally appeared in OverMyDeadBody.com
in 2015.)
