The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady (26 page)

There. That was it. That was what they were here to discuss. Corruption in the federal program. Kickbacks at Camp Briarwood.

“So tell me, Mata Hari.” He glanced up at the peephole under Silent Cal. “Far as you're concerned, those claims are all still true?” He chuckled loudly, so she could hear him.
“By the way, ‘Mata Hari' is pretty cute. You got my attention with that one.”

She disregarded the compliment, if that's what it was. “Yes, it's true,” she said grimly. “It's been going on ever since the camp started buying milled lumber for the buildings. It's still going on.”

Charlie reached into his shirt pocket for his notebook and pencil. “Hope you don't mind if I take a few notes. My recollection's not as good as it used to be.”

As he found a clean page in his notebook, he was sorting through his memories of women's voices, trying to place this one. It wasn't easy, though. Southern women tended to sound alike. This voice was familiar—it belonged to one of the Dahlias, he thought. That garden club seemed to get tangled up in everything that went on in Darling. But whose was it? From what he'd heard, half of the club members were working or teaching out there at the camp and could be expected to know something about what was going on. Ophelia, of course, but also Bessie Bloodworth, Verna Tidwell, Liz Lacy, Lucy Murphy, Earlynne Biddle, Miss Rogers, and maybe a couple of others he didn't know about. Mata Hari could be any one of them. Well, not Miss Rogers, who was a prissy old thing with a voice like a squeaky violin string. No, definitely not her. But any one of the rest. Verna Tidwell was the most likely, he thought.

“Take all the notes you please,” Mata Hari said. “It's important that you get it right.”

Her words were followed by a lightning flash that made Charlie blink, and the thunderclap followed in seconds. The sky outside the windows was darker, too, and the wind, gusting across the stovepipe, had set up an eerie, vibrating wail, like a kid blowing across a bottle. The storm was getting closer.

“Okay.” He held his pencil poised. “To start with, how come you didn't contact the sheriff instead of sending that note to me? What we're talking about here is a crime. Shouldn't you have gone to Buddy Norris?”

There was a silence. “If I'd known what I know now, I would have.” Mata Hari's voice was bleak. “Given what's happened, I wish I had. I think . . . I'm afraid you'll have to.”

He was about to ask why, but she drew a regretful breath and sighed it out. “You see, when I wrote to you, I was thinking that this was a
federal
thing, involving a federal employee, and maybe more than one. Yes, there are some local people involved, but mostly it's federal. So the sheriff wasn't . . . well, he wasn't relevant.”

“Wait a minute,” Charlie said, looking up at Silent Cal. “What do you mean, what you know
now
? What's changed?”

“We'll get to that. But later.” There was a moment's silence. “Anyway, I was thinking that Buddy Norris is a pretty nice boy, but he's new on the job, you know, with almost no experience, and no connections out there at the camp. So what's he going to do but go straight to the head guy? And for all I know, Captain Campbell himself might be in on this. It may be his idea. He may be taking a big cut.”

She paused, and Charlie asked, “Do you have any evidence that he is?”

“No, and I'm not saying he is. But if he doesn't know anything about it, people will say that he
should
, since it's his camp and he's responsible for what happens in it. Either way, it's bad for him. His reputation is at stake. He won't want anybody poking around, especially the local law. Give him half a chance and he'd probably sweep the whole thing under the rug.” She paused again. “And go after anybody who might have squealed.” With the last sentence, her voice
had changed, almost imperceptibly. It held something that Charlie thought sounded like fear.

“I see.” Charlie was scribbling fast, trying to get her words down verbatim. “So you wrote to me instead of the sheriff. You didn't stop to think that
I
might go straight to the head guy?”

But he now had a different, and rather unsettling, perspective. He was looking at the situation from her point of view. Whoever she was—and she could be any one of a half-dozen women—her knowledge made her vulnerable. It put her in danger, like . . . The image of the woman he had seen this morning, dead, strangled, flashed into his mind, and he frowned. Why had he thought of that? There wasn't any connection between Rona Jean Hancock and what was going on at the camp. Was there?

Mata Hari gave a humorless chuckle. “Of course you won't go to the head guy. You won't go to anybody, not on this. You don't want to solve a crime or put somebody in jail. You don't get paid—or get elected—for doing that. You just want a
story
. And that's what I want, too. If you write this up the way I tell you and run it in the
Dispatch
, they won't be able to ignore it out there at the camp, or pretend that it's not happening. What's more, that'll keep me safe. The bad guy—or guys, or whatever—might suspect me of telling, but they won't dare touch me.”

Charlie wondered at that. There could be a lot riding on this. Why wouldn't the “bad guy” (singular or plural) try to silence her, to keep her from telling what she knew? He started to say this, but a heavy thud of thunder interrupted him, and when the reverberations had died away, Mata Hari was hurrying on.

“But even better, if you do a really,
really
good story on
this, it might get picked up by a bigger paper. Maybe somebody will start an investigation. And when that happens, this swindle will
stop
. There won't be any more kickbacks.” Half under her breath, she added, “At least, that's what I was thinking when I wrote you that note.”

“It's good thinking,” Charlie said approvingly. It was. She had thought this all the way through, and her conclusions were pretty much in line with his own thoughts on the matter. “But if I'm going to run a story, I can't do it just on your say-so. I don't even know who the hell you are, or whether what you're telling me is the truth or a passel of lies. I have to run a background check on your information. I have to confirm it with other sources, the more, the better. But first, I'm going to need everything you've got—names, dates, amounts, everything you know. Don't hold anything back. And let's start with your name. Your
real
name.”

Of course, Charlie had already begun to work on that background check. That was why he'd put Ophelia Snow on special assignment and why she was out there at the camp today, getting the confirmation he needed. At least, that's what she was supposed to do, assuming that everything was going according to plan. Which it didn't always.

The wind blew eerily down the stovepipe again, and ashes puffed out into the room, wraith-like, the ghostly remains of long-dead fires. Somewhere toward the entry to the building—in the belfry, maybe—a board pulled loose and took up an annoying arrhythmic banging.

“No,” Mata Hari said in a determined voice. “I am
not
going to tell you who I am. But I'll tell you everything else I know. Get your pencil and start writing.”

And for the next few moments, while the lightning flickered, the thunder banged like an orchestra's percussion section, and the wind—and now and then the rain—whipped
against the old building, that's what she did, reciting the names of a half-dozen local suppliers who had paid kickback fees, the amount they had forked over, and the kind of items that were being supplied to the camp. Charlie—who hadn't known what to expect in the way of serious information,
real
information—was impressed. Whoever she was, she knew her stuff. He was talking to an insider.

When she paused for breath, he said, “How did you get all this? The names, I mean. The amounts. I need to know what kind of access you had.”

“You don't
want
to know,” she said. “And I don't want to tell you.”

He frowned. “Why?”

She didn't answer right away, and when she did, she spoke reluctantly, as if she would rather not answer the question but felt compelled to. “It wasn't . . . it wasn't honest, what I did. I didn't play fair.”

He frowned, wondering what she had done that she was ashamed of and wanting to make her feel better, to reassure her. “Look,
Mata Hari
.” He gave the name a special emphasis. “You've given yourself a spy's name, and maybe you're thinking there's something dishonorable about spying. But the kickback scheme—it's dishonest, start to finish. Illegal and immoral, too. So what does it matter if you didn't play fair?”

“It matters to me,” she said quietly. “I didn't set out to be a spy. I only did what I felt I had to do. So don't ask how I did it. Just believe me. Give me credit for telling the truth. If you could get the records, you'd see that everything I'm telling you is accurate.”

“Well, then, how about the way the scheme operated?” Charlie said, moving on. After all, Ophelia was supposed to be getting the records. With luck, he'd have plenty of
corroborating material, maybe as early as this evening. “Give me the big picture.”

She seemed happier to talk about that part of it, in the intervals between the lightning and thunder, which seemed to be coming at an accelerating clip. But she was focused on what she was saying, and she ignored the storm. At the camp, the various departments and divisions turned in their orders to the quartermaster's office, which ran a regular advertisement in the
Dispatch
for what was needed. (Charlie knew all about this, of course. Corporal Andrews, the quartermaster's assistant, brought the ads in a couple of times a month. The additional advertising revenue was definitely welcome.) The advertisement spelled out what was needed and invited bidders. Once the bids were in, the liaison officer (Ophelia Snow, as Charlie also knew) went to work, “qualifying” the bidders, who were then selected by the quartermaster.

“Sometimes they're picked on price,” she said. “The low bidder gets it. But as time goes on, they're usually picked on the basis of performance on a previous contract. That is, if your vegetables were fresh and good and you delivered on time, you'd get another contract. If you were still the low bidder, that is. It's been pretty competitive.”

It sounded like a standard operation, Charlie thought. “You're a supplier, I take it,” he said.

“Yes.” She hesitated, then in a lower voice, said, “No. Not now.”

Charlie heard the change in her tone. “Not now,” he repeated. “Why is that?”

She sighed. “Just listen,” she said, and went on to tell him in detail how the kickback system worked. The contract would be offered to the supplier, who would be told before he signed it that there was a fee involved, which would have to be paid out of the proceeds. If the supplier
balked at this or seemed reluctant, he would be told that the contract would go to the next person on the list. There was nothing overtly intimidating about any of this, the woman said. It was presented to the would-be supplier as a simple step in the process and delivered with a friendly smile, so that people would think that this was just the way business was normally done in the CCC.

“And of course, once the suppliers have accepted the terms,” Mata Hari said, “they've broken the law, too. They've become criminals, and if they balk, they'll be reminded of that fact.” Charlie could hear the bitterness in her voice. “Which means that nobody's going to tell what he's done. Everybody will keep on bidding and keep on paying the bribe. Even if they don't get another contract, they'll keep their mouths shut.”

Charlie fished in his shirt pocket for a cigarette and his pants pocket for his lighter. You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours was the rule everywhere. But when it came to government funds, quid pro quo was strictly illegal. Of course the supplier would keep his mouth shut. Bribery was a two-edged sword. Both the person who gave the bribe and the person who accepted it were equally guilty, under the law.

But still . . . He flicked a flame to his cigarette and pulled on it. “What if somebody decides not to play? What happens then?”

She laughed ironically. “Who do you think you're talking to?”

“Ah,” Charlie said, pocketing the lighter. And then, “Isn't that . . . kind of dangerous?”

“I haven't told him yet,” she said simply. “I'm hoping you'll run the story and then it'll all be out in the open and everything will change.”

Him. Him who?
Now they were getting to the interesting part. “Okay,” Charlie said, “we've gotten to the part where
you name names. I need to know who's setting this up, who's taking the bribes. I'll be careful how I use the information, but you're going to have to tell me.”

Something heavy smashed against the building—a limb off that old sycamore, maybe—and Charlie heard a window shatter. By the time the storm was over, he thought, every pane of glass would be gone.

“I'll tell you,” she said flatly. “But not yet.”

Charlie scowled at Silent Cal, whose gaze seemed more sour than ever before. “Why not tell me
now
?”

She cleared her throat. “Because it's bigger than I've said. It's . . . this is the part where it gets really bad.”

“Sounds pretty bad already.” Charlie looked down at his notes. “I don't know what the sentence is for bribery, but we're talking multiple counts.” And if the man was Army, which he almost certainly was, he wouldn't be tried in a civilian court. There would be a military court-martial, and the sentence was likely to be stiffer—not to mention that he'd be doing time in a military prison. Charlie made a note. “Any idea how many contracts we're talking about?”