Death of a Bankster by David Bishop Read Free Book Online Page A

to your husband’s boss.” Sue leafed through a couple pages of a small notebook. “Yes, here it is. A Mr. Maxwell Norbert stated he had not heard from your husband. Is that your husband’s boss?”
    “Yes. He’s the top executive officer. Sam worked directly under and reported to Max. They’ve been friends since before Sam and I got married.”
    “Well,” Sue said, “all Mr. Norbert told me was that your husband had not come into work last Friday or since.”
    “Well, of course he didn’t, Sam’s dead. But even if he were alive, why would he? Mr. Norbert had fired my husband.”
    “What?” Maddie said. This keeps getting screwier.
    Sue looked toward Maddie who kept shaking her head. “Mr. Norbert said nothing about having fired Sam. Everything he said was in the context of Sam Crawford still being employed at the bank.”
    Maddie turned to Paige who also shook her head. “That can’t be right. Sam told me in no uncertain terms that he had been fired.”
    Sue repeated, “Norbert clearly spoke as if your husband was still employed. Although, I admit I had no reason to ask him that specifically. You had not said anything about your husband having been fired. When did that happen?”
    “That same day, Thursday, while he was at the bank’s holding company in Los Angeles. Sam told me on the phone while he was waiting in baggage at Sky Harbor. I can’t imagine Maxie Norbert not knowing about that. He is the president of the bank. Sam wouldn’t have been fired without Maxie having participated in that decision … No. Wait a minute.” Paige’s fingers disappeared inside her hair and then reemerged, her hands extended. “That’s not right either. Sam said Norbert had been in L.A too. That Maxie had been the one who actually fired him. He knew. Oh, yes, Maxie knew.”
    “Holding company?” Sue asked, her face showing her lack of understanding.
    “In banking, if a company owns a bank, with or without other banking interests,” Paige explained, “at least as I understand it, the parent company is often structured as a holding company. Meaning its only assets are the shares of stock it holds in the subsidiary bank. That’s about all I know, if I’m even right about that.” Paige smiled, tightlipped. Her raised eyebrows made her eyes looks unusually large.
    “We’ll visit the bank in the morning,” Maddie said. “Talk to Mr. Norbert in person. I assume Sam had a secretary, what’s her name?”
    “Blanche. A woman who, believe me, looks nothing like her name implies. My husband said she was named after her great grandmother.”
    While Sue locked up the Crawford home and draped the doors in crime scene streamers, Maddie spoke to three neighbors who were at home. None of them saw anything going on at the Crawfords’ home that night or anything suspicious at any other time in the week or so preceding Sam’s murder. That seemed reasonable in light of the size of their residential lot and the way the driveway curved around behind two large trees, a palo verde and a mesquite, that grew in the front yard. The neighbors all said Paige and Sam were normal folks or seemed to be. One neighbor lady, name of Nancy, who lived across the street, did talk about Carla Roth as being a loose woman.
    Back in her car, Maddie got on the phone with Bill Molitor, the lead on the Phoenix PD’s forensics team. Bill agreed to bring his crew and meet Maddie at the Crawfords’ home at nine in the morning. She took a few minutes to give Bill a feel for the case. “For openers, we need to know for certain that we’ve got a murder. On this one, that’s job one. Right now, the only thing certain is that nothing is.”
    Maddie was confident that if there had been a murder, Bill’s team would find evidence of it. The fact remained, although Maddie doubted it, that this could be some elaborate hoax by Mr. and Mrs. Crawford with the collaboration of Carla Roth, RN. At this point, they had nothing to support the assertion that