"Later," I said, and slipped into my study and closed the door.
I turned on my desk lamp, got the purse out from behind the box of papers, and set it down. I took out the wallet first. This was the only thing I'd really looked at, but not very carefully. Stefanie Knight carried three different Visa cards, a Master-Card, a bonus points card for a major drugstore chain, and, of course, the driver's license I'd examined earlier. I withdrew other things from the purse, an item at a time. A brush with several blonde hairs caught in it. Half a dozen lipsticks and lip liners and various other lip things I didn't know much about. Those tampons still in the paper wrapper. Some handfuls of coins that she'd obviously just thrown into her bag rather than slip into her change purse. VW and house keys, film canister, receipts from grocery stores, drugstores, self-serve gas stations, some dating back more than two years. Three ballpoint pens, one of which looked dried up, three nail files, half a dozen eyeliners. Two white letter-size envelopes, thick with papers. Real estate papers, I guessed. The flaps were tucked in, not sealed, so I decided to take a peek into one of them.
I felt as though someone had suddenly stomped on my chest.
Money. Lots and lots of money.
All fifties. Dozens and dozens of them in the first envelope. Dozens and dozens of them in the second envelope. Thousands of dollars. I couldn't begin to guess how much.
I felt that what had quickly developed into a very bad situation was now a hell of a lot worse.
Chapter 14
They were crisp, new fifties, and I emptied both envelopes and spread the money out on the desk next to my computer. I counted out the bills in stacks of twenty, for $1,000 each. It took about five minutes, and when I was done I had twenty piles, for a total of $20,000.
That would buy a lot of low-fat cookies.
I'd never seen this much cash in one place before. I wasn't even sure I'd ever seen so much as a thousand dollars in cold, hard cash before. When I went to the grocery store, I was lucky to find six bucks in my wallet. Evidently, when Stefanie Knight went to pick up some bread and milk, it was a major event. She didn't want to take any chances on running short.
In her wallet she'd had only $25 in bills. No fifties. But these two envelopes of cash were something else again. What was she doing with this kind of money? What would anyone be doing with this kind of cash? Normal, upstanding, regular law-abiding people did not walk around with $20,000 on them. Even people for whom $20,000 was lunch money. I doubted even Bill Gates walked around with $20,000 in his wallet. (You'd throw your back out, for one thing, when you sat on it.)
When you walked around with $20,000 in your purse, the chances were pretty good that you had done something bad. Even if the money had come from a legitimate source, a down payment in a real estate deal, for example, why wouldn't Stefanie have deposited it someplace? Was she like Janet Leigh in Psycho, walking out of the office at the end of the day, deciding to start a new life with money from some eccentric home buyer who only dealt in cash?
It seemed time for a review.
I was a thief, possessed information about a murder that I had not passed on to the police, and now had $20,000 in possibly stolen money on my desk. And if that weren't enough, my wife was under the impression that (a) two days from now, she was going to get the best birthday present ever, and (b) her husband was impotent.
But I could not bring myself to call the police. Now, a lawyer, that might be a good idea. I could tell him everything, let him advise me on the best course of action. The only problem was, the only lawyer I knew was the one who handled our house deal. A specialist in land-transfer taxes was not what I needed right now.
As I considered my options, I gathered up the stacks of bills and started stuffing them back into the two envelopes.
"Dad?"
I whirled around in my chair, and as I did, three of the fifties were swept off the desk and onto the carpet. Angie poked her head into my study.
"I'm going to the mall and I need some mo -"
Her eyes landed on the fifties as they fluttered to the floor. "Money," she said. "It looks like my timing couldn't have been better."
I would have scooped up the three bills, but it seemed more important to cover up the hundreds of bills, and purse, and the rest of its contents that were spread across my desk. There was an instruction sheet for the Seaview submarine kit on the workbench end of my desk, big, like an unfolded highway map. I grabbed it with one hand, trying not to be so fast as to be obvious, and casually dragged it over the stuff I didn't want Angie to see.
She was into the room and diving for the money like an owl on a mouse. She grabbed the three fifties and smiled.
"This is just what you owe me," she said triumphantly.