Scam

nature.”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    “I know you don’t. Which is just my point. I’ll try to explain. In case Cranston Pritchert should try to figure out what happened, you didn’t want the trail to lead back to you. So you thought you would insure against that happening. So, here’s what you did. In addition to paying the talent agent and the girl for doing the job, you told ’em if anyone should come snooping around, you’d pay them a bonus not to tell ’em the truth, but to feed ’em a bullshit story. The girl’s story was that she’d been hired to have drinks in the bar with the guy, but nothing else happened—basically not to tell about drugging the drink and stealing the keys.
    “The talent agent’s story was different. She was the only one who had supposedly had personal contact with the person who hired her. Her story was to describe that person as six foot six. So any detective Cranston Pritchert hired would think his client was giving him the runaround. Which, I must admit, was pretty neat.”
    I held up one finger. “Except for one thing. Human nature. You saw these bonuses as a contingency— if a detective comes around, here’s what you have to say. But that wasn’t the way the talent agent and the girl saw it at all. They looked at it as, There’s the money, how do we get it? If the detective wasn’t finding them, they’d go out of their way to find him.”
    I shrugged. “See what I mean? So, instead of being hard to find, which is what you intended, by offering them a bonus, you guarantee the fact they’ll be found. Once found, they tell the stories you wanted told. Which, again, might have been okay if no one died.”
    “I don’t see what any of this has to do with me.”
    “You don’t? Weil, let me spell it out for you. This started out as white-collar crime. Little bit of corporate greed. Granddaughter playgirl of company head, dismissed as young, flaky, and, dare I say it, female—because I’m sure gender bias had something to do with all this. Well, I’m sure none of that sits too well with a headstrong young lady, sick to death of never being taken seriously, and when Grandpa dies she sees a chance to do something about it. She’s inherited his stock, she’s gonna have an interest in the company and be a force on the board.
    “But what happens? Before you can say boo, all the guys in the company are swooping down on her, feeding her a line of patronizing bullshit, trying to line up her stock.
    “Not if she can help it. That’s when she gets the plan.
    “The guys have asked for her proxy. She has it there in her hands. A proxy which, if she wanted to, she could fill out in their favor.
    “But she doesn’t want to. She has her own shares of stock. And she has Philip Greenberg’s shares. Plus any proxies that have come in in his name.
    “Which is when it occurs to her, what if a lot of proxies came in in his name?”
    “You’re full of shit.”
    “I’m right on target. See, the tip-off was the key. Cranston Pritchert was set up to get his keys. That meant someone either wanted the keys to his home or the keys to his office. My first thought was it had to be the keys to his home, because why would anyone want the keys to the office, they all had them? Well, that’s true, they did. Marty Rothstein, Kevin Dunbar, and Jack Jenkins all had keys to the office.
    “But not you. The little granddaughter visited the office, but the little granddaughter didn’t have the keys. She needed the keys to get into the office. Why?” I stopped. Smiled. “Mary/Maggie Mason.”
    She gawked at me. “Huh?”
    “That’s what gave it to me. A girl by the name of Mary Mason changed her name. That bothered me, and I didn’t know why. But it was the concept. Changed the name. Changed the name. Changed the name. You had to get into the office to change the name on the proxies.
    “Here’s how you did it. You went into the office at night, you found the proxies, you xeroxed them. You had your own blank copy you were supposed to send in. You xeroxed a bunch of blanks from that. Then, working from the copies you made, you forged a whole bunch of new proxies, filling in Philip Greenberg’s name. Not on all of them, of course, but on enough to give you over fifty percent.
    “You did a careful job. It took you several days. When you were done, you went back to the office to replace the real proxies with the set of forgeries you’d made.
    “One small