Suicide Season by Rex Burns Page A

might.”
    “He probably did it for the money. I’m sure there was a tremendous amount of money promised him.”
    “But we had enough money—he made a good salary.”
    Everybody always wants more, especially an ambitious man, especially if he had a mistress or two. “Why not just let it go, Margaret? He made a mistake, and paid a far greater price than he should have. Get on with your life and let the rest stay buried.”
    “I want to know, Devlin. If it was for so much money, then what happened to it? If it wasn’t, then why?”
    “You want us to keep digging?”
    “Yes. Please. You will, won’t you?”
    “Of course. I’ll be in touch.”
    Bunch raised his eyebrows.
    “She wants to know why he did it.”
    “Like you told her—for the money.”
    “And she asked what happened to it.”
    “Yeah.” He ran a large bulging knuckle along his jaw where his whiskers made a rasping sound. “That’s a good question. If she don’t know, then there’s a hell of a big account somewhere that’s going to be drawing interest for a long time.”
    “You figure he got the payoff when he delivered the plans?”
    “Half up front and half on delivery. He’d be a fool if he didn’t. And he didn’t seem like a fool—except for shooting himself.” Bunch nudged the slip of paper with the telephone number and sent it spinning across the waxed corner of the desk. “Where do you want to start?”
    “Maybe Aegis paid by check. We’d have a trace on the money if they did.”
    “Yeah. And so would anybody else. My bet is cash only, and a lot of it. But any way you slice it, Aegis is the place to start. Want to flip for it?”
    It came up tails—my job. Bunch patted my shoulder. “It’s about time you did some real work.”
    The telephone book’s white pages had the address of the Aegis Group, and a stint in the Chamber of Commerce reference works gave me a little more than that, but only a little. Listed as a development corporation, it had the necessary state licenses to “undertake any manner of lawful business” granted two years ago, and what few references to it in business and financial publications said cryptically that the group was involved in “business enterprises.” That meant, I supposed, that they didn’t want to be excluded from anything that might make a profit. The only other information about them came from McAllister, whose view was biased.
    The president and chairman was one W. S. Merrick, and its executive secretary was Leonard Kaffey, neither of whose initials fit the “D.N.” on that slip of paper. Those were the only officers listed, which wasn’t all that unusual. I dialed the public number, which was the corporation’s switchboard, and asked for Mr. Kaffey’s office. A few moments later, the representative of Devlin Securities and Investments had an appointment for the following morning.
    Seventeenth Street—Denver’s financial district—seemed to grow longer and deeper as new buildings kept rising, and by the time I reached its southern end, within beckoning distance of the state capitol’s shiny gold dome, the high walls had pinched the sky into a narrow slit of blue. The lobby of the Action West building, one of the newest, offered no relief from the canyon outside. Entering it was like walking under a poised boulder—the heavy design and massive cubes of lobby services emphasized the tower’s weight hovering over the tiny humans crawling beneath it. The Aegis offices, however, were entirely different. Small separate rooms surrounded the large general work and reception area, and light fell through banks of windows that stretched up to a second level of private offices surrounding the atrium and reached by an open and gently raked staircase. The hominess was reinforced by a scattering of comfortable chairs for waiting, by a color scheme emphasizing wooden beams and sand-colored plaster, and by a receptionist whose secretarial skills might be unknown but whose ornamental