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“How did it go?” I asked the ladies, once Gus had left.
“Better than we could have imagined,” Gertie said. “Ida Belle had him eating out of her hand.”
“It’s true,” Ida Belle admitted. “It was fortunate that I saw you were still in the truck before he noticed you. It was all I could do to get him turned away from you.”
“Did he buy my little performance?” I asked.
“Hook, line and sinker,” Gertie replied. “After you stomped off he turned to us, smiled and said, ‘Remind me to never piss her off.’”
I chuckled.
“Brilliant job all the way around,” Ida Belle said. “In the end, I thought the man was going to drool all over my shoes.”
“What’s the next step?” I asked.
“He’s going to call me in a day or two with a price quote,” Ida Belle said.
“Remember our guiding principle?”
In order for me to agree to Ida Belle’s plan, I wanted to make sure she would never be alone with Gus. Although we had no evidence that Gus would ever get physical with one of his marks, I wanted to take no chances.
“I remember,” Ida Belle said. “Did you learn anything from Gus’s truck?”
“I learned a few interesting things, yes,” I said. “What time is it?”
“7:05 p.m.,” Gertie said.
“Oh, rats. I have to go. I’m late for my meeting with Eddie at my house.”
“Who’s Eddie?” Gertie asked.
I nodded, “It’s a long story. I’ll share everything with you later. Bye, ladies.”
Eddie was parked in my drive waiting on me when I got home. I was ten minutes late.
“Sorry, Eddie,” I apologized, “it’s been a crazy day.”
“That’s okay,” he said, trying to mask his disappointment. I was pretty sure he felt stood up.
I could see a Manila folder tucked under his arm. We went inside and I invited him to sit at my dining room table.
“Do you want something to drink?” I asked. “Beer? Tea?”
“Oh, I thought we were having dinner?” he said.
Dammit. I’d forgotten I used my wily feminine charms to convince him to dig up information for me, and those charms included the promise of dinner.
“Right,” I said, pointing at him. “TV dinner okay? I have chicken or Salisbury steak.”
He looked surprised and disappointed.
“I . . . I guess so,” he said.
“I’ll tell you what,” I replied. “Let’s get through this information and I’ll take you out. How about that?”
“Okay, then,” he said, still looking a little downtrodden. It was the look of a man expecting a home-cooked meal and who knows what else afterward. The latter was never going to happen but the former was probably a reasonable expectation based on the tone of my invitation. I felt bad.
He opened the file, “I have a list of websites Gus Proctor accessed while using the library work station,” he said. “Most of them are benign.”
“Such as?”
“Lots of sites about landscaping design, the latest in plant combinations, cross-pollinating, those types of things.”
“Can I see the list?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said, handing it to me.
I glanced at the list. There were more than three dozen websites listed. It would take some time sifting through them.
“What’s this one?” I asked, pointing to one of the lines.
“That’s his online banking access,” he said. “It doesn’t show his password.”
“What’s GProctorThibLou?” I asked.
“His username,” Eddie replied. “The ten asterisks are there to hide his password.”
“I don’t recognize this bank,” I said.
“The server for that site was actually blocked,” he said. “Our server blocks all offshore based sites.”
“So, he was trying to access an offshore bank account?” I asked.
Eddie nodded, “Probably.”
“Can you tell where the location was?”
“The Cayman Islands, it looks like.”
“So even though he tried to, he was unable to access an offshore account through our server?”
“Correct.”
I smiled.
“Well, Eddie, let’s go have some dinner, shall we? Francine’s good? My treat.”
He perked up and smiled.