Action Affirmative

“Here’s your donut, Constable,” Captain Sood said jovially as he placed the brown paper bag on Cst. Grau’s desk. “That’s for having the sense to wait.”

Her light eyes became lighter. “Part of the duty, Captain.”

She then turned to Sgt. Hollingshead: “Just between you and me, partner, I’d been sure that I’d only see his wife.” With that and a smile, the captain went back to his office.

Instead, she had seen Cappel drive to a small gold dealer. Looking out her window and into the shop’s, after double-parking in front of the store, she saw an agitated conversation that told her she had seen all she needed to see. He had shot a tense glance at her when exiting, but she didn’t care. There was no more need to follow him, at least not on that night; she had gotten what she had been waiting for.

Texting Hollingshead on the official channel had gotten him over quickly. The shop owner, a nervous stick of a man in normal times, had made for an easy interrogation.

It had been the gold bars. Using the same encrypted texter program, Larry the shopkeep had gotten the names of the companies and lightly etched them onto the sides of a bar. Cappel not only had a kiln but also a microscope: having gotten the name, and having had his wife innocently fire up the kiln long before he arrived home with the gold, he quickly got the name from it and put it in the mould. The already-heated kiln, necessitating protective gloves, made short work of the evidence. The schizophrenia connection had been nothing more than a red herring.

There was something else about the case that bothered her. The dealer had gotten a piece of the action, and had been easy to threaten into compliance after being hooked by his greed. Duane Semple’s motive was fairly obvious, and the mystery of how he did it was solved by a scan through his personal computer. Semple the simple, as it turned out, had the benefit of expert advice about Cayman Island brokerage accounts. He must have gotten the technique from his old friend Earl. Still, that connection led to a piece of the puzzle that didn’t fit: Cappel himself.

Looking into the glaze, she wondered. From what she had found out on the broker, he was a liberal. The kind that was sometimes stupid, but not the kind that was greedy. He was guilty, that was proven now, but she wondered about the motive.

“Evelyn?” her partner asked. “What’s bothering you?”

She swivelled her chair his way. “I’m just having trouble picturing Mister Cappel’s motive.” Shaking her head enough to agitate her short-cropped chestnut hair, she added: “he’s not that kind of a liberal.”

Her partner hadn’t admitted it, but he had been mulling over the same point. The only fight he had gotten out of Cappel was over Hollingshead’s in-character jab at affirmative action. In retrospect, Fatty had given away the game right there.

But what had been his stake in it? He really wasn’t the greedy type, and he had been pretty good at his job before turning to crime. Desperation didn’t fit. If he had seen it as a means of striking a blow for some kind of social justice, it was an odd way to go about it. No; nothing fit.

*

The answer didn’t come until both police officers had heard about Cappel’s father. A man who had been fully qualified to become a stockbroker, he had taken a back-office job to make ends meet. Once he was in, he was stuck there until retirement.

Cappel had had something to hide, all right: years of listening to his embittered father, some of which stuck to him by osmosis. Despite his original intent to play it straight, he had cut corners like the rest of them; there was no other way to stay competitive. Unlike the rest of them, though, he had buried in his subconscious an attitude that even the good broker was half crook. When Duane had opened up to him, Earl had seen a man like his father – and a chance to strike back at the system he was half-convinced was irredeemably corrupt. In his subconscious, he was just pushing it to the next level. Consciously, he had assured himself that he would never be caught. He had been damned smart about it, and might not have.

“The man should have been a crusader,” Grau remarked to herself when she learned. But he just didn’t have the guts…