Body of Evidence (Marcus Douglas 2)

“What happened to Otis, Panthea?” Marcus asked.

“After a while Aisha got tired of Otis, but not his money, so she came up with the plan.”

“What was the plan?”

“The same one she’d worked all these years. She’d con rich men into investing in some fake business. Once Aisha got all the money she thought she could without having to show any real results, she would disappear or come up with some reason why the business failed and their money was lost.”

“Go on.”

“So we rented office space in one of those places that not only rents you an office, but the receptionist answers the phone with your company name and you have access to the conference room, office equipment. The place we rented even had a secretary pool. But they’d bill you for what they did.”

“That probably made for an impressive front,” Marcus commented.

“It really gave us a legitimate edge. We could bring marks to our office and have meetings in the conference room. At one point, we had six front companies representing six different scams we were running.”

“What kind of scams did you run?”

“Mostly real estate, internet startups were big back then, restaurants, bars, nightclubs, anything we could think up.”

“How long did you do this?”

“Four years.”

“What went wrong?”

“Otis Grimes. We were about to get paid on a real estate scam, and we were supposed to meet the mark for dinner and get the check. Who does the mark show up to dinner with?”

“Otis.”

“Right. Aisha would still see Otis sometimes when she was low on cash. So he knew right away something wasn’t right ’cause we were using fake names.”

“What happened?”

“At first, he just smiled at us and played along until we had the check. But once the mark went to the bathroom, he said he didn’t like the guy anyway, so he wasn’t gonna tell. But then he flipped on us and said he wanted all the money or he would tell and make sure he went to the police.”

“What’d you say?”

“We told him he had a deal. We would give him the money in exchange for his silence.”

“It’s not like you had much of a choice.”

“That’s what I said.”

“How much money was it?”

“A hundred thousand. We were supposed to give Otis the money and leave Houston. Set up somewhere else. But Aisha had other plans.”

“She decided to kill him.”

“Yeah,” Panthea said as she dropped her head. “I didn’t know that she was gonna kill him. You have to believe me, Marcus. The plan was to cash the check and meet him that next night at his car dealership. When we got there, Otis was sitting behind his desk. Aisha handed him an empty briefcase. When he opened it and saw it was empty, he looked up. Aisha shot him. Marcus, I was furious. I was screaming at her, and it was like she wasn’t paying me any mind. She just wiped off anything we might have touched and said ‘let’s go.’ The next morning, I took half the money out of all of the accounts and left Houston. I finally ended up in Atlanta. I met Scott and I thought I’d put that part of my life behind me.”

“Why’d you kill her?”

“It was an accident, Marcus. I didn’t go over there to kill her. When you showed me her picture, I knew it was her and what she was up to. She was getting ready to con Scott out of some big money.”

“Your money or at least half of it.”

“Right. So I went to see her, like a friend and asked her to at least back off him until the divorce was final.”