Practice to Deceive

by David Housewright

  “Is it?” she asked.

  I opened the box. It contained a string of pearls. Cynthia looked but made no move to take them. Then she sighed, a sigh of resignation. She removed her finger from the book and said, “Yes, you may come in.”

  SEVENTEEN

  WHEN I ARRIVED home the next morning, I found my house, my lilac bushes, and my willow tree smothered under roll upon roll of white toilet paper. It looked like the place had been hit by a blizzard. And the sight pushed me beyond reason. Mutilated cats on my doorstep, my house ransacked, Molotov cocktails, swastikas, punctured automobile tires, harassing phone calls, even getting shot … yet somehow this childish prank angered me more than all those other violations combined. I was out of control, looking for something to hurt, to destroy.

  Tammy Mandt, in front of her house waiting for the school bus, said, “Don’t use a hose. My friend Shelia, someone TPed her house, and they used a hose to knock it down, but the paper got all soggy and stuck to the branches and stuff. You should take it down with a rake or something.”

  And for that friendly advice I would have screamed at her, would have gladly wrung her neck, especially after she added, “Shelia’s dad acted the same way as you.”

  While she spoke, a car stopped in front of my house. A woman got out, took a photograph, then drove away.

  “Ssshhhhhhh …” I was so angry I couldn’t even get the obscenity out of my mouth.

  I PARKED AT the corner where I could watch the Dully residence through my rearview mirror and waited. What I was waiting for I couldn’t tell you. Courage, perhaps. Or maybe I was just trying to relax. It had been an emotional morning. I had changed clothes and left my home without even considering the toilet paper—I just didn’t want to deal with it.

  It was half past ten. I had called the Dully’s several times on the cellular and always reached their answering machine. I decided to give them a few more minutes.

  While I waited, I fiddled with my car radio, setting the AM buttons. It wasn’t hard to pick five stations: WCCO broadcasts the Twins and the Minnesota Gopher basketball and football games, KFAN has the Vikings and Timberwolves, KKMS has the St. Paul Saints games, KSTP broadcasts the Gopher hockey games, and WMNN is all news all the time. Finally, I turned the radio off, removed my key from the ignition, and slid out of the car.

  Burglars don’t wear black leather jackets. They don’t carry prybars in their back pockets. They don’t wander the neighborhood with ski masks covering their faces, stopping periodically to peek through a window. Instead, they wear khakis and topsiders and carry grocery bags. They try real hard to be nondescript. But how nondescript can you be on crutches? I knew I was taking an awful chance, but I needed to learn more about Willow Tree’s financial dealings and Levering’s relationship with the Dully’s, and I figured I was on to something—especially after I saw the red-hooded scarf hanging in Joan Dully’s closet.

  I was pleased with the neighborhood’s layout. The houses were all staggered so that the house across the street wasn’t looking directly at the Dullys’ front door. When I reached the cobblestone walk I turned right in, went to the front door, and knocked. I backed away, looked at the house. I went to a window, peered inside, then back to the door, and knocked some more—classic “Hey, where is everybody? I’m expected” behavior. I made my way around the house to the back door. Not once did I turn around to look up and down the street. When I reached the backyard, I slipped a pair of latex surgical gloves from my pocket and put them on. Then I took out my tools—my pick and wire—and attacked the back door. A real burglar would have hit it with a crowbar and bolt cutter. But I didn’t want the Dullys to know anyone had been there.

  Once inside I waited. Ten minutes. No sirens, no police dogs. If the neighbors had seen me, the cops would have been there by now, guns drawn.

  I went directly to the den. The computer was a standard IBM with a 20-megabyte hard drive and a printer. A simple setup, already old, used mostly for word processing I guessed. I booted up the computer and started racing through the icons. There was nothing in the memory relating to Willow Tree. You’d have thought there would be, wouldn’t you?

  For a moment I felt totally defeated. I started going through the desk drawers. In one I found a plastic box filled with 3.5-inch disks. There were a dozen, all neatly labeled—four of them carrying the title WILLOW TREE. I loaded them one at a time. They were empty. It was apparent that the Dullys had erased their records. Maybe they thought they were getting away with something. If they did, they don’t know the law like I do. While a potential litigant is under no obligation to keep every document in his possession, the very act of failing to preserve evidence that is reasonably likely to be requested during discovery is seriously prejudicial to the litigant. It’s like refusing to take an intoxalyzer test when you’re stopped for drunk driving. As far as the court is concerned, it’s the same as pleading guilty.

  I went through all the other disks. Most contained games. One, labeled ACCOUNTING, detailed the Dullys’ personal finances. I perused it carefully. Looked to me like they were doing pretty well, what with at least eight hundred thousand dollars scattered over a wide range of investments.

  “Liar, liar, pants on fire,” I muttered, remembering Joan Dully’s insistance that they were on the cusp of financial ruin.

  There was nothing else of interest in the disks, at least not to me. The defeated feeling was back with a fury. I started searching the desk. Like the disks, the vertical files in the bottom left drawer of the desk were neatly labeled. I thumbed through them quickly. My breath was coming hard and fast now. I didn’t even want to guess at my heart rate—I had been in the house much too long.

  The files didn’t reveal much. But I noticed a short stack of papers at the bottom of the drawer. They looked like they had slipped down there by accident. I pulled half of the vertical files to get at the papers, which seemed to be mostly scrap. Wait, what’s this? A crumpled white sheet, like someone had scrunched it into a ball to toss but then thought better of it, contained a long list of names. After each name was the notation: $250,000. One of the names belonged to Mrs. Irene Gustafson.

  I took the sheet to the fax machine. It had a copy function. I used it, then returned the crumpled sheet to the bottom of the desk drawer and replaced the files. I deactivated the IBM, grabbed my crutches, and went out the back door, locking it behind me.

  The walk back to my car seemed to take twice as long as the walk to the house. I kept telling myself to slow down. You run, people might ask why. And Lord knows, I didn’t do anything wrong.

  IT TOOK A long time for my stomach to uncoil—the half-hour drive to my office and another hour after that. I tried to eat but couldn’t manage it. Drinking wasn’t a problem, though. I slammed back three Summit Ales in about six minutes. After that I switched to Dr Pepper.

  Man, how do burglars do it?

  I was still buzzing when I turned to the list. I copied it off the fax paper on to regular paper, using my small Canon. Then I burned the fax copy—don’t ask me why. Nerves, I guess.

  There were thirty-five names on the list, all of them followed by addresses, telephone numbers, and the amount $250,000. And you didn’t need a pocket calculator to figure out the total since that was also notated: $8,750,000.

  The first letter of both the first and last names of thirty-two of the entries was printed in boldface. Three names—Irene Gustafson, Sam Boyd and Michael Landreth—were printed in regular type. However, each of those names was followed by the boldface initials LF.

  I called Boyd first. He lived in St. Paul. Or at least he used to. He had died of cancer four months earlier—alone, according to the caretaker of the nursing home where he’d spent his remaining four years. No family, few friends. His bills had been paid by Field Consulting, Inc.

  Landreth was living in Minneapolis, if you could call it living. He was suffering from acute Alzheimer’s and hadn’t spoken a coherent sentence in about six months. He, too, was in a priva
te nursing home, although that was about to change. The director told me that Landreth’s invoices had been marked INSUFFICIENT FUNDS and returned to the facility by Landreth’s conservator: Field Consulting.

  The other thirty-two names were fictitious: A Wood-bury address had a North Minneapolis zip code; a Coon Rapids address had a Highland Park telephone prefix. I tried each number just to make sure, dialing them in turn, then used the telephone directories to assure myself that the names did not match actual addresses.

  Three real names surrounded by thirty-two fakes. What sense did that make?

  “Must be some kind of code,” I decided. I played with the names, the phone numbers, the addresses, but my efforts revealed nothing. Then I noticed the initials. There were only ten sets: two LMs, two SDs, two DGs, two KDs, three LFs, four CSs, four CDs, four TLs, four KSs, and eight BBs. I wrote amounts next to each set:

  LM=$500,000;

  SD=$500,000; DG=$500,000;

  KD=$500,000;

  LF=$750,000; CS=$l,000,000;

  CD=$l,000,000;

  TL=$l,000,000; KS=$l,000,000;

  BB=$2,000,000.

  Staring at my notes, I figured I had found part of the answer. Unfortunately, I didn’t know which part.

  I decided to shift gears. The Dullys had claimed that much of Willow Tree’s money had been siphoned off by a bad loan to Roosevelt County. That was easy enough to check. I reached for the telephone. But it startled me by ringing before I could pick up the receiver.

  It was Anne Scalasi.

  “I want you to come over right now and answer a few questions,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “So I don’t have to send a team of detectives to pick you up.”

  “Annie?”

  “Bring your lawyer,” she told me.

  CYNTHIA GREY WAS sitting at my side when Anne Scalasi asked, “Can you account for your whereabouts at ten-thirty this morning?”

  “Don’t answer that,” Cynthia commanded.

  It seemed like good advice to me. Especially since I’d been breaking and entering the Dully residence at ten-thirty. My left foot started to beat a nervous rhythm against the leg of the interrogation room’s wooden table. I originally had been happy to see that Annie had been returned to the case. Now I wasn’t so sure. What did she know?

  “I decline to answer on advice of counsel,” I said, trying to keep my voice down.

  Anne slumped in her chair. “This isn’t fun anymore,” she told me.

  “It stopped being fun a long time ago,” I agreed. “What happened at ten-thirty?”

  “Someone shot at Amanda Field.”

  Without thinking about it I rose from my chair, putting all my weight on my wounded legs. I didn’t feel a thing.

  “Is she …?”

  “No,” Anne said. “Just a scratch.”

  “My God!” I muttered.

  “From what we can determine, it was a drive-by. Mrs. Field was working in her garden, her back to the street. She didn’t hear the first two shots. They pancaked against the house just above her head and tossed out a few splinters; one caught her cheek. She heard the third shot, though. She said it sounded like a low pop.”

  “A suppressor,” I volunteered, retaking my seat.

  “Yeah. Homemade. The same as when you were hit. A plastic two-liter pop bottle stuffed with rags, the bottom shot out. We found it two blocks away. No prints.”

  “The third shot?”

  “In the dirt,” Anne said.

  “Ballistics?”

  “Thirty-two.”

  “Does it match?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Oh, God.” I was up again, my hands on my hips, staring at the empty tabletop. But there were no answers there.

  “Taylor, I have to ask—”

  “I didn’t do it, Annie, and I wish to God I had an alibi to give you.”

  “So do I.”

  “Did Mrs. Field see the car?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Neighbors?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Dammit.”

  Anne paused, decided there was something I should know. “Mrs. Field received a telephone call a half hour before the shooting. A man threatened her. She said the man sounded like you.”

  I shook my head.

  “She said the man said he was going to get her for stealing his money.”

  “What money?”

  Anne didn’t answer.

  “The two hundred and eighty-seven thousand?”

  “The caller didn’t say.” Anne looked me up and down, pursing her lips.

  “What?” I asked.

  “We put a trap on her phone after she reported that you violated the restraining order. The ACA insisted. The call originated at a pay phone on Edgerton Street near the Merrick Community Center.”

  “Railroad Island,” I said, invoking the nickname for that depressed neighborhood.

  “Mean anything to you?”

  A spark of recognition flickered in the back of my head, then went out. “I don’t think so,” I answered.

  “Do you intend to hold my client?” Cynthia asked.

  Anne shook her head.

  “Then we’re leaving.”

  Anne spread her hands wide, like she didn’t give a damn what we did. So we left. During the elevator ride down, Cynthia whispered, “So, Taylor, tell me. Where exactly were you at ten-thirty this morning?”

  “Searching for evidence to prove that Levering Field was dirty.”

  “And was he?”

  “He and a lot of other people it seems.”

  “You know what the good thing is about being a private investigator?” Cynthia asked.

  “No, what?” I answered, anxious to hear her opinion.

  “A private investigator doesn’t have to discover who’s guilty, only prove that his client isn’t.”

  “Ahh.”

  “In this case the client is you, right?”

  “Is that a hint?”

  “The point is to get out of trouble, not cause more.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR of what was left of the Roosevelt County Housing and Redevelopment Authority did not want to speak with me, but it wasn’t personal. It had been painful for him when the agency was forced into bankruptcy, and he would have rather discussed a more pleasant topic. But I insisted, and after a few minutes he gave me the short version of the story.

  “We couldn’t pay our debts,” he said with a kind of grimace. “The HRA built several low-income housing projects. Lincoln Park. Crystal Pond. We built Lincoln Park six years ago for seven and a half million. One hundred units. But by the time the doors opened, the debt on the project was fourteen million dollars.”

  “How did that happen?” I asked.

  “The debt was financed at nine-point-seven-eight percent. When the market dropped, it became impossible for the HRA to meet interest payments, let alone pay off the principal. We tried to refinance the debt, tried to convince the bond holders to devalue the property, but we couldn’t get anyone to go along. Finally, we were faced with a six hundred and sixty thousand dollar balloon payment that we couldn’t meet, and it was over. Sad thing is, all the units at Lincoln and the Pond were occupied and renting at the market rate.”

  “What about the money Willow Tree loaned you?” I asked.

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “I was told that Willow Tree agreed to loan the Roosevelt HRA a considerable sum of money to help you meet your obligations.”

  “No, that’s not true. We spoke with Willow Tree about some additional low-income projects. But that was before our financial problems became acute. We had no discussions with them following that. Certainly we did not discuss a loan. I’m not sure that would have been appropriate in any case.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. Why do you ask?”

  I didn’t tell him that I was merely surprised that Joan Dully would tell me
a lie so easily uncovered.

  IF YOU’VE EVER borrowed money from a bank, a mortgage company, a credit union or a credit card company, you will be listed with at least one and more likely all of the nation’s major credit bureaus—whether you like it or not. Most of the information the bureaus compile, especially your credit history, is restricted by the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and, at least in theory, guys like me can’t get at it. However, for a price we can gain access to your “header” information, your noncredit data such as name, address updates, DOB, social security number, employment history, et cetera.

  I was back in the office now, researching Dully, Joan, and Dully, Peter. It took about five minutes to discover that up until they formed JPD, Inc.; both had been employed by Saterbak Incorporated, he as CFO and she as VP-sales manager. A few months ago they returned, getting their old jobs back. But that wasn’t what interested me most. What interested me most was the location: Saterbak was headquartered in the Adolph Point Office Complex. That’s where Amanda Field had gone after I sent her flowers addressed to Crystalin Wolters. That’s where she had met her friend.

  I punched up Dunn’s Direct Access and dragged its bank of Twin Cities businesses. It told me that Saterbak, Incorporated, was an investment firm specializing in start-ups. It had been founded and wholly owned by Carson Saterbak of Minnetonka, Minnesota.

  CS. I wrote the initials on a yellow legal pad and circled them several times. Then I referred to the list I had stolen from the Dullys. Yep. CS. $1,000,000.

  Carson Saterbak was easy to access. He must have been listed in a dozen data bases: the Dialog & Knowledge Index, BRS Information, Newssearch. I printed out twenty-three pages on him, although I probably would have been satisfied with just one—the page that told me Carson Saterbak had been cocaptain of the football team at Irondale High School his senior year—the same year Amanda and Levering Field had graduated.

  I NEEDED MORE information, and I knew just where to look. But I couldn’t go after it until the following day at the earliest, so I pushed the thought out of my mind as best I could, concentrating instead on the adductor exercises Tommy Sands was so gleefully subjecting me to.