Vicious Circle

by C. J. Box

  “I’m here to find out what I can about one of your customers,” Joe said.

  Ashlyn Raymer raised her eyebrows and looked at him over the top of her glasses. “Do you have a court order? We aren’t in the habit of revealing private banking information about our depositors unless compelled or by auditor request.”

  “I can get a court order if I need to,” he said. “I was hoping we could move a little faster and avoid it. But if it’s going to be difficult, I can have an order on your desk from Judge Hewitt this afternoon.”

  Hewitt was leaving any day to fly to Texas to hunt wild hogs on a private ranch and Joe hoped Raymer wasn’t aware of that.

  “I’m not trying to be difficult, Joe,” she said defensively. “I just need you to know that we take great pride in maintaining the confidentiality of our customer’s financial transactions. Think of us as a kind of Swiss bank placed way out here in the boonies. We have plenty of customers from around the state, and even Saddlestring, who bank here because we maintain a level of confidentiality not found in larger towns. I can’t promise you I can help until I know who you’re asking about.”

  “Dallas Cates,” he said.

  She paused for a moment and smiled with relief. “I can help you after all, because Dallas isn’t a customer here.”

  Joe cocked his head. “It’s my understanding that he obtained a large cashier’s check from here a week or so ago to pay for his defense in court.”

  “Then your understanding is wrong,” she said. “He’s never been a customer, even when he was on the circuit making money and before you people sent him to Rawlins.”

  Joe was puzzled. Was Marcus Hand mistaken? It didn’t make sense. Where his money came from was something Hand would be sure about.

  “Is it possible that he had an account under another name?” Joe asked.

  She shook her head no.

  “Is it possible that he accessed a family corporate account of some kind?”

  Raymer paused for a moment and said, “No” with finality.

  “Can you help me out here a little?” Joe asked. “Someone drew a fairly large cashier’s check from this bank and I was led to believe it was Dallas.”

  “You were led to believe wrong,” she said. Her tone became professorial. “A cashier’s check is a particular instrument that is guaranteed by the bank itself and drawn from the bank’s own funds. We would never issue one for someone without a balance to cover it, and Mr. Cates is not an account holder here.”

  “Huh,” Joe said. He sat a moment in silence and thought about what she’d said and how she’d said it.

  He asked, “So was the check drawn on behalf of someone else who has an account here?”

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t help you with that,” she said.

  “I know I’m missing something here,” Joe mused.

  “That’s not my problem,” she said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.”

  “Then I thank you for your time,” Joe said and stood up.

  She remained seated at her desk, but she reluctantly shook his hand when he extended it to her.

  —

  JOE CLAMPED on his hat halfway across the lobby as he walked toward the glass double doors and then a thought hit him and he turned on his heel. Ashlyn Raymer had shut her door behind him and she was on the phone again. She’d swiveled around in her chair, so her back was to him.

  He approached the bank teller who looked the oldest and, he hoped, had been there the longest.

  “I was just talking with Ms. Raymer about a court order to access an account,” he said to the matronly woman, who wore steel-framed glasses and a lime-green pantsuit. “I forgot to ask her about the last time there was activity in Eldon and Brenda Cates’s account. Would you mind looking that up for me?”

  It wasn’t technically a lie. They had talked about a court order. But he was misleading her in the hope that she’d go with it.

  She did.

  “You mean for C&C Sewer? They closed that when Eldon . . . died.”

  Joe nodded. “Did they have personal accounts aside from the business account?”

  “Brenda did,” the teller said. “Eldon wasn’t on that account.”

  “Interesting.”

  “She wore the pants in that family and handled all the financials,” she said. “Most of what they did was on a cash basis. I think they did that to avoid taxes.”

  Joe tried not to betray the building excitement he felt.

  She continued. “Up until Brenda went to prison, she did the same thing every month—deposit twenty-one hundred dollars and then disburse just about the whole balance a couple of weeks later. She barely maintained a balance worth mentioning.”

  The teller rolled her eyes and said, “This went on for at least eighteen years. Believe me, that’s how long I’ve been here.”

  “I see,” Joe said. He removed a small Field Notes pad from his pocket and jotted down the figures as much for her benefit as his. He’d learned long ago that when he opened his notebook, some people felt compelled to help fill it. It made them feel useful and important.

  “Can you confirm the exact amounts?” he asked, as if he had an idea already what they were.

  “I can do it out of memory,” she said with a sly smile. “Every month, a deposit of twenty-one hundred dollars, then a disbursement of two thousand eighty-two dollars and ninety-six cents. Leaving a monthly balance of a whopping seventeen dollars and four cents.”

  “For eighteen years?” Joe asked.

  “Until she went to prison,” the teller said. “Then the transactions stopped.”

  “When did she deposit the large sum?” Joe asked. It was pure speculation.

  “A month or so ago,” the teller answered. She looked around and then lowered her voice and leaned toward him. “Out of the blue.”

  “And it was for how much again?” he asked quietly.

  “Millions,” she whispered back. “You’d have to get the exact amount from Ms. Raymer. She’s been acting as a personal banker on that account and she deals directly with the account holder.”

  This time, he knew he didn’t contain his surprise. “Like more than one million?” he asked.

  She nodded her head up and down. “Much more, I think. But again, you’d have to get that exact amount from Ms. Raymer.”

  “Where did she . . .” he started to ask. He thought better of it. The sum was wholly unexpected and incomprehensible to him. He knew that even if Brenda sold their company, the equipment, their compound—and the acreage it sat on—there was no way it would generate close to a million dollars.

  Scrambling to think and keep up the ruse, he said, “And the monthly two thousand dollar–some disbursements she used to make—did she take it out in cash?”

  The teller shook her head. “Automatic transfer.”

  “And that went to who again?” he asked.

  “You don’t know or you can’t remember?” the teller asked, leaning back. She was on to him, and he felt guilty for leading her down the path they’d taken, although he valued the lead.

  He thought: monthly deposits made for years, automatic monthly disbursements made for years, then huge return.

  He said, “They went to the Winchester Independent Insurance, correct?”

  Her suspicions vanished and she said, “Correct.”

  Just then, Raymer threw open her door and marched up to Joe and the teller.

  “Unless you’re opening an account, I need to ask you to leave,” she said to him. To the teller: “You’re not to answer any more of his questions.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the teller said. “He said he was talking with you . . .”

  “The personal banker for Brenda Cates,” Joe added.

  “I think we’re done here,” Raymer said to them both. He mouthed Thank you to t
he confused teller before he turned and marched toward the door.

  When he paused in front next to the grizzly, he looked over his shoulder to see Ashlyn Raymer with her hands on her hips making sure he was leaving for good this time.

  Under her watch, he climbed into his pickup next to Daisy and said, “Act like we’re going home.”

  His dog looked at him with the same puzzled but empathetic expression she always displayed when he talked to her.

  Joe turned out of the parking lot to the main street and watched Ashlyn Raymer and the bank get smaller in his wide mirror as he drove in the direction of the highway.

  When they were gone, he slowed and performed a U-turn.

  There were two cars—a new Chevy Tahoe outfitted with a winch and gun racks and a beat-up Dodge Neon with a high school graduation tassel hanging from the rearview mirror—parked on the side of the small Winchester Independent Insurance building. The structure was a single-wide trailer fronted with siding to make it look less like a single-wide trailer. The name DAVID GILBERTSON, AGENT was painted on the door.

  Joe pulled his pickup in next to the Neon and told Daisy to stay. He made sure when he got out that he was no longer in the line of sight from the bank building up the street, which he wasn’t.

  He mounted the unpainted two-by-six steps and opened the front door and stuck his head inside.

  A young female receptionist—no doubt the driver of the Neon—looked up expectantly from a desk eighteen inches from the doorframe. She wore a tight summer dress even though it was fall, and her hands were poised over her keyboard like a praying mantis to avoid scarring her painted inch-long fingernails.

  “Is David Gilbertson in?” Joe asked.

  “Who may I ask is . . .” She hesitated as she caught herself repeating her standard telephone greeting, and finished with, “At the door?”

  “Game warden Joe Pickett.” He grinned as he showed himself in and closed the door behind him.

  She rotated in her chair to shout down the narrow hallway in back of her, thought better of it, and swung back around to poke the intercom button using a pencil instead of a nail tip. “David, there’s a game warden here to see you.”

  After a pause, a male voice said, “Damn it, I’m sure I bought a conservation stamp this year. Maybe I didn’t.”

  “It’s not about that,” Joe said, so Gilbertson could hear. “It’s about an insurance policy.”

  “Okay,” he said with a sigh. “Come on back.”

  —

  DAVID GILBERTSON WAS in his late fifties and he wore an open-collar shirt under a corduroy sports jacket with a shooting patch on its breast. He had unruly hair but a precise silver mustache, and the wall behind him was covered with mounted mule deer, elk, bear, and pronghorn antelope heads. The seven-point royal elk head and antlers in velvet were particularly impressive, and almost too large for the room itself. A dusty twenty-two-inch rainbow trout replica was missing an eye.

  Gilbertson was one of those men who lived to hunt and would do just about anything to support his habit. He didn’t hunt to feed himself, but to put trophies on the wall. Joe often had trouble with men like him, but there were many more of them around than there were Joes.

  Gilbertson, like Ashlyn Raymer, had once been prominent in Saddlestring with his own agency on Main Street and the corporate logo of a major insurance carrier over his name on the sign. Joe wasn’t privy to the details, but something had happened between the carrier and Gilbertson at about the time Gilbertson bought eighty acres of prime elk-hunting ground in the mountains and had built an elaborate cabin for himself. Whatever had happened, the carrier cut Gilbertson loose and the man moved up the highway and opened an independent agency in Winchester.

  “Mind if I have a seat?” Joe asked, nodding toward a single steel-framed chair across from Gilberston’s desk. The chair was piled high with newspapers and hunting magazines.

  “Just move all that stuff to the side,” he said. “I don’t get that many walk-in clients.”

  “I understand,” Joe said, although he didn’t.

  As he sat down, Gilbertson’s handset lit up and the receptionist announced that “Ms. Raymer from the bank is on the line.”

  Gilberston leaned forward and reached for the phone when Joe said quickly, “This will only take a minute.”

  Gilbertson paused. Joe knew why she was calling. He hoped Gilbertson didn’t.

  The man punched the intercom and said to his receptionist, “Tell her I’ll call her right back.”

  Joe breathed a sigh of relief, but tried not to show it.

  “So,” Gilbertson said, “what can I do for the game warden today? Are you interested in life, auto, or health? But I warn you—health insurance premiums are through the damned roof, now that we got Obamacare.”

  “I’ve got health insurance through the state and I drive a game and fish truck,” Joe said.

  “So, life insurance,” Gilbertson concluded. “Good for you. Not enough people think about what will happen to their family when they’re gone. Are we talking about term or whole life? There are dozens of options, and I’m sure we can find a plan that meets your budget and provides for your wife and family.”

  “Actually,” Joe said, “I’m interested in the policy Brenda Cates took out on her husband, Eldon.”

  Gilbertson’s eyes narrowed slightly at the mention of the names, and they darted back toward his phone. Now he knew why Raymer was calling as well.

  “I’m also interested in that trophy elk of yours up there,” Joe said. “I was wondering how it came to be that you shot it while it was still in velvet, because we both know that’s usually long before the season opens. Where on earth did you find that creature on the mountain in season?”

  Gilbertson eyed Joe and his mustache twitched. He ignored the intercom, looked over Joe’s shoulders, and shouted down the hall.

  “Dawn, go ahead and take your lunch break.”

  “It’s only ten?” she protested in the form of a question.

  “Dawn . . .”

  “Okay, okay. But don’t expect me back until one, since you’re making me leave early.”

  “Fine,” he said with a man-to-man Damn women signal to Joe. Joe didn’t respond.

  When the outside door closed, Gilbertson said, “She’s fine to look at, but I’m not sure she’s going to work out. I haven’t had much luck with recent graduates of Winchester High.”

  “Have you thought about maybe hiring someone older with experience?” Joe asked wryly.

  “I’ve thought about that, but it didn’t take.”

  “Anyway,” Joe said, “do you want to talk about Brenda’s insurance policy or tell me a hunting story about that trophy in velvet over your shoulder?”

  “I’d rather talk about Brenda’s policy. It’s not privileged information after there’s been a payout.”

  Joe nodded.

  Gilbertson sat up and shot out his arms to clear his shirt cuffs from his jacket sleeves, then rested his elbows on a stack of papers and steepled his fingers, as if getting down to business.

  “I inherited that policy in my book of business when I bought the agency six years ago,” Gilbertson said. “I always thought it was a stupid policy, if you want to know the truth, but why make an issue of it when it paid me a good commission? See, term life used to be a lot more expensive than it is these days, due to medical advancements that have prolonged everyone’s life.

  “When Brenda took out that policy on her husband nineteen years ago, it was a little over two grand a month. Today, for a twenty-year fixed term, it would be around seventeen hundred. She was paying four hundred more a month than she needed to, but I guess I never really told her that.”

  “I see,” Joe said. He scratched notes in his pad. Joe felt his phone vibrate in his breast pocket with an incoming call, but he ignored it and let it go to
message. He didn’t want to interrupt David Gilbertson.

  “The policy would have termed out at twenty years—which would have been this year if Eldon hadn’t . . . died.” He said died as if it were the wrong word, which technically it was. “The premium would have increased substantially next year for the same benefit. I guess Brenda got lucky that way. Eldon lasted nineteen of twenty years.”

  “What was the payout?” Joe asked.

  “Seven-point-five million.”

  Joe was speechless for a moment. He almost didn’t notice his phone vibrate again, this time with an incoming text message.

  After a beat, he said, “Brenda Cates took out a seven-point-five-million-dollar life insurance policy on her husband nineteen years ago?”

  “And I don’t think he ever even knew it,” Gilbertson said, nodding. “From what I understand, she put just enough in the bank up the street every month—she called it her ‘egg money’—to have them pay me the premium. I think she had the bank make the deposits instead of making them herself so Eldon wouldn’t get wise to it. He probably thought she was adding to a savings account every month. She was kind of keeping the transaction at arm’s length, so to speak.”

  Joe said, “Seven-point-five million.”

  “Yes, sir. It was the largest payout I’ve been involved in since I bought the agency.”

  “Good Lord.”

  “I met Eldon a couple of times,” Gilbertson said. “I had him pump out my septic tank. He was a crabby old son of a bitch. He wasn’t worth any seven-point-five million dollars in my opinion, that’s for sure.”

  “But he was to Brenda,” Joe said.

  “I guess so,” Gilbertson said with a shrug. “Either that, or she knew Eldon and Eldon’s ways well enough that she was pretty sure he’d buy it early. I’d actually bet on that scenario.”

  Joe nodded his head. There it was, he thought. Motivation for all concerned.

  Joe said, “So the payout was deposited in one lump sum at the bank up the street.”

  “That’s what I understand.”

  “And the good Ms. Raymer is the trustee of the account.”