by J. A. Jance
“Sorry,” Edie said. “After fifty years of marriage, you’d think you would have figured out by now that bossing me around was not in the contract. If I want to go to work, I will. End of story.”
“Wait a minute, both of you,” Ali said. “B. and I have already talked about this. We’re more than happy to help out, and we’ll be glad to make up any shortfall that will make it possible for you to stay on at Sedona Shadows without either of you having to go back to work.”
“Not on your life,” Bob declared. “This is not happening! I didn’t work this hard or come this far to end up having to count on charity for my daily bread.” His voice softened a little. “As for Dash Summers? I appreciate your having him show up to bail me out tonight, but don’t think you’re the ones who’ll be paying his bill. One way or the other, Edie and I will manage. If I have to have a public defender, so be it. And if we have to move into a shed somewhere out in the Verde Valley, that’s what we’ll do, too. Edie and I have always lived within our means, and we’re not changing now.”
“All right, then, Bobby,” Edie said, “now that all that’s settled, tell us what happened today—all of it.”
20
With a sigh, Bob Larson launched off into his story, telling it from beginning to end for perhaps the fifth or sixth time that day. In the course of the afternoon he’d lost track of the number of times he’d been asked to repeat it. He talked nonstop for the better part of an hour, telling them everything he could remember, from the time the story had first appeared on the morning news until Dash Summers had collected him from the interview room. Just as he seemed to be finishing up, a phone rang. Ali recognized her mother’s distinctive ringtone, although it took Edie a moment to unearth the device from somewhere in the depths of her purse.
“Hello,” Edie said. “Oh, why hello, Bridget.” Her voice had brightened for a moment. “Yes, Bobby seems to have misplaced his phone, but you’ve reached mine. What can I do for you?”
Ali recognized the name. Bridget Wagoner was the young woman who functioned as the nighttime desk clerk and receptionist at Sedona Shadows.
Edie’s brightness was replaced with concern. “No way!” she exclaimed. “That’s so not happening!”
“What?” Bob demanded in the background. “What’s going on?”
“Bridget said the cops showed up in the lobby a few minutes ago,” Edie replied, holding the phone’s mouthpiece away from her face. “They came with a search warrant. Bridget says she’s sorry, but since they had a warrant, she had to let them into our unit. She tried calling your cell phone first, since yours is the one they have listed as our emergency contact. Then she called Betsy and got my cell number from her.”
Bob rose to his feet. “We need to go,” he urged. “Now.”
“I can see why you’d want to be there,” Ali interjected, “but don’t speak to the officers, and, whatever you do, don’t interfere. Getting into a pissing match with cops who are in the process of executing a search warrant is the last thing you should do.”
“Yes,” B. agreed. “If they have enough probable cause to obtain a warrant, that means this is very serious. It’s also way beyond the point where you should settle for the services of a public defender. I’m going to call Dash Summers right now and let him know the latest. And before this goes any further, both of you are going to agree to my paying for Dash’s services. Understood?”
Defeat registered on her parents’ faces as first her father and then her mother reluctantly succumbed, accepting their son-in-law’s terms. Much as they wanted to fight their own battles, they knew they were in over their heads, and that knowledge diminished them both.
When Bob rose to his feet and made for the door, the worrisome, uncertain shuffle Ali had seen earlier was back. Even in his own shoes he walked with the same pained gait Ali had observed at the police department and attributed to his ungainly footwear.
It shocked Ali to realize that in the course of a single day her father had somehow changed into a frail and tired old man.
B. must have arrived at the same conclusion. “If you’re ready to go now, I’ll be glad to take you home, but only if you agree to leave the police officers alone, and only if you’ll let me call Dash and have him meet us there.”
“What do you say, Edie?” Bob asked.
Nodding, Edie reached out and took her husband’s hand. “Ali and B. have a lot more experience with these kinds of difficulties than we do, Bobby,” she said kindly. “If they think we need the help, then we probably do. I agree that it’s important for us to stand on our own feet, but right now isn’t the time. As for Eric Drinkwater? If he thinks we’ll go down without a fight, he’s got another think coming. Now come on. Let’s go home and see what kind of a mess those cops have left behind. I’ll probably be up half the night cleaning up after them.”
Ali smiled as the old can-do attitude came back into her mother’s voice. This version of Edie Larson was the one her daughter knew best—the one who always refused to take no for an answer.
Standing in the doorway, Ali watched her parents walk hand in hand down the flagstone-covered pathway toward the gate. Clinging together with their heads bowed and shoulders slumped, they were a picture of utter despair.
Suddenly Ali was propelled back in time to her seventh-grade classroom. On the first day of school she had discovered that a surprising summertime growth spurt had made her not only the tallest girl in her class but the tallest kid as well. When she fell into the habit of slouching, her mother had taken her to task and given Ali a code Edie used in public to urge her daughter to stand up straight. “Knockers up,” Edie would whisper under her breath.
At first, Ali had believed the word “knockers” was just another way of saying shoulders. Later on she realized that knockers didn’t mean shoulders at all, but when you straightened your shoulders, you straightened other things as well.
When Aunt Evie, her mother’s twin sister, died, she had left Ali her extensive collection of records. Most of them had been original cast recordings of Broadway musicals, but among them was an LP by Rusty Warren, who had, in the sixties, taken the sexual revolution onstage and on the road in the form of music with unrepentantly bawdy lyrics. Ali’s mother and aunt had shared a love for Rusty Warren’s work, and “Knockers Up” had been one of the artist’s signature songs.
“Hey, Mom,” Ali called after her parents. “Don’t forget about Rusty Warren.”
Edie turned around and looked at her daughter for a moment, and then a miraculous transformation occurred. Ali’s father’s shoulders may still have been stooped and bent, but at once her mother’s back shifted to ramrod straight. Still holding her husband’s hand, Edie walked on to B.’s car with her shoulders thrown back and most definitely with her “knockers up.”
It looked for all the world as though Edie were leading her beloved Bobby into battle. Whatever was coming, the two of them would face it together.
21
While Ali waited for B. to return, she bustled around, taking the dinner trays back to the kitchen and loading the dishes into the dishwasher. It wasn’t that late, but Leland was an early-to-bed-early-to-rise kind of guy, and he had evidently decamped for the night to the privacy of his fifth-wheel residence on the far side of the garage.
Sedona is located in high desert country, an area with huge temperature differences between daytime highs and nighttime lows. As the house cooled, Ali felt a chill, but she realized it might have far more to do with emotional exhaustion than it did with whatever showed on the thermometer. Given that, she lit the gas log in the library and brought out a bottle of Cabernet along with a pair of glasses. She opened the bottle to let it breathe and then settled down with James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake open on her lap.
She had embarked on a self-imposed effort to tackle the classics, reading them because she could and wanted to, rather than because a teacher or English professor was standing over her with a threat to her GPA if she didn’t get the job done. She had
been making good progress in that regard, but she had pretty much stalled out with James Joyce. Whatever was going on in Finnegans Wake had the unerring ability to put her fast asleep within no more than a couple of pages. And that’s what she was doing when B. returned an hour later—sitting with the book open in her lap but with her eyes shut and her chin resting on her breastbone.
She stirred when he came into the room and clinked the neck of the bottle on the rim of one of the glasses. She glanced at her watch. It wasn’t that late, just a little past ten. Still she felt as though she’d been asleep for hours.
“After today, the last thing I expected was to find you asleep,” B. observed, handing her a glass of wine.
She replaced her bookmark and closed the book
“You don’t seem to be making much progress.”
Ali held up the book and studied the position of the bookmark. She’d barely made a dent in the pages. “If somebody could bottle all these words, they’d make a terrific over-the-counter sleep aid.”
B. smiled and raised his glass in a toast. “Then here’s to James Joyce,” he said. “On nights like tonight, sleep is a good thing.”
“How are the folks?” Ali asked, setting the book aside.
“Your mother was in a state of high dudgeon by the time I left to come home. From what I could see, the cops executing the warrant were leaving quite a mess.”
“Cops in general or one cop in particular?”
B. nodded. “That would be Detective Drinkwater. There didn’t seem to be much love lost between him and your mother.”
“You called that shot. He’s the kind of guy Mom absolutely despises. You know the type—ones who come into a restaurant with a group but who don’t bother asking for separate checks until after the food has been served. If the group ends up dividing the bill so each one pays cash, those guys always manage to short the waitress’s tip on his part of the bill. Drinkwater pulled that stunt over and over, and Mom finally called him out about it.”
“You’re thinking Drinkwater is coming after your dad because he has a major chip on his shoulder.”
Ali shrugged. “It could be,” she said. “Not only that, I wonder how much homicide experience he has. Probably not much, and this one is a double to boot. If he’s looking to clear it in a hurry, Dad might seem like an easy target.”
“Yes,” B. said, “but from what your father said, there must have been bloody footprints all over that house. If the killer went out the front door while Bob was in the garage and kitchen with Dan and Millie, those footprints will tell the tale plain as day.”
“Let’s hope that’s true,” Ali said.
“And just to be on the safe side, Dash showed up at Sedona Shadows not long before I left to come home. He brought along all the paperwork needed authorizing us to handle the costs of whatever legal fees your father’s case entails.”
“Did he sign?”
B. nodded. “On the dotted line.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“We must have caught him at a weak moment. Your mother disapproved, of course, but as Dash reminded her, Bob’s the one with his life on the line here, and he has to have the final say.”
“Good,” Ali breathed.
“On the way out,” B. added, “I let Dash know that High Noon stands ready to undertake any investigative work he deems necessary and that we’ll do so on a pro bono basis.”
They fell quiet then, both of them sipping their wine. “Do you think they’re actually going to arrest him?” Ali asked finally.
“I’m not sure. If the CSIs do a decent job, it won’t come to that, but the local CSIs are probably pretty green in the homicide department, too.”
“Probably,” Ali agreed.
“With Dash looking after the case, our next big hurdle is going to be your folks’ housing situation. With their lives totally upended at the moment, the last thing either one of them needs to be worrying about is moving away from Sedona Shadows, a place where they’re already settled in and comfortable.”
“But you heard what Mom said,” Ali objected. “They want to pay their own way.”
“It doesn’t matter,” B. said. “Here’s what we’re going to do. Tomorrow morning, first thing, you’re going to show up at Sedona Shadows with a cashier’s check in hand that will cover their rent for a year in advance. With an additional year plus their first and last month deposit, that gives them fourteen months to get through whatever legal process has to be handled before they even consider making a move.”
“They’ll never agree to that.”
“We’re not going to give them a choice,” B. explained. “Rather than asking permission, we’ll present them with a fait accompli. It’s always better to ask forgiveness after the fact than it is to ask permission in advance.”
“What kind of income tax ramifications would a gift like that have?”
“Believe me, your parents are going to be in such a low income tax bracket from now on that it won’t even cause a bump. Not only will they not be receiving whatever income they were previously receiving from Ocotillo, most likely whatever funds they received previously will have to be paid back.”
“Paid back?” Al echoed. “Are you kidding?”
“I wish I were,” B. said. “Have you ever heard the term ‘clawback’?”
“What’s that?”
“In the aftermath of a Ponzi scheme like this, anyone who has received payments before everything went south is required by the bankruptcy court to pay back those previous distributions so the resulting funds can be distributed equally among all of the scheme’s victims.”
“The bankruptcy court confiscates the funds? Is that even legal?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“So my parents get hit twice, first by the Ponzi scheme itself and then by the bankruptcy trustees—insult to injury.”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“And when the bankruptcy proceedings come to an end? What happens then?”
“Most likely those won’t conclude until years from now,” B. said. “When they do, Bob and Edie will be lucky to get pennies on the dollar.”
“What about Jason McKinzie, the guy who started Ocotillo Fund Management? What does he get?”
“If they catch him—when they catch him—he’ll serve a few years in a federal prison for security violations and/or fraud, and then he’ll walk away and pick up where he left off, probably living off money he’s been squirreling away for himself all along.”
“You think he has money stashed somewhere where the authorities can’t touch it?”
B. nodded. “That’s what those guys usually do.”
“Will the bankruptcy trustees make any effort to find his stash?”
“Probably not. They’ll be more focused on the low-hanging fruit—the assets that are easy to find and liquidate.”
“Maybe we should.”
“Should what?”
“Go after McKinzie’s money,” Ali said. “Maybe we should initiate a little clawback maneuver of our own. After all, you’ve achieved some pretty good results in finding the monies Richard Lowell hid away.”
“If we were to do that and managed to find anything, remember that whatever funds we retrieved would have to be turned over to the trustees.”
“Of course,” Ali said. “That’s only fair. After all, if there’s enough of it, maybe all McKinzie’s victims can get a few more pennies back on their lost dollars. If we were to attempt this, where would we start?”
B. thought about that for a minute. “Let me talk this over with Dash tomorrow morning. If we’re working on the case and take the position that the Frazier murders are connected to the OFM mess, that gives High Noon a reason to go poking around into all kinds of things.”
“The Fraziers’ murders are connected,” Ali asserted. “And if we can link them back to McKinzie, he’ll be doing hard time for murder rather than hanging out in Club Fed.”
B. smiled. “Sounds like you
want to turn this into a crusade.”
“I do.”
“Okay, then. Tomorrow morning I’ll put Cami and Stu to work data-mining everything there is to know about Jason McKinzie and Dan Frazier, too. Combing through a mountain of material, looking for some helpful nugget is going to be a massive job.”
“Right,” Ali said. “And I know just the person to do it. We’re not going to coerce my parents into accepting rent money from us. That would kill them both, but nobody said we can’t give one or the other of them a job.”
“As in, turn your parents into our in-house researchers?”
“I can’t think of anything my mother would rather do just now than get the goods on the guy who stole their money, especially if there’s a chance of getting some of it back.”
“Maybe you’re right,” B. said, after a pause. “Whether they turned up something or not, it would at least give them something to focus on besides sitting around worrying. It also gives us a way of putting cash in their pockets without getting their noses out of joint.” He put down his glass, then glanced at his watch.
“Okay, Bella,” he said. “Let’s go. Time to get busy and go to bed.”
22
Immediately after dinner, Jessica took her leave, launching off on her two-hour drive back to her apartment in Phoenix. Once she was gone, while Haley put the kitchen to rights, she and Gram talked together in a way that hadn’t been possible earlier with a third party present. On a day when the unthinkable had happened, Haley needed a safe place to unburden herself, and she did so, sparing nothing. Carol listened, saying little until Haley finally ran out of steam.
“What happened to Dan and Millie is appalling,” Gram said when Haley finished, “but your real responsibility now is to the girls who work for you. If you want them to be able to keep their jobs and be able to support their families, it’s up to you to make sure the business doesn’t go down the tubes.”