With the authorities circling Arturo, his wife Karen seized on an opportunity to save her neck. It came in the form of Maggie Fitch’s arrest on a drug possession charge. Perhaps Karen knew Maggie from the start or even framed her for the charge. But the arrest and subsequent bail she offered through the family charity gave her the opening to exact some gratitude in the form of a secret safe deposit box in Maggie’s name. The authorities would turn the world over looking for the missing money. But one place they’d never look for it was in a random safe deposit box under the name of a homeless addict.
Maggie probably never knew what was in the box, if she even knew of its existence. She’d never get the chance anyway. She met her end in the desert, unaware that her life was more valuable than her name because it gave Karen the chance to escape forever. I wondered how much Arturo knew. Perhaps he was in on the plan all along, only to be betrayed by his wife at the eleventh hour. Only Julie could answer that now.
Julie probably thought that entire chapter of her life was safely behind her. But thirty years later, under financial pressure from an ill-advised expansion of her business, she had to revisit it. There was “free” money just sitting there. It was the answer to all her problems. All she had to do was get the owner of the box, Maggie, to be legally declared dead, then have Maggie’s brother James Fitch claim his sister’s property. But one part of the plan with Lois didn’t make sense.
“Once Fitch learned about the money in his sister’s name, why would he need you guys?” I asked.
Mr. Hearns shook his head sadly.
“I told her over and over to walk away. This was a bad deal.”
Fitch’s barroom claim that he was cheated out of a fortune actually had validity. Julie and Lois must have spun a story about the money and conveniently left out how much actually was in the account. He barely got a finder’s fee on what should have been all his.
“He wasn’t happy,” said Hearns.
“So Fitch found out what they were up to.”
“He was an idiot but he was no dummy. He started to make noise. That’s when Lo asked me for help.”
Hearns soon found himself embroiled in the whole affair. I probed for what he knew about the original source of the money, but it didn’t sound like he was aware of Julie’s past. He just knew the money didn’t come from legitimate means.
Fitch started doing his own investigating in Phoenix and all the secrets began to trickle out. I assumed that Fitch’s snooping around had alerted Arturo to what his ex-wife was up to. Now her secret was fully exposed to all the participants.
“What happened the day Lois was killed?”
“She and Fitch were supposed to meet at Julie’s house. I told Lo that I would go with her, you know, to try to help out. This Fitch guy was pissed off. He didn’t seem all there, either. Supposedly they all were going to work out a deal. She told me not to come along.” His words fell flat. It was hard, even after the fact, to believe a deal could be worked out with anything less than one hundred percent of the money going to Fitch. “And that was it. The last I spoke to her.”
He jiggled his can to calculate if it was too much to drain in a single pull.
“The cops say Fitch killed her,” Hearns said.
“It looks that way.”
“Nah,” he shook his head. “That old hag killed her.”
He stared into his beer for some support but didn’t find any there.
“Whatever happened to the money?” I asked casually, after a few moments of silence. I wanted to see how honest he was being with me.
“Lo got some, Fitch got less, that witch got the rest,” he replied. “Lo tried to give me some. Maybe ten grand, I don’t know. I never counted it. Kept it in a bag in the freezer,” he said, pointing to the garage fridge, which served as his beer cooler. “You know that night you came out here, I took the money and burned it. Got an old hubcap, a little gasoline…gone.”
His eyes were getting glassy.
“Dirty money,” he whispered.
I declined the offer for another beer. He again had that look of a man determined to get drunk and he didn’t need my help doing it. I left him alone in his garage with his tools and tall boys and didn’t say goodbye.
A LONELY, COLORLESS RAIN
The easy part was guessing where the body was buried. The difficult task was getting it out of the ground.
The old hunting retreats were built so close together that even the smallest of machinery couldn’t fit between the buildings. Also, the street wasn’t wide enough to drive a crane up to lift an excavator over the house. And access from the back was impossible without an amphibious landing unit to navigate the mountain run-off channel filled with roiling water. The only way to dig the old librarian’s body out of the ground was with some spit on the hands and a couple of jackhammers and shovels.
I sat at the little café and nursed a coffee at the counter. The place was unusually empty given the cold, drizzly rain outside. It seemed like the entire neighborhood was up the road watching the proceedings at Julie St. Jean’s old house.
The old man behind the counter barely acknowledged my presence, outside of a wordless refill of my mug. I assumed he was annoyed at the commotion I’d unleashed on his peaceful community and perhaps even the disruption to his regular business on a quiet Wednesday morning.
The Sierra Madre police weren’t exactly discreet when announcing their plans to look for Julie St. Jean’s body. The thirty-year-old mystery had become a bit of a local hullaballoo. I could hear the unmistakable whir of news helicopters overhead. Their counterparts on the ground were directed by the police to stay at the bottom of the hill, which meant they were lined up in the few parking spots in front of the old man’s shop. With each broadcast back to the studio, the camera lights illuminated the coffee shop in a cold glare, further angering an already fully annoyed man.
“Couldn’t leave well enough alone,” he muttered. “It’s a goddamn circus. And a goddamn shame. That poor woman doesn’t deserve any of this.”
“What if it means proving she was murdered?” I asked, despite my instinct to stay quiet.
“So what if she was?”
“We could finally find her killer,” I said.
“And then?”
“Find justice.”
He didn’t seem to see the value in that.
“And who is that going to help?” he challenged.
“Well, it will give closure to the whole thing.”
“No one needs nothing closed.”
I finally got what he was saying. Not everything has to be tied up with a nice ribbon. Everything doesn’t have to be neat and tidy, especially when factoring in the cost.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
I left the shop and zipped up my coat as I slid between the news crews. I headed up the road to where all the excitement was, but halfway there I banked to the right and worked my way between two houses separated by a rocky outcropping. The stone was slick with moss and difficult to climb. I scrambled up the hillside a bit farther and found a place to wait under an old oak.
There was one thing I’d heard Julie say that I couldn’t reconcile. In the heated discussion with Arturo when she revealed she never loved him, she very clearly stated that there was only one person she had loved. For Rebecca’s sake, I hoped it was her but needed to acknowledge that simply couldn’t be true. Julie had had too many opportunities to show it and failed with each one. Lois seemed unlikely despite the sordid affair. Hearns more or less confirmed that the night I visited him in the garage, when he told me that Lois knew she was being used. And if it wasn’t Arturo, that left only one person.
Down across the way, large tents glowed bright white in the otherwise dreary gray day. The pangs of jackhammers echoed throughout the ravine as they worked on the concrete slab underneath the librarian’s house.
I waited out of sight near the area where I’d first spotted Julie from the back of the police car. If there was a chance she’d come it woul
d likely be to this place. I knew I might have to wait a long time.
The rain was lighter under the oak canopy but the drops making it through were big. My raincoat started to fail after about an hour. Water first soaked through on my shoulders and then straight down my spine. I tried not to move because that only reminded me just how cold it felt to be in wet clothes. I also tried not to move because I didn’t want to be spotted.
I finally saw movement up on the ridge and stepped deeper into the brush. After a few minutes of nothing happening, I assumed my eyes were playing tricks on me. But then I saw the figure again, moving down one of the narrow cuts in the hillside. It dipped in and out of the darkened boulders perched on each side of the path and eventually came down to my level. I waited until the figure was within several feet before stepping out from my concealed spot.
“I always picked you for the sentimental type,” I said.
Julie or Karen or whatever she should be called pulled up short. She kept her hands in her pockets and subtly glanced around. I made a more deliberate scan of the area.
“Just me,” I answered to the first question she wanted to ask. “And no, I don’t think anyone would hear a gunshot with all that racket down there,” I answered to her second unstated question.
“What do you want?”
“I’m not really sure,” I said. “Maybe for you to admit you’re a horrible person?”
“Would that make it better?”
“Probably not, but it might help some.”
“You don’t get it. Never have.”
“Trust me, I get it. You’re a fraud. You’ve always been one. You cheated people out of their money, then cheated the guy you did the cheating with. All that executive coaching was just another scam, only legal this time.”
Julie wasn’t up for a lecture.
“Does it make you feel better to highlight all of my flaws?”
“Will it make you feel better if we make this about me and not you?” I countered, and then thought of her greatest con. “You never even showed at the hospital, Julie.”
“I couldn’t go!” she shouted.
It was the first time I’d seen her display so much emotion.
“Keep telling yourself that. I’m sure if there’d been something in it for you, you’d have found a way to make it work. You know until the very last minute she believed someone actually cared about her?”
I remembered those final moments in the prep room. I remembered Rebecca’s hand in mine and her staring at the door hoping someone would walk through it. No one did.
“She went over alone but believed there was someone by her side,” I said. “That’s a cruel trick.”
She looked at me and took a half-step back. It could have been a move by someone about to flee. Or, it was just to get a little more distance between us to make the shot easier.
“I lied before,” I told her. “I’m not alone up here. You’re not getting out, even if you add me to the list of people you’ve killed.”
“You always thought you were so smart,” she said, shaking her head to signal how dumb she thought I was. “I only took one person’s life.”
“Just one?” I mocked.
“And it wasn’t my idea,” she whispered.
I followed Julie’s glance down to the white tents and the bevy of activity around them. She seemed to get lost in gazing at them, as at clouds.
“She asked me to kill her.”
“You’re going to try to blame a dead woman, now?”
All along I anticipated another Julie yarn—obfuscation came so naturally to her that I never expected anything truthful to come out of her mouth—but this had a different tone.
“She knew who I was,” she started.
“How?”
“Because I told her. One week after renting out the room, we were up late talking and I just dumped everything on her. It all came out in one long, babbling mess. Who I was, what I had done, the trouble I was in. Julie was that kind of person—you just had to tell her everything. There was no judgment. She just listened. I don’t think we ever spoke about it again.” After a moment passed, she added, “I fell in love with her at that moment.”
Julie caught a glimpse of my reaction.
“You smug-faced son of a bitch,” she hissed.
“Don’t stop,” I told her. “I want to hear the rest.”
She claimed it was the librarian’s idea to take her identity.
“She worked everything out—the driver’s license, access to the bank account, and the story she would tell everyone. She spent a few weeks dropping hints around the neighborhood about how much she missed home, how she wanted to retire and move back to Florida.”
“And why would she do all that, Julie?”
“Because she was sick,” her voice faltered. “Really sick.”
I barely caught the clarification over the sounds from down below. Her voice was nearly a whisper.
“She quit her job before it became obvious to everyone. And then we just went home. I didn’t really understand it, or, it wasn’t real until it was over.” Julie started to cry. Through tears, she said, “I don’t care if you don’t believe any of this. I loved the woman. She gave me her life.”
I didn’t want to believe what felt like the truth.
“What do you mean by ‘until it was over’?”
Julie hesitated. Either she lacked the details of the narrative or she didn’t want to divulge them. I waited for her to collect herself. She eventually described the precipitous decline after the real Julie was diagnosed and refused treatment.
“I told her to see someone, to get some help, but I guess she knew it was hopeless. And who was I to tell her what to do? I had never done that before and I wasn’t about to start. She wouldn’t have listened. Julie didn’t see anything heroic in fighting it.”
I recalled a similar statement from Rebecca.
“How did she die?”
“Pills,” she answered, but provided no more details around how it went down, just an observation seared into her memory that felt as real to her today as it was on that night. “You should have heard the breathing,” she shuddered. “I couldn’t do it.”
“Do what?” I asked.
“Stop it.”
I processed her words. I looked across the way at the white orbs glowing brighter in the darkening day. If Julie’s body was down there as everyone thought, the question still to be answered was: How did it get there? Julie would have needed help dragging it down the steps, digging a hole in the glacial bedrock, pouring a concrete slab over it, and—from the way she described the final minutes of the librarian’s life—she would have needed help snuffing out her final breaths.
“Who helped you?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer.
“Please, can we not do this?”
“If he’s in on it, people are going to need to know.”
“Can’t we just leave the poor man alone,” she begged, using the same language he had used when describing his old friend. “He doesn’t need to be dragged back in after all these years.”
I looked down at the old coffee shop. If the truth was to come out, I didn’t know how he could be spared. But Julie had a way.
“I’ll take the blame,” she said. “He doesn’t need to be brought back into this after what he did for me.”
“Julie, if this is all true, then why did you say you killed her?”
“Because I let her do it. None of this should have ever happened.”
She started to sound like the Julie I knew in one of her training sessions, when she dropped pearls of wisdom on us—composed, at peace, and in charge. She steeled herself and stared down at the white tents where what seemed like the entire Sierra Madre police forced milled about in rain slickers.
“I guess this is it,” she said. “You said it was a dirty trick that I pulled on Rebecca…” her voice drifted. “Chuck, I just couldn’t watch that happen to someone again.”
It didn’t absolv
e her, but I couldn’t condemn her, either.
Julie took a hesitant step down the hill, then looked back.
“Will you walk down with me?” she asked.
I found myself reaching out and taking her hand. We only made it a few feet of the way.
The sound of the blast was instantaneous but felt like it came several seconds later. Julie fell forward, her grip tightening as she collapsed. I looked down at her body, which resembled more of a crumpled mess in the mud than the person who just moments ago had gestured for me to hold her hand. It took me a moment to realize that she still held it.
I frantically scanned the woods and caught movement as someone emerged from a clump of pines. It was the old man from the coffee shop. He carried a long gun.
I freed myself from Julie’s grip and quickly searched her pockets. The only thing I came out with was a crimson-stained hand. She had come unarmed.
And now, so was I.
RUN-OFF
Down the hill, the old man slowly worked his way up toward me. The only path to escape was to move farther away from the road, the very place where I might find some form of rescue.
I ran as hard as I could on the spongy bed of pine needles, slipping a few times but gradually able to put some distance between me and the old man. I followed alongside the concrete run-off channel, a deep gouge in the hillside that carried rainwater down into the valley. Under the gray, roiling surface, massive rocks jostled in the fury and over the deafening roar came a sickening sound when two boulders smashed together.
There was a rusty footbridge over the run-off channel up ahead. I ran across it and nearly slid over the edge when my shoes gave way on the slick surface. Looking down, it felt like the water was dangerously close to sweeping the entire bridge away.
I crawled the rest of the way and then continued up the hill on the opposite side of the channel. Twice I looked back and saw no sign of the old man. But I did see a figure up ahead walking in the same direction I was headed.
The Big Con Page 18