She compressed her lips into an impersonal and unemotional line. “What’s going on, Mr. Strong?”
“Philip, please. We’ve been through enough together, haven’t we?”
“Philip.”
“I have to lead up to this. It’s been upsetting, these past couple of years. Jim caused such turmoil for my family and yours.”
“We’ve moved on. We don’t think about him.”
Strong nodded, although his expression said, Yeah, right. “Kelly—obviously, you know my daughter. She’s working for your brother these days, right?”
“He says she’s capable, reliable, all kinds of good things.”
“She’s very good at anything she tries. You know she was first in her law school class?” Strong’s hands kneaded each other. “I thought she’d make a great lawyer.”
To make up for her wayward brother, Jim? Nina wondered. A rap on the door interrupted. “What?”
Sandy stood back to reveal Kelly Strong.
Kelly stepped into the room. “Been a while,” she said, holding her hand out to shake Nina’s.
“Your ears were burning,” her father said.
Nina liked Kelly. Not long after her brother’s disappearance, she had suffered some sort of breakdown and dropped out of law school. She came to Nina one day and asked if she might have some legal research for her to do. Nina had nothing, but it was winter, and Nina’s brother, Matt, was looking for people to drive tow trucks and snowplows. Kelly signed on, finished the specialized training in style, and turned out to have had the fingers and brain of an auto mechanic all along. She’d been working for Matt for over a year now.
“Good to see you again.” Nina didn’t like Kelly’s expression at the moment, but she looked physically healthy, at least. She was taller than Nina remembered, or maybe it was the work boots. She wore jeans and a tow-service jacket, a baseball cap hiding her newly short hair. Her cheeks were reddened from the outdoor work.
“I’m sure Dad appreciates you seeing us without an appointment. And of course”—Kelly looked her in the eye—“you’re totally pissed about seeing us at all.”
“What are you doing here?” Her father didn’t reach for his daughter.
“It’s my company, too. Marianne called me. She said you decided to drag Nina into this.”
“Why not?” Philip said. “Who else could help us—”
“I’m not saying it’s a bad idea, if she’s willing.”
Nina interrupted, “Your father was about to tell me why he thinks your brother Jim is alive.”
“Then I got here in the nick.”
“Kelly—”
“Press on, Dad. As long as you’re here, fill her in.” Kelly pulled over a second client chair, put her elbow on Nina’s desk, and took up a listening position.
“No one’s seen Jim for the past couple of years,” Philip started, then stopped.
Nina took a pull from her water bottle. Her guts snaked around in her abdomen. Why did the man have to drag this out? Jim Strong was dead.
Philip had propped his elbows on the other side of her desk and buried his head in his hands.
Kelly watched him and said nothing. She was only in her twenties, but events had focused the face that had once been pudgy and soft. There was black under her fingernails, oil maybe. She had probably come straight from a tow job.
“Philip. My time and my patience are limited,” Nina said as gently as she could. “You’ve got fifteen minutes to organize yourself and tell me exactly why you barged into my office.” She got up and went into the outer office. Sandy clicked away intensely on some document, unusually for her, not listening at the door.
“Sandy, can you please call my next client?”
“Burglar Boy.”
“I know you don’t approve of him.”
“I approve of his rich mama.”
“Maybe you can catch him. Reschedule him for four p.m.”
“Already did.”
Returning to her office, Nina settled herself behind her desk and looked again at the pair sitting across from her. They didn’t seem to have exchanged a word. Kelly looked at her father with an expression Nina would have to describe as conflicted. Philip raised his head. He looked furious rather than tearful.
“Where do I start? Jim’s come back to ruin my—Kelly and my—and Marianne’s life again. You remember my son Alex—I guess you didn’t meet him before his death—”
“No.”
“His widow, Marianne, is still working at Paradise. Remember her?”
“Of course.” Marianne, the dark French girl who had never seemed quite authentic to Nina.
“Jim was the middle child. And Kelly’s youngest here. Who was halfway through law school.”
“Fat lot of good that did me,” Kelly said.
“You’ll go back to school.”
“I’m proud I can pay my rent.” Kelly looked at Nina. “And even that’s thanks to Nina’s brother. Law school’s a thing of the past. Besides, there’s nothing like working hard for a living to teach you what crap life can bring your way, as you always said.”
Philip’s angular face reddened. “Driving a tow truck? Cleaning snow off the streets in winter? What kind of a life is that for a woman? It’s too hard for you, honey. You won’t last.”
He looked at Nina and said, “Not that I’m not thankful your family pitched in when she needed help. But it’s been a while—I expected—” Kelly’s jaw had jutted out, and Nina thought, Why is he riding her? She’s got a job in a bad economy, what’s the problem?
Still, his obvious disappointment had made Kelly turn to face him directly. “Guess what? My job makes me happy. I come home at night knowing I helped people out.”
“But you won’t let me help you.”
“How?” Kelly turned to face her father. “You owe everybody. You were wealthy for so long you don’t know how to live without money. Well, I do. I’m young. I can work. Now I pay my own way. That’s the way it should be.”
“I know everyone in this town. I could help you get a better job. Why won’t you let me?”
Kelly’s face had turned sullen. She patted her jacket pocket for cigarettes, probably. Or Mace, or a gun, nothing from this family would surprise Nina.
“Please,” Nina said, “can we stay on track here? Let’s focus on Jim.”
Frowning, Philip shifted in his seat. “I’m trying. All right. To unload some more really unpleasant family history which I have never told you about, I found out a few days after Jim disappeared that in addition to everything else he had been embezzling from Paradise for several months. He managed the Lodge and the ticketing gates. He was skimming off cash. He had taken about fifty thousand dollars from raw receipts. He hated me, Nina. He didn’t give a damn about our family. I suppose his real crimes started with the skimming. I think in those last days he was breaking down. There was that, and—”
Philip didn’t go on, but Nina knew what he couldn’t stand to say. Philip had had an affair with his daughter-in-law, Jim’s wife, Heidi. Jim had killed her in a jealous rage.
“How long did he steal from you?” Nina asked.
“Maybe two months?”
“You didn’t report it?” She reflected that it wasn’t a huge amount of money and under the circumstances hardly an awesome scandal.
“I knew it had to be someone in the family or on the staff. Because I couldn’t bring myself to call the police, I hired a local investigator named Eric Brinkman. He talked to people and examined our records, told me he couldn’t pin it on Jim, although he strongly suspected him. Jim made a very talented criminal in some ways. Personable. Good at lying and covering up.”
“You’re convinced Jim took the money?”
“I am. I had changed all the passwords, but then something much more damaging happened. Before he disappeared, Jim somehow got into our capital account. We had taken out a large loan to finance an expansion of the Lodge. He had all the numbers, knew what to do. He managed to get the mon
ey wired to an account he had opened with Charles Schwab in Sacramento, then had that wired to a casino account in Reno, then went gambling and somehow got the rest of the money converted to cash.”
“How much money, Philip?” Nina asked.
“Almost a million dollars. We had to pay out another million to cover it.”
“A million,” Kelly repeated, then fell silent. “You didn’t tell me.”
“You weren’t even speaking to me. You didn’t want to have anything to do with the business at that time. I had to decide whether to call in the police. I didn’t, because it would be the end of the business. Turned out to be the end anyway.”
So in the end Jim had found another way to screw his family. Philip had to have foreseen some of this. Jim had shown signs of his predilections from his teen years.
“Bottom line, he did destroy the resort. Receipts at Paradise started to slide as the country went into recession, and some of our other loans started becoming pressing problems. We didn’t have the capital to make some safety improvements to the quad lifts and almost got shut down. The money Jim stole might have got us through, but—the point of all this, Nina, is, I have to sell Paradise. It’s been on the market for several months.”
“We have to sell,” Kelly corrected. “You, me, and Marianne.”
“I can’t tell you how humiliated and sorry I am to lose the place I’ve loved and fought for my whole life.” Philip turned back to Nina. “Paradise has been in our family for over a hundred years. I put it on the market in January in a very quiet way.”
“And here we are,” Kelly said.
“The broker mostly looked internationally. It took him about three months to find us some buyers in Seoul, Korea, and they want to close the deal quickly.”
“How did you determine the price?” Nina asked.
“Heavenly sold for roughly a hundred million seven or eight years ago. But real estate everywhere is down severely right now. Paradise has about fifteen hundred skiable acres as opposed to Heavenly’s forty-eight hundred. Paradise is not as luxuriously developed as Heavenly, but it offers tax advantages, being partly on the Nevada side of the mountain and incorporated there. I figured we could sell it for about twenty million, and that would pay off our debts and leave us a little, and that was the best we could hope for. That was the offer, twenty million dollars.
“We have to sell, but the accountants have told us that the resort is completely overwhelmed with debt. We owe about seventeen and a half million dollars including the costs of sale, and we couldn’t get an agreement from the buyers without a condition that all the debts will be paid before the company receives any of the purchase price.”
“That’s standard,” Nina said, “to pay the debts prior to sale, but what an enormous debt load you’re talking about. Technically, you’re not bankrupt, but I don’t see how you could continue doing business with the credit needed for the ongoing operations.”
“Precisely,” Philip said.
“Is Paradise still privately held?”
“Incorporated in Nevada, yes. A Subchapter S corporation, kept within the family, no public stock. Paradise is now owned by four people, Nina. My wife and I owned the resort, and when she passed away years ago, she left her share to our children, share and share alike. So I hold fifty percent, Marianne holds one-sixth as my son Alex’s widow, Kelly owns one-sixth, and Jim theoretically owns one-sixth. Lynda Eckhardt—she’s handling the purchase and sale agreement—thought we might be able to get court approval on the sale even though we can’t get Jim’s signature on the deal.” Strong’s speech tumbled out as he leaned forward again and laid his palms on the desktop.
“Kelly, didn’t you sell your share to Marianne two years ago?” Nina said.
“Oh, I tried,” Kelly said.
“I had that agreement annulled,” Philip said, “for Kelly’s protection. She wasn’t able to make financial decisions at that time. Marianne gave up and we didn’t have to slug it out in court. Of course, in hindsight, Kelly would have done very well two years ago, and now—well, anyway, it seems I made another mistake. Kelly’s still angry about it.” He didn’t look at his daughter.
“It sounds like you both have had a very difficult time with the fallout.”
Philip hung his head. His face screwed up as if he were going to weep, but he didn’t. He said quietly, “You have no idea.”
“Oh, she knows, all right,” Kelly said.
Nina had been working out the figures on her calculator. “So that means you would net two and a half million dollars from the sale after the debts are paid. One and a quarter million for your half-ownership, and Kelly, Marianne, and—and, well, Jim’s heirs would each receive about, let’s see, four hundred seventeen thousand dollars. Am I close?”
“Yes, in a simple world. If only it were so simple.”
Kelly’s pager made a sound, and she gave the display a quick look. She stood up. “I have to get back to work. Been out since six thirty this morning. Nina, the point is that the sale is a legal mess right now, and Dad is right about one thing, that you may be the only person who can step in and help us. If I were you, I wouldn’t take the job, though. You might run into Jim, ha-ha, the homicidal maniac who won’t go away. Well, somebody’s got to make an honest living around here.” Kelly shook Nina’s hand again and left the office.
“She’s gotten bitter,” Philip said, watching her go. “Won’t take anything from me, you know. Lives on that job your brother gave her and on disability.”
“She gets state money?”
“After all this stuff with Jim, she’s never been the same. Emotional problems.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Listen, hey, don’t forget, I’m responsible for triggering a whole lot of this. I had a relationship with Jim’s wife. I regret that every single day. If I hadn’t, maybe none of it would have happened. Kelly would be a lawyer by now. Alex would be alive. Your husband would be coming home for dinner every night. I’ve paid for my trespasses, but other people—Alex, Heidi, Kelly, you—paid much more.”
Nina swallowed.
Philip leaned forward. “The buyers have given us thirty days to close escrow.”
“That’s monstrously tight for a business.”
“They have complicated financing that involves several banks, and they can’t hold the deal together any longer than that. I have to say, given the current economic climate, I’m afraid if we miss the deadline, our buyers may not be back. We may go bankrupt. We have another court hearing coming up in a few days, and our attorney doesn’t know what to do.”
Nina held her fingers to her lips. “Judge Flaherty?”
“Yeah. He’s presiding over the hearing coming up.”
“And Lynda Eckhardt is your attorney?”
“Right. But you know, she doesn’t do court work. She was only handling the purchase and sale of the business. She recommended you, but she knew the history, and frankly, I doubt she thought you’d take over.”
“That’s the background then. Tell me now. What’s your evidence that Jim’s alive?”
Philip reached inside his fleecy vest and pulled out a heavy legal file. He handed it gingerly to Nina. “Okay, here’s what happened yesterday, Nina. I went to over to Lynda’s office. She had been served with these papers. Here, take a look. Lynda made up the file for you.”
Nina pulled out the sheaf of pleadings and skimmed them as he talked. They were perfectly organized. They were so sensationally organized that Nina wondered, not for the first time, if Lynda might suffer from a mild obsessive-compulsive disorder. Anyway, she wasn’t resilient enough for court work and had the sense to know it.
“Basically, and you know I’m not a lawyer, there was an objection from a local law firm to the sale. Another outstanding firm in town, Caplan, Stamp, and Powell. Michael Stamp is the lawyer from the firm.”
Nina couldn’t help feeling pleased at being compared to that firm, with their mahogany wainscoting, Ivy League partners, and lo
ngtime universal respect from the community.
“They say they represent Jim, that he has retained them using a lawyer in Brazil as a go-between. He’s supposed to be in Brazil, Nina!”
“No,” Nina said, shaking her head, because it was impossible.
“He had all that money he stole from the resort to get away. Look, there’s an affidavit attached here that’s in his handwriting. Look.”
The papers in front of her felt heavy as she picked them up. A petition had been filed by Lynda to approve the resort sale, which was set for a hearing, with a consolidated petition to have Jim Strong, a missing person, declared dead, to be heard on the same date, two days away.
But a new, third matter consisted of a complaint in intervention and motion to have a conservator appointed for Jim Strong under the California Probate Code, along with supporting papers, all prepared by Michael Stamp’s office. Nina went straight to the notarized affidavit, the last document appended before the proposed orders:
I, James Philip Strong, declare:
1. I am over the age of twenty-one and a resident of the City of Porto Alegre, State of Rio Grande do Sul, Country of Brasil.
2. I own 16.667% (one-sixth) of the shares in Paradise Ski Resort, a private corporation licensed to operate in the States of California and Nevada. A copy of the duly-probated will of Yolande Strong, my mother, is attached hereto and incorporated herein by this reference, and is the source of my ownership interest.
3. On or about February twenty-eight and for two weeks thereafter, a Notice of Proposed Sale appeared in the Tahoe Mirror newspaper regarding the sale of all assets, stock and goodwill in the above-named corporation.
4. My consent as a minority shareholder has not been obtained, and therefore the sale is not approved by all owners of more than 5% of the stock as required by the Bylaws of Paradise Resort, Inc., attached hereto as Exhibit “B and incorporated herein.”
5. I am informed and advised and thereon aver that the reason my consent has not been obtained is that the majority stockholder, Philip C. Strong, my father, plans to deprive me of all proceeds due and owing as a result of my ownership interest, due to personal animosity and without any legal reason.
Dreams of the Dead Page 2