by Don Gillmor
“Did I tell you I talked to Dick Ebbetts?” Harry said, knowing he hadn’t.
“Dick Ebbetts?”
“From BRG. Short, troll-like. I think you met him once. Or at least at the funeral.”
Gladys made a doubtful expression.
“He thinks Dad had money. He apparently made a big score on an oil sands play.”
“So what does Dick Ebbetts think happened to that money?”
“I didn’t press him. I’m not sure I trust anyone at BRG.”
“Isn’t that the cornerstone of their business: trust? Anyway, can’t you pretty much do anything with computers these days?”
“I’m thinking of hiring someone to try to find it. The money.”
“Could someone even look without drawing attention to the fact that you’re basically accusing the company of taking Dale’s money? Why don’t you talk to them first, Harry? Just mention that it seems odd. Maybe there’s a perfectly logical reason.”
“I did talk to Prescott Lunden and August Sampson. They didn’t have a perfectly logical reason.”
“You don’t think they were involved, do you?”
Harry shrugged. “Who knows. They’re an odd pair.” And now they knew that Harry was looking for that money.
There was a squeal of brakes and a soft crunch. Across the street, a BMW had collided with a parked car, damaging the bumper. A man emerged from the parked car and pulled out his cellphone and began taking pictures of the mess. A woman in a short dress and heels got out of the BMW, holding her cell, and began taking pictures of the two cars from different angles. She took a picture of the man, who took a picture of her. They moved closer and snapped aggressively like paparazzi, leaning to get new angles, thrusting their phones out for close-ups, bobbing and weaving like boxers. They walked backwards to their separate vehicles, still shooting, then got in and closed their doors.
Harry and Gladys took a cab to the Toyota dealer and collected their prize.
When they got home, Harry went up to his study and called his brother-in-law, Ty, who had begun his career in investment banking and was now a financial consultant of some kind. It was never entirely clear to Harry exactly what Ty did. But he had once mentioned a forensic accountant he knew, some guy who was brought in to analyze a high-profile scam that was in the papers for a week.
Erin’s husband was a serious basketball fan, and Harry could hear the game on in the background. Ty had once taken Harry to a game, where they stood in someone’s corporate box and idly watched the home team get shanked by the prison-yard Knicks.
The sound of the game suddenly disappeared, Ty pressing the mute button, Harry guessed, but still watching. “This is our destiny,” Ty said. “We get a new superstar every four years, and around him, our faith builds. The new Messiah. We finish twelfth. We’re in a rebuilding phase. We finish thirteenth. The superstar gets traded to New Jersey. This is the business model. This is how you get twenty thousand people paying to witness futility.”
“Ty, the reason I called—”
“Christ, you’re making six point two and you miss a fucking layup? Sorry, Harry.”
“You once told me you knew a forensics guy. He was brought in for that Emptor Inc. thing.”
“Tommy Bladdock. They had like fourteen gnomes on that twenty-four/seven. There were twelve hundred boxes to go through. But these guys, it’s amazing. Tommy told me you have enough paper on a guy, you can see his soul. You know more about him than his wife. What do you want with Tommy?”
“Is he discreet?”
“Discreet? That’s basically his job description. While we’re sleeping, guys like Tommy are chewing through paper. They’re like termites. You don’t know they’re there until the house collapses.”
“What do these guys charge?”
“I don’t know. One fifty, two fifty an hour.”
“You think he’d work on commission?”
“Like a percentage of recovered monies?”
“Yes.”
“I suspect it’s cash on the barrelhead. They’re not called accountants for nothing. But maybe you can work something out.”
“Risk/reward.”
“Right. This is about Dale, I assume. Erin told me there might be something there. Tommy probably needs some kind of retainer. Why do I watch these idiots?” Ty asked rhetorically. “You’ve got some paper, Harry. That’s half the battle.”
“But you have to figure that anything that’s incriminating has been shredded by now,” Harry said.
“That’s the beauty of forensics. There’s always something missing. These guys see what isn’t there. They see the negative space between two numbers, and in that space they see a mistress or a gambling problem or a crushing mortgage. It’s like a seance. They bring back dead numbers and talk to them. It takes some kind of brain, some kid who grew up reading Sherlock Holmes under the covers with a flashlight. Anyway, Tommy’s a star. You want me to call him?”
“Yes.”
In the morning, Harry woke up feeling bloated and unsure, had a hasty, unsatisfying shower and came downstairs. Gladys was sitting at the breakfast table, her face sleepy, something that Harry still found oddly sexy.
“Ty told me about this forensic accountant, a friend, sort of. I’m going to hire him to look for Dad’s money.”
A piece of toast was poised near her mouth. “What do you think he’s going to find?”
“I don’t know what he’ll find. But if there’s money missing from my father’s estate, some of that money is ours.”
“How much would we have to pay him?”
“I don’t know. These guys aren’t cheap. One fifty an hour, maybe.”
“According to whom?”
“According to Ty. He knows this guy.”
“Ty the money expert,” Gladys said.
“I’m going to call him.”
“How long will he take?”
“I don’t know. He probably needs to see the paper before he can give us an estimate.”
“At $150 an hour.”
“I can’t see it being more than a day.”
“A $1,200 day.”
“Look, Gladys, if this helps us find that money, it’s a small, an infinitesimally small price to pay. It’s not an expense. It’s an investment.”
His debt took issue with this and made its presence known, a sudden high-pitched squeal from a Dantean hog slaughterhouse.
NINE
PERHAPS, HARRY THOUGHT, as he drove north to visit her in her new place, his mother was simply part of the ongoing demographic lurch. The city was on the march, the tectonic shifting of a dozen immigrant cultures. The Italians had long cleared out of the east, and the Greeks had filled the empty space. The Jews kept moving north. The East Indians looked to the exurbs; the Chinese filled the fringes. In their wake, they left Chinatowns and Little Indias, and the owners of those stores and restaurants commuted in from the suburbs every morning. The rich had started the perverse migration away from the lake. Now the waterfront had been abandoned to generic condos, to childless couples with $3,000 bicycles. The carcinomic clusters of high-rises formed a wall between the water and the city, a bulwark against invaders, a wall too listless to declare its intent, to spell the actual words: Fuck You.
His mother’s apartment was larger than Harry had suspected from the outside. There were two bedrooms and a surprisingly spacious living room. The building was built on a slope, and her apartment was at ground level at the back and opened up onto the cemetery, which appeared as a huge forest; both criminals and spirits could easily wander in. He had offered to manage the move, but his mother declined. Harry wanted to reassure himself that his mother was fine in her new place, the way parents wanted to make sure the university dorm their child was in was sufficient. Gladys was at her book club, and so Harry had invited himself over for dinner.
Felicia answered the door dressed in pants and a long cashmere cardigan that closed with a clasp. She took the flowers and wine that he’d brought. “
Harold, I’m making myself a martini. Would you like one?”
“That would be good.” He guessed it was her second. Her deft, practised movements, shaking the gin and vermouth and ice in the silver shaker and pouring into two martini glasses.
“Santé,” she said, tipping her glass toward his. “To new beginnings. Take a look around. Dinner will be ready in ten minutes.”
Harry walked out the screen door and strolled up to the steel mesh fence of the cemetery. The trees were magnificent. Old-growth oaks, maples, birch, Japanese flowering cherries, elms, a dozen kinds of conifers. A two-hundred-acre park devoted to the dead. The perfect neighbour, though Dale was there, which couldn’t be a comfort. Felicia’s father was contained in a modest crypt. Harry had visited him when he was a child, holding his mother’s hand. His grandmother had been with them, in memory a crone no taller than young Harry.
His mother’s repudiation of her past life was even more complete than Harry had imagined. She told him she had gotten a library card, her first. She took the subway now. Harry suddenly wondered if she had given all her money to a battered women’s shelter or a food bank. Her father had been a famous philanthropist; perhaps she wanted to continue his work.
As a child, Harry had spent a lot of time with his mother. He’d gone to camp for three weeks every summer, an expensive place with a Native name, bad food and a Lord of the Flies philosophy. The rest of the time he was at the cottage with his mother and sister. On weekends, Dale came up from the city, arriving on Friday night, the highway clogged with fathers smoking in their Buicks with the windows down. One Friday at midnight, Harry crept out of his room to see his parents dancing drunkenly, his mother’s arms around his father, her cigarette burning in her fingers, crying as he carefully patted her head.
In fall, the mothers and children all returned to the city, and there were family dinners, cocktails with neighbours. Harry was reunited with his friends and went back to the familiar rhythms of school. They burned the autumn leaves as a pagan ritual. His father disappeared into work.
He went back inside, where his mother was setting out two plates of Argentine short ribs on a bed of spiced wild rice.
“Mother, Erin and I are a little concerned.” This wasn’t true. As far as Harry knew, Erin wasn’t concerned about anything. “You’ve basically renounced your life.”
“Harold, you come to the end of things. Love, money, sex. It dissipates over time.”
“You’re still active. You’re still attractive to men.”
“I’m still attractive to precisely the kind of men I don’t want anything to do with. Old men who need a nursemaid, witless retirees who want a companion, entrenched old roosters who have seventy years of dull stories waiting.”
His mother’s ruthlessness extended to herself. She wasn’t one of those people who sit deluded in their apartment, hoping for salvation, carefully retouching their highlights in case they met someone in the supermarket. She had calibrated her future precisely and would take steps to occupy it with as much grace and interest as she could muster.
Harry remembered that she and Dale had once gone to New York for a weekend with a few other couples. Erin and Harry had been left with someone. Back then, you could leave your children with anyone. His parents went to see Ella Fitzgerald at Radio City Music Hall. Afterward they all went to the Plaza and drank martinis. Nat King Cole was sitting nearby and they didn’t register his presence, they took him in stride. It was this fact that came up repeatedly when his parents told the story of that weekend. We didn’t even notice him. And it was this casual proximity that made them feel that they were part of something.
But the whole city had shifted beneath their feet, subtly moving away from them. He remembered when he would see neighbours in the society page of the paper. Now there was only beauty and celebrity. No one recognized money anymore.
“Eventually you find yourself on the edges,” Felicia said. She drained the last drop of her martini and poured a little of the Malbec into her wineglass. “There is no defense against being marginalized. Perhaps talent, but so few have it. Money isn’t much help. Not as much as people think, anyway.”
Harry wondered if his mother was marginalizing herself before she could become marginalized, her need for control.
“Harold, there’s something I need to tell you. Your grandfather, as you already know, was a force. He gave away, I don’t know how much land—all that land where the hospital sits. He donated land to the university, to the Anglican church. He fell in love with giving. It became his mistress, I think. One of them, anyway. His fortune was impregnable. Certainly that is what we thought when he died. My brothers and I. Philip hired his own lawyer, you know. Frightened that Prentice and I would somehow conspire to disinherit him. How could we? In any event, there wasn’t much to disinherit. He left me that house. My mother didn’t want it. I was a woman, vulnerable, he thought. I would need shelter at some point. The money went to my brothers. They each got something like half a million dollars. Not an insignificant sum in those days, though a fraction of what they expected.”
Harry remembered his grandfather dimly. Occasionally they all went to dinner at Barton’s house, seated at the oversized table, his grandparents at each end. His grandmother, a small, faded woman in an antique dress, silent and attentive, still carrying the nineteenth century within her, slowly disappearing, like the Cheshire Cat. Barton, a big man who smoked cigars and laughed outrageously, always wore a vested suit. He was a man of American appetites, and that’s where he went to play, renting a suite at the Pierre and entertaining impressionable actresses. Harry remembered being asked to read aloud at the breakfast table from a newspaper article that outlined one of his grandfather’s charitable acts: “Barton McClary Donates Land to Church.”
He had made much of his money in real estate, a fortune built on luck (and perhaps some bribery, it was never clear) when the corporate boundaries of the city expanded to include farmland he had bought for a horse operation. The city engulfed the last of his rural properties, increasing their worth twentyfold, but he didn’t have any other tricks. The various enterprises he got into after that had mixed returns. There had been some nasty business in New York as well, a girl he had gotten into trouble, who may or may not have died while having an abortion. Part of the family mythology.
“So I had the house,” his mother said. She poured a little more of the wine. “When I married your father, we both had the expectation of a substantial sum being passed down. Instead, there was the house. Dale had some money, of course. But most of what we had he earned. We were a pretty good couple. Better than you remember, I’m sure. We weren’t good at the end, of course. And we weren’t good at times in the middle. When we divorced, I kept the house for the simple reason that it was mine. Dale gave me some money, but not as much as you would think. Everyone assumed I had my own money and I was only going after Dale out of spite. But I needed the support. Even then, it wasn’t enough. So I sold the house.”
“What did you get for it? I would put it at somewhere near three million, what with—”
“No, Harold. I mean I sold the house seventeen years ago.”
Harry sat stunned for a moment, then took a sip of his wine. “Seventeen years ago,” he repeated dully.
“The market was still flat. That lull after the housing bubble burst. I sold it for $760,000.”
“My god. But you’ve been living in it.”
“I was renting.”
“From …”
“Dick Ebbetts. He bought it and rented it back to me for $3,000 a month. At least, that’s what I was paying when I left. It was less at the beginning.”
“Ebbetts. Jesus.”
“He was in love with me. He’s always been in love with me. He knew he couldn’t have me. Not even with a gesture like that. But it was the next best thing for him. A boy from East York who now owned a house in Rosedale and the heiress in it.”
So the house had been long gone. Harry attempted a quick
calculation of what she had paid in rent over the years. In utilities. What did it cost to heat that pile of stone? “Did Dad know?”
“No. Dick would never have told him. And I certainly didn’t.”
“You said Dick was a thug.”
“He is.”
He mentally went through his lunch with Ebbetts.
“So I’ve got the proceeds from the Clarington’s sale,” his mother said.
“The Pratts.”
“The Pratts were a disappointment.” Felicia took a sip of her wine. “Harold, I have enough money to live comfortably if I’m careful. Frankly, to be rid of that world is a relief. I’ve been holding my breath for the last decade, and now I feel like I can breathe.”
His father’s money was gone, and his mother’s money had never existed. The hum of his debt was suddenly louder, high-pitched, a car being driven too hard, the engine singing on the red line.
But his mother could still be charming company. Their second bottle of wine was a modest Chilean Merlot. They chatted for forty-five minutes. She liked going for walks in the ravine, she said. She was going to Italy in early spring. She opened a third bottle of wine as a precaution.
“Harold,” she finally said, “I told you this so you can make the appropriate plans. I know Dale’s estate was a disappointment. Mine, when it comes to it, will be as well. But at least you’ve been warned.”
They drank more of the wine and Harry felt like he was underwater, moving slowly through a sea of fresh debt, the wine heaving within him.