Dance for the Dead (17 page)

“What I just told you is
the dumb way. The smartest way is always to stay as close to legality
as possible. If they were sole trustee and executor, they could have
been draining the fund since it was started. They could set enormous
fees, charge all sorts of costs to the trust, and cook the books a
little here and there to show losing investments. They wouldn’t
steal it all. They would leave a substantial sum in there. How much
is there?”

“I don’t know. I get
the impression it’s tens of millions, maybe hundreds.”

“Okay. Say it’s a
hundred million. They could get away with four or five percent a year
as trustee and executor. They could also do virtually anything with
the principal. There are written guidelines in every state I know of,
but they’re broad, and they’re open to interpretation.
They could invest in their friend’s chinchilla ranch and have
their friend go bankrupt, if nobody knew the connection. If they were
smart enough to steal it slowly and vary the investments to make it
look inconclusive, they could do a lot.”

“Inconclusive?”

“You know. The trust has
lots of stock in fifteen hundred companies, twenty million in federal
bonds and a five-million-dollar write-off on the chinchilla ranch,
and it’s tough to prove they were anything but mistaken on the
issue of chinchilla futures. Not dishonest.”

“So then what?”

“They do it a few more
times over the years, always making sure that the proportions are
right – nine winners, one loser. They’re stealing a lot,
but some of it is hidden by the fact that most investments are making
money. You have to remember that even the good investments go up and
down too, so the bad ones are hard to spot. When they’ve got
all they can, they call it quits.”

“How do they call it
quits?”

“They fulfill the terms of
the trust – that is, they disperse the money to charities. Only
now it’s not a hundred million. It’s twenty million.”

“And nobody notices that
eighty million is gone?”

“If the trust doesn’t
change hands, nobody looks. If you have twenty million, you can
create quite a splash in the world of charity. You don’t write
a twenty-million-dollar check to the United Way and close the books.”

“What do you do?”

“You divide it into
ten-thousand-dollar tidbits and dole it out. Now you have two
thousand checks from the Agnes Phillips Trust, which nobody ever
heard of. Each year, you send four hundred different charities all
over the country ten thousand dollars each. That’s more than
one a day. You do it for five years. The first year, when the
Children’s Fund of Kankakee gets a check from the Agnes
Phillips Trust, what does it do?”

“You’ve got me.”

“It sends a thank-you
note. They’re not going to demand an audit of the trust that
sent them ten grand. It would never occur to them, and if it did,
they couldn’t make it stick. They’re not heirs named in a
will. They’re a charity that got a big check at the discretion
of the people who sent it. They’re grateful. They have no idea
of the size of the trust, and they hope they’ll get another
check next year so they can help more children.”

“So at the end of five
years, the money is all gone, and the statute of limitations has run
on the eighty million they stole?”

“If they get only five
percent return on the money while they dole it out, they get a couple
of extra years. What’s working most in their favor is that
during all that time – figure eight years – nobody is
asking any questions. That’s the main thing. If at the end of
that time there’s a full-scale audit, the auditors won’t
be able to find a single instance of mistaken judgment that isn’t
at least eight years old, and no theft at all. As long as it’s
more than four since the payout began, nothing much matters.”

“So what do I do now?”

“I’ll tell you one
thing I’d do. I’d make sure Timothy Phillips isn’t
alone much. None of this works if the heir is alive.”

Jane
went to the pay telephone at a market a few miles from her house,
dialed Los Angeles Information to get the number of the Superior
Court in Van Nuys, then asked to be transferred to Judge Kramer’s
office. It was still early in the morning in California and Judge
Kramer’s secretary sounded irritable and sleepy. “Judge
Kramer’s chambers.”

Jane said, “Could you
please tell him it’s Colleen?” The last name he had given
her had slipped her mind.

“One moment. I’ll
see if he can be disturbed.”

The name came back to her.
“Mahoney.”

“Pardon me?”

“Colleen Mahoney.”

Jane’s mind could see the
secretary pushing the hold button, walking to the big oak door,
giving a perfunctory knock, and walking into the dim room with the
horizontal blinds. She allowed a few seconds for the secretary to
tell him, but before she expected him to remember and pick up, he was
on the line. “Judge Kramer.”

“Hello, Judge,” she
said. “Remember me?”

“Yes. This is an
unexpected pleasure,” he said. “At least I hope it is.”

“I found out something
that you need to know.”

“What is it?”

“Well, I read that the
D.A. has taken a look at Timmy’s trust and said Hoffen-Bayne
couldn’t be anything but honest. He missed something.”

“What did he miss?”

Jane spoke with a quiet urgency.
“If Timmy was dead, the trust was to go to charities, so the
D.A. assumed everything had to be okay. But in the trust Grandma
didn’t say, ‘If Timmy dies, dissolve the trust right away
and divide its assets among the following charities,’ or ‘Let
the trust continue forever and the income go to the following
charities.’ She simply said, ‘Give it away.’ So
there was no specific organization named in the trust who could
demand the right to see the books.”

“You’re saying that
someone at Hoffen-Bayne planned to plunder the trust fund, give the
residue to charities, and nobody would be the wiser?” he asked.
“I don’t see how they could imagine they would get away
with it.”

“A lawyer friend of mine
thinks it would have worked fine if Timmy hadn’t turned up. If
there are no heirs, there’s nobody with the right to demand an
audit.”

“Except the state of
California.”

“Let me ask you this. When
the grandmother died, wouldn’t the trust have either gone
through probate or been declared exempt?”

“Well, yes.”

“And doesn’t it have
to file tax returns each year?”

“Certainly.”

“My friend seems to think
that there’s no other occasion when the state automatically
takes a look, unless the trust changes hands. Somebody with a
legitimate reason has to ask. And the statute of limitations for
embezzling the money is something like four years.”

The judge blew some air out
through his teeth. “Your friend seems to have worked this
through more carefully than I have. If they filed the standard annual
forms, declared Timmy legally dead, and took their time about the
disbursement to charities, then yes, they could probably avoid
scrutiny until it was too late to prosecute the theft. Your friend
must practice in another state. The statute of limitations here isn’t
four years. It’s two.”

“Great,” she
muttered.

“But they can’t do
what they planned. They never got the death certificate.”

Jane spoke slowly and quietly.
“If they’ve already robbed him, then they still need to
get one. I think they’re committed.”

“It’s all right.
Timmy is under police protection.”

“I know,” said Jane.
“I went into his bedroom, talked to him, took him for a ride,
and brought him back.”

“I’ll order him
moved,” said the judge.

“Moving him increases the
danger. Just tell them you’re not keeping him incommunicado,
you want him protected, and they’ll do their best. I’m
sure you know they can’t keep somebody from killing him if the
person tries hard enough.”

“Then what the hell do you
want me to do?”

“Remove the motive.”

“How?”

“The reason to kill him is
to hide a theft, so uncover it. He’s a ward of the court. Order
an audit of his assets. Open everything up.”

“All right.”

“And, Judge,” Jane
said, “can you make it a surprise? You know – like a
raid?”

“Yes. I’ll have to
do some preliminary probing first, and I’ll have to find
probable cause for a search, but I’ll do it. Now what else are
you waiting for me to stumble onto?”

“Nothing.” Then she
added, “But, Judge…”

“What?”

“I don’t know if
it’s occurred to you yet, but if they realize you’re
going to do this, then Timmy isn’t the big threat to them
anymore. You are.”

“I’m aware of that,”
he snapped. “Now I’ve got sixty-three litigants and
petitioners and all their damned attorneys penned up in a courtroom
waiting for me, so if you’ll excuse me…”

“Keep safe. You’re a
good man.”

“Of course I am,” he
said. “Goodbye.”

Jane hung up the telephone and
drove home. She climbed the stairs, opened her closet, and then
remembered that she had given the suitcase she was looking for to the
Salvation Army in Los Angeles. She went downstairs into the little
office she had made out of her mother’s sewing room, looked in
the closet, and found the old brown one. It was a little smaller, but
she wasn’t going to bring much with her. She stared at the
telephone for a moment, then dialed his number. His answering machine
clicked on. “Carey, this is Jane. I’m afraid I was right
about the trip. I’ll call when I’m home. Meanwhile you’ll
have to make your own fun. Bye.” She walked upstairs to her
bedroom and began to pack.

As Jane set down her suitcase
and walked through the kitchen to be sure that all the windows were
locked and the food stored in the freezer, she saw the pile of
letters that Jake had brought her. She had not even bothered to look
at them. She leaned against the counter and glanced at each envelope,
looking for bills. There were several envelopes from companies, but
they were all pitches to get her to buy something new.

Finally she opened the one at
the bottom. It was thin and square and stiff, from Maxwell-Lammett
Investment Services in New York. Inside was a greeting card. It was
old, the picture from a photograph that had been hand-tinted. There
was a stream with a deer just emerging from a thicket, so that it was
easy to miss at first. All the leaves of the trees were bright red
and orange and yellow. The caption said “Indian Summer.”
When she looked inside, a check fluttered to the floor. The female
handwriting in the card said, “You told me that one morning
after a year or two I would wake up and look around me and feel good
because it was over, and then I would send you a present. I found the
card months ago and saved it, but you’re a hard person to shop
for. Thanks. MaRried and PrEgnant.”
R
was Rhonda and
E
was Eckerly, or used to be.

Jane picked up the check and
looked at it. The cashier’s machine printing on it said “Two
Hundred and Fifty Thousand and 00/100 Dollars.” The purchaser
was the investment company, and the notation said “Sale of
Securities.” She put the check into her purse and took one last
look at the card. Rhonda had probably felt clever putting her name in
code. If the people her ex-husband had paid to hunt her had known
about Jane they could have identified Rhonda’s prints from the
paper and probably traced her through the check.

She switched on the ventilator
on the hood over the stove, set out a foil pan, lit the card at a gas
burner, and set it in the pan to burn. There would come a time when
an uninvited guest would go through this house. Maybe it would be
some bounty hunter, or maybe it would be the policemen investigating
her death. Whoever it was would not find traces of a hundred
fugitives and then turn them into a bonanza for his retirement. When
the card was burned, she turned off the fan, then rinsed the ashes
into her garbage disposal and let it grind them into the sewer. She
dropped the rest of the mail into the trash can, picked up her
suitcase, set the alarm, and stepped out onto the porch.

As she locked her door and took
a last look at her house, she thought about the old days, when
Senecas went out regularly to raid the tribes to the south and west
in parties as small as three or four warriors. After a fight they
would run back along the trail through the great forest, sometimes
not stopping for two days and nights.

When they made it back into
Nundawaonoga, they would approach their village and give a special
shout to tell the people what it was they would be celebrating. But
sometimes a lone warrior would come up the trail, the only one of his
party who had survived. He would rest and eat and mourn his friends
for a time. Then he would quietly collect his weapons and extra
moccasins and provisions and walk back down the trail alone. He would
travel all the way back to the country of the enemy, even if it were
a thousand miles west to the Mississippi or a thousand miles south
beyond the Cumberland. He would stay alone in the forest and observe
the enemy until he was certain he knew their habits and defenses and
vulnerabilities. He would watch and wait until he had perceived that
they no longer thought about an Iroquois attack, even if it took a
year or two.

It occurred to Jane as she got
into her car that Rhonda’s present had come at a good time. If
she stopped to deposit it on her way to the airport, it would buy a
lot of spare moccasins.

Jane
took a flight to Dallas-Fort Worth under the name Wendy Simmons, and
another to San Diego as Diane Newberry. Then she took a five-minute
shuttle bus ride from the airport to the row of tall hotels on Harbor
Island. She stepped off at the TraveLodge, but walked down Harbor
Island Drive to the Sheraton East because it seemed to be the
biggest.