Embroidered Truths (18 page)

Betsy imagined Charlie, mourning a dead brother, faced with the complex task of sorting out the detritus of his life, nevertheless sitting down and going page-by-page through the little book given all car owners about upkeep. “You’re being very thorough.”

“‘Thorough’ is a good CPA’s middle name.”

“Back home, do you work for a big company?”

“I’m a partner in a small one. Guthmann, Nye, and Doherty.” He sat on her couch with an audible sigh, then immediately leaped up again, brushing at the seat of his jeans and looking at the couch for signs of his passage.

“Here, just a minute.” Betsy went into the guest bedroom closet and pulled down an afghan crocheted in some of Alice’s washable squares. She floated it over the couch, and he sat down on it, putting one ankle on his other knee.

“You look tired,” she said. “Are you taking care of yourself? May I offer you something to eat or drink?”

He looked at his watch, raised his eyebrows. “Later than I thought,” he said. “Maybe a sandwich of some kind, if you don’t mind?”

“Tuna all right?”

“Sure.”

“Then I want you to take a look at John’s computer.”

“You have it?” He was definitely surprised.

“I have a copy of his hard drive, and the passwords and encryptions have been removed, so all the files are readable.”

“I almost never do this, but would you mind bringing my sandwich to the computer?”

She smiled. “Fine. Do you like onions?”

“Only if there are no cucumbers instead.”

There weren’t. Not that he would have noticed if the sandwich had been made of jalepeno peppers and sardines. Betsy put the sandwich, wrapped in a napkin, into his hand, the glass of water on the table beside him, and crept away.

He emerged two hours later to hand her the empty glass. He had a small notebook in his other hand, which he had raised to shoulder level and was shaking gently. “Something’s screwy in there,” he said.

“Christopher Bright?” she asked.

“That’s one thing. But I think the explanation for that is obvious.”

“You do?”

“Certainly. John was Christopher Bright.”

Betsy stared at him. “How do you know—wait, I saw that the bank in Menomonee uses Social Security numbers as ID numbers. They’re the same, aren’t they? John’s and Christopher Bright’s?”

“No.” Charlie shook his head. “John set up a false ID to open that account.”

“How do you know that?”

“What started me thinking that had happened was that, in the biography file, Bright gives his address as a post office box number in Rusk, a little town near Menomonee. John has used a post office box number from time to time, and he always tries to get a box number that corresponds to a number important to him, the month he was born in, the month and day combined, whatever. The post office box number for Mr. Bright is the year John was born.”

Betsy wanted to say, “Coincidence!” But she didn’t, because Charlie was smiling and obviously going to make another, better point.

Charlie said, “What’s interesting is that he didn’t just use a false name, but came up with a whole new identity, a different Social Security number and all. However, I went to the St. Paul Municipal Records site and discovered that Christopher Bright, son of Angela and Edward Bright, died of kidney failure at the age of four.” He came and sat down on the afghan again.

Betsy sat down in her upholstered chair. “Do you mean he did that old graveyard thing?”

He laughed out loud. “You
are
a sleuth at that!” he said.

“Thank you,” said Betsy. She had learned the technique from a thriller, actually. People seeking to create a new identity sometimes went to graveyards to find the tombstone of a child born the same year, or close to it, that they were born. They would write to the municipality nearby, seeking a copy of a birth certificate, and once they had that, they could get a Social Security card and a driver’s license, the three solid proofs of a person’s legal existence.

“Wait a second,” said Betsy. “If John was spending every nickel he was making, where did he get two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to put into the Menomonee bank?”

“That, my dear Ms. Devonshire, is a very good question.”

“A lawyer learns a lot of unsavory things about his clients, doesn’t he? Maybe John was blackmailing someone.”

“I don’t think so. Blackmailers tend to say, ‘That is going to cost you five hundred dollars a month’ or some such regular amount, and the deposits into the Bright account were much bigger, varied in amount from five thousand to twenty-six thousand, and were made at irregular intervals.”

“Maybe he was selling something,” said Betsy.

“Could be,” nodded Charlie.

“But he wasn’t dealing in antiques or something else honest, because why go to all that trouble setting up a false identity? Drugs, maybe?”

“I don’t think drug dealers put money into bank accounts. Banks are required to report transactions larger than ten thousand dollars. I suspect Johnny, as Christopher Bright, was a tax-paying citizen.”

“So what do you think he was doing?”

“I don’t know. But it’s possible that, whatever it was, it got him killed.”

“So you’ve changed your mind about Godwin being the murderer?”

“No, not entirely. It’s possible that Godwin was also involved in whatever shenanigans Johnny was into, and that there was a danger from somewhere that the scheme was about to be revealed, and Godwin murdered Johnny to keep from being indicted.”

Betsy refused to be drawn into an argument about Godwin. She asked instead, “Did you ever do your brother’s tax returns?”

He sat back with a satisfied smile. “Every year from his first job until about two years ago. Even when we were barely speaking because of this homosexual thing, I did his returns.”

“What excuse did he give for stopping?”

He had to think about that a few moments. “He said an important client offered him a referral and he thought he should take it.”

“Maybe it’s true.”

He shrugged. “Maybe it is. I know I believed him at the time.”

After Charlie left, Betsy went in to look at the files on John’s computer.

The homemade financial statement showed only deposits, no withdrawals. Betsy noted the date the account was opened, and some of the deposit dates.

Then she went to the biography of Christopher Bright. He was born, said the bio, at St. Luke’s Hospital in St. Paul going on twenty-eight years ago. John was a great deal older than twenty-eight. Evidently he had planned to take some lessons from Godwin on knocking a decade off his appearance. His parents were missionaries and set off with their little boy to Cancun, Mexico, where they stayed until he was twelve. He came back home to live with a relative (not further identified) until he was sixteen, then he went back to Mexico until he was twenty. There followed a gap in the chronology, until he appeared in Menomonee, Wisconsin, two years ago, in need of a driver’s license.

There was no mention of his education, nor a resumé of his employment record, or even his career choice—which must have been pretty remunerative, for him to have saved so much in that short a time.

Betsy closed that work of fiction and went to the torrid-language one.

This seemed to be a collection of anecdotes, descriptions of romantic encounters, or what was desired by way of romantic encounters—of course. This was boilerplate: sentences, phrases, brief scenarios that could be lifted and dropped into advertisements. “A casual walk by the lake, a romantic dinner, an evening by the fire . . .” read one. There seemed to be a great deal of that sort of thing. “A clean, discreet young man, inexperienced in love . . .” And here were love letters, not one of which was addressed to Dear Goddy. Heavens, there were pages of the stuff! Betsy slapped the computer closed, her lips thinning in anger. How long had this been going on? Certainly longer than the brief time since John and Godwin had broken up!

She had to get up and walk through the apartment, letting her anger cool. And when it did, there followed a chill. What if Godwin had seen this? Why, he’d be broken-hearted—and then he’d be angry. Or so Mike and that slender lady from the BCA might convincingly conclude.

Seventeen

SUNDAY morning Betsy went to church to pray for help. Sitting in the familiar surroundings, hearing the familiar words was a comfort, but not an inspiration. She had more hopes of the sermon. Father Rettger’s sermons were generally good. As he did on occasion, he began with a joke, the one about the man who prayed for years to win the lottery, with no success. Finally, an old man, he grew angry and demanded of God why he, a good and devout man, had never won. There came a crash of thunder and a mighty voice called down to him, “Because you never bought a ticket!”

When the mild laughter at this rather elderly joke ended, the priest continued, “So I bought a ticket”—more laughter—“and as you can see, here I am as usual, standing in the pulpit, not at home negotiating a purchase of ocean-front property in Miami. Why didn’t I win? If I should ask God why, I’m pretty sure His answer would be: ‘There’s a million people who bought tickets ahead of you. Be patient.’”

Betsy shifted uncomfortably. She didn’t feel patient, she felt impatient, with herself, this case, the sullen facts that refused to come forth and make sense. She wanted the crash of thunder and the deep, loud voice.

“Patience occurs in the Gospels frequently. The debtor in one of Jesus’s parables cries, ‘Be patient and I will pay you all.’ Paul writes in Corithinians, ‘Love is patient, love bears all things, endures all things.’ In Galatians, he says patience is one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit, and in Hebrews it was the important trait of our forebears in faith. And, it is not only a virtue for humans, it is a characteristic of God, spoken of in first Peter.

“Now it is true, there are times when God acts quickly, in the twinkling of an eye. It can be frightening as well as rewarding when justice is swift. It is recommended that children be corrected at once, and criminals be prosecuted quickly—‘justice delayed is justice denied’ after all, and tyrants need to be brought down as fast as possible to prevent their doing more harm. In fact, when it doesn’t happen like that, in the twinkling of our eye, we grow impatient, and wonder, Where is God?

“Where indeed? He will come to us, but in His own time. Do your part—buy a ticket. Then be patient.”

“Amen,” she repeated after him, and rose with the rest to recite the Creed. Be patient. Buy a ticket and be patient. Well, she was trying to buy that ticket, but it seemed very elusive. Or had she bought it, and just couldn’t tell? She began going over the case in her head, looking at the few clues she’d collected—useless, most of them—and got so tangled up in her thoughts that a few minutes later, going to the communion rail, she looked blankly at the goblet of wine when it was offered to her, unable to remember for a moment whether she was a sipper or a dipper.

She didn’t even notice that Jill had been sitting only a pew over until, making her way out, Jill touched her on the arm. She turned, an apology forming for getting in someone’s way, when she saw who it was. “Oh, hi, Jill.”

“You seem a little distracted,” Jill noted. “Though it’s not hard to guess why.”

“Yes, I guess I am.”

“Don’t be afraid for Goddy, he’ll do fine.”

Tears formed on Betsy’s lashes, but she blinked them away. “I know.”

“Meanwhile, I think you need a break. Come over to our house for brunch. Lars is home cooking up a storm. He makes a very good omelet.”

Something in Jill’s voice brought Betsy out of her focus on herself. The woman’s normal cool was slightly overridden by something else, pleasure or excitement; and Betsy, knowing how rare that was, said, “All right. Thanks, in fact. What time?”

“Eleven all right?”

“Yes. See you then.”

She went home to change out of her Sunday best into comfortable slacks and shirt, then decided to tackle the contents of John’s computer until it was time to leave for the brunch.

John had liked the computer games Spider Solitaire and Doom. He had kept a calendar of appointments on his computer, though it was far out of date—Betsy made a mental note to check if John had one of those pocket computers so many business people carried now.

His word processing program contained mostly correspondence. There was a letter written to an attorney John seemed to know well, greeting him by his first name and asking about his family before going into crisp legal language about the new will John wanted drawn up. He was going to leave slightly larger bequests to his nieces and nephews and a slightly smaller bequest to the William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul. He also wanted to eliminate a provision in the old will, which set up a spendthrift trust for Good-win DuLac. “Our situation has altered of late,” he wrote, “and so with regret I am ordering this change.”

She braced herself when opening John’s e-mail files, but most of them were newsy little chats between friends. There was a thank-you e-mail from Charlie for the Spanish-language book on the Museum of Anthropology sent to his daughter. But some were flirtatious, and there was a small set of increasingly torrid exchanges between John and a young man named Beni Greenleaf. Beni’s spelling was as atrocious as his sentiments were naïve. Betsy noted that Beni was local, that he was eighteen, “not very tall,” with a slender build and “curly auburn hair,” and worked as a waiter in an uptown restaurant.

Then she closed her notebook, shut down her computer and left for her brunch engagement.

Lars and Jill lived in a modest house out St. Alban’s Bay Road. Betsy drove slowly down the road, noting the late spring flowers and breathing the clean, damp air—it was overcast today, with a promise of rain before nightfall. Weekend Street was a short lane between St. Alban’s and the lake. The Larson house was at the foot of the street, though mature trees blocked all but glimpses of the water. The lot was large and oddly shaped, bordered with flowering shrubs. It contained a good-size barn-shaped shed in which, Betsy knew, Lars kept his beloved 1908 Stanley Steamer. Jill’s big old Oldsmobile and Lars’ regular-use car, a new red Volvo, had to sit outside until Lars got around to building a regular garage for them.