Secret Justice Page 7

  I took a second-hand whiff of pleasure. Bad habit, I know, and I don’t have the Queen Mum to justify this one.

  Marilee’s bourbon arrived just as she was about to resume the glass-pounding routine, for which I and the rest of the patrons were no doubt equally grateful.

  She drank half of the bourbon down quickly. I had no idea how much Marilee drank on a regular basis or how well she held her liquor. And I didn’t want to find out. I was still nursing my first gin, hoping the bourbon would make her more loquacious but not obnoxious.

  “Several, actually, and perpetually,” she said, jerking my thoughts back to our conversation.

  “What?”

  “Lawsuits. I’m involved in several lawsuits almost all the time. It’s the bane of a cardiologist’s existence. People with bad hearts and bad arteries just don’t live without care and treatment. And sometimes, they die anyway. Or they have a stroke. Then, the family sues the doctor. Hazard of the profession.” She dared me to contradict her.

  In my experience, people sued other people because they were angry and felt cheated. I could believe Marilee’s bedside manner left much to be desired and might easily get in the way of her medical skills. When a loved one died, she’d be the natural target of the family’s anger.

  “I don’t mean to pry into your business. I had the impression that Margaret believes you’re suing Otter, not the other way around. Is that possible?” I was a little sorry I’d started this and wondering why I wasn’t home, relaxing, with my own cigar.

  Then I remembered my child stepmother and that answered my own question. Maybe I was so interested in Margaret today because it gave me a legitimate excuse not to go home. That didn’t bear thinking about.

  “Anything’s possible. But in answer to your question, maybe because I get sued all the time, I don’t sue anyone myself. I usually try to resolve everything out of court,” she said.

  Then, she decided to give me a break. Maybe the bourbon was mellowing her some.

  She lowered her voice and I bent closer to hear her over the dull roar of the bar crowd. “And I am trying to resolve a dispute right now with Otter. Confidentially.”

  “So what is it?” Marilee might be the only person I know that I would ask so bluntly.

  In Tampa, no one asks anyone anything bluntly. Nor do we tell each other what we really think or how we’re actually feeling. We tell everyone else what we think, but not the object of our affection, or rejection, or disdain. It’s just not done. Bad form, you know. But it’s okay to shoot them. Go figure.

  Not Marilee, though. She was one tough cookie. Cool, strong-willed, and used to having her own way, all the time. Someone had once taken advantage of Marilee Aymes, but that was a long time ago, and she’d spent a lifetime making sure it never happened again.

  “That asshole,” she hissed, her nostrils flaring and her mouth set in a hard line across her ample face. “He sold me a multi-color sapphire-and-diamond pinky ring for a gift a while back. Charged me over fifty thousand dollars.”

  “Wow. That’s a lot of money for a gift.”

  Marilee ignored my comment. “I took it in to be appraised for my insurance and they said it was a fake. Can you believe that? I went right to Otter and told him he’d give me my money back or I’d sue his scrawny little ass and make sure it got on the six o’clock news every night for a year. Do you know what the toad had the nerve to say to me?” With each sentence, her voice increased in volume until she could be heard plainly over the din of the bar crowd.

  I shook my head and kept quiet.

  “He said the ring was real when he sold it to me and whoever I gave it to must have had the stones switched. He threatened to sue me for defamation if I went public with this. And then the pony-tailed twerp offered me ten thousand dollars to settle!”

  With this last exclamation, she slammed her glass on the table so hard the ice cubes popped out onto the floor. The bartender, having learned his lesson the last round, rushed over with a fresh drink just in time.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Tampa, Florida

  Monday 8:00 p.m.

  January 29, 2001

  “WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING at, Dad?” I asked as I approached him in the Sunset Bar at George’s a little while later. I sat down across from him in the booth after I stopped at the bar and ordered a Perrier, thinking I might be careful about the drinking so I could avoid turning into Marilee Aymes in another twenty years.

  “What do you know about the old masters?” My father responded.

  “Not much. What I learned in the required art history classes as an undergraduate. Why?”

  “I was thinking about how the smallest things can trip you up. If you want to embezzle from your bank, that is,” he warmed to his subject, leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head. I saw he was drinking coffee. Which meant he was working.

  Dad’s insurance agency issued errors and omissions insurance, bonds against employee theft in banks, brokerage houses, art galleries, jewelry stores and other places where theft can be a serious loss to a business.

  As the selling agent, claims came to him from his customers for initial investigation before they were passed on to the carrier. He loved his work and always had interesting tales of larceny to report.

  “Take the case of Miami’s CenTrust Savings and Loan, for instance.”

  “Now there’s an old case, Dad. You’re too young to be wallowing in the glory days,” I teased him.

  “True. But seriously, when your Florida banking officials figured out that the bank’s chairman had purchased a famous Rubens painting and two dozen other artworks for over $29 million, it didn’t take long to discover where the money came from.” Dad smiled a satisfied grin. “He’s been sitting in prison for quite a while and is likely to be there a bit longer before he starts collecting art again.”

  Dad thinks of himself as an all-American hero, a real John Wayne, one of the good guys who makes sure thieves go to jail.

  “And this is relevant to our lives today, why?” I said, smiling, too. I guess we all get to create our own illusions, especially of ourselves.

  Jim Harper looked nothing like the Duke. More like Gig Young with salt-and-pepper hair, actually. He was taller than me by about two inches. He played squash and liked to ski, so he kept himself in shape. But Dad’s crime-stopping role was strictly cerebral. He tried to out-smart those who stole from his clients.

  Today, he had on a black cashmere turtleneck and a tan suede blazer. Grey slacks, socks and brown shoes completed the outfit. He reminded me of a black and tan Doberman; slim, sleek, and stealthy.

  “I’m thinking about a new claim I got recently and how I’m going to prove that the bank’s president has been embezzling for a long time. It’ll be something small like that.”

  We’d always been able to talk about work. It was one topic where we were completely comfortable and compatible. It was about the only topic we ever discussed.

  “If I recall correctly, that Rubens sold for over eight million dollars not long ago. I’d hardly call that a small thing,” I reminded him.

  “True. But it’s not usually like that. Usually, it’s something smaller and easier. Like the guy who cheated on his expense report by claiming he’d been having dinner with the auditor and then the auditor caught it. Or the time we were looking through a stack of paid bills and we saw that some were folded in half where others from the same vendor weren’t—because the folded ones were phony and the clerk was paying himself. That’s the usual way we catch these things.”

  He set aside his coffee cup and reached into the file sitting next to him on the bench, handing me an unsigned letter dated about six months earlier and postmarked in New York. “Maybe you’d like to help me with this one. Besides wanting to see you, it’s one of the reasons I came here.”

  Dear Mr. Harper:

  I am a bank stockholder. I have reason to believe that the president is taking bank funds for his personal uses. I’ve asked him about this and h
e denies it. But he has a lot of perks for a guy with his salary and our stock isn’t worth nearly as much as we expected.

  He has all the money in the world, but we never get any. And the bank is doing well. I’m elderly and don’t have many assets. I need my money. Please look into this.

  I handed the letter back to him. “Won’t this be a problem for you? I mean, if the president has been embezzling funds, won’t you have to pay the bank on the bond?”

  “Yes. But that’s what insurance is for, Willa. It’s important that my insureds feel like they’re getting what they paid for. And this is a complaint from a shareholder. If you’re a bank, you can’t have many of those before you have the Feds coming after you. My insureds expect me to take these things seriously and to investigate them right away. Whether or not there’s anything to this complaint, the sooner we find out, the better.”

  “You must get hundreds of letters like this every month. Do you investigate them all?”

  “To one degree or another, we do. The reason I’m getting personally involved in this one is that there’s a lot of money at stake and the carrier is one of my biggest insurers.” He put the letter back in the file. “And it gave me an excuse to spend a few days with you.”

  I couldn’t help the warm glow in which his words bathed me, surprised at his expressed desire to visit. It wasn’t something I’d heard him say often.

  “So you read this letter and you looked into it?” I asked.

  “Kind of. I gave it to one of the younger guys to look into. And he didn’t find anything. But one night, I was just flipping through the stuff he had accumulated and I came upon this.” He reached across the table and handed me a list of transactions.

  I studied it for a while but couldn’t make any sense out of it. “What is this?”

  “It’s a list of transfers, all the deals the bank has done in the last ten years. Notice anything?” From the look on his face, I knew there was something to notice. But for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what it was.

  Accounting is not my strong suit. I like unraveling mysteries, but it’s words that interest me, not numbers. I pay someone to do my taxes and I’d pay them to do all my bookkeeping if I didn’t have George. He’s the numbers man. He loves it. To me, numbers are Sanskrit, close to voodoo, cave drawings—well, you get the idea.

  “I give up. What does it reveal, Oh Great One?” I asked with mock reverence.

  “Let’s take an example. Look here,” he pointed to a transaction about halfway down the first page. “He moved one hundred thousand dollars from Company A to Company B, both of which he controls. Then here, the first company shows a receivable on its books for one hundred thousand from Company B, but the second company shows no payable back to Company A.”

  “So what?”

  “Where did it go?” He said, both hands palm up toward the ceiling.

  “I give up. Where did it go?”

  “Check the next page. The only one hundred thousand dollar deposit recorded anywhere at the time was into the president’s personal bank account. Voilà! Elementary, my dear Watson. He stole it. Plain and simple.” Dad looked pleased with himself.

  “Why didn’t the big auditing firm catch that, if it’s true?”

  “Good question. Which is what I spent the day asking them. And you know what they told me?” He stopped again. His timing was almost as good as a stand-up comedian’s.

  “I’ll bite. What?”

  “They said they were never asked to compare all of the president’s personal holdings to the bank records. They were only asked to audit the bank. Which they did. Quite competently.”

  “So how much are we talking about here? How much do you think the president has taken from the bank?” Which really meant how much had he taken from depositors and shareholders.

  Dad answered me as he collected his documents back, put them in his folder and then inside his briefcase. “I’m thinking several million over the years,” he said, almost nonchalantly, like several million dollars was gas money.

  To signal he was done working for the day, he ordered a draft beer and I ordered Bombay Sapphire and tonic with lemon, not lime.

  “Who has several million dollars?” Suzanne asked, as she approached our table.

  Today, she was wearing another of her silk designer warm-up suits. This one was silver and the underlying silk tee-shirt was bright teal. She wore silver flats with the easily identifiable Prada look, meaning they cost more than a good dinner for four at George’s restaurant.

  I’d been wondering how she could hold up her left hand under the weight of the obscenely large diamond engagement and wedding bands she wore, but even the addition of the notoriously heavy diamond-beveled platinum Rolex didn’t seem to keep her hand from fluttering to her perfectly styled hair.

  “That’s what I intend to find out, darling. That’s what I intend to find out.” Dad’s determination made me shudder and think that I didn’t want to be in that bank president’s shoes right now.

  He not only looked like a Doberman tonight, he fairly growled, reminding me that Dobermans can be effective attack dogs as well as good for personal protection and defense. Like a football team, offense or defense just depends on who has the ball.

  Later Monday evening, George and I sat in the dining room of his restaurant with Suzanne and Dad, having put off the quiet family meal as long as we could. I was once again admiring the china, crystal and silver that George had inherited from his Aunt Minnie, along with her house. The pieces were worn and well-used, which made us believe Aunt Minnie had had a wonderful life here, a tradition George and I intended to continue.

  The four of us had ordered dinner, but I had little appetite for the heavenly Salmon with White Wine Sauce and fresh snap peas that was usually one of my favorite dishes. George’s chefs had won so many awards that he couldn’t keep all of the plaques on the wall in his small office off the kitchen, so he stacked them on the floor.

  George felt it was gauche to display one’s achievements in the plain view of others, even if his competitors did so.

  Salads, complete with the dried Traverse City cherries that George orders every year from American Spoon Foods, were before us on the table and the talk had turned to sports, as it always did on social occasions with Dad.

  Suzanne and I were bored with the conversation, but our reactions to it were quite different. I was grateful that I didn’t have to contribute, while Suzanne seemed annoyed that she was being excluded.

  Get used to it, I thought. Dad had about as much desire to discuss social topics that would be of interest to Suzanne and me as he had to discuss his deceased first wife. Which is to say, no interest at all and no intention of doing so.

  It’s not that I don’t love Jim Harper. Just the opposite, actually. I’ve loved him devotedly all my life. I’ve begged him to visit us, to stay a while, to leave those cold New York winters and enjoy the sunshine.

  Yet, I see Dad rarely. I wanted to get to know him better, to leave my adolescent feelings for him, both positive and negative, behind us. To forge a new, adult relationship.

  Since Mom died, Dad has been rather scarce in my life. He’d loved mother deeply and just never seemed able to cope with her loss. Instead of the two of us helping one another through Grace Harper’s death, his solution had been to run away and hide, leaving me to live with Kate and work things out on my own.

  We’d been wary strangers since, although I suspected he wanted to change our relationship as much as I did. It had been more than a year since I’d seen him briefly in New York the last time, and then we’d just had lunch.

  All of which explains why I never know how to act around Dad. He’s a good man, but he can’t deal with emotional issues, so he ignores them. He never wants to discuss Mom and he doesn’t want to hear anything remotely unpleasant. He only talks about work and superficial things: sports, the weather, vacations. He’s a good guest, though, and entertaining.

  Despite my unease, so far, Da
d had been an excellent Gasparilla guest, I persuaded myself with the help of the wine. He’d been pleasant, fun, entertaining and the other guests liked both him and his beautiful young wife. No one appeared surprised.

  In Florida, the February/December marriage is almost as accepted as it is in Hollywood.

  I was the only one who seemed to notice how much younger Suzanne was and to find the relationship embarrassing. But then, I was the only one who saw in Suzanne what Jim Harper saw in her.

  I concluded I could work out my relationship issues with him some other time, and raised my glass of Stag’s Leap Cabernet in a silent toast to my father. The wine was much too good to sour with a bad mood.

  Suzanne, less tuned in to the reactions of her new husband than I, waited for a lull in Dad’s replay of last week’s Super Bowl and jumped right in, with gusto. She started talking about the wedding, redecorating Dad’s apartment, the honeymoon, and finally got around to the new baby.

  Every comment she made, it seemed, was followed by, “Isn’t that right, Jimmy?” leaving Dad no space to reply and forging into the next sentence without expecting one.

  By the time Suzanne took a breath, we were through with our main courses and the waiter appeared to take dessert orders, which resulted in a few seconds of sound other than Suzanne’s constant, high-pitched, meaningless prattle.

  Since I’d been running eight to sixteen miles every day to train for the Gasparilla Distance Classic, I could eat with abandon. I ordered the Gasparilla Goldbrick, a sundae the chef created especially for the festival and makes only during Gasparilla month. It’s golden vanilla ice cream, coated with butter toffee chocolate sauce that hardens into a sort of classy Eskimo Pie with crushed pecans on top.

  On the side of the pirate ship-shaped dish it’s served in is a chocolate coin wrapped in gold foil. The coin is embossed with the face of the legendary José Gaspar, for whom the month’s festivities were named, on one side, and his pirate ship on the other.