Exit Strategies

by Catherine Todd

I looked at him, but the professional mask was gone. He just looked concerned.

  “Relieved,” I said. It was the truth.

  “Really?”

  “Really.” I didn’t say any more. I could save my job worries for another day.

  “So what now?” he asked.

  “I have to decide what I want,” I told him. “But first I have to go shopping for some sensible shoes.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Melissa’s father, Eric Peters, chuckled with glee at the documents we brought him. “I haven’t thought about this stuff in ages,” he said.

  “You’re not practicing, then?” I asked, ignoring Melissa’s warning look.

  He waved his hand. “Oh, no, darling, I’m in real estate now. My lawyering days are over for good.”

  We were sitting in the living room of his trailer in Happy Village Trailer Park in Santee, a suburb of San Diego many miles inland and as far from La Jolla in every respect as it was possible to get. It wasn’t what I’d been expecting, to say the least.

  Mr. Peters seemed to read my mind. He smiled. “I’m in my minimalist period now,” he said, looking around the room. “Everything is secondhand. It’s unbelievably refreshing.”

  Melissa closed her eyes.

  “All right, my dears, we have lots to talk about.” He practically rubbed his hands together, making his stomach jiggle beneath his shirt. Wherever Melissa had gotten her stunning good looks and commitment to fitness, it wasn’t from Daddy. It made me wonder if she’d been adopted. He put the trust amendment drafted by Ryan down on the battered coffee table. “Now let’s look at this first. Becky”—he raised his eyes and looked at me—“Missy tells me you figured out that this might violate the Rule Against Perpetuities. Is that right?”

  “Well, I wondered,” I said.

  “A first-year associate, imagine that! It didn’t occur to Missy to wonder, did it, darling?”

  “No, it didn’t,” Melissa said tonelessly.

  Uh-oh.

  His voice took on a sharper tone. “Well, what you saw, Becky, and others didn’t was that even if it doesn’t sound outrageous to amend the trust to add the trustee’s grandchildren and terminate it at the death of the last to die of the grandchildren, it violates the rule because any grandchildren (bless their little hearts) could very easily die more than twenty-one years after the death of whoever is the last to die, the trustee or her four-year-old son. In other words, the trust has to be distributed prior to twenty-one years after the death of everyone living at the time your friend Carole made these changes or it violates the rule.”

  I was very happy to be right, but I didn’t like being used as a weapon in some war between father and daughter. “It was a lucky guess,” I told him. “But thank you for clearing it up.”

  “Nonsense,” he said.

  Melissa shot me a look I couldn’t interpret.

  “So what should I do now?” I asked him.

  “We’ll get to that. First we get to the really interesting stuff.” He waved the copies of the bank statements under our noses, like something we should smell. “Now, I want you to understand that here we’re entering the realm of speculation. There is nothing concrete to go on but two bank statements for offshore accounts. Nevertheless, we can entertain some very delicious suspicions, based on our experience and the unlikely coincidence of Mr. Anderson’s…um…involvement with two unscrupulous women with accounts in the Cayman Islands.” He looked at me. “Melissa will have told you, I assume, that I am not totally lacking in experience in this somewhat dubious practice myself.”

  “I didn’t provide any details,” Melissa said.

  “Nor do you know any, my child. And we’re going to keep it that way. It’s enough to mention that I know, shall we say, what I’m talking about.”

  I nodded. It seemed the most appropriate response.

  “All right, then. Let me say at the outset that there are lots of legitimate reasons to have offshore accounts, the primary one being to diversify investments. You’re probably aware that most hedge funds are formed offshore, even by the most reputable investment advisers, as a way to avoid—legally—onerous U.S. securities laws.”

  I wasn’t, as a matter of fact. My finances didn’t exactly put me in the hedge fund category, and my knowledge was limited to the ones that periodically made headlines for nefarious reasons. Still, I nodded again to prove I was listening.

  “Nevertheless, the biggest advantage of these accounts if you’re up to something you shouldn’t be is the secrecy laws of the offshore country. You can knock on the door, but nobody’s going to tell you anything.” He looked at me. “Now, suppose you’re the trustee for a fairly substantial amount of money, but your trustee days are numbered because, say, you’re planning to marry again, and under the provisions of the trust your position will terminate upon your marriage. Or maybe you just hate the other beneficiaries so much you don’t want them to get their hands on any of the principal. Ever. Anyway, with the help of an adviser of questionable virtue, you decide to salt away some of that money for yourself, thereby accomplishing two goals—feathering your own nest, and denying the other beneficiaries their rightful due. So how would you go about doing that?”

  I didn’t know the answer, but I could see how smart he was. He’d already pulled all the significant facts out of what I’d told him about Carole and the trust, and he’d constructed a believable hypothesis.

  “I’m sure you’re going to tell us,” said Melissa.

  “Yes, darling, but bear in mind what I said about speculation, won’t you? It’s only a theory.” He smiled. “Inference. An educated guess. What have you. Anyway, here’s what you might do. You take a substantial portion of the trust assets and buy some investment—stocks, annuities, mutual funds, something—outside the United States. Then you claim that the investment has gone bad, thereby reducing the principal considerably. With the aid of your adviser, you bogus up some documents—stock certificates, investment advices, insurance policies, annuity contracts, whatever—that look just like the real thing but are really fronts behind which the money is hiding. You provide your legitimate accountant with the name and contact of the agent in the Caymans who sold you the investment, but when that person is contacted he is prevented from giving information because of the secrecy laws of the islands. Meanwhile, you shuffle off a nice payment into another overseas account for your adviser, who doesn’t declare it on his income tax. The beneficiaries get an accounting statement showing a loss for the accounting period with a corresponding reduction of principal. They are very sad, they may even be suspicious, but what can they do? If no one talks, it’s not that hard to get away with it.”

  I sat back in my chair. “Oh, wow.” I was absolutely, completely, entirely certain he was right. I could feel it in my bones. My anger took my breath away.

  “What strongly suggests the possibility, of course, is the presence of these two accounts for Crystol Enterprises. Mr. Anderson appears to have been disbursing his favors rather freely. Careless of him. Now, in this case, Dr. Crystol may be thinking of running the same scam, or she might just be hiding some of her payoffs from the pharmaceutical companies to avoid paying tax, or she may be setting up a legitimate offshore investment. The size and nature of Mr. Anderson’s off-the-books payment throws a little shadow over her legitimacy, but it’s not conclusive.” He turned to Melissa. “You’re not by chance still enamored of this rogue, are you?”

  She flushed. “I hate his guts,” she said.

  Mr. Peters raised his eyebrows. “That’s perhaps fortunate, because if our suspicions are correct, I fear the Internal Revenue Service will have more than a passing interest in his activities.”

  “Well, what can I do?” I asked. “I can’t let them get away with it! If no one will talk, how can we prove anything?”

  “If there’s anything to prove,” he reminded me. “You know, the wonderful thing is, people do talk. They tell other people in their families about these accounts, or t
hey brag about what they’re getting away with. They leave inconvenient records of their transactions. If there isn’t supposed to be any money in the trust, finding an account that isn’t supposed to exist is extremely helpful. There are all kinds of ways. The IRS”—he gave a little shudder that appeared to be genuine—“has its methods, I promise you.” He smiled. “But you, Becky, are fortunate.”

  “I am?”

  “Yes indeed.” He folded his hands across his stomach. “Would either of you like a soft drink? I think there’s some grape soda in the refrigerator.”

  It was my turn to shudder. I tried to suppress it. “No, thanks,” I told him.

  Melissa made a face and said nothing.

  “Well, then,” he continued, “let’s assume for a moment that my little story is true. The evil trustee has stashed away a portion of the trust that rightfully belongs to the beneficiaries, depriving them of—well, whatever it’s depriving them of.”

  “A private school education, for example,” I suggested.

  He spread his hands. “What have you. Now we come to the lucky part. Not content with stealing some of the principal for herself—and of course she can’t steal it all, because that would look very suspicious—the trustee devises a plan whereby the hated beneficiaries will never be able to get their hands on any of the principal, at least till they’re too old to need it for anything but orthopedic shoes. Her adviser has probably told her to lie low for a while to avoid emphasizing the connection between them, and he certainly wouldn’t be involved in anything so blatantly self-destructive as changing the terms of the trust. But she can’t help herself. Her loathing for the first wife and her stepchildren festers in her till she has to do something, so she asks an associate in the firm—an ignoramus, but an innocent ignoramus—to amend the trust at her direction. The fact that it is the firm where her rival also works adds immeasurably to her satisfaction.” He looked at me. “Liking this story so far?”

  “Liking’s probably not the right word,” I told him. “I’m waiting for the denouement.”

  He laughed. “Are you seeing anybody?”

  “Yes,” I said, probably too quickly.

  “Pity. I like smart women.”

  “Get on with it, Dad,” Melissa prompted him.

  He sighed. “All right. The great thing about this story is that the trustee’s greed will be her ultimate undoing. Because now she’s gone too far, and her attempts at selfishly tying up her late husband’s assets in perpetuity come up against the laws designed to keep people from doing just that. People really do want to control others from the grave, you know. It’s quite remarkable. You can’t believe some of the conditions I’ve seen people impose on beneficiaries and trustees. The restrictions are limited only by the trustor’s imagination—or paranoia. I—”

  “Dad,” Melissa said again.

  “Oh, Missy, you’re always spoiling my fun. As I was saying, thanks to some very sharp lawyering on the part of the trustee’s rival, the violation of the Rule Against Perpetuities has been uncovered. Now the trust gets into court, and a complete accounting, probably including an auditlike review by a Special Master, will undoubtedly uncover the sort of shenanigans we’ve been postulating here. If they’ve been up to something they shouldn’t, it’s unlikely to escape the auditor’s notice, especially with a little prompting from interested parties. If the investment losses were on the level, at the very least you’d get the court to review the trust and, undoubtedly, remove Carole as trustee.”

  “That sounds like a no-lose situation,” I said excitedly. “How do I get the court to review the trust?”

  “You go to this person whose name I will give you and get him to file a motion for accounting. Then you wait to see how the chips fall.” He put the tips of his fingers together and lifted his eyes to mine. “I wouldn’t be too sure about the no-lose situation, though. In my experience there’s no such thing. Either way, I doubt RTA will be very happy with you. And—”

  “I’m helping her find another job,” Melissa interjected.

  “And you may get your client Dr. Crystol into a lot of trouble. Of course, you may feel she deserves it since she’s clearly setting you up.”

  “Setting me up?” I asked, with a sinking feeling in my stomach.

  “Well, it certainly looks that way. I take it you know why she wanted you to represent her?”

  “I assume the answer is not because we were old school friends?”

  “Were you old school friends?”

  I laughed. “No, not really.”

  “Well, forgive me for being blunt, but why pick an inexperienced lawyer in an unlikely firm to hand your business to? Does the term scapegoat mean anything to you?”

  “Dad—”

  “No, it’s okay,” I said. “He’s right. I’ve always suspected there was something fishy about it.”

  “Attagirl,” Mr. Peters said. “So go get ’em. This is one of those ‘biter bit’ stories. Don’t let ’em get away with it.”

  “I won’t,” I told him.

  “So what did you think?” Melissa asked me as we left the trailer park in her BMW M-5. She seemed hell-bent on proving the manufacturer’s claim of zero to sixty in under five seconds. The g forces were pinning me to my seat.

  A loaded question if I’d ever heard one. “He’s very smart,” I said cautiously.

  “He is, isn’t he?” she said. She looked over at me. “He was impressed with you,” she said.

  I had to bite my tongue to keep from screeching at her to keep her eyes on the road. “I’m sure he was just being nice,” I muttered.

  “Actually,” Melissa said, “he isn’t a particularly nice person. And he has very exacting standards.”

  Everybody’s relationship with their parents is so complicated. I couldn’t think what to say. “It must be hard for him, losing so much,” I said.

  She smiled grimly. “Don’t fall for it,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “That minimalist crap. The trailer park. Grape soda.” She snorted. “The whole bit. He’s a fake and a fraud.”

  “I don’t…”

  “It’s an act. A pose.”

  “For whose benefit?” If it was an act, it was a good one. That living room was pretty shabby. I doubted that the bedroom was secretly done up in Louis Quinze.

  “For the benefit of people who might be interested if they thought he had money stashed away in accounts somewhere.” She shrugged. “He wouldn’t tell me, of course, but I don’t believe for one second that he doesn’t have the kinds of offshore accounts we were talking about today. He’s far too clever.”

  “Oh.” I longed to ask Melissa what her mother was like, but I didn’t dare. Since there was no sign of her at Happy Village, I assumed she was no longer in the picture. It was interesting how transparent other people’s hang-ups were, as opposed to your own. Melissa had clearly rejected a lot of what her father represented (like junk food and big hips), while at the same time she tried to gain his approval for her mind and legal skills. I had a swift, painful vision of Allie and David, far in the future, sitting around some kitchen table dissecting their relationship with me.

  “Changing the subject,” Melissa said, taking her right hand off the wheel and resting it on the gearshift, ready to zap the competition at a moment’s notice, “I’ve followed up with Jason Krill. He really is interested in employing both of us. It could be very exciting, Becky. His company could be the next global IT powerhouse. You’d be in on the ground floor getting your get-rich-quick credentials in order.” She pushed her hair back from her forehead. “Of course, you’d have to pay your dues for a while. You have to work really hard to get started and then to keep from getting obsolete. You have to stretch yourself pretty thin. But the payoff is worth it.”

  I looked out the window, watching the world go by at eighty-two miles per hour. You couldn’t see much. I had to do something—my future at RTA was written in sand—and I could certainly use the money, but I was alrea
dy giving up so much to work. When would I have time for my children? Allie still had at least two more years at home. My mother? I hadn’t talked to her about anything meaningful in at least fifteen years. I thought maybe I should try before it was too late. Myself? I only had half a life now, or maybe only a third of one.

  “I’ll think about it,” I told her. “But thanks—I really appreciate your help.”

  “What’s to think about?” she asked.

  “You’d be surprised,” I told her.

  Chapter Thirty

  Early morning always made little pouchy things under my eyes that would not be smoothed away by any level of diligent application in the makeup department. I considered answering the door in sunglasses, but at 4:22 A.M. this would very likely be seen as an affectation. I put the sunglasses in the pocket of my windbreaker for later. I turned off the porch light so I wouldn’t stand there blinking like a mole.

  “Hi,” I said cheerily, opening the front door. I’d already warmed the croak out of my voice with coffee, but my brain was still barely plugged in.

  “Hi,” Mark said. I was happy to note that he had on a jacket nearly identical to mine, so I must be dressed properly. He eyed me. “What do you have on under your windbreaker?” he asked.

  I laughed. “Isn’t it a little early for that?”

  He laughed too, but he squeezed my arm, exploring the fabric.

  “Layers,” I told him. “A T-shirt, a sweater, and this. It’s waterproof,” I added. I felt as if I were auditioning for an Eddie Bauer ad.

  “Good,” he said. He looked at my feet.

  I stuck out one running shoe–clad foot for his approval.

  “Perfect,” he added.

  He was starting to make me nervous. All this emphasis on outdoor attire pointed to some exceptionally athletic activity, a sphere in which I did not shine.

  Burdick, scenting opportunity, leaped out of his basket in the kitchen and made a beeline for the front door. I reached around Mark and pushed it shut, stumbling a little as I tried not to step on the cat. Mark caught me before I tripped. “Sorry,” I said. “He’s an opportunist.”