by Avery Duff
He couldn’t help comparing Gia to Alison, trying to route their Winnebago through San Francisco: Oh, and why not drop by the farm and meet your parents? He’d bet even money that Alison’s long play had been locking onto a chunk of Worth real estate.
“Why do you want to know more about me?” he asked her.
“Because I like you way too much.” He kept looking at her till she said, “Seriously.”
“If you’re right, okay.”
She made him shake on it. Then she started writing in the password blanks.
“Jack was always busy, so lots of times I’d run down to the machine and get cash for him. So, I had his password for that account.”
His dry mouth made it hard to speak. He looked at what she wrote: L@L@918151413114L@L@.
“His account password in Los Angeles was only numbers,” Gia said. “None of this L@ stuff. But the letters of the alphabet represented by those numbers would have spelled Ironman.”
He got it now. The number he remembered wasn’t 918. It was a nine. Then an eighteen. I, the ninth letter in the alphabet. Then R, the eighteenth letter, and so on.
“Ironman,” he repeated.
“That’s how I see it,” she said.
And the L@? He had just now seen Bank of Hong Kong require that at least one symbol be used in an account’s password. So L@ meant LA to Jack Pierce. He remembered Jack’s finish-line photo, last leg of the Ironman. Jack telling Robert he couldn’t go the distance the day Jack fired him.
“LA Ironman LA,” he said.
“Ironman was a big deal to him,” Gia said. “Competing with guys ten years younger.”
Not anymore, he was thinking.
He wondered how many bites at the apple Bank of Hong Kong would allow him to nail the password. Usually it was three, but with Asian banks, who knew? If he burned up his last try, he’d be told to call the bank, and that would be that until he sued them to be made whole. That meant fighting Leslie’s bank, fighting an Asian bank, fighting the IRS, broke, possible jail time. Not how he wanted to spend his life—as Jack put it to him—with the hours dragging by.
“Okay, then,” he said.
Hands shaking, he typed the entire password into the box. Then he looked at Gia. “Good to go?” he asked.
“He’s predictable when you know him,” she said, squeezing his hand. “Very predictable.”
He hit Enter and the hourglass tumbled.
“Jack was with you that night. You or Alison, it didn’t matter. He was screwed with Dorothy either way. That’s why he had no alibi, why you never liked Alison.”
“Still care?”
He looked in her eyes. She looked in his. And he let it all go.
“No,” he said, “I don’t.”
The screen showed: Password Accepted/Transfer Instructions? The account balance was slightly under $10 million.
“Genius!” he shouted, and hugged her harder than she hugged him.
Once he entered the account information for his own account, he typed: $1,800,000.
She asked, “Million eight, that’s all you’re taking?”
“That’s all he owes me,” he said. And he hit Enter again. The transfer went through and his eyes slowly closed.
“What about Yoga Girl’s stash?” she asked.
He gave it some thought. Alison wasn’t his client anymore. Was there some other legal duty he owed her? He wasn’t even her boyfriend, whatever that meant to a sociopath, so he considered whether or not to be a saintly human being.
“If she ever finds hers,” he told Gia, “she can have it.”
CHAPTER 54
“Liar, liar, fucking liar!” Alison screamed from the back seat of the police cruiser.
The cruiser hugged the curb in front of Leslie’s former employer. Jerome Hartung had the ear of a pair of Santa Monica cops out front of the bank.
“First time Ms. Maxwell came in, I told her to come back with her receipt. The second time she came in, well, no receipt, and she went off like you’re seeing now, right in my office.”
“How much did she say again?”
“Two million eight. Give or take, as she put it. Not exactly a rounding error for a sane person,” Jerome added.
Alison was cuffed in the cruiser’s backseat, lying on her back and screaming. When she started booting a rear window with both feet, the cops hurried over.
One of them said, “Miss, stop it.”
The other one said, “I do not want to hog-tie you, Miss.”
“Fuck you,” was all they got back till they heard her sobbing. Then they heard her whimper something through a sliver of their open window.
One of them asked. “What did you say?”
“Robert . . . Robert . . . no . . .”
“Robert? Who is Robert?” he asked.
“I don’t know!” she screamed. “Fuck if I know who he is!”
So the cops asked Jerome if he knew who Robert was. Jerome thought about it, chose self-interest over sound banking practice. “I probably know twenty Roberts. Can you be more specific?”
On her way to the Santa Monica slam, Alison cooled down enough to think straight. She still had about eighteen grand in the bank and wished she hadn’t paid the hospital for her first ER visit. But that’s how she wanted to come across to Robert: a simple girl paying her debt because she had the money. Just a girl trying to do what was right. Same pose she used when she told him she might drop her lawsuit against Jack Pierce.
“I just want my life back,” she’d told him outside Sonya’s house, all the while thinking, What life?
Her thoughts turned to Brian. To what a loser her brother was. That was one thing Pierce had right. Brian’s two work buddies had each scored a hundred grand from Consolidated—but they were employees. Not her brother, no, not Brian; he worked for an independent contractor.
Give me a break, she said to herself. He was a loser like Dad. Her slob father: wasted, stumbling home from a clambake, choked to death on a conch fritter.
Lawyers, she hated all of them. Starting with the lawyer who’d screwed up her mom’s lawsuit after she picked up a fatal staph infection in the hospital. Took it on contingency, showed up drunk at a deposition, and later the case was thrown out of court. She didn’t dare sue him—his sister was the local prosecutor—but she packed a suitcase full of lawyer venom when she split for California.
So easy getting over on those Valley lawyers. Made her smile even now, back of the squad car. She kept her lawsuits small, dealt only with married men who didn’t like seeing photographs of themselves, fully erect, cuffed to a motel headboard. Lawyers realizing: “I’m fucked. How much does this bitch, Maxine Ellison, want to keep quiet?”
And leaving Tarzana, moving in with Brian? That was for the free rent. Brian, that guy. Gets cancer, still smokes Lucky Strike straights. He’d fire one up right there in his bed, the oxygen tube running up his nose.
“Loser!” she yelled.
“What?” a cop up front asked.
She didn’t bother answering, went back to figuring out where she stood. Robert would clear out of the condo—his movers already showed up. That gave her a place to work out what came next. She didn’t believe he’d stolen her receipt. If her money wasn’t banked, neither was his, meaning Leslie split on both of them. Something terrible had happened at the bank that even Robert hadn’t seen coming.
No way he would help her; that would never happen. One detail too many. That’s what the Marquez skeze told her in the hospital. Had she overplayed her hand with Robert? She couldn’t see it: good guy, good manners, real good-looking, all she ever wanted was for him to come over to her apartment. See her bruises, watch her pass out, and call the hospital. He’d go back to the firm, right? Tell them what Pierce did, right? Cause a big stink and after that, she would have been happy to keep quiet about it for a hundred grand. A tip to a waiter for the power couple, the ones who got off showing off their modern-art crap in the firm lobby.
Till the day she died
, she’d never forget calling Robert that night. Earlier, she’d parked outside the Bel-Air Hotel and got lucky. With Brian’s handcuffs already snapped around one wrist, watching from her car, Pierce showed up. Making it with someone in Suite 207 that night—someone besides her. One thing she then knew for sure: Pierce couldn’t account for his time.
That’s what cooked Pierce, and that was her doing, not Robert’s.
But she had to admit, Robert took the ball and ran with it harder than she believed possible. Ran with it till he banked her $2.8 million. And each day she waited for her money, it took every ounce of willpower not to bring it up every second of every day. To play it off, like having that kind of money was no big deal.
Screw Robert. Somehow she’d find that banker chick, prove her check had been banked. But with her background, all her aliases? She had to give it to that Marquez bitch—she saw this problem coming. Problems where her own honesty was the issue. Not like Brian’s case, where she’d simply been a conduit for him. Only his character mattered there, but the next case would involve her character.
Had it really been so easy for Robert to see through her? Gia Marquez said he was onto her for a long time. And he was gone, never even called her back at the hospital. So, yeah, he must’ve dug up Maxine Ellison somehow.
But how could that be? Sonya? After she’d ratted out Sonya’s yoga classes to zoning? He’d never think to check with Sonya—she just couldn’t see it.
With Robert gone, what she needed now was serious legal firepower to get back what was hers, but with no real coin for lawyers, investigators—her mind started to spin out on her new problems. Until a calming thought came to her as the cruiser rolled up to Santa Monica jail.
Lionel Brightwell’s live-in nurse.
He’d definitely want to help her, right? Pay for a serious firm to get on top of her bank. Who knows? At Lionel’s age, maybe she’d wind up with that big house on the hill. It was nothing compared with all that Gilroy farmland a half hour from San Jose, but waiting for that payday would have taken years. That Tudor up on Stone Canyon? That’s $20 million on a lit fuse.
As the cops opened the back door, she didn’t give them any trouble. Didn’t bother with a slip-and-fall with these two pretty boys, wearing bulletproof vests in case a latte spilled on them.
Better start acting sweet with this pair—that would be part of her record, too—because she was already thinking about her premier score.
My man, Lionel, she was thinking. Hey, LB, let’s get this party started!
CHAPTER 55
“Long as Big Worth was alive, everything was golden,” Robert told Gia.
Highway 1 slipped away, and Gia let him drive the Ferrari inland, winding up and over the Santa Cruz Mountains.
“Big Worth?” Gia asked.
“My grandfather, the original stakeholder, settled north of Gilroy. Now, Grandmother Tav, she wanted to be an actress. Blonde, like Marilyn Monroe and Grace Kelly in her day, she was headed from Seattle to LA when her car broke down on Highway 1, same station where Big Worth was gassing up. Once he fell for her, that was that. They came over the hill to Gilroy and moved into the big house.”
“The one in your pictures?”
“Right, a modest ten bedrooms. They had two sons, Robert and Garrett. Each one had a kid, and we all lived in the big house. Grandma Tav died early on, I didn’t know her, and Big Worth never remarried, but he believed in two things. The family farm, that was first, and second, that was the family farm, too. He assumed both sons felt the same way he did about farming, but they didn’t, and his lawyer finally talked him into spelling out who got what. Then, on his way to the guy’s office, he stroked out and crashed into a eucalyptus, end of our driveway.”
“Your driveway? Worth Avenue?”
He nodded. “Family called it Big Worth Avenue after that, but things changed. The younger son, Garrett, wanted to leave for Texas, and the older, Robert, wanted to farm. Common family-farm situation, but without the new will, things got ugly. Finally, the older brother bit the bullet, took out a huge loan on the farm, and paid his brother to leave.”
He asked her to open a file on his laptop called RLW STUFF. “Password is Z-A-C-K-M-A-Y-O.”
She started typing in the password. “Where have I heard that name?”
“Officer and a Gentleman. Richard Gere’s movie name,” he said.
“And at the end, he picks up the girl in his white uniform and carries her out of the factory. Girls love that ending.”
“Still?” he asked.
“We can’t help it,” she said. The desktop file opened. First thing she saw: an array of photos, many of them of young Robert and Rosalind.
“You’re looking at prom night, right?”
“Maybe,” she said. “How’d you know?”
“Women always go to that one. It speaks to them. The flush of young love, hopes and dreams for the future.”
“Lost virginity?” she asked.
“You tell me,” he asked. “Alison did the same thing you’re doing.”
He recalled for her that day in his apartment after Alison wavered on suing Jack. How he left that prom photo on the mantel so she would face it from his couch. From the kitchen, he watched her pick up that picture in his living room mirror. That put Rosalind’s story in play: his sister, sexually assaulted by a stranger on prom night. After hearing that story, Alison signed the power of attorney.
Gia remembered what Alison told her about Rosalind in the hospital.
“Rosalind? The one who overdosed and died?”
“She’s alive,” was all he said. “See that old newspaper article?”
On his computer screen: a Gilroy newspaper article. The headline:
GOODBYE, GILROY! HELLO, TEXAS!
Ten people gathered in a bon-voyage party photo. Robert is there, Rosalind, too, both midteens. So are the Worth brothers.
Robert pointed out his stunning mother to Gia: standing between the brothers.
“I was getting ready to start boarding school over in San Jose.”
After the bon-voyage party, he explained, Garrett, the younger brother, left for Houston with a few million, his birthright payday. It took him twenty-three months to lose every nickel of it in that big market meltdown. Twenty-three months to turn tail and come back home.
“He was always a little squirrelly,” Robert said, “a dreamer, but after that? Garrett’s never been right since.”
“Right?”
“Late-onset schizophrenia. And while he was losing his shirt, big brother Robert went long on the right crops, got every weather break, and made a killing. Took him ten years and three divorces to pay off the loan, and now he owns that three thousand acres plus, free and clear.”
“Your father, which one is he?”
“The younger brother’s full name is Garrett Logan Worth. His older brother’s name is Robert Kendall Worth.”
“You’re . . . let’s see . . . Robert Logan Worth?”
Not an exact match to either brother’s name. Before she could point that out, he asked, “What I like most about Officer and a Gentleman is Sergeant Foley trying to make Zack Mayo quit OCS. Mayo’s been running with his rifle, no sleep, Foley’s hosing him down in the cold, trying to break him, till Mayo screams at Foley: ‘I got nowhere to go . . . I got nothing else . . .’”
His voice was soft, saying it. She knew he was talking about himself.
“Tenth grade, that’s when the prom picture with Rosalind was taken. That year the market crashed on my father, and my life wasn’t laid out for me anymore.”
“You’re Garrett’s son?”
“Yeah. Named after Uncle Robert when the brothers were still tight. Now they live on the same farm, but . . .” His voice trailed off.
“So, your mom divorced Garrett after he flamed out in Texas?”
He looked at her. “I wish. She lives in the big house now. Dad lives over the garage in the old servant’s quarters. I never know when he’s going to be delu
sional or when he’s going to act normal. Depends on his meds, his dosage. Sometimes, when the others aren’t at home, he wanders around the house, goes into the study, acts like he’s paying bills, and feels like he’s the big dog.”
“And Mom is . . .”
“Shacked up with Uncle Robert. I can’t blame her, but . . .”
“But you do anyway,” she said. “To be or not to be. The mom hooks up with the uncle. Hamlet, right?”
“Hamlet,” he said. “And East of Eden, that old movie Giant, and Dallas on TV. You name it, we got it all at Rancho Rosalinda. Uncle Robert gets off having Dad under his thumb, same as he did me. Lending me money for law school, letting me pay him off but making me work the farm weekends and summers. Nowhere else—had to be at the farm.”
“And Rosalind is his daughter?”
“Yeah, my first cousin. Alive, taking the reins at the farm. We were never the same after Dad split for Texas—turned his back on the farm is how their side looked at it. Rosalind was my best friend in the world for fifteen years, and then she was gone in an instant.”
They cruised through Gilroy, headed toward the Diablo Range. He told her that manipulating his family history at the firm started off small. Misleading Philip with farm-fresh garlic to separate himself from the pack of law students. But Philip bought into his whole Worth Avenue, landed-gentry bio.
“It got out of hand over the years, so I’d say my parents were visiting LA when I knew Philip was going to be out of town.”
She nodded, imitating Robert: “Damn, Philip, you just missed ’em.”
“Like that,” he said. “I couldn’t risk telling him the truth. He might’ve felt obligated to tell his partners.”
“I doubt it,” she said. “I could tell he loved you.”
Another five minutes and he wheeled the Ferrari onto Worth Avenue, pulled onto the gravel shoulder. He called the farm manager, Luis, on his cell, speaking Spanish, laughing now and then, and finally asking him where he could find Rosalind.
