Haunted Hearts

by John Lawrence Reynolds

  She told him she didn’t know how she would do it, but even as she said the words, she knew how, had known how for several weeks, and had played with the idea in her mind. Until then it had been only a fantasy, the kind of wild dream everyone has but few ever play out in reality.

  Three months earlier, the S&L had installed a new computer system. A consultant had been hired to design and implement the system, and he remained to train the staff in its operation.

  The system included a new method of handling securities that Susan found confusing at first. The young man training her was patient and considerate, and he told her he would set up a hidden file in the system that she could use to practice transactions. He had done this with other installations, he assured her, and the staff appreciated it. They could perform trial transactions and balances, generate monthly statements, and locate and correct their mistakes, without any data appearing on the bank records. The hidden file could never access actual accounts, so there was no potential for theft. But it could print hard copies of statements. It would be submerged within archive files, with a password only he and Susan would know. When she was confident of the system, he would erase the file. No one would be the wiser. She would shine in the eyes of management.

  It worked. During training sessions, she would make fictional deposits into the fictional account files, practicing the new procedures and routines. “You’ve got it,” he said. “Next time I’m in, I’ll erase the file and finish off the training program.”

  But he never returned. He called the following week, saying he was off to Dallas to repair a major systems failure. He would return in two weeks, three at the most, to erase the file. “Or I can give you the code and you can do it for me.” She said she would do it for him, and he provided the erasure procedure. It would work only on the test file. Nothing else would be affected. She could erase it when she needed to.

  The hidden file remained in place, and the morning that Ross Myers asked for the float, an elderly couple arrived to purchase a two-year term deposit of $40,000. She knew what she could do: She entered the amount in the training file and printed a receipt, telling them an official certificate would be mailed the following week. Then she deposited $30,000 of the couple’s deposit into the business-school account and called Myers to tell him the checks could be passed.

  “He almost jumped through the telephone at me,” she said to McGuire. “Five minutes later he came into the branch with a dozen roses, handed them to me, and gave me a big kiss. One of the women came over and told me how lucky I was to have such a romantic boyfriend, and I remember how my stomach was tying itself into knots.”

  “And the check he promised to cover the thirty thousand never appeared.”

  “No.”

  “And you didn’t stop there.”

  “No. I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”

  When no money was deposited Monday morning she called Myers from the bank, frantic with worry. A woman answered the telephone at the business school, a voice she didn’t recognize, and the woman told her Mr. Myers was busy, could he call her back? Yes, Susan said, yes, right away, it’s urgent. When she gave her name, the woman asked if Myers would know what it was about.

  There was no call. That evening she drank alone in the condominium until midnight, and then fell asleep. Myers arrived home after three in the morning with a gold ring for her and a host of excuses. When she asked about the check, he said it had been delayed a week, maybe more, but he would need more money, at least $10,000 more. In a panic she told him she would go to her manager and explain what happened, and Myers told her to go ahead. It was her they’d throw in jail, not him. Besides, he promised, he would cover the amount for sure and make it all up to her, and he would take her and the children to Florida for the weekend.

  She hardly slept that night. Myers was right. There was no evidence of his involvement. If she admitted what happened, she would at least lose her job and the respect of the people she worked with, people she had grown close to. Except for her children, they were her only friends and family now. She worried as well about the elderly couple whose money she had diverted to Myers. She assumed the bank would return it, if she were to be found out. But she still felt guilty about deceiving them.

  One step at a time, she told herself. She would find a way to cover their money from some other source. She would set a deadline for Myers to make up the money. She would get out of this mess somehow, and then she would get out of the relationship with Myers. She would not go to jail. She would not let her children see their mother as a criminal.

  The next day, when she arrived at work, the branch manager called her into his office. She entered trembling, and at the sight of three men she had never seen before she almost collapsed with fright, until one of them smiled and stepped forward, his hand thrust out to shake hers. Another pulled out a plaque identifying her as Employee of the Month. Along with their congratulations they gave her a $100 gift certificate from Filene’s.

  The nightmare had begun.

  She transferred $30,000 from a corporate account to cover the elderly couple’s needs. But Myers needed more money, enough to free up some accounts receivable, he told her. Soon, he would be able to pay it all back. The next month she transferred another $30,000 to the business-school account, diverting funds meant for term deposits and issuing false certificates from the hidden training files. When enough cash became available from other depositors, she would issue real certificates, falsifying the date where necessary. Each morning she entered the S&L offices expecting to be confronted by bank officials or the police, and each day she told herself Myers would fulfill his promise to replace the money.

  “I became numb,” she said. “When you get so frightened, when you feel so beaten down, you become like a sleepwalker sometimes. That’s how I started acting. Sometimes I just didn’t care. Sometimes I almost wanted them to catch me, just to make it stop.”

  She was seeing less and less of him. He was spending more time in Florida, where he boasted of joining an exclusive club in Palm Beach and purchasing a condominium in Fort Lauderdale. He owned three racehorses, and shares in two others. He kept a car in Florida and leased another in Boston, telling her he was opening a second business school near Miami, and soon they would be living there year-round. He bought her jewelry, diamonds, watches, and fur coats, telling her they were purchased with gambling profits. He assigned the management of the Back Bay Business School to a woman with bleached hair and breasts that sat unnaturally high and firm on her chest, a woman who, the few times Susan met her, regarded her with something between amusement and contempt.

  One day in early summer, when the children were due to stay with her for a week, Myers announced he wanted to take them to Florida for a few days. She was frightened and resisted, but the children begged her, they wanted to visit Disney World again as Uncle Ross promised. Myers was adamant, he had already made arrangements. She could fly down and join them for the weekend. He had always been gentle to the children, as he could be gentle and loving with her on occasion, and she finally relented.

  The next day she called the condominium number, but there was no answer until the evening, when Ross answered and said everything was fine. He and the children had spent the day at the beach, and were having a wonderful time, and he would call her the following day. When he didn’t, she rang several times, again with no answer, until he called her at work and told her, his voice changed and a hint of desperation in it, that he needed $50,000 and he needed it now, so she should have the money wired to Florida the following day.

  She told him it was impossible. She was worried that someone could be overhearing their conversation. He became angry with her, cursed her, told her she had better start doing what she was told, that she would regret defying him. When he hung up she was shaking and crying, and she retreated to the washroom, where a teller came to tell her some man wanted to speak to her on the phone.


  The man did not identify himself. He spoke softly, with a deep voice and a vaguely foreign accent. He told her to just do what Myers wanted and everything would be all right. When she protested, he said there would be a good chance, a very good chance, that her children would not be returning from Florida until it was done. She canceled the paperwork on several large term deposits that day, issued fake receipts from the training file, and transferred the money to Ross’s account.

  When he returned with the children two days later, he brought her gifts, but the children were changed somehow, a little distant to her, and she told herself she had to find a way to end this nightmare. She began to cut herself off from her children, because she was afraid Myers would use them again, and because she couldn’t bear their innocence, their trust in her and love for her, when she knew what she was and what she was doing.

  Myers’s demands for money intensified. Once, when she told him she couldn’t go on, he pulled her out of the S&L office and slapped her face until a passerby told him to stop. In the condominium he would beat her, leaving bruises on her arms and neck, and she would try to explain them away to concerned co-workers, saying she had been playing touch football with her son and had fallen several times, or that she had been hit with a tennis ball. He balanced the beatings with apologies and promises that he would soon be able to pay all the money back, promises that he had deals under way.

  She attempted suicide, swallowing massive quantities of prescribed tranquilizers and waking alone the next day, terribly sick and even more severely depressed.

  By the end of the summer, Myers was spending almost all of his time in Florida, and Susan was being treated for symptoms of extreme stress, mixing tranquilizers with alcohol, drinking and crying alone in the Marlborough townhouse, wanting someone to rescue her and desperately afraid of spending years in prison, as Myers had promised she would if she were caught.

  She endured two surprise audits of the S&L, telling herself each time that this was when she would be caught. But she and the computer programmer had both done their jobs well, and she received another Employee of the Month award, cited for the constant flow of compliments sent her way by customers.

  One evening at the townhouse, she received a telephone call from a woman whose voice she didn’t recognize.

  “She told me she knew who I was,” Susan said to McGuire. “I was half-drunk, I was past caring who I was or who she was. She said she was Ross’s former wife, his second wife, the one who had called Thomas. She said she knew what I was doing and that she wanted ten thousand dollars from me or she was going to the police.”

  “How did she know about it?” McGuire asked.

  “She had been seeing Ross again. I learned about it later. I learned so much later. Anyway, I told her to do it, do whatever the hell she wanted, because I didn’t care anymore. You have to understand. I was cut off from my family, my friends, my children. I was constantly paralyzed with fear that I would be found out, and yet I was hoping I would be, if only to end this nightmare. If you have never been under the control of someone, maybe you can’t understand. I was basically a little suburban housewife and mother who got herself involved with a psychopathic personality, somebody who knew how to push every button to encourage me, frighten me, intimidate me, manipulate me. Do you understand?”

  McGuire said he was trying.

  “You never will,” she said. “Not totally.” She smiled and set her empty coffee cup aside. “But I appreciate you trying.”

  At times, Myers would surprise her with expensive gifts and promise to restore the fun and excitement they used to have. At other times, he humiliated her by boasting of the women he was seeing in Florida.

  She began asking herself how she had gotten to this place, how the good student, the daughter of a deeply religious father, the girl who never told a lie and never stole a thing in her life, had permitted herself to become so beaten and helpless. She had only wanted to be liked, the way her customers and her co-workers at the S&L appeared to like her without knowing the hidden truths.

  She dreaded returning to the condominium each evening, dreaded the telephone calls from Florida demanding more money, dreaded finding him sitting in the shadows to frighten her when she entered, telling her he was flying back to Florida on an afternoon plane the next day and he needed another twenty, thirty, forty thousand dollars to take with him, sometimes cajoling her with gifts or flattery, other times threatening her and her children, or beating her.

  She began stopping at a bar on lower Beacon Street after work, sipping a few drinks to build courage to continue home. Men would approach her and she would usually fend off their attempts at conversation and return the drinks they bought for her. But there were times when she was lonely and frightened.

  “One day,” she said, “I heard someone refer to a man I had seen in there before. They said he was a cop, a detective. I thought, perhaps if I could make friends with someone like that, a police officer who would understand what I was going through, he might be able to help me. I was so afraid of being caught, afraid of the shame. I couldn’t stand the idea of prison, of being locked away. So I made a point of smiling at him, and he came over and sat beside me. We talked a little, and he said I looked like a woman who needed help.”

  McGuire’s eyes locked onto hers. “When was this?”

  “Three years ago last summer. He was nice to me, and he didn’t ask questions, not at first. I liked him, I wanted to get him to like me. So I didn’t tell him about Ross, not right away. We had to be careful, because he was married.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Frank DeLisle.”

  McGuire sat back in the booth.

  “It lasted less than a month,” she said. DeLisle took her to New York one weekend. When she returned to the condominium Sunday evening, she found Myers in a drunken rage, demanding to know where she had been, and with whom. She refused to tell him. He told her he needed money the next morning, at least $30,000, and she said she couldn’t do it anymore. He beat her on the back and on the thighs, where the bruises wouldn’t show, until she agreed to get the money for him. Then he became gentle and tender, as he always did when she agreed to his demands. He apologized for the beating, and told her what a wonderful woman she was, and how much he had missed her.

  The next day she totaled the funds she had taken from depositors and transferred into the training file. She broke into tears when the amount came to over $700,000.

  Myers called in the morning, asking if she had transferred the money yet, and she told him again that she couldn’t do it anymore. When he told her he was coming down to the S&L to make her do it, she called DeLisle and begged him to meet her at work as soon as possible. When he promised to be there within an hour, she alerted her manager that she was ill and might be going home early.

  Myers arrived in a fury, hissing across the counter at her when she ignored him, trembling inside. Then DeLisle entered, flashed his badge, and stared at Myers with such hostility that he spun on his heel and left without a word.

  “Frank wanted to know what was going on,” Susan said. “I asked him to take me somewhere, alone. I had things to tell him.”

  In DeLisle’s car she told him about the thefts. She gave him details on the training file, the threats Myers had made on her children, the beatings, and the manipulation. DeLisle listened in silence. He advised her not to go home that evening, suggesting she get a place to stay downtown. To her surprise, that was his only reaction. She wouldn’t see him again until her trial, when he appeared as a prosecution witness, testifying against her, reading aloud from the notes he had made after she left his car.

  She found a room in a tourist hotel, went to work the next morning, and was arrested for grand larceny by three detectives, who entered the S&L just before lunch.

  They took her downtown for questioning. Bail was set at $500,000, a lawyer was assigned to handle he
r case, and she spent four months in jail awaiting trial.

  “I kept reading about myself in the newspapers,” she said to McGuire.

  “I remember it,” he said. “I remember hearing the story, and how nobody could believe that someone smart enough to fool the state banking authority could steal so much money and claim it wasn’t for them. Just the newspaper reports, that’s all I remember.”

  “When the police went to look for Ross, the condominium was cleaned out. The jewelry and the furs he bought me were gone, and most of the furniture had been sold. He got rid of everything he could in exchange for whatever money he could get his hands on. He destroyed all the photographs of me and my children, so everything vanished except my memories. Then he hired a lawyer and told them that a friend of his was in trouble, meaning me. This friend, he told the lawyer, might try to implicate him. He and the lawyer went to the police together. The lawyer. . . .”

  “Marv Rosen,” McGuire said. He shook his head. Frank DeLisle. Father Frank. DeLisle DeLovely, the good family man, the good cop who would not tolerate swearing in his presence, the guy everybody would go into the jungle with. Sleeping with Susan and then dumping her, dropping a tip when he discovered what she was up to, and then abandoning her. And Marv Rosen, defender of hopeless causes. No wonder he bragged that Myers hadn’t stiffed him on any fees. Myers paid his legal fees with money Susan stole for him. Nobody stiffed Marv Rosen on fees, not ever.

  “How did you know?” Susan asked. “About Rosen?”

  “I’ve seen Myers’s file. And I talked to Rosen yesterday.”

  “About me?”

  “No. Only about Myers.”

  “Then you know what happened to Ross.”