Shakedown

by Joel Goldman

  I went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator in the hopes that the food fairy had been there and had left me something to eat. It was as empty as the rest of the house. My stomach was talking to me, demanding to be fed.

  I’d left my wallet in yesterday’s pants. When I fished it out, I found the ?ash drive Joy had given me. I decided to read what I’d copied from Jill Rice’s and Wendy’s computers instead of the morning paper while I ate breakfast. I grabbed my laptop and headed out, looking for food and answers.

  Chapter Sixty-one

  I went back to the same place where I’d had breakfast the other day. The food was good, the price was right, and the Internet access was free.

  The place was full and smelled of bacon grease and fresh-baked cinnamon rolls and hot coffee. The chatter at the two-dozen tables clashed with the sounds coming from the open kitchen of banging pots and pans and orders placed and filled. Harried servers dodged between tables, sweating to keep up, their heavy feet slapping on the hardwood ?oor, laying down a percussion track.

  A few customers wore athletic shorts and T-shirts stained from just-finished workouts. Those who had contented, full faces and round bellies lingered over the New York Times. Three couples in skintight, multihued bicycle gear sat at two tables they’d pushed together, shoveling down pancakes and trading jibes about who had dogged it the last five miles.

  Two women, perfectly coiffed and made up, sipped coffee and nibbled on fruit, their tennis bracelets catching the light, their rackets resting beneath their table. A cute, dark-haired woman near fifty sat with a white-haired man, the two of them laughing the way a father and daughter should. One man sat alone, hunched over his plate. He looked up as I passed, his red bleary eyes and haggard jowls testament to an ill-spent night.

  A corner booth opened up and I slid in as the busboy wiped the table and the server, a woman with beehive hair, pinched eyes, a sour mouth, and a build that spread out the same way the Mississippi pours into the Gulf scooped up the tip the last customer had left, quietly cursing the few quarters she dropped into her pocket.

  “I’ll have two eggs up, crisp bacon, hash browns, toasted rye, and coffee. Hold the apologies to my arteries.”

  “Better you hold the jokes, honey. I’ve heard them all,” she said.

  By the time my food arrived, I was deep into Jill Rice’s tax records. She and her husband filed separate returns, which was common for spouses who wanted to keep their assets separate. Joy and I never did. Neither of us had had more than lunch money when we got married, and what we’d saved since then, we’d saved together. Money hadn’t driven us apart.

  The records Jill gave me didn’t include her husband’s return. Hers was pretty simple. She had interest income from CDs and bonds, dividend income from stocks, and capital gains from the sale of an office building she’d purchased ten years earlier. The interest income and dividends totaled approximately three thousand dollars. She made another hundred twenty-five thousand on the sale of the building. Neither amount was a red ?ag.

  I didn’t have her returns from prior years, so I had no idea how the income she’d reported compared to the past or whether she’d sold assets to generate cash for living expenses. A lot of wives who depended on their husband’s income would do that after their husbands went to jail.

  Jill’s only other income was from a partnership called PEMA Partners. There was nothing describing what PEMA Partners was or did. I looked online and came up empty. PEMA was private and quiet, operating below the cyberspace radar, just like hundreds of thousands of other partnerships all across the country that invested in raw land, strip shopping centers, bamboo farms in Central America, and other can’t-miss opportunities of a lifetime.

  The only documentation Jill had about PEMA was her partnership tax return, called a K-1, that itemized the amount of income attributed to her ownership interest. Whatever PEMA was, Jill Rice owned 25 percent of it, which threw off $868,000 and some change last year, more than enough to support her lifestyle regardless of her husband’s legal problems. She may have filed a separate return just to protect her assets from those problems. That was smart planning and good evidence that she knew enough about what her husband was doing to plan for the worst.

  I had been hungry when I ordered but lost my appetite while studying Jill’s return. I had staved off my anxiety over Wendy with the certainty that I’d find a lead that would take me to her. When it became obvious that I hadn’t, my gut began to twist, optimism giving way to pessimism that soaked my insides with fear. I had been holding myself together with string and chewing gum, fighting the shakes, and trying not to let the memories of my lost son and the damnation sure to come if I let history repeat itself and claim my daughter take over all my thoughts.

  I took a deep breath. My eggs smelled rotten. I shoved the plate to the edge of the table and opened the files I’d downloaded from Wendy’s computer.

  She had e-mail files and photograph files, and other files labeled with every aspect of her life, including work, friends, medical, music, recipes, finances, travel, subscriptions, blogs, yoga, downloads, videos, books, Mom & Dad, MySpace, and one labeled personal, as if there was anything else that could have been left out of the other files. It would take days to study the contents and extract anything useful.

  There were software programs that would perform keyword searches of her files, but I hadn’t loaded one on to my computer. I logged on to the Internet to find one. When the connection failed, I summoned my server, who told me that the restaurant’s system was down.

  “It was up a minute ago. What happened?”

  “I had a husband used to say the same thing. Like I told him, timing is everything.”

  “That’s just great.”

  “Hey, it’s free. You get what you pay for,” she said with a smirk that cost her a tip.

  “You got that right,” I told her.

  I had no choice but to take it one file, one document at a time. I started with Wendy’s e-mail files. She used a program that automatically downloaded her e-mail from her ISP’s server to her hard drive. That was the good news.

  The bad news was she had thousands of e-mails stored, including the ones that promised her long-lasting erections, weight loss without dieting or exercise, and several from former high officials in Nigeria who wanted to split ten million dollars with her because she seemed like an honest American. I looked for e-mail with Colby’s name, even though he could have used a screen name different from his own. After an hour, I’d found a handful of innocuous messages confirming dinner plans and other dates.

  Frustrated, I closed the e-mail folder and tried her Adobe files. There were hundreds of PDFs, some of them labeled with descriptive terms, many of them anonymous. I scrolled through them, clicking on one dead end after another. When I found a file titled “tax return,” I clicked on it.

  The file contained a copy of her tax return from last year. She’d filed a Form 1040, not the 1040EZ that I would have expected for someone working a job one step above entry level at a commodity brokerage firm and who didn’t have enough deductions to itemize. Wendy’s W-2 income was thirty-six thousand.

  I skimmed through the rest of her 1040 and understood why she hadn’t filed the EZ return. The reason was her eye-popping partnership income of $434,000. I blinked but the number didn’t change. I clicked through the rest of the pages to find her partnership tax return, my index finger twitching when I found the K-1. My daughter owned 12.5 percent of PEMA Partners. I started to shake and couldn’t stop.

  Chapter Sixty-two

  Since Kevin died, I had relied on hard facts to tell me whether people were good or bad, guilty or innocent. I stopped trusting my hunches and gut feelings because that’s what got Kevin killed. Besides, instinct never convicted anyone. Only the facts did.

  Staring at Wendy’s K-1 for PEMA Partners, I realized that I’d applied the same standard to my family, demanding tangible proof of their love and loyalty, testing our relationships agains
t only what I could prove beyond a reasonable doubt, afraid of anything that required me to get under their skin and into their hearts. I accused them of their ?aws and convicted them of their weaknesses. It made no difference that I applied the same standard to myself. That was only fair.

  Joy understood. She showed me her pain because she blamed me for it and concealed everything else. That Wendy may have hidden as much or more was a staggering indictment.

  Her ownership interest in PEMA Partners was unmistakable proof of a connection between her and Jill Rice and, by extension, Thomas Rice. I hoped but didn’t believe that she had hit a home run in the commodities market and innocently invested her windfall in PEMA. Wendy would have told her mother and me if she had. Instead, she’d kept secret the fact that her net worth now exceeded mine.

  Colby was the common denominator between Wendy and the Rices, which meant that unless someone had held a gun to her head, she could be part of everything that had happened. We are all responsible for the choices we make, but life had conspired against her since the moment Kevin was taken, her relationship with Colby spawning the perfect storm that had swept her into the hands of people willing to trade her life for theirs.

  When I stopped shaking, I opened my eyes and found my server hovering over me.

  “You want me to call 911?” she asked.

  I slid out of the booth and dropped a ten on the table, breaking my promise not to leave her a tip, and made my way toward the door. “Forget it.”

  She looked at my untouched plate. “Something wrong with the food?” When I didn’t answer, she got in the last word. “With some people, it doesn’t pay to be nice.”

  ***

  Thomas Rice was dead. Colby was on the run and Wendy was probably being held hostage to lure him back. That left Jill Rice as the only person who could shed any light on PEMA Partners. I didn’t have to wait for her to come home this time, though she didn’t answer the door until I’d rung the bell half a dozen times.

  “It’s you again,” she said when she opened the door.

  Her lacquered good looks had crumbled, replaced by a washed-out shell. Her eyes were empty, dull sockets surrounded by dark circles. Without makeup, she had the pale, lifeless look of someone who’d been ill for a long time, her survival still in doubt. She was wearing black pajama pants with a matching shapeless top, though she looked like she hadn’t slept since I’d told her that her ex-husband was dead.

  Rice clung to the doorframe for a moment, then turned and walked back into the house, the open door an invitation to follow. I expected to find a collection of empty wine bottles scattered through the house but there were none. She was stone sober but tottering on the edge nonetheless.

  She sat on a sofa in the den, lost among large, decorative pillows covered in bright ?oral prints that made her look smaller than she was. The room was large, one wall all glass, two layers of drapes drawn against the sun, the lights turned off, the room and her skin the same shadowy gray.

  A decorator’s fingerprints were evident in the way each knick fit with each knack, furniture and fabrics blending and contrasting in muted harmony with the wall coverings and artwork. A plasma TV hung above the fireplace, the screen black and silent. It was a perfect, soulless show house.

  There were different ways to conduct an interrogation. The choice depended on an assessment of the subject’s vulnerability. A good rapport made some people open up. They wanted to talk, to confess to someone they liked or whose approval they craved. A friendly smile, an understanding nod, and a humble acknowledgment that we’ve all stepped in the bucket at one time or another often opened the ?oodgates.

  The hard way was another way, but it was obvious that I wouldn’t have to go there with Jill Rice. She’d already gone there by herself, taken a self-administered beating, and was ready to talk. All I had to do was listen. I sat in a sleek, high-backed, black leather chair angled across from the sofa and waited.

  “They won’t release Tommy’s body until next week,” she began.

  It was the first time I’d heard her refer to him with any sign of endearment. “That’s a long time to wait to see him,” I said.

  She turned her head toward the covered windows. “I’ve waited a long time. I can wait a little longer.”

  “Have you made the arrangements?”

  She nodded, studying the drapes. “It will be private. There’s really no one else but me. I’m having him cremated.”

  “Then what?”

  She looked at me, a gallows grin creasing her lips. “Then I’ll come home and pack.”

  “Where are you going?”

  Rice shrugged. “I haven’t figured that part out yet.”

  “You should talk with someone, maybe a psychologist, someone to help you get through this.”

  She didn’t say anything, this time examining her nails. “Is that what the FBI recommends under these kinds of circumstances?”

  “You were divorced, but it’s obvious you still cared about him. That’s a lot to work through.”

  She grabbed a pillow and wrapped her arms around it. “I’ll tell you what’s a lot to work through. Killing him. That’s what I did, you know. I killed him.”

  We both knew that she hadn’t, but there was no doubt that she believed she had. “He died in prison, not at home.”

  “I sent him there.”

  “He broke the law. It was a risk he took.”

  “But,” Rice said, her eyes red and wet, “I turned him in.”

  “He was a drug dealer. He deserved to go to jail.”

  She looked at me like I was a simpleton, rolling her eyes. “I didn’t turn him in because he was a drug dealer. You see the way we live. Do you have any idea what this costs? I turned him in because he cheated on me. I caught him screwing our neighbor’s twenty-year-old daughter. She was home from college. He was working at home. I walked in on them. She thought it was funny.”

  “What did he think?”

  “That I would put up with it because of the money. That’s what he told me. I told him that I wouldn’t be his whore. It was all very dramatic.”

  “How long had you known that he was dealing drugs?”

  “From the start. Tommy was very good about business. He put together a pro forma and showed me how it would work. He said it was all about managing the risk.”

  “That’s why he put the assets in your name.”

  “Not everything. Just enough to take care of me if he ever got caught. He said he loved me and would do whatever he had to do to keep me out of trouble. When I caught him cheating, I was so mad I didn’t care what happened to him. After he was arrested, he said he forgave me. He said he’d gotten what he deserved for being unfaithful. Now he’s dead and it’s my fault.”

  Jill Rice didn’t mind being married to a drug dealer as long as he didn’t cheat on her. Thomas Rice made sure he provided for his wife even as he betrayed her. He forgave her for turning him in, but she couldn’t forgive herself. Politicians argue about family values. I gave up trying to make sense of them a long time ago.

  “Tell me about PEMA Partners. I ran across it when I looked at your tax records.”

  “I don’t know much about it, really. I worked when we were first married. We didn’t need my income, so Tommy invested it. I gave him complete control over the account. Then he started putting his money into it. He was good at what he did. Even after he lost his license, he could still invest for me. One day, after he started the drug business, he told me he’d used the account to buy into PEMA. He said it would generate enough money to take care of me if anything hap

  pened to him.” “Who are the other partners?” She shook her head. “No clue. Tommy handled every

  thing. Why are you so interested in PEMA?” “My daughter is one of your partners.” “Maybe someone was trying to protect her.”

  Chapter Sixty-three

  It had always been my job to protect Wendy. I’d done that as long as she had let me. I cautioned her about strangers w
hen she was little. I embarrassed her in front of her boyfriends when I asked them about their intentions. I called her to ask where she was and why she wasn’t home even if it was only midnight and she was over eighteen.

  As the anger and bitterness she’d silently harbored percolated to the surface, she lashed out at Joy and me, then drifted away, experimenting with sex and drugs. I tried even harder then, tried to pull her back, tried to protect her from herself. When Wendy finally came back to us, I held her close but not too close, having learned from my mistakes.

  When she graduated from college and got her own apartment, I advised her not to rent on the ground ?oor or near the stairs since that made her a potential victim for burglars and rapists. I engraved her name below the serial number on her computer in case it was ever stolen. After Wendy started her job, I told her to be honest and fair and that she could be disappointed, but not surprised, when others failed to meet her standards.

  I spoke the language of modern parents, encouraging her in her education and career, championing her independence. But in my heart of hearts, I was a throwback to my parents’ generation. I wanted her married, cared for, and safe, ambitions I kept to myself because she would have heard them as sexist, though I would have wished the same for her brother, had he lived.

  Jill Rice’s last comment rang in my ears as I drove away. Her husband had put his assets in her name to protect her from him. I remembered my conversation with Colby outside Fortune Wok earlier in the week when he intimated that he and Wendy planned on getting married. Maybe he had protected Wendy in the same way Thomas Rice had protected his wife. Then a greater likelihood hit me.

  There are some things a daughter will tell her mother only on the promise that the mother won’t tell the father. I was afraid I’d stumbled across one of them.

  Joy had moved into an apartment on Tomahawk Creek Parkway in a Johnson County suburb called Leawood. The three-story buildings were red brick with bright yellow trim. A jogging trail wound through the complex. I found her walking the dogs, reining them in from their pursuit of the geese that ?ocked to the pond at the edge of the complex.