The Deposit Slip

by Todd M Johnson

  As Erin turned onto the side street, she could just make out the dark mass of her SUV, shadowed from the starlight under the maple. A few steps closer and Erin realized that something was wrong.

  She pulled her keys from her purse and her steps accelerated to a quick walk, then a jog. Thirty feet away and she could make them out. One figure was standing on the hood of the SUV, the other alongside. The figure atop the hood was raising a hand holding something long and slender. The arm came down, again and again, and each time Erin heard the thump and crack of the windshield shattering as the hand descended.

  She stopped and screamed out a high, loud shout of anger. The dark figures turned to face her, and Erin waited for them to run away.

  They did not. The man on the hood slid off to one side, joining his companion. Their faces were turned in her direction but shadowed—and she realized, her heart accelerating, that they were deciding whether to flee at all.

  Slowly and deliberately, the man from the hood turned away from her. The other man followed and together they walked away from Erin down the street.

  Erin stood without moving, clutching her bag and keys, staring at the swaying limbs of the maple that hung like a bower over the damaged car. She no longer felt the cold. Still her hands quaked. And for the first time in her life, standing on the streets of her own hometown, Erin felt deeply afraid.

  4

  It was nearing midnight when Jared entered his townhouse following his visit to Clay’s office, briefing book in his hand. He tossed it onto the couch on his way to the kitchen.

  The refrigerator held a Mountain Dew and a Red Bull. He grabbed the Red Bull and trudged wearily back into the living room.

  The answering machine on the coffee table flashed with a single message. It was Jessie, asking how things had gone at Clay’s office. He weighed calling her back, at least to hear a friendly voice. But it was very late. His eyes were sore and his head felt like it was stuffed with cotton.

  Jared took a long gulp of the caffeine drink. His eyes were drawn to his monthly bills, stacked on the end table, ready to be paid. He picked up the top ones: MasterCard, just two hundred dollars under the credit limit; the cable bill, Final Notice across the letterhead; American Express; Xcel power.

  The Olney check would’ve helped. Maybe another six months of grinding and things would be different now that the Wheeler case was done—especially if he could coax more litigation out of his referral sources and maintain the long hours to work the cases. Tired as he was, he couldn’t afford to take a break now.

  Jared set the bills down and wearily reached for the binder. Time to see what Clay was making such a fuss about.

  The binder slipped from his hand and hit the floor, opening with a dull thud. A legal-sized sheet of paper unfolded at his feet.

  It was an oversized photocopy. The enlarged pixels were blurry and the color washed out, but the language and lettering were legible.

  It looked like a deposit slip with the name “Ashley State Bank” in cursive lettering just below the upper edge. In its center were three lines of mechanical machine-print lettering. The first gave a date, three years and eight months ago—February 10, 2008. The second line was an eight-digit account number. The third line read:

  Deposit: $10,315,400.00

  Jared sat up, a rush of adrenaline rousing him. He opened the binder, removed the copy, and held it up to the light. There were no more marks visible on the slip. He returned to the binder with increased interest. The next page was entitled “Erin M. Larson, as Personal Representative for the Estate of Paul Larson v. Ashley State Bank,” followed by a short four-page case summary. Jared forced down another deep drink of the Red Bull and settled onto the couch to read.

  Paul Larson was a farmer with property midway between Ashley and Mission Falls, Minnesota. . . . The farm had been in the Larson family for four generations. . . . In good years the land yielded enough for the next year’s crop and an occasional trip to Florida. In bad ones, only debt. . .”

  After five minutes, Jared reached the end. This was too short. He looked at the pockets inside the binder cover, but there was nothing more. He read the report through again, focusing especially on Erin’s discovery of the deposit slip at the Mission Falls Bank and Ashley State Bank’s repeated denials that the slip was genuine.

  Where were the details? The case was filed over five months ago. Why was Mort Goering withdrawing from the case? What about legal analysis of the claim?

  Clay would never have accepted this summary when Jared worked with him at Paisley. Either his standards were slipping or the point of this binder was to focus Jared on the size of the claim.

  A ten-million-dollar case, with documentary proof, and a bank defendant with deep pockets. If that was Clay’s strategy, it was working.

  Jared began to feel jittery. He stood to stretch and pace.

  How did ten million dollars get into the hands of a farmer from Ashley, Minnesota? Was the money illegal? Did the bank still have it?

  He looked at the deposit slip again. Was the slip even real?

  It was up in Ashley; that was a downside. But a ten-million-dollar case.

  The phone rattled and Jared jumped. Caller ID showed it was Jessie’s cell.

  “Jessie?”

  “Yes. You’re still awake.”

  “Yeah. So are you. Pretty late to be calling.” The clock over the mantel showed 1:15 a.m.

  “I couldn’t sleep. With your track record the last few months, I figured you’d be up too. So what did Clay have to say?”

  “He’s got a referral. A big one.”

  “Contingent fee or hourly rate?”

  “Contingent fee, I imagine.”

  “Why’s he referring away a big case?”

  Jared explained about the Paisley agreement and described the case—including the urgency. The phone went quiet.

  “Jessie?”

  “Yeah, here. Just thinking.”

  “What is it?”

  “Well, I thought a week ago you swore you wouldn’t dive into another case like this right away.”

  These weren’t the words he wanted to hear right now. “I know. But I thought you wanted me to start working my way out of the hole.”

  “I do. But another contingent fee case? The ones that only pay in the end? If you win? Remember? And all that expense for a large new case. On top of that, you’ve been working long hours already. For a long time.”

  It wasn’t what he wanted to hear. “Clay offered a loan for expenses.”

  “I thought Clay was pretty tight,” Jessie said, her voice registering surprise.

  “Yeah, well, he is expecting a referral fee.”

  Silence. “So you’re going to take the case?”

  “I don’t know. I think I’ll go up tomorrow to meet the client; talk with her former counsel. Get more facts.”

  “There are some other clients in the office who’ve been waiting awhile because of the Olney work.”

  “I’ll take some files with me, work on them over the weekend, or in the motel if I stay.”

  “I’ve never known you having a case in Ashley before,” Jessie went on. “First referral from up there?”

  “First one worth considering,” he lied. “Phone Goering tomorrow and set a time for me to call him. I’ll try to speak with him on the road.”

  She said she would, and they ended the call.

  Jessie’s reservations left Jared cold. She was right, but it dampened his excitement. He looked around the room with fading eyes. A half-empty box of Korean food stood near the lamp—it’d been there since Monday. The office financials were stacked knee deep next to the mantel. The pictures he planned to hang still sat in boxes from the move eighteen months ago. He barely noticed anymore. Then his eyes returned to the stack of bills.

  Yeah, it probably was too soon. The past few months were like metal grinding metal: the financial strain, the long hours—it felt like he was wearing away pieces of himself that would never return. S
till, cases like these, Clay would remind him, don’t come along when it was convenient.

  Jared suddenly felt like dropping. The Red Bull was losing its grip, or couldn’t keep pace with his exhaustion. He turned out the lights and stumbled upstairs to bed.

  She hung up the phone.

  When Clay telephoned this afternoon, Jessie tried to pry out of him his reason for calling. Clay put her off with that silky southern voice. She never was charmed by Clay like Jared and others were at Paisley.

  Jessie assumed any referral would be a tough case—one that Clay wouldn’t want to keep. Jared always thought he could find a way to win, whatever cards were dealt him. He was good enough that he usually could squeeze a good result out of a tough case. But losing the Wheeler trial had shown what could happen when the risk was too big.

  She had to force him to take a break. The office cash flow had reached the point where Jessie didn’t even bring all of the office bills in to Jared each morning with the mail. And the exhaustion had started showing on his face and voice since the Wheeler trial finished a few months ago.

  Jessie buried the notion of dialing Jared again. He hadn’t taken the case yet. She could still stop this freight train before it got out of control.

  5

  The gravel in Mort Goering’s voice over the car speaker phone made Jared want to clear his own throat. A lifetime smoker, he thought, and one who liked to hear himself talk. Still, Mort had the verbal swagger of someone who tried cases not once a year, but every month—until each new jury was as familiar as extended family. Jared had tried cases against his type, and he respected them.

  Mort rolled through the details of the Larson suit like he was giving an opening statement. Just out of high school in the early seventies, he growled, Paul Larson left northern Minnesota for the Marines. He shipped out to Vietnam, finished one tour, re-upped for a second. The second round he was wounded—severely—and got the Navy Cross. When he returned to the States, his parents retired and left him the farm. He married his childhood sweetheart and moved onto the land, and Erin arrived nine years later—their only child.

  “Erin’s mom died too young. Cancer. Very sad,” Mort said.

  Erin went to high school in the Twin Cities. Never went back to live with her dad on the farm again. Then about eight months ago, Dad wrapped his car around a tree in a snowstorm. Erin came up to Ashley to settle up the estate.

  “Erin finds a key in her dad’s desk. Thought it was from the bank in Ashley, but turns out her old man had opened a safe-deposit box in Mission Falls, twenty miles away. He didn’t bank there, just had the box. So a few weeks after her dad’s funeral, Erin goes there to clear it out and, voilà, the deposit slip.”

  Mort chuckled. “She’s got no explanation for the money. It wasn’t even her dad’s Ashley bank account number, but strangely only a couple of digits off.” He snorted. “From what heights does that kind of manna fall, huh? I cleaned out my parents’ safe-deposit box when they died, and got a lock of somebody’s hair, a set of worthless stamps, and a half-empty carton of Luckies. I think my pop used to sneak a pack whenever he’d come into town by himself.”

  “What do you know about the deposit?” Jared asked, wishing Mort would hurry up.

  “Not much,” he responded. “The deposit slip was dated February 10, 2008. Based on other deposit slips in Paul Larson’s records, it was printed on the same kind of paper used by Ashley State Bank. Also same print style, colors—identical. But for all that, the bank denies any information about knowledge of the deposit—including the account number. When Erin wrote and called, the bank politely told her to go jump in a lake. She finally gave up and called me. Took her awhile to make that decision. Between you and me, I think she was scared to even know where the money came from.”

  Jared understood that reaction. “How far did you get in the lawsuit before you withdrew? Any discovery?”

  Mort described how he’d served formal demands on the bank for discovery of information: written interrogatories and demands for documents.

  “In response I got garbage. The bank hired two jackals in suits, this Stanford and Whittier, who stonewalled my discovery. I got pages of objections for each request or question. I demanded better responses; they gave me more garbage. I finally brought a motion to compel, and they came back at me with a sanctions motion—directed at me and Erin.”

  “What kind of sanctions motion?”

  “Rule 11,” Mort spat.

  Rule 11. The court rule that said a party sued on a frivolous claim could get sanctions—fines—against both the plaintiff and their attorney. It was the atomic bomb of pushback in a lawsuit.

  There was a pause on the line. “Mort?”

  “Yes. Sorry. My secretary was grabbing my calendar. I served the complaint on the bank on April twenty-first of this year. Your old comrades at Paisley appeared in the case two weeks later and—here it is—on July third, they served their sanctions motion. Fastest sanctions motion I’ve ever got slammed with.”

  Marcus and Franklin were scorched-earth attorneys, but why were the Paisley lawyers so confident, so early, that a case like this was frivolous?

  Mort was already rolling on. “Yes, so on July third they served me with fifty interrogatories, over a hundred document demands, and the motion demanding attorneys’ fees and costs from Erin and me under Rule 11.”

  This made no sense. “Mort, Rule 11 won’t stick unless the claim really is frivolous.”

  “Exactly. What could be frivolous about a claim based on a deposit slip from the bank?”

  There was another pause on the line. “Heather, can you hand that book to me? Yes. No, the one on the left. Thanks. Jared, when you get to a law library, check out Morrison on Banking Law. I’ll email the page number. Let me paraphrase it for you now. Under Minnesota law a deposit slip is evidence of a deposit. What it is not is an actual contract itself. Sort of like a movie ticket doesn’t prove you actually saw the film. So you’ve gotta get other evidence to prove that an account existed, that the account was owned by the plaintiff claiming a right to the money; that the money actually went into the account; and that the money never left the account.”

  Jared heard the thump of a book on a desktop over the line. “In this case, we couldn’t even connect the deposit slip to the farmer ’cause it didn’t even reference the farmer’s account number. So the sanction motion from Whittier and Stanford argued there was nothing to my lawsuit; I was just fishing. Sure enough, when the court finally made them produce the bank’s internal records—including Paul Larson’s account records going back three years—there was no sign of the deposit and no record of any account with that number attached to it.”

  Mort sighed. “I took two depositions, from bank employees who were supposed to be the experts on the bank’s accounts and account activity. Neither one knew squat about the deposit or the account identified on the slip. They both testified the slip had to be a fake. Once the depositions were done, Stanford and Whittier scheduled their sanctions motion for a hearing. And you’ll appreciate this. They claimed the bank had already incurred a hundred twenty thousand dollars in attorneys’ fees. One hundred twenty thousand dollars. Can you believe that?”

  They were sending a message, Jared thought. Even in the Paisley firm, where intimidation tactics were admired, Stanford was legendary for his “messages.”

  “You know I don’t mind a fight,” Mort growled. “But the judge we drew at the Mission Falls Courthouse, Judge Lindquist, he’s a tough one, not afraid to rule on motions. He’s handed out some serious sanctions against attorneys in the past. And all I’ve got is a deposit slip with no one alive to tell me if it’s real or fake. I finally told Erin I had to withdraw. I can’t take a chance on a six-figure fine.”

  “What’s this about having to get an attorney by next week?” Jared asked.

  “Oh, that. I told you Judge Lindquist is tough. I asked for ninety days for Erin to find another attorney; Lindquist gave her three weeks. So she’s
got until next Wednesday.”

  That meant that even if he took the case, Jared would be on a short calendar to find supporting evidence. It also meant that if he took the case, he’d be under the same Rule 11 sanction cloud as Mort.

  “So, how long’d you work with Clay?” Mort asked, changing the subject.

  “Five years, as an associate at Paisley.”

  “Couldn’t learn from anyone better,” Mort said. “I met him on a farm implement products case fifteen years ago up here in Bemidji. Power train—farmer lost a hand. Six-figure verdict. The jury loved Clay. Terrific lawyer.”

  Yeah. Nothing got past Clay. So Clay probably knew about all these issues in the Larson case before he offered it to Jared. Just another reason Clay didn’t take the case himself.

  “Anyone else look at the case the past couple of weeks?”

  Mort hesitated. “Yes. A couple, I think. Erin’s been beatin’ the bushes. All of them passed. Don’t know if it’s the Rule 11, the time crunch, or what. Clay’s the only one I contacted for her. Hey, Jared, there’s something else you ought to know.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Erin’s had some troubles up in Ashley. Tires slashed. Angry notes and phone calls. This case has stirred up some hard feelings in town.”

  Jared felt his stomach churn. “Why all the emotion?”

  “The bank’s causing it, far as I can tell.” Mort huffed. “Seeding the local paper with articles about how the case could break the bank. Saying if the bank collapsed, farmers’ loans would be picked up by tougher managers who’d be more aggressive on foreclosures; hurt the local economy. That kind of thing.”

  Jared tried to shut off a rush of memories and emotions. Why would he step back into that morass in Ashley again? Ten million reasons, he told himself. At least he had to take the next step.

  “Can I come pick up the file on my way to Erin’s place?”

  “Sure. I’ve got a legal intern who’s taking a year off from Hamline Law School to get some experience. Great young gal, quite sharp. Rachel Langer. I’ll have her pull it together for you.”