Jared shook his head. “No.”
Vic looked surprised but continued. “Verne—he’s not a bad guy. I know that sounds pretty stupid after what he did. But he’s not. He’s a Vietnam vet—like Paul.” Vic searched Jared’s face for a sign of softening after this appeal. When Jared didn’t respond, he went on.
“Well, Verne worked at the grain exchange when your dad stole—had that problem there. The exchange cut some jobs right after that, and Verne lost his. Took him two years to find steady work again. He always blamed your dad’s problem for the job cuts.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Jared asked.
Vic hadn’t removed his coat and a sheen of perspiration began to glow on his forehead. “Because Verne had a few beers that night and Greg—he was at the table with us when you came in—he went and told Verne who you were, and that’s when Verne went off on you. Now Verne can’t sleep. He’s sure you’re gonna sue him.”
Vic went silent, staring at Jared.
Sue him? That was a thought. All he needed was more litigation in Ashley.
“He’s got a kid in college, Mr. Neaton,” Vic went on. “He and his wife live in a small house; he’s got no money—”
“Tell Verne,” Jared interrupted him, “that’s not going to happen.”
Vic looked at Jared uncertainly. “I’d heard you were getting ready to file something against him.”
“I don’t know who you’re listening to, but I’m not going to sue Verne.”
Vic froze on the couch, as though he should keep exploring the issue. He looked around the room, then back into Jared’s face. “Really?”
Jared nodded.
“Okay.” The hands withdrew from Vic’s knees. “Okay. I’ll tell him.”
Vic crossed the room with careful steps, looking like he was afraid he’d startle Jared into changing his mind. Stepping out on the porch stoop, he suddenly turned and grabbed Jared’s hand. The porch light lit up his look of relief, still mixed with doubt. “Thanks,” he said, as though exacting a promise.
Jared turned back into the living room. Jessie stood beside the kitchen door.
“Sue him? What’s he talking about? What’s ‘coldcocking’?”
Jared put a finger to his lips, pointing down the hallway toward his father’s bedroom.
“I had a little problem at the Legion Hall.”
Jessie crossed her arms. “Are we not communicating anymore?”
“I don’t know,” Jared answered, falling back onto the chair and looking up at Jessie. “So tell me, how is it staying with Erin?”
Jessie stared back sullenly.
“Out with it, Jessie,” he muttered.
Jessie stepped purposefully to the couch and flopped down as well. “All right. What’s going on?”
“What do you mean?”
“This case. What’s going on?”
“It’s a case, Jessie. Like any other. Long hours, hard work.”
Jessie shook her head, and Jared noticed how deep the rings were encircling her eyes. “No, it’s not. You’ve never taken chances like this before.”
“Big reward, big risk,” he said, knowing the words sounded trite—and worse, insincere.
“Stupid decisions, stupid results,” she responded sarcastically, her mouth set in a line between anger and resolve. When Jared didn’t answer immediately, she went on.
“Is it her?”
He caught himself before saying Who.
“No,” he answered, not sure if it was really true.
Jessie looked away, and Jared was knifed with regret, seeing the depth of her disappointment that he was not engaging.
He let loose a deep sigh. “Really, Jessie. At least not the way you mean it.”
Jessie looked back, waiting for more. “Whatever it is, Jared, you’d better figure it out. Because it’s killing us.”
“We’ll be fine.”
“Uh-huh.” She stood and grabbed her jacket slung over the back of a chair. “Well, tell that to Stanhope Printing.”
Jared’s stomach twisted. “Stanhope?”
“Yep. One of our last clients? Remember? Because they called last week and left a message—it’s one of the two dozen messages I brought back last time from Minneapolis that you haven’t bothered to answer. I didn’t have the heart to tell you myself, but it’s there on the message slip. They’ve gotten an offer for their business. From guess who? Our friends at Paisley suddenly want them back. Stanhope’s about six inches from taking it. And they’re not the only one. This is worse than the Wheeler case—because we never really recovered from the Wheeler case before you jumped onto this one.”
Jessie strode across the living room before turning at the door. “Jared, I hope you know what you’re looking for from this case. It had better be worth everything. Because that’s the price you’re paying for it.”
Jessie’s words echoed in the silence that followed the closed door. Stanhope? If Paisley was taking a run at that one, they’d also be after Pleasance Motors and half a dozen other clients he’d taken when he left the firm. If they succeeded, even the trickle of fees he’d been earning these past months would dry up.
Jared felt sick at the gulf growing between himself and Jessie—on the case, in the office, and particularly over Erin. But he felt an inevitability about this now, that it had passed beyond just choice.
He’d told himself it was about the money. But he’d known for weeks now the money couldn’t be what wedded him to this case. After pounding the pavement for evidence and deposing half the allowed witnesses, the possibility he was going to lose this case was mounting. Plus, he’d received the Rule 11 sanction letter promised by Marcus—another thing he hadn’t shared with Jessie.
If it had been about the money, he should have packed up and headed back to Minneapolis by now. And it wasn’t about attraction to Erin, either, as Jessie suspected.
Two nights ago, he’d had the familiar dream about his father, spread-eagle on the floor. The dream was coming more frequently since he’d moved here. As before, he’d heard his mother’s scream; leapt from his chair; run down the hall. But this time—for the first time—the face of the man on the floor was not his father. It was obscured, unrecognizable. And the voice that called to his mother from the floor was foreign to him too.
Since leaving Ashley years ago, he’d kept a tight hold—on his ambitions, his goals, his focus. Returning to his hometown, living with his father, handling this case. It had begun to feel like sand through his grip.
“You got into a fight at the Legion Hall?”
Jared turned, startled. It was his father, standing in the hallway in his bathrobe. His eyes looked sleepy, his hair tousled.
Jared shook his head. “No. It’s nothing, Dad. Go back to bed.”
Sam remained in the hallway. “Why didn’t you tell me you lost that other big case you handled, Jedee?”
How did he know? Jessie. She was working here all day with his father around. Jared felt the familiar spark of betrayal.
“You’re working all night,” Sam continued. “You look exhausted; Jessie tells me you’ve got a mountain of work back at your office. . . .”
“Dad.” He knew his voice was tinged with anger. “I can move out if you want. But don’t get into my business.”
“Have you seen the article?” his father asked.
“What article?”
His father retreated to his bedroom. He returned a minute later to hand Jared a copy of a newspaper.
It was this week’s Ashley Gazette. Jared scanned the top headline: Lawsuit Could Close Local Bank.
“When did this come out?”
“Monday.”
Jared skimmed the article. It described the lawsuit and the “risks” the lawsuit posed to Ashley State Bank. The fourth paragraph told Jared’s high school graduation year. It then gave a brief history of his legal career. The next three paragraphs were dedicated to his father’s arrest, prosecution, and jail time.
“This is rid
iculous.”
Sam nodded. “I know.”
Marcus arranged for this article. There had been plenty of articles about the bank case. The difference was that this one highlighted his father’s crime. Marcus was trying to muddy up the pool, turn potential jurors against the case. In the process, he was also trying to make it harder for Jared to find sympathetic witnesses willing to talk.
“I just want to help if I can,” Samuel said carefully.
Jared’s chest filled with a mix of combustible emotions.
“I’ve got a lot of work to do” was all he let escape. He headed past his father and into the kitchen, toward the basement stairs.
As he descended the wooden steps, Jared felt that stomach-lurching sensation he remembered as a boy when he jumped from the fifty-foot cliffs into the rushing St. Croix River. That instant when excitement turned to fear as the fall went on and on—past anything he’d ever experienced before.
He could only wonder: when was the landing on this leap?
Jared awoke with a start and sat up. The cold metal on the back of the chair leached through his sweatshirt as he struggled to rise out of a disorienting haze. The room was lit by a lamp on the edge of a table spread with bank documents. An alarm clock on the table read four thirty in the morning. The chilled basement was silent except for the humming of a small space heater, blowing warm air across his stockinged feet.
Jared rubbed his eyes and looked around. Bankers boxes lined one wall, stacked nearly to the ceiling, three rows deep; the thinner stack of boxes he’d already reviewed lined the other wall. It seemed at once discouraging and incongruous: the finished stack was growing, but it didn’t seem like he was making nearly enough progress on the unfinished rows.
Jared straightened, stretching an ache in his back; glanced again at the clock. Asleep two hours. He grimaced at the stale Red Bull taste in his mouth and headed upstairs for a glass of water.
He’d stayed in the basement since the confrontation with his dad and tried to put it out of his head. It didn’t matter what his father thought, Jared lectured himself through a vague sense of discomfort. It didn’t matter how this impacted his father. The small penance his father paid by letting him use the house was nothing.
Jared wandered into the dark living room. A stack of Jessie’s typed document summaries sat to one side of the computer monitor. Jared picked the top sheet up and held it close in the darkness.
Tomorrow—no, today—was Monday. Five witnesses to go. Maybe this week would be better.
Even standing, Jared felt himself slipping into sleep and shook his head hard. Too much more work to doze off again just yet. Maybe another hour, then he’d catch some sleep before showering for today’s depositions.
As he turned to go back downstairs, Jared’s eyes were drawn to a thin line of light slashing across the carpet in the hallway leading to the bedrooms. He walked toward it. The light came from his father’s bedroom, the door barely ajar. Jared pushed it gently to open it.
In the dim light of a bedside lamp, his father lay asleep, splayed across the bed, his head angled across a pillow in surrender. Strewn over the bed were half a dozen piles of documents, each neatly organized and covered in sticky notes. A notepad lay near his father’s hand, a pen near his open fingertips. One of his father’s accounting manuals lay open nearby.
At the base of the bed were four bankers boxes, three with stacks of typed sheets on top. The fourth was open and empty and, Jared saw, the source of the papers on the bed.
Jared stood for a full minute, disoriented by the vision. At last, he turned away and headed back to the basement stairs.
In the basement, Jared walked along the stack of unreviewed bankers boxes. At the farthest corner, he looked behind the front stack.
Here, in the darkest corner of the basement, at least thirty bankers boxes had been removed from the back rows. Jared sized up the other side of the room once again, where the finished boxes stood.
How many days had this gone on? How completely had he lost control?
He had answers for neither.
Powerless, Jared headed up the stairs and to bed.
22
A couple hours later, Jared showered and grabbed an untoasted Pop-Tart for breakfast. Before walking outside to his car, he glanced into his father’s bedroom. His father—and the boxes—were gone.
In the night, Jared had planned his confrontation with his dad for this morning. The more he thought about it, the more the sight of his father and the boxes tore at him. He would not be grateful to this man. He could not let his father insinuate himself back into his life this way. His resentment fired, and he concluded in one instant that he would threaten to move out if necessary—though he realized in the next moment how empty such an ultimatum would be. He knew he had no money to move out. Clay’s betrayal had seen to that. Now his dad was taking advantage of his need.
In his confusion, frustration, and bewilderment, Jared felt mostly relief that Sam was gone before he got up. That meant he could deal with this later.
Ten minutes later, Jared parked his CR-V in front of the bank. There was too much riding on these depositions, he told himself. He had to focus. Later, he and his dad would have this out.
Fred Carrington cleared his throat loudly for the third time in as many minutes.
“Well,” he began his answer, “as I said, the number on that slip is not for any account in the Ashley State Bank.”
Jared listened to the gentle tapping of the court reporter’s fingers on the keys of her transcription device, completing Carrington’s response. He gazed at a copy of Exhibit 1—the deposit slip—in his hands. What was he missing here?
“You agree, Mr. Carrington, that it has the same number of digits as a typical Ashley deposit number?”
The elderly vice-president brushed his graying moustache with his left hand, then nodded agreeably. “Yes.”
“And that the form of the deposit slip—the information contained on it—is consistent with an Ashley deposit slip?”
“Yes.”
“Did you check both current and closed accounts?”
“Yes, I did.”
Jared stared at the sheet in his hand as though he could will it to talk.
Shelby and Mrs. Huddleston had been right with their assessments so far. Although these witnesses seemed nervous and had been prepped with a strong hand, he’d not deposed one yet who appeared to be lying—including Mr. Carrington.
But if this wasn’t a current or closed account number, what was it? And how was this slip generated?
“Mr. Carrington,” Jared began, as another thought occurred to him, “could someone have input an account number for purposes of printing this slip, even if the account number was no longer—or never had been—in the bank database?”
The witness coughed more deeply this time before speaking. “I suppose that could be done.”
“Without leaving a permanent record?”
“Yes.”
“How.”
“Don’t speculate,” Whittier interjected, leaning close to the witness.
Mr. Carrington winced, but went on.
“Well, they would need to input the account number on the deposit template screen, but then erase it instead of saving the data like they’re trained to do after printing. You would also have to decline to save it in the system or print a copy for the bank records.”
“And would the depositor—the bank customer—have any way of knowing whether their deposit had actually been saved in the bank’s system after the deposit slip was generated with this number?”
“Objection,” Whittier began. “Calls for speculation.”
“I, well, perhaps not,” Mr. Carrington blurted quickly.
Jared paused, then tried another tack. “How long are closed account numbers kept in the system?”
“I don’t understand.”
“After an account has been closed, how long would your database even keep a record that the number had been in
use at one time.”
“Ten years.”
Jared turned to Whittier. “We’re going to take a break.”
Standing on the lawn outside the bank entrance, beneath the American flag snapping in the breeze, Jared called Jessie.
“Yes?” Jessie answered. Jared heard a cool crispness in her voice.
“Jessie, call Erin please. Ask her whether she has come across any records for closed bank accounts of her father that are older than ten years.”
“Okay.” Jessie hung up without asking the reason for the request.
Jessie had sounded about as friendly as Whittier. It was going to be a very long week.
On his drive home, Jared listened to Erin’s message on his cell. She hadn’t run across records of closed bank accounts for her father—of any kind. “Dad’s main account at Ashley bank, the farm account he had when he died, goes back to the seventies,” she said. “So far as I can tell, he didn’t open or close another one. Sorry.”
Another dead end. As he parked the CR-V in front of his father’s house, Jared saw lights on in the living room and felt his mood drop yet another notch.
Through the deposition, he’d almost forgotten his resolve to confront his father. For a moment he considered letting it go another day. No. There was no point in putting this off. This wasn’t just about last night. It was a talk that should have taken place years ago.
Jared walked across the dark lawn to the front door and into the empty living room. “Dad,” he called out, “grab your coat. Let’s get some dinner.”
The Cellar Restaurant was tucked in the basement of a building on Main Street that once served as the town’s only hotel. Like so many businesses in downtown Ashley, the hotel was gone now, and the half-empty two-story building was converted to offices.
Through decades of change on Ashley’s Main Street, the Cellar remained, the only “formal” restaurant in town—and perhaps in the county. White tablecloths and linen napkins covered the tables. At seven, the lights would dim. The waiters, neighbors by day, were transfigured with their gleaming patent leather shoes and black bow ties.
The Deposit Slip Page 14
