Mexico Is Forever

by Benjamin M. Schutz

  “Hearing’s in thirty days, Leo,” Joe chipped in.

  “If we get the go-ahead to track down any lead, regardless of the cost, there’s a ninety-five percent likelihood that in thirty days we’ll know the truth about her.”

  “Can you give me an estimate of the cost? If it’s more than half the estate, it’s not worth it, right?” Skrepinski smiled sourly.

  “True enough. How big is the estate?” I asked Joe.

  “We’re not sure. Peter’s father got a sizable ‘golden parachute’ when he was let go, and he received disability checks for almost ten years. That added up to almost half a million dollars. Frohmeyer did all right with the estate. He’s had it for over four years. He was conservative except for his ‘heir searches.’ The estate’s now about $630,000.”

  “So half is over three hundred thousand.” I smiled. “I’m a bargain. My estimate is fifteen thousand. Two percent to save fifty.”

  “All right. What do we do next?”

  “Send the contract and a retainer check for two thousand to my office. Let me ask some questions now. You didn’t buy this Sarabeth Timmons before the deposition. What soured you on her? The birth certificate you showed me was legit. It’s real clear that your father married and produced a child. Why not her?”

  Skrepinski glanced away and deferred to Joe, who leaned forward, relishing the tale he was about to share.

  “It wasn’t her, it was Frohmeyer, the executor, we didn’t trust. Peter’s father, from what we’ve gathered, was quite disturbed. He was a ballistic and munitions engineer. Quite brilliant, really. Made a number of breakthroughs for the government. Then he switched to designing nontraditional launchers and warheads. He was courted by some private firms up in New York and went to work for them. Anyway, he became paranoid, although I’ll tell you, doing the kind of work he did and after that Gordon Bull thing, maybe he really was being followed. Ultimately, he wasn’t able to work. The company let him go with a psychiatric disability. He drifted around the country. Peter doesn’t know much about those years. Eventually he returned here to Virginia, where he was born. He deposited his savings into jumbo CDs at a local bank. Frohmeyer was a bank manager at another branch. His girlfriend was a teller at Edward Timmons’s branch. She told him about the strange guy with all the money. Anyway, after he died the bank sent out statements, which were returned as undeliverable. The girlfriend told Frohmeyer about it. He checked it out and found out that Timmons had died. He waited the required thirty days then filed to be appointed as executor of the estate. We’re looking into how he handled the money. Frankly, apart from some dubious trips with his girlfriend, I don’t think he looted the estate. It grew and he kept pocketing his five percent administrator’s fees for doing nothing. An easy thirty grand a year for doing nothing. Anyway, the five-year statute of limitations was coming up on unclaimed estates. The state contacted Frohmeyer that it was going to escheat, and he had to prepare to roll it over. Good-bye thirty-thousand-a-year cushion. So what does Frohmeyer do? He finds an heir, Sarabeth Timmons, right under his nose. Mind you, he’d gone looking in Los Angeles twice before and found nothing. She’d have been a tough search but not impossible. The timing smelled to me. The records were there all the time—the marriage, the divorce, the birth certificate. He could have found her five years ago. I think she’s a phony. Her answers today only strengthen that belief. Frohmeyer needed an heir. This way he avoids escheat. I think he cut a deal with her to pretend to be Sarabeth Timmons. They get the estate through probate, then there’s $630,000 split two ways. If Frohmeyer was smart he lied to her about how much it was, got her to take a flat fee. Christ, it could be as little as ten grand. Remember, as executor he’d be sending her the check. She’d never know the true size of the estate, and he walks off into the sunset with the rest.”

  “Until your client shows up and fucks it all up.”

  “Right.”

  “How did you find your father?” I asked.

  “I talked to my mother about him. We really didn’t mention him much after he left. I’d been in therapy working out a lot of stuff about him, and I thought I was ready to find him and confront him about it. So I went back to my mom and we talked for the first time in years. That’s when I found out they were never married. I tried to get information about him from the labs he worked for, but they said it was confidential. My mom had a card from him from about five years ago. It was just like him, rambling on with his conspiracy theories and calling her ‘the Spy in the House of Love’ and blaming her for everything. I checked out the postmark, then used old phone books to get an address. I came down to see him. That’s when I found out that he’d died.”

  “What made you think that there would be an estate?”

  “My mother told me about how the lab let him go and the money they gave him. He stayed home for a while. She saw the disability checks. I tried to figure out, based on how he lived, how much money might have accumulated. Once I realized how large the estate could be, I retained Mr. Anthony to locate it and make sure I got what was coming to me. My father was a monster. I don’t have a single good memory of him. He was cruel to my mother and me and then he abandoned us. The only good thing about his life is that he died rich. He squandered everything else in his life. His brains. Our love. But not his money. That money is mine. Believe me, I earned every penny of it the nine years he lived with us. Now I want what is mine. I’m not going to let this fraud perpetrated by Frohmeyer take half of what is rightly mine.”

  Maybe Skrepinski and Sarabeth were brother and sister, tied by common wounds even if no blood was shared.

  “A couple of things occur to me, before we start. Do you know anything about your father’s own family?”

  “No. He refused to talk about them. My mother and I never had any contact with them.”

  “If they’re dead and left an estate that passes through your father to you, the estate could be even larger than you think.”

  Joe nodded. “I thought of that. Frankly, I wasn’t in a hurry to find out until we’d disposed of Frohmeyer and Timmons.”

  “The other thing is that while we’re trying to disqualify Timmons from the inheritance, we might uncover other legitimate heirs. You need to know that that’s a possibility.”

  “If they’re legitimate and they spent any time with my father, then they deserve to be compensated for that.”

  “You make him sound like a war criminal.”

  “He was worse. He was a sadistic, abusive man who made it impossible to love him. He took anything that was warm and kind and decent and twisted it into something ugly.”

  “Well, I’d best get started on this.” I realized that I didn’t want to hear about anybody else’s sorry childhood. I was growing allergic to misery.

  “What do you need from us, Leo?”

  “I want any records you have, or Frohmeyer has. A copy of the deposition, the divorce file, the birth certificate, the marriage license, his father’s death certificate, any old photographs of your father. There’s a guy in Philadelphia that can reconstruct how your father looked as he aged. We may have to use him if we hit any dead ends. Get a subpoena for her gynecologist’s records. Is Frohmeyer still the executor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does he have any idea how much trouble he’s facing?”

  “We’ve made that abundantly clear.”

  “Good, then he should be dying to cooperate. I want a release from him authorizing access to all of Edward Timmons’s bank records for the last ten years.”

  “Done. You gonna sic Rosa on them?”

  “You got it.”

  Skrepinski asked, “Who’s Rosa?”

  “Rosa Cravat. A freelance auditor. Even the IRS is afraid of her. She specializes in asset searches and fraud. When she’s done she’ll know where every penny went that your father ever spent. Hopefully he paid child support for his daughter. If he did, that’s how we’ll find her trail.”

  “Anything else?”

  I loo
ked over at Joe. “Did you get an order for blood work or DNA tests?”

  “Yeah. But without knowing anything about the father, the results were equivocal.”

  “Can you exhume his body?”

  “No. He was cremated and had his ashes spread over the bay.”

  “If we find his parents maybe we can determine his blood type from theirs. Same thing with Timmons’s mother if we can’t find her. Then if we’re real lucky she’ll turn out to be incompatible. Don’t anybody hold their breath.

  “Fax me as much as you can. Courier the rest. As soon as we get the stuff, we’ll begin. If we need subpoenas or court orders for further records, I’ll call.”

  I stood up, shook hands all around, and left.

  CHAPTER 3

  An hour later I sat at our conference table with Kelly Willets, my secretary, Rosa Cravat, and investigators Del Winslow, Clancy Helm-rich, and Larry Burdette. Fax-fresh copies of all the records from Joe Anthony’s office were stacked in front of me.

  “All right, let’s get started. We’ve been hired to find out if a woman claiming to be Sarabeth Timmons is the real McCoy or an imposter. I want to approach this investigation from a number of directions simultaneously. We have a batch of documents from Joe Anthony’s office to start with, and there will be more to follow. If you need additional records or authorizations for access, go through Kelly. She’ll run everything by me. I want a summary memo at the end of each day. Route them through Kelly. She’ll pull them together and I’ll review them. My comments will be in your boxes at the start of the next day. Anything that’s a rush or after hours you can get me on my beeper, and I want you to, because I will be doing the same with you. Any documents you review, annotate, or use in any fashion I want Xeroxed in their entirety for the file. Any questions?”

  I scanned their faces. Nothing.

  “Let’s divvy up the work. Del, you and Clancy I want on surveillance. I think this gal is hiding something, even if she is Sarabeth Timmons. I don’t want her to rabbit before we’re done with her. Kelly’ll give you her address and phone number. She lives with another woman, Ellen Piersall. I don’t think roommates covers it, so we may need to throw a net over her too. We have Sarabeth’s social security number, so go ahead and see if she has a passport. I want to know where she goes, what she does. Once you get her routines and if she looks like she’s staying put, I’ll pull one of you to interview the few collaterals we have. I want you to shoot some film of her too, full length and facial. Make copies of the good stuff and put them in the file so anyone who needs them can get them right away. If we hit a dead end I might need a tape of her voice, so look for ways to do that.”

  Del and Clancy finished making notes and nodded at me. They were a good surveillance team: Del, dapper and sophisticated. Clancy, rough hewn and folksy. One or the other fit in almost anywhere. Saved on disguises too.

  Larry Burdette came to us from a local therapist. He’d been seriously agoraphobic and hadn’t left his house in almost four years. A combination of medication and desensitization had enlarged his world a bit, but Larry was still terrified to talk with strangers, at least face to face. But on the telephone, that was something else. He was indefatigable and resourceful.

  “Larry, you’ll be smilin’ ’n dialin’. At the start, I want you to handle all the phone work. When you start turning things up, we may have to give some of it to Clancy or Del, but for now it’s all yours. I want to track this woman three ways. First, backward in time as Sarabeth Timmons. You have a social security number, driver’s license, a joint bank account, and credit card numbers.”

  Larry grinned at his riches. His eyes squinted shut behind his bulletproof glasses. That and his marked overbite made him look like the chipmunk of happiness.

  “With all of that to start with, I’ll expect to know her menstrual cycle by lunch tomorrow. I also want to check out this woman’s story about her childhood. You’ll see from the deposition that she didn’t give us much. Her mother, or so she claims, worked as a live-in domestic or a prostitute. Both are cash-only jobs and paperless. We have a marriage license, a birth certificate, and a divorce file. Let’s track the mother and then the little girl through her. We have a social security number on the mother and a driver’s license, and we think she moved out to the L.A. area. The baby’s birth certificate says her mother was born in Tennessee. Track down her b.c. and get a line on the grandparents. Let’s see if they kept in touch with the daughter and granddaughter. Oh, yeah, one other thing, call LAPD Gang Squad and see if they can give you anything on a ‘Chino.’ He rode with the Hounds of Hell, at least three years ago.”

  Larry scribbled while I spoke.

  “Kelly, when we break here, get me the number for Dan Kearny and Associates in San Francisco. I want to see if they can do a little legwork for us out there.”

  “Is it on file?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You ready for me yet, Mr. Big Shot? I may be retired, but I’m not dead. I have things to do too, you know.”

  That was Rosa Cravat. Fifty years an accountant. All that experience and a larcenous heart made her impossible to beat. If she wanted to hide money, God couldn’t find it.

  “Yeah, Rosa, I think I’m ready for you. I see you dressed for work.”

  “Well, if you’d move it along, maybe I could earn a few dollars before the sun goes down today.”

  Rosa’s trademark was a pair of cuff links she wore to work. She never interviewed the poor bastard she’d caught embezzling or in a fraud or hiding assets until she already knew where the money had gone and how. Then she’d sit with him or her and ask a thousand questions that she already knew the answers to. She’d nod at each lie, smiling her kindly grandmother’s smile, as if her grandson were denying he filched the cookies. When her hands were clasped in front of her under her chin, her two cuff links would line up side by side. The right one read BULL and the left one SHIT.

  “We’ll have an authorization from the executor of the estate granting you access to all of Edward Timmons’s bank records. We know he got disability checks each month. Apparently he kept the company informed when he moved so that the money followed him on his travels. He also had a child support obligation for this child. That’s the trail I want you to follow. See if you can locate the mother and child and how recently.”

  “That’s it? My grandson can do that. I didn’t come over here to be bored, Mr. Haggerty.”

  “I know, Rosa. I asked you to come because we both know that when the simple stuff doesn’t work out, then it gets interesting. This way you’re the first to know that the simple stuff didn’t work. Then you can find the trail nobody else can see. That’s why you’re here.”

  “All right. When you get the consent, send the records to my house. I’ll call you when I’m done.” With that, she stood up, tucked her calculator under her arm, and left. Rosa never discussed fees with people. Nobody would dream of stiffing her. Who would want her having access to their books? Far better to pay her, whatever the bill.

  “That’s it. Any questions? No. Okay. Let’s get on this one.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Kelly knocked on the door at five. She peeked around the door and I waved her in. Kelly’s father was black and her mother Filipino. She had her mother’s hair and wore it as a long braid to her waist or as an ebony coil on her head. Her skin was her father’s and her face was a map of compromise.

  “Here’s the memos. Larry took the file home to work on some of the L.A. calls. Clancy is watching the Timmons woman. Del is writing up the report. He’ll drop it in before he leaves. Dan Kearny said he’d be free after three his time. I’m out of here. You need anything?”

  “No, thanks. I’ll lock up the shop.”

  “Okay. See you tomorrow.” She reached to pull the door shut.

  “Leave it open, Kelly. Thanks.”

  She waved good-bye and left. I checked the clock, swung around, and turned on the TV. They were showing one of the regional finals in the NCAA to
urnament. March madness in full bloom. I leaned back, put my feet up, and watched the game. Both teams played tenacious defense and moved well off the ball, but they had offended the great god Klang and he punished them with iron on every shot, tight rims and eccentric bounces.

  The game turned into a rout, then it got ugly. Hand checks became kidney punches, elbows flew like scythes. The referees were motioning for the Red Cross to step in.

  Del walked in, tossed the report on my desk, and glanced at the screen.

  “This game is over,” he announced.

  “How can you tell?” They hadn’t flashed the score.

  “Easy. They’re letting the white boys play.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Nah, Del, these are the Honky State Albinos. You just don’t see them on TV much, that’s all.”

  “Right. Like I said, this one’s over.” On cue, one of the guards lofted a lottery shot at the buzzer. Klang showed no mercy, and it hit like a rainbowed brick and caromed over the backboard.

  I turned off the set and asked Del what he had found.

  “Nothing yet. Clancy is going to stay on her until she beds down. I’ll pick her up in the morning. We didn’t get any photos yet. If nothing natural occurs, he’ll do something to get her to hold still and talk to him and I’ll shoot the roll.”

  “Fine.”

  “All right, I’m gonna head home. You leavin’?”

  “Nah. I’ve got a call into the West Coast. I’ll probably leave after that.”

  “Okay. See you tomorrow, Leo.”

  “Take it easy, Del.”

  I scooped together the memos and clipped them to the Skrepinski folder and set it out for Kelly to file in the morning. I dumped a couple of other folders in my briefcase. Maybe I’d read them tonight. I picked up a paperback. A gift from a client. He wanted to know what I thought of the book. How it stacked up to real detective work. Unfortunately I’d read a couple of the author’s previous works. He was now a best-seller, and as his advances had grown, his books got shorter. Maybe all that money had convinced him that his words were so valuable he should hold on to them. He had single-handedly created cosmetic publishing. The length was masked by increasingly larger type. The first mass-market book for the blind. The margins were so wide, the text so short, that you read the book by fanning the pages so that the print would form words. If his advances got any larger his next one would be a pop-up book.