Seeds of Deception

by Sheila Connolly

  If there was a connection there, and if Miriam had had an ulterior motive in getting the job, she still hadn’t made her move, and she had been in the job a year. If she’d wanted no more than to go through Phillip Corey’s files, she would have had plenty of opportunities before now, starting with her first week on the job. Phillip and Arthur had apparently given her complete access to all the files in the office, which went back to when they’d started the practice. And Miriam knew the schedules for both her father and Arthur. She had keys to the office, and she could well have known about Enrique and used him to get into the house, or, heck, she could have borrowed Daddy’s keys and had copies made.

  “Meg, I think you’re seeing villains behind every bush now,” her mother said. “If Miriam had wanted to find something, she could have done it at any time. She has free run of the office, and she’s been digitizing the back files for a while now. There’s nothing hidden there.”

  “I know—I was just thinking the same thing. Does Daddy keep any files in the house?”

  “I don’t know, to be honest. Nothing current, I’m sure. There may be some old boxes in the attic here. When we moved, years ago, we had a company come in and deal with all the packing, so I can’t say that I looked at or labeled every box. I can’t say how far back they might go. Why on earth would it matter?”

  “Mother, I’m just trying to look at all possibilities. The bottom line is, someone broke in here and into Daddy’s office presumably because they were looking for something they believed he had. If it was only this house, it could have been a simple robbery—it’s an upscale neighborhood, and this house is pretty well concealed, at least in back. But the office break-in? I assume there’s nothing of particular value there—apart from the files. No money, no valuables. Why break in there?”

  Elizabeth shrugged helplessly. “Meg, I don’t know.”

  Meg glanced at Seth, then back at her mother. “Do you think we could look in the attic, see what’s up there?”

  “You should ask your father, but I have no objection—as long as you don’t leave a mess.”

  “Don’t worry. And I’ll talk to Daddy first.” Meg stood up quickly, but then stopped and kissed her mother on top of her head, which appeared to startle Elizabeth.

  Seth followed Meg into the hall. Meg turned to him and said, “If Miriam is actually Joe’s sister, that suggests that what we’re looking for dates back to the years we all lived there. Yes, Joe and Miriam were kids then, but it’s possible that something happened then that didn’t seem important at the time, but that does now. Does that make sense?”

  Seth shrugged. “In a way. At least it narrows the search. We’re looking for boxes of files from your father’s legal activities for the years that he and your family lived in Madison. Wasn’t he with the New York firm then?”

  “Yes, but he may have taken on some cases of his own. Like what he did for Joe Caffarelli. There could have been others.”

  “Your father seems to be a methodical person. He might have made some copies of documents or notes from his prior job and kept those, or, as you say, he could have handled other cases that didn’t involve the law firm. Didn’t Joe Caffarelli mention that he’d just cleared out his father’s files himself? And he found a file on his dealings with your father?”

  “He did. But Miriam’s been working for him for a year, long before Joe went through his old files. And she was just a kid when Daddy was trying to help Joe. It seems more likely that she might have remembered the name, and when the job opened up she decided to apply for it. Look, all I want to do now is dot another i or cross another t. If there’s nothing there, then we’ll know. Let’s tell Daddy we’ll be looking around the attic.”

  “Boy, you sure know how to show a man a good time. I’m really looking forward to rooting around in dusty old boxes in a freezing attic.”

  Meg swatted his arm. “Hey, you’ll have the pleasure of my company.”

  They found that Phillip had retreated to his study on the second floor again. Did he and her mother ever spend time with each other? Meg wondered. “Hi, Daddy. Seth and I thought we’d look through the attic and see if there’s anything of mine left there. I’ve got more room in my house now, and I could take it off your hands if you don’t need it.”

  “Ah, darling, I don’t spend much time poking around up there, so I’m not sure what odds and ends have accumulated. If there’s any furniture up there that strikes your fancy, you’re welcome to take that with you. We have more than enough as it is.”

  “Thank you—I’ll see what we find. Do you and Mother have any plans for the day?”

  “Not really, other than enjoying spending time with you two. I need to get ready to get back to work tomorrow, and I’m sure Arthur will be a bit slower than usual.”

  “We’re coming with you, if that’s all right.”

  “Do I have a hope of stopping you?” Phillip softened his comment with a smile. “Things are likely to be quiet. As I think I’ve said before, no one wants to start litigation before Christmas, so my calendar is fairly clear. I assume you want to introduce yourself to Miriam.”

  “Yes, I do. Ready for the attic, Seth?”

  “You’re fascinated by attics, Seth?” Phillip asked.

  “Actually, I am, since I remodel older buildings. I haven’t had a chance to get up close and personal with many from this era—the 1920s, right?—and I’d be interested to see how construction techniques have evolved. But the truth is, I’m just muscle for Meg—I get to move stuff around and carry it down if she finds anything she likes.”

  “That sounds familiar. Well, I’ll let you go. And don’t be surprised if Elizabeth and I take a nap later—one of the perks of growing older. Or we could watch your New England Patriots playing.”

  “Okay. We’ll try not to make too much noise upstairs, Daddy. See you later.”

  Meg led the way up to the third story. “The guest room and bath are down at that end.” She pointed to the end opposite the stairs. “The maid’s room is at the front, there—it has its own bath. And the attic—what there is of it—is at the back.” She opened a closed door, and a chill gust of musty air greeted them. The space was unheated, but not unpleasantly cold. It had a solid floor, but the rest of it was unfinished, and poorly lit. They stepped into the room, and Meg pulled the door closed behind them, then turned to survey the scene. “This is really very tidy, which makes our job easier, I guess. I’m impressed that they’ve gotten through thirty-plus years of marriage without accumulating more stuff. Or maybe they’ve dumped a lot of it along the way.”

  “I don’t see much from earlier generations,” Seth commented. “What about your grandparents? Didn’t they leave anything behind?”

  “Apparently not. I never knew them, you know.”

  “Why?” Seth asked. “I can’t imagine that.”

  “A variety of reasons, I guess. Died young, moved away, hated each other on first sight. We didn’t discuss it. I probably know more about them from my genealogy research than I ever heard from my parents. Anyway, Mother kept the family jewelry, which was pretty modest, and a few odds and ends like sewing boxes or china, and some photographs, but I don’t remember any furniture or big stuff—oh, except for one wing chair. There”—she pointed again, to a neat stack of Bankers Boxes grouped together in a corner—“that looks like the best candidate for Daddy’s legal records. You want to split them between us?”

  “Fine with me. Remind me what I’m looking for?”

  “We’re assuming that anything from Daddy’s current practice is kept at his office. He set up that practice about five years ago. So anything older than that but not the product of the New York firm is the best bet, I think.”

  “And what do I do if I find something? Mark it? Pull it out?”

  “Damn, I should have thought this through better—I would have brought sticky notes. For now, just leave
the covers in place but stick them on end, and I’ll look at them. Is that okay?”

  “This is your idea—I’m just along for the ride.”

  “Then let’s get going before it’s too dark to see up here.”

  24

  They worked in silence for a while. At least the contents of the boxes were neatly arranged and labeled, which helped, and the outside of the boxes bore the approximate dates of the files. Meg had no idea what she was looking for, apart from her suspicion that it was something that had happened at least fifteen years earlier and it might involve someone from Madison. Joe Caffarelli had mentioned that her father had helped his own father out, when they’d first moved to the town around thirty years ago, but that case had come to nothing, according to her father. Would he have bothered to keep any records of that?

  After half an hour of digging through files, Meg reached the conclusion that her father had kept every scrap of paper that had anything to do with any legal matter. One box contained nothing but instruction manuals and guarantees from a range of appliances she was pretty sure he hadn’t owned for years. She doubted that he’d done the filing himself, but he’d instructed someone to take good care of the files, and he’d moved the records to Montclair with him. So if there was something of a legal nature to be found, that had precipitated the recent events, it would probably be here somewhere.

  Seth had pulled out his share of boxes and lined them up in chronological order. “Got something,” he called out.

  Meg straightened up, stretching her back, and went over to join him. “What?”

  He handed her a slim file. “Labeled ‘Caffarelli, 1987.’”

  “That would have been not long after we moved to Madison.” She took it from Seth and looked around for a place to sit and check it out, but the attic offered few comforts.

  “You want to take it downstairs and read it?” Seth asked.

  “No, I think we need to finish up here first, while there’s light. There can’t be too much more to go through. But I’ll put this by the door so it doesn’t get lost.”

  After another half hour they’d been through all the boxes, with no new discoveries, and shadows were collecting in the corners. “I guess that’s it,” Meg said reluctantly. “I hate to pin all my hopes on that one file, but I don’t see anything else that fits.”

  “So let’s look at it and decide if it’s relevant,” Seth suggested.

  “In a moment. You see anything up here we want?”

  Seth scanned the room. “I don’t see much of anything. Sad, kind of. You should see my mother’s attic—she must have at least four generations’ worth of stuff up there.”

  “It makes me a little sad, too, I guess. There are no memories here. I know—there’s not much point in keeping useless stuff, but handling something that one of your ancestors owned or even made makes them more real, somehow. Like shaking hands with them across the years. Apparently I didn’t inherit that feeling from either of my parents—maybe somebody up the line somewhere. Okay, let’s go downstairs and see what we’ve got.”

  Seth picked up the sole file on the way out the door, and Meg made sure the lights were off before she pulled the door shut behind them. Out in the hallway she couldn’t hear any sounds of activity, so she and Seth made their way quietly to their bedroom and sat on the bed. He handed her the file.

  “Okay, what’ve we got?” he asked.

  Meg looked at the battered old file. “I’m almost afraid to look. If there’s nothing there that matters, I don’t have a Plan B. Which means we go to Daddy’s office in the morning, meet Miriam, if she’s willing, say hello and good-bye to Arthur, and head home, I guess.”

  “You’ve done what you could, Meg.”

  “I know. It just seems unfinished.” She opened the file and started reading.

  It didn’t take long. There were typed summaries of some conversations with the elder Joe Caffarelli, and copies of formal correspondence, as her father had said. But far more interesting were the handwritten notes her father had included. They were a bit cryptic, but knowing what she knew, they told a bigger story. When she was finished reading, she carefully closed the folder and sat staring at the cover, trying to think.

  “Well?” Seth asked.

  She looked at him them. “My father lied to us.”

  “What do you mean? When?”

  “When he told us about his dealings with Joe Caffarelli, in Madison. There’s not much detail in the file, but here’s how I’d reconstruct what happened. We know that Joe senior was related to a Mob family, at a time when that mattered. He tried to distance himself, but they wouldn’t let him. The overtures were more or less as my father described them—they wanted some kickback from the sports store in exchange for expedited shipping and such. I think Joe was just exploring the options, legally, to see if he could put them off. That’s why he came to my father, rather than an unfamiliar law firm. But he wasn’t entirely honest with my father then.”

  “But your father said he knew about the Mafia connection,” Seth said.

  “Yes, he did. He wasn’t blind or stupid. He offered Joe a strictly by-the-book opinion, and sent those letters he mentioned and got no response. And then Joe told him, ‘thanks, but we’re done.’”

  “So Joe accepted the inevitable?”

  “Maybe. As my father suggested, maybe he figured out that to stay in business he had to go along with the plan. The store was pretty small potatoes then. And Daddy and Joe parted ways, apparently amicably.

  “But the story doesn’t end there. My father kept his eyes open or his ear to the ground or whatever you want to call it, and he realized that in the late eighties the sports business was just an opening wedge. He guessed that Joe got sucked in deeper. You have to remember, drugs were relatively new then. A sports store which sold to a lot of area high school and amateur teams would provide a lot of access to potential customers. So even if Joe looked the other way, maybe there were employees he was urged to hire, or suppliers that included something extra in their shipments. I don’t know, and my father didn’t say much, because I doubt he had much proof. But he did leave a few handwritten notes in the file, and one of them says ‘drugs’ with a question mark.”

  “Okay, say your father knew there was something going on. What could or should he have done back then?”

  “I don’t know. He had no proof, or at least there’s none here. He’d just moved to town, and he had a child in school—me. In theory he could have gone to the FBI or the state attorney or something like that, but I get the feeling he liked Joe Caffarelli and he didn’t want to get him into any more trouble than he was already in. So in the end he did nothing, apart from watching. But I’m pretty sure he knew what was going on.”

  Seth thought for a moment. “Say that’s true. Why would anyone be so interested in that file now and want to get their hands on it? Has something changed?”

  “Maybe,” Meg said. “Here, look at this.” She handed him a page of handwritten notes.

  “What am I looking at?” Seth asked, bewildered.

  “It’s my father’s notes on a conversation he had with Anthony Del Monte, at some social event. Off the record.”

  “Why is that important?”

  “Because Anthony Del Monte is the New Jersey attorney general, who made a name for himself prosecuting organized crime cases back then. And it looks like he was in bed with the bad guys.”

  “That’s a big jump to a conclusion, Meg. What part of these notes says anything like that?”

  “I know it’s thin, but often there’s information in what is not said. Daddy asked him about a hypothetical case, and Del Monte blew him off, politely, of course. Probably not surprising, taken by itself.”

  “From these notes, it looks like he said ‘thanks for stopping by’ and showed Phillip the door. That’s not exactly incriminating. He must have been a busy man.�
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  “I get that. But look at his name.”

  “Del Monte? Why?”

  “Because that’s Miriam’s last name.”

  Seth stared at her. “Ah. So now you’re suggesting that Miriam is not only Joe Caffarelli Senior’s daughter, but she’s also married to a relative of the attorney general? But that doesn’t prove much by itself, other than that they all knew each other.”

  “Seth, we now have a whole series of coincidence stacked up. How many coincidences does it take to make a fact?”

  “Mark Twain probably had something to say about that. What’s your point now?”

  “One, the attorney general is now running for governor.”

  “And you know this why?” Seth asked.

  “Because since I grew up here, my brain is tuned to pick up the words ‘New Jersey’ wherever I hear them. And there haven’t been all that many governors in my lifetime.”

  Seth shook his head. “And there’s another point?”

  “Miriam was helping her brother clear out their father’s old files very recently, and maybe what they saved on their end, that corresponds to this one here, triggered some old memories and looked like it could be trouble, which Del Monte didn’t want at this particular juncture. So Miriam took it upon herself to see if she could find and eliminate whatever information my father had saved, just in case. But things got a little out of hand, with Enrique and then Arthur.”

  Seth sighed. “Meg, you know I love you. I respect your intelligence. I know you aren’t given to fantasy. But you have strung together a series of ‘what-ifs’ and ‘maybes’ that defies probability. Your thesis here is that Miriam is Joe senior’s daughter. I’ll buy that. She’s married to a politically connected guy whose father is running for governor—it should be easy enough to verify that. Somewhere along the line she saw something or remembered something about her father’s past that set off alarm bells, and she decided she needed to remove any evidence of it, if such evidence even existed, so that her hypothetical father-in-law wouldn’t get blindsided by it. And there she was, by design or your favorite word “coincidence,” in the perfect position to check out all of your father’s files. She knew what was in the office files, so she decided to look here at the house and unfortunately ran into Enrique, who she killed. Then she decided to take another pass at the office in case she had missed something, and had the further bad luck to run into Arthur and walloped him, too, but at least he survived her attack. Does that about cover it?”