Fallen Idols (18 page)

Pete was washing glasses in the sink at the far end of the bar. “I'm taking off in a minute, Pete,” Clancy called down. “Close up whenever you feel like it.”

“That's a positive ten-four,” Pete answered. Clancy smiled. The man was a die-hard fan of cop shows on television, particularly the old, square ones that Jack Webb used to produce.

He drew a short draft for himself and carried it to an empty booth in the back. Sliding onto the wooden bench, he unfolded the slip of paper he'd been carrying around in his wallet, on which he had printed the name and phone number of the real estate broker in Madison who had sold his parents’ house. His stomach tightened as he looked at it—he had promised Callie he'd let this alone.

His rationale for breaking his vow was that this was no big deal. He had already obtained this information before he had made his pledge. This was nothing more than tying up a loose end. Better to tie them all in a neat bundle than to leave one dangling. That's how you hurt yourself, you trip and fall on a dangling loose end, like an untied shoelace. He would make this one call, and that would be it.

He took his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed.

Okay, he thought, making a spur-of-the-moment, minor-league Faustian bargain with himself: If a service picks up, won't leave a message, and I'll walk away from this. If a live person picks up, I'll follow through. He was hoping the service would pick up. “Hello?”

Not the service—a live voice. “Brooks Martinson, please,” he read from his note.

“Speaking.” The voice on the other end of the line was deep and resonant. A voice that had been self-trained to make deals.

He'd made a pact with himself—now he had to follow through. “Mr. Martinson, my name is Clancy Gaines. I'm Walt Gaines's son. Professor Gaines, from the university.”

“Of course,” Martinson boomed out. “How are you, Mr. Gaines?”

“Fine, thanks. I hope I'm not calling too late.” He glanced at the clock on the wall. Nine-forty-five.

“Not at all, not at all,” come the reassuring answer. “I do much of my business in the evening, after people have gotten home and had their dinner. How can I help you?”

“You were the real estate broker who handed the sale of my father's house last year, weren't you?” Clancy asked.

“Yes, I was. Fine man, your father,” Martinson added, with a salesman's ass-kissing slickness. “The community was sorry to see him leave.”

“I'm sure.” A harmless lie. “But sometimes you have to move on, whether you want to or not.”

Now the voice was sympathetic. “I understand.” Alluding to the unspoken—Jocelyn's death. “So …”

The point of this call. “I'm helping dad with his estate planning, and I need some figures. I'd get them from him, but he's out of the country, on work.”

“Yes, of course,” Martinson said. “His archaeology work.”

“That's right.” Walt's extensive travels, common knowledge in Madison, were a good cover for this skulking around. “What I need to know is, what did the house sell for? Actually,” he continued, “I need to know what he netted, after commissions and other expenses.” He paused. “Shoot, I just realized. You're at home, and your files would be at your office.”

“I am at home,” Martinson answered, “but I have the information here. If you'll give me a moment, I'll dig it up for you. Or would you prefer I call you back?”

“That's okay. I'll hold.”

“It won't take but a few seconds.”

Clancy patted his pockets for something to write with. Having pen but no paper, he grabbed a napkin from the holder.

In less than a minute, Martinson was back on the line. “All my transactions are on my computer, so it was a cinch to bring up the information,” he explained, his tone insinuating that not all his competitors were so professional. “Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

“The house was listed at four hundred and forty-five thousand dollars, and we sold it for four-fifteen.”

Clancy scribbled the numbers on the napkin.

“We could've done better if we had held firm on our asking price,” Martinson continued, somewhat defensively, “but your father wanted to sell as quickly as possible, so he took the first bid that was in the ballpark. Four-fifteen is still a good price,” he added hastily, “considering the age of the house and the neighborhood.

Nowadays, people spending over four hundred are looking for a newer house. But that was a fine house,” he added quickly. “Solid construction. I personally prefer the older neighborhoods. I understand your father is living in the Los Angeles area now?”

“Yes.”

“Big difference between real estate prices here and out there,” the broker said. “You get a lot more bang for your buck here,” he added in defense of his home turf.

“True,” Clancy agreed. “Do you know what they bought the house for, back in ‘77?”

He had been five, going on six, when they had moved to the big old Victorian with the acre of backyard and the big trees they'd hung swings from. He was going to miss going back there for holidays with his own children.

“I have it right here. Your parents paid thirty-five thousand dollars for it. Seven thousand down, with a twenty-eight-thousand mortgage.” He chuckled. “Things have changed since then, haven't they?”

“No kidding. And that was what, a thirty-year mortgage, twenty-five?”

“It was a twenty-five-year mortgage, that's correct.”

Which meant his father had owned the house free and clear. After paying Martinson his six percent commission, that would come to—he quickly ran the figures in his head—three hundred and ninety grand. A good grubstake.

“So he cleared close to four hundred thousand dollars,” he said, to verify his calculation. He wrote
$390K
the napkin.

“Well, no.”

“No?”

“That
would
have been the amount, if your parents had maintained their original mortgage,” Martinson explained. “But with the refinancing, that wasn't the case.”

Clancy sat back. His parents had refinanced their house? He hadn't known that; not that it was any of his business. Still, it seemed odd. They were frugal in their life-style.

He put the thought aside. “The refinancing, right. I'd forgotten. How much was that again?”

“The most recent one?”

There was more than one? “Yes.”

“That would have been two and a half years ago, and it was for two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars,” Martinson said, clicking off the figures.

Clancy felt numb as he wrote the numbers down on the napkin. “Two seventy-five.”

“That's correct,” came the voice from the other end of the line.

“So then the profit would have been …”

“One hundred and forty thousand, before commissions and other fees,” Martinson said crisply, sparing him the calculation. “It came to a net profit of about a hundred and ten thousand dollars.”

Clancy tried to recall what his father had told him about how much he'd made on the sale. That he had done well? Something like that. Pulling a hundred grand out of a more than four-hundred-thousand-dollar house isn't doing well, any way you cut it.

“Mr. Gaines?”

“Yes, I'm still here. I was writing the amounts down. You were saying the most recent refinancing was for the two-seventy-five. Were there others?”

“Yes.” There was a short pause. “Your parents refinanced their house three times. Not a bad financial strategy,” he added, “given how the value climbed, particularly over the past decade.”

Clancy wrote the number 3, underlined it. “Could you give me the years they did that? Besides the most recent one, which was in 1999, would it have been?”

“Nineteen ninety-nine, that's correct. The other two times were in ‘94 and ‘97. Taking advantage of low interest rates and a rising stock market, one would assume. Quite a few of my clients did that. Many of them got burned when the market crashed, of course, but the lucky ones took their profits and put them into conservative, safe investments. I'm sure your father was one of the prescient ones. He's a very smart man, it was a pleasure to do business with him.”

“Yes, he's smart,” Clancy agreed. But not with money, money was never a big deal with his parents. Theirs was the life of ideas, and adventure. He wanted to consult with Will about this, because of his younger brother's expertise, but he couldn't imagine his parents as big plungers. He'd certainly never seen any indication of their having wealth, until he had been inside his father's new house.

“Is there anything else I can assist you with tonight, Mr. Gaines?” Martinson asked.

“No,” Clancy answered. “You've given me everything I need.”

“Well, glad to be of help,” the broker responded cheerfully. “Please give your father my best regards.”

“I'll do that,” Clancy said woodenly. “Good-bye.”

He turned his phone off. Smart play, asshole. You think you're going to tie up one loose end, and you wind up unraveling the whole damn ball of yarn.

“How was business?” Callie asked, when Clancy came in the door and flopped on the couch, turning on the television to ESPN to catch the scores. He needed to keep up—if a client had an injury it was important to know about it before he got the call from the team's doctor, or more commonly, the athlete's agent.

“The usual for Tuesday. Barely enough to pay the help.”

“You should start taking Tuesdays off. Pete can open as well as close.”

“I should, yeah.” He watched some footage from the Bears practice. They had squeaked by Tampa Bay in their season opener, but this coming week they had the Rams. Talk about out of the frying pan into the fire. The spread in Nevada would be close to ten points, but there would be plenty of fools from Chicago taking it.

The stuff on TV was boring, and he was distracted. He channel-surfed, catching some Headline News, other sports channels. The Cubs, who had tantalized their fans during June and July by playing smart, winning baseball, were well into their usual September swoon. And now that Michael and Scottie were gone, the Bulls were going to be garbage for a decade. A great town, Chicago, Clancy thought of his adopted city, but if you follow sports you'll go nuts.

“Did you eat?” Callie asked. “I could heat up last night's chicken.”

“I'm not hungry, hon. Thanks anyway.” He turned the set off with the remote. “I did something stupid tonight.”

She stared at him, hands on hip. “Don't tell me it's about your father.”

He nodded. “Yes,” he said balefully, like a kid anticipating a scolding from a teacher.

“You promised, Clancy.”

He could hear the irritation in her voice. “What did you do?” she demanded.

He recounted his conversation with Martinson, the real estate agent. “Dad didn't make squat on his house,” he said, after he had given her the details.

“I don't think a hundred thousand dollars is squat,” she rebutted. “I wish we had a hundred thousand in the bank.”

“It's squat when you should've pulled four hundred out. But that's the tip of the iceberg. Why were they refinancing the place?”

“I'm sure there's a logical explanation.” Callie paused. “You aren't going to dig deeper into this, are you?”

He gave her a sad-sack half-shrug.

“So a promise to me means nothing.”

“Come on, it's not like that.”

“It isn't? How is it, then? What are the rules for justifying breaking a promise, Clancy? Like, when's it okay to?” She was steaming. “Does this go both ways? Boy, great marriage we're having here tonight.”

“Look, honey, I don't want to fight about this.” He had messed up, and he didn't like that she was busting him for it, although she was well within her rights to do so.

“Then you shouldn't have done it.”

He didn't answer her.

“So now what?” she demanded. “When's the other shoe going to drop? How many shoes?”

“I—”

“Screw it,” she snapped, cutting him off. “You want to go off on some cockamamie wild-goose chase, be my guest. Just don't tell me you're doing it. When ignorance is bliss … I want to be ignorant, of everything. Leave me out of the loop.” She paused. “What about Will and Tom? Did you tell them?”

He shook his head.

“You going to?”

“Probably.”

She shook her head, more in sadness than in anger. “You guys are cruising for a bruising,” she warned him. “You'd better be damned careful about asking questions you might not want answers to.”

“Curiouser and curiouser,” Tom said. “Which doesn't surprise me, although it does make me more nervous and pissed-off about dad than I already was.”

He was on the phone with Clancy; his older brother had called him. “You talk to Will about this yet?” he asked.

“No, I called you first.”

It was nine o'clock, the following morning. A warm, balmy day, almost tropical in feeling, the beginning of Indian summer, Clancy's favorite time of the year. He was in his office at the fitness center, on a short break between appointments. Between the disconcerting news from the real estate agent and Callie's bitching at him, he had hardly gotten any sleep.

He looked outside the glass partition of his office to the large therapy room. The place was abuzz with activity. You're up to your neck running two businesses, he thought, and now this? What he was finding out about his parents was giving him an ulcerous pain in his stomach. He figured Tom and Will had the same nauseated feelings in their guts, too.

This latest development was going to make things even worse.

“What do you think this draining of funds from the family treasury is about?” Tom asked.

“How should I know?” Clancy responded. “We've already discussed how it's none of our business what they did with their money. I don't give a damn about that.” His trying to understand and then explain his parents’ erratic behavior was becoming more difficult and aggravating.

“Bullshit.”

Busted. “You're right. I do care. But it's not my affair.”

“Or mine,” Tom replied testily.

“Mine, ours, it's the same deal.” Jesus, it was so easy to hurt Tom's feelings. “The thing that bothers me is that it's so out of character. This is becoming like a wooden Russian doll. You keep opening one up and finding more inside.”

Tom was silent for a moment. Then he asked, “Even if it is none of our business, don't you want to know where the money was going? What they were using it for? I never noticed any big changes in their life-style.”