Found Money (17 page)

They were out of lettuce. For nine straight days, Sarah’s late-morning snack had consisted of the same unique sandwich delicacy. Peanut butter, sliced bananas, mayonnaise, and iceberg lettuce on rye bread, grilled on both sides until the mayo was bubbling and the lettuce went soft.
Dee-licious
. But it just wasn’t the same without the lettuce.

She slumped with despair as she stood staring into the open refrigerator. She made one more attempt to bend her pregnant body and check the bottom vegetable bin. Definitely no lettuce. Her hormones took over. She was suddenly on the verge of tears.

The phone rang. She paused, unsure whether it was worth the effort to answer. The wall phone was all the way on the other side of the kitchen. Her swollen ankles were worse today than yesterday, and the cold air from the open refrigerator was feeling mighty good.

It kept ringing. Seven, eight times. Somebody really wanted to talk to her. She stepped away from the fridge and slowly crossed the room, grimacing with each step. She answered in a clipped tone. “Yeah.”

“Sarah, it’s Liz. Where is Brent?”

“Not here.”

“I didn’t think so. Where is he?”

Sarah checked the clock on the oven. “Probably halfway back from Denver by now.”

Liz hesitated. “I appreciate your candor.”

“Excuse me?”

“I didn’t expect you to actually admit he came here.”

“Liz, what are you talking about? He went to Denver to see
you
.”

“Me?”

“He left early this morning. Real early. Like two
A.M
. Said he wanted to catch you before you went to work. He couldn’t sleep. Was up thinking about that deposition your lawyer wanted him to give. He needed to talk to you about it.”

“I never saw him.”

“That’s funny. Then I don’t know where he is.”

“Neither do I. But I have a pretty good idea of where he’s been. Somebody beat the daylights out of my lawyer this morning. Jumped him right in his garage on his way to the office.”

“Oh, my word. Is he hurt bad?”

“Bad enough to land in the hospital.”

“Gosh, Liz. That’s terrible. I’m sorry.”

“Are you?”

She stiffened at the accusatory tone. “Wait a second. You don’t think Brent—what
are
you thinking?”

“Just look at what happened. Yesterday, Brent was served with a subpoena. It made him so mad he couldn’t sleep. He jumped in his car in the middle of the night and drove to Denver, supposedly to talk to me. Next thing we know my lawyer’s in the emergency room getting his face stitched up.”

Sarah’s hand shook nervously. “Just slow down. I know this looks bad. But let’s not jump to conclusions.”

“This is hardly a jump. Brent’s in trouble this time, Sarah. Big time. All I can say for you is that I hope you had nothing to do with it.”

She was about to respond, but the line clicked. Her hands shook harder. She gripped the phone, paralyzed with confusion. The dial tone hummed in her ear. Liz was gone. Brent was unaccounted for.

And Sarah felt completely alone.

Ryan insisted on a thoroughly private line for his call to his lawyer. Agent Forsyth offered the use of an embassy phone, but somehow that sounded about as private as dialing into a talk radio station. The only viable option was a pay phone on the street. Forsyth wasn’t happy about it, but he didn’t seem prepared to arrest him to prevent him from walking out of the building. The Panamanian police were no longer a threat, since their only apparent objective had been to assist the FBI in bringing him to the embassy. Ryan found a public phone right on Avenida Balboa. Cars and buses rumbled by on the busy street. He closed one ear with his finger as he dialed Norm’s private line.

“Where are you?” his lawyer asked.

“About a block from the embassy. I’m at a pay phone, but they’re expecting me back inside when I finish talking to you. I’ve been sort of detained for questioning by the FBI.”

“What?” He sounded as if he was coming through the phone.

“You heard me.” Ryan gave him the two-minute summary, filling in the gaps since their talk last night.

“First off,” said Norm, “I suppose it tells us something that you ran into the FBI instead of the
DEA. The FBI does do drug work, but if the government thought the three million dollars at Banco del Istmo was drug money, I would think DEA would have detained you rather than the FBI.”

“Does that mean they know the money is from extortion payments?”

“I wouldn’t go that far, but I will say this. It’s puzzling that the FBI went to all the trouble of coordinating with the local police to question you in Panama. It would have been much easier just to wait for you to return to the United States.”

“Except that last night I booked a flight to the Cayman Islands so I could check on that offshore corporation that transferred the money to my father’s account. Maybe the FBI wasn’t so sure I was coming back to the states.”

“That’s possible. But the FBI doesn’t have unlimited resources to chase people around the globe. If these agents were based in Panama, that’s one thing. But if they flew down from the States just to talk to you, this thing may be bigger than your father even knew.”

Pedestrians hurried past on the sidewalk. In a moment of paranoia, Ryan wondered if any were FBI. “Let’s take this one step at a time. What do I do right now?”

“Step one is to get your new passport. It should be ready and waiting for you right there at the embassy, and they can’t withhold it.”

“Then what?”

“Legally, you have no obligation to talk to anyone. The FBI has no right to detain you. But we have to be concerned about appearances. After you leave, the FBI agent will fill out a Three-oh-two report that makes a record of your conversation. We don’t want that Three-oh-two to state simply that on the advice
of your attorney, you refused to talk to the FBI. That sounds like you’re hiding something. We want you to sound as cooperative as possible, short of talking to them. So here’s what you do. You go back to the embassy and tell the agent that you fully intend to cooperate. But now isn’t a good time to talk. Your bag was stolen along with your passport. You’re upset and you’re tired. Ask them for their business cards. That’s important. I need to know which field office these agents are from. Tell them your lawyer will contact them about an interview in Denver after you’ve returned to the States.”

“So you want me to come straight back to Denver? No stop in the Cayman Islands?”

“Do
not
go to the Cayman Islands. I’ll have my investigator check out that lead discreetly. Everything you do from here on out, you have to assume the FBI is watching.”

“This is getting so nuts.”

Norm sensed his frustration. “Ryan, take it easy. You’ve done nothing wrong. If a crime has been committed, it was your father. The FBI can’t send you to jail for something your father may have done.”

“The FBI may be the least of my problems. Obviously someone has been tailing me all over Panama, maybe even followed me from Denver. And I still can’t figure out why the same woman who scammed me out of my bag at the hotel bar would then warn me that the police were coming to my room to pick me up.”

“Are you sure it was the same woman?”

“Sounded just like her. If it wasn’t, that’s even more baffling. It is strange, though. Why would someone who essentially robbed me suddenly decide she’s on my side?”

“Maybe she’s not exactly on your side. Just that in certain respects your interests coincide.”

“What do you mean?”

“The essence of blackmail is the secret. Neither side wants the secret to get out. If it does, the blackmailer loses his cash cow, and the person paying the blackmail has to suffer the consequences of the world knowing the truth about him.”

“You think she’s protecting the person who was blackmailed?”

“I think she knows who paid the money. And I think it’s her job to make sure nobody finds out.”

Ryan swallowed hard. “Then why doesn’t she just kill me?”

“Probably for the same reason she didn’t just kill your father. He must have worked out some arrangement where the secret would be revealed if anything untoward happened to him or his family. It’s a fairly common safety valve in any extortion case.”

“How would it work?”

“Hypothetically, let’s say your father had photographs of a famous TV evangelist having sex with his German shepherd. This is not the kind of thing that advances an evangelist’s career. Your father blackmails the evangelist, but he’s afraid the bad guys might kill him rather than pay him five million dollars. So he sends copies of the photographs to some third party, along with explicit instructions. If Frank Duffy dies under suspicious circumstances, the photographs are to be sent immediately to the
National Enquirer
. That way, killing the blackmailer accomplishes nothing. The only option is to pay the money.”

“So in my situation, this third party would be…who? My mother?”

“Not likely a family member. Maybe a friend. Maybe someone with no apparent connection to your father at all.”

Ryan fell silent, pensive. Maybe somebody like Amy. Maybe that was why she had balked at his hints to move their relationship beyond business.

“You still there?” asked Norm.

“Yeah, I’m here. I was just thinking. This third party you mentioned. They probably wouldn’t work for free, right?”

“It would be typical to give them a cut of the extortion money.”

“Say two hundred thousand dollars?”

“I guess. Whatever they negotiate. What are you driving at?”

“Maybe it’s best I’m not going to the Cayman Islands after all. There’s something I need to check out back in Denver.”

Norm stiffened, concerned. “You’re getting that funny sound in your voice again. What are you thinking?”

He smiled with his eyes. “I’m thinking that things are just beginning to make sense.”

Visiting hours at Denver Health Medical Center started at 7:00
P.M
. Liz reached Phil Jackson’s private room at 7:01.

She was eager to see him and make sure he was okay. She walked briskly, then slowed steadily. A journey down the busy hospital corridors triggered memories of Ryan’s medical school residency, back when DHMC was called Denver General Hospital. She remembered the night he’d decided to be a surgeon. She remembered the following nights, too, the years of sacrifice. Ryan worked twenty-hour shifts for wages that didn’t even come close to paying his student loans. They lived week to week on Liz’s paycheck. They saw each other once a day for dinner right at the hospital, usually a ten-minute burger break between her night job and her day job. Ryan had invested so much.
She
had invested just as much. All for the glorious payoff of life without parole in Piedmont Springs.

For Liz, it was a return to failure. She had grown up dirt poor, one of seven children in a dilapidated four-bedroom farmhouse. She was the only one in her family who had ended up staying in Piedmont Springs. It was a bitter irony. Her heart had been broken when Ryan had gone away to college without her. She was seventeen and left to play mom to six younger siblings, an experience that had taught
her never to want children of her own. Four years later, her friends had been so jealous when Ryan invited her up to Denver and asked her to marry him. A medical student. A future surgeon. He could have been her way out. No one had told her it was a round-trip ticket. In hindsight, she should have smelled trouble when it took five years of living together to move the engagement to the wedding.

“Knock, knock,” said Liz as she appeared in the doorway.

Jackson was sitting up in bed and conscious. He looked battered but better than expected. The right side of his face was swollen with purple and black bruises. A bandage covered eleven stitches above his right eyebrow. Painkillers and a glucose solution fed intravenously into his needle-pricked forearm. His dinner rested on a tray over his lap. It had hardly been touched. At his side was a yellow legal pad and a case file his secretary had brought from the office.

“Phil?” she said softly.

He waved her in and tried to smile, but the movement of any facial muscles seemed to cause him pain.

“You poor man.”

“Nothing a good dose of work can’t cure.”

“Don’t you ever stop?”

“Don’t complain. It’s your case I’m working on.”

She nearly shivered with gratitude. “You have no idea how relieved I am to hear you say that. I was so afraid you would drop my case.”

“Why would I do that?”

She shrugged impishly. “I spoke to your paralegal this afternoon about the phone conversation I had with Sarah Langford. Didn’t she tell you?”

“She told me everything. Honestly, I figured it was Brent long before you even called.”

“And you’re still sticking with me?”

He laid his legal pad aside and took her hand lightly, looking her straight in the eye. “Let me tell you something. I have deposed everybody from Teamsters to gangsters—and ripped them to shreds. I have had my tires slashed, my house vandalized, my life threatened. If I were easily intimidated I’d be sitting in an office at some big law firm doing bond work. I’m more committed to your case than ever. Nobody threatens Phil Jackson. Least of all a punk like Brent Langford.”

She squeezed his hand, then pulled away shyly.

“Don’t be embarrassed,” he said. “You can’t help yourself. All women find men with purple faces absolutely irresistible.”

“It is a very nice shade of purple.”

He smiled, then turned more serious. “You know, I’m not the only one who has to gear up for a fight. You need to brace yourself as well.”

She nodded tentatively. “I’ll do what I have to do.”

“Good. Because this is going to get nasty. And I don’t just mean Brent’s deposition. The whole Duffy family is going to feel the pressure. In fact, the FBI should be taking a pretty close look at them already.”

“The FBI?”

“One of my most satisfied former clients is now a special agent in the Denver field office. I called her this morning from the hospital and asked her to poke around a little. Brent’s attack is a federal offense—obstruction of justice. The FBI has much bigger fish to fry, but with a little friendly encouragement and factual embellishment, I think I
piqued her interest. Ryan’s phony invoices at his clinic. Frank’s talk of all the money he was going to leave you. Brent’s statement that it was ‘family business.’ It probably won’t amount to anything, but it doesn’t hurt to have your husband squirming under the microscope of a possible federal racketeering investigation.”

She blinked nervously. “That’s pretty harsh, don’t you think?”

“Do you want to win or don’t you?”

“Yeah, I want to win. But—”

“No buts. Now do me a favor. Take this,” he said as he handed her a slip of paper. It had two phone numbers written on it.

“What’s this?”

“My secretary got a call today from the law office of Norman Klusmire. He’s your husband’s new divorce attorney. The top number is his beeper number. On your way home tonight, stop at a pay phone and dial his beeper. Be sure to use a pay phone so there’s absolutely no way of tracing the call back to you. Just enter the other number and hang up.”

“Whose number is it?”

“It’s the home phone number for the judge in your case. He’s a crusty old fart who goes ballistic whenever lawyers call him at home. He won’t even give Klusmire a chance to explain he was answering a bogus page. This is the kind of stupid little thing that’ll have Judge Novak riding his ass all the way to trial. It should teach a hotshot criminal lawyer like Klusmire to think twice before taking on another divorce case.”

“That’s too clever,” she said as she tucked the piece of paper into her purse.

“I can’t take full credit. I sort of stole the idea
from one of my clients. Whenever she suspected her husband was off with his mistress, she used to beep him with their rabbi’s home phone number.”

“Do you always steal from your clients?”

“Sometimes.”

“What are you going to steal from me?” she asked coyly.

He raised an eyebrow till it hurt. “We’ll see.”