Found Money (4 page)

Amy took Monday morning off, arriving at the office during the lunch hour. After six straight days of nonstop work, three thousand travel miles among the firm’s U.S. offices, and immeasurable abuse and aggravation from frantic attorneys, she felt entitled to a few hours with her daughter.

The Boulder office of Bailey, Gaslow & Heinz was on Walnut Street, filling the top three floors of a five-story building. Boulder was the firm’s second-largest office, though with 33 lawyers it was a distant second behind Denver, which had 140. The office prided itself on doing the same quality work and generating the same billable hours per lawyer as Denver. That was the minimum standard set by the new managing-partner-in-residence, a certified workaholic who had moved from Denver to Boulder to whip the satellite office into shape.

“Morning,” said Amy as she breezed by a coworker in the hall. She got a cup of coffee from the lounge, then headed back to her office. The thought of a week’s worth of work piled up on her desk made her dread opening the door.

Her office was small, but she was the only non-lawyer in the firm who had a window and a view. Marilyn Gaslow had pulled strings to get it for her. Marilyn was an influential partner who
worked out of Denver. Her grandfather was the “Gaslow” in Bailey, Gaslow & Heinz, one of the founding partners over a century ago. She and Amy’s mother had been friends since high school—best friends until her death. It was Marilyn who had gotten Amy hired as the computer expert, and it was Marilyn who had committed the firm to pay half of Amy’s tuition if she went to law school. The only condition was that Amy had to come back to work at the firm as an associate, putting her valuable law and science background to use in the firm’s nationally recognized environmental law practice. At least, that was supposed to be the only condition. Ever since Amy had accepted the deal, the firm had treated her like slave labor.

She sat down behind her desk and switched on the computer. She had been checking her e-mail from outside the office for the past week, but she had some new messages. One was from Marilyn, just this morning. It read, “Atta girl, Amy. One hell of a job!”

Amy smiled. At least
one
of the firm’s two hundred lawyers knew how to say thank you for salvaging the computer system. Somehow, however, it didn’t mean quite as much coming from Marilyn, her mother’s old buddy. She scrolled down to the next virtual envelope on her screen. It was from Jason Phelps, head of the litigation department in the Boulder office. Now, kudos from
him
would definitely be a breakthrough. She opened it eagerly.

SEE ME!
was all it said.

She looked up from her screen and nearly jumped. He was standing in the doorway, scowling. “Mr. Phelps—good morning, sir. Afternoon, I mean.”

“Yes. It is
after
noon. A big T-ball game for Timmy this morning, I presume?”

Her gut wrenched. It didn’t matter how many nights and weekends she worked. It didn’t matter if she was away on firm business. For a single mother, temporary unavailability always gave rise to the same negative inference.

“Her name is Taylor,” she said coolly. “And she doesn’t play T-ball. Her mother doesn’t have time to take her.”

“I need that joint defense network for the Wilson superfund litigation operable by three o’clock. No later.”

“I have to work through the MIS directors of six different law firms. You want it in two hours?”

“I
wanted
it yesterday. Today, I
need
it. I don’t care how you get it done. Just get it done.” He raised a bushy gray eyebrow, then turned and left.

Amy sank in her chair. Things were picking up right where they had left off.
I’d like to play T-ball with your head, asshole.

She would have liked to say it to his face, but he would surely pull the plug on the firm’s promise to subsidize her tuition. Then she couldn’t go to law school. And then she couldn’t come back—to
this
.

“I need a life,” she muttered. She wondered why she put up with it, but she knew the answer. Every two or three months, her ex-husband would remind her. He’d call with another one of his empty offers to pay half of something for Taylor if Amy would pay the other half. Sometimes he was just being disruptive, like the time he told Taylor he’d send her and Amy on a Hawaiian vacation if Mommy would just pay half. Taylor had pranced around the house in a plastic lei and sunglasses for a week before that one blew over. Other times he was just taunting
Amy, like his standing offer to put ten thousand dollars into a college fund for Taylor if Amy would come up with the other ten. Things like that—things for Taylor’s future—really made her wish she were in the position to call his bluff.

Maybe she was.

Her eyes lit with a devilish smile. She picked up the phone and dialed his office. His secretary answered.

“I’m sorry,” she told Amy. “He’s in a meeting. Can I take a message?”

The message was right in her head, ready to spring. Taylor’s going to Yale. Pay half of
that
, you blowhard. But she realized it was premature. The money wasn’t hers. Not yet.

“No message, thank you.” She hung up and came back to reality.

She checked the clock. She’d have to clone herself to meet Mr. Phelps’s three o’clock deadline. She drew a deep breath and returned to the computer, but not for Phelps’s project. A financial planning program appeared on her screen.

She smiled thinly as the computer calculated the interest on two hundred thousand dollars.

The funeral was on Tuesday at St. Edmund’s Catholic Church. Neither Ryan nor his sister were regular churchgoers. His parents, however, had attended nearly every Sunday for the last four decades. Here, Frank and Jeanette Duffy had exchanged marriage vows. It was where their two children had been baptized and taken their First Holy Communion. Ryan’s sister, Sarah, had also been married here. In the last row of the balcony, a fellow altar boy had told Ryan where babies really come from. Behind the solid oak doors in the side
chapel, Ryan used to confess his sins to an old Irish priest with a drinker’s red nose.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned…”

Ryan wondered when his father had last gone to confession. He wondered what he’d confessed.

St. Edmund’s was an old stone church built in the style of a Spanish mission. It wasn’t an authentic Spanish mission. The old Spanish explorers hadn’t bothered to go as far east as the Colorado plains in their search for the mythical Seven Cities of Gold. Places like the San Luis Valley and Sangre de Cristo Mountains in southwest and south central Colorado were filled with reminders of the legendary search for cities made of solid gold. The Spaniards seemed to have stopped, however, once the landscape turned interminably flat. Somehow, even sixteenth-century explorers must have sensed that no riches would lie in Piedmont Springs.

If only they had checked Frank Duffy’s attic.

Ryan felt a chill. The church was cold inside, even in July. Dark stained-glass windows blocked out most of the natural light. The smell of burning incense lingered over the casket in the center aisle, rising to the sweeping stone arches overhead. The service was well attended. Frank Duffy had many friends, none of whom apparently had a clue that he was a blackmailer who’d socked away two million dollars in extortion money. Dressed in black, his mourners filled thirty rows of pews on both sides of the aisle. Father Marshall presided over the service, wearing a somber expression and dark purple vestments. Ryan sat in the front row beside his mother. His sister and brother-in-law sat to his left. Liz, his estranged wife, had been “unable to attend.”

The organ music ended abruptly. An ominous
silence filled the church, pierced only by the occasional squawk of an impatient child. Ryan squeezed his mother’s hand as his uncle approached the lectern to deliver a eulogy. Uncle Kevin was bald and overweight, suffering from heart disease, once the odds-on favorite to drop dead before his younger brother. He seemed the least prepared of all for Frank Duffy’s death.

He adjusted the microphone, cleared his throat. “I loved Frank Duffy,” he said in a shaky voice. “We all loved him.”

Ryan wanted to listen, but his mind wandered. Months in advance, they knew this day was coming. It had started with a cough, which he’d dismissed as the same old chronic emphysema. Then they found the lesion on the larynx. Their initial fear was that Dad might lose his voice. Frank Duffy had the gift of gab. He was always the one telling jokes at the bar, the guy laughing loudest at parties. It would have been a cruel irony, taking away his ability to speak—like an artist gone blind, or a musician turned deaf. The throat lesion, however, had only been the proverbial tip of the iceberg. The cancer had already metastasized. Doctors gave him three to four months. He never did lose his voice—at least not until the very end, silenced by his own sense of shame. His death brought its own irony.

The eulogy continued. “My brother was a workingman all his life, the kind of guy who’d get nervous whenever the poker ante rose above fifty cents.” His smile faded, his expression more serious. “But Frank was rich in spirit and blessed with a loving family.”

Ryan’s heart felt hollow. His uncle’s fond memories no longer seemed relevant. In light of the money, they didn’t even ring true.

He heard his aunt sobbing in the second row. Several other mourners were moved to tears. He glanced at his mother. No tears behind the black veil, he noted with curiosity. She sat stone-faced, expressionless. No sign of sadness or distress of any kind. Of course, the illness had been prolonged. She must have cried it out by now, no emotion left.

Or
, he wondered,
was there something she knew?

Amy met Mr. Phelps’s unrealistic three o’clock deadline. She always met her deadlines. This time, however, she was feeling abused. She went home when she finished.

She conjured up an image as she drove—a fantasy of sorts. It had to do with the money. She wouldn’t just quietly give notice, she decided. She would drive her old truck to Bailey, Gaslow & Heinz, like any other day. She’d get her morning coffee, retreat to her office, and sit very calmly at her desk. But she wouldn’t turn on her computer. She wouldn’t even close the door. She’d leave it wide open—and just
wait
for someone like Phelps to come piss her off.

For the moment, however, the waiting was beginning to breed paranoia.

It had been Gram’s idea to keep the money in the house and see what happened. Amy had a nagging instinct that someone was testing her, checking whether she’d do the honorable thing. She recalled the pointed questions on her application to law school.
Are you currently under investigation for any crime? Have you ever been convicted of a crime?
Before long she would face the same probing questions in her application to the Colorado State Bar Association. What kind of dim view might they take toward a candidate who had
knowingly deprived the IRS of its fair share of a mysterious cash windfall? Worse yet, someone could be setting her up—someone like her ex-husband. Maybe he’d reported the money stolen, the serial numbers registered with the FBI. The minute she tried to spend it, she’d be arrested.

Now you’re really being paranoid.
Amy’s ex-husband made a stink over paying five hundred dollars a month in child support. He certainly wouldn’t risk shipping two hundred grand in a cardboard box. Still, the prudent course was to contact the police, probably even fess up to the IRS. But Gram would kill her. She’d kill herself, if she messed up her chance to beg off law school, return to her graduate studies and follow her dreams. It was time for Amy Parkens to live on the edge a little.

Amy walked to the kitchenette and opened the freezer door. She reached for the box of cash behind the frozen pot roast.

“Amy, what are you doing?”

She turned at the sound of her grandmother’s voice. She felt the urge to lie, but she could never fool Gram. “Just checking on our investment.”

Gram placed a bag of groceries on the table. She’d returned from the store sooner than Amy had expected. “It’s all there,” said Gram. “I didn’t take any.”

“I wasn’t suggesting you had.”

“Then leave it be, girl.”

Amy closed the door and helped unload the groceries. “Where’s Taylor?”

“Outside. Mrs. Bentley from three-seventeen is watching her. She owes us, all the times I’ve watched her little monsters.” Gram paused, then smiled with a thought. “Maybe we can take some
of the money and get Taylor a nanny. A good one. Someone who speaks French. I’d like Taylor to speak French.”

Amy stuffed a box of Rice Krispies into the pantry. “Excellent idea. She’ll be the only four-year-old in Boulder who orders
pommes frites
with her Happy Meal.”

“I’m serious, Amy. This money is going to open a whole new world for your daughter.”

“That’s so unfair. Don’t use Taylor to make me feel better about keeping this money.”

“I don’t understand you. What’s so wrong about keeping it?”

“It makes me nervous. Sitting around, waiting for a letter in the mail or a knock on the door—anything that might explain the money. An explanation might never come. If the money was sent by mistake, I want to know. If it’s a gift, I’d like to know whose kindness is behind it.”

“Hire a detective, if you’re that nervous. Maybe they can check the box or even the money for fingerprints.”

“That’s a great idea.”

“Just one problem. How are you going to pay for it?”

Amy’s smile vanished.

Gram said, “You could use some of the money. Take five hundred bucks or so.”

“No. We can’t spend any of it until we find out who it’s from.”

“Then all we can do is wait.” She folded up the paper shopping bag, placed it in a drawer, and kissed Amy on the forehead. “I’m going to check on our little angel.”

She grimaced as her grandmother left the apartment. Waiting was not her style. Short of hiring a
detective and checking for fingerprints, however, she wasn’t sure how else to go about it. Cash was virtually untraceable. The plastic lining had no identification on it. That left the box.

The box!

She hurried to the freezer, yanked open the door, and grabbed the box. She set in on the table and checked the flaps. Nothing on top. She turned it over. Bingo. As she had hoped, the box bore a printed product identification number for the Crock-Pot it had once contained. Amy had purchased enough small appliances to know that they always came with a warranty registration card. She doubted, however, that they would freely give out names and addresses over the phone. After a moment to collect her thoughts, she called directory assistance, got the toll-free number for Gemco Home Appliances, and dialed it.

“Good afternoon,” she said in her most affected, friendly voice. “I have a favor to ask. We had a potluck supper here at the church the other night, and wouldn’t you know it that two women showed up with the exact same Gemco Crock-Pot? I washed them both, and now I’m not sure whose is whose. I really don’t want to have to tell these women I mixed up their stuff. If I gave you the product identification number from one of them, could you tell me who owns it?”

The operator on the line hesitated. “I’m not sure I can do that, ma’am.”

“Please. Just the name. It would save me a world of embarrassment.”

“Well—I suppose that would be all right. Just don’t tell my supervisor.”

She read him the eleven-digit number from the box, then waited anxiously.

“Here it is,” he said. “That one belongs to Jeanette Duffy.”

“Oh, Jeanette.” Amy wanted to push for an address, but she couldn’t think of a convincing way to work it into her ruse.
Leave it be
, she thought, heeding Gram’s advice. “Thank you so much, sir.”

Her heart pounded as she hung up the phone. She had surprised herself, the way she’d pulled it off. It was actually kind of fun, exhilarating. Best of all, it had worked. She had a lead.

Now all she had to do was find the right Jeanette Duffy.