Concrete Angel (38 page)

“Whose office?”

“Guess?”

“Now how are we going to do that?”

“I bet anything she’s got copy of his office keys. She’s a key junkie—you should see the ring she carries. She can probably let herself into houses and offices up and down the coast.”

It was easy to eliminate some of the keys on her chain—our door, the car keys, Grandmother’s house, the key to her safes and storage units. I was shocked to see there were almost a dozen. Some looked old, but others were shiny new. While she was taking a nap one afternoon, I made copies of the remaining ones. The storage keys were easy to ID, tagged with the unit’s location.

It only took a few tries before I got the knob on Bud’s office door to turn. Bud and Mom were out for the evening so Jason and I brought Ryan with us. “What are we looking for,” Jason asked. “Any specific ideas?”

“Some proof of—of whatever the deal is,” I said, making a play area for Ryan by moving some chairs and cushions around. I handed him a bag of his plastic animals, which he immediately began to set up in this exciting new environment. Smiling encouragingly, I said, “Whatever she’s up to now ‘cause I know it’s the biggest scam yet. So let’s hunker down and find something to turn over to the cops. Or to my Dad before she brings the roof down on us.”

We began going through drawers. Bud had a lot of them—half of his back room was filled with file cabinets. It was nearly all patient records inside.

“Old Bud certainly has a thriving business,” I said. “Hard to believe such a sleazy guy could attract so many patients. I’ve never been sure what it is he does either. Is he masseuse to the stars?” Suddenly my hand froze. The name on the top of the file in my hand read
Adele Hobart
. “Grandmother,” I said uneasily. “Jason, look. This is my grandmother’s file. I can’t believe she came to this guy ‘cause she hates him as much as I do. Is he billing her for treatments she didn’t have?”

Jason came over and took the file from my hand. A few seconds later, he whistled. “Not her, Christine. Medicare. He’s billing Medicare for treatment. He’s billed them for nearly a year’s worth of visits from her. Twice a month. For her spine problems.” He started shuffling through the file. “I wonder how many of these other so-called patients are on Medicare.” He whipped around. “All of them. Look at their dates of birth. Somehow he’s gotten hold of their Medicare numbers and billed treatment.” At the back of the drawer, he found a long list of names and Medicare numbers. “I think Bud’s managed to get his hands on their social security numbers. He could be stealing from them too.”

“How’d he get them?” I asked. “Maybe my mother gave him my grandmother’s information, but what about the rest.”

There had to be a hundred files like my grandmother’s.

He flopped into the chair, thought for a minute or two, and pretended to pick up a phone. “Mrs. Brown,” he said. “This is the Medicare office in Harrisburg. We’re issuing you a new card next month and want to verify your social security number, address, and other relevant information. Can you read it from your current card to me? Certainly. I’ll be happy to wait while you go get it.”

I gagged, sinking onto a stool. “Do people fall for it?”

“Sure,” he said. “Especially if he targets older seniors, the ones who aren’t as clear-headed or ones not as skeptical of telephone calls. A caller with an authoritative voice is very effective with older people. Try sending them a letter with a fake letterhead and they’re toast. They have no idea how easily something like letterheads can be faked.” He thumbed through the files again. “There are literally hundreds of names in here. Does he have a copier?”

“Yes.”

“Well, let’s make a few copies. Don’t need to do them all. Just enough records to be persuasive.”

But who were we going to be persuasive with?

J
ason and I pieced together what must have been going on in department stores too and showed up at Daddy’s house a few days later.

“She met someone with a greater vision,” he said, when I’d finished telling him about the trips to department stores. “That’s always been a concern. I didn’t worry about Mickey too much—he was satisfied with his lot. But Bud…”

The box of cheap bracelets in the basement persuaded us she was buying expensive jewelry, but returning low-priced things for a refund. Choose a busy clerk and how attentive would they be to the quality of a bracelet or sweater or handbag if a price tag was attached. It’d taken me, the fount of suspicion, a minute or two to realize the gold on the bracelets was paint. Some were brass. Not hard to imagine she’d pulled the same stunt with cashmere sweaters, alligator shoes, and who knew what else.

When we’d gone through the entire battery of bad deeds we’d come across in the basement and at Bud’s office, we sat back, giving Daddy a minute or two to take it in.

“I knew about a lot of the early stuff. Saved her ass more than once.” There was a tinge of pride in his voice you couldn’t mistake.

“But a lot of this stuff’s new to you, right? You never heard about it before?” I sensed a certain bristling going on from Jason’s corner. He’d told me more than once he couldn’t understand why my father had tolerated so much. It was hard for him to understand the different sort of pressures Daddy had—the expectations placed on him by his parents. His primary responsibility as far as they were concerned was to make his wife behave. And if that failed, to keep her misdeeds under wraps. My mother had brought so much disgrace to his family Daddy was reluctant to allow any more to surface.

“It’s gonna come out, Daddy,” I told him. “She’s bound to get caught. I don’t know how deep she’s into this Medicare fraud, but the department stores are sure to get wise. She and Bud have so many balls in the air, one’s bound to crash.”

“So what do you want me to do?” Daddy asked. “Go to the cops? Confront her myself? I’m not sure what you’re asking. How many times do I have to bail her out?”

I was a bit taken aback by this coolly delivered reply. I’d expected rage. What I got instead was a tepid and largely unsurprised response coupled with a limp self-defense. He wasn’t her husband anymore, but her deeds predated his escape. Did he expect me to overlook all the evidence we placed at his feet because it might be inconvenient to him?

“I think you should ask your attorney how to handle it. Let him advise you—us,” I said. Jason was nodding in the background—this had, in fact, been his idea.

Daddy shook his head. “As an officer of the court, he’d be obliged to report it. We have to be sure what we want to happen before I approach him. Be certain we want her to go to jail—for perhaps as much as a decade. Look, you’re out of it, aren’t you? Move into a dorm—I’ll give you the money. Put some distance between you.”

Move into a dorm? This was his response? I realized it was how he’d handled it over the years. Send her off to her mother’s house. Slap her in a hospital, find her a place to live well out of his orbit. Let his sister take care of things. Let his daughter. He’d written letters to get her jobs he knew she was ill-suited for. Bribed—who knew how many people?

Well,
did
I want to see my mother in jail? If it meant getting Ryan out from under her influence, the answer was yes. I went in with my big guns next.

“She killed Jerry Santini,” I said, tears in my eyes. Jason moved quickly, covering my hands with his. “I might as well tell you this too, Daddy. She shot him while I was sleeping in the next room.” I stopped to catch my breath. “She was the one who pulled the trigger and then made me take the blame. Shouldn’t a murderess be in prison?”

My father’s mouth started to form words, but then he hesitated. “You mean… for not stopping… you, right?” Hadn’t he heard what I said? He was looking everywhere but at me as he broke into a sweat.

I realized it then. He knew the whole story and had known since it happened. Had let me go through with my lies, let me make my appearance in that judge’s chambers, spend the year in therapy, and never blinked. That was his method for dealing with his wife. Or ex-wife. Hand her off to his daughter.

“You knew, Daddy! You knew! I don’t know why I didn’t realize it before now.” Or had I? Had I been as eager as he was to obscure the truth?

He was staring at his feet.

“Why didn’t you do anything?” I asked him. “Daddy?”

“My attorney, one I no longer use by the way, talked it over with the fellow she used for her legal woes. Sid… something.”

I didn’t bother to fill in the right name. Both of my parents forgot names that proved embarrassing.

“Well anyway, the two of them talked over the various scenarios. Eve would’ve gone to jail for years if she confessed. Maybe for life. Or gone back into a facility, at the very least. If you took the blame—they figured—and rightly as it turned out, the judge would do exactly what he did. He’d come down easy on a kid. Almost think of your action as heroic—trying to save your mother.” He cleared his throat. “We thought it was a better plan all around. You would’ve lost your mother.” His voice was defensive, whiney. “You forget how attached you were to her in those days. Those first years—you two were inseparable. She couldn’t keep her hands off of you.” He looked up. “More than once, I was jealous. Jealous of my own kid.”

“That’s not it at all,” I said, shaking his pap off. “That’s not why you went along with it. Your family would’ve been affected by Mother’s conviction. Been disgraced again. It might’ve hurt the business. Got you booted from some boards, your clubs.”

It was a wonder his eyes hadn’t burned a hole in the floor. “With me as the murderer of record, it all got covered up.”

I hated him—even more than I hated my mother, who was clearly a sick woman. He was a coward. A coward who’d never once put me first.

He cleared his throat. “Maybe if you tell Eve all the things you know, she’d stop. If you lay it on the…”

I could tell he didn’t believe this. Both of us knew she was powerless to give up her junk: anything else, including me, came in second.

“So what are you going to do?” he asked.

I didn’t answer. I wondered if I’d have anything to say to him again. Suddenly a new thought popped into my head. “What about Grandmother Hobart?” I asked. “Did she know about me as the sacrificial calf too?” Had she gone along with it all too—never saying a thing about it? Where was her Christianity?

“Absolutely not,” he said. “We never considered telling her the truth. She didn’t enter into it at all.”

He looked me straight in the eye, and I believed him. At least there was that then. One person had believed me to be a murderer but didn’t abandon me.

Jason and I drove home, neither of us saying much. I couldn’t help but wonder if he was regretting what he’d gotten himself into with me. I would have.

M
y mother was paging through a magazine when I came into the house carrying the same attaché I’d taken to my father’s a few days before. She was probably the only person in the world searching for the ads rather than the articles in a magazine. The little slap each turning page made was sickening in the state I was in. She didn’t look at me, didn’t notice the attaché, probably mistaking it for my usual book bag.

Earlier that day, and somewhat unconsciously, I’d decided this was the right time. Life had come to a complete standstill. I couldn’t study or think of anything else. The newly spawned hatred of my father was eating away at me. I wanted to be done with both of them—done with the two people who were supposed to care for me but hadn’t.

Jason gave me little prods as well, telling me putting the confrontation off was not the way to go.

“Get it over with,” he said. “You’ll feel much better. No matter what the outcome.”

The outcome
. I could hardly imagine an end to it all—hardly think of a life without the burden of my mother dogging my every step. What would it be like not to expect horrific things to happen whenever the doorbell or the telephone rang. How would it feel not to expect the police car on the street to be heading our way?

“She’s a parasite,” Jason told me.

But was I too? We’d lived off each other for so long.