Practice to Deceive (26 page)

“Mrs. Gustafson paid it,” I reminded her. “She lost everything.”

“We, too,” Peter said.

I glanced around the room. “If you don’t mind my saying so, you wouldn’t know it to look at you.”

“Mr. Taylor, we can barely make the minimum payments on our credit cards,” Joan claimed. “We are literally one paycheck away from financial disaster.”

“You got jobs after Willow Tree crashed?”

“It seemed like the prudent thing to do at the time.”

“Whom do you work for?”

“Mr. Taylor, our employer is not responsible for us,” Joan replied.

I admit Joan Dully sure seemed like the real thing. Every word she spoke sounded honest enough. But remember what I said about not trusting someone who looks you in the eye and never turns away? The same holds true about people who insist on using your name in every sentence.

I thanked them for their time. Joan walked me to the front door, her arm linked through mine like we had been high school sweethearts in a previous life. Peter following behind. As we walked, I told Joan how much I admired her home. She shrugged the compliment away. “Ten percent down can buy anything these days,” she said.

Then, at the door, I turned slowly, going into my Peter Falk impersonation: “There is one more thing. It’s silly, really; don’t know why I’m asking. But Saturday morning? The Saturday morning when Levering Field was killed? Where were you?”

“I was here,” Joan said. “Making love with my husband.”

Peter didn’t miss a beat. “We like it in the morning,” he said.

“I’m a night person myself,” I admitted.

I
T WAS PAST
nine when I reached Cynthia Grey’s home. I would have been there sooner, but I had to make a few stops first. She answered the doorbell after the third ring.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi.”

I nearly gasped when I saw her. She was wearing colors: a red cotton tunic over faded blue jeans.

“I like your outfit,” I told her.

She frowned and shifted her weight. “Red is the color of luck,” she told me.

She carried a law book in her hand—
Minnesota Statutes Annotated, Volume Seven, Sections 62C to 69
—her finger holding her place.

“May I come in?”

“What’s in the box?” she asked, motioning toward the small black case I held in my hand.

“Do you know what day it is? It’s our twenty-fourth anniversary. Twenty-four weeks exactly since we started seeing each other.”

“Is it?” she asked.

I opened the box. It contained a string of pearls. Cynthia looked but made no move to take them. Then she sighed, a sigh of resignation. She removed her finger from the book and said, “Yes, you may come in.”

SEVENTEEN

W
HEN
I
ARRIVED
home the next morning, I found my house, my lilac bushes, and my willow tree smothered under roll upon roll of white toilet paper. It looked like the place had been hit by a blizzard. And the sight pushed me beyond reason. Mutilated cats on my doorstep, my house ransacked, Molotov cocktails, swastikas, punctured automobile tires, harassing phone calls, even getting shot … yet somehow this childish prank angered me more than all those other violations combined. I was out of control, looking for something to hurt, to destroy.

Tammy Mandt, in front of her house waiting for the school bus, said, “Don’t use a hose. My friend Shelia, someone TPed her house, and they used a hose to knock it down, but the paper got all soggy and stuck to the branches and stuff. You should take it down with a rake or something.”

And for that friendly advice I would have screamed at her, would have gladly wrung her neck, especially after she added, “Shelia’s dad acted the same way as you.”

While she spoke, a car stopped in front of my house. A woman got out, took a photograph, then drove away.

“
Ssshhhhhhh
…” I was so angry I couldn’t even get the obscenity out of my mouth.

I
PARKED AT
the corner where I could watch the Dully residence through my rearview mirror and waited. What I was waiting for I couldn’t tell you. Courage, perhaps. Or maybe I was just trying to relax. It had been an emotional morning. I had changed clothes and left my home without even considering the toilet paper—I just didn’t want to deal with it.

It was half past ten. I had called the Dully’s several times on the cellular and always reached their answering machine. I decided to give them a few more minutes.

While I waited, I fiddled with my car radio, setting the AM buttons. It wasn’t hard to pick five stations: WCCO broadcasts the Twins and the Minnesota Gopher basketball and football games, KFAN has the Vikings and Timberwolves, KKMS has the St. Paul Saints games, KSTP broadcasts the Gopher hockey games, and WMNN is all news all the time. Finally, I turned the radio off, removed my key from the ignition, and slid out of the car.

Burglars don’t wear black leather jackets. They don’t carry prybars in their back pockets. They don’t wander the neighborhood with ski masks covering their faces, stopping periodically to peek through a window. Instead, they wear khakis and topsiders and carry grocery bags. They try real hard to be nondescript. But how nondescript can you be on crutches? I knew I was taking an awful chance, but I needed to learn more about Willow Tree’s financial dealings and Levering’s relationship with the Dully’s, and I figured I was on to something—especially after I saw the red-hooded scarf hanging in Joan Dully’s closet.

I was pleased with the neighborhood’s layout. The houses were all staggered so that the house across the street wasn’t looking directly at the Dullys’ front door. When I reached the cobblestone walk I turned right in, went to the front door, and knocked. I backed away, looked at the house. I went to a window, peered inside, then back to the door, and knocked some more—classic “Hey, where is everybody? I’m expected” behavior. I made my way around the house to the back door. Not once did I turn around to look up and down the street. When I reached the backyard, I slipped a pair of latex surgical gloves from my pocket and put them on. Then I took out my tools—my pick and wire—and attacked the back door. A real burglar would have hit it with a crowbar and bolt cutter. But I didn’t want the Dullys to know anyone had been there.

Once inside I waited. Ten minutes. No sirens, no police dogs. If the neighbors had seen me, the cops would have been there by now, guns drawn.

I went directly to the den. The computer was a standard IBM with a 20-megabyte hard drive and a printer. A simple setup, already old, used mostly for word processing I guessed. I booted up the computer and started racing through the icons. There was nothing in the memory relating to Willow Tree. You’d have thought there would be, wouldn’t you?

For a moment I felt totally defeated. I started going through the desk drawers. In one I found a plastic box filled with 3.5-inch disks. There were a dozen, all neatly labeled—four of them carrying the title
WILLOW TREE.
I loaded them one at a time. They were empty. It was apparent that the Dullys had erased their records. Maybe they thought they were getting away with something. If they did, they don’t know the law like I do. While a potential litigant is under no obligation to keep every document in his possession, the very act of failing to preserve evidence that is reasonably likely to be requested during discovery is seriously prejudicial to the litigant. It’s like refusing to take an intoxalyzer test when you’re stopped for drunk driving. As far as the court is concerned, it’s the same as pleading guilty.

I went through all the other disks. Most contained games. One, labeled
ACCOUNTING,
detailed the Dullys’ personal finances. I perused it carefully. Looked to me like they were doing pretty well, what with at least eight hundred thousand dollars scattered over a wide range of investments.

“Liar, liar, pants on fire,” I muttered, remembering Joan Dully’s insistance that they were on the cusp of financial ruin.

There was nothing else of interest in the disks, at least not to me. The defeated feeling was back with a fury. I started searching the desk. Like the disks, the vertical files in the bottom left drawer of the desk were neatly labeled. I thumbed through them quickly. My breath was coming hard and fast now. I didn’t even want to guess at my heart rate—I had been in the house much too long.

The files didn’t reveal much. But I noticed a short stack of papers at the bottom of the drawer. They looked like they had slipped down there by accident. I pulled half of the vertical files to get at the papers, which seemed to be mostly scrap.
Wait, what’s this?
A crumpled white sheet, like someone had scrunched it into a ball to toss but then thought better of it, contained a long list of names. After each name was the notation: $250,000. One of the names belonged to Mrs. Irene Gustafson.

I took the sheet to the fax machine. It had a copy function. I used it, then returned the crumpled sheet to the bottom of the desk drawer and replaced the files. I deactivated the IBM, grabbed my crutches, and went out the back door, locking it behind me.

The walk back to my car seemed to take twice as long as the walk to the house. I kept telling myself to slow down. You run, people might ask why. And Lord knows, I didn’t do anything wrong.

I
T TOOK A
long time for my stomach to uncoil—the half-hour drive to my office and another hour after that. I tried to eat but couldn’t manage it. Drinking wasn’t a problem, though. I slammed back three Summit Ales in about six minutes. After that I switched to Dr Pepper.

Man, how do burglars do it?

I was still buzzing when I turned to the list. I copied it off the fax paper on to regular paper, using my small Canon. Then I burned the fax copy—don’t ask me why. Nerves, I guess.

There were thirty-five names on the list, all of them followed by addresses, telephone numbers, and the amount $250,000. And you didn’t need a pocket calculator to figure out the total since that was also notated: $8,750,000.

The first letter of both the first and last names of thirty-two of the entries was printed in boldface. Three names—Irene Gustafson, Sam Boyd and Michael Landreth—were printed in regular type. However, each of those names was followed by the boldface initials
LF
.

I called Boyd first. He lived in St. Paul. Or at least he used to. He had died of cancer four months earlier—alone, according to the caretaker of the nursing home where he’d spent his remaining four years. No family, few friends. His bills had been paid by Field Consulting, Inc.

Landreth was living in Minneapolis, if you could call it living. He was suffering from acute Alzheimer’s and hadn’t spoken a coherent sentence in about six months. He, too, was in a private nursing home, although that was about to change. The director told me that Landreth’s invoices had been marked
INSUFFICIENT FUNDS
and returned to the facility by Landreth’s conservator: Field Consulting.

The other thirty-two names were fictitious: A Wood-bury address had a North Minneapolis zip code; a Coon Rapids address had a Highland Park telephone prefix. I tried each number just to make sure, dialing them in turn, then used the telephone directories to assure myself that the names did not match actual addresses.

Three real names surrounded by thirty-two fakes. What sense did that make?

“Must be some kind of code,” I decided. I played with the names, the phone numbers, the addresses, but my efforts revealed nothing. Then I noticed the initials. There were only ten sets: two LMs, two SDs, two DGs, two KDs, three LFs, four CSs, four CDs, four TLs, four KSs, and eight BBs. I wrote amounts next to each set:

Staring at my notes, I figured I had found part of the answer. Unfortunately, I didn’t know which part.

I decided to shift gears. The Dullys had claimed that much of Willow Tree’s money had been siphoned off by a bad loan to Roosevelt County. That was easy enough to check. I reached for the telephone. But it startled me by ringing before I could pick up the receiver.