“How did you know him? His brother doesn’t think you did, but we know better, don’t we, Tommy?”
“Yes, we do. What was it you and Flip had going?”
The threat of tears was gone. It was as if she’d lowered over her face the veil of the character she played. The real woman was again replaced by the part of Brenda Tierney.
“I’m telling you, she doesn’t know him.” The banker returned to his chair. He lifted from the floor the papers that had fallen when he went after Hathaway. He stared at the pages for a long time.
Hathaway didn’t take his eyes off the girl. “Tell us about the real Brenda Tierney.”
For an instant, her guard dropped. Those green eyes betrayed fear. Then the veil dropped again. “You’re looking at her.”
“No, the real Brenda Tierney,” Tom said. “The one born in Westmoreland, Pennsylvania.”
Her eyes held. She didn’t allow them to shift. She was good, all right.
“We got your social. The one you used when you applied here. Your HR people really want to cooperate with us. That Brenda Tierney wasn’t born around here at all.”
“So I was born in Westmoreland. So what?”
Tom stepped in. “So how do you live in two different places? You’ve still got an address in Pennsylvania, and this address here in LA. What’s that about? And what’s the tie with Flip Dunn?”
“There’s no tie. My parents live in Pennsylvania. I went to school there. They still get some of my mail.”
Hathaway looked at her as if he were peering through a magnifying glass. “Tidy.”
She waved a hand. “You guys need another hobby. Jason, I don’t think we have to listen to this.”
The banker slouched in his chair. His eyes had the appearance of having sunk far into their sockets. “Get out.”
“Don’t you want to know where the body is?” Tom asked.
“No.” He blinked, seemed to regain something. “All right. Where is he?”
“Coroner’s. You need the address?”
“No.” He stared at the papers he’d picked up off the floor. “I have to call my father.”
Hathaway leaned into Brenda. “We’ll be in touch, baby.”
“I’m not your baby.”
Tom said, “They really want to cooperate with us. We’ve got your picture, your fingerprints. It’s just a matter of time until we find out who you really are.”
“Get a life.” She went to Jason. “You better call your dad. I’ll finish that up for you.”
He looked up at her. The papers drew his attention like something from the distant past. Things like a brother’s death had a way of dividing time into before and after.
The banker handed her the papers.
59
Alone in his office, holding the handset to his landline, Jason stared at the telephone and tried to think of what he would say to his father. How do you tell a man his son is dead? Do you drag it out, tell him you’ve got some bad news, try to prepare him for the worst thing he’ll ever experience by giving him five seconds to brace himself? Do you tell him to sit down?
He thought of his father in that old shell of a house, the only sounds the clink of bottle on glass or the scrape of a dog’s toenails against linoleum. The old man shuffling from room to room or collapsing into an easy chair to try for something on television that didn’t make him too angry to watch. No friends. No companion other than the canine that watched mutely from the corner.
The old man might be expecting a call like this. Maybe not today, but knowing his son, knowing the kinds of things he was capable of, the kinds of things he did and people he associated with, he must have expected to get news like this one day. Maybe that’s why he drank so much, to dull the dread of a uniformed policeman showing up on his doorstep or an unwelcome voice on the other end of a phone call telling him his son was dead.
This wasn’t helping. Jason had to call. It was better coming from him than from someone like those two POs.
But Phil. Poor Phil. Before he could distract himself to stop it, a picture came to Jason’s mind: Phil before they were grown, before Mom left, when things were . . . no, not good, but at least settled. Jason pictured him as a kid, running through the neighborhood, that stupid corduroy jacket ballooning out behind him, the jacket Jason had worn until the sleeves didn’t reach his wrists anymore. It was threadbare by the time it got to Phil, and it hung nearly to his knees, but he had loved it. He’d loved everything he got from Jason.
How did their lives get so far away from them? They were just a couple of boys with the aspirations boys have. They were going to be astronauts, soldiers, spies, firemen. Anything you could attach the word hero to. But now, before they hit forty years old, their lives were spent.
Poor Phil. His one heroic act had ruined everything. Jason ran his hand over his face. No tears. How could he cry when all this was his fault?
We’re looking for the truth these days, aren’t we? So let’s go for the truth. Let’s really go for it, like we never have before. You’ve been pretending for years. You’ve blamed everyone and everything but the one person who should take all this on his shoulders. It’s all your fault, Jason. You were the one who ran off with Danah. You were the one Phil had to chase down. You were the one who called for help.
His fingers went to the telephone keypad. They touched the same numbers he’d called that night twenty years ago from a payphone outside a bar.
The busy signal beeped back at him from miles away. It churred again and again until the recurring rhythm embedded in his brain.
He hung up.
Brenda bounced in. She laid the consistency letter before him and stood back.
The letterhead, the signature—it looked as authentic as any consistency letter he’d ever received directly from Casey. “Don’t you want to know how I did it?” She smiled at him. No pain on that lovely face, nothing remotely touching the grief tearing through Jason’s chest.
“Sure.”
“A little copy-machine magic. I printed out the old one, taped in the new text, ran it through the copier, some white out, copied it again, and voila.”
It would have fooled him if he hadn’t known. Surely it would fool Loan Ops. Even the signature.
“Want me to PDF it to Loan Ops?” she asked.
“Yeah. Sure. That should do it.”
She turned, and he watched her body shift and the movement of her clothes around her as she crossed the room and left.
He picked up the phone again. Redial. Buzzing busy signal five times, six, seven. Whom could he be talking to?
Jason slammed the receiver down. He would have to go over there.
While he waited for his laptop to shut down, he looked around his office for the last time. All the years in here cutting deals, winning and losing against the competition, growing the team and driving his region to higher and higher success, and he was leaving in the middle of the worst downturn of his generation.
“They can have it,” he said and shoved the laptop into his briefcase. He walked out in his shirtsleeves.
Brenda looked up. “Where are you going?”
“I have to go to my dad’s. I can’t reach him.” He looked around, but no one was close enough to hear their conversation. “Call me if anything goes wrong with the funding. I’ll watch my e-mail for the alert that it booked.”
She smiled, and that dimple in her right cheek appeared. “Okay, Jason. Good-bye.”
He stared at her. For an instant, her smile faltered. She whispered, “I’ll see you there.”
His briefcase had grown heavy. His legs felt mired in mud, in quicksand.
Everything in him wanted her. Tomorrow they would be across the ocean together, their pockets lined with all the cash they could ever need. So what was wrong?
What was wrong was that he was committing a federal crime. They would fine him enough to break him for life. They’d give him the full thirty years in prison. What was wrong was that he was risking his life for this girl and t
he money. That was what was wrong. He’d known it ever since they’d decided it could be done. Now they were actually doing it. They were going to pull it off. That’s what was causing the tugging at his insides, worse than any bad decision he’d ever made. That had to be it.
So why had he only started feeling it when she said good-bye?
He edged away.
She returned to her keyboard and mouse. Her eyes shifted back to him. The dimple returned with her smile.
It was no good. That feeling in his gut wouldn’t go away. Something was wrong, and it wasn’t the crime. The crime was perfect.
He returned to her desk. “What’s going on here?”
She lifted her face to him. “Loan ops is good with the consistency letter. They’re boarding it now. The wire should go any minute.” She looked over her shoulder, whispered, “Oh, Jason, it’s so hard not to kiss you right now. We’re almost there. Everything we want is happening.”
Play it out. That was what occurred to him. Despite everything warning him that it was all wrong, the prevailing thought was to play it out.
He turned away. He had to find his father.
60
The instant Jason stood clear of his car, his bones chilled at the sound. A wail, feral, primal, muffled by walls and locked doors into a distant sound.
Coming from his father’s house.
He bolted. Across the lawn, up the steps.
He tore the screen door back, pounded on the wood, shouted. “Dad! Dad!”
Max barked from the other side, whined, and again tried to howl out his fear.
The doorknob wouldn’t budge. Jason shook it, shouldered into the door, but it had no give to it at all.
He turned and ran to the side of the house. Max wailed sadness and want, the siren of it rising and falling, cutting through the house’s sides to ice Jason’s core.
The door next to the gravel driveway was solid too. The old man refused to put bars on his windows, but nobody would get in through these doors. Jason shouted through it, but the only answer came from Max.
He went for the gate to the backyard. Maybe the old man hadn’t reinforced the door in the back of the house. Jason’s fingers scratched for purchase on the latch to free the gate, tripped it. He crashed into the backyard.
He’d been through the back door thousands of times. This one had never been changed. Max’s cries came through more clearly here.
Jason seized the knob. It was locked, but it wobbled in his hand. The deadbolt above it would be locked too. But this old door wouldn’t hold. He leaned into it. Backed away, shoved it. Stepped back. A running start, and he crashed into it.
Something cracked. Either his shoulder or the door.
Five steps back now. He sprinted at it.
It exploded inward.
Jason stumbled into the kitchen. He lost his footing, broke his fall with his hands.
He looked up. Level with Jason’s face, Max barked out his fury, teeth long, eyes red where they should be white at the edges. But the dog didn’t bite. Max turned and ran out of the room. Returned, barked some more. Jason got to his feet.
“Dad?”
He willed himself forward. He stepped on the stained linoleum as if the thin layer were the only thing between his feet and oblivion. From the back of his mind came information on the composition of linoleum from research he’d done on a loan to a flooring company. It was worthless information, and he despised himself for thinking about linseed oil and limestone here and now.
He rounded the corner. Max stood whimpering at the end of the hallway, where a doorway led to the bedroom.
A smell hit him. Vomit. Excrement. He covered his nose and mouth. “Oh, no.”
He walked to Max.
Hank Dunn lay half off the bed, his face buried in the carpet. The seat of his pajamas was stained, and near his pillow another stain pooled, peppered with partly digested chunks of food. The telephone was off the hook, the handset dangling by the extended looped cord to within an inch of the floor.
Jason knelt next to his father’s head. “Dad?”
Max nosed in to lick the unmoving face.
“Dad?” Jason put his hand on the old man’s shoulder. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d touched him. “Dad?”
He pushed on the shoulder. No response.
His fingers probed into the folds of the old man’s neck. Along the ribbed tube of his father’s windpipe, he searched for a pulse.
There.
A faint quiver against his fingertips.
He pulled his hand away. The smell assaulted his throat. His hand again went to his nose.
No noise came from the phone. It must have been off for a while. He’d been on the phone when it happened. Or he’d tried to call 911.
Jason went to it and pressed the button, held the handset to his ear. When he had a dial tone, he dialed the three numbers. He was in the middle of giving the address when his father spoke.
Jason put down the receiver. “Dad? What?” He went to his knees.
The old man’s face drooped as if half of it was melted. One eye blinked slowly and remained partially open. The right side of his lower lip pressed against his teeth to form a sound, and then the lips drew together again to end it. It was one word, and Jason knew the word even though the old man’s tongue couldn’t make the L sound anymore.
He was trying to say Philip’s name.
Jason returned to the phone, confirmed the address, and hung up on the operator.
He decided to try to move his father. It couldn’t be good for him to be in that position, whatever the problem was. He slid his arms underneath his father’s shoulders and lifted him onto the bed. When he had him lying down, his arms were underneath his father’s shoulder blades. It occurred to him that this was the first time he’d hugged him since he was a child.
He stood away. The old man was still trying to say Phil’s name, and something else. One eye wouldn’t open, but the right eye flickered at Jason like a dying light bulb.
His father was trying to tell him Philip was dead. “I know, Dad. That’s why I’m here.”
“Ph-p, ne-n,” he kept saying out of the right side of his mouth. He couldn’t make the D sound or the L sound with his tongue. His head was inches away from what he’d thrown up.
His old right eye closed slowly. It reopened. In the distance, a siren wound through the air.
Paramedics would be here soon.
The right eye closed again. A frown pinched the right side of the old man’s forehead, then smoothed.
The eye didn’t open again. His father’s chest thinned into the bed.
Deep in the emptying cavern of Jason’s mind, he wondered if he should call 911 and tell them they could turn off their siren now.
61
Brenda didn’t answer.
She might have abandoned the phone. It wouldn’t be a bad idea. Jason cut off the call when her voicemail picked up for the third time. No point leaving another message.
He was numb. More numb than his old man had been when the paramedics told Jason what he already knew. He sat in the living room that used to be his father’s, on the same sofa Jason had dozed on when he was a teenager. His hand stroked the worn pattern of the cloth. The wooden coffee table at his knees bore the marks and wear of heels propped on it, of cold glasses beading moisture onto it. Across the room, the gray face of the old television reflected a square of light from the window. Jason had bought the set for his father for Christmas years ago, and the old man had never replaced it.
This would all go. Box it up, take it to some charity. He would have taken care of it, if he were going to be around.
He looked at his phone. Nagging, nagging. The feeling beneath all his numbness pestered and prodded him. Good-bye, she said to him. There was no one around to hear her. Why had she said that?
He shivered.
His iPhone contained an e-mail telling him that his fraud was complete. It was an automatically generated e-mail. He’d see
n hundreds of them in his years at BTB. It informed him that a loan assigned to him had funded. He opened the message again. At some point when he was standing over his father’s dying body, a thirty-million-dollar wire transfer had left BTB for the Federal Reserve. Now, an hour later, the fed had probably processed it. The money was on its way to Nevis.
Good-bye.
He stood. The front door was still unlocked from the paramedics’ exit. He went outside and found himself searching the street for signs that he’d been discovered. No one apprehended him on his way to the car.
His personal laptop was in a case in the trunk. He took it out and powered it up. Standing in the street, he waited for it to go through its starting sequence. He stared at the house where he grew up. The paramedics had taken his father’s body away, but the stained bed remained. Jason was unable to parse sorrow from the sense of dread overtaking everything else inside him.
He made his way onto the Internet. A cloud broke free from the sun, and glare obliterated the screen. He walked to the house. In the shade of the porch, he typed in the web address for his bank in Nevis. It came up and prompted for his user name and ID number. He typed them in. Pressed Enter.
In two seconds, red letters flashed across the screen. We’re sorry, but we are unable to recognize that combination of user name and password. Please try again.
He might have entered them wrong. It happened all the time. One missed key, one lowercase instead of an uppercase letter.
His mouth was dry. Deliberately, with his eyes fixed on the keyboard, he entered his user name, and tabbed to the password field. He typed it in. His finger trembled over the Enter key. He hit it.
Red letters again. Blanks below waited for the proper character entry.
She’d stood over his shoulder while he entered the codes. She’d been at his side when he created the accounts. His lover, his coconspirator. She’d watched him type the letters and numbers. She’d stroked him and kissed him and purred into his ear while he obediently gave her the keys to the bank.
It would be 5:30 pm in Nevis. He’d never reach a banker there now. She could have changed his ID information on the Nevis account as soon as the wire left BTB. After watching him initiate wires in and out of that account, she could have given the bank wire instructions to direct the thirty million dollars out of Nevis to anywhere in the world.