A Fistful of Empty Page 18

  “Look, I didn’t come looking for this money. You all found me, not the other way around.”

  “That’s not the point and to set the record straight, you were found by the executor of the estate, not by Mr. Skrepinski or this office. I want her name, Ms. Timmons.” Joe was jabbing the air with his finger. “We can do it now, here, nicely, or we’ll be in court with a motion to compel and one for legal fees. What’ll it be?”

  Joe adjusted his tie and stretched his neck like it was caught on something. Sarabeth Timmons weighed whatever debt she felt she owed this woman with her current predicament.

  “Her name is Rachel Porter.”

  “Address?”

  “She moved. She lives in San Francisco now, I think. I don’t know where or what her number is.”

  “Of course.” Joe shook his head. “Ms. Timmons, when you were growing up, did you ever receive any letters or gifts from your father?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ever send him anything?”

  “No. I didn’t know anything about him. My mother never spoke about him. I didn’t know who he was until Mr. Frohmeyer called me. So no, we didn’t have any contact.”

  I pushed a note over to Joe. He glanced down at it.

  “One last question, Ms. Timmons. Do you know a man named Kaspar Hauser?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  CHAPTER 2

  “Who the hell is Kaspar Hauser?” Joe asked as he circled his desk.

  “He was found wandering the streets of Nuremburg in 1820 or so. A complete wild man, totally uncivilized. People thought he’d been raised by wolves,” I said, sitting down to face him.

  “You’re shitting me.” Joe shifted papers.

  “What do you think she was telling us? Hell, wolves would have taken better care of her.”

  “Do you believe her?” Skrepinski asked.

  I turned to face him. “I don’t believe anybody. I assume everything she told us was a lie. Now I’m going to try to check out everything that she gave us.”

  “Did she give us anything?” Skrepinski was incredulous. “There were damned few names, places, and details in what she said.”

  “True, but she gave me some openings to pry into her life, and she gave away some things that she didn’t even know she was doing.”

  “Such as?”

  “How do you like the coffee?” I nodded at his mug.

  Skrepinski frowned at my non sequitur. “Fine, it could have been hotter, though. What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Joe asked her if she’d been arrested. She said no. She denied any regular work history. Yet, when the coffee was served, she picked it up with a napkin and kept the napkin around the mug the whole time. The coffee wasn’t hot. Nobody else did that. When she got up to leave, I followed her to the door. She stood there waiting for me to open it for her. She wouldn’t touch the knob. I waited long enough to be socially awkward, then I opened it for her. She gave me two things. One, her prints are on file somewhere. Unless she’s Jane Bond, I’ll bet she’s been arrested. Second, she’s careful. If what she told us was a lie, it’s not a sloppy one. She constructed it so that it’ll be hard to disprove.”

  “Can you do it?”

  “That’s what we’re going to find out.”

  “That’s not what I asked, Mr. Haggerty. I’ve reviewed the fee agreement you sent me. A hundred dollars an hour for your time, fifty dollars an hour for staff time, plus expenses. Before I agree to that, I’d like to know what is the likelihood that you’ll be successful.”

  “Depends on budget and time. How long do we have?”

  “Hearing’s in thirty days, Leo,” Joe chipped in.

  “If we get the go-ahead to track down any lead, regardless of the cost, there’s a ninety-five percent likelihood that in thirty days we’ll know the truth about her.”

  “Can you give me an estimate of the cost? If it’s more than half the estate, it’s not worth it, right?” Skrepinski smiled sourly.

  “True enough. How big is the estate?” I asked Joe.

  “We’re not sure. Peter’s father got a sizable ‘golden parachute’ when he was let go, and he received disability checks for almost ten years. That added up to almost half a million dollars. Frohmeyer did all right with the estate. He’s had it for over four years. He was conservative except for his ‘heir searches.’ The estate’s now about $630,000.”

  “So half is over three hundred thousand.” I smiled. “I’m a bargain. My estimate is fifteen thousand. Two percent to save fifty.”

  “All right. What do we do next?”

  “Send the contract and a retainer check for two thousand to my office. Let me ask some questions now. You didn’t buy this Sarabeth Timmons before the deposition. What soured you on her? The birth certificate you showed me was legit. It’s real clear that your father married and produced a child. Why not her?”

  Skrepinski glanced away and deferred to Joe, who leaned forward, relishing the tale he was about to share.

  “It wasn’t her, it was Frohmeyer, the executor, we didn’t trust. Peter’s father, from what we’ve gathered, was quite disturbed. He was a ballistic and munitions engineer. Quite brilliant, really. Made a number of breakthroughs for the government. Then he switched to designing nontraditional launchers and warheads. He was courted by some private firms up in New York and went to work for them. Anyway, he became paranoid, although I’ll tell you, doing the kind of work he did and after that Gordon Bull thing, maybe he really was being followed. Ultimately, he wasn’t able to work. The company let him go with a psychiatric disability. He drifted around the country. Peter doesn’t know much about those years. Eventually he returned here to Virginia, where he was born. He deposited his savings into jumbo CDs at a local bank. Frohmeyer was a bank manager at another branch. His girlfriend was a teller at Edward Timmons’s branch. She told him about the strange guy with all the money. Anyway, after he died the bank sent out statements, which were returned as undeliverable. The girlfriend told Frohmeyer about it. He checked it out and found out that Timmons had died. He waited the required thirty days then filed to be appointed as executor of the estate. We’re looking into how he handled the money. Frankly, apart from some dubious trips with his girlfriend, I don’t think he looted the estate. It grew and he kept pocketing his five percent administrator’s fees for doing nothing. An easy thirty grand a year for doing nothing. Anyway, the five-year statute of limitations was coming up on unclaimed estates. The state contacted Frohmeyer that it was going to escheat, and he had to prepare to roll it over. Good-bye thirty-thousand-a-year cushion. So what does Frohmeyer do? He finds an heir, Sarabeth Timmons, right under his nose. Mind you, he’d gone looking in Los Angeles twice before and found nothing. She’d have been a tough search but not impossible. The timing smelled to me. The records were there all the time—the marriage, the divorce, the birth certificate. He could have found her five years ago. I think she’s a phony. Her answers today only strengthen that belief. Frohmeyer needed an heir. This way he avoids escheat. I think he cut a deal with her to pretend to be Sarabeth Timmons. They get the estate through probate, then there’s $630,000 split two ways. If Frohmeyer was smart he lied to her about how much it was, got her to take a flat fee. Christ, it could be as little as ten grand. Remember, as executor he’d be sending her the check. She’d never know the true size of the estate, and he walks off into the sunset with the rest.”

  “Until your client shows up and fucks it all up.”

  “Right.”

  “How did you find your father?” I asked.

  “I talked to my mother about him. We really didn’t mention him much after he left. I’d been in therapy working out a lot of stuff about him, and I thought I was ready to find him and confront him about it. So I went back to my mom and we talked for the first time in years. That’s when I found out they were never married. I tried to get information about him from the labs he worked for, but they said it was confidential. My mom had a card fro
m him from about five years ago. It was just like him, rambling on with his conspiracy theories and calling her ‘the Spy in the House of Love’ and blaming her for everything. I checked out the postmark, then used old phone books to get an address. I came down to see him. That’s when I found out that he’d died.”

  “What made you think that there would be an estate?”

  “My mother told me about how the lab let him go and the money they gave him. He stayed home for a while. She saw the disability checks. I tried to figure out, based on how he lived, how much money might have accumulated. Once I realized how large the estate could be, I retained Mr. Anthony to locate it and make sure I got what was coming to me. My father was a monster. I don’t have a single good memory of him. He was cruel to my mother and me and then he abandoned us. The only good thing about his life is that he died rich. He squandered everything else in his life. His brains. Our love. But not his money. That money is mine. Believe me, I earned every penny of it the nine years he lived with us. Now I want what is mine. I’m not going to let this fraud perpetrated by Frohmeyer take half of what is rightly mine.”

  Maybe Skrepinski and Sarabeth were brother and sister, tied by common wounds even if no blood was shared.

  “A couple of things occur to me, before we start. Do you know anything about your father’s own family?”

  “No. He refused to talk about them. My mother and I never had any contact with them.”

  “If they’re dead and left an estate that passes through your father to you, the estate could be even larger than you think.”

  Joe nodded. “I thought of that. Frankly, I wasn’t in a hurry to find out until we’d disposed of Frohmeyer and Timmons.”

  “The other thing is that while we’re trying to disqualify Timmons from the inheritance, we might uncover other legitimate heirs. You need to know that that’s a possibility.”

  “If they’re legitimate and they spent any time with my father, then they deserve to be compensated for that.”

  “You make him sound like a war criminal.”

  “He was worse. He was a sadistic, abusive man who made it impossible to love him. He took anything that was warm and kind and decent and twisted it into something ugly.”

  “Well, I’d best get started on this.” I realized that I didn’t want to hear about anybody else’s sorry childhood. I was growing allergic to misery.

  “What do you need from us, Leo?”

  “I want any records you have, or Frohmeyer has. A copy of the deposition, the divorce file, the birth certificate, the marriage license, his father’s death certificate, any old photographs of your father. There’s a guy in Philadelphia that can reconstruct how your father looked as he aged. We may have to use him if we hit any dead ends. Get a subpoena for her gynecologist’s records. Is Frohmeyer still the executor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does he have any idea how much trouble he’s facing?”

  “We’ve made that abundantly clear.”

  “Good, then he should be dying to cooperate. I want a release from him authorizing access to all of Edward Timmons’s bank records for the last ten years.”

  “Done. You gonna sic Rosa on them?”

  “You got it.”

  Skrepinski asked, “Who’s Rosa?”

  “Rosa Cravat. A freelance auditor. Even the IRS is afraid of her. She specializes in asset searches and fraud. When she’s done she’ll know where every penny went that your father ever spent. Hopefully he paid child support for his daughter. If he did, that’s how we’ll find her trail.”

  “Anything else?”

  I looked over at Joe. “Did you get an order for blood work or DNA tests?”

  “Yeah. But without knowing anything about the father, the results were equivocal.”

  “Can you exhume his body?”

  “No. He was cremated and had his ashes spread over the bay.”

  “If we find his parents maybe we can determine his blood type from theirs. Same thing with Timmons’s mother if we can’t find her. Then if we’re real lucky she’ll turn out to be incompatible. Don’t anybody hold their breath.

  “Fax me as much as you can. Courier the rest. As soon as we get the stuff, we’ll begin. If we need subpoenas or court orders for further records, I’ll call.”

  I stood up, shook hands all around, and left.

  CHAPTER 3

  An hour later I sat at our conference table with Kelly Willets, my secretary, Rosa Cravat, and investigators Del Winslow, Clancy Helm-rich, and Larry Burdette. Fax-fresh copies of all the records from Joe Anthony’s office were stacked in front of me.

  “All right, let’s get started. We’ve been hired to find out if a woman claiming to be Sarabeth Timmons is the real McCoy or an imposter. I want to approach this investigation from a number of directions simultaneously. We have a batch of documents from Joe Anthony’s office to start with, and there will be more to follow. If you need additional records or authorizations for access, go through Kelly. She’ll run everything by me. I want a summary memo at the end of each day. Route them through Kelly. She’ll pull them together and I’ll review them. My comments will be in your boxes at the start of the next day. Anything that’s a rush or after hours you can get me on my beeper, and I want you to, because I will be doing the same with you. Any documents you review, annotate, or use in any fashion I want Xeroxed in their entirety for the file. Any questions?”

  I scanned their faces. Nothing.

  “Let’s divvy up the work. Del, you and Clancy I want on surveillance. I think this gal is hiding something, even if she is Sarabeth Timmons. I don’t want her to rabbit before we’re done with her. Kelly’ll give you her address and phone number. She lives with another woman, Ellen Piersall. I don’t think roommates covers it, so we may need to throw a net over her too. We have Sarabeth’s social security number, so go ahead and see if she has a passport. I want to know where she goes, what she does. Once you get her routines and if she looks like she’s staying put, I’ll pull one of you to interview the few collaterals we have. I want you to shoot some film of her too, full length and facial. Make copies of the good stuff and put them in the file so anyone who needs them can get them right away. If we hit a dead end I might need a tape of her voice, so look for ways to do that.”

  Del and Clancy finished making notes and nodded at me. They were a good surveillance team: Del, dapper and sophisticated. Clancy, rough hewn and folksy. One or the other fit in almost anywhere. Saved on disguises too.

  Larry Burdette came to us from a local therapist. He’d been seriously agoraphobic and hadn’t left his house in almost four years. A combination of medication and desensitization had enlarged his world a bit, but Larry was still terrified to talk with strangers, at least face to face. But on the telephone, that was something else. He was indefatigable and resourceful.

  “Larry, you’ll be smilin’ ’n dialin’. At the start, I want you to handle all the phone work. When you start turning things up, we may have to give some of it to Clancy or Del, but for now it’s all yours. I want to track this woman three ways. First, backward in time as Sarabeth Timmons. You have a social security number, driver’s license, a joint bank account, and credit card numbers.”

  Larry grinned at his riches. His eyes squinted shut behind his bulletproof glasses. That and his marked overbite made him look like the chipmunk of happiness.

  “With all of that to start with, I’ll expect to know her menstrual cycle by lunch tomorrow. I also want to check out this woman’s story about her childhood. You’ll see from the deposition that she didn’t give us much. Her mother, or so she claims, worked as a live-in domestic or a prostitute. Both are cash-only jobs and paperless. We have a marriage license, a birth certificate, and a divorce file. Let’s track the mother and then the little girl through her. We have a social security number on the mother and a driver’s license, and we think she moved out to the L.A. area. The baby’s birth certificate says her mother was born in Tennessee. Track down her b.c
. and get a line on the grandparents. Let’s see if they kept in touch with the daughter and granddaughter. Oh, yeah, one other thing, call LAPD Gang Squad and see if they can give you anything on a ‘Chino.’ He rode with the Hounds of Hell, at least three years ago.”

  Larry scribbled while I spoke.

  “Kelly, when we break here, get me the number for Dan Kearny and Associates in San Francisco. I want to see if they can do a little legwork for us out there.”

  “Is it on file?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You ready for me yet, Mr. Big Shot? I may be retired, but I’m not dead. I have things to do too, you know.”

  That was Rosa Cravat. Fifty years an accountant. All that experience and a larcenous heart made her impossible to beat. If she wanted to hide money, God couldn’t find it.

  “Yeah, Rosa, I think I’m ready for you. I see you dressed for work.”

  “Well, if you’d move it along, maybe I could earn a few dollars before the sun goes down today.”

  Rosa’s trademark was a pair of cuff links she wore to work. She never interviewed the poor bastard she’d caught embezzling or in a fraud or hiding assets until she already knew where the money had gone and how. Then she’d sit with him or her and ask a thousand questions that she already knew the answers to. She’d nod at each lie, smiling her kindly grandmother’s smile, as if her grandson were denying he filched the cookies. When her hands were clasped in front of her under her chin, her two cuff links would line up side by side. The right one read BULL and the left one SHIT.

  “We’ll have an authorization from the executor of the estate granting you access to all of Edward Timmons’s bank records. We know he got disability checks each month. Apparently he kept the company informed when he moved so that the money followed him on his travels. He also had a child support obligation for this child. That’s the trail I want you to follow. See if you can locate the mother and child and how recently.”