Page 21 of Pro Bono

Agent Stamford said, “You don’t have to deny anything or work out a plea or tell us anything. It’s a free chance for you to learn what we know. While you were heading for the front of that bus, you may have noticed that the bus driver behind that big windshield was a Black man. A handsome Black man.”

Warren’s eyes widened.

“I think he gets it,” Foltz said. He smiled, leaned forward toward Warren, studying him, and then spoke in a raspy whisper. “You’re right, we’re not FBI agents, dumbass.”

11

Charlie Warren was silent. He had remembered the bus from the first moment when fake agent Stamford had mentioned it. The bus had been a regular feature of his dreams for the past seventeen years—half his life.

He crafted a slight smile and said, “Why drag me here? What do you want?”

Stamford said, “That morning I was driving a busload of firefighters who had been fighting a wildfire in California to the state prison at Ely. When you were coming at me, I saw your face. My friend here was also on the bus, and he saw you too. For the first few years it was hard for us to find out who you were. We did learn your mother’s name.

“We were in prison, so we couldn’t do much on our own. But there was a guy there who had gotten really good at preparing appeals cases for other inmates. He had been a lawyer somewhere before he killed his wife and her boyfriend, and he kept busy by researching these cases and filing them. We asked him if he had a way to do research on peopleon the outside. It turned out he did, because he had to locate witnesses, solicit their testimony, and so on.”

Foltz said, “We had your mother’s name. He found her and pulled all the public records about her—the deed to the house she owned, her two marriage licenses, your father’s will, car registrations. And your name. We read the story about you in theLA Timesonline. You were twenty-six then, but you looked about the same, so we knew it was you. We had long sentences, and time can answer a lot of questions.”

Warren said, “How did you know my mother’s name, and why did you bother?”

Foltz said, “It started a few minutes after you went past us. Our bus was headed east, and we went right by the wrecked BMW. We stopped and backed up. The car’s engine was still hot, and the driver was stuck in the wreck with the air bag holding him there. We dragged him out, but he was dead. The other guys all got back in the bus, but I hung back. I turned the engine off and used the keys to see what was in the trunk. There was a fancy leather bag with clothes and a little cash money, but the big thing was a manila envelope. I opened it, and it was full of papers, the kind that companies used to report on investment accounts. The current accounts were all in a man’s name, but there were some withdrawal receipts that were from bank accounts in the names Linda Warren Stone and McKinley Stone, all cash. Stone wasn’t the name of the man that was on all the big investment stuff. That was all I had time to read, because the bus was filling up and we all knew we had to get to a phone and call the police before they came across us. I left everything except the envelope. That I shoved down the front of my pants and covered with my shirt. When I got the chance and could talk to my friend here, I told him what I had.”

Stamford said, “I stopped the bus at a restaurant and called the state police and told them who we were and that we’d found the wreck. We hid the envelope in a vent on the roof of the place.”

“On the roof?”

Foltz said, “Yeah. So it would be safe.”

“Years later I got out of prison, went back, and retrieved the papers. The envelope was greasy and sooty, but the papers inside were just fine. I waited for him to get out so we could do what we’d been planning for over fifteen years.”

“What was that?”

“Get the money,” Foltz said. “It was all in the name that wasn’t McKinley Stone. The envelope had his real identification—license, birth certificate, social security card, all the stuff people collect. The picture was McKinley Stone. We hired a guy to do a version of them that had a few old pictures of me on them.”

“Of course, it didn’t work,” Warren said. “It was subject to escheatment by the state.”

“That’s the word. Too much time had passed. All the banked money got confiscated by the states where the banks were, because they hadn’t heard from the owner for so long.”

“Legally it’s not confiscated,” said Warren, “just held. It also isn’t your money, and never was. And by the way, it would be pretty unlikely that a man who never touched any of his accounts in seventeen years isn’t dead, no matter whose picture is on his ID.”

“So we thought of you,” said Stamford. “What Stone took was your mother’s money.”

“That’s right,” Warren said.

“And we figured that since he had married her, he probably thought he could take the money without a legal problem, but then he ran outon her without getting a divorce. Since he died right after that, she’s his legal heir. Right, Your Honor?”

“That’s right,” Warren said. “Even if he hadn’t stolen it from her, whatever he had when he died goes to her in the absence of a will. That’s how it works in California law.”

“So now you know,” said Stamford.

“Right,” Warren said. “So now, I suppose you’re going to tell me why I should help you take my mother’s money.”

Stamford said, “The short answer is that this guy was really smart. We figured out from the papers in his car that he must have converted every withdrawal from her accounts into cash, converted that into bank accounts, and then used those to invest in new accounts with new companies. No single company handled both a withdrawal and a new investment. No match there. The amount withdrawn never matched the next purchase. They never happened within months of each other, so that didn’t match.

“The biggest thing is that the owner’s name didn’t match. McKinley Stone was an alias. At the end of the process, a man with a different name, social security number, license, and birth certificate, all of them real, opened a new account and invested some money. Nobody who looked for it found it. The reason is that nobody had the name. We have the name, and we have the papers.”

Warren starred at the two men. “So, what do you want?”

“We’ve been researching you, following your life for years. You’ve grown into a successful lawyer who is known for finding hidden stashes of money for clients. We also personally saw you as a teenager right after you killed the man who conned and robbed your mother. We know you’ve got a pair of balls on you. You’re somebody we want to be in business with.”

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