Page 24 of Pro Bono

“What do you mean?”

“Your problem with your investment portfolio takes precedence over everything else. I’ve been trying to bring you up to date on it since the evening after you brought me the monthly reports. I’ve found the discrepancies you mentioned and a few more. I’ve started by freezing your banking and investment accounts so no more money disappears. I think the financial advisors assigned to two of your accounts have beenembezzling. If you want to continue with my services, I’ll take your case pro bono.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why any of it? And why help me for free?”

“Because it’s the right thing to do. I was the cause of your frightening experience—unknowingly, but still. One obvious move would be to withdraw from your case, but as I said, I’ve made progress and I think the best thing I can do for you isn’t to abandon you. I’ve used my status as your attorney to freeze your investment accounts, and notified the two companies you’d been robbed. Next, we see what the companies want to do.”

“I get that,” she said. “Why help those two who grabbed me?”

“Partly because that was their price for you, and, secondarily, because they actually do have something to offer me. They have important information pertaining to my family that nobody else in the world has, including me.”

“To keep them out of jail you’ll need my silence, right?”

“Worse. I need to persuade the police that there was no kidnapping.”

“You want me to lie.” She studied him. “I think you should tell me why. You have to tell me more about what this information is.”

“That’s fair,” he said. “About twenty years ago my mother, who was a widow, got married to a con man. He was calling himself McKinley Stone. Right away he started to siphon off money from the investments she and my father had made. He used all kinds of methods—taking cash advances on her credit cards, withdrawing money from stock portfolios, setting up monthly draws from accounts in her name into a joint checking account, borrowing money, and forging her signature. His last act was to set fire to the house and take off in the new BMW he’d bought with my mother’s money.”

“Wow,” she said.

“He drove hard and made it to northern Nevada before he ran off Route 50 into a ditch and was killed.”

“It sounds as though he deserved it.”

“Maybe,” Warren said. “The first people on the scene were a busload of prisoners who were returning to Nevada after fighting a big fire in California. They stopped and went to the wreck to see if the driver was alive, but he wasn’t. One of them found an envelope full of receipts for withdrawals, deposits, and investments, and the dead man’s identification.”

“This isn’t making me want to take a huge risk to keep them out of jail.”

“My mother and her lawyers could never trace what McKinley Stone had done with her money. They learned McKinley Stone was an alias, but not the name he had used to deposit my mother’s money. They never knew that name. But inside the envelope the convicts found were the man’s real birth certificate, social security card, driver’s license, and passport. The pictures were the face of McKinley Stone.”

“So my kidnappers told you they have everything you need to get back the money he stole from your mother.”

Warren nodded his head. “I believe they do.”

“You’re doing this for your mother?”

“It seems to be the last chance for me to fix this for her.”

“The story is hard to believe. How do you know it’s true?”

“They have to come up with the papers before I do anything. Either they have them or they don’t.”

She stared at him for a long moment, and then spoke. “When my husband died a few years ago, it destroyed me. I arranged his funeral, got through it, and then collapsed. I cried continuously for days, and some days I couldn’t get out of bed but never really slept for more than a fewminutes at a time. I went to the doctor, and he prescribed a sleep medicine and an antidepressant. I took them both and had a bad reaction.”

“What kind of reaction?”

“I got in our car without really being awake. I was dreaming. I drove, and what had really happened got mixed up in the dream. He had been driving a couple home who’d had too much to drink, and I was waiting for his call to go pick him up. I think I thought I was driving to find him. I disappeared for two days—basically until the medicine wore off. They put me in the psych center at UCLA for observation. It was apparently just a drug interaction.”

“Is this documented?”

“It’s in my medical record at my doctor’s office, and I’m sure UCLA must keep their own records, and my insurance company certainly wouldn’t forget what it cost. The thing is, I still have the pills in their original bottles.”

“You do?” he said. “Why?”

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