Page 4 of Pro Bono

“What’s that?”

“You know. Optimistic and confident. If I say we shouldn’t buy something, he tells me I’m being silly, timid for no reason. ‘The markets go down, but they always go up again.’ ”

Charlie began to ask her more questions when she was alone. Even with her vague answers, he came to realize that Mack had been living for two years like a very expensive pet. He had a beautiful new BMW. It had been bought only in his name because he said that made it easier for him to bargain for the best price, insure it, and take it in to be serviced. He also had a new wardrobe and a lot of stories about the wonderful places they had visited in the past year.

It settled on Charlie that his parents had not been very good at survival. His father had achieved himself to death and died of a heart attack unselfish but early. His mother had judged her second man by assuming he was just like her first, but on no evidence. Over the summer the strain on the marriage became impossible for Linda to hide. Around the Fourth of July, Charlie heard her ask Mack if he knew why the June deposits from the investment accounts hadn’t turned up. He said “They have. I used them for the kid’s June 30th tuition payment.”

Charlie knew there was no June tuition payment. Tuition was charged at the beginning of fall semester and at the beginning of spring semester. Schools didn’t defer billing until the end of an academic year in June. That night, when Mack and Linda were out to dinner, Charlie looked around in his mother’s office that Mack seemed to have taken over. He checked the file drawers where his mother had always kept the account statementsfrom her banks and investment companies and was able to trace a decline in the balances, which seemed to have accelerated over the school year. His mother’s bank statements showed large checks written to credit card companies, and her long-term accounts had numerous cash withdrawals.

The most disturbing to him were the investment statements. This seemed to have been a good year for stocks. Each of the accounts had some increase in value each of the nine months while he’d been away, a couple of them large, but a decrease in balance. On the first day of each month for years, there had been a transfer of the same sum of money from the stock funds to the joint bank account. But last year, beginning in September, sometime before the fifteenth of each month, there had been an additional withdrawal of an irregular sum that seemed roughly proportional to the recorded increase in stock value. If the value went up five percent, the withdrawal was about that much. Mack had been tapping the accounts, but trying to make it less glaring by timing it. Charlie noticed that Mack was an optimist. Four times he had overestimated the rise in prices, twice drastically.

Each time Linda and Mack were out together, he looked deeper, searching for signs of where the money had gone. Charlie needed to wait for a day when Mack was out without Linda before he could show her what he had discovered. She sat at the desk and stared down at the figures as he pointed them out, then went back month by month and showed her the same phenomena. Charlie watched her closely, and it was only about ten minutes before she began to cry. He pulled the paper she’d been looking at away from her. “Don’t get the statement wet,” he said. “We’ve got to keep him from knowing.”

“I don’t want to keep him from knowing,” she said. “I can’t believe he’s been doing this to us. The minute he gets back here I’m going to be in his face.”

“If you do that, he’ll know that you caught him,” Charlie said. “As long as he doesn’t know, maybe there’s something you can still do.”

“What? Send him to jail? Sue him? He’s my husband.”

“I don’t know,” Charlie said. “I’m not married to him, and I’m not even legally an adult, so nobody will listen to me. If somebody does something, it’s got to be you.”

“But what can I do about it now?”

“Something. Get on the phone and cancel anything they’ll let you cancel—his credit cards, his permission to sign things at your banks and brokers. Withdraw anything you can and transfer it to a new account. Change every password. If there’s any card you can’t cancel, report it missing, maybe stolen, so they have to freeze it and send you a new one. You must have an accountant you had before he came along. Call him and tell him what’s going on. How long is Mack going to be gone?”

“He said he’d be back around six. He has a haircut appointment, some kind of business meeting, and then he was going to shop for clothes.”

“It’s not even ten now. That gives us some time. Pick out the accounts that are worth the most and try to save those first. I’ll try to find the right phone numbers and dial them so you can just talk.”

They both worked frantically. There were papers that would have to be signed in person, accounts she couldn’t deny Mack access to, things that couldn’t be done until the next day when Mr. So-and-So could approve them, or couldn’t be done by phone, or needed both her signature and Mack’s. If Mack’s access to an account couldn’t be canceled, she would withdraw funds and have the checks mailed. If she couldn’t withdraw everything from an account, she withdrew what she could and moved on. After the most obvious things had been done, or at least attempted, Linda called the attorney she and Charlie’s father Matt Warren had hired to write a will leaving their money to Charlie, andthen more recently, to change her will so Mack was included. Linda told her what had happened and said she needed a new will and a divorce.

A couple hours later, the lawyer called back. She and a colleague had been working on securing large assets, and he had discovered that McKinley Stone had approached a real estate agent within the past week and tried to arrange a sale of what he called “the family house.” The title search had revealed that the house had been placed in a living trust in Matt and Linda’s names with Charlie as the only contingent beneficiary sixteen years ago. Mack had no right to sell it. She would try to find out more and let Linda know what she learned. She also said, “Meanwhile, get out of that house before he comes back. When these guys get found out, they aren’t ever pleasant, and sometimes they’re violent.”

Mother and son packed suitcases. They agreed to each drive one of the cars to keep them both out of Mack’s hands. They would meet at a hotel in Santa Barbara and keep working on preventing Mack from finishing the job of stealing the money Linda and her first husband had put away for them. Linda would drive the Jaguar, and that would leave the Toyota Charlie had driven whenever he’d been home from school.

Charlie carried his mother’s luggage to her car and saw her off. As he was about to leave, he realized that he should bring some more of the financial papers with him. He went back into the house and selected the monthly statements from Linda’s account drawer that were the clearest evidence of what Mack Stone had been doing, put them in his bag, and then, as he was opening the back door, heard the whisper of the BMW’s tires on the paving stones of the driveway.

The BMW stopped on the driveway, blocking Charlie’s car in. The only thing he could do was retreat into the kitchen, unlock the back door, then slip into the pantry and wait. He heard Mack come in the front door talking loudly on his cell phone. He said, “Well, I’m home now, and Ican prove this is just a misunderstanding. My wife will explain to you that I have a perfect right to move any of our assets from one place to another any time I please.” There was a pause while the other person said something, and then Mack said, “Then first she can explain that they are joint assets.” There was a pause. “Linda!” The next time his voice came from the staircase. “Linda!” The third time, the voice was faint because it was coming from the second floor. “Linda!” Charlie could hear strain and frustration in it. Charlie slipped out the back door with his suitcase, carried it across the front of the house and the next three to the nearest corner, and took out his phone.

His friend Kyle Sung lived a couple blocks away, so he called him. He said, “Look, I’ve got to go out of town for a few days, and my car is blocked in the driveway. It will be clear in a couple hours, but I’m in a big hurry. Could I borrow your car for the trip and leave you the keys to mine?”

“Sure,” Kyle said. “I don’t need to drive anywhere tonight. I’ll pick you up in a minute.”

“Great. Can you make it at the corner by Nora Hartz’s house?”

“Sure.”

Kyle’s car was much better than the one Charlie had been using. It was a practically new Audi and had a big engine, but it was sleek and had a dark gray color that made it look understated and expensive. Charlie left the house and walked down the street past Nora Hartz’s house carrying his suitcase. When he got near the corner Kyle was already in sight. As soon as Kyle pulled over and popped the trunk, Charlie put his suitcase in and got into the passenger seat. As Kyle drove back to his house he said, “You feel like telling me what’s going on?”

Charlie said, “It’s basically my mother breaking up with the asshole she married. I’ve got to stay out of his way for now, and he just pulled his car into the driveway and accidentally blocked my car in.”

“Wow. That’s bad timing. You think he’ll give me a hard time when I come to get your car?”

“I think he’ll be gone in a couple hours. If he isn’t gone yet, he’ll be all smiles, pretending to be a great guy. Thanks for this.”

“No problem.”

When they reached Kyle’s house, Kyle got out and left the motor running. “Good luck with all of it, man.”

---