Page 45 of Pro Bono

He read. ‘‘Charles Warren & Associates and so on.

“Founding Fathers Vested Investments Fraud Division has investigated the claim you submitted on behalf of Mrs. Vesper Ellis. We have found no evidence of any discrepancy in Mrs. Ellis’s holdings with Founding Fathers. The copies of monthly reports which you appended to support her claim are partial and incomplete, and include only the initial investments made by Mr. and Mrs. Ellis when the relationship was established, and while they reflect a growth of value, recent quarterly dividends, and interest, they don’t include everything.

“There are two additional linked accounts, numbers FF 798423D and FF 135834I, which were also established by the attachment to the agreement that Mr. and Mrs. Ellis signed at that time. These two accounts hold the dividends and interest from quarters prior to the most recent two quarters, as well as the proceeds from occasional sales of stocks, bonds, or other securities, all of it held in cash equivalents for future purchases or other uses as directed by Mr. and Mrs. Ellis.

“Attached please find the most recent reports for FF 798423D and FF 135834I, as well as this month’s report for their principal investments. We can see that Mrs. Ellis’s claim is based on a misunderstanding, probably caused by the unfortunate death of her husband, Mr. George Ellis. Had his death been reported to Founding Fathers Vested Investments, her advisor, Ronald Talbert, could have contacted her with useful information, as well as answered all of her questions. Please see Attachment 7, Report of Change in Account Holder(s), which must be filled out and returned as promptly as possible. Sincerely, Marissa Susquino Esquire, Director, Fraud Department, Founding Fathers, etc., etc.”

“I can’t believe it,” Vesper said.

“Look at these two attachments I’ve got on the screen. Have you ever received one like them before?”

She leaned over his shoulder. “No.”

“Then you’re right not to believe it,” he said. “Instead of telling you that one of their people has been robbing you, they’ve replaced your missing money in these two new accounts and they’re time traveling to make the theft never have happened. They’ve probably got somebody creating monthly reports for the past few years right now.”

“They would do all that?”

“It’s a very risky strategy, but they obviously don’t want to have anybody know the truth. My guess is that either Ronald Talbert has been doing this to other clients and they need to keep it quiet while they top off dozens of accounts, or they’ve already got some other problem, like maybe troubles with the federal regulators. It’s got to be bigger than the damages they should have paid you, which they could have done after a half hour of investigating.”

“What are we going to do?”

“If you do nothing, they’ll replace your lost money. They’re hoping you’ll believe there’s no point in pursuing a lawsuit or anything.”

“But what do you recommend?”

“That we check to see if your money is really in the account. If it is, you close the account today and put the money in a bank. We can still come for them after that.”

20

Most mornings, Patrick Ollonson came into the office at six fifteen, because that was nine fifteen Eastern time, and it made him seem to be a client advisor who wanted to be in his office and already reading the summaries and projections for the stock market session that would open fifteen minutes later. That had always been a pose, but it had seemed to work for many years to compensate for average performance. The bosses liked to see the troops at their posts early, prepared to detect the moment when all the indicators lined up to make a particular course of action a clear winner. It was true that sometimes the prize could be won by getting into a sure thing early, and sometimes it paid to be the first one out. But for Ollonsun, to be there early was an empty gesture. He had never sent a mass alert to his clients to buy or sell anything.

But this morning he had been in his office at 4:00A.M.He had not wanted to see anyone coming in, not wanted to be in an elevator or a hallway with anyone. He didn’t want anyone to see his face with its swelling, bruises, and cuts, or especially, to have to answer any questions about it.

Pat Ollonsun had married Christina Welbrower five years before Ron Talbert turned up and married Francesca, her younger sister. He’d had all that time to learn what marrying into the Welbrower family meant. The grandfather was Ted Welbrower, for Christ’s sake. He’d been a B-17 bomber pilot in World War II, shot down over Germany and captured, and later decorated for organizing the escape of two dozen Allied prisoners. After the war he’d borrowed money to buy up cheap tracts of farmland ten miles out from various western cities. Then he had put up some land as collateral for more loans to start car dealerships so people could live ten miles out and commute to the city for work.

Land meant houses meant roads meant cars meant gas stations meant food sales meant warehouses. His son Daniel, the girls’ father, was the educated version of the Welbrower girls’ grandfather, and the education had been like adding a jet engine. He was one of the first to cater to the new suburbs with shopping malls. Every bit of family history was just as intimidating. The maternal grandmother came from an ancient aristocratic Scottish family with actual castles and miles of green rolling land and rocky coastline. The girls’ mother seemed to have no ancestors who weren’t professors, scientists, or something. The Welbrowers didn’t think of themselves as snobs. They thought of themselves as superior. It was an opinion that everybody else seemed to share.

Being the first son-in-law had been a mixed experience for Pat Ollonsun. The good part was that Christina was beautiful enough to be an actress if that hadn’t been too low-class for Welbrowers, and she had learned in college courses that frequent monogamous sex was one of the most wholesome and health-promoting activities humans could do. The bad part was his own status. From the first introduction, Christina’s family and friends found Patrick Ollonsun to be an unsuitable match, sofar beneath Christina that it had caused some of them to start introducing her to other young men to head off the marriage.

The truth about his marriage was more complex than he had understood at first. Christina had told him early on during a moment of tipsy honesty that his unending persistence in getting her to notice him, then date him, had made her think he could counterbalance the ferocious energy of the Welbrowers. The women, particularly as they were growing up, were prized and protected, but it was like being a treasure, not a person with agency. Christina had developed a resistance to being controlled by her family. She knew she was desirable, knew that most men in her social circle would want her. But an outsider like Ollonsun, who was about to take his first job in a California finance company three thousand miles from the nearest Welbrower, had been irresistible.

Five years later, when Christina’s sister Francesca had brought Ronald Talbert around, Pat had understood. He had realized that what Francesca was doing was reacting to the rift Christina had created with the family and choosing Christina’s side. For her it was rejecting the control of the old almost-medieval Welbrower patriarchy, being close to her beloved elder sister, and embracing the newness and freedom of California. She had even chosen a man who, from her flawed point of view, was like the one her sister had.

Pat had befriended Ron and taught him things that would help him survive in the world of the Welbrower sisters. To the extent that he could, he helped encourage and aid his wife’s efforts to bring Ron and Fran into her own social circle to make up for being dropped from the one Christina knew would exclude them. He had been the wise older brother-in-law, and when the time came, the doting uncle. And he had helped Ron learn the ways to produce enough income to fund a marriage to a Welbrower sister.

And now here he was, hiding in his office with his phone connected in an endless call to his own cell phone so any incoming call would find the line busy. It wasn’t really endless. He’d been in the office for over six hours. It was now a little after tenA.M., and he’d had to renew the call every two hours because that was when the phone company automatically cut it off. He looked as though he’d either been in a drunk driving accident and gone into the windshield or been runner-up in a bar fight. His brother-in-law, his protégé and supposed friend, had done this to him.

He had been sitting here for all these hours, trying to think his way out of this mess. He had made his best effort to hide his hand in Vesper Ellis’s losses, but he had been skimming other clients’ accounts for so long that the sums had gotten to be more than he could cover. He had longed to ask for help from his wife’s family, but it was a solution he had tried before, and they had refused. Her father had actually referred to some warning he had given Chris when their engagement had been announced that when this day came, she shouldn’t bother to ask.

When their grandfather had died, Christina and Francesca had inherited identical trust funds. Pat had gone to considerable effort to find a way into Chris’s, but her grandfather’s attorneys had anticipated that some future husband might do that and set the trusts up so that there were three trustees who had to approve any withdrawal. Ollonsun had been sure that Christina could get around that, but he also feared that asking her would start the avalanche of questions that would sweep him out of the marriage.

This morning he’d gotten out of the house early enough that she hadn’t seen his face yet. She was used to not seeing him in the mornings, but by tonight he would need to find out from Ron what he was telling his wife, so their stories matched. He didn’t look forward to that, and he would give Ron time to cool down first. Meanwhile hehad bigger and more immediate problems. He had learned that his “get out of jail free card,” the former mentor who had risen to be head of the European Division, had been quietly replaced during the past year; after he’d tried some inquiries of mutual acquaintances, he learned he had a fatal case of cancer.

Ollonsun had run through many possible ways of saving himself—framing someone else in the Great Oceana company—a brilliant young intern who had great computer skills; telling Vesper Ellis he’d borrowed some of her money to pay for his daughter Zelda’s emergency surgery and would pay her back in installments; saying he had not known that her late husband George Ellis was dead, so he’d approved withdrawals requested in that name that had now been traced to North Korea or Russia or China. His ideas had become increasingly wild and unpromising. They had, as the morning went on, become scarcer, and their space in his mind was slowly being usurped by hopes that something he had already tried was going to work.

The hope his mind kept returning to was that the two men he had been paying to watch Vesper Ellis and her lawyer would save him. He had given them a lot of cash last night and they had agreed to hurt both client and lawyer badly—fifteen thousand, if Ron had counted right. It was entirely possible that they would do such a good job that Vesper Ellis and Charles Warren would back off, in physical pain and afraid for their lives. But Pat could still hear one of them ask if he and Ron were willing to accept the fact that the victims might die. He admitted to himself that this was actually a better outcome. Then there would be no victim anymore, and no lawyer to pursue the complaint. He started to pray for it, and then felt that somehow prayer didn’t seem likely to help.

He was hearing the sounds of business going on outside his office door—footsteps as people walked up and down the open concoursewhere dozens of people worked in cubicles or in rows of computer screens arranged three to a desk in a fold-around arrangement. There was a woman’s voice that had a melodious quality that carried and reminded him of Chris’s voice as it came closer. Then he heard the “pock pock pock” of her high heels coming closer. They stopped, and he had a feeling of dread. She rapped on his door.

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