Page 66 of Pro Bono

“I defer to her exact figures. Since I never cared much about him any more than I care about her, she’s more likely to be right than I am. You have to admit he was one cold, selfish bastard. And, speaking of Mother and Daddy’s rules, how does May feel about him using her address and attaching his real name to it? I’ll bet she likes that a lot.”

“Believe it or not, it didn’t come up. I’m sure it will at some point. What she wants right now is that all of the siblings know about it right away. She wants a meeting of everybody where we decide how to go after the money.”

“Peter, look at yourself, and look at me. You spent at least twenty-five years shearing the sheep. You made enough money to go live in a fishing lodge or chalet or whatever it is, relax, and live the life you want. I’m the pampered wife of a very rich man who demands nothing more from me than to have sex with him once in a while. By the time I actually leave, taking a fortune with me won’t even be stealing. By then the assets will be so mixed up even I won’t know who owns them. Why the hell would either of us want to fool around and draw the attention of the State of Arizona?”

“I don’t know if I do. I’m just being a good brother.”

“To whom? Me, or her?”

“Both of you,” Peter said. She heard him moving around, and then he said, “Hi, baby. I’ll be off in a second.” More movement.

“Got to go now,” she said. “Bye.” She cut the call, walked across the living room of the hotel suite, and into the bedroom she was sharing with Dale. There was a very comfortable reading chair that looked down on Michigan Avenue. She didn’t want to use up any time on her brother Peter’s regular appointment with one of his escorts, and particularly didn’t want to hear anything. She only wondered whether she had succeeded in talking him out of going to the meeting about the late Daniel’s money. The whole thing might be nothing, but she’d decided it wouldn’t hurt to try and cut him out of his share.

She sat there and looked down at the pedestrians walking along both sides of the busy street. They looked hot. Some of the men had taken off their coats and a couple had even loosened their ties. Chicago could be so humid in the summer.

27

Warren opened the door of Vesper Ellis’s house with the key she had given him on the day when the locks had been replaced. “Hello!” he called. “I’m back.”

He saw her appear at the second-floor railing above the staircase wearing a white terry cloth robe. She waved. “Hi, Charlie.” She turned and disappeared.

He climbed the stairs two at a time, and continued across the hall to the bedroom. “What have you been up to? Have you heard from my mother?”

“She hasn’t called. You’d probably have better luck calling her a little later, when it’s getting closer to dinner time in the Eastern time zone and she’s back at her hotel.”

“And to what do we owe this?” He gestured at the bathrobe.

“I did some yard work all morning, and then I was taking care of a bunch of business papers and things, and then I realized that what I wanted next was to take a bath. That was where you came in. How is your day going?”

“I was downtown in court most of this afternoon. The judge in my mother’s case ruled that the marriage between Daniel Webster Rickenger and my mother was a real marriage that was binding on him even though he used a false name. I had submitted the license and a lot of photographs from the big wedding they had. I also submitted a lot of transfers as proof that the money they lived on came from her. I had interior and backyard photographs from different years, and papers showing that the house they lived in was the one she and my father had bought. I even had some business letters Rickenger sent referring to them as Mr. and Mrs. Stone.”

“So you legally proved the late Mack Stone was the same man as this Rickenger guy?”

“Several times in different ways. The photographs of him were the same, as were the fingerprints from the old papers, the new papers, and the wrecked BMW. The medical examiner in Nevada and the police both had records of the prints taken from the body. He was also wearing the wedding ring when he died.”

“Does this end it?”

“It essentially ends the part about the bank accounts in this state, and maybe any others we find that were turned over to other state governments. The evidence is so overwhelming we could do it all over again once a week. All that’s left is going to be financial instruments like stocks and bonds. I don’t know what that’s going to be like. That’s for another day.”

“She’ll be glad to hear it. She wants to have as little to do with this as possible. What’s next on your schedule?”

“I have no plans.”

“Then you can share the bathtub with me. It’s nice and hot.”

Peter couldn’t help feeling a bit uncomfortable. The lake was in a forest of tall pines, and the road was narrow and thinly traveled. That was good, but there were other houses only a couple miles from this area, along the crestline of the Sierra Nevadas—not as many as there were around Lake Tahoe, but enough. He didn’t want any of the people in those houses to take notice of his visiting relatives, so he had told them different times to arrive. One car on that road was just some tourist who took a wrong turn. Two at once was a parade.

He sat at the window where he could see the road starting at around tenA.M.The first one to arrive was May, of course. She had decided that it was necessary to transport her 125-pound body and a carry-on bag in a full-size SUV rental with oversize knobby tires designed for driving off-road. He was relieved when he saw Rose show up at quarter to four in a rented compact Mazda. He had Rose pull around the side of the house where her car would be obscured by the porch. He had gotten into May’s SUV himself and parked it behind his boathouse where its fat-assed gaudiness couldn’t be seen from the road.

He had already prepared the lake side of the house to host his sisters. He had restocked the bar on the side of the great room. He had groupings of three chairs, each arranged in desirable places—the big porch overlooking the lake, inside in front of the two-story window, and on one end of the long dining room table. Wherever they felt like sitting to confer, he had it ready. He had been careful to discourage pairs of people sitting without the third, because opportunities like this seemed to enable secret deals and conspiracies. The history of the Rickenger family did not inspire trust.

Peter concentrated on showing each sister to the bedroom suite he had chosen for her and keeping the alcohol and snacks plentiful and in plain sight. He didn’t give any signal to either that it was time to beginthe meeting. Peter felt nothing but dread about it, and he knew that there were more demanding personalities present than his. Let them decide when they wanted to take up the business.

Beginning in late afternoon the siblings sat on the porch, looked at the lake and the peaks, made drinks, and lied to each other. He knew that everyone had, over the course of their careers, made money. Their parents had prepared all of them for a life of taking what they wanted. They were all quick to see vulnerabilities and quick to exploit them. He was sure they all had enough to be considered prosperous, but these rare meetings were reunions, a chance to give the other Rickengers the impression that you were richer, smarter, and better than they were.

As usual, he heard it all but didn’t take it very seriously. If your whole life was dedicated to getting other people’s money, you cared about money and thought about it and worried about it all the time. Peter had been just like them until one day something had happened to him. It was as though a circuit breaker clicked. It was right after the construction people had finished building this house and had driven away for good. He had suddenly realized he had enough money.

For a while he wondered if it meant he was dying. He waited, but didn’t die, because the event wasn’t medical. It was mathematical. He had paid for the house and had no more desire to go anywhere else. He realized that he could afford to live the way he did now until he was well over a hundred, a point he would almost certainly not reach. That day he stopped taking any risks to get more. He stopped caring about money, then stopped thinking about it. The way he thought about this transformation was that he had been cured of being Peter.

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