Chapter 12
12
W arren called out, “Mrs. Ellis? It’s Charlie Warren again.”
“Come in.”
Warren said, “Get your stuff. I’m taking you home.”
She immediately got her purse, threw into it whatever she had taken out during the past two days, and followed him across the living room and into the kitchen, where he reloaded his pockets with his belongings. He called an Uber and said, “Good timing. He’ll be here in a minute. Come on.”
They could see the car by the time they had walked down the driveway. They got in and the female driver said, “Fifty-six nine eight nine Wilshire?”
“That’s right,” he said.
The driver took them over Laurel Canyon to Crescent Heights to Wilshire and then to Warren’s office, where they got into his rented car and drove out of the underground garage. He said, “I’m taking you to your house. We can talk on the way.”
“What happened?” Vesper Ellis said. “How did you get them to let us out? Are the police coming?”
“It turns out this isn’t what I was afraid it was,” he said.
“What is it?” she said.
“You were not their intended victim. They only took you in case they needed leverage to negotiate with me.”
“Are you saying they’re not criminals?”
“No, they’re criminals, all right. They served long sentences in a high-security prison. They were watching my office the day when you came to see me. When they saw you, they thought they’d found something to hold over me. You were attractive, well-dressed, and about my age, so they figured you might even be more than a client.”
“Isn’t that what kidnappers do? They abduct somebody that someone else will pay a ransom for?”
“This time there were no ransom demands, no death threats, or any of the things that people have nightmares about. It was a bad decision made by people who aren’t very sophisticated.”
“You sound like you’re their lawyer.”
“I’m your lawyer. I’ve just made an agreement with them that includes your immediate release and a permanent prohibition on any future contact with you.”
“What did you get in return?”
“You, for starters. Also, they actually did have a business proposal for me. It would not begin until after your case is completed.”
“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 been embezzling. 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 few minutes 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?”
“There wasn’t anything wrong with them that I know of if you don’t take them together. I kept them in case I needed one or the other sometime.” She looked at him. “But it means I can tell the police I made the same mistake when I got upset and depressed all over again after I found out the money George set aside for our future was being stolen. I blanked out and drove off.”
“As I was listening, I realized how crazy this idea is. I’m sorry for putting you in this spot.”
“I want to do it.”
“Why?”
“I guess because I got to feel a little bit of what your mom went through, and I don’t want to stand in the way of your getting everything back for her.” She paused. “Maybe because you didn’t just shrug it off when I was abducted. Or maybe because you said you still want to help me with my problem.”
“If that drug interaction happened to you again today and you made it home, what would be the first thing you’d do?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Yes, I do. I would call my friend Tiffany, because I know she’s got to be worried sick. I had told her I’d call and let her know how the meeting with you went. That was three or four days ago.”
“Okay. But first we’ll have to do something else.”