Chapter 25
25
O ne week later, Charles Warren leaned back on the couch in his living room, and spoke into burner phone number three. He said, “Hi, Mom. This is your favorite son. Where have you been?”
“I was at the beach all morning, had lunch with a friend, and then I was outside gardening. I don’t recognize this number. You’re lucky I answered at all.”
“It’s part of a long story, but this is a temporary phone I had to buy because my regular one is involved in a case, and I don’t want my personal calls to my mother recorded.”
“Hard to blame you. So how have you been?”
“Busy. I just finished a complicated pro bono case, and I have a new girlfriend.”
“Congratulations. I guess you found somebody who doesn’t mind having a man with no time to pay attention to her.”
“Not exactly, but she is an adult and acts like one.”
“She must be right there or you wouldn’t say such nonsense.” She raised her voice. “Hello, new girlfriend. I hope my son is being nice to you.”
“He’s very nice,” Vesper said. “And I’m pleased that you introduced yourself, Mrs. Warren.”
“Linda.”
“My name is Vesper Ellis.”
“I’m eager to meet you. Charlie has very high standards.”
Charlie said, “That just happens to be why I called, sort of. I wondered if you would mind letting Hawaii fend for itself and flying back to LA for a few days. I’m about to start working on something new, and it involves you.”
“How can it involve me? Don’t tell me I’m being sued.”
“No,” Charlie said. “I’ve been contacted by a pair of men who are in possession of the actual identification and the financial records of Mack Stone. I believe what they’ve got includes his birth certificate in the name he was born with, the documents issued by the companies where he reinvested your money, and enough other supporting stuff to find and claim it.”
“After seventeen years? How can that not be a scam? Have you seen all these documents?”
“I haven’t seen them yet. I expect to in a day or two.”
“And why did they bring this to you?”
“The short answer is that they learned they couldn’t claim it because it isn’t theirs. It’s yours. Not only did Mack steal it from you, but even if it had belonged to him, you were still legally married when he died, meaning it’s now yours.”
“You know what?” Linda said. “The time when we really needed the money was long ago. I think the final stage of my growing up was when I learned to do without it. I’m happy the way things are right now. I’d rather you keep it.”
“We don’t have it. Having you here in person would make it much easier to claim it.”
“Well, all right. I’ve missed you since your last visit here, and I know I’m going to like Vesper, so I’ll get on my computer and make a reservation. I’ll email you my flight information.”
An hour later she emailed her airline itinerary for a flight in three days. He emailed back, “Itinerary received. I’ll pick you up by the baggage claim. Please bring the following documents, unless they’re already here: your birth certificate, marriage licenses or certificates for both marriages, all documents you received after Mack Stone’s death (death certificate, police reports, etc.), any official documents regarding his theft of money from your accounts. Also bring anything else that strikes you as relevant that’s not mentioned here. It’s all ammunition for the search and the court cases. Your Highly Skilled Attorney, etc.”
The next day, Warren used the number three burner phone to call Copes and Minkeagan. He started with Minkeagan. “I suppose you’re wondering why you hadn’t heard from me.”
“No. You’ve been waiting for us to die of old age. Ain’t going to happen.”
“Mrs. Ellis’s case has been settled. I’m ready to get started on the McKinley Stone case.”
“Well, it’s about time,” Minkeagan said. “We were beginning to wonder if you’d found a way to screw us that we hadn’t heard of.”
“Does that mean you’re ready?”
“Yes, it does. Do you want us to come to your office?”
“No. It might take months to fix up after that fire. I’ll arrange a meeting somewhere else. The rest of the building is okay, so I’m trying to get them to move us to another floor.”
“How do you want to do this, then?”
“I’ll call you with the place, you bring the material you’ve got, and we can start going over it and making plans. Is that acceptable to you?”
“Let me talk to our mutual friend and I’ll get back to you.”
“Sure. Call me on this phone and let me know what you guys decide.”
The 11:50 A.M. Hawaiian Airlines flight from Kahului Airport landed at LAX on time and taxied toward the terminal. In a moment Linda Warren had her only bag on her lap and her seatbelt unfastened. She waited patiently for the crew of the plane and the ground crew to complete all the steps—the Welcome to Los Angeles announcement, the warning about bags in the overhead compartments shifting, making the accordion folds of the boarding tunnel outside stretch out to press against the plane’s fuselage, the unsealing and opening of the door. When all that was done, the aggressive passengers who had to be first and had pushed their way ahead to the overhead compartments and were now occupying the aisle began their lockstep advance past her and out the doorway. She was now fifty-nine but had not yet let her hair go gray, so nobody stopped to let her into the aisle until another woman about her age came along, nodded, and smiled. She stood, said, “Thank you,” slipped into the aisle, and headed for the door.
Linda Warren had moved away from Los Angeles before her fiftieth birthday. By then her only child had graduated from law school, passed the bar exam, and had started his own small law firm, seemed to be supporting himself, and didn’t have time to accept much motherly attention. First, she had put her belongings in storage, rented out the house on the west side, and moved to a succession of different parts of the country. She would stay in each place for a year or two until she felt restless again, and then move somewhere else.
She had lived in Hanover, New Hampshire, for long enough to explore New England, then wanted to be warm again, so she moved to Key West, Florida. She next tried New York City, but eventually found the crowds and tall buildings made her feel hemmed in. She then went to Hawaii, and after a time rented a house on Maui. The place suited her, and she made friends and felt happy until the fire, when four of the friends who lived in Lahaina died and the others were all displaced. She had put up twelve of them in her rented house on the north side of the island. They had all moved out and moved on now—the families first, then the singles, one at a time. She was now considering moving on herself, to put herself physically away from the memories. The fact that they were good memories didn’t help, because they were memories of people and places lost. She liked being near the sea better than other places, and was considering either the northwest coast of Washington, or maybe a place in the east like Maine.
She walked with her head up and her spine straight, in her usual perfect posture. Her carry-on bag was strapped across her chest with her left arm resting on it. She kept her strides at the same pace from the landing gate, along the concourse, to the down escalators toward the baggage claim area where people were waiting for passengers. She saw her son before the escalator had taken her down five feet, and then looked for the girlfriend. There she was, just at his shoulder, looking up to study Linda as she came down the escalator. Of course, she thought, and used the time to study her. Very pretty face. Shoulder-length dark brown hair, done by a good hairdresser. A modest dress to keep the cute figure from being the only impression—either because she was meeting his mother or she simply felt it was tasteful—please make it be that. Vesper. It was odd, but she looked like somebody who was up to having a name like that.
She reached the shiny floor and walked toward them as they came to meet her. Charlie held his hand out to take the strap of her bag and then leaned in to give her a kiss on the cheek. “Aloha,” he said. “Linda Warren, this is Vesper Ellis.”
Linda held out her hand and Vesper shook it, and then Linda held on to her hand and said, “You look like a very nice person, Vesper. I knew you would be when we talked on the phone. I’m pleased to meet you.”
“Thank you,” Vesper said. “I’m very pleased to meet you.”
Charlie said, “Is this your only bag?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’ve become a very efficient packer since I moved away from here.”
“It’s great to see you again, Mom. I turned in my rental car for a nicer one in your honor.”
“I’m flattered. Lead the way.”
They drove north on the 405 freeway past the exit for Charlie’s office or his condominium. “Where are we going?” Linda asked.
Vesper said, “We talked and it seemed to us that it made the most sense if we all stayed at my house. It’s bigger than Charlie’s condo, and since your case could involve some pushback, the fact that neither of you are officially connected with my place might help keep things safer. There’s plenty of room, so we won’t feel crowded.”
Linda said, “That’s very thoughtful of you.” She turned to Charlie. “Tell me about this ‘pushback.’ ”
He said, “That’s just it. I don’t know what forms it might take. I’ve learned that one of the things that money does is attract predators, and sometimes it even turns people into predators who weren’t before. I also know that Mack Stone was a criminal, and I assume he knew other criminals. We’re about to start tracing things backward, asking questions that somebody may not want answered. Sometimes people will do desperate things to protect secrets. We need to use your name as our legal right to ask, and the attorney doing the asking will be me. Same surname.”
Linda didn’t take her eyes off him. He was keeping his eyes on the road ahead—or was he just avoiding looking at her? “I see,” she said. “The real reason you wanted to drag me back to the mainland to Los Angles was that you didn’t want to start this while I was living alone in Hawaii. You’re trying to protect me.”
“Well,” he said, “your name is going to come up a lot.”
The next morning Charlie drove his mother from Vesper’s house to Warren & Associates. As soon as they were in the car and in motion she said, “I’ve waited a long time to see you with a woman like her.”
He waited. Finally, he said, “And?”
“You’re both adults. You’ll figure it out.”
They reached his office building and he parked in one of the spaces for visitors in the underground garage and they took the elevator up to the third floor, where his firm had been moved into a new office. When they entered the outer office Martha said, “Hello, Mrs. Warren. It’s nice to see you again. Charlie, I put Mr. Copes and Mr. Minkeagan in the conference room.”
“Thank you, Martha. Come on, Mom. Time to get started.”
They walked into the big conference room. “Gentlemen, this is my mother, Linda Warren. And this is Alvin Copes and Andrew Minkeagan, the men I told you about.”
She shook hands with them both, and then went to the chair that her son pulled out for her and sat.
“All right, gentlemen,” Charlie said. “Are those the papers you referred to?”
Minkeagan said, “Yes. We put them in this filing envelope right away because the manila envelope was greasy and grimy. But this is everything, and all of it is just the way it was.”
Copes said, “His name was Daniel Webster Rickenger. It’s on his birth certificate, Social Security card, passport, and all the financial papers.”
“I see,” Linda Warren said. “Where is the birth certificate from?”
“Memphis, Tennessee.” Copes peered into the thick brown expandable envelope and pulled out the birth certificate, then laid it carefully on the table in front of her so she could read it.
She looked down at it for a moment. “Daniel Webster. He wasn’t much like the original.”
“No, he wasn’t,” Charlie said. “What else have we got to work with?”
Minkeagan said, “The stack of regular-size papers are the receipts from his deposits and monthly reports on how his investments were doing. They have the names of the companies and the account numbers on them. I think those might be the big things. There are also the ownership papers for the BMW and a Los Angeles marriage license with your name and McKinley Stone on it.”
“Ownership of things he wrecked, I guess.” Linda said.
Charlie said, “Guys, do you agree that we should make copies of the papers to work with and keep the originals here in the safe?”
“We talked about that,” Copes said. “And that’s pretty much what we thought. There’s no sense in bringing in people we don’t know we can trust and paying them to guard our secrets.”
“Right,” Minkeagan said.
“Okay,” Charlie said. “Let’s all agree on where we start. A lot of the money Mack stole from my mother was in these accounts. There’s a standard practice of all fifty state governments that requires that abandoned accounts be turned over to the state treasurer or similar official. An abandoned account is one that has seen no deposits or withdrawals or other activity for three to five years, depending on the state. That practice is called ‘escheatment.’ ”
“Sounds like an excellent name for it,” Linda said.
“Some states require the bank to publish the names of the account holders or do it themselves. Some states send a letter to the last known address,” Charlie said.
“I never received anything of the sort,” she said. “I guess Daniel Webster Rickenger didn’t have the same address as Mack Stone.”
“Which brings up our first problem. We have some bank accounts in this paperwork. Some, but only some, are located in the State of California. The US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency says the proper procedure in a case like this one is to start by sending an inquiry to the office of the treasurer of the relevant state. So we start by preparing to send these inquiries.”
Minkeagan said, “Preparing to? What the hell?”
“First, we need to establish in court that the late McKinley Lawrence Stone and Daniel Webster Rickenger were the same person, and then prove that Linda Warren, formerly Linda Warren Stone, was his wife at the time of his death. That makes her his heir in the State of California,” Warren said. “But there’s no reason not to get the inquiries all ready to be mailed out while we’re waiting to get this to court here in LA. Since the Mack Stone we knew was a very competent thief, I think we’ve got to ask all fifty states, Puerto Rico, and a few of the American protectorates. We should work out the procedures for Canadian and Mexican banks too. If there’s anything hidden in foreign countries, we’ll have to work through local attorneys in those places.”
“What’s next?” Copes said.
“We get started on the other assets. You said you’ve gotten in touch with some financial services companies that held stocks and bonds and things in Rickenger’s name. As they told you, in seventeen years companies get bought out by bigger companies or merge or go broke or change their names, and so on. When an account is actively managed, some stocks get sold and replaced by other stocks or gold or bonds or real estate trusts or annuities or cyptocurrency or whatever. But every month the company will produce a report that says how many dollars the account’s current holdings are worth on the market. Once we’ve established that Linda Warren is the owner of an account, we claim it. They will convert the account to cash and send the money. That’s the rough description of the process. Any questions so far?”
“Jesus. How long does this take?” Minkeagan said.
“Months. Years if there’s resistance and we have to sue,” said Warren. “It won’t take up all our time, but it won’t all happen at once. We’re starting by establishing that my mother is the heir because once that’s done, we can do several accounts at once. Are you two broke?”
“Not yet,” Copes said. “The wolf isn’t at the door, but I can see him just peeking at us over the hill.”
“I’ll get some papers done to pay you a cash advance on your finder’s fee. I’ll call you when the money is here. Does anybody have any questions?”
“No,” Minkeagan said. Copes shrugged and stayed silent.
Linda said, “Do you need me here anymore?”
“No. I’ll have some papers for you to sign later in the day, but I can bring them to you.”
“Good.” She stood up and turned to the two old men. “Thank you for finding these papers. Meeting Mack Stone was the worst thing that ever happened to me. I hate remembering it, but it’s been nice having some of my curiosity satisfied. Goodbye.”
She walked to the door. “See you later, Charlie.”
A few days later Warren was in the Stanley Mosk Superior Courthouse on Hill Street filing the papers to have the former Linda Warren Stone declared the sole heiress of all money and property owned by the late McKinley Lawrence Stone, also known as Daniel Webster Rickenger, his original name. His claim included copies of many documents, some proving that she was married to him when he died, and others that showed that he had transferred most of her money to himself before his death. The explanation was complicated, but thoroughly detailed and proven.
It took six weeks for the court to approve the claim and declare her the widow and heir of the deceased under either of these names. Warren went back to his office that day and had the office’s favorite messenger service pick up the box of letters of inquiry to mail to the treasurers of all fifty states, Puerto Rico, the District of Columbia, and several US protectorates in the Pacific, asking whether they had possession of any abandoned accounts of Daniel Webster Rickenger. There were also inquiries to the Canada Board of Treasury Secretariat and Mexico’s Comisión Nacional Bancaria y de Valores .
Warren had already sent letters of inquiry to all the investment companies that had supplied Daniel Rickenger with proof of money entrusted to them. Warren had his mother sign papers allowing him to act as her attorney and spokesperson. Then he said, “Now that we’ve got that part done, it shouldn’t take too long for the other states to answer. We can just sit tight.”
“That’s good to know,” she said. “But I think I’m going to do some exploring on the mainland. I want to visit a few places and see if one of them might suit me for a while. Don’t worry, I’ll make sure you know where I am all the time.”