Fallen Idols (31 page)
The documents in this folder had been jammed in hastily, a rush job. He dug one out. It was a manifest from his parents’ final trip to La Chimenea, including a list of the student volunteers who had been there, along with their addresses and phone numbers. He glanced over the names. None of them rang a bell.
Putting that aside, he fished out a thick, legal-sized envelope that was also from a Milwaukee firm. Inside, he found a set of policies from an insurance company. He scanned them quickly.
“Jesus Christ,” he whispered to himself. “What in God's name is this?”
It was getting dark. The facility was closing in ten minutes. He carried a few boxes of memorabilia out to his car — the precious things he didn't want to leave behind — along with the two accordion files. Then he turned off the lights, locked the unit, and hightailed it back to Chicago.
A
hard rain had been falling since before dawn. Will awakened in darkness as it pelted down on his windows and the small balcony outside his living room. Although he normally had his morning coffee and whatever else for breakfast at his office—fruit, a container of yogurt, once in a while a croissant or scone—this morning, because it was still too early to go in, he brewed up a pot of coffee and drank it sitting by the windows, watching the rain as it came down in sideways sheets, washing the remaining leaves off the trees, forming small rivers in the gutters along the sides of the street. No one was outside braving the elements. Even though Tom was in the other bedroom, sleeping, he felt alone.
He had been up late last night, looking over the documents Tom had brought back from the storage unit. Clancy had joined them. It had been a somber time. By the time Clancy went home, after midnight, they were more upset than they had been before, which was saying a lot. On the face of things, the documents, particularly those relating to stocks, were very upsetting. Morethan upsetting—they were potentially terrifying. He'd find out more this morning, when he got to the office and started checking them out.
The gist of what he'd read was that his parents had been heavily involved in buying and selling stocks for several years, starting in the mid-1990s. It looked to him, going through these papers, that they might have even been day-trading on their own. The broker they had used would know. That would be his first call this morning. He was swamped with his own work, but he was going to get into this right away.
This was why they had been refinancing their house; that was obvious to him. He knew people who had done that, mortgaged everything to get in on the stock boom. Friends of his in college had done it, their parents had done it. It was like those commercials for Ameritrade that had run a few years ago with the punk-looking kid who squawked like a chicken, egging on his girlfriend's square father to get in on the gold rush.
Some of the people he knew who had jumped on the bandwagon had made fortunes. Others—most of them—had risen with the tide, and then had crashed on the rocks when the tech boom collapsed. You didn't see commercials like those Ameritrade ones anymore, or read about all the instant dot.com millionaires, most of whom were broke now. Will didn't know if his parents had had the foresight to cash in their chips and leave the table, or if, like most people who had never owned stocks until the urge to make easy money became irresistible, they had kept on gambling long after their luck had turned.
Maybe they had gotten out okay. His father had recently bought a very expensive house, and from what Tom and Clancy had told him, was living large in other ways as well. Maybe the money his parents had made went into that. He hoped so. But if that had been the case, why hadn't his father said so, instead of lying about getting a special deal on the mortgage? He would have thought Walt would be crowing about making out in the market, when so many others had fallen on their asses.
If their broker was cooperative, he'd know in a few hours. He didn't know the man, but someone in his office would, or would know someone who did. Assuming he was able to talk to the broker, he could have the information he was looking for by lunchtime.
Even with milk and sugar, the coffee was rancid in his mouth. He dumped what was left in his cup down the drain and went to shower and get ready for the day. He wasn't looking forward to it.
It wasn't yet seven-thirty, but every broker was at his desk, almost all of them on the telephone. They did it all day long. You got in early and you went home late. That's why it was a young person's game. At twenty-six, Will had the stamina to do it. He didn't know if he would at thirty-six, or older. By then he'd be a partner, and wouldn't have to.
He sat at his desk, his parents’ information spread out in front of him. He had on his telephone headset, which he put on when he came in and kept on until he left for lunch, or when his day was finished. He had been lucky—one of his co-workers knew the Milwaukee stockbroker. That had saved some time. Looking at the phone number in front of him, he dialed.
“Jesse Warsaw,” came a man's crisp voice into his ear.
“Hey, Jesse, this is Will Gaines, from Merrill Lynch in Chicago. You got a minute?”
“Sure, Will,” the voice said with instant ease. One broker to another. More enjoyable talking to a fellow broker than a panicking client, which too often was the case these days.
“I need some information on an account you were handling a few years ago.”
“One of my accounts?” came the guarded reply.
“My parents,” Will interjected quickly. “Walter and Jocelyn Gaines.”
“Oh, uh huh.” The voice relaxed. “So you're their son?”
“One of them. I have two other brothers. Listen, Jesse.
I'm cleaning some stuff up here.” He paused. “You heard about my mom?”
“Yeah, I did.” The voice came over heavy. “That was awful. I'm really sorry. She was a damn nice woman.”
“Thank you. She was. So you did know her. Not just over the phone.”
“Oh, sure. She was a spitfire.” The conviviality came bark into Warsaw's voice again. “I always enjoyed her visits.”
“She saw you at your office? In Milwaukee?”
“Yep.”
Will shuffled through the documents. “Those accounts. They're not open anymore, are they?”
“Do you have the account numbers handy?” Warsaw asked.
Will read them off.
“Give me a minute.”
Will waited while his counterpart brought the accounts up on his computer. All over the large room, an entire floor of the building, brokers were working, making calls, buying and selling stocks and bonds, setting up meetings. It was a perpetual motion machine that never broke down, regardless of whether the markets were going through the ceiling or the floor. Rust never sleeps, will often thought, and neither does commerce.
Warsaw came back on the line. “All those accounts are closed,” he confirmed.
Will had expected that answer. The next one was the key. “For how long?”
There was no hesitation. “It's been a couple of years now.”
A couple of years. From before his mother's death.
“So how can I help you, Will?” Warsaw asked pleasantly.
C
lancy hastily arranged for his partners to cover his afternoon appointments; those that couldn't be fitted in, he postponed. Shortly after noon he swung by Will's apartment and picked up Tom, and the two drove I-94 north to Milwaukee. The rain had abated slightly, but it was still a slow, gnarly drive. Eighteen-wheelers fantailed sheets of dirty water across the windshield of their car, making it hard to see much beyond the car ahead. To compound the misery, the highway was under construction from Route 137 to the Wisconsin border. For several miles, traffic crawled along in one lane at fifteen stop-and-go miles a hour.
Before he left his clinic, Clancy had talked to Will. The news about their parents’ heretofore unknown stock transactions was brutal. Will hadn't gotten into details over the phone, it was too complicated. This evening, after Clancy and Tom met with the insurance broker whose name Tom had found in the buried documents, the three of them would talk everything out.
The insurance agent they were braving the elements to see didn't know they were coming; rather, he knew he had an appointment, but he didn't know it was with the sons of Walt and Jocelyn Gaines. Clancy had called his office that morning and set up a meeting for three-thirty, using a pseudonym. He wanted to sandbag the man, catch him by surprise. Most crucially, he didn't want the agent calling their father before the meeting, to inform Walt that his sons were investigating his insurance policies.
Clancy hated acting covertly, but they had no choice. What Tom had uncovered was too incendiary to be prematurely exposed to their father. Walt would have the mother of all shitfits and would order the agent to have nothing to do with his sons, a demand which the agent, of course, would honor. They had to blindside the man and worry about the consequences later.
What was normally an easy two-hour drive took an extra hour, but they had left early enough, so they weren't late. The insurance agency was located in a downtown high-rise commercial building. After parking in the underground lot, the brothers rode the elevator up to the agency offices, where Clancy gave the phony name (Clancy as surname, rather than first) to the female receptionist. She dialed her interoffice phone, and a moment later a middle-aged, ruddy-faced man in a nice-looking double-breasted charcoal gray suit appeared in the lobby from behind closed double doors to greet them.
“Mr. Clancy?” the man asked expectantly, looking from one of the two athletic-looking young men standing in front of him to the other.
“That's me,” Clancy answered. “This is my brother. He came along for the ride. My wife's busy, and didn't want to make the drive alone,” Clancy explained “You're Phillip Holbrook?”
The man nodded. “Yes. Where are you from?” he asked blandly. “How did you get my name?”
“Down south,” Clancy answered, deliberately vague, to the first question. “From a satisfied client of yours,” he responded to the second.
“I see,” Holbrook said, in the tone of someone who doesn't but assumes he'll get an explanation. “Come on back.”
They followed him through the double doors, which led into a maze of offices of various sizes. Holbrook's space was one of the nicer ones, with a view of the city below and Lake Michigan, barely visible in the rain, in the distance. Settling in behind his desk, he motioned for the two to sit opposite him.
“Can I offer you something to drink?” he asked hospitably. “Coffee, soft drink?”
“No, thanks,” Clancy answered for both.
“This weather's terrible,” Holbrook commented blandly, looking out the window behind him. “Did you have any problems getting here from—”
“No,” Clancy answered, cutting him off. “No problems al all.”
Shrugging off Clancy's rebuff, Holbrook picked up a legal pad and a Mont Blanc fountain pen. “Well, then. How can I help you today, Mr. Clancy? What sort of insurance were you looking for? Life insurance, you mentioned over the phone.” He glanced from one brother to the other. Tom looked back at him, his face inscrutable.
Clancy nodded. “I want to discuss life insurance, that's correct.”
“Are you familiar with the various types of policies available?” the agent asked, ready to go into his spiel, “Term, whole life, so forth? Do you own any insurance at present? Are you married, do you have children?” He poised pen over paper, ready to write. “What is your occupation, Mr. Clancy?”
“We're interested in these policies, specifically,” Clancy replied. He took the certificates Tom had found in the storage unit from his inside jacket pocket, leaned across Holbrook's uncluttered desk, and laid them in front of the agent.
Holbrook picked them up, looked at them, and recoiled as if he'd put his hand into a box and touched a snake. “Where did you get these?” he asked. He dropped the papers onto his desk.
“You issued these?” Clancy answered in turn.
Holbrook leaned away from his desk, to put some distance between himself and the two determined men facing him. “These policies are confidential. I can't discuss them without getting permission from the policyholder or beneficiary. In writing,” he added emphatically.
“Walt Gaines being the beneficiary,” Clancy said. “Since the policyholder is deceased.”
Holbrook licked his hips involuntarily. “Yes.” He picked up the policies again. “Did Mr. Gaines give these to you?” he asked, now not only suspicious but alarmed.
“Indirectly,” Clancy answered. He smiled thinly at the man, as if trying to disarm him, or at least to not intimidate him, as he clearly was. “Walt Gaines is our father. I'm Clancy Gaines, and this is my brother Tom.” He stood and pulled his wallet from out of his back pocket, took out his driver's license, and showed it to Holbrook.
The insurance agent blanched as he looked at the license Clancy was holding under his nose. “I see,” he said tremulously. He looked from Clancy to Tom, who was staring at him as if measuring him for something unpleasant.
Clancy put the license back in his wallet. “I'm sorry I deceived you over the phone, Mr. Holbrook,” he said. “But I didn't think you would see us if I told you who I was, and I didn't want you talking to our father about my calling you.”
“You're right on both counts,” Holbrook answered angrily. He put a finger on the papers, as if testing them for heat. “I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to leave.”
Clancy shook his head deliberately. “And I'm afraid we're not going to, until you explain these to us.” He leaned forward and tapped the documents.
“I couldn't if I wanted to, which I don't,” the man responded. “There are confidentiality laws I'm obligated to uphold.”
Clancy leaned across the desk. “This is our mother and father we're talking about here, not some fucking legal abstraction, Jack.” His voice, although low in volume, was suddenly fierce with threat. “I want you to explain these policies to us, in detail, now. Or …” He hesitated.
“Or what?” the agent croaked.