The Deposit Slip (4 page)

E
rin was not what Jared had expected. She met him in front of the farmhouse wrapped in a white ski jacket, wearing jeans and a baseball cap. She was slim and pretty, with curly auburn hair bunched in a ponytail. It took a few seconds before he realized what it was: There was too much “city” about her, standing in the shadow of the silo. She didn’t fit against the backdrop of acres of broken soil.

The farm lay at the end of a long rutted driveway off of County Road 3. It was marked by a weathered wooden board with
Larson
burned on its surface in a child’s lettering. Next to the mailbox was a
For Sale
sign from Ashley Realty.

The farm was a mix of care and wear. The bright red barn looked recently painted, but a stack of bricks marked unfinished repairs on its masonry foundation. The livestock pens were even and square, but missing fence planks made the empty pens unusable.

A sedan sat parked at the side of the house. Jared saw that the windshield was a shattered web of cracked glass.

He followed her through the side door. Once inside the house, Erin seemed more suited to the surroundings. She moved familiarly around the kitchen, setting store-bought cookies on the breakfast table with cream and sugar. Jared noticed that she referred to the farm as her father’s and never her own.

For a while they sat at the kitchen table with cups of steaming coffee, asking about common acquaintances from Ashley. It was a short exercise, as neither had many names to share, and it quickly became apparent to Jared why he hadn’t known her. Erin was two years behind him in school, and as Mort had said, she’d left Ashley High after ninth grade to finish in the Twin Cities.

“Right before tenth grade, my aunt Karen—she was Mom’s sister—offered to pay my tuition to Trinity High School in the Twin Cities. I jumped at the chance,” she said, describing the loneliness of growing up on a farm without a mother. Her father doted, she explained, but was quiet and withdrawn. When her aunt’s invitation arrived, her father didn’t resist. It must have been obvious she wanted to leave.

“I loved him dearly,” she sighed, “but I hated the farm. And in the end, the farm was all he had. I was fifteen, old enough to know my leaving would be hard for him. But I couldn’t stay. It was high school, you know? Dad offered me a car—because of the isolation—but that wasn’t enough. I wanted to be somewhere, and this farm was a corner of nowhere. It was quiet all the time with just the two of us. Just the chores and each other.”

She looked out the window and Jared followed her gaze. Beyond a pine in the yard, there wasn’t another break on the horizon for miles over the tossed soil.

Jared steered her away from the guilt-filled memories, asking what she did after high school.

She told him she finished college at the U of M, then went to work in advertising. She now had an apartment near the river in Minneapolis.

“I used to get up to Ashley every few months. Father was so grateful to see me, but there was always the parting a few days later.” The strain in her voice deepened. “I hadn’t spoken with him for a while before he died.”

What kind of man was her dad, Jared asked.

Erin went quiet for a time. “When I was very young, I wondered why he wasn’t a senator or the president. Maybe that’s how every girl feels about her father at that age, especially if he’s kind and gentle. Even without a mom, he tried hard to raise me like a daughter. When I went away to school, he never made me feel guilty.

“I always thought of him as this quiet, honest farmer and a war hero. He worked dawn to dusk, never complained, paid his bills. Treated people decently. When I was older, I knew that he had some rough times financially, but I never knew it growing up. That’s the kind of man I thought my father was.”

She paused, her face flat with an effort at composure. “But suddenly he’s gone, and I find this deposit slip. So what am I supposed to think now?”

No answer was expected, and Jared wouldn’t have shared the thought that came to mind anyway. He pressed on.

“Did your dad have any social life? People he spent time with?”

They used to belong to the Lutheran church, she explained, but after her mother died, they hardly went. There were the neighbors on the surrounding farms. He’d see them, help them out or get help in return on occasion. And he’d go to the Legion Hall sometimes. But few people came to the memorial service, and most of them she didn’t recognize.

“Any ideas about the money? Rich uncle pass away? Oil found on an old family plot? Thirty-year-old Apple shares surface?”

She rewarded him with a smile and a light laugh. “No. Nothing I know about. He didn’t have many relatives and fewer he kept in touch with. Just Aunt Karen—my mother’s sister.”

“No midnight calls from your dad three years ago talking about a windfall?”

“No.”

It was time to ask. “What do you want out of this lawsuit?”

It was the question that told the most about a client. Some groped for answers they thought their lawyer wanted to hear. Others told the truth, at least the truth of the moment. Even if they told the truth, clients’ desires from a lawsuit differed so much. Some wanted “justice”; others, just a chance to tell their story in court. Sometimes it was only about the money. And appetites evolved in a lawsuit. Jared had seen the meekest client morph into a Wall Street banker when it came to cash.

“I want to know what happened—where the deposit came from,” she answered, her voice growing stronger as she continued. “I want to know what it was all about. If the money was my father’s, I want it back. No matter what, I don’t want the bank to keep it.”

Her final statement came in a flat voice of resolve. It was a good answer, Jared thought, from a courtroom perspective. She didn’t claim she would fund an orphanage or try to end world hunger. He never trusted the self-righteous types—juries saw through them or they collapsed under cross-examination. There was no false bravado in Erin’s voice or face. Her goals were plain, believable, fair.

Juries were like sports fans: they wanted to pick sides. A jury would like Erin. It didn’t hurt that juries hated banks—almost as much as they despised insurance companies and lawyers.

Jared looked across the table at Erin, her hands wrapped around the cooling coffee mug. Her face said everything—the sad, small curve of her mouth and the mix of guilt and pain in her eyes. He understood her need to know about the source of the money.

“Where do you think the money came from?” he asked at last.

“I don’t know.” She shook her head slowly.

“You must have thought about it.”

Hesitation. “Yes, but I haven’t figured anything out.”

Jared glanced through the window at the car parked outside. “Someone thinks you don’t deserve the money.”

She grimaced. “The paper has an article a week about the suit, and they usually take the bank’s side. They make it sound like I’m trying to shut down the town. I never expected this kind of reaction. Not in Ashley.”

“Are you frightened?”

“No. At least . . . I wasn’t.”

“You know, apart from the harassment—there’s another risk if you keep going with the case now. You, or the estate, could get sanctioned if you lose.”

Erin shrugged. “I know about the Rule 11 business. I don’t care if they sanction me. I’m broke. The farm’s in foreclosure—by the bank, of all things. I’m trying to sell it, but no one’s shown any interest. There’s some equipment and a little livestock. The farmer who leased the land this summer is taking care of that now. But there’s not much to lose.”

Jared was silent for a few moments before Erin asked, “So are you interested in the case?”

The question shook him back into a cold sense of reality. Of course he was interested in a ten-million-dollar case. Even if it turned out the deposit was government money—or came from some other source—Jared knew he’d likely be able to keep a fee for recovering it. But first they had to recover it. And Erin had no concept of where Jared was financially or the impact of his Wheeler case. His gut twisted at another risky war against a team like Stanford and his pit bull Whittier. Especially one up here in Ashley.

He looked at Erin. She had taken his mug to the counter to refill it during his silence. He liked her and so far he believed her. He definitely liked the idea of a fight against a bank stealing money from a farmer—even illegal money.

Jared surveyed the room. It looked vintage seventies; probably when it was last remodeled. Maybe by Erin’s mother. The cabinets were pine, the scarred sink porcelain, and the counters lime green. A cookie jar in the shape of a bear sat on the window ledge over the sink. It echoed from back before the Larson family suffered the loss of a young man’s wife and the theft of a young girl’s mother. He wondered how much Paul Larson had changed after that. Was the father Erin knew when this room was frozen in time the same man who walked into a bank twenty years later with ten million dollars?

“I don’t know,” Jared answered when Erin sat down once more. “I need to do some research.”

Her voice grew strained. “You know I have until next Wednesday to find a new lawyer.”

“I know.”

She shook her head, her eyes fading to resignation. “It’s not fair.”

The look made him want to say yes. It was definitely time to go. Jared stood and reached for his jacket.

“I assume you want me to handle this on a contingent fee basis,” he said awkwardly. “I typically keep one-third of the recovery as my fees, and I cover the costs.”

She shrugged. “I have no other way to pay you. I’m living off savings and a couple of small life insurance policies my father had, and that’s running out.”

Jared nodded as he slipped on his coat. “All right. I’ll get back to you Monday.”

She looked him directly in the eye. “I’m not sure who to trust anymore. What advice to accept. Since I found this deposit slip, everything seems like it’s about the money. Is it?”

Jared didn’t respond and she didn’t press.

They parted in the yard shaking hands. As Jared drove away, he thought about the moment. Surrounded by bare fields, vacant pens, and the stillness of the barren farmyard, the suddenness of her warm skin felt like a fire in a cold and empty room.

J
ared left his car on the far side of Ashley Central Park. He planned to start at the bank. The building would tell him nothing and he knew he couldn’t question the bank employees without a subpoena, but starting at the bank seemed appropriate. He had parked here, a few blocks away, because he also felt like taking a walk downtown after so many years away from Ashley.

Crossing the park to reach Main Street, Jared thought about Erin—her isolation on her father’s farm and the imprint of sadness behind her eyes. He heard again the strain of uncertainty in her voice when she assured him that she “had to know.” Her face reappeared in his mind, especially the expression when he elicited the brief laughter.

Jared reluctantly stopped the last train of thought. She was a potential client, and there were rules about that.

How long had it been since he’d dated anyone, though? Or thought about dating someone? He shook his head.

Lawyers in love: it was an oxymoron. A third of his law class ended up marrying classmates. The same percentage of Paisley lawyers ended up marrying secretaries—if not the first time around, the second. Because who else did you see, working day and night and spending weekends looking down onto the city streets from the office?

He’d thought about dating Jessie when he first met her at Paisley. She was bright, empathetic, full of energy. Attractive too, though in a different way than Erin—less on the surface and more in how she carried herself. But he’d recoiled at following the same pattern as all the other lawyers, and now he’d gone and hired her and there were definitely rules about that too.

Jared arrived at Main Street. To the north, the sidewalk sloped down into the retail stretch of Ashley. The familiar sight of downtown brought his mind back to the present. He turned and headed downhill.

It had been two, no, three years since he’d been back here. Another five years before that since he’d helped his mother pack to move away. Looking down the street, Jared thought the six blocks of downtown seemed little changed from when he would hurry down this sidewalk, allowance in hand, to buy the latest Marvel comic at Burnside’s Book Store. At age ten, Jared made the journey weekly until his father learned of the growing collection under his bed and forbade him from buying any more. Always the accountant, his dad lectured that they were a waste of money.

For a while, he and his best friend, Stuart, escaped the letter of the prohibition by gifting each other comics each week—reasoning that neither was buying comics for themselves. It was Jared’s first act of legal interpretation, and it ended badly. His dad, the final judge and jury of his young world, learned of the scheme and threw out the whole collection.

Ahead waited downtown’s unmistakable center—the four-story structure of the Ashley State Bank. Even after all these years, its dark red brick, rich as blood, still anchored Ashley’s downtown as though it were its beating heart.

The century-old Ashley State Bank building stood on the corner of Main and Sycamore. Except for its height, it reminded passersby of a church, with its dark red coloring, lighter red brick trim, and the date 1891 carved in deep letters in the capstone over the door. That wasn’t an accident: Ashley was known for its multitude of churches, and the bank was built the summer after the First Lutheran Church was finished on Willow Street. When completed, the bank immediately enjoyed a prestige that rivaled the Lutheran edifice. After all, it was, then and now, the tallest building in Ashley by two stories.

Jared stopped for a moment on the sidewalk facing the bank. The building carried the strongest memories of his childhood. This bank had become the fault line between him and his father—so much so that he felt an irrational reluctance to go in. He shrugged it off and ascended the steps to the front door, pushing through the heavy glass doors into the bank’s broad foyer.

As Jared stepped into the entryway, he slipped to his right, out of the way, and pulled out his wallet as though searching for something. He hoped to go unnoticed, not wanting to run into anyone he knew. As he pretended to search the wallet, Jared glanced at the tellers behind their counters and the half-dozen patrons in line and at a side table preparing deposit and withdrawal forms. To his relief, no one looked familiar.

Standing in the marble entryway, watching the line move forward now, Jared wondered how Paul Larson would have made his deposit three years ago. Stepping to the teller window and passing his funds under the cage bars? But that would be absurd—no one waited in line to pass a ten million dollar check to a bank teller. Especially if that check wasn’t legal in the first place.

Jared looked past the teller cages toward the back of the bank. A row of offices lined the far wall. He could make out names and titles of several vice-presidents. In the corner was the president’s office.

That’s where the transaction would have occurred. Somewhere in the back, in the privacy of an office, alone with an officer of the bank.

Jared recalled waiting in line before these same barred teller windows long ago. Twelve years old, he came each week clutching the tally from a day of mowing lawns and clipping hedges. He would inch forward in line, surrounded by the smell of cologned men with short, fat ties, the pungent sweat of overalled farmers, or the cloud of a graying woman’s perfume. At last, he would part with bills still moist from sweaty pockets, sliding them under the metal cage. He would watch as the bored teller converted the product of six hours of pushing a mower under a blazing sun into tiny smudged print on the page of his deposit book, then step away anticipating his pride at presenting the book to Dad waiting at home.

Those printed entries marked the weeks of summer—until his dad’s praise became a litany of expectations and the pride faded as Jared felt inadequate to meet them. By fourteen, the lectures and cajoling had become a daily occurrence, until Jared feared to even make a withdrawal, which might be seen by his father. At last, he took to hiding a portion of each week’s earnings in the back of a dresser.

Jared realized that he was staring at the teller window. He looked away to avoid notice. People kept entering and leaving the bank through the glass doors to Jared’s left. He couldn’t stand there much longer without drawing attention.

He turned and stepped back through the glass doors, taking a sudden deep breath on the sidewalk outside.

“Jared Neaton?”

A tall, sandy-haired man mounted the steps, and it took Jared a moment to place him. Willis Severson, a high school classmate. Jared greeted him cautiously. They were never close, and Jared wanted to move on before others coming or going from the bank were drawn to them. He avoided answers that would engage too much conversation. It wasn’t hard: Willis was mostly interested in telling his own history. Only half paying attention, Jared heard that Willis had never left the area, was married with three kids, and lived in nearby Merritstown now. When Willis paused for a breath, Jared jumped in to apologize about an appointment and headed past him down the steps.

Reaching the street level, Jared turned uptown, moving away from his car. The library was only a few blocks farther on, and he wanted to confirm what Goering had said about the law. Using the library computer and Internet connection, he would do a Westlaw search. Time was not on his side here, and he had to find some answers quickly.

From half a block’s distance, Mick looked through the telephoto lens pressed to the narrow opening in his car window. Neaton stood fifty yards away in front of the bank door, though through the lens, his face looked as near as the dashboard.

After Rachel’s call, Mick had downloaded Neaton’s picture from the online Hennepin County Bar Directory and raced north from Minneapolis to Ashley. Given the three-hour drive, he knew he was unlikely to catch the lawyer at the Larson farm, but figured Neaton would come into Ashley afterward. The trick was where to pick him up.

The bank seemed the surest bet. Mick parked with a clear line of sight and waited. Ten minutes ago, he’d felt the satisfaction of seeing Neaton approach along Main Street before climbing the bank steps and disappearing inside.

Now as Neaton emerged from the red stone building, Mick watched another figure approach him on the steps, his hand outstretched. Mick focused in as the two men merged, snapping a long series of shots.

In less than two minutes, Neaton parted from the other man and descended the steps. Mick lowered the camera and raised his car window shut, looking away as the lawyer walked past his position on the other side of the street.

Now what? Stop in the bank to figure out what Neaton was up to? No, he thought. His client would be
very
disappointed if Mick couldn’t report on all of Neaton’s activities in Ashley. He had to stay with Neaton for now—at least until he left town.

In his side-view mirror, Mick watched Neaton move away up the street. He lifted his cell phone and punched in a speed dial number. “Hello? May I speak with the Mr. Grant? . . . No, he’ll know what it’s about. Just tell him it’s Mick calling.”

Two hours passed in the cool of the library. Jared clicked on another Minnesota case summary and scanned it quickly. It gave the same answers as the last four.

Hunched before the library computer, Jared’s research confirmed what Mort Goering had told him about Minnesota law on deposit slips. A bank account was a contract between the depositor and the bank—it obligated the bank to repay any money placed in the account. A deposit slip showed money went somewhere—but didn’t prove that a bank account actually existed, that the depositor owned that account, or that any money deposited in that account remained there and was never withdrawn. Unless Jared could find other evidence to prove each of these propositions, Erin’s deposit slip was a dead end.

He leaned back and shook his head. So there it was. This was going to be an old-fashioned discovery battle, against well-funded attorneys who always played hardball.

He took a deep breath, stretched, and looked around. The library still smelled of that strange mix of new print and musty old tomes. Jared wished he could bottle it. During the worst days of high school, when his world was collapsing, he would hide out here on Saturday afternoons. That smell had become home to him.

The date on the computer screen reminded Jared again that time was very short. He still had to review Goering’s files in his car. If possible, he needed to find an expert who could help him understand what bank records might exist to prove the deposit. He also should see what he could learn from witnesses in Ashley. And he only had a day or two to do all that and decide if he would take the case.

The critical witnesses would be those who could confirm the details of the deposit or the account and help him trace the money. Jared imagined it like a rock dropping in water. The point of the impact was the moment of the transaction—the most crucial witnesses at that center would be Paul Larson, deceased, and the bank employee who handled the transaction. The next ring out would be anyone Larson confided in, or other bank employees who learned about the transaction. After that, who else? Anyone who could confirm that the account existed and it was owned by Paul Larson.