“Where should I begin?” my mom said.
“Let me clear the chairs, so we can sit down and figure it out.” I sat in the swivel high-back leather chair; Mom sat in the boxy office chair next to the desk. I spun around, surveying the chaos.
“I don’t even know what we’re looking for,” I groaned, “but I do know we have to examine every single piece of paper.”
I retrieved several new cardboard file boxes and folded them into shape. “We’ll categorize the piles as we go through them,” I said, “put them into labeled manila folders, and store them in these boxes.”
It didn’t take long for my mother to become bored. “I don’t think I can be of any help,” she said. She patted my hand, wished me luck, and went off to get us some coffee. I had made it through several more piles of innocuous notes when she returned with the full mugs.
“Got one box filled already,” I said. “Now it’s time for John’s briefcase.” I clicked it open. “Look!” I screeched. “It’s the earrings I wore during the attack, and latex surgical gloves, just like the ones I saw in Indiana.” I handed them to her and shuddered. “If the police hadn’t stopped John at the rental car, there would have been no evidence to support the crime.”
I searched further in the case and found a map of Indiana, notes about the Chicago Holiday Inn, and two rental car express cards for Chicago. When did he go to Chicago? I started a list, by dates and documents, then laid the items back inside. My lips trembled when I saw my tattered photograph, the one John had said he would never remove from his briefcase. I closed the briefcase, set it in the hall, and came back for a long sip of coffee.
“Your dad always said he felt there was something strange about John,” Mom said.
“Why didn’t he ever tell me?”
“He wanted you to be happy, and it seemed you were.”
“I was, except for the financial part.”
My stomach grumbled hungrily. I was shocked when I looked at the clock above the desk. I hadn’t realized how much time we had spent going through the papers.
After lunch, Mom lay down to take a nap. Slowly, systematically, I made my way through the piles of paper on the top of the office desk, then progressed to the file drawers. In an innocuous, unlabeled folder I discovered a crazymaking puzzle piece ... the contract for the second mortgage on my Antioch house, the one John took out while my father lay dying. Chills swept over me. My signature was forged. My name was not in John’s distinctive scrawl. Someone else had signed it. Who? John must have had an accomplice. I made a note to visit the loan office the next day, and resolved to check my rearview mirror often.
Discovery propelled me forward. I shuffled through the rest of the desk file drawers but came up empty-handed. I attacked several piles from the bookshelves. The first one revealed nothing. The second pile provided another piece of the puzzle. I found the signature card John said he had taken to Kirsten when he picked up the funds, the card that required two signatures for advances on the last Concord second mortgage. He never turned it in.
I dug further into the pile. My heart sank when I saw, stapled together, the missing HFC loan statements I had never laid eyes on. John had been withdrawing against the equity loan for the past five months. I grabbed the calculator. His withdrawals totaled more than $17,000. Most of them were in the same increments as the deposits to our checking account for his supposed teaching salary. I retrieved the checkbook. I could not account for $5,000. I had stepped into financial quicksand, and no one was there to throw me a lifeline. I made a note to visit Kirsten and find out what had happened.
“Barbara, I’m up,” Mom called from downstairs. Her voice startled me. “Julie is going to pick me up. We have some errands to run.” My youngest sister, Julie, had moved back in with my mother.
“Don’t forget the new key. The doors will be locked.”
I turned to one of the desk drawers and dug through layers of pads and papers. Near the bottom I found the unsigned department of psychology contract that John had shown me as proof of his employment, followed by a stack of University of California stationery. White-Out obscured the department name on the first sheet. Subsequent copies showed that the stationery was from the department of history. No wonder I had struck out when I called the university looking for proof of John’s employment.
How could I have been so stupid, so naïve? I dug a little further and found an opened package of name tags with the UC Davis name and seal. The final proof of John’s complicity about his teaching career lay at the bottom of the drawer; stapled together was a complete W-2 form, filled out in triplicate. John had given me a forged original. I made a note to call my CPA; the taxes would need to be redone.
I heard the key turn in the lock of the front door. I got up, turned the light off, and met Mom in the downstairs hall.
“I’m exhausted,” I said. “Let’s fix dinner and a cocktail. Have I got stuff to tell you! You’re not going to believe what I found today.”
Tuesday morning I tackled the telephone calls on my list. I arranged for counseling with Carolyn Pedrotti in Concord for Wednesday afternoon. I contacted Tom Landers to change my will. He could see me Wednesday morning. I called the phone numbers of Admiral Lee and Jack Berger. They were phantoms of John’s imagination.
“Come on, Mom, let’s take a ride,” I said. “We have a couple of financial institutions to visit.”
In Walnut Creek we marched into the mortgage company that had funded the Antioch second. “So you’re the real Mrs. Perry,” a man blurted out as he walked over to me, hand extended. He introduced himself as the loan officer. “We always felt there was something unusual about that loan.” My body tensed at his words. I didn’t shake his hand, and I couldn’t contain my sarcasm.
“Great. That fits right in with how my life is running these days. Lots of things are out of the ordinary.”
The loan officer told me John had arranged for the loan over the phone, but the head of lending insisted it be completed in person. John demanded that the loan officer come to the house, and when he did he met a woman named Barbara Perry. He described a woman who evidently looked something like me. I couldn’t think who that could be. I jotted down
security
and underlined it several times.
“At the house John did all the talking,” the loan officer said. “When I asked John to let you talk, he said he would speak for both of you. I asked for your driver’s license and John produced an expired one. I accepted it, but I still had my doubts.”
“Why did you process the loan, then?” I said, trying to remain calm when what I wanted to do was yell how stupid and unprofessional he had been.
“I talked it over with my boss. He said to get third-party identification. I met John and the woman at the Miwok Valley Bank, on Clayton Road, and the loan manager there identified you.”
“The papers were notarized. How could that happen?”
“I did it, even though the photo on the driver’s license was a stretch of the imagination.”
“I want copies of all the documents,” I demanded, “including your comments on the cover of the folder.” I made a note to follow up with the bank, the police, and small claims court.
I dropped into the Walnut Creek police station. The desk sergeant called a detective to the front, and he told me that my loss of $15,000 was not enough to trigger a fraud investigation. Screwed again.
The visit to Kirsten at HFC in Concord held better promise. “John came in for another withdrawal in January,” she said. “I told him it was the last one without your approval. I remembered how adamant you were when you wanted two signatures. He never turned in the new card we discussed right before the loan funded.”
“Too bad you didn’t follow through earlier. Now I’m left with another seventeen thousand dollars of debt.” Another puzzle piece dropped into my hands. John had been cut off at the same time I told him I was investigating his teaching story.
The Clayton Road branch of Miwok Valley Bank was on the way home. The bank manager was skittish about his actions, and it was obvious John had conned him, too. My pity turned to disgust when he felt no remorse for his part in the fraud.
Back home I retrieved the mail and Mom made us some tea. We sat at the kitchen table; I sorted out the junk mail, saw the telephone bill, and opened it. Under long distance, there was a charge to Hot Springs.
“Mom, this is when John called me at Grandpa Jonas’s.” I gasped. “But the bill says it was placed from Chicago.” I scribbled this on my expanding list of enigmas.
Later that evening as Mom watched television, I went into John’s office and grabbed a pile of papers from the computer desk. Nothing new there. I filed them and snatched another pile. It contained an airline ticket stub in John’s name for a flight to Chicago on February 2, and an Avis receipt for a Cadillac on the same day. On a piece of scratch paper were two phone numbers—one for our neighbor, a pharmacist, and one for a kennel in Walnut Creek. I picked up the phone. By the time I finished my calls, I came to a sickening conclusion. “Dear God! He planned to kill me in Indianapolis!”
“Don’t take the name of the Lord in vain,” Mom admonished. She had appeared at the door of the office on her way to bed.
“Can you believe it?” I told her. “As soon as I left for the airport to fly to Hot Springs, John took the dogs to the kennel, flew to Chicago, and spent two nights at the Holiday Inn. On Monday he drove to Indianapolis and the Holiday Inn North. He was waiting and watching as I checked in.” I felt sick. He was the one who had requested the remote room in the back. I visualized the ether bottle and surgical gloves on the bathroom counter.
“Mom, he was going to smother me in my room, carry my body to my rental car, and have a car wreck, and it would have looked like I died in the wreck. The ether would have been out of my bloodstream by then.” I fell silent. “He would have collected extra insurance because I died on a business trip.”
“Why do you suppose he backed off?” Mom whispered.
“I guess my room location, and the fog.”
“Where did he get the ether?”
A light went on. “From the vet, when he couldn’t get it from our neighbor.” I made a note to call our veterinarian in the morning.
Mom trotted off to bed, but I continued to unwind the shroud of deceit John had wrapped around me. I waded through more piles of papers and was rewarded. By midnight I figured out that John had altered his birth certificate to appear two years younger and used our Two Star stamp, the one we received when we incorporated the business years before, to make it look official. Most disturbing to me were the clues attached to the attempted murder in Virginia, the clues that revealed premeditation and plans to allow John to reap even more loot. He took out maximum insurance on the rental car at National Airport. He made sure the hotel room was secluded and close to the parking garage. The bastard was going to stage a car accident that would make it appear I died in it.
I stumbled off to bed but couldn’t sleep. My mind raced as I continued to fit the pieces together. John’s suspicious actions right before the trip came into focus. He failed to get the Antioch house willed to him, but he would inherit from my death. When I stubbornly refused the HFC life insurance, he continued with his plan to surreptitiously add to the loan. John wanted instructions on the computer and movie camera because I wasn’t going to be around to use them. He left his Rolex watch at home and the Westinghouse papers on the bed so he could appear the grieving widower.
The ugly truth stared me in the face. John really had tried to murder me. I couldn’t hide behind my denial any longer. I felt stupid. I had consistently ignored or denied every sign of fraud, deceit, and attempted murder. I was disgusted with myself and with him. What a devious mind he had. My denial disintegrated to dust, and I cried myself to sleep.
I rose early on Wednesday and called Homicide Detective Greg Smith to report what I had found. “Wish we could hire you.” He laughed in his strong, deep voice. “You’re good.” His laughter dissolved into caution. “I have some bad news. John’s bail is being reduced from twenty-five thousand dollars to ten thousand because he got booked into family court, and he only needs to post ten percent.”
“What? He can get out with only a thousand dollars bail money now?”
“Because you are John’s wife, the call went in as a domestic dispute, and that falls under family court.”
“You mean if I had been a prostitute and he had done the same thing, he would have been booked directly into criminal court?”
“Yes.”
“That says a lot about Virginia law, doesn’t it? A wife is nothing but chattel. I’m a double victim.”
“Sorry. Maybe what you’ve turned up will be enough to retain the higher bail. By the way, we still haven’t been able to confirm or deny his rear admiral status.”
“What about his fingerprints?”
“We haven’t heard back from the FBI yet.”
“It’s been five days. I thought the police got faster results.”
“Real life doesn’t work like a TV show,” he said compassionately.
I hung up. If I didn’t have enough to worry about, now there was a chance John could get out of jail. I had taken care of stopping him from my end, but what about his accomplice? Could she be getting the money for him? I scribbled down
Confirm John is an admiral.
The phone call was the beginning of a close working relationship between the detective and me, the investigator. Greg made me feel like someone cared that I was operating in uncharted waters. To divert me, he sent me cartoons with the words changed to fit my case, lending a bit of humor to a sad situation.
I called the local vet and confirmed that John had duped them out of the ether, not once, but twice, which gave him a lethal amount. John used our cat’s ear problem for the ruse. For the first bottle, John convinced the local vet that it was recommended for the cat by the UC Davis Veterinary School. For the second one, he said he spilled the first bottle and needed a replacement.