Sons of Fortune

“Long enough for her to make a phone call to her lawyer.”

“Then why didn’t Ray contact me?”

“He tried to, but you weren’t in the office and she took the phone off the hook when you got home, and don’t forget when I called you from LA, it was three thirty, but it was six thirty in Hartford and Russell’s was already closed.”

“If only you hadn’t been on vacation.”

“My bet is she took that into consideration as well,” said Nat.

“But how?”

“One call to my secretary asking for an appointment that week, and she would have known I would be in LA, and no doubt you confirmed as much soon after you’d met her.”

Tom hesitated. “Yes, I did. But it doesn’t explain why Ray didn’t refuse to action the transfer.”

“Because you’d deposited the full amount in her account, and the law is very clear in a case like this: if she asks for a transfer, we have no choice but to carry out her instructions. As her lawyer pointed out when he called Ray at four fifty, by which time you were on your way back home.”

“But she’d already signed a check and handed it over to Mr. Cooke.”

“Yes, and if you had returned to the bank and informed our chief teller about that check, he might have felt able to hold off any decision until Monday.”

“But how could she be so confident that I would authorize the extra money to be placed in her account?”

“She wasn’t, that’s why she opened an account with us and deposited $500,000, assuming we would accept that she had more than sufficient funds to cover the purchase of Cedar Wood.”

“But you told me that her company checked out?”

“And it did. Kirkbridge and Company is based in New York and made a profit of just over a million dollars last year, and surprise, surprise, the majority shareholder is a Mrs. Julia Kirkbridge. And it was only because Su Ling thought she was a phony that I even called to check and see if the company was having a board meeting that morning. When the switchboard operator informed me that Mrs. Kirkbridge couldn’t be disturbed as she was in that meeting, the last piece of the jigsaw fell neatly into place. Now that’s what I mean by attention to detail.”

“But there’s still a missing link,” said Tom.

“Yes, and that’s what turns her from an ordinary flim-flam artist into a fraudster of true genius. It was Harry Gates’s amendment to the finance bill that presented her with a hoop that she knew we would have to jump through.”

“How does Senator Gates get in on the act?” asked Tom.

“It was he who proposed the amendment to the property bill stipulating that all future transactions enacted with the council should be paid in full on signature of the agreement.”

“But I told her that th

e bank would cover whatever surplus proved necessary.”

“And she knew that wouldn’t be sufficient,” said Nat, “because the senator’s amendment insisted that the principal beneficiary,” Nat opened the brochure at a passage he had underlined, “had to sign both the check and the agreement. The moment you rushed back to inquire if she had a checkbook with her, Julia knew she had you by the balls.”

“But what if I’d said the deal is off unless you can come up with the full amount?”

“She would have returned to New York that night, transferred her half million back to Chase, and you would never have heard from her again.”

“Whereas she pocketed three point one million dollars of our money and held on to her own $500,000,” said Tom.

“Correct,” said Nat, “and by the time the banks open in San Francisco this morning, that money will have disappeared off to the Cayman Islands via Zurich or possibly even Moscow, and although I’ll obviously go through the motions, I don’t believe we have a hope in hell of retrieving one cent of it.”

“Oh, God,” said Tom, “I’ve just remembered that Mr. Cooke will be presenting that check this morning, and I gave him my word that it would be cleared the same day.”

“Then we shall have to clear it,” said Nat. “It’s one thing for the bank to lose money, quite another for it to lose its reputation, a reputation which your grandfather and father took a hundred years to establish.”

Tom looked up at Nat. “The first thing I must do is resign.”

“Despite your naivete, that’s the last thing you should do. Unless, of course, you want everyone to find out what a fool you’ve made of yourself and immediately transfer their accounts to Fairchild’s. No, the one commodity I need is time, so I suggest you take a few days off. In fact, don’t mention the Cedar Wood project again, and if anyone should raise the subject, you simply refer them to me.”