Susan Albert - Rueful Death

"Don't give me that, boy. Now's no time to screw with the truth." With an effort, the old man picked up the mask and put it over his face, breathing heavily. He pulled it aside enough to ask, "Where's Father Steven? Thought you called him."

"I left a message." Tom forced a grin. "What do you want the priest for, anyway? You're not in that" bad a shape."

"You can't lie for shit, boy."

"It's true, Dad," Tom protested. "You'll be up and around-"

The old man's sigh was slow and heavy. "Yeah, sure. Up and around, and then what? Back down again in a month or two. And in the end-" He turned his head to look at the respirator. "More of this, and nurses messin' with you every ten minutes, and a helluva lot of pain." He closed his eyes. His eyelids were thin parchment. "Forget the priest. He can't absolve me, anyway."

Tom's eyes slid to me. "You're not thinking straight, Pop. Wait until you can-"

"Listen to me, boy. You've got to handle this so the bank doesn't get hurt. I killed-"

"Shut up, Dad," Tom said fiercely.

The old man closed his eyes. "You keep a civil tongue in your head, Tom-boy. I killed that meddlin' woman, and I'm not goin' to be around to suffer the consequences. But you are, and so's the bank." His breathing was more and more labored. "It's up to you, Tom. You got your work cut out for you. Damage control, that's what they call it."

"I don't know what you're talking about." Tom sounded desperate. "Sadie got kicked in the head. Anyway, she's not dead. She's right down the hall in Intensive-"

I touched his arm. He started, as if he'd forgotten I was there, and looked at me. I shook my head slightly.

His eyes went dark. "She's dead?"

I nodded, and he seemed to slump. He turned aside as I went to the bed and leaned over it. The old man had pulled the mask back over his face and was breathing raspily.

"What happened in the barn, Mr. Rowan?" I asked.

I thought he might object to my being the one to ask the question, but he seemed to welcome it. He slipped the mask aside. "My kinda woman," he said. "You get that boy to handle this right, or it'll ruin his name. He's got to fix it, before it brings down the bank." With great effort, punctuated by periods of silence imposed by the mask-longer and longer, as the story went on-he told the whole story.

Tom Senior had called Sadie the night before to ask her what she had up her sleeve, and she'd told him that she intended to blow the whistle on the bank fraud. If she did that, he knew it was all over. It might take a while, but the bank would go under, like the Singapore bank that was sunk by a junior official speculating in Japanese investments. Or like the one in Orange County, California, which filed for bankruptcy after an investment officer lost a billion or two in derivatives-risky stock ventures that lure investors out of the safe shallows into the treacherous deeps.

And it was derivatives, of course, that had been the devil in the old man's woodpile. He had begun his term as trust official by investing conservatively, as he always had. But Carr County had been struck by a three-year drought that forced a couple of big ranchers to go under, leaving their loans unpaid. To cover those losses, he had borrowed from the Laney Trust, using its assets as leverage in increasingly speculative markets. Occasionally he did well, and once or twice had brought the trust account almost back to where it should have been. But one spectacular loss forced him to

double up on his stock purchases in order to make the money back before anybody found out. When that attempt failed, the Laney Trust was left holding the bag-an empty bag. -

He stopped at last, exhausted. I pulled the mask over his face again. He lay there, eyes closed, pulling in each breath as if there wouldn't be another. Tom sat in a chair on the other side of the bed, his face buried in his hands.

I turned to Tom. "Why didn't he just let Sadie tell and be done with it?" I asked. "A lot of people-experienced investors, big-time brokers-have lost their shirts in derivatives. Your father was the foundation's legally designated fiduciary officer. Unless it could be proved that he intended fraud, neither the board nor the order had any recourse against him, or against the bank. Even if he'd been brought to trial, he probably wouldn't have been convicted."

Not in this county, anyway, where the bank, like the company store, had a hand in the pocket of every prospective juror. A good defense lawyer would have convinced everybody that Mr. Rowan had done what he did to save the bank, the town, and the county from financial disaster. Anyway, the junior official in Singapore only got six years. Even if the county attorney had managed to wring a conviction out of the jury, Mr. Rowan's sentence would have been probated on account of age and physical condition.

Tom didn't answer, and I couldn't tell whether he had heard me. A nurse came in to check the respirator and the electrical apparatus, and left again. After a moment, the old man's eyes opened. He signaled me to remove the mask.

"Why didn't I let Sadie spill it?" he asked hoarsely. "Because all I needed was time. Just a few weeks, a couple of months at the most. I could've turned the situation around."

Tom's head came up swiftly. "I told you, Dad. There's nothing left to leverage."

"When did you find out about all this?" I asked Tom Junior.

"Last night, after Sadie told him what she planned to do. We were up half the night talking about it. I told him I'd take care of it, although I wasn't sure what that meant." He closed his eyes, numb and defeated. "Honest to God, China. I never figured he'd go out there to see her."

The old man's face seemed even grayer as he gasped out die words. "It was worth a shot, wasn't it? Sadie has… had a lot of respect for you, Tom. I figgered she'd hold off if she knew you were takin' over. I told her you'd make sure the foundation got its money."

"That's a lie, Pop." Tom shook his head sadly. "You've got to face it: Jesus Christ himself couldn't bring that money back."

The old man ignored him. "I told her to just sit tight. I told her you'd fix it so nobody'd know diddly. But she wouldn't listen." His frail voice soured. "Truth is, she was happy as a hog in mud that the money was gone. She didn't want it back. Can you b'lieve it? She was glad it was gone." He was shaken by a fit of coughing, and when it was over, he pulled at the mask like a drowning diver.

"Glad?" Tom asked dryly. "That's hard to believe."

I believed it. Sure, the deed restrictions tied up the land. But for all Sadie knew, an aggressive, hard-nosed church lawyer might get those restrictions set aside. With the trust fund depleted, however, there wouldn't be a nickel to build a retreat center or a golf course or a tennis court. St. Theresa's eight hundred acres would stay exactly as Helen Laney had wished, and the nuns would go on as they were, contemplatively growing garlic.

"So it wasn't you she was after," I said to Mr. Rowan, "or even the bank. It was the order all along."

"Yeah, but it wouldn't have stopped there. Once she started talking, it'd have been like a tornado through a tomato patch. The bank would' ve gone, and once the bank went, the town would have dried up too."

His voice trailed off. He was running out of steam. "So what happened?" I prompted gently.

"The more she held out, the madder I got," he said. "She went out to the barn to feed her horse, and I followed her, still arguin'. I finally just… lost it. There was a mattock leanin' against the wall. I grabbed it and swung. She went down like a sack of corn and I hit her again."

Across the bed, Tom groaned.

The old man turned his face away. "Go look under the hay bales at the north end of the barn. That's where I hid the mattock."