Joel Goldman - Shakedown

I didn’t have her returns from prior years, so I had no idea how the income she’d reported compared to the past or whether she’d sold assets to generate cash for living expenses. A lot of wives who depended on their husband’s income would do that after their husbands went to jail.

Jill’s only other income was from a partnership called PEMA Partners. There was nothing describing what PEMA Partners was or did. I looked online and came up empty. PEMA was private and quiet, operating below the cyberspace radar, just like hundreds of thousands of other partnerships all across the country that invested in raw land, strip shopping centers, bamboo farms in Central America, and other can’t-miss opportunities of a lifetime.

The only documentation Jill had about PEMA was her partnership tax return, called a K-1, that itemized the amount of income attributed to her ownership interest. Whatever PEMA was, Jill Rice owned 25 percent of it, which threw off $868,000 and some change last year, more than enough to support her lifestyle regardless of her husband’s legal problems. She may have filed a separate return just to protect her assets from those problems. That was smart planning and good evidence that she knew enough about what her husband was doing to plan for the worst.

I had been hungry when I ordered but lost my appetite while studying Jill’s return. I had staved off my anxiety over Wendy with the certainty that I’d find a lead that would take me to her. When it became obvious that I hadn’t, my gut began to twist, optimism giving way to pessimism that soaked my insides with fear. I had been holding myself together with string and chewing gum, fighting the shakes, and trying not to let the memories of my lost son and the damnation sure to come if I let history repeat itself and claim my daughter take over all my thoughts.

I took a deep breath. My eggs smelled rotten. I shoved the plate to the edge of the table and opened the files I’d downloaded from Wendy’s computer.

She had e-mail files and photograph files, and other files labeled with every aspect of her life, including work, friends, medical, music, recipes, finances, travel, subscriptions, blogs, yoga, downloads, videos, books, Mom amp; Dad, MySpace, and one labeled personal, as if there was anything else that could have been left out of the other files. It would take days to study the contents and extract anything useful.

There were software programs that would perform keyword searches of her files, but I hadn’t loaded one on to my computer. I logged on to the Internet to find one. When the connection failed, I summoned my server, who told me that the restaurant’s system was down.

“It was up a minute ago. What happened?”

“I had a husband used to say the same thing. Like I told him, timing is everything.”

“That’s just great.”

“Hey, it’s free. You get what you pay for,” she said with a smirk that cost her a tip.

“You got that right,” I told her.

I had no choice but to take it one file, one document at a time. I started with Wendy’s e-mail files. She used a program that automatically downloaded her e-mail from her ISP’s server to her hard drive. That was the good news.

The bad news was she had thousands of e-mails stored, including the ones that promised her long-lasting erections, weight loss without dieting or exercise, and several from former high officials in Nigeria who wanted to split ten million dollars with her because she seemed like an honest American. I looked for e-mail with Colby’s name, even though he could have used a screen name different from his own. After an hour, I’d found a handful of innocuous messages confirming dinner plans and other dates.

Frustrated, I closed the e-mail folder and tried her Adobe files. There were hundreds of PDFs, some of them labeled with descriptive terms, many of them anonymous. I scrolled through them, clicking on one dead end after another. When I found a file titled “tax return,” I clicked on it.

The file contained a copy of her tax return from last year. She’d filed a Form 1040, not the 1040EZ that I would have expected for someone working a job one step above entry level at a commodity brokerage firm and who didn’t have enough deductions to itemize. Wendy’s W-2 income was thirty-six thousand.

I skimmed through the rest of her 1040 and understood why she hadn’t filed the EZ return. The reason was her eye-popping partnership income of $434,000. I blinked but the number didn’t change. I clicked through the rest of the pages to find her partnership tax return, my index finger twitching when I found the K-1. My daughter owned 12.5 percent of PEMA Partners. I started to shake and couldn’t stop.

Since Kevin died, I had relied on hard facts to tell me whether people were good or bad, guilty or innocent. I stopped trusting my hunches and gut feelings because that’s what got Kevin killed. Besides, instinct never convicted anyone. Only the facts did.

Staring at Wendy’s K-1 for PEMA Partners, I realized that I’d applied the same standard to my family, demanding tangible proof of their love and loyalty, testing our relationships against only what I could prove beyond a reasonable doubt, afraid of anything that required me to get under their skin and into their hearts. I accused them of their?aws and convicted them of their weaknesses. It made no difference that I applied the same standard to myself. That was only fair.

Joy understood. She showed me her pain because she blamed me for it and concealed everything else. That Wendy may have hidden as much or more was a staggering indictment.

Her ownership interest in PEMA Partners was unmistakable proof of a connection between her and Jill Rice and, by extension, Thomas Rice. I hoped but didn’t believe that she had hit a home run in the commodities market and innocently invested her windfall in PEMA. Wendy would have told her mother and me if she had. Instead, she’d kept secret the fact that her net worth now exceeded mine.

Colby was the common denominator between Wendy and the Rices, which meant that unless someone had held a gun to her head, she could be part of everything that had happened. We are all responsible for the choices we make, but life had conspired against her since the moment Kevin was taken, her relationship with Colby spawning the perfect storm that had swept her into the hands of people willing to trade her life for theirs.

When I stopped shaking, I opened my eyes and found my server hovering over me.

“You want me to call 911?” she asked.

I slid out of the booth and dropped a ten on the table, breaking my promise not to leave her a tip, and made my way toward the door. “Forget it.”

She looked at my untouched plate. “Something wrong with the food?” When I didn’t answer, she got in the last word. “With some people, it doesn’t pay to be nice.”

Thomas Rice was dead. Colby was on the run and Wendy was probably being held hostage to lure him back. That left Jill Rice as the only person who could shed any light on PEMA Partners. I didn’t have to wait for her to come home this time, though she didn’t answer the door until I’d rung the bell half a dozen times.

“It’s you again,” she said when she opened the door.

Her lacquered good looks had crumbled, replaced by a washed-out shell. Her eyes were empty, dull sockets surrounded by dark circles. Without makeup, she had the pale, lifeless look of someone who’d been ill for a long time, her survival still in doubt. She was wearing black pajama pants with a matching shapeless top, though she looked like she hadn’t slept since I’d told her that her ex-husband was dead.

Rice clung to the doorframe for a moment, then turned and walked back into the house, the open door an invitation to follow. I expected to find a collection of empty wine bottles scattered through the house but there were none. She was stone sober but tottering on the edge nonetheless.