Those paid invoices for shipments that never seemed to happen? Well, that money was being squirreled away in some bank in the Cayman Islands.”
“He admitted it,” Blake said, elated and sickened at the same time. “We won.” And then, observing the other man’s bowed head, he added, “You won.”
“Not so fast.” Schuster shook his head, looking old and tired in a jacket wrinkled from hours of sitting in court. The energy that seemed to pulse through him twenty-four hours a day was eerily absent.
“James didn’t admit to anything but being blackmailed.”
Frowning, Blake sat back, a curious numbness spreading through him. “What? By whom?”
“Your father.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
SITTING BACK with his arms resting on the sides of his chair, Blake hoped he looked relaxed. He was working hard to maintain the facade.
“My father.” They were the only two words spinning around in his mind. There should be more. Would be more. He knew that. For now, focusing on remaining calm was keeping him detached.
Or a sense of survival was.
Schuster, forearms on his knees as he leaned forward, nodded. His hands were clasped as though he didn’t quite know what to do with them.
“My father had no reason to blackmail Eaton James.”
The man’s pockmarked face thinned as he continued to watch Blake. “Apparently he did.”
No, he didn’t. James was a liar, on trial for fraud. “Why?” If Blake was going to clear his father’s name, he had to have the facts.
“After James claimed that he lost the money your father had invested with him, your father hired a private audit firm to inspect James’s books. His right to do so was in the contract he’d had his lawyers write up at the time of the investment.”
Blake recognized his father’s hand in that. Walter Ramsden had been at times almost maniacal in his need for control.
He’d been equally so in walking the straight and narrow.
“The firm found everything in order, according to the document James received. Your father, allegedly, was not satisfied with the record.”
None of which seemed at all unusual to Blake.
“According to James, your father threatened to call someone he knew at the IRS unless James turned over his records to him, so that he could see for himself what was and wasn’t there, with the understanding that if he found anything that even hinted at tampering, he’d call the IRS anyway.”
With a hand to his chin, Blake nodded. Sitting still was excruciating. Almost as painful as listening to what should be a fantastic story, but was, in fact, quite believable, about his deceased father. He could too easily see Walter Ramsden giving James a fair chance to prove himself before turning him in, and then considering himself judge and jury of that proof. After all, Walter Ramsden firmly believed that he always knew what was best.
The damnable thing was, he pretty much always had.
Except, of course, in his decision to invest with Eaton James.
“Threatening to call the IRS on a firm whose bad investment has just lost you a huge chunk of money is hardly a crime, and nowhere near the vicinity of blackmail.”
Unless someone like Juliet McNeil, who colored the truth to match any decor, was painting the picture?
Running a hand through his graying hair, Schuster picked up his glass. “Mind if I have another?”
“Help yourself.” Blake motioned to the bar. He should get up and do it, and get one for himself, as well. Except that he hadn’t finished the one he had.
The back of the man’s slacks looked as though he’d slept in them more than once. Apparently sometime during the afternoon, the prosecutor—whose attention to his appearance was normally obsessive enough to be noticeable—had lost track of the crease in his pants.
With a glass that was twice as full as the one Blake had poured originally, Schuster took his seat.
“James testified that after your father looked over his books, Walter claimed the legitimate start-up companies under Terracotta’s umbrella were fraudulent. Apparently a couple of the new ventures had well-known San Diego businessmen at the helm as the principal signers. Because the auditors knew the reputations of the businessmen in question, they didn’t audit their books, but rather accepted as fact the invoices and receipts going to and coming from them.”
Just like the well-known national firm that had been in the news at least twice in the past two years. Blake frowned. “My father thought the companies were nonexistent fronts to hide Terracotta Foundation losses or gains.”
“Apparently.”
“And these principal signers, how would James have convinced them to act as principals for businesses that were not legitimate?”
“McNeil asked James that very question,” Schuster said, shaking his head. “I swear, the woman had no idea what her client had up his sleeve, but she sure rolled with the punches.”
Blake couldn’t tell if the older man was repulsed, or reluctantly in awe. He suspected a combination of both.
“And what was James’s reply?”
“That your father was obsessed and, he suspected, not quite as mentally alert as he’d once been…”
Blake burned. His old man had had many faults, but a lack of mental sharpness had not been one of them. That was something his mother absolutely would have told him about.
“He said that your father found the fact that all of the principals held seats on the Semaphor board suspect. He accused James of playing on the trust of his philanthropic associates—”
“Something my father had fallen prey to.”
“Exactly.”
Sitting forward, Blake picked up his glass. Sipped slowly. This wasn’t sounding so bad, after all.
“If my father had been wrong, if the companies weren’t fraudulent, what did James have to be afraid of? I think that the fact that the state found the same evidence is pretty telling, don’t you?”
Schuster swirled the liquid in his glass, took a drink, then frowned at Blake. “Not so fast,” he said, his eyes deadly serious. “In the first place, if your father didn’t have something on James, the blackmail attempt would not have been successful.”
He’d actually forgotten, for a moment, that that was where they were headed. James’s ridiculous attempt to buy his freedom.
“And secondly, your father is the one who turned evidence over to the state.”
Goddammit. He hadn’t been told that.
So Schuster’s entire case was hinging
