like Schuster and Juliet McNeil, if there wasn’t substantial proof.
Schuster sighed, dropped his head. “Much of the paper trail I’ve spent the past five years unwinding was created at the direction of your father. In a private meeting, of which no one knows, he told me where to look. And what I’d find.”
“And he was right.”
“Of course he was right, or we wouldn’t be here,” Schuster said impatiently, looking up. “James maintains that your father planted the evidence.”
Glass in hand, Blake sat back. Hard. The moment had gone from incredible to absurd.
“If my father turned everything over to you, what did he supposedly have to use to blackmail James?”
“I met with your father just days before he died. Twenty-four hours after James had met with him, giving him a particular piece of information that he believed would not only get him out from underneath your father’s control, but would turn the tables on him. He had information with which he could blackmail your father, instead.”
“He admitted to blackmailing my father?”
Schuster shook his head. “No, he claims he only used the information to get your father to leave him alone. He had no intention of doing anything illegal.”
Taking another sip of whiskey, although he knew he needed his mind completely clear, Blake set the glass down.
“But he claims that, until he came up with whatever hold he had on my father, my father used the evidence of fraudulent companies to blackmail him.”
“Yes.”
“So again, I ask, if there was nothing fraudulent in those books, why give in to blackmail?”
Not that he believed, for one second, there’d ever been any blackmail. Blake might have gone three years without speaking with his father, but there were some things he just knew.
“James had made some very stupid mistakes. Namely some bad investments—not unlike the Eaton Estates deal—that, had they become known, would have lost the Terracotta Foundation all of its investors. Think of it, a nonprofit organization losing money instead of gaining it to benefit third world countries. He’d made other investments that were keeping him afloat, but who’s going to give money to a man they can’t trust? He’d have been bankrupt with no possible way of recouping his losses, his reputation ruined.”
“So why didn’t the original audit of Terracotta show those losses?”
“Because James started up a couple of other small companies that he used to hide the losses.”
“The companies my father questioned.”
“Correct.”
“So were they legitimate, or weren’t they?”
Shrugging, Schuster finished off his whiskey. “That’s the six-million-dollar question that only the jury will be able to decide at this point. The companies themselves exist, such as they are. It’s a matter of having a license. It’s all paper. What James is guilty of, which your father discovered, is that he forged the names of the principals for both of the companies in question.”
“Forged the names of men on the Semaphor board?”
Schuster nodded. “Reputable businessmen, both of them. He’d gambled on the fact that, were he to be audited, the firm would take the names at face value and not look at those books. A chance that paid off.” The prosecutor dropped his head a second time.
“Chances are I’m going to lose this one because I went for a charge of fraudulent schemes and the man is guilty of forgery,” he said. “I haven’t done a forgery case since my first year out of law school.”
He might lose a case. But what about justice?
“If this is true—” which Blake was certain it was not “—why wouldn’t James have come clean with his attorney from the beginning?”
“Who knows?” Schuster said, standing to pour himself another drink. Blake was going to have to call the man a cab. “McNeil has one hell of a reputation. Maybe he was hoping she’d get him off altogether. Save his reputation, his business, his lifestyle. And when he got scared, he figured facing the much lesser charge of forgery was better than spending the next fourteen years in jail. Ego and fear. Two of the three things that most often get a man.”
“And the third is?” Blake didn’t give a damn. He was stalling. Avoiding the rest of what Schuster had to tell him.
“Sex,” the man said, his lips pursed with disgust.
“So what motivation did James give for my father blackmailing him? How did he explain the fact that Walter Ramsden, a man everyone in the business community knows to be honest to the point of self-righteousness, didn’t go immediately to the authorities with the things he’d found?”
The prosecutor’s eyes were surprisingly clear as he stared at Blake. “You.”
“What?” He hadn’t meant to raise his voice.
“You hadn’t seen your father in four years, Blake. That’s a long time when a man is in his seventies. Especially a man who is suffering from a bad heart. A lack of physical strength had taken its toll. Apparently Ramsden Enterprises wasn’t doing as well as it once had.”
“Nothing that couldn’t easily be fixed.” Blake tried to keep defensiveness and emotions out of his reply. He couldn’t afford clouded judgment at this moment. “As with any company in today’s market, we needed to diversify. To expand. The day of small family concerns had passed.”
“Expansion takes time. Planning. And more energy than your father had. He needed the money to stay afloat until you came home.”
Standing, Blake grabbed his glass from the table and took it to the small built-in dishwasher at the bar. “Well, there you go then,” he said, his back to Schuster. “That will be easy enough to prove. Just look at our books. I did, thoroughly, when I came home. True to form, my father left not one dime unaccounted for—either incoming or outgoing. There was absolutely no influx of money other than what was invoiced and signed off with double signatures.”
“You actually think your father would have put the money someplace it could be found? Tracked?”
“No.” Blake turned. “I don’t. Because my father would never have taken the money to begin with.”
“According to Eaton James, he put it in an account in the Cayman Islands.”
Blake’s eyes narrowed. “How convenient. James mentions a place that’s well known in the business world for its ability to hide money as though it didn’t exist. Without the Cayman Islands’ cooperation, he knows there’s no real way to prove his claim one way or the other. And he’d also know that the government is known for its blindness to such matters.”
Schuster’s eyes were narrowed, too, although he remained seated. “He has a bank account number. That was the information he presented to your father just before Walter came to me.”
There was more. Blake felt it
