Maybe Dad was getting bored in his old age. Picking bigger challenges. Fine for him, but I wasn’t feeling much like taking on a tough con today. I actually did have an Ethical Theory take-home test to complete before tomorrow.
It was more than twenty minutes before Miss Daisy Brown made an appearance in the foyer. Silk robes draped her soft, curvy figure from head to toe. She had her hair curled up in a style that made me feel as though I’d stepped through the door onto a 1950s film set, and the fact that she had on so many jewels I worried she’d fall down the stairs only added to the image.
“Maise, you can go now. I’ll be wanting more fresh cucumbers from the market.” Miss Daisy Brown dismissed her help before turning to me, the smile on her face as icy cold as the diamonds around her neck.
The tag on my sensible navy blue suit scratched at my neck and the backs of my knees. The smile on my face felt forced, but she couldn’t tell. I held out a hand when the old lady tottered over to me, her ankles wobbly in the three-inch heels that barely brought her even with my five-foot-eight.
“Good morning, Miss Brown. I’m Special Agent Gillian Cooley, with the white-collar crime division at the FBI.” She peered at my badge when I held it out. The squint of her eyes told me she needed to be wearing glasses. They probably didn’t complement her fashion statement. “I’m here to discuss your recent fallout with accountant Neil Saunders.”
Miss Daisy Brown pursed her lips, which were too full, the skin around them too tight. She didn’t mind spending the money on fighting a losing battle against time, it seemed. “I don’t have anything to say about that.”
Great.
Step two—assess the mark’s intelligence and level of desperation.
“If you wouldn’t mind sitting down with me for just a few minutes, I’d like to ask you a few questions and let you know what our task force is doing to recover the funds lost by you and many others.”
Her ears perked up at the mention of others. “I suppose it couldn’t hurt to listen to what you’ve got to say. We can go into the dining room. Maise set out some lemonade.”
More like saliva juice.
I followed her through a wide doorway into the ugliest dining room known to man. The walls were covered in black-and-white damask paper and dotted with giant wrought-iron sconces that looked as though they were meant for the outdoors. The table was mahogany and stretched from one end of the room to the other, even though I knew from my research that the woman had no family. She’d never married or had children; she had no one to spend her millions on—not that she’d earned a cent of them. Her grandfather had owned massive amounts of property in Texas that had been flowing with oil. His descendants still lived off the proceeds.
The entire house smelled of kasha and mothballs, along with a potpourri of other scents I had no inclination to pin down. Trying not to breathe through my nose, I slid into an upholstered chair at the dining-room table and pulled a folder from my briefcase. It contained the details of what was stolen from her investment accounts and a forged report as to my father’s last-known whereabouts, as well as a nifty little card that claimed to give the FBI permission to include her in the list of victims and continue working on her case. In truth, it added my father as a signatory on her checking accounts and safety deposit box at the local bank.
It was shocking how many financial institutions didn’t call to double-check things like signature cards, or even require customers to fill them out in person.
She sat down and stirred three packets of Splenda into a tall glass of yellow lemonade. “Maise is trying to kill me. Today it’s forgetting the sugar in the lemonade and not making it pink like I asked. Tomorrow it’ll be swapping arsenic for lemons.”
I kept my mouth shut about that, but made no move to grab the sweating glass in front of me. “Miss Brown, this will only take a few minutes. I’m here so we can verify the facts of your particular case. If you would like to be included in our investigation, I’ll just need a signature.”
She took the stapled pieces of paper containing her case specifics and glanced over them. The breath staling in my lungs released when her hawklike eyes slid over the words and numbers instead of studying them. There weren’t any mistakes—I knew the scam backward and forward—but I always worried there would be too much information there, or things the FBI wouldn’t know, but Neil Saunders, a.k.a. Neil Paddington, would.
She didn’t say anything about my having too much information, or start screaming her fool head off for the police. Miss Daisy Brown did pinch her bottom lip, watching me in silence while the rusty wheels turned in her batty old brain.