January Justice Part 36

"You can. But not the way you mean. Tell me what those men want. Let me help you. Give me something I can fight for."

"I...I want to do that, Malcolm. I want to trust you. I know I need help. I mean, obviously, I do need help. And I feel alone all the time. I'm so tired of feeling alone. But there are things I...I just...it's just very hard to know what I should do."

I drew in a deep breath. I let it out and said, "I know who you are, Olivia. I know you're Alejandra's daughter."

She removed her hand from mine.

I said, "I went to Guatemala. I met your father. I know how he's living, and I know he doesn't have to live that way. He has money in the bank, and it's the same amount of money your mother took as ransom for Dona Elena. It's obvious that's where he got it, and it's obvious he's a good man, because he won't spend it."

"No," she said, crossing her arms back over her chest. "I sent him most of that money. Dona Elena is very generous with my salary, and I don't spend much on myself. I've been sending him money every month."

"Okay. Good. You're opening up a little. Now tell me the rest."

She stared at me. She looked down at the floor. "All right."

44.

We went into the living room. I settled onto the sofa, thinking she would want to sit beside me, but she chose the upholstered chair. There was no need for me to ask her questions. Once she started talking, it poured out like a flood over a broken dam.

"I was a senior at Belmont High School in LA when my mother kidnapped Dona Elena. My father came and took me out of cla.s.s that day, and we went to the apartment and watched it on the television set. Even when they showed the video of my mother standing behind Dona Elena with the gun, Papa wouldn't believe it. I remember he kept saying 'No' over and over to the television, and a couple of times, he said, 'That's not her,' but anyone could that see it was her.

"When the police came, they took Papa into a bedroom and left me out in the living room. They asked me all kinds of things about my mother. Did she talk about politics a lot? Did she talk about her job? What did she say about Dona Elena and Arturo Toledo? Was she angry with them for some reason? Did my parents have some special need for money? Was I sick? Was my father or my mother sick? The questions went on and on. They asked me where I was born and when, and I knew they were asking that because they wanted to know if I was an American citizen. I remember my father started shouting in the next room, telling them to get out of his house. Papa made them leave, and I was proud of him for that, but I was also scared. I knew they would make my parents leave the country, no matter what else happened.

"After the murder, all those videos and what my mother did to Toledo, Papa still wouldn't believe it. He never once admitted that my mother had gone crazy. When Dona Elena told the police she heard my mother talking to some men at that place where they held her, Papa said the URNG must have forced my mother to do it. Papa wouldn't go to work. He said he had to be there when she came home. He sat in the living room for weeks and waited. He checked the telephone sometimes. He picked it up and listened to make sure there was a dial tone. But she never called and she never came. My mother was done with us. The only ones who came were immigration.

"Papa was a wreck. When we got to Guatemala, his sister and her husband took us in at first, and then we moved to an apartment. The one where he is now. He didn't try to find work. He hardly ever went outside. He just sat there by the phone all day, waiting for a call. Then he started drinking.

"He had some money saved, I guess, because he said I had to go to college. He said when my mother came home, she would be angry with him if he let me stay there. They had always planned for me to get a college education, like he did. Papa's a civil engineer. Or he was. But he wouldn't let me go to school in America. He hates America now. He made plans to send me to a university in Valencia."

I interrupted her. "That's where you met the Formula One racing team?"

"Yes. But before I went to Spain, I had a lot of time to think about what my mother had done. My father told me about Arturo Toledo, how he had been the mayor of Coban during the bad time in Guatemala, how he had made a lot of people disappear and gotten rich from bribes and ransoms. My father told me how Toledo used to go to families after their loved ones had been disappeared. Toledo promised to return them if their families gave him enough money. Papa said Toledo did that to my mother's family. After my grandfather was disappeared, Toledo took all of my grandmother's money and promised to return my grandfather, but he never did.

"I thought a lot about how that would have made me feel if someone had done that to my father. I began to understand what my mother did. It was wrong, I know, but it was understandable. I tried to say that to Papa, but he accused me of betraying her, simply because I had faced the fact of what she did. He said she would never choose to leave us. Not for revenge, and certainly not for money. He said she had only taken the job with Toledo to try to find a way to expose him. She would never do the things to him they said she had done. She was innocent of everything. She was only waiting until it was safe to come back to us, and then she would explain what really happened, and I would be sorry I had ever believed that she was capable of such horrible things."

Olivia shook her head. "You saw how he is. It's heartbreaking to be with him, to watch him go on pretending. G.o.d forgive me, I was glad to go away to Spain.

"I spent the first year over there taking general-studies courses. I had no idea what I wanted to do. Then I met those guys on the racing team and spent a lot of my spare time playing around with cars. I thought about dropping out and doing that full time, but they were real good guys. They said they'd only hire me if I finished school. So I entered the mechanical-engineering program, because that would be most helpful with the team.

"Then as time went by, I began to think more carefully about what my mother had done, and I realized something wasn't right. If she really wanted revenge on Arturo Toledo for what he did to our family, why bother kidnapping Dona Elena? Why not take Toledo directly? And she would never have believed that Toledo had only two hundred thousand dollars, so why demand so little?

"I decided my mother must have kidnapped Dona Elena because she couldn't get to Toledo. He was always surrounded by armed bodyguards. He called them his 'friends,' but they were bodyguards. So my mother took his wife instead. And then she asked for such a small amount to get him to bring the money to her personally. Toledo always claimed he had taken nothing from the people, so if my mother had demanded more, he might have simply claimed he didn't have it. She knew he would have certainly allowed Dona Elena to be murdered before he put his millions at risk. But she also knew his pride was monumental. So she trapped him. With the police there and the videos released to the press, he couldn't pretend he didn't have a sum as small as two hundred thousand dollars. When she made that demand, she left him no choice. He had to bring the money to her or else allow himself to look like a heartless coward, which was something he would never do."

I interrupted her. "You think the plan all along was to get him alone so she could kill him?"

"No no no! That must have been an accident. My mother's not a killer. She wanted to get him away from his bodyguards so she could make him give her access to wherever he had hidden all that money. An offsh.o.r.e account, probably."

I leaned back, considering Olivia. I didn't believe for a second that Toledo's death had been an accident, but if that was what she had to tell herself, it seemed unnecessary to debate the point. Instead I said, "You think she got away with millions."

"I do, yes."

"Interesting. It would explain how she's been able to elude the law for all these years."

She nodded. "Living on the run is much easier with money."

"It also explains your international banking degree."

"Yes. When I realized what my mother had done, I decided to change my major from mechanical engineering to business management with a concentration in international banking."

I said, "You planned to find your mother by finding the money."

"At first I didn't have such a clear-cut plan. I only wanted to understand how people move large amounts of money around, and how they hide it from governments. My plan came later, after I graduated. I went back to Guatemala to be close to Papa, but he was just the same. That's when I realized the only way he'll ever get over this is if I bring my mother home, or else prove to him once and for all that she's never coming back."

I said, "So you came back here to find your mother. You came back for your father's sake. To find a way to save him."

"He's dying, little by little. I had to do something. I decided to try to get close to the Guatemalan community here, since this was where she was last seen. I have dual citizens.h.i.+p, so I came back with my American pa.s.sport and moved into a hotel in Pico-Union, hoping somebody would know where she was. But I couldn't predict how my mother would react if she heard I was looking for her. It had been five years already at that time, and she hadn't made one attempt to get in touch. If she heard I was back and looking for her, she might just go deeper into hiding. So I found a guy and bought a driver's license and a social-security card in the name of Soto, hoping my mother wouldn't realize who I was until I at least had a chance to talk to her."

I said, "She's famous in Pico-Union."

"I know. They call her La Alejandra. Their defender. To tell you the truth, I was surprised when I came back and found out she's been doing good things for the community all this time. I think I thought... I hoped..." Olivia looked down at her hands clasped tightly in her lap. I saw a tear escape her eye and trace its way along her cheek. "Actually, I was disappointed she's alive. It means she doesn't want to come back to us. Do you think G.o.d will forgive me for that?"

"You'd rather be orphaned than deliberately abandoned. If I can understand that, I'm pretty sure G.o.d does."

"I hope so. It feels good to finally admit it to someone. I'm tired of thinking about this all the time and never being able to talk about it." She wiped her eyes. "I'm so tired of being ashamed of her. I know that's probably hard to understand."

"No," I said. "It's not hard."

She looked at me.

I said, "My father is in prison for murdering my mother."

"Oh, Malcolm."

"n.o.body should have to face a thing like that alone."

"Do you think...I mean, do you think you could hold me?"

I patted the sofa cus.h.i.+on at my side. "Come on."

She moved over from the chair, sat down, and leaned against me. I put my arm around her shoulders. I thought about her story. Except for the part about Toledo's death being an accident, I was pretty sure most of it was true. But I was also pretty sure she had gotten one other thing wrong, and that one thing changed it all.

She took in a deep breath and let it out with a sigh. "There's more I ought to tell you."

"Okay."

"I got a part-time job working as a clerk for an escrow service, and I moved into a cheap one-room apartment in Pico-Union and spent as much time as I could at churches and the library and some of the neighborhood bodegas, telling people I wanted to meet La Alejandra. I volunteered at La Sociedad Guatemalteca Benevolencia a lot, talking to the old folks.

"One day, Congressman Montes held a town-hall meeting there. I was in charge of the accommodations, making sure he had coffee or bottled water, whatever he wanted. Dona Elena came with him. It felt surreal, meeting this movie star my mother kidnapped. She was very friendly and easy to talk to. Well, you've met her, so you know. She asked me all kinds of questions, like she really wanted to get to know me, and at the end of the evening, she offered me the job as her personal a.s.sistant.

"It seemed like fate. Like I was following in my mother's footsteps, taking a step closer to her somehow, because of the connection with Dona Elena. I didn't think very much about it. I just went to work.

"Now I spend my days keeping her appointments straight, making the calls Dona Elena doesn't want to make, running all kinds of errands, you name it. It's actually a good job. I've met some amazing people. But there's never any mention of the kidnapping and murder.

"I was starting to think I'd never get anywhere, but then one day my computer died. It was bad timing because we were hosting a fund-raiser the following night, and I had a million details to get organized. There was no time to buy a new computer, so Dona Elena told me to use an old one she had stored in a closet off their garage. I set it up and went to work. It was a little slow but better than nothing. Then I opened an old file on that computer by mistake, and I realized the person who had created the file was Arturo Toledo.

"It turned out to be one of the computers he was using at the time my mother...when he was killed. It had hundreds of his files still on the hard drive. I guess Dona Elena didn't realize that, or else she didn't care.

"I had moved to Venice Beach by then, and I had bought my own computer, so I made copies of the files and took them home. Over the next few weeks, I read every word of his old emails in my spare time. I looked at all his photos. He had hundreds of snapshots of everything from vacations to baseball games to pictures of his backyard. Finally I found one little doc.u.ment, a single page with three numbers on it. If I hadn't studied banking in Spain, I wouldn't have realized it was a bank code, a pa.s.sword, and an account number.

"It took another five weeks to find the bank. It was in the Cayman Islands. The account was still active, but it had a negative balance. The bank had been levying fees for seven years, but n.o.body had paid them because, of course, it was Arturo Toledo's account, and he was dead. And the account had been emptied on the day he died.

I said, "So you hit a dead end."

"Not really. I was able to hack into the bank's records and-"

"Wait a minute. You bypa.s.sed a bank's security system?"

"Yes."

"But how did you do that? I mean, how do you know how?"

"I taught myself a lot about computers while I was in high school, and when I got to college, I kept learning. I'm pretty good at things like that."

"And at working on performance race cars."

"That's true."

"What else can you do?"

"Well, if your toaster breaks, I can fix it for you. Or a television. Or an air conditioner. Like I told you before, I just have this thing about machines. Sort of an intuitive understanding of how things work. I grew up taking things apart to figure out how they work. Anything mechanical, really. And electrical. Any kind of logical system. Mathematics comes super easy for me. I do calculus equations in my head. I can program in most languages. I know most of what there is to know about electronics. Whatever."

"So you're a genius."

"I kind of am, actually. But only when it comes to machines and things. I don't understand much about people."

"Okay. So you're a genius, and you're inside the financial records of an offsh.o.r.e bank in the Cayman Islands. What next?"

"Well, I was able to find out where the funds in Arturo Toledo's account were wired. So I went to that bank, which was in Argentina, and once I hacked that one, I saw the money had been moved again immediately."

"Moved immediately? You mean seven years ago, on the day Toledo was killed?"

"That's right. Someone really knew what they were doing. It took me three days to follow the money through six banks before I found it."

I sat up straight, forcing her to move away a little on the sofa. "Wait a minute. You found Toledo's money?"

"Uh-huh."

"How much is there?"

"A little over nine and a half million dollars."

I whistled.

She said, "It was eleven million originally. There have been regular withdrawals over the years. I like to think my mother has been spending it on the people. You know, being La Alejandra."

I said, "So, you're close to finding her."

"I don't know for sure. It was a numbered Swiss account. That means there was no name a.s.sociated with the account, just a number. So I can't be sure if she's the one who set it up."

"Can't you watch the account and track the withdrawals?"

"No. The account holder moves any funds they want to withdraw into a separate escrow account maintained by the bank. From there I guess it must be wired to them. But the escrow account is on a different server, and the security is too good. I've been trying to get into it for the last few weeks, but there's just no way."

"Then there's nothing you can do?"

"Well, I did try one thing, but I kind of wish I hadn't done it now."

"What's that?"

"I took the money."

"You what?"

"It seemed like the best idea at the time. Just because the account holder chose to move withdrawals into the bank's escrow account doesn't mean it has to be done that way. So I set up my own numbered account and moved the money into that."

I couldn't sit still. I got up and began to pace. "How careful were you to cover your tracks?"

"Actually, I wanted them to trace it back to me, so I made it pretty easy. I mean, they can't find the money, but they can tell I'm the one who has it."

I stared down at her. "You're using yourself as bait."

"You could put it that way."

"That's what the men wanted at your house. They kept asking you where it was. They want the money."

She looked up at me and nodded.

" Toledo was murdered for that money, Olivia. What were you thinking?"

"There was nothing left to do. I had to try something. I guess I kind of hoped my mother would be the one who came. But even if she sent someone else, I thought all I'd have to do is tell them who I really am. I didn't believe my mother would let them hurt me."

I started pacing again. "That night at your apartment, did you tell those men who you really are?"