“I’m sure she found that very persuasive.”
He laughed. “She also thought I was the smart one. She called me Henyo. It means ‘genius.’ ‘Look at Henyo, he can talk to computers but not to girls.’ Or, I don’t know. Maybe she wanted to punish me. Whatever. Lucky me.”
“What does the will say?”
“Sixty percent to her kids, thirty percent to the grandkids, ten percent to the church.”
“Pretty straightforward.”
“Yeah, till you look a little closer. The house is the main asset. But she’s got money squirreled away all over the place. Not just multiple bank accounts. I found three thousand dollars in cash under the bathroom sink. I’m trying to be fair, and everyone’s calling me up all mad. ‘What’s taking so long? Why haven’t you finished?’ Why? Because look at this mess.”
Bright young guy applying artificial intelligence to traffic grids but struggling to wring meaning from piles of paper.
“Peter said you noticed some irregularities,” I said.
He nodded. He opened the laptop. “I started itemizing her bank statements.”
“Is that necessary?”
“Peter’s lawyer said the same thing.”
“I admire your diligence. It just seems like you have enough on your plate as is.”
“I wanted to make sure there’s no huge discrepancies. It’s how I roll. For all I know she has a million bucks buried in the backyard. I’m seeing all these payments I can’t figure out. Look.”
He showed me a QuickBooks entry from March 17, a check for $135 to SFRA.
He scrolled back to February 17. Another $135 check to SFRA.
January. December of the previous year. November.
One hundred thirty-five dollars, SFRA.
Identical entries appeared monthly for the previous two years.
“That’s as far back as the online accounts go,” he said.
He drew over the B of A folder and began taking out sheaves of paper, secured by alligator clips and bristling with tape flags. “So then I started going through by hand. Same deal.”
Each flag indicated a $135 check to SFRA.
“Do you know what it stands for?” I asked. “San Francisco something?”
“I tried googling it. I get so many hits it’s useless.”
“How many payments are we talking about?”
“The earliest I could find is from 1996. All in all it works out to around forty-seven thousand dollars. It might not seem like much, in the grand scheme of things, but she wasn’t a rich woman. She wasn’t poor, either. I gotta say that or she’s going to descend from heaven and scream at me.”
I smiled. “Understood.”
“She was a kid during the war. She and her sisters were living on the streets, eating from the gutters. She knew what it meant to have nothing. She bought day-old bread until my mom made her stop. She kept the same car for twenty-five years. It died and she got another just like it. This,” he said, placing a hand on the bank statements, “isn’t like her.”
I said nothing.
“You don’t agree,” he said.
“I didn’t know your grandmother. I get that it seems inconsistent with her behavior.”
“But.”
“Inconsistency is human. And the payments could be innocuous.”
“Then what the hell is SFRA?”
“Maybe a membership fee? Or a subscription.”
“She didn’t belong to clubs. She bought the National Enquirer once a week.”
“Something to do with her church.”
“I asked the priest. He said no.”
“A mortgage or a loan.”
“The house was paid off in 2007. I’m not aware of other loans. It’s possible. I haven’t finished with everything yet. All I know is I’m seeing a pattern. It reminds me of when I get recurring charges on my credit card, stuff I signed up for without realizing.”
“Okay,” I said, “but this is analog. Your grandmother’s physically writing checks. She must’ve believed she was paying for something. What does the rest of your family think?”
“They’re clueless. My mom gets so emotional it’s hard to have a conversation. My uncles, too. They’re like, ‘It’s your job, you deal with it.’ ”
“Can you access her bank account? I’d like to see an image of the most recent check.”
He logged in and clicked open the March 17 payment, filled out in Marisol’s tidy handwriting. SFRA. One hundred thirty-five dollars and 00/100. The back bore an illegible scrawl but no account information, suggesting a mobile deposit. Likewise for the remaining online images.
“What about canceled checks? Do you have any of those lying around?”
From the B of A folder he removed a manila envelope stuffed to bursting.
“Immigrant mentality,” he said.
He hadn’t gotten the chance to sort them. We started in, one by one. Chris was sweating. I was, too. The house had no AC. He told me, laughing, how lola would sit on the living room couch, watching Days of Our Lives at maximum volume and fanning herself with a pamaypay, which she also used to whack anyone she felt deserved it.
“She sounds tough.”
“Oh yeah.”
“I guess you’d have to be, to survive what she survived.”
“Yeah. But whatever she did was out of love.”
“You miss her.”
He nodded.
We found a check, dated December 17, 1998, $135 to SFRA.
I turned it over. In addition to the same indecipherable signature was an account number, a routing number, and the time and date of deposit.
Chris leaned in. “Can you use that to tell who it is?”
“I can try. You mind if I hang on to this?”
“Take it all.” He sat back, rubbing absently at his chest. “The lawyer thinks I’m wasting my time. But I can’t get it out of my head. You know?”
“I do, yeah. In your position I might feel the same way. As to whether it’s a waste of time, that depends on what you expect to get out of the process. Can I be straight with you?”
“Please.”
“I’m happy to look into this for you. I think it’s important to acknowledge that you may have already found everything there is to find.”
“You’re preparing me for disappointment.”
“I’ll run with it as far as you want. But sometimes when people come to me with a request like this, what they’re really after is closure.”
He stared at the pile of canceled checks; fuzzy edges and yellowing paper.
“I don’t have any expectations,” he said. “I just feel like I owe it to her. What if she was stressed out over this, and it contributed to her stroke? It’s fifty grand. It’s not nothing.”
He turned to me. “It eats at me. What else am I missing?”
Chapter 3
My office sits behind a Laundromat. What it lacks in ambience, it makes up for in convenience: half a mile from my house, half a mile from my parents, and catercorner to a killer ramen shop. I grew up in San Leandro, and since Amy and I moved back, I’d been getting reacquainted with the city. It fascinated me to see how it had changed and not changed. Prices climbing. More and better restaurants. But the meters still took quarters only.
I ran the canceled check through a specialist data broker. The most they could tell me was that it had been deposited at a Wells Fargo. But they couldn’t specify the branch, and the account was closed, no way to retrieve the owner’s name.
Per Google, SFRA was the Science Fiction Research Association.
Or it was the South Florida Radio Amateurs.
Store Front Reference Architecture. Student Financial Responsibility Agreement. Software Frequency Response Analyzer. School Funding Reform Act. Scottish Flood Risk Assessment.