The Cake House Read online

  “No. I’m not.”

  He shook his head, closed his eyes, crumbling as if in pain, and perhaps he was. It hurt me; I could only imagine how much it hurt Claude. He was saying, “No, no, no,” quietly to himself.

  “You can’t tell me you didn’t have fair warning.” My mother spoke, and I marveled at the understanding in her voice. “That you didn’t see the writing on the wall. You couldn’t have kept it up much longer. Was it arrogance?” She continued in her calm, smoke-raspy voice. “That you couldn’t believe it would ever end?”

  Behind where Claude stood, the duffel bag sat on the dining room table, like a black hole sucking the light that streamed in through the sliding doors: all that money and none of it his.

  Claude went back over to the money but didn’t pick any of it up, answering with a dull inflection. “It was a ride,” he said, with a hint of a shrug to his shoulders. “Wild and crazy. I knew it would end one day,” he said. “But I thought I could get out before then.”

  “Robert thought the same thing,” she added.

  Then he flushed red and his eyes grew soft. He pleaded. “It wasn’t only about the money.”

  She closed her eyes. “You can’t stop for one minute, can you?” And her voice was almost a whisper. “You tell that to everyone you ever hurt.”

  He looked stricken; then his expression hardened. Claude didn’t move, didn’t take his eyes off hers. “You’re my wife,” he said through clenched teeth.

  She shook her head and stepped back. “Yes, I guess I am.”

  A strong knock on the front door shook the entire house. I felt lightheaded. The knock came again, accompanied with shouts. They called Claude’s name.

  None of us moved. Claude breathed hard and fast. He closed his eyes. Blindly, he reached out for my mother, and in mercy, she took his hand and held on.

  A bullhorn shattered the illusion of intimacy. A man’s voice filled every corner of the living room. The place was surrounded. Please come out with your hands above your head.

  Claude only stood there with my mother before him.

  Wood splintered. The door broke open, orders were shouted, and men washed into the house through the front, the first wave crashing in. I turned toward the sliding glass doors and saw a second wave of men in the garden. My mother had her arm around me, the three of us standing close together in the center of the living room. Claude kept his eyes on her, even as an ocean of men spread out through the living room with their guns raised.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Deputy Mike held his hand up and the other men lowered their weapons. “Mr. Fisk,” he said. “Could you please come with me?”

  Claude didn’t resist when they took first his right arm behind his back and then his left arm. He said nothing when his rights were read, silent when they clicked the handcuffs on.

  Harold entered the living room, no longer the weak old man I had known in Claude’s office, but taller now, strong, with his dark, heavy gaze taking in the room. He wore an FBI vest and a badge that swung from a chain around his neck.

  When Claude saw Harold, something electric snapped through the air. He took a step toward Harold, hostility burning in his eyes. Deputy Mike yanked him back, blocking Claude with his body. He spoke in a whisper until Claude shifted his attention back to my mother.

  Two men in FBI vests went through the contents of the desk and the dining table, gathering paperwork and putting the money into evidence bags. I flinched when I heard things being moved in the darkroom, realizing for the first time that it was more than Claude who would lose everything. I would too, and my mother as well. My camera was in the darkroom, but I squelched the urge to run and get it, already knowing that I wouldn’t be able to keep it.

  I wanted to feel betrayal—at both Claude and my father, at their selfishness that kept on taking from me and my mother—but the blade of fear in Claude’s eyes only made me sad.

  “It’s time,” said Deputy Mike to Claude in a low voice. He put a hand on Claude’s shoulder, another on his back, guiding him to the front door. Outside a crowd gathered. The police had set up a barrier to keep the crowd back. Two agents, one on each side, marched Claude across the lawn. He kept his head down and stumbled. I turned away when they put him into the backseat of an unmarked car. The windows were tinted, so I couldn’t see if Claude watched us as the car drove out of sight, down the hill, around a corner. And he was gone.

  SANTA CLARITA OFFICERS MIXED IN with the FBI men. My mother sat on a chair in the dining room while men in boots stomped through the house. I sat near her, afraid of her ashen face, her flat, distant expression.

  Deputy Mike sat down at the table across from my mother. “I’ve been asked to speak with you, if that’s all right.” When she didn’t answer, he looked down at his pad, tapped his pencil against the wood of the table. He reminded me of Tom, with dark rings under his eyes and an aura of unkemptness.

  “Will we have to leave?” I asked, already making plans, thinking of what my mother and I would need to do.

  He shook his head. “Not for a while. But,” he said, lifting his gaze back to my mother, “all of Mr. Fisk’s money will be frozen, pending the investigation. There were a lot of families affected by his business, a lot of people hurt. It’ll take a while to untangle it all.”

  “Are we in trouble?” I asked, but all I really wanted to know was if my mother was in trouble.

  Deputy Mike shook his head. “I don’t think so, but we do have questions.”

  When she didn’t answer, he looked down at his pad. “Did you know the nature of your husband’s business?”

  She shifted in her seat, gazing toward the living room.

  “Your first husband, he also worked for Mr. Fisk, is that correct?”

  Her cheeks turned pink. “Isn’t there something about a spouse not being compelled to testify against her husband?” she asked.

  “These are just questions, ma’am.”

  She put her hand down on the table, one finger tracing over the grain of the wood. “I think I’d better speak with an attorney before answering any questions.”

  Deputy Mike placed his pencil down across his notepad. “Of course. But if you’re willing to listen, we’re hoping you can help us. The investigation is ongoing. We’ve got a pretty good idea of the scope of Mr. Fisk’s operation, but we’re still missing some key information. The domestic bank accounts tied to Global Securities are nearly empty, as are his personal accounts. However, there may be more money, hidden somewhere.”

  I turned to the cash, now in labeled evidence bags on the table. It already seemed like a mountain of money.

  “No,” said Deputy Mike, noticing where I was looking. “More than what’s there. That man”—he pointed to a short man with thinning hair searching through the contents of the rolltop desk—“is the SEC fraud examiner. He believes there might be more. Anything you can tell us would be helpful.”

  My mother shook her head. “Claude never shared anything with me. We never spoke about his work or where he got his money. I’m afraid I don’t know.”

  “Please, Mrs. Fisk,” said Deputy Mike. “Anything at all.”

  “Don’t call me that,” she said with a quiet, exhausted voice. “Call me Dahlia.”

  They both fell silent. Deputy Mike seemed reluctant to leave. I watched the SEC fraud examiner speak into a phone he held to his ear with his shoulder while he wrote on a notepad.

  “How much money did he steal?” I asked.

  Deputy Mike took a deep breath. “We’re not sure yet. Somewhere between two and three million. It might be more—they’re still figuring it out. He’s been running this scam for about ten years. That’s enough time to do quite a bit of damage.”

  I envisioned a circle of greed like a roundabout or a Ferris wheel going faster and faster until people couldn’t hold on anymore and got flung off, tossed aside and left broken. No one was safe from the force of that spin; not my father, not Claude, no one.

  “There is o
ne thing,” said my mother. “But I don’t think it’ll give you much more. You’d probably find it on your own.”

  “That’s all right. Everything helps at this point.”

  She rose, and we followed her as she ascended the stairs to the third floor, into her bedroom. There were a few uniformed men inspecting the dresser drawers, checking the mattress, rifling through the clothing in the closet. The men stopped when we entered. Without a word, she went into the walk-in closet. An agent stepped aside. At the far back, she went down to her knees, almost as if to pray, and reached into the forest of coats and dresses, pushing them aside. She pulled up part of the carpet that had been cut, revealing a hidden compartment.

  “I found it when I was cleaning,” she said, meeting my eyes, and I remembered that long-ago day when she’d been searching for her notebook, frantic to find it one moment, then ordering me out of the room the next.

  Deputy Mike opened the compartment and pulled out a stack of documents. I saw the first page, I saw the written notes, and I knew even without reading it that it was written in my father’s handwriting, that my father’s name and Claude’s name were there.

  My mother gathered her dress to her body, as if she didn’t want any part of her, even her clothing, to touch anything else. When she eased out of the closet, I took her hand.

  “I hope it helps,” she said.

  He turned his head to speak into his walkie-talkie. I heard his voice echo throughout the room, throughout the house. He ordered the carpets pulled up and the walls checked; he said, “Knock them down if you have to.”

  It was strange to think of Claude tucking money into every hole in the Cake House. I visualized him sneaking around at night with bags of cash, searching for unlikely and obscure hiding places. Had that been my father’s suggestion? Or perhaps the idea came from the ghost, whispering in Claude’s ear. But that was who Claude was, a man who hides.

  WHEN THEY LIFTED THE CARPET in the third-floor bedroom, they discovered a second hidden cubbyhole by the bed, beneath the floorboards, that held more cash. They found a safe hidden behind the new drywall in the darkroom. It took them all day to crack it open, but eventually they did. The safe held evidence of bribes and false SEC filings and computer disks. A thorough search of the house revealed more hiding places: in the second-floor bathroom under the sink, in Alex’s room underneath his bed.

  The closets were molested, bookshelves left ruffled and flustered, bedclothes stripped, leaving shamed, naked mattresses. Officers picked through every drawer and every cabinet, upended every vase big or small, went through each room until all of Claude’s secrets were revealed. They found my mother’s notebook, still wrapped in its plastic, underneath their bed. They tore the plastic off, flipped through its pages. Already so fragile, the pages came loose, scattering across my mother’s mattress. I collected all the pages and put it back together again.

  That night, I slept with my mother in the unfamiliar darkness of her bedroom, in the bed she had shared with Claude. They had made love in that bed. They had held each other. Next to me, she lay taut and rigid on her back, sometimes with her eyes closed, sometimes with her eyes open. Her breath was even, steady, a constant metronome in the shadows.

  “Is it wrong?” she said in the darkness. “Is it wrong that I can’t cry for Claude?”

  I took her hand and lay on my back to stare at the ceiling with her.

  “Maybe, in some ways, this is a blessing.” The words were spoken under her breath, like a prayer to some god she couldn’t ever believe in. “I don’t have a husband anymore. I don’t have a home. Nothing. Clean slate.”

  “Me. You have me.” Her hand closed around mine. “And you’re still married to him,” I said. “He’ll be free one day.”

  “Maybe,” she said, already falling asleep.

  I wondered if Claude and my father had been right—was it better to be rich than poor? Better to have and take than to lose, because otherwise you’re left with nothing. But my father and Claude had gone about it all wrong. Maybe I could find the right way; maybe I could figure out why they failed.

  THE LOCAL NEWS CARRIED THE story. I sat in my pajamas in the dark of the living room with a bowl of cereal, watching the television set.

  Claude was forty-five years old. Born in a small town in Northern California called Anderson. His mother died when he was twenty-five and his father died when he was thirty. He had two younger sisters, both married: one lived in Anderson and the other had moved to Memphis for college and stayed there after graduation.

  After his mother’s death, he enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles, and majored in economics. He worked for the school newspaper as a reporter and photographer. He’d graduated in the middle of his class, without distinction, without merit, but fellow classmates remembered who he was. He’d been popular; he helped his friends out of difficulties. He made it seem like it meant something to be his friend, that you were something special.

  Claude’s first job out of college had been with a small Los Angeles–based investment firm called Krantz Investment Securities, LLC, sometimes referred to as K.I.S., LLC. Krantz Investment Securities was still active as a valid corporation with the California secretary of state. Its address was a post office box. Paul Krantz, the legal contact for the company, couldn’t be located. Krantz Investment Securities was owned by ElsieTrading. ElsieTrading also didn’t appear to exist.

  Krantz Investment Securities reportedly specialized in long-term wealth management, except no one could locate a single individual who had ever invested with them. No one knew if there was a real Paul Krantz or not. It had been in operation for a few years before quietly folding. Some analysts thought it a sham, that Krantz Investment Securities was the beginning of Claude’s long, slow dance with the devil. What was known was that during his employment at Krantz Investment Securities, Claude reported income on his taxes anywhere between ninety thousand and two hundred thousand dollars.

  A year after Krantz Investment Securities ceased to operate, Claude started Global Securities. Apparently, Global Securities began life as a legitimate business, taking investments from individuals, creating financial portfolios, trust funds, annuities, and so forth, but it didn’t last long. Within a year, Claude began depositing his clients’ money into special accounts, using one client’s money to pay another.

  If there was one thing Claude was good at, it was finding those vulnerable persons and convincing them to part with their money. He was good with soon-to-be retirees nervous about their future and wanting some security, good with restless families wanting to do something with their nest egg.

  They called him a crook. They claimed he defrauded hundreds of investors, with thirty percent of Claude’s victims being local to the Santa Clarita area, several families having older children attending Canyon High. They called it “affinity crimes.” Claude’s victims lost everything: their money, their retirement funds; they were in danger of losing their homes; their children couldn’t go to college anymore. At the end of the news segment, they featured some of Claude’s victims. The first photograph was of a family of three, and I nearly threw up my cereal when I recognized Tina with her parents, the three of them smiling during a happier time, followed by an image of the kid who had died in the car accident, standing with his mother, also smiling. Both of Claude’s sisters invested with their brother. A couple of his old school chums invested with Global Securities.

  Sweat broke out along my forehead. The montage of photographs continued, families with teenagers who went to my high school.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Deputy Mike smiled when I opened the front door. “Rosie,” he said, and I tightened my grip on the door handle. Rosie was Claude’s name for me. It shouldn’t be used by anyone else.

  “I’ve come to see your mother. Can you get her for me?” he asked.

  My feelings for Deputy Mike had changed since that day he drove up beside me when I had chanced to run away. I no longer wanted him to
rescue me. I had lost my father and I thought I had lost my mother, but I hadn’t lost her. She was still here, still with me.

  My mother came down the stairs, dressed in a suit and carrying her purse. “Will this take long?” she asked Deputy Mike. “I have an appointment.”

  “Not long,” he said. He placed his hat down on the table, seeming uncertain whether he should take a seat or not. “He’s asking to see you.”

  She placed her purse next to Deputy Mike’s hat. “I’m not sure I’m ready.”

  “It doesn’t have to be today.”

  An awkward silence followed, with Deputy Mike watching my mother while she fiddled with the strap of her purse.

  “Do you have any questions?” he asked.

  She shook her head but then rubbed at her forehead, partially dislodging the clip holding her hair back. If her posture and her composure showed nothing of her state of mind, her voice was ragged and harsh and lacking sound.

  “How much has been recovered?” she asked.

  “Two hundred thousand, two-fifty maybe. Not enough,” said Deputy Mike.

  I thought of all that cash found in the various secret places around the house. In my simplicity, in my imperfect understanding, I had thought that was all the money Claude had stolen. It had seemed like a lot to me, piles of it, and so tightly bound. Of course it was nowhere near the total he had stolen.

  Deputy Mike seemed to know what I was thinking, because he said, “Even with the value of the house it won’t be enough.” He paused, then spoke again. “Mr. Fisk isn’t speaking. He keeps asking for his son, but Alex won’t talk to him. And now he’s asking for you.”

  I thought of Alex, still out there somewhere. I wondered if he and his mother had remained in California or if they had left for her home, wherever that was. I bit my lip to stop from asking.

  “The truth is, there might not be any more recovered. Certainly not all of it.”

  Deputy Mike kept his gaze on my mother.