Field of Thirteen - Dick Francis [90]
‘Could he?’ Jules Harlow interrupted. ‘Could he have you back in court? And on what charge?’
‘Laundering drug money and selling drugs,’ Sandy Nutbridge said fiercely. ‘Which I didn’t do. But when he tells lies, people believe him.’
Patrick Green felt secure in embezzling fifty-seven thousand dollars from Mrs Nutbridge and ten thousand dollars from Jules Harlow because he believed both of them to be weak foreigners who wouldn’t do much beyond the first agitated squawking. He could make them believe that he wouldn’t be able to disprove further IRS allegations of money-laundering and drug-dealing against Sandy Nutbridge if his fees weren’t paid for the first case. The IRS had believed and acted on his allegations the first time and, because of its habitually suspicious outlook, he had faith it would do it again.
Patrick Green, well pleased with his clever scheme, used the Nutbridge bail money to pay off his own personally threatening debts. He had borrowed too much at exorbitant interest rates from dangerous people, and had come frighteningly close to their debt-collection methods, but no longer now need he fear being punched to pulp in a dark alley. Not a violent man himself, he shrank from even the thought of the crunch of fists. He felt very relieved indeed to have been able to steal the feeble old British people’s money to get himself out of the certainty of pain, and no flutter of remorse troubled his self-satisfaction.
Patrick Green had reckoned correctly that Sandy Nutbridge would month by month send to his mother instalments to pay off what she’d borrowed on his behalf. Green knew it would cost Sandy Nutbridge far more then he could afford to pay lawyers to try to recover his mother’s money through the courts. What Patrick Green had totally overlooked was the nature of the small quiet man whose ten thousand dollars he had pocketed with the help of his colleague Carl Corunna.
Carl Corunna, big and bearded, had reported Jules Harlow, after their meeting, to be an ineffectual mouse, ignorant and easily defeated. Carl Corunna had then insisted that he had earned half the embezzled ten thousand dollars for instructing Harlow to make the cashier’s cheque payable to Patrick Green himself, and not more safely directly to the US District Clerk. Patrick Green, bitterly arguing, finally offered one thousand: they settled on two.
Jules Reginald Harlow, though he might be unworldly in matters of bail bonds, still had an implacable belief that justice should be done. He set about finding himself an attorney of sufficient brain to out-think frauds, and via businessmen with inside understanding came finally to a meeting with a young good-looking electric coil of energy called David T. Vynn.
‘Mr Harlow,’ Vynn said, ‘even if you get your money back, which I have to tell you is doubtful, it will cost you maybe double in lawyers’ fees.’
‘Your fees, do you mean?’
‘Yes, my fees. My advice to you is to write off the loss and put it down to experience. It will cost you less in the end.’
Jules Harlow spent a long minute looking at the boyish outcome of his attorney search. He had expected David T. Vynn to be more substantial, both in body and years: someone more like big, bearded Carl Corunna, he realised. He also remembered, however, that physicists, mathematicians, poets, painters, composers and nearly all innovators (including himself) had been struck by divine revelation in their twenties. He had asked for the best: he must trust that in David T. Vynn he had got it.
David T. Vynn (29) spent the same minute remembering what he’d been told about Jules Harlow (51): that a chamois on a mountainside couldn’t leap as fast or as far as this grey man’s intellect. He had taken this – to him – minor case out of interest in the computer-genius mind.
‘Mr Vynn,’ the grey man