The Millionaires - Brad Meltzer [12]
Across the room, I hear him wandering through the rest of the apartment and sniffing the air. “Mmmmm… smells like Oliver,” he announces. “Air freshener and loafer whiff.”
“Get out of my bathroom,” I call out from my bed, where I’ve already opened my briefcase to flip through some paperwork.
“Don’t you ever stop?” Charlie asks. “It’s the weekend—relax already.”
“I need to finish this,” I shoot back.
“Listen, I’m sorry about the vanilla joke…”
“I need to finish this,” I insist.
He knows that tone. Letting the silence sink in, he curls up on the foot of the bed.
Two minutes later, the lack of noise does the trick. “Sometimes I hate rich people,” I finally moan.
“No, you don’t,” he teases. “You love ’em. You’ve always loved ’em. The more money, the merrier.”
“I’m serious,” I say. “It’s like, once they get some cash—bam!—there goes their grasp of reality. I mean, look at this guy…” I pull the top sheet from the paper pile and wing it his way. “This moron misplaces three million dollars for five years. Five years he’s forgotten about it! But when we tell him we’re about to take it away from him—that’s when he wakes up and wants it back.”
He reads the letter signed by someone named Marty Duckworth—“Thank you for your correspondence… please be aware that I’ve opened a new account at the following New York bank… please forward the balance of my funds there.”—but to Charlie, it still looks like just another normal wire request. “I don’t understand.”
I wave the short paper stack in front of him. “It’s an abandoned account.” Knowing he’s lost, I add, “Under New York law, when a customer doesn’t use an account for five years, the money gets turned over to the state.”
“That doesn’t make sense—who would ever abandon their own cash?”
“Mostly dead people,” I say. “It happens in every bank in the country—when someone dies, or gets sick, sometimes they forget to tell their family about their account. The cash just sits there for years—and if there’s no activity on the account, it eventually gets labeled inactive.”
“So after year five, we just ship that money to the government?”
“That’s part of what I’m working on. When it hits year four and a half, we’re required to send out a warning letter saying ‘Your account’s going to be turned over to the state.’ At that point, anyone who’s still alive usually responds, which is better for us, since it keeps the money in the bank.”
“So that’s your responsibility? Dealing with dead people? Man, and I thought my customer service skills were bad.”
“Don’t laugh—some of these folks are still alive. They just forget where they put their cash.”
“Y’mean like Mr. Three-Million-Dollar Duckworth over here.”
“That’s our boy,” I say. “The only bad part is, he wants to transfer it somewhere else.”
Looking down, Charlie rereads the grainy type on the faxed letter. He runs his fingers across the blurry signature. Then, his eyes shoot to the top of the page. Something catches his eye. I follow his fingers. The phone number on the top of the fax. He makes that face like he smells sewage.
“When’d you get this letter again?” Charlie asks.
“Sometime today, why?”
“And when does the money get turned over to the state?”
“Monday—which is why I assume he sent it by fax.”
“Yeah,” Charlie nods, though I can tell he’s barely listening. His whole face flushes red. Here we go.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“Lookie here,” he says, pointing to the return fax number at the top of the letter. “Does this number look familiar to you?”
I grab the sheet and study it close. “Never seen it before in my life. Why? You know it?”
“You could say that…”
“Charlie, get to the point—tell me what’s—”
“It’s the Kinko’s around the corner from the bank.”
I force a nervous laugh. “What’re you talking about?”
“I’m telling you—the bank doesn’t let us use the fax for personal business—so when Franklin or Royce need to send me sheet music, it goes straight to Kinko’s—and straight to that number.”
I look down at the letter. “Why would a millionaire, who can buy ten thousand