He went in to say goodnight to Bobby, who was watching TV from his bed, and then he went back to his own room. He reminded himself that he wanted to hit the stores on Rodeo Drive in the morning. Tallie had given him a long list of stores that sent Brigitte expensive gifts. That was an assignment that would really have disgusted his son, and he was thinking about it as he went to bed, and smiled nostalgically. Jeannie would have loved a morning on Rodeo Drive. Everything he did and thought about always led him back to her.
Chapter 13
JIM STARTED WITH the stores on Rodeo Drive, and walked from one end to the other. Gucci, Fendi, Prada, Jimmy Choo, Dolce and Gabbana, Roberto Cavalli, and there were several jewelry stores whose names Tallie had given him too: Cartier, Van Cleef, and Harry Winston. He was mildly embarrassed not to have checked the stores sooner, but he just hadn’t had time. His priority had been interviewing the suspects and reviewing the evidence gathered by the forensic accountants. If they went to trial, they needed proof “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
In each store he walked into, he asked for the general manager, and inquired about the free gifts given to Brigitte Parker, Tallie Jones’s assistant. Tallie had assured him that Brigitte got free merchandise everywhere, for some very high-end items, everything from jewelry to furs to luggage. Tallie said Brigitte always bragged to her about it, but Jim just wanted to check it out for himself. It was a phenomenon he wasn’t familiar with, to that degree, and he wanted to know how it worked.
And in each case, he got the same answer. Some claimed that once a year they sent out a gift, like a scarf, a nightgown, or a sweater, a decorative glass, a pen, a crystal table object, in thanks to their best customers, usually at Christmas. In some cases they offered VIP discounts, for which Brigitte didn’t qualify. They all assured him that Brigitte was one of their best customers, and she paid for everything she bought, and only occasionally with a small courtesy discount. And they confirmed that the items she purchased were expensive. Several fur coats, in a rainbow of colors, including a fifty-thousand-dollar golden sable jacket at Dior, four-thousand-dollar handbags, a diamond necklace, and a vast number of sweaters, shoes, and dresses. But in every instance, they assured him that Brigitte paid for her purchases herself, and none of them had been gifts from the store, contrary to what she told Tallie. Once again, Brigitte had lied.
He asked if she paid by check, credit card, or cash, and their records showed that she always paid cash, except for the sable, which she had paid for by cashier’s check. Jim asked the manager then if it was possible that his sales force actually gave her the items as gifts without his knowledge. The manager of Prada laughed when Jim asked him. “Not if they intend to stay employed here. That would be theft, as far as we’re concerned. I’m sure Ms. Parker has had gifts from us at Christmas over the years, but that would be a key chain, a wallet, or a scarf. Nothing larger. We’re running a business here, not a charity drive. We make our share of charitable donations, but not to our clients.” Jim looked faintly embarrassed to have asked the question. But the picture of Brigitte’s shopping habits had become clear to him in two hours on Rodeo Drive. She spent a fortune, always in cash, and none of the expensive items that she wore were gifts, contrary to what she claimed and Tallie believed. She was one of the best customers at every store, some more than others, and she had never used a credit card in any store, just cash. Her employer’s cash, most likely.
The jewelers told him the same story, and from what he could tell, her expenditures on jewelry and clothes far exceeded her income, not to mention the expensive decorations and antiques he had seen in her house the day before. He could have kicked himself for not making this little exploration sooner. It was all the evidence they needed. She had even bought herself a diamond ring the year before for nearly a hundred thousand dollars. And unless her family was sending her money he knew nothing about, that hadn’t shown up in her bank accounts, Brigitte Parker was getting all this cash from somewhere. She had stopped taking it when Hunt left Tallie’s house, but at the rate she spent money, Brigitte wouldn’t be able to stop for long. And it was going to be easy to get her shopping records from all the stores Jim had just been to and several others. He had been to ten stores on Rodeo Drive and three jewelers, and he was beaming when he walked into his office.
“Do I want to know what happened to you on the way to work this morning?” Jack asked him as he walked into the room where Jim was sitting at his desk with a beatific expression. He had everything he needed for the assistant U.S. attorney he had spoken to initially to pursue the case and issue a warrant for her arrest.
“I got lucky.” Jim grinned at him.
“You look it.” Jack leered.
“I’ve been on Rodeo Drive all morning, and thank your stars you’re not married to Brigitte Parker. The woman spends a fortune.”
“I thought it was all courtesy gifts because of her employer.”
“Not a one. She must have spent more than a million in the last three years. We’re going to have to check Tallie Jones’s books again. She’s pulling out more than we think. And she pays for everything she buys in cold, hard U.S. currency, cash.” He was grinning from ear to ear, as Jack dropped a printout on his desk.
“This must be your lucky day then.” Jack’s smile matched Jim’s as he pointed to it. “That’s a present to you from the San Francisco bureau. They talked to her father, her stepmother, and her sister. The story about the stepmother is true-they hate each other. But other than that, nothing she told her boss is true. She has no trust fund. They have no money. Her father is retired and worked for the phone company. Her mother died when she was a kid, and the stepmother says she’s a pathological liar and always has been, even as a child. She has ripped them all off for money on various occasions. She slept with her sister’s husband, borrowed money from him, blackmailed him, threatening to expose their affair to her sister, and pretty well wiped out their savings. It sounded a little like her threats to Hunt. She never goes back to San Francisco, and if she does, she never calls them, and they don’t want her to. Barney in the SF office says the father is a nice old guy and cries when he talks about her, says he doesn’t know what’s wrong with her. She spent about a year in a psychiatric hospital after her mother died, and got picked up regularly for shoplifting as a kid. There was something about credit card fraud, on a small scale, but it was never prosecuted. None of them have seen her in about fifteen years and hope they never do again. Oh,” he remembered and then added, “and she was never a debutante, if anybody cares.”
“Hollyyyyy shit,” Jim said with an even bigger grin. “Bingo!” And then his face clouded over. “Do you think the family will warn her that we’re on to her?”
“According to the boys in SF, they never talk to her and don’t want to. Her sister says she hopes she goes to jail where she belongs. And with a little luck, and the help of the U.S. attorney’s office, we may just be able to make her dreams come true. I don’t think you need to worry about them tipping her off. It’s all yours, maestro. It’s all in the report,” he said, pointing to the papers on his desk.
“You’d better get out of here, or I’m going to kiss you!” Jim warned him, and Jack pretended to run to the door.
“Don’t you dare!” The two men were laughing as Jack left and went back to his own office. Jim read through the report carefully, and now he had everything he needed. The only question he knew the deputy U.S. attorney would ask him would be if it qualified for the FBI, or if they had to turn it over to the police, but Jim thought he had a good case for keeping it with them. They had discovered that she had used Tallie’s free air miles several times without her permission, which was a federal felony, and Victor had pointed out that she had made several improper transfers from Tallie’s bank online, which was federal wire fraud, so they were clean. Jim didn’t want to give up the case. He wanted to do Tallie Jones the favor of prosecuting this woman, and getting back whatever they could for her, the merchandise if nothing else, so Tallie could sell it. And maybe her house, furniture, art, and antiques. It looked as though she spent the cash she took very quickly. And now he wanted to investigate how she had paid for her house, since it was obvious she hadn’t inherited the money, as she said, nor paid for it with her trust fund, which she’d never had. Brigitte was a liar from beginning to end, and poor Tallie had trusted her and fallen for it hook, line, and sinker. He wondered how long Brigitte had been stealing from her, and suspected that she had for many, many years, possibly the entire time, ever since Tallie started making money, and really serious money from her work. The only thing that had hidden what Brigitte had done was the fact that Tallie made such huge amounts from her films, and that she trusted Brigitte so completely, she never checked her accounts, or Brigitte’s handling of her money. Her assistant had had free rein for all those years. It had been foolish of Tallie to trust her to that extent, but Brigitte had carefully cultivated their friendship, and developed Tallie’s total trust in her, and being trusting and believing in people you thought you knew well wasn’t a crime and didn’t deserve to be met by a
