Chapter 5 - Smoke and Mirrors
The digital clock on my parents' kitchen microwave ticked over to 10:14 PM.
The flashing lights outside had finally stopped. Deputy Vance had driven the pearl-white Silverado away toward the county impound yard twenty minutes earlier, its massive tires crunching over the dried oak leaves along Crestwood Lane like a hearse rolling out of a cemetery.
The house was cold now. Every time the front door had opened, another wave of November frost had swept into the foyer, and nobody had thought to adjust the thermostat.
Mom sat at the mahogany table, her fingers hovering an inch above the untouched birthday cake. The sixty-five white candles stood straight and stiff in the white frosting, their wicks black and unburned. She looked twenty years older than she had three hours ago. The diamonds in her ears—the ones bought with the money stolen from her own medical reserve—seemed to weigh her head down, pulling the corners of her mouth into a permanent, bitter curve.
Dad was still standing by the island. In front of him were three separate stacks of paper: the forged bank drafts April Vance had faxed over, the mechanic's lien from North Central Iron Works, and Maurice’s handwritten shop diary.
Darius hadn't moved from the hallway floor. He was leaned back against the baseboard, his legs stretched out across the hardwood, his eyes fixed on the ceiling molding.
“We can fix this,” Darius said suddenly.
His voice didn't have the boom it usually carried, but the greasy, desperate confidence was creeping back around the edges. He sat up, resting his elbows on his knees, looking at Dad with an expression of intense, pleading urgency.
“Dad, listen to me,” Darius said, leaning forward. “You haven't heard the whole story. You’re letting Grant poison your mind with a bunch of selective documents. He’s an investigator—he knows how to build a case to make anybody look guilty. That’s what insurance companies do! They twist the facts so they don't have to pay claims!”
Dad didn't look up from the papers. “He didn't forge your signature, Darius. You forged his.”
“It wasn't a forgery!” Darius snapped, his hands waving in the air as if he could physically reshape the reality of the ink on the page. “It was an implied authorization! Grant told me two years ago in the lawyer’s parking lot: *‘Let me know if you need anything signed.’* We had an oral understanding! I had sixty thousand dollars in payroll due on the Lima Road project. If I didn't meet payroll, forty union carpenters would have walked off the site. The general contract had a five-thousand-dollar-a-day liquidated damages clause! I was protecting the family name!”
“You were protecting your own neck,” I said, leaning against the doorframe of the kitchen.
“I was protecting the business!” Darius yelled, turning his glare on me. “The business that was going to pay for Mom’s private nursing when the time came! The trust only had two hundred and forty grand, Grant! Do you know how fast two hundred and forty grand goes in a memory care facility? Three years! Four years max! I was turning that two hundred and forty grand into half a million through Lions Crest!”
“By buying a seventy-four-thousand-dollar wakeboard boat?” Dad asked.
The question was so quiet, so deadly simple, that Darius’s mouth hung open for three seconds before he found a reply.
“The boat was... that was client entertainment, Dad! You have to entertain the commercial developers! You have to take them out on Lake Wawasee, buy them steaks, show them you’re a player! If you look like a small-time sub who’s scrambling for cash, they don't award you the five-hundred-thousand-dollar framing packages! It was marketing!”
“Marketing,” Dad repeated. He picked up the DNR boat registration, held it between two fingers, and let it drop onto the floor. “Maurice spent forty-one years in that shop behind the rail yard. He never bought a boat. He never had a marketing budget. He had a pencil, a hand plane, and a reputation so clean that men from Chicago would wait six months for him to build their dining tables.”
“The world has changed, Dad!” Darius shouted, his voice cracking with exasperation. “Maurice was an old relic who worked for pennies! You can’t survive in modern construction with a pencil and a smile! You have to leverage assets! You have to use capital!”
“You used your mother’s capital,” Dad said.
“And I was going to replace it!” Darius scrambled to his feet, walking over to the island with his hands outstretched, desperate to find some purchase on my father’s conscience. “The Lima Road project closes on December fifteenth. I have a three-hundred-and-twenty-thousand-dollar retainage check coming from the general developer! The second that check clears, I’m putting every single dollar back into the trust! Plus eight percent interest! Mom won't lose a nickel! In fact, she’ll be ahead!”
Mom looked up, a faint, desperate flicker of hope returning to her eyes. “Artie... did you hear that? He’s going to put it back. In December. That’s only five weeks away.”
“Evelyn,” Dad said, his voice dropping into a register of profound pity. “Look at me.”
Mom blinked, startled by the hardness in his tone.
“Do you know why Detective Miller took his laptop tonight?” Dad asked.
“Because Grant called them!” Mom cried.
“No,” Dad said, pointing toward the window that looked out over the driveway. “Because the retainage check on the Lima Road project doesn't exist.”
Darius flinched. He took half a step backward, his hip catching the corner of the granite island.
“What are you talking about?” Darius stammered.
I pulled my personal phone from my pocket, tapped the screen, and placed it face-up on the counter between Dad and Darius.
On the screen was an official public notice from the Allen County Building Department, dated three days earlier.
“The Lima Road project was shut down on Tuesday, Darius,” I said. “Stop-work order issued by the chief building inspector. Four structural steel beams on the second floor were installed without approved engineering stamps. The developer terminated your subcontract for default at four o'clock yesterday afternoon.”
The room went dead silent again.
“They didn't just terminate you,” I continued, reading directly from the county report. “They called the performance bond. The bonding company is going to pay the developer to tear your work out and replace it with a qualified crew. And then the bonding company is coming after your personal indemnity agreement to recover every dime.”
Mom looked from me to Darius, her mouth opening and closing like a fish on a dock. “Darius? Is... is that true?”
Darius didn't answer. He was staring at the phone screen, his eyes wide, his breath coming in short, wet gasps.
“He doesn't have three hundred thousand dollars coming in December, Mom,” I said. “He has two million dollars in performance liabilities hanging over his head. And the only thing he had left to stave off bankruptcy was Grandpa’s trust account. That’s why he took the last forty-two thousand dollars in August. He was using Mom’s hip replacement money to pay off the interest on his business loans so the banks wouldn't seize his personal accounts before he could figure out his next scam.”
“It wasn't a scam!” Darius screamed, his face turning an ugly, purplish red. He lunged across the island, knocking the stack of bank drafts onto the floor, his fingers clawing toward my Carhartt jacket. “You ruined me! You went to the building department! You tipped off the inspector!”
I didn't back up. I caught him by both wrists before his fingers could reach my collar.
Grandpa Maurice had taught me how to handle rough lumber when I was twelve. If you grip green oak too loosely, the splinters will tear your palms to ribbons; you have to take hold of it with your full weight, lock your elbows, and let the grain know you aren't moving.
I twisted my wrists outward. Darius let out a sharp, choked gasp as his forearms locked against my leverage. He was heavy, but his balance was terrible—soft from years of sitting in climate-controlled truck cabs and drinking fifty-dollar bourbons.
“I didn't have to tip off the inspector, Darius,” I whispered, our faces inches apart. “The building inspector is Dave Miller. Detective Miller’s first cousin. He noticed your bad welds three weeks ago when the second-story framing started sagging toward the parking lot.”
I shoved him back.
Darius stumbled, his boots catching on the edge of the kitchen runner rug, and hit the dining table hard. The crystal cake stand wobbled, tipped, and shattered against the mahogany floor, sending shards of glass and clumps of white birthday frosting spraying across my father’s shoes.
Mom screamed, a high, ragged sound that echoed off the high ceiling like a wounded bird.
Dad didn't even look down at the broken glass. He looked at Darius, who was leaning against the table, panting, his hair wild, his hands covered in almond frosting.
“Get your coat, Darius,” Dad said.
Darius froze. “What?”
“Get your coat,” Arthur Porter repeated. His voice was entirely flat. There was no rage in it, no theatrical drama, no trembling. It was the sound of a man reading a final meter reading on a shut-off valve. “And leave this house.”
“Artie, no!” Mom wailed, grabbing Dad’s forearm with both hands. “You can’t throw him out! His truck is gone! He doesn't have a ride! Where is he going to go?”
“He can walk,” Dad said. “The city bus stops at the corner of Clinton and State in twenty minutes. That’s how Grant got to work every day when he was nineteen and saving for his first car. Let Darius see what the bus looks like.”
“Dad, you can’t do this to me,” Darius pleaded, the arrogance completely gone, replaced by a terrifying, hollow desperation. “I’m your son. I’m your namesake. Arthur Darius Porter!”
“Maurice Lions was my father-in-law,” Dad said, pointing at the cedar box resting in the middle of the mess. “He gave me five thousand dollars in nineteen seventy-eight so I could buy this lot and build this house for your mother. He never asked for a dime of interest. He never asked for a contract. He just looked me in the eye and said, *‘Take care of my girl, Artie.’*”
Dad took a step closer to Darius, his eyes burning with a cold, terrifying fire.
“I let you take care of her paperwork,” Dad said. “And you stole the roof right off her head.”
“He didn't steal the roof!” Mom cried. “The house is paid off! We paid off the mortgage five years ago!”
Dad turned his head slowly toward his wife.
“Did we, Evelyn?” Dad asked.
The kitchen went dead still again.
“What do you mean?” Mom whispered, her hands dropping from his arm. “Artie... what do you mean?”
Dad reached into the back pocket of his trousers. He pulled out a crumpled white envelope that had been delivered by certified mail on Thursday afternoon—an envelope he had kept hidden in his workshop coat until tonight.
He laid it on the mahogany table, right beside the cedar box.
On the front was the return address for Allen County First Federal Bank.
“Darius brought me some papers to sign six months ago,” Dad said, his voice barely audible above the hum of the refrigerator. “He said it was an equity line of credit for the trust. To get a better interest rate on Maurice’s capital. He told me it was standard procedure for estate tax planning.”
Dad looked at Darius.
May you like
“He had me sign a second mortgage on this house, Evelyn,” Dad said. “For one hundred and forty thousand dollars. And the first default notice arrived forty-eight hours ago.”
***
