Kirkland finished a bite of dill pickle and sighed. “Just that he is Elanore’s little brother and was involved in a variety of financial crimes ... if you’d rather not—”
Catherine put up a hand only briefly. “You should—”
“I don’t need to—”
“No, no ... it’s okay.” She paused for several moments then nodded. “I’ll give you the Reader’s Digest version,” she said then took a sip of tea. “In just a few years I went from working girl—and no, not that kind of working girl—to married and clueless wealthy socialite to criminal suspect to working girl to divorce′... with a brief detour in there near the end for therapy.”
As he gazed at her with an amused look, Catherine’s mind flashed to the feelings of walking out to the mailbox from the Burnett’s ten thousand square-foot home with a growing sense of dread at the next thing she might find in it. The dry taste in her mouth and the twinge in her gut were still faintly familiar.
Worse than the myriad of seemingly incomprehensible letters from attorneys, banks and the IRS were the county constables that had shown up repeatedly in their garishly decaled vehicles in front of the home; answering the door two or three times a week to sign for lawsuit summonses had been nauseatingly embarrassing.
Eventually, as the filings seemed to dwindle in the fall of 1990 she thought there might be a light at the end of the tunnel.
Her husband had assured her the plaintiffs in these suits were just people who didn’t know how to run their businesses or they were jealous naysayers or just greedy opportunists – nothing that could actually threaten his carefully contrived operation. He had two attorneys who, he routinely told her, were confident he would prevail. “It’s just part of the cost of this business,” he would tell her, and she didn’t understand enough of what he and his teams of people were actually doing to argue about it.
For some time there had been almost no limit to the money they could tap into to pay the mounting legal bills and still maintain their lifestyle. Little had she known some of his associates and promoters had come to the realization that the house of cards was going to be coming down around them and they were lining up with some of the victims and their lawyers to try and get something before there was nothing to get.
The civil suits were destined to be costly but worthless exercises of the legal system; eventually word spread that suing wasn’t going to accomplish much but make the lawyer’s BMW and Mercedes lease payments; finding Burnett’s assets was harder than it looked.
While Roger Burnett’s schemes were starting to collapse, Catherine had no idea the worst was about to happen; luckily, the arrest of her husband on the criminal charges had been effected in secrecy before dawn and none of the neighbors had actually seen him taken away on that Saturday morning.
Although no longer debilitating, the memory was still painfully vivid. Two hours before she normally felt a sense of needing to get up to feed the cats, the sounds of people talking loudly and thumping noises from around their house had stirred her from her medication-induced sleep. The adrenaline had then driven her to her feet and down the hall in a flimsy nightie just in time to see Roger in handcuffs, being taken down the front stairway and out the door to the waiting automobiles.
That horrific morning, after escorting her back to her bedroom and allowing her to put on a robe, a policewoman had more or less kept her penned in a corner of the enormous kitchen. They shared coffee as she heard more than saw innumerable people coming and going through the house executing the search warrant. By the time dawn had made it possible for the neighbors to see what might have been going on there was only one unmarked sedan left in the driveway loop.
When one of Roger’s attorneys finally called to let her know what was going on, she was frantic, over-caffeinated and unable to stop crying, let alone understand why he was not coming home then or any time in the near future. Despite Burnett’s standing in the community, bail would probably be denied because of the apparent frequent contacts with persons and financial entities in Panama and possibly other off-shore venues. At the arraignment the judge quickly ruled that he presented a clear flight risk.
At the end of the hearing all she really knew was that she was alone and according to the charges on the indictment she could be left alone for most of the rest of her life if he was convicted. What shocked her almost equally was the revelation of hidden assets which the prosecutors introduced into evidence and were steadfast in still trying to find.
At some points in the spiral down into the end of life as she knew it there had been short but peaceful periods of complete numbness. Sometimes they were nothing more than a few lost moments sitting at the kitchen table. She couldn’t count the number of the times she just curled up on the bed or the couch and found time had slipped by for disturbingly longer periods.
One afternoon in the office of the attorney Alex Calder had retained for her husband, she had numbly gazed off into the space outside the windows for nearly four minutes. She had been shocked and reacted almost rudely to the small gaggle of worried people that gathered in front of her after they realized she wasn’t paying attention – at all.
She had thought of the episodes as simple naps brought on by the fatigue of the whole horrifying experience but had also taken more-than-full advantage of sleeping pills to block out ten or twelve hours of reality at a time. But the experience of waking up on the kitchen floor without knowing how she got there scared her enough to dump every prescription bottle in the house into the toilet.
Her withdrawal from their large circle of friends came about rather suddenly. Only a small handful even tried to call and find out if she needed something and those she gently but firmly advised that the whole thing would be over soon; it was a witch hunt; a prosecutor making a name for herself; the IRS bullying a successful businessman to scare other people in businesses like his; back-stabbing, jealous rivals, etc., etc., all the things her husband was telling her and anyone who would listen.
Knowing little about how their bills were paid and with almost no documents left in their home after the search warrant had been executed, she struggled to piece together what it took to keep all that had been taken for granted. She started opening bills for the first time but until the bank statements arrived she had little idea of how much had been lost and how soon things were going to be disconnected or shut off. While there were several bank accounts there had been only one they shared and it had been frozen the morning of the arrest; they hadn’t bothered with her personal account but there wasn’t enough in it to make the mortgage payment plus the club dues in addition to paying the myriad of utilities and services they relied on for their—until-then—enviable lifestyle.
One Saturday morning she had been startled by the noise of mowers. The yard workers had descended on the property just as they did every week during the spring but this time she had to tell them not to come back as she handed their crew leader the hundred dollars in cash when he came to the door. Her attempt at an explanation was interrupted with a gently raised hand and an understanding, sympathetic look. Even he knew Roger Burnett was in jail and in their native language he told her he was genuinely sorry – and not just because they were losing a long-time customer. They had spoken often and she knew he had first-hand family experience with what happens to women whose husbands wind up in prison – or deported.
Alone in her kitchen that morning, with the proof of the looming financial implosion in front of her, Catherine Cruz finally admitted to herself that she was not going to be living in their dream home much longer. In tears and unable to see a way out of her nightmare, she got out of the chair and calmly gathered all of the paperwork and left it in a stack on the corner of the table.
Almost an hour later she was aroused by the sound of the front door chime; she had no idea how she had only gotten part way up the main stairs nor why she had decided to lay down. When she got to the door and saw the express-delivery driver through the security lens her stomach l
urched at the thought of more bad news.
The startled look on the man’s face just before he turned and strode away said much about how she must have appeared and after that embarrassment, opening the heavy envelope with trembling hands and reading the contents only added to her distress. The instructions from the Harris County Sheriff’s office on how to visit her husband and the detailed, official-looking rules seemed draconian and complex; despite the fact that she had just learned there was a way to see her husband, the certainty of his being incarcerated was somehow more painfully tangible.
The enormity of being the wife of a jailed defendant in a high-profile tax fraud and conspiracy case reached its peak when Elanore drove her to the collection of facilities that made up the Harris County detention system.
Never having seen the inside of a jail, let alone one of the largest facilities of its kind in the U.S., the experience had been nerve-wracking just from the sheer number of people with a person in custody to visit. Equally disturbing was the sense that many of the visitors might somehow be involved with ‘real’ criminals. The incongruity of seeing attorneys in suits among small knots of distressed-looking and obviously poor women didn’t escape her, nor did the fact that most of the young men milling around waiting were wearing what could only be described as the ‘boys most likely to be in jail’ look. Underlying all of that misery, the realization that most of the conversations around her were taking place in Spanish was her discomforting introduction to the fact that the justice system was disproportionately involved with the local Latino population.
Once beyond the visitor screening portal, seeing her husband through thick glass and talking to him over a handset with other people being able to overhear their conversation was yet another exposure to a world of indignities. With tears in her eyes and barely able to keep from crying uncontrollably, what she then learned sitting at the hard stainless-steel cubicle made her physically ill – Roger Burnett’s ego had mutated and intensified. Instead of just being ‘a really sharp guy’ and a bit cocky, somewhere, at some point she hadn’t been aware of, he had concluded he was not subject to the laws of the United States or Texas. He was convinced he was not only right, but that the entire justice system was conspiring to make sure no one would try to be successful using his business model. He was now a martyr and in his mind he was going to be out of jail and back to business in weeks, not months and especially not the decade or more the attorneys were discussing when the subject of a plea bargain was on the table.
To her utter disbelief he told her he was no longer going to need the attorney the Calders had retained; he was now representing himself—going ‘pro se’, as he put it—because the lawyers did not really understand the law and only wanted to preserve the corrupt status quo.
No amount of pleading on Catherine’s part could have changed his mind and a new fear had begun to nudge its way forward in her consciousness – her husband’s ‘cause’, his determination to ‘do this for all sovereign American citizens’, had become more important than his life with her.
She could barely remember the ride home from that first visit. One minute they had been downtown then Elanore was parking the car in the driveway and she found herself offering a rambling apology for the way the yard was beginning to look.
The next major shock had come when she learned her husband faced a psychiatric examination to determine if he could represent himself. Even the efforts of the Burnett family were stymied as they watched their son flail against the legal system with nonsensical, seemingly paranoid and even quasi-religious diatribes that did nothing but embarrass them during the competency hearing – a hearing that was notable for the most part from Roger’s winding up in the news as a kind of celebrity among a small group of truly odd-ball protesters outside the courthouse.
Eventually, the judge decreed he was competent to stand trial and he acted as his own attorney, despite what the court described as his “fictitious beliefs” that the United States had no authority to prosecute him and the stern warning from the bench that he should retain counsel.
During one of her blank episodes just two days after that hearing she had dialed the Calder’s home collect from a pay phone in Sugarland and began a rambling, semi-coherent story about needing to find her husband to get him to pay the electricity bill so the FBI and IRS people would go away and leave them alone.
At that point, the woman that was Catherine Burnett had finally come mentally undone and the Calders had decided it was time to go beyond hiring an attorney for her husband and providing a shoulder to cry on. They managed to convince her to wait for them at the convenience store in Sugarland by promising they would come and take her to Roger; they knew where he was; that everything would be fine as long as she waited for them. When they found her car she had thankfully fallen asleep and they drove her home where Elanore spent the night with her.
The next morning Alex had shown up at the door of the house with two of their ranch hands and a large rented truck. After they cajoled, pleaded and finally convinced Catherine to go with Elanore to meet with a doctor, almost everything she owned other than the furniture had been loaded into the van and taken to the Calder ranch; except for a trip some months later to ensure there was nothing left behind after the property forfeiture, Catherine never saw the interior of the house again.
With professional care she had come to learn there were periods of fantasy her mind created to cope with the stress. Differentiating between them and reality had not been easy at times and it had taken several months to learn to function without the intrusions of those confused memories. There were some she could even now laugh about with Elanore but there were still rare bouts of emotions she had to find diversions around.
Now, being caught up in a very real fantasy she had a sense those feelings and episodes belonged to someone else from another time. She felt an urge to lighten the moment and said, “I’ve decided I was more clueless than crazy.”
Kirkland grinned then looked at the tablecloth absently for a moment. “She was clueless, too – not, not that she was ...” he paused, realizing he might be saying something that would have the wrong implications. “She, she ... I didn’t ... I was always chasing the next client ... thinking it would settle into a normal routine once the business was up to speed ... whatever ‘normal’ is.”
Catherine only nodded sympathetically at his struggle to explain what was clearly still an uncomfortable facet of his life.
Kirkland carefully framed his next words to avoid an outright lie about any number of situations that under some circumstances might have been considered bending or breaking the law; there was one simple truth and he felt it was appropriate to use it: “One difference I suppose ... between your husband and me ... I’ve never been arrested.” He noticed the grin on her face and realized she was far enough beyond it to make light of the subject but he turned serious again. “My wife was right about any number of things ... the main one being I never made enough room for her on my schedule. We lived with each other for only weeks, sometimes only days at a time.”
She read the somewhat distressed look as he spoke and immediately made the connection with what he had said a few minutes earlier about fitting her into his schedule.
Kirkland sighed before looking her in the eyes and saying in a whisper, “I don’t intend to let that happen ever again ... but ... I’ve also learned to be patient.”
Catherine’s heart felt as if she were rapidly nearing the top of the first giant hill on a roller-coaster; somehow she knew what was going to happen but she not only couldn’t get off –something was telling her she really didn’t want to.
CHAPTER 23
Calder Ranch, Texas, Saturday, May 24, 1997
Before lunch, Margaret Calder changed the dressing on Dennis Boland’s wound then Marty Calder escorted him out to the barn where he retrieved some of his clothes from the collection of the bags and luggage in his van. Oddly enough he felt he was almost as much a guest as prisoner even tho
ugh he was still confined to one of the guest rooms.
What puzzled him most was the old woman’s almost grandmotherly attitude; he wondered how she could be concerned about the welfare of a person who had tried to rob her at gunpoint.
He also correctly perceived any attempt to get away would most likely be met with disastrous consequences; most of the time the senior Calder was wearing a handgun in a shoulder holster and the huge younger one that was rarely not in sight looked like he played tight end in the NFL.
They had successfully set up and connected one of his computers on a dial up modem and they allowed him to log in and send one very important email they composed for him. During the course of the day he was allowed to dial in and check for a response every hour and later in the afternoon the third check resulted in a message with a phone number.
“I, look, this, the way it works ... I have to call him from a pay phone,” Boland told Alex Calder. “If I don’t he’ll find out the call came from here. We use a forwarding call-back network – it’s the only way I can reach him.”
Alex thought for a moment. “Send him back a message that you’ll call around six. The nearest pay phone is about twenty minutes from here.”
- # -
Alex and Marty drove Boland to a convenience store and pulled in near the phone pedestal at the corner of the property. Marty handed their captive a small stack of quarters then got out and stood, leaning on the fender while Boland stepped over to the phone, made a call then entered a number and hung up.
“Now we wait,” he said with a shrug.
The ringing phone startled Boland and he seemed nervous when he answered but he quickly discerned the local traffic noise made his story about being in hiding more believable. He told Bailey the Calders’ influence had kept the burglary story out of the news but he was almost certain his disappearance from work would soon become a matter of far more than just coincidence. “If they put two and two together and show the old lady my picture I’m fucked,” he reported. “Even more fucked than I already am.”