The Signing

I would like to thank Randi for the invitation to participate in this event. Also, thanks for Rand's editorial assistance. Any errors in the published story are all mine. Please read all of the stories in this event. You'll be in for a real treat!

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I didn't suspect a thing. Okay, perhaps I should put that into perspective. I didn't suspect a thing, but that was because there were no obvious red flags that I noticed at the time.

Looking back, the signs were there, but I was too much in love with my wife Angela and too trusting to identify them for what they were. But then, why would I be looking? We were a loving, dedicated couple right? Well, maybe one of us was.

She had become a little distant, perhaps a little preoccupied, seemed a bit snippy and more controlling than usual, but when I asked her if anything was wrong, she answered me by saying "it's just the pressures of work, honey. Don't worry. It'll all be resolved, given time."

Because I loved and trusted my wife with all of my heart, my stupid, stupid deluded heart, I took her word for it. Yeah. Silly, silly me!

I had been, in effect, orphaned at a late age. My parents had been driving back from a church youth conference they had volunteered at every year since they had been teens themselves, when a drunk driver had smashed into their car. A slight comfort to those of us who knew and loved them was that they would have died almost instantly, such was the impact. The drunk driver also died in the crash.

At first it looked like it would just be a case of putting in a claim with the driver's insurer, but then a local TV station had an anonymous tipoff. Someone had sent them a copy of the security videos from the bar he had been drinking at, and it was obvious the bar staff had been feeding him alcohol long after it was obvious he was very badly drunk.

One member of staff was seen and heard on the video telling her colleagues to stop serving him alcohol and pleading with them to call him a cab. They mocked her, calling her a pussy and the scene switched to an outside security camera. Although there was no sound, it was obvious from the video that the staff were helping him get into his car as he couldn't stand up without assistance.

The station sent copies of the video to the police, the DA and to me, as someone at the station had gone to the same church as my folks and vaguely knew me.

Obviously, all hell was let loose, because the bar had clearly breached the strict Texas Dram Shop Act, which prohibited the sale of alcohol to inebriated customers.

The bar owner tried to claim that the bar had provided training to staff to avoid serving alcohol to obviously impaired customers. That defense failed because the bar owner was seen on the security video serving the drunk himself on multiple occasions throughout the evening.

The defense failed, also, because the one bartender was clearly shown arguing with her colleagues, including her boss, that the customer shouldn't be served any more alcohol and should be put in a cab. The final legal slam dunk was when the owner was seen telling his staff to half carry the drunk to his car and to "shove him in the damn thing."

As they had blatantly breached the Dram Shop laws, they had no defenses. The owner's license was revoked, criminal charges were filed and the widow of the drunk driver and myself hired the same attorney to sue the bastards. Her situation was bad, worse than mine, certainly. She was a stay at-home mom with three children, all under the age of 12.

Her husband had been a highly successful attorney, he had been a recovering alcoholic but he'd fallen off the wagon and those idiots had filled him with booze and then pushed him into his car to drive away and kill himself and my parents.

The bar owner settled the claims through his attorney. The widow of the driver received $14m and I received $7m. Her settlement was higher because she was suing on her own behalf and on the behalf of her children. Believe it or not, ours wasn't the record Dram Shop law settlement in Texas. That still stands at $31m, I believe.

I put the money into a bank account that was designed to generate interest and I left it there. When Angela and I got married, I changed the account so that it would require both my wife's signature and my signature to access the money. Despite my protestations, Angela had insisted on both of us signing a fairly severe prenuptial agreement that she had had drafted.

I didn't know why I left the money there. I just couldn't bring myself to do anything with it. I wouldn't even look at the balance online. However, it wasn't that we needed the money, as my wife and I were both in very high-income jobs.

Eventually, I decided that I had to try to understand why I wouldn't or couldn't do anything with that money.

My wife's job involved a number of out of state business trips, and I decided to use one of her longer business trips as the opportunity to visit my counselor and talk through my problems about the money and why I couldn't spend it, or even look at the online balance.

We established that the money was my last link with my parents. He believed that I had two problems with it. Firstly, it felt like I was profiting from the death of my parents, but also, that if I spent the money or even looked at the balance, it was acknowledging that they were dead.

I admit that the last point brought me to tears, but it was a cathartic moment, and after I wiped my tears away, I shook hands with him and left his office feeling better than I had in a long time.

I returned home and I decided to at least look at the money in the account, which I'd been loath to do, even if I wouldn't actually spend any of it, immediately. I'd obviously ask my wife for her input when she came home.

Remodel the house? An extension? Buy a new house? Go on a cruise? Start a new business? Start our own family? Look for investment opportunities? All these ideas were floating around in my mind, but they were all sunk when I opened the banking app on my computer and noticed that although I hadn't been accessing the account, someone had, because money was missing from it with regular, monthly withdrawals.

A cold feeling hit me. Damn! My account had obviously been hacked. I looked at the time, it was still relatively early in the day and the bank would be open for at least several more hours, so I decided that rather than wasting time phoning or using online access, I'd visit my bank's branch in person.

When I arrived, I walked up to the tellers and said: "Hi. I'm David King and I'd like to report a fraud on a bank account of mine. Could you please let me speak with a fraud officer?"

Her smile froze and she asked me my name and the details of the account, which I provided to her on a printout I'd brought.

She looked them over and said: "Mr. King, can I keep this paper at least for a while? Thank you. Could you please go into room one over on the other side of the lobby, please?"

I thanked her and entered one of the three large private glass-fronted cubicles on the other side of the lobby.

I waited for ten minutes before a young man came into the room and closed the door behind him. "Hello, Mr. King. My name is Byron James, I'm one of the account managers at First Mercantile Bank. You report that there has been fraudulent activity on the Wealth Generator account that you have with us. The only activity I can see is the regular monthly money transfers from your account that you and your wife set up six months ago."

He paused and handed me a piece of paper. "Here, Sir. This is the document that you and your wife signed back then."

I looked at the paper, studied the signatures at the bottom of the box, and noticed that one signature had been signed by a Mr. or Ms. Squiggle. I also noticed something else. My wife's signature looked to be her signature, but the signature against my name looked nothing like mine. Not even a vague approximation. As I said, a squiggle.

I passed the paper back to him. "Thanks. But you see, this is why I wanted to see someone from your fraud department, not an accounts manager, no slight intended on you, of course, but you see that might well be my wife's signature, but that's definitely not my signature. Please get someone from your fraud department."

He looked pained and replied, "No offense taken, Mr. King, Sir. I'll get someone from Fraud for you. They won't be long."

After another wait, slightly longer this time, a woman entered the room. She introduced herself with a handshake. She sat down opposite me.

She was reasonably tall, attractive but had suspicious, questioning eyes. Obviously, a result of a life working in banking fraud, I thought to myself.

"Hello Mr. King. My name is Amanda Fellowes. I am the fraud officer at the bank. Can you please tell me why you suspect that there have been fraudulent transactions on your account?"

I explained that although it was, as far as I could tell, my wife's signature on the form, it was not my signature, that I had not seen the form and had certainly not approved of setting up the Automated Clearing House Transaction, or the monthly payments over the past six months.

She checked my own signature against the one on the transfer form and pursed her lips for a moment.

She nodded. "Yes, I understand, Mr. King. The total amount of money transferred now stands at $60,000. Why weren't you aware of these transfers?"

I explained why I hadn't looked at the account and why I'd looked at it for the first time since I'd opened the account several years previously. She nodded, a look of sympathy on her face. "Yes, I can understand that."

She logged in to the computer that was on the desk in the interview room, and began purposely tapping on the keys and sort of flicking the mouse. "What I'm doing now is shutting off the ACHT and also sending over to the bank the money was being paid into, a Reverse Payment Order with instructions that we believe the account there to have been involved in the fraudulent transfer of funds."

She pressed the enter key with a flourish and said "That's that done.

"Now I am going to call up our archived video footage from the bank's internal and external video surveillance system from the date that the ACHT was set up and see who it was who did it."

After some more tapping on the keyboard the large screen in the room lit up with a series of paused video screens.

"Do you have videos saved for such a long time?" I asked.

"Yes, in the old days we'd keep them for 90 days, but since we switched from VHS to digital recording, all we do is upload them to our cloud server and leave them there indefinitely. And this is one of the occasions when it proves what a good policy it is.

"By the way, where is your wife at the moment?"

"She's at a business conference in Palm Springs. Why'd you ask?"

She gave a brief smile. "Just being nosy, I guess."

She skimmed through the videos until she had three different views on the screen. They were dated and time stamped. We saw my wife and a man just a little taller than her. He was wearing a fairly poor dark wig. I didn't recognize him from that view.

They obviously had an appointment, as a receptionist led them to one of the interview rooms. Not the one we were in, I noticed.

When they sat in the room with a bank official, the camera in the room got a good view of him. By reflex I glanced up at the camera in the room we were in. This time I did recognize him.

"Do you recognize him?"

"Yes, I do. I have met him a number of times. He is a work colleague of my wife. I think his name is Andrew Carter."

She nodded. "Yes, that is confirmed by the fact that the name on the account your money was transferred into was in the name of Andrew W. Carter, at the Texas Mutual Bank."

She paused before she spoke. "Mr. King, we will have to report this to the authorities. My hands are tied on this, unfortunately."

I shrugged. "It looks as if my wife is cheating on me, so I think the book should be thrown at her."

"Yes, I can understand that. However, bank fraud is a Federal Offense, so I'll have to report this to the Federal Prosecutor and the FBI."

I shrugged.

She had written something on a Post-It Note, which she handed me. "I don't know if you'll be interested, but this is the name of the private detective that we use at the bank and his contact details are here. I'm truly sorry that you found out about your wife and her colleague like this."

I thanked her, we shook hands and I left the bank, heading into a different, uncertain world.

I called the private investigator from my car on the way home. I booked a Zoom appointment for later that evening.

As I walked from my car to the house, I received a text message from my wife. It was all in caps. "IT'S NOT WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE! I CAN EXPLAIN IT ALL! DON'T DO ANYTHING ELSE!"

I thought, "This should be good."

Obviously, she and her lover had found out about the discovery of their fraud, when the RPO had magically sucked my money back.

I replied to Angela, "Are you coming home now to tell me why it's not what it looks like? Can you please tell me what it is, if it's not what it looks like? And what else shouldn't I do?"

Fairly quickly under the circumstances, she replied "Don't involve the authorities. They don't need to know about this. And I'm sorry, but I can't come home now. This work conference is very, very important, and although I know you want to see me to let me explain everything to you, I have to stay here until the conference is over on Thursday. I hope you know that I love you."

I replied "Whatever."

The Zoom meeting with the private investigator at Greater Houston Investigations went well. Better than I'd expected. Barry Greer was a former Military Police investigator and he really knew his stuff.

After I told him my tale of woe, he was sympathetic. "Okay, so you believe your wife is having an affair with her colleague, Andrew Carter, and they both work at Liteworks Marketing in Houston. But at present, they are at a work conference in Palm Springs at the Palm Springs Convention Center.

"I have an investigator I use who covers Palm Springs," he said. "If you want, I can get them to investigate your wife and her lover starting as soon as you like."

"How about now?" was my response.

"That's no problem. Though it might be costly?"

I shrugged. "Yeah, I guessed it would be, seeing as the investigations would take place both here in Texas and over in California. Still, I need to know what's happening, so the cost will not be an obstacle, within reason, of course."

I paid the initial fee by debit card and we ended the call.

Greer had been as good as his word and he had got the investigator in Palm Springs on the case, immediately.

In fact, I received my first report from them the next morning at 11AM, my time, which was 9AM, Palm Springs time.

It was a fairly bland report. Angela and Carter were sharing a room, even though she was supposedly staying in a room of her own.

They'd come down to breakfast and it was obvious, the report said, that they were upset. They were saying things like: "How could he do that?" "Has it gone?" "Yes." "All of it?" "Yes. The bastard! All of it! I'll fix him when we get back home!" "No! Don't do that! You'll get into trouble, and besides, I don't want him hurt!"

It was tawdry and very out of character for what I knew about Angela. Or what I had thought I knew about her.

The private investigators in California and Houston were able to get enough evidence to prove that they were having an affair. This was important to me as I wanted to file an at fault divorce, citing adultery as the grounds. That was possible in Texas, as it was a fault/no fault state. The courts would still need evidence, which I received from Greer and his colleagues in California.

Angela arrived home Thursday. She'd picked her car up from Houston Airport. Before she left for her work conference, we'd joked about the early start for her to get the only direct flight from Palm Springs to Houston, as the flight left at about six in the morning.

She dragged her cabin luggage wheeled suitcase through the door and she looked like shit. She was angry. "What the fuck did you do it for, you asshole?" My word, she was angry!

I decided to use the old biblical trick of heaping coals on her head. "Why, yes, Angela. I accept your apology for cheating on me and helping your lover to steal $60,000 from me."

She looked nonplussed for a few seconds before she spoke again. "Did you really have any need to set the FBI on us?"

I shook my head. "Sorry, honey, that's nothing to do with me. When the bank discovered that there had been fraudulent activity in their main branch, they became quite incensed. They told me that the situation was like when a school teacher discovers a child is being abused and they are mandated to report it to the police? Apparently, banks are mandatory reporters of frauds against the bank."

She made an effort to moderate her anger. "Well, okay. But why did you check the account? Didn't you trust me?"

"It wasn't that, but when I looked at the account and noticed the transactions, I panicked. I thought the account had been hacked, so I told the bank."

"Why didn't you call me?" her voice was now starting to sound a little whiny.

I shrugged. "I never thought of phoning you. It just never occurred to me. When I found out that the payments had been arranged by you and your lover, I felt as if my life had ended."

"Well, why did you look at the account? You never look at the account." She sounded accusatory, somehow. As if it had been my fault.

I explained to her why it was that I came to be looking at the account after my session with my therapist, and a look of guilt tempered the somewhat sour expression her face had hitherto been wearing.

"Shit. Oh, David! I'm so sorry! That must have hurt."

I sat down at the table and I motioned for her to sit down too.

"How long have you been cheating on me, Ange?"

She denied that she had, actually, been cheating on me. She went on to explain how Andrew had needed someone to unload onto about his marital problems.

Angela told me that she had been a shoulder for him to lean on, someone to open his heart to.

"His wife didn't understand him. She was abusive, she was violent and he wanted to leave the marriage but didn't know how to do it. And he needed help and advice."

I was shocked that my normally intelligent wife could have fallen for such a line of obvious BS.

"Oh, honey! Come on! He was feeding you a line and you were stupid enough to fall for it!"

She looked hurt by my obvious disdain for his tale of marital woe. "It's true!"

"Anyway, why did you and he steal the money from the account?"

"Oh, we weren't actually stealing it, Dave, we were only borrowing it! We'd have paid it back once he was able to get away from his witch of a wife and he'd gotten himself set up away from her."

I shook my head, unable to believe what I was hearing. "Angela, you were his friend and his confidante, were you also his lover? Were you cheating on me with Carter?"

"No, honey! Never! I wasn't his lover. Honestly! You have to believe me!"

I thought, "No, bitch, I don't have to believe you."

I looked at her for a few seconds and said: "But you were sleeping in the same room at Palm Springs, weren't you?"

She nodded.

"And have you ever had sex with him?" This time she gave a half-hearted shrug which was more of a twitch than anything else.

"Well, were you having sex with him? Is he your lover? Are you cheating on me?"

"We are, we were having sex, but he isn't my lover and I'm not cheating on you. Sex with Andrew is different from the sex I have with you. I have sex with you because I love you. I was only having sex with Andy, Andrew, because I... I... felt sorry for him, for what he was going through with the witch."