A/N: Rumor has it that Mr. Lichtenstein owns Chuck. Personally, I want confirmation.
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Jack looked at his daughter with a bit of a smirk. "Ok," he said. "The schnook and his sister the only heirs of a rich California family or what? Come on, what's really going on, Angel?"
Sarah sighed and looked at her dad. She had known this would be his reaction. The shape of his entire worldview would not permit him to accept the simple truth that she loved Chuck. This was one of the issues she had known she'd have to confront when she agreed to let her dad back into her life.
"Dad, did you ever hear Mark Twain's quote about his own dad?"
"No, but I have a feeling you're going to share it with me."
"I'm going to butcher it a little bit but it's something like 'when I was a teenager my dad was an idiot, but by the time I was twenty-one I was amazed by how much he'd learned.'"
"The wisdom of the old man, huh?"
"I think that's what Twain had in mind, but I'm taking a different lesson from it here. I'm choosing to understand that... if we are lucky enough to have our parents around … we will come to see them differently as we ourselves age. The godhood and infallibility from when we were small children, followed by the disdain during our rebellious teen years, eventually gives way to a more complete, more mature, understanding of our parents as people themselves, with their own strengths and weaknesses, their own foibles."
"I'm all ears. What do you understand about me?"
"I am sad for you, dad. Truly I am. I know that's not what you were expecting, but it's the fact. I'm sad."
Jack leaned back in surprise and shook his head. "No, no. Oh, honey, nothing to be sad about me. I did ten years without too much trouble and now I'm out and about. If I don't let that get me down..."
"No," Sarah interrupted with a raised hand. "Not that. Not being in prison. I'm sad that you can't love. I don't know what happened to you as a young man, but something, somehow, broke inside of you. Something that you've never been able to fix. And it's tragic. You'll always be alone..."
"Nah, I have you," he said with a soft smile.
"That's not what I mean, and you know it. And anyway, you don't have me. Chuck has me." As she had been talking, Chuck had returned and sat down silently. As she said the last sentence, she reached out and took his hand, squeezing it to give her the strength to continue. "You didn't love mom..."
"I..." he tried to interrupt.
Sarah held up a hand again to forestall the interruption. "...you didn't. And the whole time we were running around together, yeah, there was the occasional woman in this or that town, but it wasn't love. You just needed to scratch an itch. I understand. I do understand. And the 'words of wisdom' you shared with your little girl. 'Love is a fiction.' 'It's a con you tell yourself.' 'It's just a delusion.' 'It's a trap.' Dad, that stuff messed me up for years after you went away. I now know that you're wrong. And not just wrong, it is a dreadful and ugly and tragic misperception of the human condition. You were wrong. I understand that you really believed it...believe it still, I'll bet. You've lived by it your whole life...unless you've had a prison wife you just haven't told me about yet...but, it's wrong. It took me falling in love with Chuck to really understand just how incredibly and devastatingly wrong you really were. And you're my dad and I do love you and that makes me sad for you. You'll never understand just how liberating it is to tie yourself joyously to another person with all your heart and soul for every second of the rest of your life. To need another person every bit as much as you need the air to breath." Sarah was squeezing Chuck's hand for all she was worth, as she looked at her dad with tears streaking her cheeks. "I feel so, so sorry for you, Dad. I really do."
When she ran out of steam, there was a soft smile on her dad's face, but pain in his eyes. "Oh, Angel, don't feel sorry for me. I'm good. I'm just fine. I'm just glad that you are happy, that's all. However, it happens, I love you too and I'm happy for you. Happy for you both."
The waitress arrived and Chuck ordered them another bottle of wine.
Sarah and Jack had fallen silent after Sarah's cathartic release. Into the silence Chuck said, "Jack, I understand you're in town for business. Anything you can talk about?" He held his hands up in front of him defensively and said, "Not to pry. Don't say a thing if you don't want to. None of our business."
"Thanks, Chuck. Yeah. I've got a business deal to finalize with Dimitri Semenov."
Sarah said, "The Russian oligarch? He's the oil guy, right?"
"Nope, the gas guy. Billionaire after he stole all the gas exports from the USSR after the break-up. They are his, but probably only for so long as it takes a bigger fish to steal them from him, I guess."
"And what's your business with him?" asked Chuck.
"I'm just a middleman. I represent the owners of Nagamichi Plaza. I'm just arranging for him to get into contract to check it out...see if he wants to buy it," said Jack, with a smile.
"The Texas Two Step?" asked Sarah with a smile of her own. Turning the conversation away from her issues with her dad had put her into a better mood.
"Bingo, darlin'," Jack replied.
"Who are you using for the contract?" she asked.
"I found a kid right out of law school. Hung up his shingle and eager as hell for a big new client," said Jack.
"And the rep?" she asked.
"Coleman & Copley," he said, naming one of the premier law firms in Los Angeles.
"Umm, guys...can you fill in the grifter newbie here maybe? What are you talking about?" The other bottle of wine arrived, and Chuck poured it out for all of them.
Jack started. "Ok, Chuck. You have to understand a little bit about how the real estate business works first. This is a two-step con. The first part is to get a rich guy into contract to buy a building. No one buys big office buildings without checking them out first, of course. They need to read the rent roll and leases, talk to the tenants, send in engineers and environmental guys for the physical inspections, have the lawyers make sure the thing is legal, etcetera, etcetera. A dozen different investigations. That all takes weeks and costs tens of thousands of dollars to perform. If they don't like what they find, they don't buy the building. Wasted some time and money, but a cost of doing business. No biggie. But no buyer is going to go to all that expense and trouble only to have the seller refuse to sell to them at the end of that due diligence process. So, they do a contract. The seller agrees to sell the building for X dollars, but the buyer can walk away for any reason if he doesn't like what he finds in due diligence within Y days. You with me?"
"Sure, makes sense," said Chuck.
"But the seller wants to know that the buyer is real and not just wasting everyone's time while he pretends to be looking at the property," said Jack.
"Why would he do that?"
"To flip the contract to someone else for a profit? Or to go out and find investors to give him the money to do the deal? Lock up a free option to buy and then hope for the best? So, to make sure that the buyer is real, the seller makes him put up some money, the down payment, with the contract execution. It's in escrow with seller's lawyer or title company or something. A million bucks sometimes, depending on the cost of the building being sold. The buyer gets it back if they walk away."
"Ok, right," said Chuck. "But what does 'escrow' mean? Sorry, I haven't done this before."
"Escrow means that the person holding the money promises to follow the parties' directions in disbursing the money. Give it back to the buyer if the buyer elects to walk away. Give it to the seller if the purchase of the building closes. And lawyers holding money in escrow take it very, very seriously. They can get into a world of trouble messing around with escrowed funds they are holding."
"Ok," said Chuck. "So, the down payment goes into escrow with a lawyer. I'm with you."
"If I have an experienced real estate lawyer negotiate the contract of sale for the seller, he or she will hold the down payment or a reputable title company would, so I can't do either of those things. I need someone to handle the contract that the buyer wouldn't trust to hold the down payment. It's why I am using a kid out of law school to do the contract. One man law firm. The buyer won't trust him to hold the money. And he shouldn't."
Sarah said, "That's the first step of the Texas Two-step."
"Exactly, Angel. No one would trust him with a million dollars. So, we use a different law firm, a reputable law firm. In this case Coleman & Copley. Everyone would trust them with the money, and they should."
"But what if they don't have the same understanding as everyone else about what the money coming into them is for?" asked Sarah.
Jack continued the thought. "What if they were hired to collect a sum owed to their client? When the money hits their account, they are told by their client to deduct their legal fees and wire the rest of the money to the client's account. That's the second step. We use their sterling reputation as the holder of the funds, but they never deal with the actual people sending the money and think the money is coming into them for a totally different purpose."
Chuck said, "So, the first con is for the buyer to put up the down payment with a law firm under the contract. The second con is for the law firm holding the money to forward it to the client under a completely different understanding as to what's going on."
"Exactly," said Jack with enthusiasm, warming to the excitement of the possibilities.
"What if the buyer insists on a title company, as you said?" asked Chuck.
"I explain that the seller had a bad experience that way once and insists that it be with a law firm," said Jack.
"How'd you pick that building?" asked Chuck.
"True owners are in Japan and there won't be any expectation that they would be around for a meeting or something," said Jack. "Also, the Russians think the Japanese are all crazy, so any weird behavior would just be attributed to that."
"Right. And the whole thing falls apart if everybody talks to each other or gets in a room together or something," said Chuck.
"Yeah. That's where the risk lies. We have to keep them separate. Nobody is going to know the kid, he's too fresh. That leaves Semenov's lawyers on the purchase contract. I have to finagle so one of them doesn't call the C&C lawyers. Usually ok, but it can go sideways easily. Somebody bumps into somebody at a cocktail party or the gym or whatever. If that happens the whole thing collapses. But if not...it works pretty well."
"And you have to do it this way, with the money before the investigation." said Chuck. "It collapses again when the buyer knocks on the door to send in an engineer or something and the real building owners say 'what the fuck?'"
"Exactly. This is one business where you can get away with getting some of the money before they get to kick the tires on what they want to buy. Since I don't own what they want to buy...well, that works out pretty well, I think."
"By the time it falls apart from the knock on the building's door, you have the down payment money in hand and are off for parts unknown," said Chuck.
"Exactly," said Jack.
The dinner bill came and they haggled gently for a few moments over who would pay for dinner. Jack won and put down sufficient cash.
"Well, there are several points of risk that I can see, Jack, but it's certainly doable," Chuck finally said.
Jack had a bit of a predatory grin when he said, "Yeah. I've done it twice before, but never with something this big. And anyway, I can control almost all of the risk."
"Honestly, I don't really know if it's appropriate to say good luck. I mean you're working to defraud a guy," said Chuck with a chuckle.
"Yeah, but he's a Russian who himself stole his riches. That's got to ease your conscience a bit," replied Jack.
"Be careful, Dad," said Sarah as they were getting up from the table.
"Always, Angel," he said, leaning over to give her a kiss.
"How long will you be in town?" she asked.
"Through next week. I'll be working pretty hard until then, but I've told Semenov's guys we have to sign by the end of the week or we are going to look to the next buyer."
"They buy it?" she asked.
"Sure. I can be pretty persuasive, you know," he grinned. "And I'm a hell of a dancer."
"Oh, I know," she said. "Call before you leave. Maybe we can do this again."
"Sure thing, Angel," he said. He leaned in to give Sarah a kiss on the cheek and wrap her in a hug.
"Love you, dad," she said.
"Love you too."
Chuck shook his hand and wished him a good night.
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A/N2: Mark Twain: When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.
A/N3: In real life, I'm a commercial real estate lawyer. I've bought and sold thousands of buildings in transactions exactly like what I've described here. The Lichtenstein con in canon was ridiculous for someone like me. The Texas Two-step as described by Jack is an actual real-life con, although I made up the name. A good friend of mine was on what I am calling the "reputational" side of the con last year. He spent a significant amount of time being interviewed by the FBI about his dealings with the new client his law firm thought it had helped to collect a disputed debt but who had actually stolen several hundred thousand dollars.
A/N4: I thought the idea of having to go through the Lichtenstein con to get the account number of the Sheik's hidden assets pretty stupid. Tracing the money is something the Intelligence Community is actually really good at. And, anyway, what makes anyone think that hidden assets would be used to buy a building in the United States? By definition, they cease to be hidden at that point, right? It makes no sense. So, I changed it into an actual con that makes a lot more sense in the real world and reflects how business actually is handled.
A/N5: And a special thanks to my dear friend David Carner, who kindly read over this chapter to help me make sure that my explanation of the Texas Two-step made sense. Thanks, pal. I owe you so much more than one. Of course, if it still didn't make sense, that's my fault.
A/N6: How'd I do?