Chapter 1b

"What mistake?"

She pulled a piece of paper from one of her desk drawers. It was an official looking legal form with numbers printed all over it. "This is a breakdown of your tour revenue as of last week. It lists all forms of expenses and all forms of income, including merchandising. When you read the bottom line it says that we made $1,116,428, or, to round down a bit, $1.12 million."

"Wow," Jake said, whistling. "That's not bad."

"Not bad at all," Pauline agreed. "It's a little over one hundred and eighty grand for each of us, but it kind of disturbs me how willing you were — how willing all of you are — to just accept my word about how much money you're pulling in."

"Why does that disturb you?" he asked. "You're my sister. You're not gonna embezzle from us."

"How do you know that, Jake?" she asked. "Am I not just as prone to temptation as anyone?"

"I've known you all my life, Pauline," he said, more than a little exasperated by this conversation. "I know what kind of person you are."

"You don't know what's in anybody's heart, Jake, nor do you know what limits of temptation that anyone is able to resist. When you're talking about this kind of money you shouldn't trust anyone blindly. Not even your sister."

"Are you saying you're going to screw us?"

"No," she said. "I haven't screwed any of you out of so much as a penny, nor do I have plans to do so, but I could screw you if I wanted to. It would be absurdly easy to do so. I could've told you all we made half a million on the tour, given you each eighty grand, and then pocketed the rest and none of you would have ever known. And that's only the tip of the iceberg. I could be skimming off your royalties and your off-tour merchandising profits too. All of your money comes to me first and then I divide it up and wire it into your accounts. Quite frankly, Jake, in the amounts we're dealing with now, I'm no longer comfortable doing this. I'm basically an honest person and I like to think I'd never embezzle money but I'd feel better if there was some kind of oversight."

"What are you suggesting?" he asked.

"You need to get an accountant," she said. "All of you need someone to help manage your money for you for and it would make sure that I stay honest. It would remove any temptation I might ever feel for helping myself to a little more than my share."

"An accountant?" Jake said distastefully. "I've heard horror stories from some of the other second contract bands about accountants. They say you should never trust any of them. They'll cheat you blind, steal all of your money, and then send you a fucking bill for their services."

"That's because those other bands are letting their accountants run their money the same way you're letting me do it. I'm not suggesting you simply transfer responsibility from me to some bean counter you find in the Yellow Pages. I'm suggesting you find someone with good references who seems at least superficially trustworthy to help manage your money for you. He'll also be able to figure out how best to pay your taxes come next year — what you can deduct, what you can't, how you can set yourself up so you don't owe as much. This is something that I'm not qualified to do — in fact I'm planning to utilize an accountant myself when it comes to taxation issues. In any case, I will be able to keep your accountant honest because I will know how much money I'm turning over to him. He will be able to keep me honest because he will see all the financial paperwork and wire receipts I get from National. Both of us, working together, will be able to keep National honest."

"Why can't I just be my own accountant?" Jake asked. "I can go through receipts and paperwork, couldn't I? I'm not an idiot. I'm sure I could research the tax laws as they relate to..." Pauline was laughing. "What?" he asked, angrily.

"I'm sorry, Jake," she said. "But would you recognize a forged accounting sheet if I showed you one? Would you recognize fake wire transfer receipts?"

"Well... probably not," he admitted.

"And as for managing your own money..." She laughed again. "I'm sorry, but that's just hysterical."

"What's so fuckin' funny about it?" he asked.

"Jake," she said. "You have pulled in just over a million and a half dollars in the past seven months, right?"

"Right," he said.

"And where is that money right now?"

"You know where it's at," he said. "It's in my bank account."

"Exactly," she said. "You have a million and a half dollars sitting in the same checking account you opened when you were sixteen. It's earning no interest for anyone but the bank and it's fifteen times the amount the FDIC even insures. That is not very good money management. This is not income from a paper route or from flipping burgers at McDonalds we're talking about here. We're talking about more than a million dollars, with much more on the way."

He had to admit that she had a point there. He had meant to start looking into managing his money a little better — he wasn't a complete idiot financially — but he'd just never found the time. Maybe this was like looking after his car or cleaning his house or getting from home to the airport. Sure, he could do it for himself if he took the time to learn how, but why not hire someone to do it for him? After all, he was rich now, wasn't he? Wasn't that what rich people did?

"Hmm," Jake said after running these thoughts through his head. "I find you make a good point, Pauline."

"Good," she said. "I thought you'd see things my way. Now the next step is to start looking into accounting firms in the area, filtering through them one by one until..."

"No," Jake interrupted, "I think I already know who I want doing my accounting."

Pauline looked at him sternly. "You do?"

"Yep," he said, nodding in confidence. "I think I do."

"Jake," she asked carefully, "do you even know any accountants? I mean certified ones with cards and everything?"

"Yes I do," he said. "I know one."

"One? Jake, this isn't like picking someone to cut your grass while you're away. An accountant needs to have references and we need to check out his background."

"We're getting the cart ahead of the horse here, sis," he said. "I don't even know if she's really an accountant or not. I don't know if she'd even do it. I do want to look into it though."

"She?" Pauline asked. "A female accountant?"

Jake raised his eyebrows. "Are you saying a female couldn't possibly be a good accountant?" he asked. "Pauline, I'm shocked at you."

"Shut the fuck up," she said. "You know that's not what I meant. Is this a woman you used to fuck?"

"I've never fucked her," he said. "I wanted to once, but that was back in sixth grade."

"Sixth grade?" she asked. "Who is this woman?"

"Jill Yamashito," he said. "My twin."

"Your... twin?"

Jake smiled, draining the remainder of his beer. "Yep."

Heritage, California

November 26, 1986

It was Wednesday afternoon, the day before Thanksgiving, when Jake pulled his father's Chrysler LeBaron to the curb at 29^th and N Streets in Heritage's semi-fashionable mid-town section. A small, non-descript office building stood on this corner. The sign out front read: YAMASHITO, YAMASHITO, and YAMASHITO. CERTIFIED PUBLIC ACCOUNTANTS.

Jake got out. He was dressed in a conservative pair of dress slacks and a long-sleeved, button-up shirt. His dark glasses were upon his face despite the overcast sky. A few pedestrians were walking by but none seemed to notice that the longhaired freak they were crossing the street to avoid was Heritage's most famous personality. Pauline stepped out of the passenger seat. She was adorned in one of the business dresses she used to wear when she had worked for Heritage's biggest corporate law firm. The two of them — along with Nerdly, who was at his parent's house — had flown into their hometown six hours before in order to share the Thanksgiving holiday with their families.

"So this is where your twin works, huh?" Pauline asked, looking the building up and down.

"This is the place," Jake said. "Her parents have run their business out of here since before Jill and I were born."

"And now she has her name on the sign too. How fifties of them."

"Yes," Jake agreed. "It's kind of quaint, ain't it?"

Jill Yamashito was a girl Jake had known since kindergarten. They had attended the same elementary school, the same junior high school, and the same high school. They had been jokingly called twins in their elementary school days because they shared the exact same birthday — March 7, 1960. The two of them had been reasonably close friends through eighth grade as they shared a birthday and a similar intellect. Both were always the ones who seemed to know the answers when called upon but both had always been painfully shy. Jake had never been as good of a student as Jill. He was more the classic underachiever while she had been brought up to revere education and excel. They had drifted apart in high school as Jake discovered the joys of marijuana, cutting school, and hanging with his stoner friends while Jill had buried herself in academia, striving for that coveted academic scholarship to the Stanford University School of Business and her eventual place in the family CPA business. Still they had continued to share several of the college prep classes in their junior and senior years and had kept on nodding acquaintance with each other. The last time he'd seen her was the night of high school graduation when they'd hugged briefly after the ceremony. When Pauline told him he needed an accountant, Jill's face had popped immediately into his head, the first time he'd thought of her in years.

"Are you sure this is a good idea?" Pauline asked him now as they headed toward the small building.

"You checked her out, didn't you?" Jake asked. "You tell me."

Pauline still maintained close contact with Steve Marshall, the head of Investigative Services at Standforth and Breckman, the corporate law firm she used to work for before dedication herself full time to Intemperance. He had done a background check on the Yamashitos, utilizing all of the resources of the S&B empire — which were considerable (and some of questionable legality) — to see if they were worthy of counting beans for Jake Kingsley. He had turned up a wealth of information on them.

John and Laura Yamashito, Jill's parents, had both done time in a Japanese internment camp as children, having been placed there by the American government in early 1942 along with their parents. Though they had been in the same camp they had never known each other back then. Both managed to rise from the poverty they'd been a part of after World War II and attend the University of California at Heritage's School of Business on academic scholarships. This was where they'd met — two of only eight Japanese-Americans in their graduating class of 1955. They married shortly after both had passed the California CPA exam and, the victims of blatant prejudice by all firms corporate and family owned, had instead opened their own small bookkeeping business in downtown Heritage in 1958. There they'd been ever since, slowly developing a reputation as honest, hardworking, and, most of all, resourceful accountants who specialized in small businesses.

Jill, after graduating high school in 1978, fourth in a class of 308 (Jake was 220 in the class with his 2.13 GPA) had gone on to Stanford University on a full academic scholarship and had graduated seventh in her class in 1982 with a bachelor's degree. After passing the CPA exam and receiving her card she could have been hired at any number of corporate auditing or accounting firms but she'd instead joined the family business and had been there ever since, handling an increasing amount of their accounts as her parents groomed her to take over once they retired.

She had one brother, born in 1962, now twenty-four years old. He had shunned the family business, dropped out of college in his junior year, and was now a rookie officer with the Heritage County Sheriff's Department where he was putting in his time working in the county jail.

The firm itself was moderately successful, it's clients mostly small businesses of less than twenty employees — the majority of them businesses with five to ten employees. There had never been a single complaint lodged against them with any government agency at the local, state, or federal level, accusing them of any malfeasance.

The elder Yamashitos — despite a net worth of nearly three quarters of a million dollars — still lived in the house they'd bought back in 1959 — a house that was just around the corner from where Jake and Pauline's parents lived. Jill — who was unmarried and, as far as could be determined, unattached in any way — lived alone in a modest 1700 square foot house in an area of Heritage known as "The Pocket", which was nestled in a bend of the Sacramento River.

"They seem to be as honest as the day is long," Pauline said. "But they've also never dealt with money in the amounts we're going to be presenting them with. Their most successful client is Ralph Polesco, the guy who owns those high-class restaurants downtown. His annual revenue is a little over a million dollars or so. They have no experience with the amounts we're going to be pulling in and no experience with entertainment revenue."

"They're accountants," Jake said. "They'll figure it out. They're honest and hard working. That's what I remember most about Jill. If they agree to accept me as a client, I feel confident they'll do the best they can for me."

Jill sighed. She still thought her brother was being impulsive. "I suppose," she said. "Shall we?"

"We shall," he said.

They stepped up to the door and opened it, walking into a small lobby with a few chairs and magazines. Behind a partition, working at a desk with an IBM computer atop it, was a woman Jake instantly recognized as Jill. She was dressed in a black business suit, her hair tied tightly into a bun. She was not exactly a pretty woman — she never had been — but she was not ugly either. Plain looking was perhaps the best way to describe her. She looked up at the sound of the bell on the door and her breath seemed to catch in her throat for a minute.

"Hey, Jill," Jake greeted her, smiling. "How you doing these days?"

"Jake?" she asked, her eyes widening in surprise. "Jake Kingsley?"

"That's me," he confirmed. "This is my sister, Pauline. How are you doing? Haven't seen you since graduation."

"Oh my God," she cried, actually blushing a little. "I'm... I'm... well, I'm fine. It's good to see you."

"It's good to see you too," he said. "I suppose you've heard I'm a musician now?"

"Uh... yes, of course," she said. "Everyone knows that. My God. What are you doing here?"

"Well," he said, "I have a little business proposition for you."

"A business proposition?"

"Yep. I need an accountant. I hear you're quite a good one."

"An accountant?" she said, as if she'd never heard the word before.

"That's right," he confirmed. "Are you accepting new clients?"

It turned out the firm of Yamashito, Yamashito, and Yamashito were accepting new clients, but they were a bit trepidatious about what Jake's intentions were. After spending a few minutes catching up with each other's lives since high school — Jill already knew about Jake's life, of course, including the infamous sniffing coke out of a girl's ass-crack incident and his three arrests, and Jake already knew about Jill's life, since Pauline had backgrounded them — she brought her parents out to meet the famous rock star and his sister. John and Laura were very polite and excellent hosts to the business meeting. They brewed coffee and served it with fresh pastries from the bakery next door. They sat them down at a conference table in the back and listened politely to Jake's proposition. That was when the trepidation began to appear.

"Mr. Kingsley," John said, looking at him carefully. He was dressed in slacks and a collared shirt and wore a conservative tie. Despite his heavily Japanese features his voice carried not a trace of an accent. "I'm a bit confused as to why you came to us with this business proposition. Surely there are hundreds of accounting firms in Los Angeles who are more familiar with handling large amounts of money from an entertainment personality?"

"I'm sure there are," Jake said. "But I don't know any of those people. I do know Jill. I've known her since we were both in kindergarten. Do you remember when I used to come over to your house to play when we were kids?"

"I do remember," John said. "That was back in the second and third grade, as I recall. You've certainly changed a lot since then and so has Jill."

"I knew Jill all through school," Jake said. "We weren't really close friends anymore after sixth grade or so, but I still knew her. She was always one of the smartest girls in class, always dedicated to whatever it was she was doing, and it is my belief, based on what I knew of her and her upbringing back then, that she is a fine accountant. I prefer to go with people I know rather than people I don't know. If there's one thing I've learned in my time in Hollywood is that everyone is trying to take some sort of advantage of everyone else. I don't want a Hollywood accountant. I don't want a large firm. I want someone with some humanity."

"Jill is indeed a fine accountant," John said. "But again, we're not used to dealing with the amounts of money you're talking about, nor are we the least bit familiar with taxation of entertainment revenue. We keep books for small businesses here — restaurants, hardware stores, bakeries, that sort of thing."

"Accounting is accounting, isn't it?" Jake asked. "And tax laws are something that people like you are supposed to be good at looking into, right?"

"Well... yes," John agreed. "But... well..."

"Look," Jake said, "in the first place, the amount of money we're talking about is probably not nearly as much as you seem to think it is — at least not now. I have a million and a half in the bank and Pauline is about to deposit another hundred and eighty grand in tour profits. My next royalty check should be coming in sometime in January and it will be somewhere around a hundred and fifty grand, depending on how many albums we sell. I'm not a Rockefeller or anything."

"Is that all?" Laura, Jill's mother asked, surprised. "You've sold millions of albums."

"It's a long story," Jake said. "The people making most of the money from those albums are the kind folks at National Records. A good chunk of my income came from an endorsement contract I have with Fender Guitars."

"Interesting," said Jill, who had been mostly silent to this point.

"So what exactly do you want us to do?" John asked. "If you're looking for us to engage in any sort of 'creative' accounting or to help shield you from taxation, I should let you know right now, we do not condone or participate in that sort of thing. We play completely straight with our clients. We are honest people and we do not help others engage in dishonesty."

"That is exactly what I'm looking for, Mr. Yamashito," Jake said. "I want an accountant who will keep me out of trouble, who will keep the IRS from ever being able to say I'm not paying my taxes and who will keep me from spending more money than I should be. I want advice on how to distribute my money, how to invest it. I will be a pain in the ass at times, I have no doubt about that. I like to spend money frivolously. For instance, I spent nine thousand dollars to pay for a ride home from Seattle in a Lear Jet just so I wouldn't have to sit on the bus another day. I like to live in nice accommodations, drink the finest wines, smoke the finest cigars, and go on spur-of-the-moment trips to exotic locations. When I'm involved with a woman I want to spend outrageously on her. I don't want lectures on how to best conserve my money and make it grow, but I want an accountant who will tell me when I'm starting to go overboard and head toward debt. That is what I'm looking for. And I want Jill to be that accountant. Do you think she can handle it?"

"I know she can handle it," John said. "The problem is that I don't think this firm is prepared to handle you. I'm sorry, but I must respectfully decline your offer. If you'd like, I can give you the name of several Heritage firms where I know the accountants to be above board."

"You haven't even heard how much I'm willing to pay for your services," Jake said.

"It doesn't matter," Laura said. "My husband is right, Mr. Kingsley. We are a small business oriented firm and representing a rock and roll musician is just beyond our capabilities."

"Uh... Dad," Jill suddenly spoke up. "Could we maybe talk about this a little?"

"There's nothing to talk about, Jill," John said gently. "Your mother and I have made our decision."

"I think you made a poor decision," she said.

Her parents looked shocked at her words. "Jill," John said firmly, "I've said no to Mr. Kingsley. That is the end of the discussion."

"No," she said, "it's not. I think Jake is offering us a unique opportunity to expand into new areas here. I think we would be unwise to dismiss him without at least a sober consideration of his offer."

"Jill," Laura said, "this is not..."

"I want to do this," Jill said stubbornly. "This is something different than the restaurants and the hardware stores that are barely in the black. I can do this and I want to do this."