"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.