“Do you want me to talk to her or not?” Nina said, when I didn’t reply right away.
“I don’t know. I didn’t part ways with the firm under the best of circumstances.”
“Louise was pretty angry with you for roughing up Jean-Claude, of course, but she was more upset about why you roughed him up.”
“What about Jean-Claude? I doubt he’d be very happy to see me.”
“Not to worry. He’s history. When Louise told Denis what happened, he was apoplectic. It wasn’t the first time Jean-Claude had got into hot water putting the moves on a female employee. Louise wanted him charged with sexual harassment and disbarred, but Denis is afraid of Jean-Claude’s mother, his sister Margot. He did the next best thing.”
“Which was what?”
“He sent Jean-Claude ‘down the river,’ as he put it, to the Quebec City office.”
“Quebec City is a beautiful town,” I said. “Even if it is filled with politicians.”
“Except that Margot runs the office there. You’re lucky. The stupid shit still wanted you charged. If Margot hadn’t forbidden it, he’d have done it, too, even though he’d have destroyed his own career in the process. You’d have gotten off, of course. After all, you were just defending the not-so-fair damsel’s so-called honour. But it might have dragged on for months. And by then you’d fled the jurisdiction, as it were.”
I might have come back, I thought, if only for the satisfaction of seeing the silly prick hang himself out to dry. “So basically, he got off scot-free.”
“There’s a postscript,” Nina said. “A couple of postscripts, in fact. A year or so later he was caught on video getting a hummer in a strip joint the cops had under surveillance for bringing in girls from Eastern Europe and pimping them out to the customers. Not even Maman could save him from that one. He was disbarred a year ago. Last I heard he was in rehab up north somewhere. It probably won’t surprise you that he had quite an expensive coke habit and was embezzling money from clients to pay for it.”
“Not exactly the smartest gene in the pool, is he?” I said.
“You sound almost sorry for him,” Nina said.
“Not a bit,” I said. “He got everything he deserved. What’s the other postscript?”
“The firm laid a fat settlement on me. It was Margot’s idea—afraid, I suppose, that I’d file a sexual harassment suit. It never even occurred to me. I mean, nothing really happened, did it? At least, not with him,” she added with a coy grin. “And until you came blundering on to the scene, I had everything pretty much under control, anyway. I didn’t want to take it, but Louise and Denis told me I might as well.”
“Did you?”
“Yeah. I can’t tell you how much, but it was a nice chunk of change. I used some of it to expand my condo, buy my Strat and produce the album, but most of it went straight into my retirement fund. You’re the only person outside of the firm who knows about it. I didn’t even tell my parents.”
“How are they, by the way?”
“As annoyingly and self-righteously zealous as ever.”
Chapter 3
We drove the rest of the way downtown in silence, while Nina dozed and I let my mind slip back four years to the aftermath of the altercation with Jean-Claude Aubert.
I’d awakened around 1 a.m., head throbbing, achingly erect. Nina was asleep, right arm across my chest, legs straddling my thigh, warm and moist and feather-light. I lay still, afraid to move lest she awaken. Gradually, my erection subsided and I began to extricate myself. She muttered in her sleep and rolled away. I got out of the sofa-bed, collected my clothes scattered about her studio condo, and dressed in the bathroom. When I came out of the bathroom, shoes in hand, minus one sock, the bedside light was on and Nina was sitting cross-legged on the bed.
“Sorry,” I said, feeling like a thief, acutely aware of her unselfconscious nudity. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“You didn’t,” she said. “I need to use the bathroom.” She stood and walked past me toward the bathroom. She had two bars of music tattooed on the back of her right shoulder, eight half-notes. They were, she’d told me, the opening notes of the first song she’d written. “Don’t leave yet, okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
She went into the bathroom. I found my missing sock and sat on the edge of the bed to put it and my shoes on. She came out of the bathroom wearing a robe.
“It felt strange,” she said, smile timorous, “being naked when you were dressed.” Timorousness did not suit her.
“Look, Nina,” I said, standing. “I—I’m not sure what to say.”
“Just don’t say you’re sorry, for Christ’s sake,” she said, violet eyes sharp with anger. The anger faded. “You aren’t, are you?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure what I feel. It’s just that I can’t help thinking that you’re still a kid.”
Her anger flared up again. “I’m thirty-two, for fuck’s sake. Nearly thirty-three. I’m not a kid.”
“I know you’re not. Look, I—I’m not sorry, but I don’t like this feeling I have that I took advantage of you.” I looked at the empty tequila bottle on the alcove kitchen island, and the chewed lemon wedges surrounding it. “You had a lot to drink.”
“So did you,” she said. “And I can hold my liquor better than you think. Fuck, Riley, you didn’t take advantage of me. If anything, I took advantage of you. By the time we got back here I was so goddamned horny, if you’d just touched me I’d’ve gone off like a fucking bomb. I think I came twice before I even got you out of your pants.”
“Jesus, Nina.”
“I know you think of me as your kid sister, but I’m not your sister. Or, as we’ve established, a kid. I’m sorry you feel guilty about what happened. Okay, maybe I do, too, a little. But it’s not your fault, all right? Frankly, you didn’t stand a chance.”
I tried to remember how it had happened. I couldn’t. I hadn’t been that drunk, had I? One minute we’d been sitting on her foldout couch, talking and doing tequila shots, then we were tearing each other’s clothes off. She’d cried out when I’d entered her, and for a brief second I’d been afraid I’d hurt her. “It’s okay,” she’d said. Then it no longer mattered. I don’t remember folding out the bed.
“Do you want to forget it ever happened?” Nina said.
“I don’t know.” I shook my head. “No.”
“But you want me to tell you it’ll never happen again.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Four years later, I still didn’t.
I pulled into the visitors’ parking of Nina’s condominium building on the south side of the Lachine Canal, in the section of Montreal’s southwest borough known as Pointe-Saint-Charles, called simply The Point by most of its inhabitants. Despite the ongoing conversion of derelict factory buildings to condominiums, the area still had a way to go before it would shed its dilapidated nineteenth-century industrial look. It was not without a certain gritty charm, however.
“While you were in Scotland,” Nina said. She paused. I waited for her to finish the thought. “I don’t suppose you paid much attention to the news. The Montreal news, I mean.”
“Not much. Why?”
“If you had you might have read about a man named Charles Pearson Brandt, known as Chaz.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell. Who is he?” I turned the engine off. The sudden silence suggested that, in addition to wheel alignment, the Volvo’s exhaust system also needed attention.
“He was an independent financial advisor who ran a Ponzi scheme in Hudson and the West Island for fifteen years or so. About three years ago, though, he disappeared with his assistant-cum-accomplice-cum-girlfriend and fifty million or more of his clients’ money, although he’d probably scammed half again that amount. Small potatoes, I suppose, compared to the hundreds of millions Bernie Madoff stole, but a whack
of money none the less.”
“You’re right about that,” I said, wondering where she was headed.
“Brandt’s victims were mostly elderly: widows, widowers and retirees, referred to him by his other clients, who believed he was making them a shitload of money. I guess they’d never heard, or had forgotten, that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. The earnings statements he sent out were pure fiction. As if that wasn’t bad enough, toward the end he’d also started forging his clients’ signatures on mortgage and loan applications he had no intention of making payments on. He’s a sociopath, obviously, without a shred of empathy or compassion. He left nearly a hundred elderly people, people who trusted him, completely destitute.”
“There must be a reason you’re telling me this.”
“The man who assaulted Terry,” Nina said. “His name is Fredrick Strom. His mother was one of Brandt’s victims. She owns a small horse farm near Hudson, but she’s had to sell off all the stock. She probably won’t be able to hang on to the property much longer, either.”
I remembered the man’s words to Terry: You should be in prison, not … spending my mother’s money.
“Why did Strom assault Terry? What’s her relationship to Brandt?” I had the feeling I wasn’t going to like the answer.
“He’s her ex-husband,” Nina said. “She divorced him in absentia a year ago. She didn’t know anything about his Ponzi scheme. She’d been married to him for five years when he disappeared, but he’d been running the scam for years before she met him.”
“Obviously Strom doesn’t believe she didn’t know about her husband’s racket.”
“No,” Nina said. “Not just him, either. Pretty much all of Brandt’s victims think Terry was complicit—or at least knew about it. Some people, including a former fraud squad investigator, also believe she has a chunk of the money stashed away and that she knows where Chaz is hiding out.
“She feels terrible about what he did to those people. If she had any of the money, she’d have given it back. And if she knew where he was, she wouldn’t hesitate to tell the police. As it is, she lost her home in Hudson, her car, even the country house up north that had been in her family for sixty years. The bastard forged her and her brother’s signatures and mortgaged it to the hilt just a couple of months before he took off.
“She came close to losing her business and her savings, too, but because there’s no proof that she knew Brandt was a crook, they couldn’t seize anything she had before she married him. We’re hopeful she can get the country house back. We’ve filed suit against the bank Brandt used for not doing its due diligence when it approved the mortgage. Christ, they weren’t even good forgeries. We’re pretty sure there was an inside guy he was paying off at the bank.”
“We? Roche-Desjardins is representing Terry? Is that how you two got together again?”
“Not quite. We reconnected when her first husband, Rebecca’s father, died in a car accident two years after they were divorced. Around the time she met Brandt. We’d sort of kept in touch after you bailed on her, and she knew I worked for a law firm. She needed a lawyer to sort things out after Rebecca’s dad died and left her a small inheritance.”
“Why did you change your mind about telling me about her situation? Aren’t you violating privilege or something?”
“I haven’t told you anything you couldn’t find out for yourself from the Internet. She might be a little pissed I told you, but I figure it’s easier for me than for her. She’s had a difficult time, the last few years.”
“Do the police have any idea where Brandt might be?”
“Not a clue. One morning he just kissed Terry goodbye, something he hardly ever did, left for work, and dropped off the face of the earth. The police found his car at the train station in Vaudreuil. Other than that, nothing. He and his girlfriend simply vanished. It’s like they just ceased to exist.”
“They probably had their exit strategy in place for some time,” I said. “I would have. And with the kind of money they stole, you can buy yourself a pretty good new identity. I imagine they’re sipping rum punches on a beach in a country without extradition.”
“I suppose,” Nina said.
“Another possibility,” I said, “although perhaps a less likely one, is that they actually did cease to exist.”
“What do you mean?”
“Fifty million is serious money, and the people who trade in false identities tend not to be the most scrupulous types. Most probably have mob connections. It could be that Brandt and his girlfriend are sleeping with the fishes at the bottom of the St. Lawrence River in concrete-filled oil drums. It all depends on how smart and/or careful Brandt was. If that’s the case, his victims can forget about recovering any of the money.”
“Jesus, Riley.”
“I’m sure the police are considering all possibilities.”
“Yeah, I guess they are,” she said. “But as far as we know they’re operating on the assumption that he’s hiding out somewhere.” She looked out through the windshield at the entrance to her condominium building, then turned back to me. “I know it’s late, but would you like to come up? Have a drink or a cup of coffee?”
I hesitated, impaled on the horns of a three-pronged dilemma. On the one horn, I was afraid that if she wanted to take up where we’d left off four years before, I would have to reject her, and the last thing in life I wanted to do was hurt her. On the second horn, I was afraid that if she did want to rekindle the flames I’d tried so hard to quench, I would be powerless to resist: she was a beautiful and desirable woman to whom I was as intensely attracted as ever. On the third horn, though, what the hell difference did it make? She wasn’t my sister. A physical relationship with her wouldn’t be incestuous, even if it might feel like it was—and I could get over that in relatively short order. But I knew I wasn’t going to stay in Montreal and that she wasn’t going to leave. I didn’t want to restart something that was just going to end with one or both of us getting hurt.
“Well, do you?” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Look, I fucked up, all right. I let it happen. I knew we’d both be hurt, but I let it happen anyway.”
“Bullshit,” Nina said. “We were both drunk, but we were both adults. Okay, fine, we made a mistake. That doesn’t mean we’re going to make it again.” She smiled, lovely in the glow of the streetlights through the car windows. “For one thing, we aren’t drunk. Your virtue is safe.”
Such as it was.
“Anyway, there’s something I want to show you.”
Chapter 4
Her apartment was on the top floor of the four-story building, overlooking the strip of federal parkland flanking the canal, with a panoramic view of the misty nighttime cityscape. It was bigger than I remembered, a result of the expansion she’d mentioned. She’d purchased the adjacent two-bedroom apartment, knocked down the dividing walls, and ripped out the second kitchen and one of the extra bathrooms. The place still smelled of fresh construction. “I have a real bedroom now,” she said. It must have been some settlement.
“I’ll put on some coffee. Or would you prefer tequila?” She grinned. “Just kidding.”
“Coffee, I think.”
She started the coffee, then said, “Come with me.”
She took me into the new section of the condo and opened a door to a room lined with egg-crate sound insulation and crammed with equipment: a compact multi-track recording suite, a seventeen-inch MacBook Pro, an amplifier and speakers, a small forest of mic and music stands, and a variety of musical instruments. There were four guitars in floor stands: her old pink Fender
Telecaster, a Fender fretless bass, a Martin Dreadnought six string, and a Gibson electro-acoustic twelve-string, with an empty stand that I presumed was for her Stratocaster. There was also a full-sized electronic piano keyboard, a double keyboard synthesizer, an acryli
c electric violin, even a big old Roland accordion. Scattered throughout were various percussion instruments: tambourines, bongos, a xylophone, and a rack of tubular bells. There wasn’t space for a full drum kit—there was barely space for a cat, let alone to swing one—but a set of electronic drum pads was crammed into a corner.
“I wanted to build a small recording studio, but even though I put in a ton of sound insulation, I have to keep the volume down or the neighbours start to complain. We can’t rehearse here, but I can work and record demos. This is what I wanted to show you.” She pointed to a large corkboard filled with postcards. Twenty years’ worth, in fact.
“Jesus, Nina,” I said. “I didn’t know you were keeping them. Did you save them all?”
“As far as I know,” she said.
I’d started sending her postcards when I landed in Drumheller, Alberta, the first stop on my twenty-year odyssey. Thereafter, I sent one every month or so, although occasionally a couple of months would go by between them. I always sent one when I arrived someplace new. I rarely wrote more than a few lines, but I always wrote something, to show that I was thinking of her.
“I thought about using them to put together a book,” she said. “The Life of Riley.”
“Oh, please.”
“You think I’m weird for keeping them?”
“No. Of course not. It’s, well, sort of reassuring. When I first started sending them, I thought you’d probably just chuck them out or tear them up without ever reading them. You never told me you were keeping them.”
“Of course I kept them. I cried when the first one came, I missed you so much. But when they started coming more or less regularly, I knew you hadn’t forgotten me.”
“Never,” I said.
Nina took down one of the cards. “I used to keep them in a shoebox, but when I built this room, I got them out and pinned them up.”
She handed me the card. It was a photograph of the village of Waterville in Ireland, similar to the photograph on the cover of her album. I turned the card over and read what I’d written on the back: I think it’s going to rain again today. Huh?
The Evil That Men Do Page 3
