by Lisa Black
“Which you violated the Constitution to do!” Ned moved closer to Anna. Maggie moved closer to Ned, without any idea what she would do if he threw a punch or, God forbid, the crowd joined in. They seemed ready, pushed to the brink of the abyss by fear and desperation.
“Oh, make up your mind—we were too far removed from investment banks to be able to legally loan to them, or we were supposed to control even the non-Fed-regulated banks so this wouldn’t happen in the first place?” This momentarily silenced him but she didn’t seem to notice. “And Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act says we can loan to anyone in unusual or exigent circumstances, and the circumstances couldn’t get much more exigent.”
“The Fed acted way outside its powers,” Ned insisted. The protesters were a mix of average colors, genders, and ages, but two men of greater than average musculature flanked Ned Swift. They looked ridiculous trying to stare down the petite Anna, but Maggie had no faith that the traditional disdain for picking on someone smaller would apply here. Surely the indignity of “beating up on a girl” didn’t seem to occur to males of the modern age.
Anna said, “Don’t fool yourself that the bailouts weren’t sanctioned. Your congressmen and -women knew exactly what the Fed and the Treasury were going to do and exactly why. They agreed it was necessary, behind closed doors. But put a camera in their face and then it’s all hand-wringing and outrage. They voted TARP down to look good in front of their constituents, until those constituents saw their pension plans shrink like plastic wrap under a hair dryer. Then Congress grew a pair and passed it. Reed, Pelosi, and Dodd asked the Fed to loan to GM and Chrysler—”
“Never mind GM,” a dumpling of a woman interrupted. “What does this have to do with the people here foreclosing on my house?”
“Forget it, Mrs. Davis,” Ned sneered. “Our government is only interested in helping their Wall Street pals.”
“Wall Street is Main Street,” Anna said, more vitalized than cowed by this confrontation. A true believer. “If credit is choked off growth goes down, unemployment goes up. Congress wanted to wait until the damage got huge, visible, and irreversible … and the money lent to those Wall Street pals, incidentally, was repaid with interest in six years, putting a profit of four hundred and seventy billion back in the government’s coffers.”
Ned said, “Only so the banks could get around the executive pay restrictions.”
“Does it matter why, as long as the US got its money back?”
“Pay restrictions should have been made permanent!”
“You want to nationalize the banks? Have private enterprise taken over by the government?” Anna all but purred. The crowd of staunch mideasterners turned to look at Ned.
“What? No!”
“That’s what it would take. It’s not practical otherwise—if conditions are too onerous the firms wouldn’t participate.”
“Fine,” Mrs. Davis said. “Can I have some of that four hundred billion?”
“Sorry,” Anna said, sounding genuinely regretful. Her color had not returned, the shock of Tyra’s death obviously still with her. And having to talk a mob out of a riot wouldn’t help, Maggie thought. Maggie needed an opening to break in, get Anna, and leave with her. She felt 95 percent sure that this incident represented only posturing by Ned Swift, but also 95 percent positive that his motives wouldn’t matter if the crowd decided to act.
But Anna kept talking. “The profit we make on loans like that and T-bills, once our operating expenses are deducted, goes to the Treasury to reduce the deficit.”
“I need my deficit reduced.” But the woman’s voice had calmed.
“I’m sorry the Fed couldn’t save the economy, and your economy, entirely. This wasn’t just the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression—it was the worst ever. We kept a recession from turning into a depression. It was the best we could do.”
Mrs. Davis patted the young woman’s arm, commiserating over a suddenly shared sorrow, and Ned Swift’s face reddened. Maggie calculated how many steps lay between her and her car. Between her and Anna and her car. Sweat trickled down her back, not entirely from the humidity.
Maggie said, “Anna—”
A young man popped up with a sarcastic tone. “One more time—why are we talking about what happened ten years ago when this year Sterling lied to me about my loan?”
“Ask Ned,” Anna said. “He brought it up.”
Swift opened his mouth as if his next words would be at earsplitting decibels, but nothing came out. He had exhausted his diatribe and gotten nowhere, and it made him angry. Angry men could turn violent within a nanosecond, something Maggie knew only too well.
“This isn’t helping,” Maggie said to the crowd. “She can’t help you. The woman you should be haranguing is already dead. Come on, Anna.” She laid a hand on the young woman’s rock-hard bicep and tugged, hoping the person she tried to rescue wouldn’t turn against her. That could happen, too.
But Anna slowly moved.
“Good luck with your lawsuit,” Maggie told the crowd, which seemed to soften enough of them that she got herself and Anna across the street and into the car without any epithets or thrown missiles. As she started the engine she watched Ned Swift on the opposite curb, his eyes narrowed against more than the sun. In front of his own people he had failed to skewer the enemy in a battle of wits, and now he looked as if he wanted to skewer Anna with a set of sharp knives. And Maggie, too. She drove away.
Chapter 18
Anna finally spoke. “Thanks for the ride. And—thanks.”
“No problem. Where were you going?”
“Lunch, I guess. I had to get out of the office. I couldn’t sit still and crunch numbers. No one there gives a crap about Joanna and even less about Tyra. And I keep seeing her lying there…. I should have gone out the back way but I didn’t think … why did you stop?”
“I thought they were going to lynch you.”
“So did I.”
“Have they ever gotten violent? Against people at Sterling?”
“Not that I know of. Ned seemed to be all talk. Until today.”
Maggie squinted. She had forgotten her sunglasses. “Where should I drop you?”
“Right here.” Anna pointed, and Maggie pulled into Totally Fresh!’s small parking lot. “Would you join me?”
She needed to prep for the Graham trial. She had evidence in the car. But Anna, despite the resolve she’d shown the mob, trembled from hairline to ankle. And Maggie felt hungry. Starving, actually.
Maggie left the scrapings and tapings in the car. She locked the vehicle; only she had the keys, the items were to be stored at room temperature anyway, and the odds of the killer or some random vehicle burglar breaking into the car to steal what had been found under Tyra Simmons’s nails had to be astronomical. Besides, the diner had only a small lot and she could see the car from the window. This should, she believed, constitute sufficient chain of custody. And she really was hungry.
The air-conditioning greeted them with a welcome blast of chill. The restaurant had room for only six tables along a spotless tile floor. The equally spotless kitchen stayed in full view, where hair-netted employees in sparkling white smocks assembled lunches for the healthy-food crowd. The peak lunch hour had faded yet customers still filled the order-line rails.
Don’t talk about the case, Maggie reminded herself as they waited in line for the nice-looking delivery boy from the day before to take their order. Don’t share any police information, don’t ask anything that could be construed as an interrogation, and don’t tell her you’re on the way back from Tyra’s autopsy.
“I had to get out of there,” Anna said again when they sat. “Two people dead in two days, and all they care about is market share. The … surrealism got to me and so … I decided that nothing counteracts surrealism like chicken and almonds with rice noodles.”
“Absolutely,” Maggie said, just to say something.
“Although I think mac and cheese would be
even more antisurreal. Maybe a good bloody hamburger with bacon and cheddar.”
“Comfort food.”
“Yeah.” It didn’t seem any amount of food could comfort Anna. She picked at her noodles.
Say something, Maggie ordered herself. Something that’s not about dead bodies of sweet girls. “Why does Ned blame Sterling’s habits on the Federal Reserve?”
Anna gave this some thought before answering. “Used to be, banks were careful about loaning because if the borrower didn’t pay the loan back, the bank lost. Problem was, sometimes banks assumed people were bad risks because they were the wrong color or gender or had had a period of low earnings. Plus they were the only place to go for a long-term loan so they could afford to be picky. Credit needed some democratization, and one White House after another, regardless of party, wanted to up home ownership in the United States. Home ownership makes citizens more stable, contributes to overall economic stability, etcetera. America’s always been more sentimental about home ownership than other countries. So presidents encouraged financial firms and especially their own Fannie and Freddie to make more loans—there’s nothing wrong with legitimate subprime lending—and investors got hooked on mortgage-backed securities. Meanwhile, the Internet and computerized credit scores made it easier to examine and approve borrowers, regardless of whether you had a branch in their city or not. Good for borrowers—now they could be picky, and go for better rates than the snooty bank. They could go to mortgage loan originators, like Sterling, and other firms that only did loans. I know what you’re thinking.”
Maggie had been thinking that she should have stuck to a more general topic. Like the weather. But at least Anna now ate her noodles instead of pushing them around on her recycled paper plate.
“Why aren’t I in Ned’s corner, wanting to publicly crucify Sterling? Practicality. The whole financial crisis started with Bear Stearns—they had a lot of mortgages, too much uncollateralized paper, and they tried to fix it. But once a run on them began, no one would lend to them even with T-bills—totally safe—as collateral.”
Maggie remembered to check on her—or rather, the city’s—car but the Taurus with the faded paint rested comfortably in the parking space, windows and doors intact, Tyra Simmons’s fingernail scrapings undisturbed.
“Bear wasn’t too big to fail; it was too interconnected … like a chain-link fence. Each wire is only one wire, but pull on it and the whole fence wobbles. It’s been ten years, but still this country can’t afford another wobble,” Anna said in deadly earnest. “I want the Sterling problem to be quietly and discreetly dealt with by merging with Bryan. That is my top priority here, not, unfortunately, helping those poor people whom Sterling cheated.”
“You think Sterling did?” Maggie asked, before she could stop herself.
Anna finished the last of her noodles. “I can’t prove it. Here’s the life of a regulator: Firms are supposed to open their books to us, so we can check that they’re meeting their capital requirements and that their reported incomes and outgoes are on track with what they’re reporting. Simple, right? Except we’re getting the information from the very people we’re regulating. I guess it’s like a criminal investigation. You can’t open up a suspect’s head and look inside. You can only find out what they’re willing to tell you. And if it’s like, oh yeah, I stole that car, they’re sure as hell not going to tell you. Lauren has a habit of waving away my requests as ‘confidential’ and Joanna simply ignored me. Jeremy continually gave me printouts that were outdated. The guy who had them before me … not a bad guy, but he had short-timers’ syndrome, ready to retire and his brain had already chartered a fishing boat in the Keys. Definitely not about to challenge anything or anyone in any real way.”
“You think he let stuff go?”
“I think he let a lot go. Their capital requirements had been underserved for years before I got there.”
“So you’re—”
“Hamstrung. All we can hope is that the firm is either sloppy, so that you find the important stuff anyway, or that they’re actually honest and aren’t doing anything bad. And a little courtesy is great, too. Most firms do a great job of faking their complete cooperation, but some are stupid enough to be dismissive or hostile. In Fannie and Freddie’s heyday they treated their regulators like absolute dirt, because they had so much pull on the Hill they could get away with it. But our power to interfere in business dealings is limited—by design. We have a capitalistic society and it’s been working pretty darn well for over two hundred years.”
“What can you do?”
“Write my report as best I can. Point out what else I need to see and that requests for same have been denied. Complain to my superiors. Same old same old. Supervisors promise to look into it, maybe even report to the relevant congressional subcommittee, people murmur, political parties make more contributions, resolutions get adjusted, parties make more contributions, and somehow it all gets lost in the shuffle. You make noise, you eventually get drowned out. You make too much noise, you get transferred or fired. In this day and age of short attention spans, contributions to parties and super PACs are like water in a watering can. It keeps washing the harsh parts of the legislation away until the cliff of legal versus illegal has been eroded into a gentle slope. Dodd-Frank was enacted years ago, but it’s still being rewritten. Congress wants to gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and fund it through congressional committee instead of directly through the Fed. Funding is everything. Once they hold those purse strings they can bring even a bulldog to heel. That’s how Fannie and Freddie got away with so much for so long.”
“Wow.” Maggie had only finished half her salad, so fascinated by this portrait. “That really sucks.”
“Yeah … I guess it’s like your job. You battle the crime, but you can never make it stop. All you can do is keep trying to fight the good fight. You can’t change anyone’s integrity but your own.”
Hardly a new thought, but it struck Maggie with a force she didn’t expect. Was that what she was doing? Fighting a good fight? Jack had killed people and she had looked the other way. She had killed someone and looked the other way. What the hell did that say about her integrity?
Just when she began to think she had coped, she had put all past events in a box in her head where they could stay quiet and stop screwing with her sense of the world, they burst out with teeth bared and claws flying.
“You okay?” Anna said with concern. “You suddenly look … um …”
“Yeah, fine. I thought of something, that’s all,” Maggie lied, as she had been lying to everyone around her for thirty-seven days. She had gotten good at it. “Thanks for explaining all that, though. I find it interesting.”
“Happy to. Usually I bore people to death.”
Maggie smiled but her stomach churned, now rejecting the delicious lunch. At least Anna looked better. Her color had returned and the trembling was gone.
Standing, Anna said, “Thanks for the physical and mental rescue, too. We’ll have to do lunch again. Next up in the series of lectures by Anna Hernandez: derivatives and what they mean to you.”
“I look forward to it.”
They emerged into the hottest part of the day, reflected sunbeams wafting up from the city’s asphalt. Despite the temperature Anna wanted to walk back to the office and Maggie didn’t argue; she knew how a brisk stride with no company save your own could help to clear one’s head. But as she unlocked the driver’s door, Anna standing only a foot away, the rear driver’s-side window exploded into a thousand tiny shards of glass.
For a split second Maggie could only stare, her mind dumbly wondering why a pane of glass would suddenly decide to self-destruct, and hope that none of the shards now piercing her forearms would find their way into her eyes. Or Anna’s.
Then she let go of her keys, grabbed Anna Hernandez, and shuffled them both into a crouch behind the rear bumper before she even registered the tuft of stuffing coming from the rear driver’s-side
headrest inside the shattered window. The shot had come from the car’s ten o’clock. She needed to get the bulky metal object in between her and Anna and the shooter.
Elsewhere on the street, excited voices raised, brakes squealed, other tires accelerated in fear or escape. The two women clutched each other. No more shots came, but Maggie didn’t intend to take any chances. She dialed 911 with one trembling thumb and kept Anna huddled behind the car until the cavalry arrived.
Chapter 19
“Not even a make?” Riley asked her in disbelief.
“I didn’t even turn and look,” Maggie said, embarrassed and miserable. She sat in the back of an ambulance in the Totally Fresh! parking lot, more for protective cover than out of medical need. “I grabbed Anna and ducked behind the bumper. It could be anything from a pickup to a bicycle for all I know. He might have been on foot, though that sounds awfully risky.”
The detective said, “All right, don’t beat yourself up about it.” But it sounded like a suggestion to beat herself up about it, at least a little.
Jack hadn’t said a word yet. He watched the EMT pick the last sliver of glass out of her left elbow and gazed pointedly at the small pile of bloody gauze accumulating in the biohazard trash can. None of the cuts were deep, but they were legion and included a few in her chin. Clothing had protected the rest of her body. Anna had fared only slightly better. As if the poor girl hadn’t already been through enough for one day, Maggie thought.
Riley said, “Patrol grabbed what passersby they could corral and a few helpful drivers stuck around. With luck they’ll come up with something.”
Jack interrupted, as if he had held it back as long as he could, “I told you to be careful.”
“What?”
