Silent Partner

by Stephen Frey

  “Of course not,” Liv agreed emphatically. “If you were black, you’d have to be an idiot to check that box.”

  “Why?” Angela was fairly certain she knew how Liv was going to respond, but she wanted to hear her say it.

  “Why?Come on, Angela. Don’t be silly.”

  “I want you to tell me.”

  “Because then everybody in the bank who’s involved in approving your loan knows you’re black.”

  “So?”

  “So? So maybe some white person who’s involved in the process lives in a nice neighborhood with good schools and safe streets. The same neighborhood the black man applying for the mortgage is trying to move his family to.” Liv chuckled grimly. “Just for kicks, let’s call our black man LeroyJefferson ,” she suggested. “Anyway, that white person in the bank sees from the application that Leroy is black, and that Leroy is about to move in next door. He figures Leroy will have at least fifteen children, throw wild parties, and probably sell heroin and crack as his primary source of income. Maybe even sell those drugs to the white man’s kids. So the white man steps in and denies the loan. He keeps the black man out.”

  “Well, I—”

  “With a name like Leroy Jefferson,” Liv interrupted, “every white guy out there will assume the applicant is black. But what if his name is John Smith? That name wouldn’t catch anybody’s attention. Everybody assumes John is white, and he slips into the neighborhood. But by identifying himself on the application as black, everybody knows what’s going on.” She pointed at Angela. “Or maybe it goes even deeper than that at some organizations. Maybe it isn’t just one person who happens to see a black man applying for a mortgage on a house in a traditionally white neighborhood and denies the application because he happens to live in that neighborhood. Maybe there’s a policy at the bank to deny black people loans in certain sections of cities or in certain M.S.A.’s. Maybe the policy isn’t written down anywhere, but everybody knows about it just the same. That kind of thing goes on in the residential real estate business. You read all the time about agents not showing houses in certain highly desirable sections of town to black families. A bank might do the same thing. A bank like Sumter.”

  Angela shrugged. “So the solution is simple, right? Don’t check the box.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Just one problem with that.”

  “What?”

  “If the applicant opts not to answer the race question on the form, the bank employee who accepts the application must do it instead. I’ll repeat that. That bank employeemust fill in the box if the applicant doesn’t. It’s required by law.”

  Liv shook her head in disbelief. “What?”

  “Yes. It says that right on the application.”

  “So they fill in the box just by sight?”

  “Or by reviewing the surname if the race isn’t clear by looking at the applicant, which, of course, can be a very inaccurate way of gathering data.”

  “My God.”

  Angela nodded. “Shocking, huh? Now that’s only for mortgages. When it comes to small business loans or credit cards, the race question isn’t on the application. In fact, with respect to small business loans and consumer credit, it’s illegal for a lending entity to ask what race you are.”

  “Why would the federal government have banks require blacks to identify themselves on a mortgage application? That bothers me.”

  “They do it so they can compile information. So they can monitor a bank’s performance on minority lending.”

  Liv raised her eyebrows, then nodded.

  “It’s actually intended to helpprevent the problem,” Angela continued.

  They were quiet for a while until Liv finally spoke up. “So what?” she asked bluntly.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “So the government compiles all this data. So what? What do they do with it?”

  “It really only comes into play when banks want to merge.”

  “How does it come into play then?”

  “The government can disallow a merger of two banks if one of them has a bad record regarding service to low-income individuals in a particular M.S.A., or a bad record of serving minorities.” Angela shook her head. “I should emphasize the word ‘might.’ The government hasn’t taken exception very often, despite the fact that some very big banks who have merged in the last few years have had atrocious records when it comes to serving low-income M.S.A.’s.”

  Liv sneered. “How would we know what a bank’s records indicate, anyway? I’m sure the government keeps all that data hidden away where the public can’t get at it.”

  “Not true. There’s a Web site where you can check the record of any bank that has to report.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep. Take the Web address down and check it out tomorrow when you get to your office. It’s fascinating to go to it and play around.”

  Liv picked up her pen. She’d put it down to take another swallow of wine.

  “The address iswww.ffiec.gov/cra .”

  “What does f-f-i-e-c stand for?” Liv asked.

  “Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council. That’s the agency tasked with monitoring the information banks are required to report. The F.F.I.E.C. is an umbrella group with reporting responsibility to regulatory bodies, including the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the FDIC, and a couple of others.”

  “So I can check out a bank’s record myself?”

  “Sure. Not that it makes much difference.”

  “But I don’t understand. If regulators go to all of that trouble to amass information, why don’t they act against banks with bad records more often? Banks like Sumter.”

  Angela sighed. “You said it yourself a few minutes ago.”

  “I did?”

  “You pointed out that a bank needs to know what someone’s income is so they can determine that person’s ability to repay a loan, that having that piece of information is only fair.”

  Liv rolled her eyes.

  “That’s the crux of the problem, Liv. Banks hide behind the fact that, while, by law, they are supposed to serve everyone in the communities in which they operate, they end up being monitored by the exact same regulators who monitor them for the quality of their loan portfolios as well. The FDIC guarantees everybody’s deposits up to $100,000 per bank. And you’d better believe politicians don’t want to have to answer to taxpayers about bank failures and bailouts, because it’s their constituents who pick up the tab. So when regulators and examiners start warning banks that they aren’t properly serving low-income communities, they whine about having to keep their loan portfolios clean. That being forced to lend to low-income borrowers will jeopardize the quality of their assets. That usually gets the regulators to back right off.”

  “So, essentially, all of this reporting doesn’t do any good.”

  Angela nodded. “Unfortunately not. By the way, when you look at Sumter’s record on the government Web site I told you about, you’ll notice that while the record isn’t good, there are others that are worse.”

  “How’s that possible?”

  “First of all, other banks really are that bad. Second, of the four categories in the bank-rating system with respect to what’s called the Community Reinvestment Act—the categories being outstanding, satisfactory, need for improvement, and substantial noncompliance—about 98 percent of all banks receive an outstanding or satisfactory rating.”

  Liv shook her head. “Please tell me you’re joking.”

  “No. I’m not.”

  “That’s incredible.”

  “It’s pathetic,” Angela agreed. “And it’s due in part to the old garbage in, garbage out problem.”

  “You mean banks lie to the government?”

  “We have a division with 140 people at Sumter dedicated to reporting under the Community Reinvestment Act. Are you telling me that one or two bank examiners, which is what the government sends to audit us, are going to
outsmart us?” She glanced around. “Throw on top of that the fact that most of the examiners ultimately want a job with the bank they’re regulating. The government doesn’t pay well, and the bank promises a nice salary when their gig with the government is up. So what’s an examiner’s incentive to be tough?”

  Liv sat back in her seat, no longer writing, astounded by what she had heard. “How do you know all of this?”

  Angela’s eyes narrowed. “Last year, an old friend of mine’s father was denied a loan he needed to purchase a small house in North Carolina, near where I grew up. He had the down payment and had held the same job for seven years, but five different banks refused to offer him a loan. So I did some research. What I’ve just told you is what I found out.”

  The old friend had been Sally Chambers. Her father, Willie, had managed to save what he thought was enough to buy a small home in a decent neighborhood and get himself out of the trailer park. But he hadn’t been able to get a mortgage. So she’d helped him, finally finding him a lender who agreed to provide him with a mortgage, but only after she’d traveled to Asheville personally and gone into the bank with him, threatening to bring discrimination charges against the institution if they didn’t reconsider.

  She’d never told Liv about Sally. She had often wanted to but never had. Maybe now was the time.

  Liv reached across the table and touched Angela’s hand. “What’s wrong, honey?”

  “What do you mean?” Angela asked.

  “There’s something on your mind. I can always tell.”

  Angela stared back at Liv. She wanted to talk about that night. To tell Liv about the guilt she’d endured for so many years. But then Liv might think less of her, or, worse, begin to wonder why they had become such good friends over the past few years. She might begin to wonder if Angela had darker motivations for being in this friendship.

  “Just some issues with my boss,” Angela answered. “Nothing I can’t handle.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  His orders were to stick to Angela Day like green on grass, because eventually she’d lead them to Jake Lawrence. Eventually, in the rich man’s dog-in-heat desire to see the woman again, the reclusive billionaire would put himself at risk, put himself in a vulnerable spot they could take advantage of. At least, that was the word from the source on the inside.

  In his coat pocket the man carried three photographs, three blurry head shots of an individual he’d been told was Jake Lawrence. He’d studied the photographs for hours, committing them to memory. His assignment was to kill anyone who showed up on Angela Day’s doorstep looking even remotely like the face in the photographs. But he was to take the ultimate action only if he wascertain he had a kill shot. That wasn’t going to be easy. Apparently there had been an “incident” on the Wyoming ranch, and the people who had retained his services didn’t want Lawrence so alarmed by a second failed attack that he went completely underground where no one could get to him for months, even years.

  The man had also received a stern warning not to arouse Angela Day’s suspicions, not to let her think for a moment that she was under surveillance.

  Of course,he snickered, chewing on a Milky Way bar. He was watching Tortelli’s from behind a minivan parked fifty yards down the street from the restaurant’s front door. That was always a component of the directive. “Do not arouse the mark’s suspicion.” Why did they even need to communicate that? He was a professional, trained by the world’s elite spy agency before deciding to make areal living, as opposed to a paltry government stipend, a stipend that didn’t come close to compensating him for the mortal danger they put him in time after time in countries so tiny and far from home they hardly seemed capable of causing any real damage to the homeland. He’d never had that zealous God-and-country attitude that drove most of his associates. He was driven by economics, so he’d taken a different tack and disappeared during a mission in South America, supposedly captured by insurgents and supposedly dead.

  Now, after several highly profitable private assignments, he ought to have had some jingle-juice in the bank, he thought to himself grimly, allowing the candy bar wrapper to flutter to the snow. But somehow he always seemed to spend everything within six months of the payoff.

  This time would be different, he promised himself. This time he was going to stash the big payday away, then retire. He’d been in this game too long. Sooner or later, probably sooner, he was going to slip up—it was inevitable in this line of work—and he didn’t want to think about what would happen then. He’d been on the delivery side of those torture sessions. He’d seen firsthand what it meant to endure incredible physical pain: all thirty-two teeth extracted one by one, back to front, with needle-nosed pliers; eyes slowly gouged out over two hours with a ballpoint pen; intestine pulled out inch by inch through an incision in the subject’s belly until it lay coiled on the floor like a garden hose.

  The door to Tortelli’s opened and the man leaned forward, one hand on the minivan’s passenger door side mirror as he watched Angela Day hug a woman in the dim light streaming down from a bulb above the front door, then head off toward her third-floor apartment a few blocks away. He waited until the other woman had climbed into a cab, then moved slowly out from behind the vehicle. He was careful to skirt the glow from the streetlights as he followed from a safe distance.

  Angela Day had seemed uneasy from the moment he’d begun his surveillance. Constantly checking over her shoulder, as if she felt his presence. Even taking the trouble to go through that second tavern and emerge from the back door. She was nervous all right, and that wasn’t good. It made things much more difficult. But he was confident she hadn’t seen him. He could turn into a ghost when he wanted to.

  The snow made things more difficult as he moved furtively through front yards. He was leaving a trail, which he wasn’t pleased about. But the temperature in Richmond was supposed to warm tomorrow—into the fifties—and the tracks would quickly melt, taking with them the proof of his presence. He probably didn’t have to follow her so closely. He probably could have waited for her down the street from her apartment, but he took pride in his work, and you never knew when or how someone like Jake Lawrence was going to make contact. He’d learned to expect the unexpected, and he couldn’t afford to screw up this assignment. The more he thought about it, the more he wanted this one to be his last. He’d take the million he’d been guaranteed, open a bar in Tahiti, and get out of this racket forever.

  He nimbly negotiated the waist-high picket fence surrounding the house across the street from Angela’s apartment, then knelt down behind a small white pine to watch her climb the building’s snowy steps to the top floor. She lived on the third story of a mansion that had been converted into floor-through apartments. Hers was a spacious two-bedroom place, and he’d rigged the door while she was away so that he could easily get inside once she was asleep. He was going to make certain Jake Lawrence didn’t slip quietly into her bed right under his nose.

  In the glow of an outside light, he watched her hesitate on the landing in front of her door. The next moment he was facedown on the ground, snow filling his eyes, nose, and mouth, wrists forced roughly behind his back. He was a powerful man and, based upon his inability to so much as move his legs, he was guessing that he had been attacked by at least three people, maybe even four. He cursed himself as they lifted him roughly to his feet, yanked a hood over his head, and informed him he would be killed instantly if he made so much as a sound. He nodded his assent, wondering how and when he would be executed. He’d had a bad feeling about this assignment right from the start.

  An hour later he was removed from whatever vehicle he’d been tossed into. With the musty hood still covering his face, and his wrists now tied together in front of him, he was led down into a basement. He assumed it was a basement from the room’s deep chill and mildew smell, and the way the muffled voices of his captors echoed off the walls.

  “Sit down,” said someone with a deep voice and a thick British accen
t.

  Strong hands pushed him down into a hard wooden chair. The hood was yanked from his head, and he blinked several times, the bright light from the single bulb burning his eyes. Two men towered over him.

  “Why were you following the woman?”

  The man glanced up into the intense eyes of the skinny bald captor who had asked the question. “What are you talking about?”

  “We know you were watching her.”

  The man’s eyes flashed to the other one, a brute wearing a leather jacket with a wool collar. “You’re out of your mind. I wasn’t watching anybody.”

  “Then what were you doing in the yard across the street from her apartment?” the Brit demanded.

  The man could see others in the background. There were at least four of them. They all appeared to be brandishing weapons. “Hanging Christmas ornaments.”

  “Christmas was six weeks ago.”

  “Okay, then I was taking them down.”

  The big one in the leather jacket grabbed him by the throat and squeezed, until his vision began to dim. But there was no point struggling. The men in the background were aiming their hardware directly at him. With just his wrists tied in front of him, he could have made short work of the one grabbing his throat—and probably the Brit too—but he wouldn’t have been able to dodge the bullets.

  “Talk, you stupid shit.”

  The man’s gaze dropped when the big one removed the hand from his throat, his eyes narrowing even as he gasped for precious air. There was a large scar on the back of the big one’s left wrist. It was the mark he’d been told to look for. He glanced up and saw a speck of reassurance in the expression.

  The Brit reached into the pocket of his black trousers for something, but the big one interrupted the move, grabbing his arm.

  “No, Billy. We’re not going to get anything out of him so quickly. Why don’t we let him think about it for a while? Let him stew on his situation.”

  The Brit hesitated. “All right,” he agreed quietly, motioning over his shoulder to the men behind them. “Take this guy away,” he ordered. “No food or water.”