Arturas’s grin returned. Volchek laughed.
“You did well,” said Volchek as he picked up his phone and deleted the text message.
A successful con artist relies on a number of different skills. None of these skills is worth a damn if you can’t get people to trust you. Building trust with a potential mark is no different from building trust with a jury—the same shit applies. My persuader ran perfectly by destroying Goldstein; now I’d shown the FBI the door. I felt like I’d earned Volchek’s trust. The only thing left to do was exploit it.
“How do I know my daughter’s still alive?” I said.
The grin that Arturas wore slipped slowly away, and he set his lips firmly together.
“You can talk to her. You’ve earned it. Do not try to give her any signals. She is calm. Remember, she thinks the men with her are private security that you arranged because of a threat.”
Arturas dialed a number and pressed speaker on his cell phone. I couldn’t understand the conversation; he’d reverted to his native Russian. It sounded as if everything was cool. No raised voices on either side of the line. The voice on the other end was female, and Arturas’s features softened as he spoke. I thought the woman was likely to be his girlfriend. Arturas stopped talking and handed me the phone. I held it about three inches in front of my face.
“Amy, are you there?” I said.
Nothing.
“Dad?”
I tried desperately to keep the emotion from my voice.
“Yeah, it’s me. Are you okay?”
“I’m okay. What’s happening? Where are you and Mom? Elanya says I can’t … I … that I can’t go outside.”
Her voice sounded shaky. The speaker buzzed with Amy’s quick, full breaths. She was frightened. I guessed Elanya to be the woman Arturas had spoken to, maybe his girl. It made sense for the Bratva to have a female on hand to look after a girl of that age. A woman would have sounded more convincing to the school.
“Best do as the lady says, honey.”
1-646-695-8875.
“Why aren’t you here with me? I mean … we should be together, right?” said Amy, her voice rising tremulously at the final word.
That was Amy—smart, inquisitive, and recently equipped with a finely calibrated bullshit meter that all kids seem to develop at that age. She knew. She knew something wasn’t right, and it terrified her.
I cleared my throat, put my hand over the speaker, and blew out my cheeks. I couldn’t let Amy detect any fear in my voice, so I swallowed down that clawing, sour tightness in my throat.
“I love you so much, sweetie. I’m going to see you real soon. Don’t be scared. I won’t let anything happen to you. You’re my angel, remember?”
“Dad?”
1-646-695-8875.
“Yeah?”
“Is Mom there with you? Can I … please … I want to talk to her. I want you … I want you and Mom to come get me, please. I love you. Please come get me, Daddy … please…” She broke down completely, each shrill cry bringing her closer to hysterics. Her sobs grew fainter as the phone was taken from her.
Blinking away a single tear, I tried to call out to her, but the words were strangled. Arturas made a cutting motion across his neck. I’d had all the time he was prepared to give me, and he put his hand on the phone.
1-646-695-8875.
“Honey, it’s okay. Don’t cry. I love you, too,” I said, raising my voice, which had become thick with fear and anger.
Arturas hung up.
I wanted to kill them all. Right then, right there. It took every last reserve of willpower that I had left to stop myself. I couldn’t allow that to happen. Not yet. There were three of them. Even with my speed, at least one of them would have time to make that call. The call that would end Amy’s life. I tried to think of something else.
“Where’s my wife?”
“She doesn’t know Amy is missing, so far as we know,” said Volchek. “The school thinks we have her in protective custody. A fake security firm ID brought no questions from the school. Your wife is not expecting Amy home until tomorrow night. Your wife will not trouble you. Or me. If she does—she joins your daughter.”
I gently moved my neck from side to side to ease the pain that spread from my shoulders into my brain. Amy knew something bad was happening. She didn’t trust her captors. She didn’t buy their story. I had never known her to be so frightened. Last time she was scared was around eighteen months ago. Her English class had to do a public speaking event. Amy, being smart and funny, had been chosen to do a three-minute speech in front of the whole school. She sat in the dining room of our house, quietly sobbing over her speech. I read it; it was fine. The problem was standing up in front of hundreds of kids and delivering it. After a lot of encouragement, she read her speech to me and couldn’t even finish it; she froze, stumbled over her words, and then cried.
“I can’t do it. I’ll have to leave school. There’s, like, just no way.”
So I told her that I would give her the secret to becoming a great public speaker—I was a lawyer after all.
“Wiggle your toes.”
“That’s it?” she said.
“That’s it. Our brains somehow perform best when our bodies are occupied. That’s why so many people come up with a solution to a problem or have a great idea when they’re driving, or cooking, or just plain old sitting on the can. Nobody will be looking at your feet, and you won’t be thinking about how nervous you are—you’ll be thinking about your toes.”
She wiggled her toes and read her speech again, perfectly.
Funny thing about sitting at the dining table that night. I couldn’t remember the last time she had hugged me. I missed her speech the next day. Clean forgot about it; Jack and I had picked up an armed robbery case. When I got home late that night, Christine told me Amy’s delivery had been great, but she had cried all the way home from school because I hadn’t been there to see it.
I was through letting down my little girl.
1-646-695-8875 repeated over and over. I let it resound inside my head.
I would not forget that number. I saw it brightly lit in white, on the screen in front of me during the call. What could I do with it? I didn’t know at that moment.
But I had it.
That’s where Amy was, at an apartment or house or office at the other end of that cell phone number. I didn’t own a cell phone, hated them, so I memorized whatever phone numbers I needed. I knew that 646 was an area code. Specifically, an area code that covered Manhattan. That narrowed Amy’s location down. The island of Manhattan is more than thirteen miles long and less than two and a half miles wide. Around two million people live on the island and maybe another two to three million commute in and out every day. So yeah, I’d narrowed it down, all right.
I needed help to trace that cell number to a location, to find Amy, to get her out. There were two men I trusted with my life; the first was my best friend from childhood, Jimmy Fellini, who was now someone to be feared. The other person was a judge, Harry Ford—a man who had held my fate in his hands twice before and on both occasions had changed my life. In my thirty-six years on this planet, I had occupied two different worlds—the world of the hustler and the world of the lawyer—and the skills that my dad had taught me allowed me to flourish in both realms, because, in reality, they weren’t so very different after all.
I needed help from both men. I hadn’t yet figured out how to contact them or how much I would tell them.
My watch told me there were twenty-two hours left. Twenty-two hours to get Amy and double-cross the mob. The LCD display read six o’clock. The first session of night court was already under way. Barry had told me Judge Ford would preside over the graveyard shift, the second sitting of night court. That meant Harry was probably already in the building, reading the case files, readying himself for his night’s work. So much of my life had been changed by unforeseen circumstances, by chance, by luck. Was that fate? All I knew then was that I
had seven hours to get to Harry before he went into court. If I didn’t get to him before one a.m., I wouldn’t get to him at all.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The files sat open in front of me in the chambers office. I’d told Volchek I needed to read the case files to make sure there were no more surprises that could threaten his bail. Outside the chambers, in the reception room, Arturas and Volchek were whispering. I tried listening to their conversation, but I couldn’t really make it out. It was past seven, full dark outside and raining hard. Victor lay on the green couches in the outer office, relaxed. I thought of Harry—there was a huge risk in roping him into this. Harry was, after all, a judge. But to me he was more than that; he was a friend. If it weren’t for Harry, I would’ve stayed in the con game my whole life.
Hustling seemed like a cocaine rush for the first few years, and if the kick wasn’t addictive enough, the money sure got you hooked real fast. My targets were mostly insurance companies. Companies just like the one that had taken my dad’s health insurance premium every month and then let him die instead of paying out on the policy. Health care fraud played a small part in my operation; I mainly focused on motor accident fraud: a high-risk, high-reward game against some of the most devious minds you could imagine. Hustling an insurance company was like playing poker with Satan—his house, his rules. But I’d always won. By the time I’d quit, I had almost perfected the art of the whipper.
Pulling off a fraudulent claim was no mean feat. The trick was letting the insurance company think that they’d hustled you.
You start off with a fake law firm. Some might think that’s pretty difficult to set up, but that was the easy part. I kept an eye on the obituary columns and death notices, and I usually got a hit on a dead small-time lawyer once a month. Those kind of lawyers are usually high-cholesterol, high-alcohol, and highly stressed chain smokers. Every lawyer whose identity I’d stolen died from a heart attack. Lucky for me that booze and stress kills hundreds of lawyers every year. So I’d find a likely dead candidate and pay the grieving widow a visit. Flowers and a check were my weapons. I’d tell the widow that her husband represented me and won me a fortune in a case and because he was such a gentleman, he would never accept any gifts. I’d like to give the widow a few thousand bucks as a thank-you. After I handed over the cash, I would ask for a memento of my great legal hero—usually his practicing license, which I would have framed and put on my wall as a permanent reminder of the dearly departed.
The license was really all I needed. The New York State Bar Association is usually the last to know that one of their number had passed away. Lawyers don’t go to other lawyers’ funerals. If they did, they wouldn’t have time to go to court. So, one fake ID later, I would set up as the deceased lawyer and start my practice.
The practice involved more mechanical and auto-body repair work than legal enterprise. It all started with a crash. A cheap and easy-to-repair car would approach a stoplight just as it was about to turn red, and instead of going through it, the driver slammed on the brakes at just the right moment, causing the vehicle behind to ram into the back of the car. It’s not an easy task, and at the height of my career, I employed two precision drivers who masqueraded as various injured plaintiffs.
The rules of the road say you have to drive within a safe stopping distance, and by the time the vehicles hit, the light would be red. A no-brainer for an insurance claims handler. They would want the case settled quickly and cheaply. Enter the stupid plaintiff’s lawyer. My bogus firm would send a letter of claim to the driver at fault, who, in turn, would send it on to his insurer. Once communication was established, the insurance company needed to see bait. The bait was another letter to the insurance company or their defense lawyers about the accident, but this time there would be another letter in the envelope. This extra letter would be neatly crumpled and ink stained, as if it had jammed coming out of the printer and shouldn’t have been attached to the letter to the insurance company. The crumpled letter was from the bogus law firm to the bogus client, telling him that despite his mother’s operation/kid’s accident/burst water pipe, etc., on no account was he to settle early, as his preliminary medical report indicated his case was worth maybe two hundred grand.
The fake medical would be enclosed. This was the expensive part, as we had to rent a unit and set up a whole fake medical practice. That’s where Boo, ex-hooker turned massage therapist, came in. She would man a fake medical practice for a few weeks, answer the phones and let me know when the insurance investigators had done their due diligence by checking out the medical center. This was real easy to tell, as the only people who came to the medical center were investigators, the center not having any real patients at all. The lower the blouse that Boo wore, the quicker the due diligence happened. I’d met Boo on the street just after my nineteenth birthday. I came out of McGonagall’s Bar around midnight to find two fierce-looking guys bearing down on a tall, beautiful woman in a white dress and ketchup-red lipstick. She stood her ground in ten-inch pencil heels. One of the men held a pipe; the other swung his belt. I stepped in, drunk, of course, and managed to land a sloppy punch on the guy with the belt before his pal drove the pipe into the side of my head. When my vision cleared, Boo was standing over me, wearing flats and smoking a cigarette. The two guys lay on the ground beside me. One of them, the one who was screaming, had his belt around his neck and the heel of a stiletto buried in his knee. The other guy didn’t make a sound, and I saw the pipe sitting beside him with one end bent out of shape, wet and bloodied. Boo didn’t have a mark on her. She took me back to her apartment, cleaned me up, and put me to sleep on her couch.
Usually, within a week of either the insurance company or their law firm receiving the bogus letters, an investigator paid a visit to Boo’s fake medical practice to check it out. A couple of days after that, offers would arrive for amounts between twenty and fifty thousand dollars on the condition that the offer of settlement was accepted within fourteen days.
Needless to say, all my fake clients accepted the offers. The check came made out to the firm, for deduction of legal expenses, and the banks were only too happy to cash up for the young lawyer trying to resurrect his mentor’s old law firm. And that was my life. I was happy hitting back at the defense lawyers and the insurers that robbed my dad of his dignity and his life. But fate or luck, or whatever you want to call it, intervened when a nine-pound hammer and a split second’s misjudgment changed my life forever.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I tried concentrating on the files. This case had brought me here, and I had to learn everything I could about it. Part of my plan required me to find some kind of leverage with the Russians, and I felt confident I could find it in the files. My skin felt hot, and my eyes couldn’t seem to focus on anything for long. If I wasn’t fidgeting with the pages, I seemed to stare into nothing. I was panicking. At least I was aware that I was panicking. I controlled my breathing and concentrated on that single task of inhaling and exhaling.
Three files were of no use at all. Expert reports compiled by four different law firms: legal opinions and expert summaries on the case—none of which helped. Some experts said Volchek would be the worst witness they’d seen in their careers. I thought that to be a fairly reasonable assessment. All of the reports and expert opinions came to the same conclusion—Volchek was guilty.
The other four files contained the trial bundle. File one contained the charges and a transcript of Volchek’s interviews with NYPD. Volchek hadn’t answered a single question in any interview. The only other document of interest was a photocopy of the front page of the New York Times from April fifth, two years ago. A mug shot of Mario Geraldo, probably from an early arrest, and below the fold, a picture of Volchek being led from the court. The article focused on the murder and subsequent arrest of the leading light of the Russian Mafia.
File two largely consisted of photographs and maps. Mainly photos of the crime scene. The photos revealed an untidy apartment with a fat man
on the floor. The fat man had a bullet hole in his face, an inch below the left eye and a quarter inch from the nose. A pretty central shot. There was bound to be a medical examiner’s report somewhere in the papers, but I hadn’t found it yet. I didn’t need to read the report. This guy had the cause of death written all over his face. Momentarily, the pain in my neck eased, and I stretched my shoulders again to prolong the relief.
The fat man in the photos wore a grubby white vest and dark pants. He was barefoot. Mario Geraldo, the victim. His appearance didn’t give the impression of him being a typical victim. He looked like he came straight from the casting couch of the best Scorsese movies. There were four Italian crime families in New York. I couldn’t think of anyone by the name of Geraldo, but the name had some resonance that I couldn’t quite define yet.
I held the photo under the desk lamp in the chambers and peered closely at the fat man lying in the middle of the room. I tried to make out his tattoos in case they were old gang tats. None of the ink was territorial. I saw powder-burn marks around the entry wound. He’d been shot close; the gun almost at his face but not touching the skin. If the gun had been touching his head when it went off, the powder wouldn’t have burned such a wide area of skin and there would be a smaller, but more profound, circular burn from the hot mouth of the gun barrel.
I emptied all the photos from the file onto the desk and started piecing together the scene. There was a report from the CSI and a statement from the IO, a guy named Martinez. I didn’t want to read either one of these documents before I’d examined the photos and made up my own mind. If I read their reports, it might infect my interpretation of the scene. Not that there was a lot to interpret. The cops caught Little Benny in the apartment with the gun still hot on the floor. He confessed to the murder a day after he signed his plea bargain. He got twelve years, would be out in seven.
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