Need You Now

by James Grippando

  “Don’t!” shouted Collins.

  Robledo took aim at his forehead.

  “Please, I can fix this!”

  Robledo hesitated, his finger poised to pull the trigger. He hadn’t come to listen, but there was poetry in watching a scumbag beg for his life.

  “I can get the money back for you,” said Collins. “And more.”

  “How stupid do you think I am?”

  “Your funds never went to Cushman.”

  “What?”

  “You’re right,” said Collins. “Cushman is a Ponzi scheme. I figured that out eight, maybe ten months ago. But that’s good news for you.”

  Robledo took sharper aim.

  “No, please! Listen to me. I was one of Cushman’s biggest feeders for three years. After a while, it was obvious to me that he was a fraud, but here’s the thing,” he said with a nervous chuckle. “My clients didn’t want to hear it. I think half of them even knew it was smoke and mirrors, but nobody wanted the bubble to burst. So I kept taking their money, and I kept telling them that I was investing it with Cushman. But I lied. I haven’t sent money to Cushman in over six months.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “It’s the truth, Manu. The last three quarterly statements I sent out showing investments with Cushman were all fakes. And here’s the best part. When Cushman blows up-which is right around the corner-all my clients will think they lost their money. They have no idea I’ve been stashing it away.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “It’s absolutely true! Not a single penny of what I funneled through BOS/Singapore ever reached Cushman. It’s all safe in offshore accounts. It won’t go down when he goes down. Get it? When Cushman blows up, the big winner is me .”

  The scheme made too much sense to have been made up on the spot by a coward staring down the barrel of a gun. Robledo asked, “How much are we talking about?”

  “Ten figures. Almost a third of that is yours.”

  “A third?” he said, scoffing. “Wrong, my friend. All of it is mine.”

  Collins stared back at the gun, which was still aimed at his face. “Let’s talk,” he said. “All I have to do is get my banker to unwind everything, and then everybody will take his fair share.”

  “What banker?”

  “Put the gun down so we can talk.”

  “What banker? ”

  “Please, I’m begging you. Don’t throw this opportunity away. Don’t pull that trigger.”

  R obledo’s encrypted telephone line rang. It was the weekly call he dreaded. The one that made him wish he had ignored Collins’ pleas and pulled the trigger. It was from Ciudad del Este-from his investors. Robledo swallowed his anger and answered with the respect that was due his chief funder.

  “I’m very sorry, Doctor ,” he said, using the Spanish pronunciation. The “doctor” wasn’t a medical doctor. He claimed to hold a doctor en derecho , though Robledo had never verified his law degree.

  “Sorry for what, Manu?”

  “I need a little more time.”

  “Time has run out.”

  “Please. I have upped the pressure. I should see results soon.”

  “Upped the pressure how?”

  Robledo paused, not sure if he should even mention Patrick Lloyd. True, he had threatened the boyfriend with the intent of doubling up the pressure on Lilly, but somehow Patrick had found the church, and Robledo wasn’t convinced that his overly affected accent had kept Patrick from realizing that the Reverend Robledo and the gunman in the back of the SUV were one and the same. He confined his remarks to Lilly.

  “I made it clear to her today: no more stalling, or I put a bullet in her head.”

  There was silence, then a chilling reply: “Don’t make me call you again, Manu.”

  “No, of course not, Doctor .”

  More silence, and then a final warning. “If I have to make just one more phone call, then take my advice, Manu. Put that bullet in your own head. It will be much more pleasant for you that way.”

  The call ended, but Robledo continued to hold the phone to his ear, absorbing the threat, even after his funder had disconnected.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, thinking aloud, “I have plenty of bullets.”

  25

  I was starving, and the steep climb up the back staircase to Evan’s second-story apartment made me even hungrier. We were in the heart of Chinatown, and I smelled moo goo gai pan and sweet-and-sour something or other wafting up from the busy restaurant directly below.

  “Smells good,” I said.

  “For about an hour it does,” he said, leading me up the narrow stairway. “The day after I moved in I got so nauseous that I thought I was going to have to move out. But the rent’s cheap, and when your research takes you to places as far away as Singapore, money is definitely an issue. After about six weeks, I hardly even noticed the smell anymore.”

  Evan was breathing heavily as we reached the landing at the top of the stairs. A small window overlooked the Dumpsters in the alley. A chain-link gate extended the full width and height of the dimly lit hallway, blocking all access, and behind the gate was a heavy metal door. It was painted black, and the only way to get to it was through the gate, which was padlocked. Evan unlocked it, then used another key to unlock the deadbolt on the door.

  “Is the neighborhood really that bad?” I asked.

  “It is when you have the road map to two billion dollars.”

  Two days earlier a remark like that would have sounded utterly loony to me. What a difference two days make.

  Evan locked the gate behind us and pushed open the door. I noticed two peepholes, one high and one low. It struck me as odd, and Evan picked up on my curiosity.

  “You can tell a lot from a person’s shoes,” he said. “If somebody from the Salvation Army comes knocking on your door wearing a pair of A. Testoni calfskin boots that set him back at least a G, then… well, maybe he’s not from the Salvation Army.”

  He directed me inside, closed the door behind us, and secured the deadbolt. The remark about the expensive Italian footwear begged for a follow-up: Did he think the Mafia was after him? But before I could go there, he switched on a lamp, which literally threw a whole new light on things.

  “Holy cow,” I said, taking it all in.

  A tiny kitchen was to the left, behind a half-closed curtain, and the twin-size mattress on the floor told me that it doubled as his bedroom. The rest of his one-room apartment was the interesting part. An armchair, the television, his desktop computer, and few other pieces of furniture had been pushed to the center of the room so that there was nothing against the walls. The lone window had been covered over with brown butcher paper. Scores of unframed photographs dotted the walls from floor to ceiling, each connected by a thick hand-drawn line. The lines were in various colors-red, blue, green, and yellow-and sometimes more than one colored line connected one photograph to another. Where there were no photographs or colored lines, someone had gone to work with a thick black Sharpie. It was one long narrative, much of it boxed or circled to contain separate thoughts. Hand-drawn arrows directed the flow from left to right, from the kitchen, past the window, around the door, and then back to the kitchen-a 360-degree flowchart of some sort.

  “Here’s my analysis,” he said.

  “It looks like hieroglyphics.”

  “This is a working draft.”

  I noticed a number of red flags-literally, flags drawn in red marker on the walls. I approached one at random. “What are these for?” I asked.

  The question seemed to engage him. “There are thirty-eight in all,” he said. “These are all the red flags I pointed out to the SEC-each one sufficient in and of itself to prove that Cushman was running a Ponzi scheme.”

  I looked closer at the one in front of me. It appeared to have something to do with Cushman’s purported trading strategy-that is, a bogus explanation of trades he had never actually made.

  “Cushman claimed that his success was base
d on trades of S &P 100 Index Options,” said Evan. “A simple call to the Chicago Board of Options Exchange would have confirmed that the total S &P 100 Index Options that Cushman claimed to acquire at any point in time exceeded the total open interest in S &P 100 contracts at the stated strike price.”

  I knew what Evan meant, but there was an even simpler way to think of it. “So basically Cushman claimed he was buying filet mignon when anyone with second-grade arithmetic skills could plainly see that the only thing left on the menu was ground chuck.”

  “Well put,” said Evan. “But unfortunately the rigors of second-grade addition and subtraction are beyond the SEC.”

  A photograph near the window beckoned, and my shadow moved across the wall as I approached.

  “This is the shot you took of Lilly and me in Singapore,” I said.

  Two lines, one yellow and one green, fed into our photograph. I followed the yellow one backward, right to left, which led me to Gerry Collins. The green line, extended backward, led to a question mark.

  Evan said, “I haven’t quite figured out how you teamed up with Lilly Scanlon.”

  Apparently, he knew nothing about Andie Henning and the FBI, and I wasn’t there to educate him. My focus turned to the red line flowing out of the photograph of Gerry Collins, which traced back to another photograph. This one gave me chills. It had been a long time since I’d seen my father, but I recognized him instantly.

  “Why is the line from Tony Martin to Gerry Collins red?” I asked.

  “Why do you think?”

  My gaze swept the room. Again, the red flags caught my attention. The line between Collins and my father was the only red one in the entire flowchart, and apart from those flags, there was not another red mark on the walls. Evan was still waiting, but I could only guess why.

  “Because he killed Collins?”

  “No,” said Evan. “Because it’s sort of a red flag, at least for me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t believe for one minute that he did it.”

  I turned and faced him. I liked the way he thought. “How do you know Tony Martin?” I asked.

  “You mean Tony Mandretti?”

  I didn’t pretend to be surprised, but his knowing that Tony Martin was Tony Mandretti did not equate to knowing that Tony Mandretti was my father. I had to play it cool.

  “Okay,” I said, “how do you know Tony Mandretti?”

  He removed his coat and hung it behind the door. A cheap brown suit and orange dress shirt make it difficult to come across as serious, but somehow Evan was pulling it off. He stepped closer, looked me in the eye.

  “I’m alive today, thanks to Tony.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I’m the guy Tony Mandretti was supposed to whack.”

  I had not seen that coming, and my expression must have shown it. I was face-to-face with the living and walking confirmation of the story my mother had shared with me-that my father had turned against the Santucci family after refusing a direct order to carry out a mob-style hit.

  “I did some bookkeeping for the Santucci family when I was just a neophyte accountant. They thought I was skimming, and those guys have no sense of humor at all when it comes to money. I owe Tony my life. That’s why I shared my report with him.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “I can never pay him back for what he did, but I thought a fifty-fifty split on the biggest whistle-blower payout in the history of Wall Street would be a nice gesture.”

  “So it was you and Tony who presented the report to the SEC?”

  “Actually, it was just Tony.”

  “Why just Tony?”

  He made a noise like a chicken.

  “You were scared?” I asked.

  “Hell, yes. Take a look at these red flags,” he said, pointing. “The money from Europe, especially. Billions and billions of dollars came through offshore accounts. Now, I suppose there are legitimate reasons to have an offshore account. But any moron would know that a good chunk of that belongs to the Mafia, drug lords, or worse. These are people who would think nothing of rubbing out a quant like me who runs to the SEC screaming Ponzi scheme.”

  “Tony wasn’t scared?”

  Evan scoffed. “Tony Martin, Tony Mandretti. Doesn’t matter what his name is. The guy’s a total ballbuster.”

  The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. I was thinking of Connie.

  “Anyway,” said Evan, “you probably see my point. Tony put his own life at risk and gave up everything he had-including his family-because he drew a firm line in the sand. He refused to be a triggerman, even if the hit was on a worthless quant. That makes it hard for me to believe that he killed Gerry Collins, nearly tearing his head off in the process, over money.”

  It was exactly what I’d been saying all along. “I definitely see your point,” I said.

  “Good. So tell me, Patrick. How do you know Tony Mandretti?”

  I hesitated. Evan apparently didn’t know that I was Tony Mandretti’s son, but surely he suspected it. Strongly suspected it. There was no better explanation for the way he’d been following me around and snapping photographs.

  Evan said, “I’ve more than kept my part of the deal.”

  He meant the report on the wall, which he’d shared with me on the condition that I give something in return. He’d already filled a major hole. I had the feeling there were others he could fill. His rapport with Connie had been almost instantaneous, and now that I’d spent time with him, I trusted the guy, too.

  “You’ve been very helpful,” I said.

  And then I told him.

  26

  T he New York Stock Exchange was closed, the trading day was over, but Joe Barber gave me forty-five minutes to meet him in his midtown office-or I was fired. I left evan’s apartment and immediately called connie.

  “I’m headed over to BOS,” I told her.

  “Can’t you lie low, at least for a few days? I just snuck you out of the ER to keep the Santucci family from putting a bullet in your head.”

  “That whole rescue was based on bad information from Lilly. What’s happening has nothing to do with the Santuccis. I’m sure of it, now that I’ve talked to Evan.”

  I quickly told her who Evan Hunt really was, then explained my thinking. “He invested countless hours to expose Cushman’s fraud, and he’s put in even more time tracking the money. He’s like an encyclopedia, and in all the information he’s gathered, the only place the Santucci family shows up is when he and Dad first met-when Dad was still Tony Mandretti.”

  “He’s a quant, not a private investigator.”

  “He’s definitely right about one thing: if last night in Battery Park had been a hit on Peter Mandretti ordered by the Santucci family, I’d be dead now. The guy who attacked me didn’t say a single word to suggest that he knew my real name.”

  “But Lilly was explicit when she called and asked me to help get you out of the ER: the Santuccis have figured out that you are Peter Mandretti.”

  “Someone injected the mob into the equation to drive a wedge between Lilly and me. To make her stop trusting me. Or to make her trust them.”

  “And you think that’s Robledo?”

  “No. Robledo is only a part of the big picture.”

  “According to Evan, you mean?”

  “Connie, the man is a quant. You met him. He processes information better than a computer. More important, Dad trusted him. They teamed up on the Cushman report.”

  Her response came with a sigh of resignation. “You told him, didn’t you?”

  I took her meaning: the fact that I was Tony Mandretti’s son.

  “Yes. We need him. He doesn’t think Dad killed Gerry Collins, either. Even better, I think he can help us prove it.”

  She didn’t shout, didn’t even groan. My final point-that Dad had put his trust in Evan-seemed to have been the clincher.

  “I need to get back to the bank,” I said. “Not just because the head of
private banking says so. It’s the only way to find out what’s really going on.”

  She realized there was no changing my mind. “Be careful,” she said.

  I assured her that I would try.

  G oing back to BOS presented a host of concerns, ranging from the questions that corporate security had raised about my identity to the fact that I really hadn’t done squat on the job since my return from Singapore-under “Patrick Lloyd” or any other name. I addressed the one problem that I could actually fix: my appearance. The combination of zoo blankets in Connie’s van and the Chinese restaurant below Evan’s apartment had me smelling like a snow monkey smothered in Szechuan sauce. Borrowing one of Evan’s orange dress shirts and Mickey Mouse ties-he had a closet full-was not going to cut it. My apartment was roughly on the way, and the cabdriver waited at the curb as I ran upstairs and did a five-minute Wall Street makeover. I reached the BOS/America executive suite with all of thirty seconds to spare. Barber’s assistant ushered me into his office, where I was hit with an immediate surprise.

  “Lilly?” I said.

  She was seated in the armchair facing Barber’s desk. “Yes,” she said coolly. “Lilly is my name. Always has been.”

  The “always has been” remark was a clear indication of her anger toward me for lying about my past. I had sensed some of that in the ER, but it seemed to have escalated since the morning.

  “Have a seat,” said Barber.

  I took the leather armchair beside Lilly. She was no longer shooting daggers at me; she avoided eye contact altogether.

  We waited in silence as Barber flipped through a document. There was no telling what it contained, but I suspected it had nothing to do with our meeting-that a man who enjoyed his power and position was simply making me sit, stew, and speculate about what kind of trouble I was in. It would have been easy to freak. Barber had a naturally hard look, and nothing about his office suggested that he was a man of mercy and compassion. Not a single photograph of his wife or kids anywhere. It was more of a shrine to his own achievements, a collection of plaques, honorary degrees, and photographs of him with everyone from the late Charlton Heston to three past presidents. A glass-encased issue of Fortune with his picture on the cover hung on the wall directly over his Bloomberg terminal.