Mortal Bonds

by Michael Sears

  “All stolen from the Hurricane Relief?”

  “No, dude. None of it. That’s just where he parked it. It was like his rinse cycle. The money was siphoned off from all the investors. Everybody chipped in, whether they wanted to or not.”

  “Do I denote a touch of admiration in your voice?”

  “It’s a work of art. I cannot imagine how many hours the guy must have spent on this. And from what I can tell, it is all very gone. Poof.”

  “Spent?”

  “No. I can see the transfers to his checking accounts. Those are friggin’ huge. But, no, this is just gone. Vanished.”

  “A billion is still a lot of money.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “You said there were two areas.”

  “This is good. Money comes in from different banks all over Central and South America. The money then goes into one account. Then a few days later, the account is empty. No transfer, no record of an override, no nada. A month or so goes by and it happens again, or, even weirder, it happens in reverse.”

  “I know what that is.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yeah, an interested party explained it to me the other day. Von Becker was washing cash at one end and paying off in bearer bonds at the other. This guy told me there was a good chunk missing somewhere. How much did you find?”

  “You mean how much did I not find. Just north of one hundred mil.”

  “Ah, you have done well, grasshopper.”

  “Grasshopper?”

  “Before your time,” I said, feeling more like Methuselah than ever. “Are you ready for the bonus question?” I was sure I knew the answer.

  “Do I get a bonus?”

  “You’ve already earned a bonus. But before you rush off to practice your best Euro pickup lines on the women of the continent, answer me this. In all those lists of banks, does the name of one Swiss private bank keep recurring?”

  “What’s the name?”

  “Doerflinger Freres and Company. Et Cie.” Castillo had given it to me.

  I heard Spud, as I still thought of him, furiously tapping at the keys of his laptop.

  “Doerflinger?” he said.

  Aha. “Yes. What have you got?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “As in nada. Zip.”

  Shit!

  | 20 |

  The New York Post had made William Von Becker’s mistress sound like a combination of Greta Garbo and a sexual gymnast—a mysterious recluse, brought up in a commune in northern Nevada where children were encouraged to experiment with sex as soon as they could walk. Mistletoe Evans had been married at thirteen to a sixty-year-old man. When she ran away six months later, it was her testimony that put the commune leaders in jail. The rest of the clan—including her parents—had disappeared into the ghost towns and dust-blown trailer parks that cling to the edges of civilization in the western desert. Mistletoe had been adopted by an aunt and brought to live in New York City. The media moved on.

  Until Mistletoe became famous again.

  This time, however, she had refused to speak to any of the hordes of reporters, which didn’t stop them from writing about her, though it did keep them from actually reporting anything. She opted to remain a mystery.

  Mistletoe was still a mystery—the mystery being why a sixty-some-year-old man with access to more money than an African dictator would choose as his mistress a thirty-something beanpole with no discernible hips or breasts, and hair that would have embarrassed a scarecrow.

  At my knock, she answered the door and meekly bowed backward, allowing, if not exactly inviting, me to enter. I stepped over the threshold and tried not to react to the strong odor of cat.

  “Thanks for agreeing to see me, Ms. Evans.” Once I had convinced her I was an investigator and not a reporter, she had been more than willing to meet with me. She did insist on two things: that we meet at her apartment—a rambling three-bedroom on Park Avenue with twelve-foot ceilings and a marble foyer—and that there be no tape recorders.

  “They lie,” she had said.

  An orange-striped cat wound its way between my ankles; a gray looked up from its perch on the back of the couch, as though considering whether or not to get up and greet me as well. It decided not to and turned its head away.

  “Umhm. Umhm.” The woman was looking around her living room distractedly. “Can I get you something to drink? I have cold chai tea. Very calming. I tend to drink a lot of it. I guess that says something, doesn’t it?” She gave a sharp laugh. “Or water. I have water. I have a purifier. A filter, really. But I change the filter. You have to change the filter, or the water stops tasting good. Do you have a filter, Mr. Scabbard?”

  She looked up at me for the first time and I saw a remarkably open face. Not pretty, but arresting. Interested. A nice face. She wore no jewelry or makeup, just a black T-shirt, comfortable-looking jeans, and nothing on her feet. And a Mets cap on backward. Already I didn’t like her.

  “Stafford,” I said, correcting her automatically. “Actually, Jason is fine. No. No, I don’t have a filter. Maybe I should get one.”

  The living room furnishings were all older, comfortable antiques, and except for a fine dusting of cat hair, they all looked to be beautifully maintained. The giant flat-screen television that dominated one wall was the only modern anachronism.

  “Stafford, yes, yes. I have a good visual memory, but sometimes things don’t come out right when I say them. It’s better when I write them down. Stafford. Stafford. Does that ever happen to you?” She was like an enthusiastic teenager: she had a very definite, direct way of speaking, but she changed lanes too often without signaling. “Your son would benefit from a water filter, I am sure.”

  “How do you know about my son?”

  “Google.”

  Of course. Even Mets fans and weird Upper East Side cat ladies knew how to Google.

  “Well, yes, you may be right. I’ll look into getting a water filter.”

  She smiled happily, having accomplished a little something in our brief acquaintance. “Autism is an environmental disease, like breast cancer and asthma, so you need to do all you can to control his environment. Does he speak? Does he communicate?”

  He did communicate. Just not this week. I might have challenged her blithe acceptance of the environmental explanation for autism but I had found that those who believed in it had zero tolerance for those of us who had accepted the single overwhelming, undeniable fact in all autism research: nobody knows.

  “Ms. Evans, could we talk a bit about William Von Becker?”

  “I see. You don’t want to talk about your son. I’m sorry. I sometimes lose my sense of boundaries. That’s what my therapist says. She says it’s because of the way I was brought up. I must practice my boundaries, but I so rarely go out and I don’t get many visitors. So, when do I get to practice?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Hmm. My therapist said it was okay to talk to you, but that you wouldn’t answer any of my questions. I hope she’s wrong. Now, sit down here.” She gestured toward a sagging armchair. “I brushed the cat hairs away today, just for you.”

  I sat. She had missed a few.

  She sat on the couch, facing me. A long-haired, caramel-colored cat immediately leapt up beside her and accepted a single long caress from ears to tail. It leapt down again, and left the room.

  “My aunt kept cats,” she said, as though carrying on the tradition was both a duty and a pleasure. Then she made another of her conversational leaps. “Who do you think killed him? I think it was the family, but there were probably a lot of people who wanted him dead.” She rattled this off as though discussing dinner.

  When I had first heard that Von Becker was found dead in his cell, I had immediately assumed that he’d been murdered. That thought lasted as long as it
took the Bloomberg news announcer to read the rest of the sentence “. . . an apparent suicide.”

  “You know, Ms. Evans, you’re not at all what I expected.”

  “Call me Missy. People stumble over my real name, as though they don’t believe it, so I tell them to call me Missy.”

  “I can call you Mistletoe, if you’d prefer. Mistletoe. See, no stumbling.”

  She smiled and became almost pretty for a moment. “You went to prison, too. I read about that. Was it really bad? I didn’t like to think of Willie in prison, but it’s better than being dead.”

  I did not want to talk about my time in prison. Ever.

  “Can we talk about you and Mr. Von Becker?”

  “Willie,” she corrected. “You won’t tell her, though, will you? I called her right away to say how sorry I was about him getting arrested and she was not very nice.”

  It took me a second to realize who she was talking about. “You called his wife?”

  She shrugged. “That boundary thing, right? I thought it was a good thing to call, but . . .” She trailed off.

  “But your shrink said no?”

  She gave a sad smile. “. . . guess not.”

  “As long as we’re crossing boundaries, can I ask you? How did you and Willie meet?”

  “In my therapist’s elevator. Every Tuesday and Thursday at five of four we would ride up together. I got off on twelve and he rode up to sixteen.”

  “I see. Was he going to see his shrink?”

  She laughed delightedly. “Noooo. Willie wouldn’t see a therapist. He said he had too many secrets. Therapists want your secrets. It’s how they live.”

  “Okay, but he had a regular appointment in the building. Do you know who he was seeing?”

  “Oh, yes. He told me. I mean, he told me much later, after we fucked. He didn’t tell me then. It was still a secret.”

  “And who was it?” I prodded, as gently as I could.

  “His mistress. She was a model, from Brazil, I think, but I never met her, so I don’t know. Willie said she was very beautiful, but cold. That’s why he liked me.”

  “You’re not cold?”

  “No,” she answered, suddenly quite serious. “I’m not cold. Willie stopped giving her money and she went home. Or he gave her money and she went home. I’m not sure which.”

  I wondered whether it was worth trying to track the woman down. Livy Von Becker would probably not want me to spend a week in Rio looking for her dead husband’s ex-mistress.

  “Mistletoe, the whole world seems to be convinced that Willie offed himself. Why do you think he was killed? He was alone, locked in a cell.” He took off his jumpsuit, made a noose out of the sleeves, and hung himself from the window bars. “Seems like a straightforward suicide.”

  “She was right.”

  “Who?”

  “My therapist. She said you’d answer me by asking questions.”

  Impasse. One of us was going to have to give or the trip would be wasted.

  “Fine. I don’t think he was killed. However, if he was murdered, I’d say it was someone who had lost a lot of money. And, as you say, there are a lot of people like that out there right now.”

  She shook her head emphatically. “You’re looking at it upside down. Who has the most to gain? That’s what you should be asking.”

  I’d been talking with her too long—she was starting to make sense.

  “Did Von Becker ever talk about business?”

  “Willie.”

  “Willie. Sorry.”

  “Willie talked about business all the time. I liked it. He had a nice voice. Does your son like to listen to you talk about business?”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever talked to him about business. I talk about other things.”

  “You should try it. I’ll bet he likes it. It’s nice to listen to someone talk about things that excite them.”

  “Did he talk about offshore money? A Swiss account, maybe?”

  “I don’t know. I liked to listen, but I didn’t always know what he was talking about. I’m not very good about money. I asked him to take care of mine, you know—my aunt left me some money—but at first he said he wouldn’t do it. I had to ask him again and again before he agreed.”

  There couldn’t have been much there or Willie would have snapped it up. Only, now it was gone.

  “What will you do now?”

  Her eyes flicked away. “There’s a little left. Not much. I don’t need much, but . . . I don’t know.”

  There wasn’t anything to say to that. Her name wasn’t even on the lists of clients. Willie had just made the money disappear. I didn’t want to think about what would happen when the little that was left was gone.

  “Did you ever meet any of his business associates?” And what would any of Willie’s Wall Street cronies have thought of Mistletoe?

  “You’re cheating. It’s my turn. Do you think I’m pretty?”

  The strange thing was, the longer I was in her presence, the more attractive she became. She was still a pale stick, but I felt myself wanting to please her. She radiated a comforting feeling that, while anything was possible, everything was safe and protected in this room. There were no demands, nothing to stress over. I could see what had drawn in Von Becker and held him here.

  “I suppose I do,” I said.

  “I thought so. It’s too bad. You’re ages too young for me, you know. Not my type at all, but we could fuck, if you want.”

  I had never been propositioned in quite that way before. Did this kind of thing happen to George Clooney all the time? What would he do?

  “Uh, thank you, but I’m in a relationship.” Though I had been spectacularly forgiven, I was sure that casual sex with Mistletoe Evans was not on the list of Ten Things You Should Be Doing to Maintain Your Long-Distance Relationship.

  “Okay.”

  “My turn?” I said, raising my eyebrows.

  She chuckled. “Sure. You go.”

  “His business associates? Friends? Did you ever meet any of them?”

  “No. Well. Just Paddy.”

  “Paddy? Paddy Gallagher?”

  She nodded.

  “Where did you meet him?” So much for Paddy’s claim that they were merely business acquaintances.

  “Here. We never went anywhere else. Paddy would stop by sometimes and we’d all watch the game together or maybe a movie and order in Chinese. Paddy drinks too much, though. I worry about him.”

  I tried to imagine Paddy Gallagher sitting in the chair I now occupied, plucking cat hairs off his two-thousand-dollar suit, and pushing General Tso’s chicken around his plate.

  “Paddy’s a Mets fan?”

  “No. Willie was a Mets fan. He tried to buy them once, he said. Paddy’s a Yankees fan. Me, too.”

  My opinion of her improved substantially.

  “What do you think of Jeter this year? Do they move him to DH?”

  “He’s got to get his OPS up over eight hundred again.”

  “And his fielding percentage back up over ninety-eight,” I said.

  “He can do that. Fielding percentage is kind of bogus anyway. If a guy only goes after the ones that drop in his glove, he’s a one-oh.”

  She was enjoying herself, relaxed and smiling. So was I.

  “So what’s with the enemy’s hat?”

  She twisted it around to the side so the brim stood out over one ear. “For Willie.” She dropped her hand to her lap and stared down at it. Our connection was gone—she was mourning.

  And I had questions that still needed answers. “Would they talk about business together? Willie and Paddy.”

  “Not during the game.” She pointed to the big TV. “Willie wouldn’t let anyone talk when the game was on.”

  “How about after?”

 
“I guess. Paddy got angry one time. We were watching The Man Who Would Be King. Do you know that movie? They both liked Michael Caine movies. He was in that other one, too. What was it?”

  “Why was Paddy angry? What did he say?”

  She gave a big Paddy grin. “There’s a lesson there,” she said. It was an excellent impersonation. “That’s what he said, and Willie didn’t like it. He said Paddy worried too much. Then he told him that he’d always be taken care of, and Paddy left early. But the next time he came over, everything was okay.”

  Paddy was right in the middle of it all.

  “Mistletoe, try to remember, please. I am sure Willie had lots of secrets. But did he ever tell you any about money? Where he might have hidden some?”

  “Everybody asks me that. The FBI must have asked about a billion times. I don’t remember. If he did, I wasn’t paying attention, because it never mattered. Willie came over. We talked. We sat on the couch and held hands. We’d eat dinner and watch a movie and he’d put his arm around me. Sometimes then we’d screw. Then he’d go home. It wasn’t like he was here making calls and doing deals. He was here to be with me. Like we were friends.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s a surprising relationship. You seem to have known a side of Von Becker that no one else got to see.”

  “He was nice.”

  “Can I be an asshole and ask you something I have no right asking? Did you love Willie?”

  She sighed and rolled her eyes. “Oh, god, now you sound just like my therapist. She’s always asking me that. I don’t know! Let me ask. Do you love your son?”

  “Absolutely. Without any shadow of a doubt.”

  “Well, see! That’s great. You know that. You’re lucky. I’ve never known anything that definite in my life. Certainly not when I was little. I think maybe my aunt loved me like that. She was nice to me. Willie could be nice like that. I miss him all the time. But when I heard he was dead I didn’t fall apart and cry all night or want to die myself. I cleaned the litter box and vacuumed. I didn’t watch a movie that night. Does that mean I didn’t love him or that I did?”