I was beginning to anticipate the ending to this story—and it was ugly.
“But the husband found out,” I ventured.
“Someone sent him pictures.”
“I see.”
“So there was a lot of yelling and finger-pointing and many awful things were said before they finally agreed on a divorce. Only, splitting the assets became a problem. She didn’t want to own half of a chain of newspapers. He didn’t have the cash to buy her out. The lawyers fought over that like two pit bulls.”
“And Charles Penn comes back into the picture.”
“Oh, yes. He made a lowball offer to ‘help them out.’ All cash. The lawyers wanted the man to take it. The judge ordered him to.”
“And Penn got the newspapers for pennies on the dollar.”
“No. The woman finally had her eyes opened and saw what that snake had been up to all along. She agreed to a thirty-year note and a trust. Saved the man’s ass. Her ex-husband married the mistress—who all agree is a bitch on wheels—and kept the papers. He has never missed a payment. If he does, he forfeits everything, so the ex-wife is well taken care of. The kids all sided with her. She’s happy.”
I looked at Carol in the evening candlelight. She may have been easily ten years my senior, but she was a good-looking woman. Assured. Comfortable with herself.
“She’s content,” she said.
But, I thought, sometimes she invites men to see the sunrise from her bedroom window.
“Though if she ever gets the opportunity to put a stake through Chuck Penn’s heart, believe you me, she will do it.” She drained her glass and I poured her another.
24
The combination of the wine, cold medicine, and exhaustion caught up with me on the way to the airport. The slog through security felt like a marathon that I was running in ankle-deep sand. I was fast asleep before we left the gate.
I woke up when the wheels hit the New York runway a little on the hard side. Still, the plane didn’t bounce, so the pilot earned a short burst of ironic applause. There was drool on my chin, and from the looks I was getting from the other passengers in first class, I had been snoring. Probably pretty loud. Business travelers in particular frown upon snoring.
And, I realized as I walked zombie-like through the nearly empty airport, I had run afoul of another business traveler’s axiom—when you get on a plane with the beginnings of a cold, you will get off with the rest of it. My eyes itched, my throat burned, and my sinuses felt as though they were packed with cotton. Cotton and cement.
The line for cabs was mercifully short and the cold rain barely registered through my misery.
“The Ansonia,” I croaked.
“What’s that?” the young Latino said, in an accent that I could use to almost pinpoint which block on Northern Boulevard in Woodside the kid had grown up on.
“Into the city. Broadway and Seventy-third.”
“Not a problem.”
I was glad that it was not a problem. What would we have done if it was a problem? My head fell back and I felt the exhaustion washing over me again, but a mote of attention to duty pulled me back. I’d had my phone turned off for three hours. Too long in case Heather needed me for an issue with the Kid. Of course, there was no Kid problem that Heather couldn’t handle a lot better than I, but a general sense of responsibility, or guilt for having been away, dictated that I at least check for messages.
I had three text messages.
5:48VirgilCall me.
8:39SkeliWhat time do u get in? Love u. Give a call.
9:13VirgilChk ur vcemail
I checked voicemail. One message.
“Call me whenever you get this. The prosecuting attorney leaked Haley’s grand jury testimony. We have major damage control issues.”
Virgil’s phone went straight to voicemail.
“Got your message. I’ll call you at ten.” My voice sounded like someone stripping gears on a dump truck.
—
Heather was asleep on top of the covers on the Kid’s bed, squeezing him up against the wall. He must have loved it. I didn’t wake her.
I made myself tea, swallowed a glass of raspberry-flavored Emergen-C, put on some music, and swaddled myself in a blanket before plunking down in my chair by the window facing down Broadway.
I called Skeli.
“Are you up?”
“Well, I’m not in bed yet. Actually, I fell asleep watching the Grand Prix of Figure Skating and now Jimmy Fallon is on. So that’s what? Two hours? Three?”
“It’s late.” I was too hot. I sat forward, slipped off my jacket, and sank back into the chair again.
“How was your trip? You don’t sound good.”
“Just a cold. Penn blew me off. But I learned something. I have to see how it fits in.” My jacket slipped off the arm of the chair and fell to the floor. I leaned over and picked it up. Four white or cream-colored business cards fell out of the side pocket and onto my lap.
“What are you listening to?”
“10,000 Maniacs,” I said. “Unplugged. Old stuff.” I flipped through the cards. Carol. Melissa. Lani. Barbara. They were all sleight-of-hand magicians; I hadn’t noticed any of them slipping their cards into my pocket.
“I think I like it.”
High praise from someone who once told me she didn’t like Emmylou Harris because she was too “rocky.”
“I’ll get you a CD.” I tossed the cards onto the end table and couldn’t suppress a chuckle.
“What’s funny?” Skeli asked.
“I missed you,” I said, choosing to hold off on describing my dinner party until sometime in the distant future. Or never.
“How about this weekend? Do you have any time to look at apartments?”
“There’s a happy thought. I’ll let you know tomorrow. Can you make time for that vacation? I think the Kid is coming ’round.”
“Yes. Emphatically so. What was his objection?”
“I think his biggest problem is that I suggested it. If it came from you, or Heather, or even my father, he’d be on board already.”
“He’s worried about you,” she said.
“Yeah, well, I’m worried about him. We’re made for each other.”
“I’m not worried about either of you. You’ll both figure it out.”
We rang off with the usual expressions of mutual affection and I went and gently roused Heather.
“It’s late. Take twenty for a cab,” I said, proffering the bill.
“I live less than a block from the subway. Besides, I’ll never get a cab in the rain.”
“Anything I should know?”
“He did the thing with his pee again. I don’t know what it’s about either, but I think it’s harmless. Ignore it. For now.”
I nodded. I trusted her judgment more than my own.
“You okay?”
“Just a cold.”
“Get some rest.”
I did.
25
An email from Lydia Sharp suggested that we meet for coffee up by City College. I didn’t know the Hamilton Heights–Sugar Hill section, but McKenna hadn’t offered an alternative. If I thought about it at all, it was northern Harlem. I knew that the area had been the home to the elite of black culture, politics, and business—from Cab Calloway and Count Basie to W. E. B. DuBois and Thurgood Marshall—but all that had been a long time ago. By the time the Giants left the Polo Grounds and moved to San Francisco, the neighborhood had deteriorated badly.
I was surprised, therefore, at how far it had come back. I walked over to Amsterdam from the 137th Street subway station, after riding up on the Number 1 train, getting off twice, and waiting for another train, to be sure that I wasn’t being followed. I wasn’t.
There was still a neighborhood feel to the street-level businesses, which had near
ly evaporated over the years around the Ansonia. The low-rise apartment buildings showed the effects of ten years of gentrification, but the people on the street reflected a mix of ethnic and economic backgrounds. There were still plenty of gated first-floor apartment windows, but the hustle on the street was good. I found myself fantasizing about finding an apartment up there big enough to raise a growing family.
A block uptown from the campus was a basement-level coffee shop, two steps down from the street. I was early, but I was sure McKenna was already somewhere nearby, watching to see if I had been followed. I went in and ordered an Earl Grey with lemon and a tall water. There was an empty corner table where we would be able to watch the door and the whole café. The place was half-full with an assortment of students, Internet entrepreneurs, bloggers, and freelancers, and a couple of retirees reading the Times online. I swallowed a handful of vitamin C, aspirin, echinacea, and a caplet of elderberry extract and ginseng, and sucked on a zinc lozenge. I didn’t know if I was doing any good or slowly poisoning myself, but I was making Skeli happy. If it worked, all the better.
Virgil rarely took my phone calls before all the markets were open and it was still forty-five minutes before the NYSE bell, but I tried him anyway. He answered with a growl.
“Where the fuck are you?”
Virgil was not given to cursing as a rule. I was sure it was the first time I had heard him use an f-bomb.
“Working. Uptown. What’s up?”
“Haley, that frigging idiot, sank his own battleship.”
“He failed the grand jury test?” I said.
“He told them off.”
“What’s the call?”
“Order imbalance. They’re hoping to get an opening price by late morning.”
That was bad.
“What’s the buzz?”
“The floor trader thinks it bottoms down by thirty percent. Give or take.”
A disaster. The firm was going to take a bath. Should I have tipped Virgil off to what McKenna and I had found? I still thought I had made the right decision. But as Virgil might have a different view on the matter, I kept it to myself.
“What the hell did he say?” I said.
“Aw, hell. What didn’t he say? He answered every question with a speech. The prosecuting attorney let him deny, deny, deny for an hour, and then sprung his trap. They had the bank records. The trade authorizations were generated from Arinna Labs. Probably from his computer.”
“Did Haley have a comeback?”
“At that point, he took the fifth.”
“Oh shit. Making himself look like a total liar.”
“Yeah. He may as well have put the noose around his neck and stepped off the scaffold. The grand jury took about a minute and a half to come up with a true bill.”
“Did you ever talk to the other board members? Ward and the lawyer?”
“Yes. Helen Ward has already resigned in protest. Kavanagh’s a straight arrow. Neither one profits in any way over this. You don’t seriously think either of them is involved, do you?”
“No. I’m just tying up loose ends. I’m getting close.” I took a breath and plunged on. “I need to talk to Haley’s lawyer,” I said.
“I’ll see what I can do. But why?”
I wasn’t ready to say what I believed; I wanted a few more bits of confirmation. “It’s complicated.”
“Did you find something and you are not sharing it with me? Who the hell pays your fat salary? If you have any pertinent information, you owe me!”
I had never heard him so near to losing control. I still didn’t want to get into particulars, but I gave him the conclusion. “It looks bad, but Haley didn’t do it.”
“And when the fuck were you going to get around to telling me?”
“You didn’t need to know,” I said. “And you don’t pay me a salary—you are paying me money I already earned.”
“Do you know how much you’ve cost the firm today?”
“I couldn’t let you trade on that information. It was nonpublic. The SEC would have shut you down—and put my sorry ass back in jail.”
“Well, now they won’t have to shut us down. The market is taking care of that, no thanks to you.”
“I was protecting you,” I said.
“That wasn’t your decision,” he yelled.
“Since when is my not going back to prison not my goddamn decision?” As soon as I said it, I realized that I already had the attention of everyone in the coffee bar. “Shit!”
“You’re fired,” he said.
I didn’t believe him. Besides, he couldn’t fire me. “I have a contract. Buy me out.”
“Sue me.”
“And I’ll win.” And I would. But I was speaking to a dead phone. Virgil had hung up.
I looked around at the faces, some openly staring, some ostentatiously not looking. “Sorry,” I said. “I just got fired. It’s not my day.”
There was a round of nodding commiseration from the crowd and an understanding, motherly smile from one of the white-haired retirees.
You know that your life is much too complicated when you have to stop and think which of your lawyers you need to call to handle a given circumstance.
I had just started dialing when a young, bearded Hasidic man dressed in a black suit and broad-brimmed hat came down the steps and walked in. He had a pronounced limp and was carrying a thick black briefcase. He got a cup of coffee and came over to join me. I shut down my phone and shook his hand.
“What’d you do to your foot?” I asked.
“I put a pebble in my shoe to remind me to limp,” McKenna said. “It changes my physical profile. Recognition software won’t be looking for someone with a limp.”
“You’re worried about recognition software in west Harlem? Aren’t you taking this just a bit far?” I said.
“You never know what is enough.”
“Where’s your FBI guys?”
“Thirtieth Street and First Avenue. Intake for the men’s shelter system,” he said.
“They won’t suspect?”
“Processing can take all day there.”
“What do you have for me?” I may have been fired, but that didn’t mean I had to stop working. Virgil would be back.
“Arinna Labs. I think I have a way in, but we may eventually have to go on-site. I’ll let you know.”
“On-site? Out to the lab itself?”
“Is that a problem?”
Add breaking and entering to my list of LinkedIn talents. “It’s a last resort.”
“Okay. I’ve also worked on the bank again. The trade instructions definitely came from Arinna.”
“We knew that.”
“But the account creation definitely did not. It would have taken a good-sized team with some powerful systems to make that happen. And though I won’t be able to tell you who they were, I can say that they were very good. Among the best.”
“Can we show it to Haley’s lawyer?”
“You show it. I’m not quite ready to surface.”
“What do I need to tell him?”
“There’s another wrinkle to it. The account had to have been approved. Meaning a bank officer had to go into the system, put in his own password, and make the account go live. Without that, it’s just bits of electronic data.”
“They had to get to a banker,” I said.
“Not impossible,” McKenna said. “But you’d need someone to do some research and find out who was approachable. You can’t just wait outside the bank waving hundred-dollar bills and expect to successfully bribe a banker.” He laughed. “Well, maybe you can, but I think you’d want to be a little more discreet.”
“Do you have a name?”
He shook his head. “Only a password. But they’re unique. The good guys will find him.”
“I’ll get it to the lawyer.”
“Can you get his email? I’ll forward all of the materials to you.”
“I’ll see. I was fired just before you arrived.”
“Does that mean I’m fired, too?”
“Nope.” I took a thick envelope from my inside pocket and handed it to him. “You still work for me. But for right now, we’re both living off my money market account. When we go through that, we can start on my line of credit. We’ll both be okay for a while.”
He pushed his chair back. “Is that it for now? I’ll get you the email.”
“No. I need help with something else. Surveillance equipment. Who can I talk to? I may want to pick up a few things, but what I really need is advice.”
“Not a problem. We have to go back downtown. There’s a guy in the West Village who I can trust.”
“And one other thing. I need to start shaking things up a bit. I have an idea for setting up a sting, but I need you to hack into someone’s private computer. Maybe a couple of people’s.”
He hunched back over the table and took his laptop out of the briefcase. “Who do you want me to start with?”
“Mrs. Selena Haley,” I said.
26
Barneys on Madison sells clothes, but the restaurant in the basement is the main draw for the ladies who lunch. The sign says FRED’S AT BARNEYS NEW YORK, but I never heard anyone call it Fred’s. It was “Barneys.” I was not the only man in the dining room—most of the staff was male and there were two men eating at a table on the far side of the room.
Selena Haley was checking her watch as I approached. Her lunch date was already five minutes late.
“Mrs. Haley?” I said. “May I join you?” My voice sounded strained, nasal, and flat. I promised myself a nap just as soon as this was done.
She looked up and for a moment she was beyond speechless. Guilt, anger, and fear fought for top billing. But she was good. Breeding and training. She recovered almost immediately.
“Mr. Stafford? I’m so sorry, but I’m waiting for someone. She should be here any minute. But thank you for asking.” I was dismissed.
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