“You look so serious, Alex. Everything okay with the two young women you spirited out of my custody?” He was adjusting the blinds as we lost the day’s light.
“We made some progress with the first interview. Nan and I are both optimistic that we’ll get these girls to open up. And from what we hear they had a great first night in the shelter. Nothing wrong on that front.”
“What, then?” Donny asked, checking his answering machine for messages.
“I think we need to spend some time talking about your relationship with Ethan Leighton,” I said.
“He’s been a friend since law school. A good one. I don’t have to tell you how shocked I am by all this.” Now he was sorting the markers in the front of his desk drawer.
“You do, actually,” Mike said. “That’s just what you have to tell me. How shocked are you? I recall sitting with you Thursday night while Coop charted all the connections between people in this case on her blackboard. I just can’t remember seeing a line that stretched from Salma Zunega directly over to you.”
We had Donny Baynes’s complete attention now. He slammed the drawer shut.
“I did not know Salma. That’s a fact.”
“Never met her?”
“No,” Donny said. He wanted no part of being questioned by Mike Chapman. “Alex, I don’t know what gives you the idea-you couldn’t possibly think I held out on you about something.”
“I’m not sure what to think.”
“Why? Where did this come from?”
“Did you ever meet Salma Zunega? Not ‘know’ her, Donny. Just meet her is all I’m asking,” I said.
“Look, can we talk one-on-one?”
“I’ve got no secrets from Mike.”
Donny Baynes hesitated before answering. “What do you have, a photo of me on a rope line at a fund-raiser with Ethan’s girlfriend?”
“I don’t have anything at the moment except a hunch that you are so close to Ethan you must have been in Salma’s orbit every now and then. What am I going to find if I dig a little deeper? Are there photographs? You tell me.”
Mike was letting me take the lead, seeing that Donny was more comfortable trying to angle his way through this with me.
“I didn’t know her, Alex. Can I swear I was never in the same room with the girl? No, I can’t do that,” Donny said. “Because I didn’t have any clue that my good friend Ethan Leighton had gone off the deep end without a life vest. He’s been in one political race after another. There are always attractive young women around in campaigns. It never seemed to get to him, and why would it? He had Claire at home. He had a relationship with his wife that we all envied.”
“You and I stood on the beach together Wednesday morning, with bodies washing up on shore and hundreds of victims whose lives had just been turned upside down. You were furious when Mercer Wallace arrived to tell us that Ethan had crashed his car-and by the way, had a lover, and a child he’d fathered with her. Did you fake that?”
“I didn’t fake anything,” Donny said, pulling on the cord of the venetian blinds. “Ethan kept that side of his life so compartmentalized, I would have given everything I had to believe that Mercer was mistaken. Ethan’s got a public persona that’s different than his private one-sure-but this crazy-ass part of him? I didn’t know it existed.”
“I’ll ask you again, Donny. When you heard about Salma’s death on Thursday-when you sat at my conference table and saw Polaroid photos of the young woman who was hoisted out of the well-did you recognize her?”
“Now you’re asking a different question. Recognize her? Did she look like someone I’d ever seen before? You’re asking that?”
“Sorry if I didn’t make myself clear, Donny. I’m asking that.”
“She looked familiar. She’s a pretty girl.”
“You should have seen her before she went bottoms up in the well, man. She looked a hell of lot better.” Mike had focused his attention on a photo on the wall of Baynes shaking hands with Mayor Statler. “You keeping Hizzoner up to speed on the boat people? He knows what you’re doing over here?”
“Yeah, he does,” Donny said, happy to field a question on another issue.
“Today. You see him today?”
“Last night, when I knocked off,” he said, laughing a bit as he straightened out his blotter. “Jeez, Chapman, I’ve got to answer to you now? Something’s wrong with that picture.”
“City Hall?” I asked. “Did you go to City Hall last night?”
Donny was trying to read my expression. “You don’t mean to imply I should have told you I was going there, do you? Statler called. I walked over and gave him a quick update, Alex. You’ve got nothing to do with the pieces of the case that my guys are working on.”
I was determined to get back on course and stop Mike’s interference.
“I’m glad you went,” I said, thinking of the plastic bag in Mike’s jacket pocket. “Go back to Salma, Donny. I wasn’t done with that.”
“Not much more to say.”
“She looked familiar to you, have I got that right?”
There had been no photographs of the elusive Salma in the newspapers, and it was impossible to believe the battered face of the woman in the well, represented in crime-scene photos, would be recognized by anyone who had only met her in a crowd.
“Yes. Vaguely familiar.”
“Did you ever talk with her?”
“I wish we could sit down with Ethan,” he said, throwing up his hands. “I’m sure he’d confirm I didn’t know her.”
“Next time you have dinner with Ethan,” Mike said, stepping all over my words, “maybe he can refresh your recollection.”
“I’d say that’s a few months down the road, Chapman. I’ll be arm’s distance from him, just like everyone else in law enforcement. He’ll straighten this out. This situation makes him look awfully screwed up, but he’s a good man at heart.”
“Damn. I was counting on you to nab me an invitation to that fancy private cabal.”
“Just what would that be?” Donny asked, bracing his arms on the edge of the desk.
“That gentlemen’s social club you boys got going. By invitation only. Seems totally unfair that Coop can’t buy herself a seat, but I had high hopes of joining you. Don’t you want to tell us a little something about it?”
THIRTY-EIGHT
“I haven’t had anything to do with that group in years,” Donny Baynes said as he sat down in his high-backed leather desk chair. “So far as I know, it doesn’t exist. Who’s been feeding you that crap?”
“Kendall Reid,” I said.
Donny cradled his forehead in his hands, elbows on his desk. He took a few seconds to collect himself. “Reid’s a thief and a liar. I don’t know what the hell he’s trying to do by dragging me into this.”
“He says you know-maybe you were even there-the night Ethan met Salma.”
“Look, if she’s the girl I think, I never put her together with Ethan. She was probably at fund-raisers. But I always figured she was Kendall Reid’s girl. Maybe he was just the beard for Ethan. Maybe that’s how stupid and naive I am.”
“What about this men’s club?” I asked.
“I just told you it’s defunct. Can’t have anything to do with this.”
“You also told her you didn’t know who Salma was, when it turns out you might,” Mike said. “It’s a good time to spill your guts and let us decide.”
The task force prosecutor was silent.
“Don’t try to filter the facts, Donny,” I said. “You’re too tight with Ethan to make the judgment calls. Let us help you decide.”
“This is harmless, Alex. I promise you it was harmless,” Donny said. “The Tontine Association. That’s what it was called.”
“Tontine. Haven’t heard that word in ages. Michael Caine-The Wrong Box. Which brother lived longer.” Mike was trying to loosen Baynes up by making light of things. “Which one got all the money. Is that the right movie, Coop?”
“Yup
. Robert Louis Stevenson story.” Mike knew the movies, I knew the books.
“What’s a tontine anyway, Donny?”
“They’re schemes for raising capital-like a combination of a group annuity and a lottery. A Neapolitan banker named Lorenzo de Tonti invented them in the seventeenth century.”
“They legal?” Mike asked.
“Not anymore, ’cause they’re basically swindles. But-but-it was just a name we used. There was no tontine involved.”
“Financial geniuses, the Italians. They got Tonti, Ponzi-Gotti-all came up with clever ways for guys to make a buck. I’d think as a prosecutor you’d know enough to stay away from that kind of stuff.”
“It was Moses Leighton who formed the club. I was in private practice at the time. It was just a well-intentioned way of raising money for the restoration of some old properties in the city.”
“Like how?”
“It’s a simple concept. In a real tontine, each member invited in pays a sum-say five hundred dollars from twenty members each. The money’s invested, and every year-every good year-you get a dividend. When an investor dies, the money is reallocated among the survivors. Last man standing gets the whole pot-a gamble that in the old days could leave someone with a fortune.”
“Your tontine wasn’t real?” Mike asked. “Is that what you’re saying?”
Mike was baiting Donny and it was working. Asking simple, general questions about the concept to get his subject to open up. And Donny Baynes was talking.
“They’ve been banned in this country for decades. Moses Leighton had this idea to start an organization for private funding to help the city raise money for neglected projects, things that just wouldn’t get repaired or restored because of budget restraints.”
“And Ethan was a new city councilman at the time,” I said.
“Exactly. It was a lot about paving a future for his son, of course.”
“With a swindle?” Mike asked.
“Listen to me, will you?” Donny liked being in the superior position to Mike again. “This is why the first tontines were created-for governments to use to raise capital. They were good things. Louis XIV created a tontine in 1689 to fund military operations when he was broke. It was honest. It worked. The last surviving investor lived to the age of ninety-six with that fortune. The British government copied the idea to go to war against France a few years later.”
“So why’d they stop working?”
Donny was gesturing with both hands. “Investors caught on. They bought shares for infants and children, instead of for themselves. If the kids lived till old age, they often made pots of money. The governments weren’t able to keep up with the costs. That’s why you’ve got a pension today, instead of a tontine-instead of a death gamble.”
Mike nodded his head. “Okay, so what did old Moses have in mind?”
“The city owns a good number of properties in the five boroughs that have historic significance. They’re run by a nonprofit trust that raises private funds for them, in tandem with the city parks department, since several of them sit in local parks.”
“Is Gracie Mansion part of that trust?” I asked.
“It is. And these are great old houses that date back centuries, so they’re enormously expensive to maintain. Moses Leighton had a creative idea to help the city do just that.”
“With an eye to restoring Gracie in case his son needed a mayoral roof over his head,” Mike said.
“Bloomberg was a little more popular than Moses expected. That’s why Ethan took the congressional seat.”
“So the club?” I asked.
“Moses invited thirty or forty guys to participate as members. I think he wound up with a little more than half that at every dinner. Some of them were politicians, and others were wealthy businessmen, but all approved of his plan.”
“What was it?
“A dinner club. A perfectly respectable dinner club,” Donny said, looking Mike in the eye. “Every second month Mr. Leighton arranged to have dinner catered for us at one of these different properties. Most of them are restored, to one degree or another, and run as museums.”
“You rented them?”
“Even you can do it, Chapman. It’s one of the ways they make money. Most people don’t even know these places exist, especially in the other four boroughs.”
“Leighton paid for the dinners?” Mike asked.
“He did. He underwrote them. But we each had to make a contribution to his enterprise. Five hundred, a thousand, each according to his means, I guess. If you were in public service, you paid less, and he had some very high rollers from the investment banking world. You gave him your check, which went to the trust to restore the houses, of course.”
“Not the tontine?”
“A pretty harmless tontine, Chapman, like I said. At each dinner, every member had to bring a bottle of wine-a really fine wine. The money went to its designated purpose, and the wine got stored in Moses Leighton’s cellar. Last man standing gets a damn good selection of wines, to toast those gone before him.”
“Who’s in the club?”
“I told you, it’s been disbanded.”
“Why’d that happen?”
“A few of our original members-uh-had some problems.”
“Hit the skids?” Mike asked. “Who were they?”
“Moses and Ethan Leighton, of course, were the founders of it. Ethan invited me to join, along with a couple of our other law school friends who were also at big firms. I’ll give you their names if you think it matters. One of them was convicted of insider trading, so he was the first to go.”
“A classmate of yours?”
“Yes. And a year later, one of the men was a suicide-jumped out the window of a hotel room where he’d been holed up doing drugs. Had a problem with crystal meth and male prostitutes.”
“Guess the screening for club standards was a little loose,” Mike said. “Was Kendall Reid in the club?”
Donny rubbed his hands together as he answered. “No. But Reid was around the Leightons all the time back then. Working for Moses, I think, before he became Ethan’s aide. He wasn’t in on these dinners. Probably because he was just considered staff by the Leightons. That may be why he’s so resentful about all this, telling you about me, like I’d done something wrong.”
“Did Ethan ever bring a woman to any of these meetings?” I asked.
“Not once. Nobody did. Don’t get me wrong, Alex. No reason it couldn’t have been that way. Nothing improper. It was just a throwback to the old boys’ club kind of thing that Moses Leighton thought would be amusing every now and then.”
“Which politicians were involved?” Mike asked.
“We had some councilmen from each of the boroughs, a congressman from Queens. And we had the former police commissioner, before he crashed and burned.”
“Bernie Kerik?”
“Yes. A real gent,” Donny said, sarcasm dripping from his words. “The guy was a misfit in that group from the first time I met him. You got that feeling his big disgrace was just around the corner, if you could only put a finger on it. When the feds arrested Kerik, that was like the third strike for the Leighton tontine.”
“Running clean out of gentlemen, huh?”
“Ethan told his father it was time to let it go. We actually raised a good amount of money for these historic trusts.”
“Where had you met?”
“The first dinner was at Gracie Mansion, of course. Bloomberg wasn’t involved, but he let us use the dining room, since that house is the real star of the trust-the most elegant of the old estates. I think our next dinner was in the Bronx, at the Bartow-Pell Mansion on Pelham Bay.”
I knew the fashionable old property, renowned for its Greek Revival details and its extraordinary gardens.
“And others?” Mike asked.
“King Manor.”
“The Kings of Queens?”
Donny tried to smile. “Yes, Chapman. Rufus King was a member of the Continental Cong
ress. He was a senator from New York and later ambassador to Great Britain. I hadn’t known anything about him.”
“Where’s the manor?”
“It’s not grand, like Gracie. It’s an old farmhouse, off Jamaica Avenue. King was an early and outspoken opponent of slavery.”
Donny thought he was lulling Mike into a history lesson, and while he was testing the information, Mike was leading his charge exactly where he wanted.
“Was the Hamilton Grange one of your meeting places?”
“Yes. Yes, it was.”
“But Kendall Reid had nothing to do with that evening?”
“I don’t remember ever seeing him at dinner.”
“A little odd that the phantom funds that Reid’s alleged to have stolen are for a fictitious Save the Grange organization. Or was that part of a Moses Leighton plan?”
“Odd, how?”
“That your all-boys club was about getting money for this handful of fancy old houses, and Kendall Reid’s council scam arose out of the same concept.”
“Hey, maybe that’s between Reid and the Leightons,” Donny said. “Maybe that’s exactly where Reid got the idea for his own swindle, from a corruption of the plan that Moses Leighton had. I’m sure Paul Battaglia will figure that out without your help, Chapman.”
“I’ll just leave it alone, Mr. Baynes. I won’t even breathe the word tontine to the district attorney.”
“You know why it was named that? I’ll tell you. It had nothing to do with schemes and swindles,” Donny said, standing up and staring out the window, over the seaport of lower Manhattan. “Right down there, at the corner of Water and Wall streets. That’s where the old Tontine Coffee House was located. Ever heard of it?”
Neither Mike nor I had.
“I was a securities litigator before I joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office, handling stock frauds, among other things. The Tontine Coffee House is where the New York Stock Exchange was organized, two hundred years ago. It was built by the merchants of the Tontine Association-Archibald Gracie was a charter member-as a daily meeting place.”
Hell Gate Page 27
