by Thomas Perry
There was still something missing from the story Mary Perkins was telling: who were the seven men following her? “By then he must have known you weren’t going to pay the money back.”
“In a way they all knew too much. See, Cyrus has been around long enough to have seen problems come and go—the oil crisis and the stock market slide in the early seventies, the inflation after that. He’s a survivor. There was no question this wasn’t going on forever. If he rode it out, then when it ended he’d be on top of a big company and could count the change later. But if he stopped now, he was out of business. Sometimes these guys would do anything to keep the money moving through—loan anything to anybody and then cook the books to keep the loan from going bad.”
“So you got big loans and walked away with the money.”
“That was my specialty. There were other people who made a lot of headlines by building screwy empires—lending themselves money to build ghost communities in the desert and paying themselves and their families fifty million in salaries for doing it. But what I’m trying to tell you is that it was all going on a long time, and the ones you’ve read about weren’t the only ones who did it. They weren’t even the only ones who got caught. They were just the ones who got convicted. They were very unlucky.”
“Why unlucky?”
“It meant that one of these overworked low-level federal accountants had to get around to looking at all the loan papers, spot yours, notice there was something really wrong with the loan, ask questions, get the wrong answers, and convince his supervisor to do something about your loan instead of about somebody else’s. Even then the procedures were amazing. That stuff we’ve all heard about the cold-eyed bank examiners popping in at dawn and padlocking everything is a myth. It never happened that way. Not once.”
“You’re saying it was staged for the television cameras?”
“No, the pictures were real. What you didn’t see was what happened first. The regulator asks questions. Six months go by while somebody at the bank dances around. The supervisor sends his first-level letter.”
“What’s that?”
“They all have names like Notice of Discrepancy or Letter of Caution or Admonition. The letter describes what they found and says they want it fixed. Another six months go by, and the regulator checks the bank again and sees that you didn’t fix it. He looks deeper for other problems, or he forces you to agree to move the loan over to the debit column instead of the credit column. Another six months go by and you get the Caution. Then the Admonition.”
“That’s ludicrous.”
“Of course. The regulating procedures were left over from the days when everybody in the business was Cyrus Curbstone. If he got a letter pointing out a discrepancy, he would have been after it like it was a gaping hole in his own roof. The system was set up to say, ‘Please look into this,’ then ‘Have you fixed it?’ then ‘Okay, here’s how you fix it,’ then ‘If you don’t fix it, I will,’ and finally, ‘Here I come.’ ”
“You have to wonder how any of these people got caught.”
“It was like being chased by a glacier. You could live a whole life without seeing it get any closer. It was coming, sure. But there was so much time to get out of the way.”
“And some waited too long.”
“Only a few. About a thousand people actually got to the point where they went to trial. This meant that their savings and loans were so out of control that the government put them at the top of the list for closure. They had to be losing millions a day for that. Then a couple of agents had to figure you were so obviously guilty that it was worth spending four years of their lives preparing the case. A U.S. attorney had to be sure the case was a slam-dunk, so it wouldn’t ruin her won-lost record. Then her boss would have to be convinced that you had stolen so much that when the case was over they could recover enough millions in civil court to repay the millions all this prosecution was costing, and enough millions more to make it look to Joe Taxpayer like they’d gotten his money back, and enough millions more so it would look like they put your head on a pole to scare off the other high rollers.”
“How did that work out?”
“Not so great. In order to convict, they had to take the judge and jury through all these loan papers, land-flips, asset appraisals, and files. The average person can barely follow his own taxes. All this paper was written up to fool qualified accountants. The paper made most of these guys look like victims. For all I know plenty of them were. About a third got off, and of the others only about half got convicted of anything that carried jail time. The average sentence was three years.”
“You said they were picked so there could be civil suits. Didn’t they still have to face that?”
“Sure, but they all said they were broke. Even if they had a hundred million dollars in a box under their bed, they also had papers to show they owed somebody two hundred million.”
“I know the government confiscated land and buildings and things. They’ve been selling them off for years.”
“If you read that much, you don’t have to ask me how that’s going. The savings and loans the government took over were the worst, because that was all they had enough money for. The worst were ones where somebody had pulled land-flips to jack up an acre in the middle of a toxic waste dump from a thousand dollars to a million, and had a shady contractor put a substandard building on it so they could jack up the price of the land all around it.”
“It’s an interesting story,” said Jane, “but it’s history. It’s been over for years.”
“Oh?” said Mary Perkins. “Then let me ask you something. Where is it?”
“What?”
“The money.”
“It wasn’t real to begin with, was it? If you take something that’s worth a thousand dollars and say it’s worth a million, and then it goes back to a thousand, nothing happened.”
“Something happened. Somebody walked out the door clutching a check for a million dollars he didn’t have before, so he got a profit of nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand. The collateral wasn’t real, but the money he got from the bank was. He didn’t even have to pay taxes on it. A loan isn’t income. It’s a deduction.”
“I forgot about that for a second.”
“Sure you did. You’re supposed to. Everybody gets used to the idea that money is gooey, flexible stuff. They talk about it inflating and deflating and flowing and being liquid. No reason why it can’t evaporate.”
“Somebody got it, but if nobody can put his hand on it, then it did evaporate. So that part of it is over.”
“It’s not over,” said Mary Perkins. “We’re just moving into the second round now.”
“What’s the second round? The ten thousand who got away are still doing it?”
“No. Let’s say a lull has settled over the borrowing industry. There’s no such thing as a savings and loan anymore. The ones that are left are just banks that haven’t changed their names yet. That goose has been killed. Scams always work best in boom times, when everybody’s too busy to do much checking, almost any business you say you’re in might make a profit, and the value of any kind of collateral is going up. But there’s still unfinished business.”
“Then what’s unfinished?”
“I’ll give you another typical case: a guy who got into the borrowing business right after the law changed. He didn’t amount to much before that. The government shuts him down in ’eighty-nine or ’ninety when they take over the S and L he was borrowing from. He weasels around during the four years it takes to prepare a noose for him. His lawyer and the prosecutor work out a plea bargain. He’ll cooperate in the investigation, do six months for one count of making a false statement on a loan form, and settle for twenty million in damages.”
“The government bought that?”
“Would you?”
“No.”
“Neither did they. If he’s offering twenty, he’s got forty. The only way he could have gotten it is by stealing it. They t
ake him to court. He’s convicted. He gets his standard three-year sentence and is ordered to repay fifty million dollars. He says he’s broke. They say, ‘No way is this man broke.’ They lock him up and look for hidden accounts, fake names, the rest of it. They find nothing. He serves his three years. Some time during those three years the statute of limitations runs out on everything he did at the bank.”
“You mean he’s free? Nobody can do anything?”
“He can never be charged again by the government for the crimes he committed in getting the money. Of course he still can’t show that he’s got twenty or forty or a hundred million. He’s still got the judgment against him for that much, and swearing he didn’t have it was a new crime. But generally speaking, his legal problems are over. Now he’s got illegal problems.”
“What are those?”
“Well, let’s study this guy. He got only a three-year sentence for the following reasons.” She ticked them off on her long, thin fingers, the nails looking like knife points. “He has never committed any offense before. He is clearly not armed or violent or dangerous. He has no known connection with organized crime or the drug trade. Everybody who ever heard his name thinks he’s got a fortune, but federal investigators who sniff out money for a living didn’t find it. What does all that mean to you?”
“It means he’s got the money pretty well hidden.”
“Good for you. You win a trip to the Caribbean.”
Jane looked closely at Mary Perkins. “I think I know what his illegal problems are.”
“Yes,” said Mary Perkins. “He’s not violent enough to scare anybody off and he’s got no connections that are worth anything. If you steal his umpteen million he can’t even call the police because he’d have to tell them he had that kind of money, and this time his sentence wouldn’t be three years; it’d be more like thirty. He’s the perfect victim.” After a long pause Mary Perkins added, “He’s a lot like me.”
Jane drove along the dark highway skillfully, sometimes lingering in the wake of a big eighteen-wheel truck for many minutes if the driver was pushing to make time, and sometimes moving out into the other lanes to slither between drifting cars where the truck wasn’t nimble enough to navigate. Always she stayed within a few miles an hour of the rest of the traffic to keep from tempting the state police, but almost always she was the one who was passing. It was difficult to study and recognize the headlights coming up from behind, so she kept them back there. Now and then she would see one of the exceptions coming up fast in the rearview mirror, and she would evacuate the lane he seemed to prefer and find a space in the center, where she could move to either side if he swerved toward her, and waited there until he had gone on his way.
“Why aren’t you saying anything?” asked Mary Perkins.
“I’m waiting to hear your story.”
“I told you.”
“You told me a lot of stuff about how you used to steal money. You didn’t tell me anything about yourself. I thought you were just warming up to it.”
“What do you want to know?”
“What’s your name?”
“Mary Perkins,” she answered, the annoyance making her voice strain. “I told you that in the ladies’ room in Los Angeles.”
“Okay,” said Jane quietly. She drove in silence for a long time.
“Oh,” said Mary Perkins brightly. “You mean the one I was born with. I haven’t used it in years, so it sounds strange when I say it: Lily Smith.”
“What made you pick Mary Perkins?”
“Well, I was in a business where it didn’t seem to be a good idea to use the name on my birth certificate. Smith is okay, but it sounds like an alias. Perkins is the kind of name that makes the mark think good thoughts. Mary Perkins is Mary Poppins, with ‘perk,’ which is peppy and cheerful instead of ‘pop,’ which is unpredictable. And ‘kins’ is sweet and innocent, like babykins and lambkins. Also, all names that end with ‘kins’ are Anglo-Saxon in a homespun straight-from-the-farm sort of way, not in the my-ancestors-were-on-the-Mayflower way.”
“And Mary is just from Mary Poppins?”
She smiled. “It’s kind of hard to find anything that sounds more innocent.”
“The word immaculate comes to mind,” said Jane.
“Well, there’s that side of it, of course,” said Mary Perkins. “But there are other things that aren’t quite as obvious. First, Mary says ‘mother.’ In fact, it says ‘mother of somebody important.’ And it’s common and feminine. See, if you’re going to rob banks—” She stopped, as though she realized it was going to be hard to make herself understood, then started over. “Did you ever take a look at the way your bank is set up?”
“I think I have,” said Jane.
“You’ve got the open floor, which is just there to make you think the bank is big and solid. Then you see the people. At the tellers’ counter there are twenty women and a couple of men too young to shave. Then there are a few desks behind that, where everybody is always on the phone. Those are usually women in their fifties. They look like chaperones, there to supervise the twenty women and two boys up front, and to smooth over mistakes.”
“I take it those aren’t the people you were trying to impress.”
“Not if what you came for is money. When you get behind those desks, there are offices. Sometimes they’re not even on the same floor. But somewhere down a long, quiet, carpeted hallway there will be a huge wooden desk with nothing on it except a couple of those old-fashioned black pens that stick up out of a marble slab, and a lamp with a green shade. Behind that desk will be a middle-aged man. See, banks are in layers. You can meet fifty-two senior executive vice presidents, and all of them are women. You’ve got to resist the temptation to tell them enough so that they can say no, and hold out until you see this man.”
“And Mary was for him?”
“Yes. It’s straightforward, short, and unpretentious. It’s not a nickname. It’s not a boy’s name that was supposed to be cute on a girl. A lot of women in businesses use initials: M. H. Perkins, or M. Hall Perkins. They think it makes them serious. They’re wrong. It does not endear them to that man in the back office, and that is the only game being played.”
“It is?”
“You must impress the man who has the power to say yes. He doesn’t want to be fooled, or to be in business with any person of either sex who is insecure enough to hide things. The only thing worse is a hyphenated name—the woman is married, which is a fact that has very big pluses and minuses that have to be managed carefully. But the hyphenation implies some kind of nonconformist convictions about men and women that she wants to advertise. The man in the back office is not interested in thinking about that. He’s interested in getting more money. He wants to deal with somebody who is going to get lots of money and pay him some of it.”
“Okay, so Mary Perkins makes it in the door, and M. H. Perkins doesn’t.”
“Right. She’s at the door now. She’s energetic and cheerful and well scrubbed, and she has hair that’s a bit on the long side and high heels and subtle makeup, but not so subtle that he can’t tell she bothered. She wears good jewelry, but very little of it, and it’s small. If Mary is married for this meeting, it’s a solitaire diamond that’s just a little bigger than an honest banker can afford, and that’s all. If she’s not, maybe a lapel pin. Why? Because that’s the way the women who end up with the most money look. The most common way to get it is still to marry it, so Mary is feminine.”
“It doesn’t sound as though he’s thinking about Mary Perkins as a business partner.”
“I’m not talking about the deal. I’m talking about the first impression—unconscious, probably—the five seconds from the door to the chair. Finance is a tough business. The guy is smart, and above all he’s patient. He’s seen a lot on the way to the corner office. In order to automatically get back ten percent of his loan each year, he has to lend the money to somebody who will win—who will use his money to make fifteen percent. What I�
�m describing for you is the sort of woman he can be made to believe will win.”
“How did Mary Perkins get to the point where people are hunting for her?”
Mary Perkins shook her head as though she were marveling at it. “There was a lot of wild stuff in the papers when I went to trial. My lawyer told me that if I went for the plea bargain, it didn’t matter how much I agreed to admit I took, because I was already broke. The prosecutor could use a ridiculous number to help her look good, and I would declare bankruptcy and never have to pay a dime. It didn’t work that way. Now people think I was one of the ones who ended up with the big money. They want it. I don’t have it.”
“Who are these people?”
“That’s part of the problem. It could be anybody.”
Jane looked at her for a moment. Mary was slouching in the passenger seat, looking out the window at the darkness. When she turned to meet Jane’s gaze her eyes were wide with wonder and a touch of injury. What she was saying coincided with the truth in one spot: there was no way of limiting the number of people who might be interested in robbing a woman who had stolen millions of dollars. But this did not alter the fact that Mary Perkins knew who was after her tonight, and that she insisted she didn’t. Jane said, “Why were you in county jail?”
Mary Perkins shrugged. “Parole violation. I saw those men and tried to leave town.”
Jane stifled the annoyed response that rose to her tongue. Mary obviously was experienced enough to know that the best lies were short and simple. Where did the lie begin? She might have noticed that men were following her, but she had not tried to leave town because of that. Something else must have happened first—something that told her what they wanted. All of the hours Jane had spent hustling this woman around the country settled on her chest like a weight. “Where do you think you could go where there would be the smallest chance you’d be recognized?”
“Smallest chance?”
