Shell Game (Stand Alone 2)

by Badal, Joseph

  “So, what happens at the end of the month?” Carrie asked.

  “The bank can foreclose on the collateral behind the loan. That’s all of the restaurant locations, which would, in effect, put an end to the company. I assume the bank would close down the restaurants and sell the buildings and land. I doubt they want to be in the restaurant business. There’s so much equity in the property the bank should easily come out ahead.”

  “And Edward gets the shaft.”

  “Edward and Betsy and you and me. All shareholders. And the hundreds of employees who helped us build the company.”

  Carrie was quiet for a while and then said, “I’d better go change.” She smiled, the dark and evil spirit apparently gone. “I really am starving.”

  “I think I’m ready to crash,” Carrie said after they’d finished coffees and cannoli’s.

  “Oh, thank goodness, me too,” Betsy responded. “I had no idea being pregnant could be so tiring.”

  Katherine chuckled and said, “Wait until the baby is born. You don’t even know what tired is.”

  “Oh, great,” Betsy said, smiling.

  Edward and Betsy drove off while the valet retrieved Katherine’s car. While Carrie and Katherine waited, Katherine pulled her cell phone out of her purse and punched in a number.

  “Hello, Wendy, it’s Katherine. Just checking to see how you’re doing.”

  “Thanks for calling. I’m okay.” Wendy’s voice wobbled, then she broke down, crying.

  “What’s wrong?” Katherine said, alarmed.

  “We need to talk. You’re not going to be happy with me, but I think it was the right thing to do.”

  “What?”

  “Let’s wait until we get together. How does tomorrow morning at 9 work for you?”

  “Honey, I’m no more than ten minutes away from you. I’m coming over there now. By the way, my daughter is with me.” Katherine closed her cell phone.

  “Who was that?” Carrie asked.

  “I know you’re tired, but this is important. Can you stay awake for a story?”

  “Go ahead and start. If I fall asleep, you can continue tomorrow.”

  “Once I start this tale, there’s no chance you’ll fall asleep.”

  Katherine drove to the convent as she started her story in 1988 with Frank’s death and then segued to the current problems in the banking industry, explaining how the politicians and the regulators and the banks and the investment banks and the rating agencies and greedy borrowers created a toxic economic environment that was now threatening Winter Enterprises. She then told Carrie how she met Wendy Folsom and what had transpired since then.

  Ten minutes later, they checked in at the administration building at St. Francis College and told the young woman there where they were going.

  “I can’t let you go anywhere on campus after hours without first announcing you and then having a security guard escort you.”

  “Fine. Please call Mrs. Folsom.”

  The woman blushed. “There are no phones in the visitors’ rooms.”

  Katherine gave her Wendy’s cell number. “Try this.”

  The woman got through to Wendy and then called a security guard.

  Katherine guided Carrie to a corner of the massive reception area and filled her in on some details about Wendy. When she described the way Folsom had beaten Wendy, Katherine saw Carrie’s darkness reemerge, something visceral and vengeful and dangerous.

  “Have you met this guy, Folsom?” Carrie asked.

  “A long, long time ago.”

  “Tell me what you know about him.”

  “Wendy’s his third wife. All of them were young, blonde, and blue-eyed. All from good families. He seems to have a thing for preppie girls. Apparently he treated Wendy well in the beginning, but became more violent as the months went by and she thinks he would have killed her if she’d stayed with him, and that he wouldn’t have cared. The only thing that’s important to him is money, she said. He’s manic about it. ”

  “And now this bastard’s bank is trying to ruin Edward.”

  “Seems that way,” Katherine said.

  A seriously overweight, sixtyish man wearing a wrinkled gray uniform arrived ten minutes later. His hair looked tousled and his eyes were puffy. Katherine thought he looked as though he’d been sleeping. In fact, he looked like an unmade bed. The young woman at the reception desk asked the guard to take Katherine and Carrie to the visitors’ wing of the convent. They all loaded into an extended golf cart and rode up to the convent.

  After thanking the guard, the women entered the building and found Wendy waiting for them in the hall. Her eyes were wet. Katherine noticed Carrie’s eyes narrow when she looked at Wendy, whose face was still swollen and bruised. Katherine introduced Carrie to Wendy.

  “Let’s go down the hall,” Wendy said. “There’s a break room we can use.”

  Philippa Gonzalez found an empty lot across from the college, next to a small, darkened building with a sign out front that said a paving contractor occupied the building. It was almost 10 p.m. and dark. She ran across the street and scaled the rock wall onto the college grounds. After a quick run, using trees and bushes to cover her approach, she entered the convent’s visitors’ wing. She padded softly down the hall to an intersecting hallway, and peered left and then right. A light shone twenty yards away, on the right. She was about to turn the corner but stopped when she heard female voices.

  “It’s good to finally meet you,” Wendy told Carrie after they were seated in a small room with a two-seater couch, two arm chairs, and a coffee table. “Your mother talks about you a lot.”

  Carrie smiled. “Don’t believe half of what a mother says about her children.”

  “Wendy, what’s going on?” Katherine interrupted.

  Wendy lowered her gaze to her hands in her lap. “I called Gerald today.”

  “Why, Wendy? Both Paul and Sylvia Young told you to have no contact with him.”

  “I made him a proposal. He’s agreed to do something for me in return for my dropping the charges against him.”

  “Is this about money? Did you demand more money from him?”

  Wendy’s head came up and met Katherine’s eyes angrily. “No, it’s not about money. I would never make a deal with him so I could get more money out of him.”

  “Then what?”

  Wendy dropped her gaze again.

  “Come on, Wendy,” Katherine implored. “What is it?”

  She looked at Katherine and said, “I told him I’d drop the charges if he made the bank stop harassing Edward.”

  Katherine was dumbstruck. She sat on her side of the couch without any idea how to respond. Finally, she leaned forward, elbows on her knees and said, “Wendy, Edward wouldn’t want you to do anything to jeopardize your safety, nobody does. I truly appreciate your desire to help us out with the bank, but negotiating with Gerald Folsom is like negotiating with the devil. Maybe worse”

  “But it’s a win-win situation for everyone,” she protested.

  “Only if your husband holds up his end of the deal.”

  Carrie cleared her throat and said, “I hope you don’t mind my butting in here, but how did you call your husband?”

  Wendy considered the question for a few seconds and said, “I used the phone in the office around the corner.”

  “So, Folsom could have captured the phone number and figured out where you are?”

  Wendy’s face went pale; her eyes widened.

  “Wendy, my mother explained about your husband’s abuse. Do you believe he’s capable of doing you more harm?”

  Wendy nodded slowly.

  “Do you believe he’s capable of killing you?”

  Wendy hesitated a second before nodding again and saying, “Yes.”

  Philippa heard one of the women speak the name Wendy and she heard a reference to Gerald Folsom and the threat he posed to this Wendy. Philippa put two and two together and guessed the hit on Wendy Folsom had been commissioned by her
husband through Toothpick Jefferson. It made no difference to her.

  Katherine’s stomach cramped. “You’re coming home with Carrie and me,” she said, standing, moving toward Wendy, and extending her hand. “Let’s go. Now.”

  They didn’t take time to pack any of Wendy’s things. Katherine and Carrie escorted her from the convent, fast-walking down toward the parking lot.

  Philippa heard one of the women say they were going to leave the building. The woman said, ‘You’re coming home with Carrie and me.’ Philippa backtracked and went outside, hiding behind a corner of the building. She saw three women hustle toward an SUV parked in a lot fifty yards down the hill. Sprinting back to the campus perimeter, Philippa climbed over the wall and ran to her car. She backed out onto the street and gunned the engine. At the intersection with Germantown Pike, she edged the nose of her vehicle forward until she could watch the college’s parking lot exit. When the SUV pulled out, she turned left, ignoring the red light, and followed.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Hanging back far enough to avoid detection, Philippa trailed the SUV for fifteen minutes. After it turned into a rural residential area, where there were no street lights and houses appeared to be on one-acre lots, she allowed even more distance. Even when she lost sight of the other vehicle, she could still see the occasional flash of its headlights. But three blocks into the subdivision, she lost sight of the vehicle and no longer saw its lights. She came to an intersection and slammed the steering wheel with her hand in frustration. Opting to turn left, Philippa drove for half-a-block and suddenly spotted three women bailing out of the SUV she’d been following. She cruised past the driveway, which meandered for about thirty yards to a one-story house bordered by enormous oak and pine trees.

  Philippa decided to wait until the women retired for the evening. She’d been paid to eliminate one target; she would prefer not to have to take out three for the price of one. Although she would do so if necessary. Besides, one woman or three women would pose no obstacle for her.

  The last of the house lights went out at 11:20. Philippa waited another fifteen minutes and then slipped out of her car and circled the property on foot, keeping to the densest part of the tree growth. Wearing all black, including a watch cap and skin tight gloves, she broke through the tree line and carefully approached the back of the house, watching for fallen branches or anything that might trip her up. An air conditioner unit sat on a concrete pad near the left corner of the house. It was running and making enough covering noise to mask the sound of her approach.

  The windows on the rear of the house indicated there were three large rooms there, separated by smaller rooms Philippa assumed were bathrooms. The room on the left had a sliding glass door opening onto the back patio. The other two rooms had large windows, but no doors. Assuming the women were in the bedrooms, the best course of action would be to attempt entry on the front side of the house. She walked around the house and peered inside the sidelight window by the front door. There was no alarm pad visible on the entry wall and no signs of a dog – no water bowls, no dog houses in the yard.

  She tried the front door handle. Locked, with a deadbolt. Moving to the right front corner of the house, she eyed the driveway where it curved around to the garage. There was a door that accessed the back of the garage. It, too, was locked. But this lock was a simple device inset in the door knob. Philippa pulled a plastic card the size of a credit card and slipped it between the door jamb and the lock. Jiggling the card, she inserted it past the tongue of the lock and pulled on the door handle. The door opened smoothly, and silently. She propped the door open with a handy bucket partially filled with potting soil in case she had to make a quick exit. Entering the garage, she took six steps to an interior door. She didn’t need to use the plastic card this time; the door was unlocked.

  Now inside the house, Philippa removed a switchblade knife from her fanny pack. She tip-toed down a short hallway terminating at another hallway that lead to the rooms at the back of the house.

  The first room she came to was the one with the sliding glass door opening onto the patio. The door to that room was open, and Philippa saw a woman lying in bed, facing her. The woman appeared to be in her fifties and was snoring lightly.

  Philippa passed an open bathroom door, arriving next at a closed door. She grasped the lever door handle and began to press down on it when an almost indiscernible, muffled noise caused her to recoil from the door, looking up and down the hall. But there was no one else in the hallway. Maybe the wind had moved the garage door she had propped open. She had barely heard anything herself and doubted any of the pampered suburbanites would have been roused by it. Despite that thought, she had a momentary impulse to abandon the job, at least for tonight. But the $5,000 fee she would earn swamped that impulse.

  Placing her hand back on the door lever, she slowly applied just enough pressure to crack open the door. The movement of the door was almost soundless—just a slight brushing of the door bottom against carpet. The sleep-bound woman in this room was lying with her back to the door. A nightlight in the connecting bathroom shined just enough light on the bedroom to allow Philippa to see the woman’s long blonde hair. That was part of the description of the target Toothpick had provided her. The third woman she’d seen at the college had also been a blonde, but that woman’s hair had been very short.

  Philippa opened the door enough to allow her to glide into the room. She moved the door to an inch of closing and rapidly moved to the bed. She was one step from the side of the bed when she stopped, the hair standing up on the back of her neck. It wasn’t a sound or a smell or something she saw. Something else in the room had changed, almost like an electrical charge in the air. She had almost convinced herself that she was imagining things as she looked back over her shoulder. Then her stomach clenched and her breath caught in her chest.

  Philippa spun around, raising her left arm in a defensive move and thrusting out with her knife hand, confident her strike would finish the woman standing in front of her. But the woman ducked her thrust. Philippa pulled her arm back, altered her stance, and shifted the knife to her left hand. She struck out again, but hit nothing but air. About to wade in closer to the woman, Philippa was suddenly disoriented and in excruciating pain, collapsing to the floor. She gasped as though she would never take another breath.

  Wendy jerked upright in bed, screaming. She had been dreaming that Gerald was beating her, but this was no dream. Someone she couldn’t see was making pained, animal-like noises and another person stood near the footboard, framed in the doorway. She retreated against the headboard, then scrambled off the far side of the bed, moving toward the bathroom. She ignored the pain that quick movement caused.

  “Wendy, calm down,” someone said.

  Wendy fled into the bathroom before she realized the voice was Carrie’s. She came back into the room and walked over to Carrie, trembling as she looked at someone writhing on the floor. Before she could say anything, the hallway light came on and Katherine, holding a fireplace poker, rushed into the room. She flipped the bedroom light switch, bathing the room in bright light and momentarily blinding the occupants.

  “What happened?” Katherine demanded. She pointed the poker at the figure on the floor. “Who’s that?”

  Carrie bent down, picked up the knife the intruder had dropped, and knelt down next to her. The intruder appeared to be breathing easier now. Carrie summarily searched the woman, finding a revolver in her jacket. She handed the pistol to Katherine. Knife in hand, she shook the woman with her free hand.

  The intruder’s eyes darted around; her face was beet red.

  “You get one chance to tell me the truth,” Carrie said to the woman. “If you do the right thing, I’ll let you go.”

  The woman looked around at the women in the room. “You’ll really let me go?” she asked hoarsely.

  “You’ve got my word,” Carrie said. “But if I ever see you again I’ll kill you.”

  Wendy saw th
e woman’s eyes widen for just a split second.

  “You tell me who sent you and you get a break. You take the stupid route and I’ll call the police.”

  The woman looked at Carrie. Her breathing had eased a lot and she no longer looked as panicked.

  “Three seconds,” Carrie said.

  “Okay, okay,” the woman croaked. “Guy named Jefferson. Toothpick Jefferson.”

  “Got a number for this Jefferson?” Carrie asked.

  The woman recited ten digits.

  “Now describe him to me.”

  SATURDAY

  JULY 23, 2011

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Gail Moskowitz knew she had something that smelled really bad. Nearly every time Donald Matson had been in charge of an agency transaction, Gerald Folsom and Folsom Financial Corporation’s names had popped up. But she had found absolutely nothing indicating anything illegal had occurred, even if there was no question Matson had violated FDIC policies and guidelines for asset disposal. He had sold assets the agency accumulated from bank closures on a sole-source basis to Folsom, instead of sales based on competitive bids. And Folsom had purchased assets from the FDIC at the low end of the range of such sales to other investors.

  Folsom had purchased sixteen secured loan pools averaging $87 million in loan face value per pool over the past twenty years. The price he’d paid was an average of twenty-three and a half percent of the face value of the loans. That meant Folsom had paid only slightly more than $327 million for about $1.4 billion in loans. The last time Gail had checked, the average investor in loan pools recovered fifty-eight percent of the face value of loans, plus accrued interest. Before interest, she figured Folsom recovered at least $807 million on an investment of $327 million. Not a bad return.

  But Donald Matson had a reputation in the agency as a guy who got things done. Did she want to destroy Matson’s reputation now that the man was dead? Especially since she had no proof anything had gone on between Matson and Folsom, other than a relationship that had benefitted the agency.