The Importance of Being Dangerous

by David Dante Troutt

  Finding the Short Hills Mall after dark was tricky, but she did. It was the only place in New Jersey she knew, and New Jersey was roughly south and west, which is the direction the navigational system on her Mercedes told her to go. At the mall, she, Raquel, and Aunt Chickie had a bite to eat, bought a few items to make the ride more comfortable for them, and headed to a mailbox store that was about ready to close. Sidarra left the other two outside and went in to mail a few items. She sent the silver Bergdorf box full of clothes, jewelry, and just under $25,000 cash to Marilyn at the pharmacy where she worked at the corner of Duane and Reade streets. Then she scribbled a short note to Darrius and included the key and a little thank-you cash in the envelope, and sent that off too. Driving most of the night, they pulled into an Ohio motel by 3:00 A.M. The important thing, she realized as her head adjusted to the strange-smelling pillow, was that they were gone. Long gone in the slow lane to New Mexico.

  32

  ORIGINALLY, THE CASE OF THE UNITED STATES versus Griffin Haley Coleman and Yakoobiah B. Jones was tried as one. The two men sat in court with their lawyers at the defendants’ table for several hearings at which they wore the same crisp dark suits and faced ahead like silent soldiers captured behind enemy lines. They sat beside each other and listened to the lawyers exchange technical arguments with the judge as the prosecution began disclosing evidence of the crimes with which they were charged. They were alleged to have violated both state and federal laws, but the charges were combined for a single trial in federal court. After some internal office wrangling, Jeffrey Geiger was named the lead prosecutor.

  At times the case seemed stronger than Griff had thought. The police hackers had indeed reproduced the computer traces of credit card fraud by recovering files long deleted from Yakoob’s hard drive. They identified a grand total of $172,000 which had been misappropriated from a victim list of twenty-one individuals. Geiger was one of them, but the judge allowed him to proceed with the prosecution despite the possible conflict of interest. The handwriting on the yellow piece of legal paper was identified as Griff’s. Their bank accounts started to increase, then fluctuate wildly shortly after the first names were found on the system. Since the illicit monies had been used in stock purchases across state lines, the two men had engaged in interstate commerce, which could land them in federal, not state, prison. Anything purchased with the kitty was considered ill-gotten gain.

  The rest of the case would have to proceed from that basis. And the prosecution would, of course, have to prove that the incredible accumulation of stock market wealth connected to the death of Chancellor Eagleton, a Solutions, Inc. director and shareholder, was more than coincidence—say, a lucky online bet. Griff and Koob would not only have to have known Raul Rodriguez, they would have to be shown to conspire with him for homicidal ends. That would amount to both securities fraud and murder. The only problem, Geiger discovered after the second court hearing before the judge, was that the key was in showing that Griff and Yakoob had benefited from the Solutions, Inc. IPO as illegal insiders. If they weren’t invited to buy stock in their own identities, the government would have to show that they had somehow disguised themselves as angels during the angel round of financing. But, as Griff’s attorney pointed out in pretrial conferences inside the judge’s chambers, that would entitle the defense to examine the records of all the shareholders who were allowed to participate in the IPO. With a little resourcefulness, he had already learned that Jack Eagleton was not so upstanding after all. The chancellor had made timely announcements on education policy intended to artificially drive up the value of the company just before it went public. At the last minute he had also personally authorized the issuance of a thousand shares of Solutions, Inc. to his wife and children in the name of a nonexistent trust fund. That was insider trading. A trial on that charge would reveal publicly that the good chancellor was dirty. So the government decided to leave that count out.

  Griff was right about one thing—that it was a good time to make a deal. All that was left of the charges against him were the credit card thefts, conspiracy to commit fraud, receipt of stolen goods, and, for failing to pay a cent in capital gains taxes on dividends, tax evasion for almost a million dollars’ worth of traceable wealth. It was not nice to make online bets on the deaths of public figures, but it was not illegal to do so. Much to Jeffrey Geiger’s supreme personal disgust, the United States Attorney’s office agreed to a plea arrangement by which Griffin Haley Coleman would pay about $75,000 in restitution to his victims with interest, settle his debt plus penalties to the Internal Revenue Service, and serve a required minimum of seventeen months in a medium-security federal penitentiary designed for white-collar convicts. His license to practice law was also revoked. He would never vote again. The Full Count would be sold at auction—in all likelihood, back to Q. Griff’s wife Belinda, who did not fly back from Japan to attend any of the proceedings, filed for immediate divorce and put their brownstone up for sale.

  Encouraged by the busted securities fraud case, Yakoob stayed on to fight at trial. While Marilyn watched every day from the seat behind her husband, the prosecution showed a jury reams of technical computer evidence. They called Yakoob a “terrorist mastermind” and, over the objections of his defense lawyer, hammered repeated references to Yakoob’s association with a neighborhood friend, Raul Rodriguez, a.k.a. the notorious “Candy Man,” who had viciously assassinated the city’s beloved schools chancellor in his home. When it was all over, Raul had been linked to at least two murders, the unprovoked near-bludgeoning-to-death of a Harlem man named Tyrell Johnson, and assorted acts of wanton thuggery. It didn’t matter that Raul was dead or that he was not on trial. Nor did the jury think Yakoob was the least bit funny. He faced all the same charges as Griff and was convicted of them all.

  Yet the real problem with deciding not to take a plea as Griff had was that Yakoob’s continuing trial gave the prosecution the time it needed to connect him to Fidelity. It wasn’t just that by then the police hackers had become intimately familiar with Koob’s hacking fingerprint—his methods and patterns of field deduction and decoding. It was that his computer showed him to be inside the bank itself. It was almost so obvious that for weeks they missed it. His own bank had been hit by rare identity thefts that, when properly traced, had to come from either a customer or an employee. The thief had to have a password, because the firewall had not yet been breached. Griff was fortunate that these facts came out after his plea was accepted for related crimes; he could not be retried. Yakoob was lucky that Cavanaugh was alive. Still, the judge sentenced Koob to a mandatory minimum of six years in prison.

  Immediately after the sentence was announced, both Marilyn and Yakoob dropped lifelessly to the floor. Koob bumped his head on the defendant’s table going down. He was still unconscious when Marilyn came to, crying to say goodbye and holding her stomach. While she waited for an ambulance with her mother, she watched them wheel her husband away on a gurney. An hour later, an emergency room doctor would tell her the good news. That cramp in her stomach was the developing embryo the fall did not injure at all. Koob too would survive.

  Before the judge adjourned the trial, he had explained that the court would retain jurisdiction over the matter in the event the prosecution’s unsuccessful efforts to locate the missing Desiree Galore changed. Unfortunately, she did not seem to exist. Unlike Griff, this coconspirator used no password, left no computer trail, and received whatever gains she got through a fictitious identity. For all the government knew, she too was dead.

  PERHAPS IT WAS SIDARRA’S SLOW, careful driving and too much air blowing through the car’s open windows, but Raquel came down with one of those terrible summer colds that prevented her from seeing the beauty of the country they crossed. On the fever’s first evening, Sidarra made a comfortable bed of blankets in the backseat for her to curl up on beside the cat. Aunt Chickie sat up front with Sidarra where they could finally talk. But they didn’t really. It had been a pretty miserable fir
st three days, and instead they began to argue. They argued and argued. The subject never got much bigger than its common beginnings—that Sidarra was hopelessly lost and refused to accept the fact and get help—but the pitch peaked quickly and stayed there. Sidarra’s voice ranged high with short, sharp shrieks of defensiveness, while Chickie’s loud accusations filled the small space with low, raspy sweeps of disgust and incredulity. It really came down to: How could you be so stupid? And Sidarra claiming that she was doing everything in her power not to be stupid. Back and forth, over and around each other it went, while Raquel and the old cat slept. It was never clear if they were arguing the same point. But it was true they were lost. After a while, Sidarra admitted that and pulled over onto the shoulder to look at a map.

  “You just need to know how disappointed I am in you, Sidarra,” Chickie said calmly to the landscape in front of the windshield as Sidarra puzzled over interstates.

  “I know you are. You have a right to be,” Sidarra whispered.

  “Yes, but you must still hear it.”

  She heard it. With the car stopped, she even confessed a lot of what the Cicero Club did to get investment money. She didn’t tell about the blood, though; Sidarra herself had trouble imagining what happened to Blane and the chancellor. She and Aunt Chickie continued on in silence for a while save for a few sniffles that signaled the spread of Raquel’s cold.

  “You think Alex will understand?” Sidarra asked.

  “Your brother?” Aunt Chickie smirked. “Sure. He’s not your problem. You can tell him a lot. He’ll want to help you. Heck, he’ll be glad to get some help, as many kids as he and that woman have running around that big place. No, I wouldn’t worry about Alex. I’d worry about your brother Charles.”

  Sidarra grew somber. “You know we don’t talk. Not in many years.”

  “That may be so, but him and Alex talk all the time. Alex moved out there to be near Charles. You need to remember that Charles has some strong feelings about this kind of stuff. You’re not the first criminal in the family, you know.”

  Sidarra’s eyes blinked hard and she turned to her aunt. “What’s Kenny’s record got to do with Charles?” she asked, recalling her youngest brother’s bouts with the law.

  “I’m not talking about Kenny, Sidarra.” Aunt Chickie took a deep breath and tried to blow down the road ahead. “I’m talking about your father.”

  “Daddy?” Sidarra said in shock.

  “Yes, precious. Your father. Your father spent most of the first two years of your brother Kenny’s life in jail for running numbers. I guess you were too young to remember that. Maybe you blotted it out. So did Kenny. But Charles didn’t.”

  “My God,” Sidarra said softly. “Charles never forgave him?”

  “Charles does not forgive.”

  Sidarra scanned the horizon, then looked over at her aunt, whose face looked tired yet peaceful bathed in the deep auburn light of late sunset, and smiled. She took a long breath, checked the rearview mirror for cars, and pulled out again onto the highway. The words stayed in the air. The long road had grown lonely of other travelers.

  “Sidarra, are you done wasting yourself for men?” Aunt Chickie asked, surprising her.

  “I didn’t do this for a man, Aunt Chickie. I was broke. That cat managed money better than I did. Hell, I was past broke, I was broken. I’d run out of expectations. If it weren’t for Raquel, I was ready to die. You might have noticed, but I was angry too. After Mommy and Daddy died. Very angry. So I was trying to live again, I think. I had forgotten how.”

  “You remember now?” Chickie grunted.

  Sidarra shook her head. “I’m not sure. You think you know the secrets after a while—about your own feelings, about how to get the images out of your head, how you’re gonna go on without your people. The pain subsides just enough for you to put your work clothes on again every day, and off you go, you know? On to the next best thing to save yourself from drowning in it all. Pretty soon you think you’re really doing something. You’ve really turned a corner. Because you now have an understanding that you paid for with all that pain, and at least it’s paid and you’re out the other side. You know?” She looked over and Aunt Chickie had drifted off to sleep, her mouth open. Sidarra could speak freely, and aloud she continued. “But you’re not. You’re not on the other side of grief. Time has just passed. You thought your depression would kill you, but it didn’t. So you had days and days to fill; you had a job and a daughter and needs to fulfill. No matter how selfish it seemed, you just couldn’t stop thinking about your own life. You got distracted from your parents and stopped seeing them in their final moment of violence, stopped thinking about what they were supposed to be doing this day and that, stopped hoping they’d magically call and continue the conversation you never finished. You never decided to do your own thing again, you just did it. And lo and behold, your thing became some other thing that would never have been possible before, or desirable, when they were here. You never would have even looked at it. You would have seen it for the trouble that it is. But now you just did it, naturally, it seemed, because for all its stupid mischief it contained love, the one thing you knew you had to have. Again.

  “I guess it takes longer to figure out than I thought.”

  THE TWO-LANE HIGHWAY CURVED gently through the earth. Aunt Chickie was fast asleep beside her while Pussy Galore’s marigold eyes peered out at the sky from deep in the corner of her box. Still a little congested, Raquel snored gently in the backseat. So this is flight, Sidarra thought. Dusk fell in slow motion. The engine was a mere purr; the tires followed the asphalt edges effortlessly. An aimless observation struck her: the car really was pretty nice after all. This was what Alex was talking about when he first recommended it. Sidarra leaned way back in the seat with her knee pressed lightly against the steering wheel. One long-nailed finger, like a pool cue sketching angles, was all it took to continue along the line of progress westward. She was fleeing. The countryside in this light resembled the flat, rough terrain she and Griff had watched from planes overhead, the occasional ridge of beige hills like cattle backs, sun-singed bush, and gnarled trees. Down low, it made for peaceful escape. There was a good chance the police weren’t even looking for her, but she was running anyway. Now, almost alone on this unknown highway, reality began to catch up. The loss of her beautiful home, maybe forever, and the room she had made. The loss of her job and what she was finally gonna be able to do. The loss of the only city she ever knew. The loss of Harlem in the morning. It would be forgiveness or insanity that would cure her. She had already tried insanity.

  Forgiveness could begin with Griff, she realized. There would be no way to call or write to him in prison without the risk of being traced back and discovered. Maybe she should send her letters to the condo in Belize, Unit 12D. There would be no way to show him the charter school she was going to start in New Mexico. So she would have to take pictures at every stage of the project and send them down there, too. By now, the sun had nestled low enough below the horizon’s hairless foothills that the last reds were burning into blue. It occurred to her: she could sing to Griff on tape. She could send him anonymous songs of love and faith. She could send those to the prison from anywhere. Griff would know who it was. A thoughtful man like him was going to have a hard time in prison. Somebody would need to sing to him.

  Then, like a distraction, what her father would call the secret to this path she was on presented itself in one tiny mirror: the outlines of Raquel asleep, her small fists curled below her chin, her angelic eyelashes closed to dreams, that softest skin. This child would have to forgive Sidarra one day, too, for yanking her clear out of her life. The school she loved. The places in which she secured her own little comfort. Her friends. Michael. And when that happened, Sidarra might finally have grounds to forgive herself.

  ON THE NIGHT when the Mercedes-Benz pulled into Alex’s driveway just outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, she, Aunt Chickie, and the cat were all sick with Raquel’s cold.
By then Raquel was fine and fresh from a nap. It was almost ten at night, and everyone but her was so exhausted Alex nearly had to carry each of them into the house. Raquel was not tired at all. Her spirit caught hold of the newness of the surroundings and she could not help herself. The house was large but modest, at the end of a new subdivision by the edge of an endless field. It looked like the desert. The air was still warm, but a sweet-smelling breeze blew in from a distant mountain range. Inside the house you could smell the chicken dinner that still waited on low heat atop the kitchen stove. Raquel’s cousins were all asleep by then except Erica, now twelve, whose parents let her stay up. Erica showed Raquel her music collection, walked her through the house, and immediately wanted to hear all about New York City, where she had never visited. Then she took Raquel down to the finished basement, where Alex and his wife Claire were already showing Sidarra and Aunt Chickie what would be their new windowless home. The sparse room was large, clean, and U-shaped, with enough cast-off furniture to swallow echoes. On one side was a long green pool table. Alex explained that he hadn’t had time or enough guys willing to dismantle it yet. Nobody had played on it in years, and there’d be plenty more room once it was gone. At the opposite end were sliding glass doors that appeared to lead out to a patio.

  “What’s out there?” Raquel chirped, her eyes huge with anticipation.

  “Oh,” Erica answered excitedly, “that’s the swimming pool! C’mon, I’ll show you.”

  The four adults watched them practically dance across the basement to the doors. They slid them open together and leaped outside.

  “Mommy!” Raquel screamed seconds later. “Quick! Come look!”

  Sidarra smiled awkwardly at her big brother and made her way to the doorway. There they shined above them and engulfed the moon by the millions: “Stars!” Raquel shouted.