by Lisa Black
Jack glanced at Maggie as if expecting her to jump in, which for some reason made her smile.
“It sucks up the dirt?” Riley suggested.
Pierce Bowman laughed. “I was going to say nature abhors one, but yours is probably more apropos in this case.”
Jack said, “And this has to do with Sterling because … ?”
“Enter Joanna Moorehouse, who goes right back into the subprime mortgage business that everyone else had just gotten out of. In no time at all she’s trading into the billions with some decent tranches … but of course she also has a number of trades that completely suck. I’m interested in buying her good stuff, not the crap.”
“And Joanna—”
“Said it was all or nothing. She’s ready—she was ready—to move into the big tree in the Big Apple. But I wasn’t biting.”
“And Lauren and Leroy Sherman?”
“They were all for splitting the company, if that was what it took to shake the dust of Sterling Financial off their feet.”
“But Joanna didn’t agree.”
“Vociferously. Sherman is one of those who keeps his head down and lets everyone else get shot first, but Lauren would get into it with Joanna. These glass walls look nice and fancy and ‘aren’t we all so honest,’ but they don’t block sound all that well. No secrets here.”
Riley spelled it out. “So you think Lauren killed Joanna to get the merger done.”
Bowman laughed. “No! Sorry, didn’t mean to imply that. Lauren talks a good game but she’s no Lucretia Borgia. She’s not even a Joanna. Now if Lauren had been killed… .”
Riley said, “So you don’t work for Sterling. But you have an office—”
“Just temporary. I evicted the in-house counsel—poor kid.”
“How long have you been at this location, then? In Cleveland?”
“Two, two and a half weeks. It should only take another few days; then Dhaval and I will be done and out of here.” He glanced out the window at Cleveland’s downtown. “Thank God.”
“And when you say ‘done’—”
“After due diligence we’ll have a finalized proposal of what portion of Sterling we’re willing to buy and what they’re going to have to dump. Then Joanna can—could—take it or leave it.” He grew pensive and added, “I hope this doesn’t delay things. I’m not sure exactly how their charter … I assume Leroy and Lauren take over, which will be good for me. They’re on board and the deal will go through.” His face cleared. Maggie could imagine him thinking “win-win for everybody.”
Except, of course, Joanna.
Chapter 8
Beyond that Pierce Bowman had nothing to add. He hadn’t known Joanna Moorehouse or anyone else at Sterling longer than the few weeks he’d been there, had no personal relationship with any of them, had never been to Joanna’s house, and had no idea if she had any enemies other than the protesters outside. Even they did not rise above small-town antics to him. “You should have seen Wall Street during the Occupy movement days. I went to work every day waiting for someone to toss a grenade into our lobby or coat all our Journals in anthrax powder. Bastards.”
To Maggie’s surprise, he gave up buccal swabs and fingerprints without complaint. Perhaps he simply didn’t want Lauren Schneider to show him up; as he elbowed the conference room door open he threw a challenging glance toward her office. Then he continued to the men’s room with his hands balled into fists to keep the ink from brushing any part of his suit.
Riley leaned over the radiator cover, stretching out his back and watching the people on the sidewalk. “I think they’re breaking for lunch. Speaking of which—”
“You’re hungry,” Jack finished for him, as if this were a foregone conclusion.
“I was thinking that if our day traders out there get the munchies, we can’t stop ’em. Our guy could go out for burgers and never come back.”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “But that officer standing at the elevator doors—with his required body cam we will have nice close-up shots of anyone who leaves.”
“Thank you, ACLU,” Riley muttered. “Those body cams work both ways.”
They were tense, Maggie saw, and thought she could understand why. Being here at all was a gamble. These were the early hours of an investigation into a brutal murder, and if Joanna Moorehouse had been slaughtered by an ex-boyfriend or a long-lost child looking to inherit, then these hours would have been a complete waste of time. And looking at the people at their desks, so focused on interest rates and market shares, it was hard to believe any one of them could have plunged a knife into a human being again and again with the same intense drive.
The elevator dinged and a delivery boy—man—laden with a stack of white boxes emerged. Everyone looked, without pausing in their phone conversations, their gazes following the tower of sustenance as the delivery guy moved over to a large table in the corner and set them down with an assurance born of practice.
Riley said, “There. Munchies averted.”
The very pretty young woman Maggie had noticed earlier finished a call, went over and paid the man. They exchanged a laugh, he left, and one by one, managers took a break from the desk work to drift over to the salads and sandwiches. The woman came to the conference room and told the cops and Maggie to help themselves if they were hungry. Her name was Tyra Simmons, and she was Sterling’s in-house counsel. “Seriously, we always have too much food. Most of these guys are like teenage boys. Some days they inhale the whole table, and other times they forget to eat altogether.”
Riley asked if she could spare them a few minutes.
The smile wiped from her face, but she took a seat and explained her position there. Every investment firm had their own lawyer, particularly important in this day and age. Real estate and fiduciary laws varied by state and sometimes by city and, on top of that, changed often. Regulatory requirements from the Federal Reserve and SEC were a constant challenge. It kept her busy, she finished wearily.
Riley asked, “Are there any lawsuits pending against Sterling?”
“Right at the moment? About forty-eight.” At their surprised looks, she said, “That’s pretty average for this market share.”
“What are they, um, regarding?”
She brushed a handful of long dark hair over one shoulder. “People not happy with the return on their investments. People not happy with their mortgage payments. People not happy with being evicted after they couldn’t make their mortgage payments. Other companies not happy because we’re taking their customers too easily. That sort of thing. Normal, unfortunately, in the business world.”
“Let’s talk about the suits right here in the Cleveland area,” Riley said.
“Forty-eight,” Tyra Simmons said. “Those are the ones in Cleveland. Nationally, I couldn’t guess. Ninety-nine percent are nuisances with no legal merit.”
“Any one-percenters that come to mind?”
She thought, a line forming between her perfectly shaped eyebrows, and drummed one set of long nails on the tabletop. “Ned sicced a class action on us regarding one of our power loans.”
“Ned Swift?”
“The same.”
“Was Joanna worried?”
Tyra shook her head.
“Any of this class action group get especially hyper, especially toward Joanna?”
“No. Just Ned. He showed up here a few times. He would demand meetings with me and her, but then he didn’t have anything new to say so we started to refuse anything if it didn’t happen in front of a judge.”
“What happens to the suit now?”
She blinked. “Nothing. I mean, nothing changes. It was brought against Sterling, not Joanna personally. Though … she got some pretty ugly letters. Joanna would shrug them off but I could see they bothered her.”
Jack’s interest seemed to perk up. “Did she keep them?”
“I did.” She spoke more surely now, perhaps glad to have some concrete way to help. “I insisted. You never know what will help in
a lawsuit.”
The slender woman popped up without further warning and went to her office.
“There’s something she’s not telling us,” Riley fretted.
“She’s a lawyer,” Jack said. “There’s probably worlds she’s not telling us. Like maybe Sterling Financial is as crooked as hell.”
Tyra returned with a green hanging file. Maggie gloved up and took it from her; if they wanted to collect fingerprints from the pages it would be best not to add more of their own. But paging through the sheets with Riley and Jack looking over her shoulder, it seemed that processing wouldn’t be necessary. The authors were not anonymous. They included their names and addresses as they told Joanna Moorehouse that she and Sterling Financial were “thieves,” “hucksters,” “economic vampires who sucked the lives from their already weakened prey.” The effect of this somewhat elegant analogy had been ruined by a very less elegant illustration of a devil-like scourge supping at the neck of a prone stick figure. Drops of blood in contrasting ink added a finishing touch of drama.
“Let’s start with this guy,” Riley suggested.
But the next missive trumped the drawing since it described Sterling, and Joanna personally, as “a money-sucking leech whore who ought to be burned at the stake.”
“That one kind of scared me,” Tyra admitted. “I insisted we update our security system here. Joanna even said she had gotten one for her home, so I know it bothered her.”
The low murmur of voices and activity outside suddenly bounced higher, into an excited waterfall. Riley crossed to the window and looked out. “Miss Simmons, is that Ned Swift?”
She moved to his side, lithe as a cat, and took one quick peek. “Oh yeah. That’s him.”
Riley and Jack exchanged a look, then mobilized without a word. They were stepping into the elevator before Jack noticed Maggie behind them.
“You stay here,” he ordered as he punched a button.
What was she supposed to do there? “Why?”
“Can never be sure about a mob.” The doors closed.
She stood there, stupidly watching the light move down the crack in the middle as the car descended. What did that mean? Were the irate customers going to attack the detectives with pitchforks and hand-lettered signs when they took away the group’s leader? Would a riot ensue? What should she do?
She returned to the window, pressing her forehead against the hot glass in order to see the sidewalk below. From that angle the half closest to the building was lost, but she caught a glimpse of Jack’s shoulders and Riley’s thinning red strands as they approached a middle-aged man with curly hair and a lightweight plaid jacket. The cops spoke, the group of protesters hovered like agitated bees, Maggie watched, and then Jack moved toward the building and out of her sight.
*
Ned Swift turned out to be a wiry man with sandy blond hair, almost as tall as Jack, with round glasses and a few ancient acne scars marring an otherwise cherubic face. When the detectives emerged from the building he said only, “Did they call the cops on us again? We have a permit.”
Riley straddled tough and friendly with this guy, telling him that they had no problem with the protest but would appreciate a few moments of his time, his words reassuring but his tone firm. Swift didn’t mind. He agreed instantly and entered the cool lobby with a cheery wave to his acolytes, who, after a few worried looks, carried on wending through the sweltering morning without him.
The detectives settled on the leather furniture, next to the piano. The stone and glass of the walls nearly soundproofed the room and it was nicely quiet, save for the clicking of the receptionist’s keyboard and the tinkling hush of a tiny Zen waterfall on the end table.
Riley flipped open his notebook. “Can you summarize for us exactly what your problem is with Joanna Moorehouse?”
“Certainly.” Swift settled more comfortably into the soft armchair and straightened his jacket, releasing a puff of Axe body spray into the atmosphere. “If you remember the housing bust, 2008, thirty percent of Slavic village homes went into foreclosure, Cleveland led the country in vacant homes, etcetera etcetera?”
This time Riley said only, “Yes.”
“Because mortgage originators like Sterling made loans to people they knew bloody well could never pay them. They set it up, collect their fees for doing a little paperwork, the investors get monthly payments, borrowers begin paying off their house, everybody’s happy.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“You know how that Greek guy said everything had to be in moderation?”
“Yeah?”
“When there’s money being made, moderation goes out the window. Even people with bad credit don’t want to pay high rates and, obviously, don’t have the money to pay high payments, so … creative math. Adjustable rates that you can ‘lock in’—except the rate you’re locking in is a completely different rate, prime plus whatever the bank feels like tacking on, so from day one this will already be higher than a thirty-year fixed. Low rates with balloon payments, which would work out fine if you know you’re going to win the lottery in three years. Interest-only payments, in which you aren’t paying a penny of the principal until the payment leaps up by one or two hundred percent in, say, seven years.”
“But—” Riley began.
“Exactly. Why make loans you know are going to fail? Because Wall Street compensation is based on that year’s performance. All the higher-ups get bonuses based on a percentage of profit—for CEOs this can be millions, double-and triple-digit millions. So when they will make more in one year than most people could make in several lifetimes, they don’t think in the long run.
“These firms—Ameriquest, Long-Term Capital, Long Beach Mortgage, and now Sterling—they don’t care if they falsify paperwork, whether they let their clients lie about their income, whether they flat out defraud their clients by pretending to sign them up for a fixed rate and then fake the papers to put them in an adjustable rate—because by the time their monthly payment suddenly triples and they default, the original firm is long out of it and the borrower is arguing with a company that never knew them and only knows what the original firm told it.” Ned went on, using both hands for emphasis, “Unfortunately, the sophistication of the American borrower had not caught up by 2008 and isn’t much better now.”
Jack tugged at his tie. Ned Swift seemed calm and scholarly with a good grasp of the facts. He also seemed to loathe Sterling Financial and Joanna Moorehouse from the tips of his reddened ears to the raging tremor racing through his voice.
“People have to fight back. Cleveland and a bunch of other cities sued the lenders, but the mortgage banker’s association donated a few million to the state political parties and the lawsuits were thrown out. The Federal Reserve, the SEC, Congress threw up their hands and said there was nothing they could do. In 2008 the music finally stopped and some dancers collapsed, the government bailed out the rest, and our lawmakers were supposed to make laws so this couldn’t happen again.”
Jack’s legs twitched, aching to move, to do something.
“Except with caps on their compensation the investment banks and mortgage banks had plenty of money to keep up the kickbacks to the political parties, so the new laws wound up watered down into trickles.”
“Wait,” Jack said. “Are you protesting things that happened ten years ago, or things that are happening now?”
“The past is preface,” Swift said, but wiped away the smug tone when he saw Jack’s lack of appreciation for it. “The behavior I protested in 2008 slunk away for a while, laid low but never went away. Mortgage securities were a cash cow, and just because we slaughtered the cow doesn’t mean people lost their taste for milk. The big firms reined it in because no one, not even them, wants to go through that again, but little places like Joanna’s saw opportunity. Have you noticed commercials for instant credit and cold calls from barely legal sharks offering anyone who answers a no-collateral, pick-a-payment loan? They’re baaack—doing all t
he bad things they did before, but this time having the sense to get out before someone blows too hard on their house of cards. Why do you think Joanna’s selling to DJ Bryan?”
“So you’re saying Sterling knowingly made bad loans?”
The smugness returned and Swift spoke with exaggerated patience. “Yes. One of her victims—I have the copies right here”—he pawed through a battered leather carryall full of files and dog-eared pages—“wanted a refi to put a roof on her house. Eighty-five, and she’s going to be kicked out of the home she raised her children in. Tina, a part-time waitress in Tremont told the loan officer she only made about three-fifty a week. Including tips. He said no problem and added a zero. A welfare mother on Quincy bought a three-bedroom, two-bath bungalow in Brooklyn. A guy named Kurt—”
Riley interrupted. “Okay. So Sterling is a predatory lender and you’re organizing a class action lawsuit. But what is your relationship with Joanna Moorehouse?”
Swift put his files aside. “She’s the head of the snake. She knew exactly what she was doing every step of the way.”
“How long have you been acquainted with Ms. Moorehouse?”
Swift finally picked up on the oddity of Riley’s questioning. “Our lawsuit is against Sterling. What, is Joanna whining about the protests, or the letters? Is she going to—”
“How did you know about the letters?”
He paused, but only for the briefest second. “She all but threw them in my face last time I saw her.”
“And that was?”
He made a show of thinking, chin in one hand, staring into the distance. His gaze fell on the people on the sidewalk outside, and the lines around his mouth softened as when a mother looks upon her brood. “About two weeks ago. The gargoyle in the back lot knocks off at six and our Joanna tends to work late.”
“So you laid in wait by her car?”
He frowned at the wording. “No! I just wanted to make sure she would personally be in court for the hearing the next day. Instead she shrieked at me about getting irate letters.”