Perish

by Lisa Black

  “Purchase,” Bowman corrected.

  “Have you found any red flags?”

  Bowman sighed. “Have a seat, Detective. You don’t have to loom over me like some sort of avenging angel.”

  Jack resisted for a moment, purely because he really didn’t like this guy, but then told himself not to be stupid. If the guy was willing to talk, let him talk. He sat.

  “Dhaval, my quantitative analyst, has gone over their books thoroughly, verified accounts, even called in favors in other cities. What Sterling says it has, it has. They even meet their capital requirements, which is where most places fail their stress tests. There’s nothing wrong with Sterling. No red flags. If Joanna and Tyra were keeping some dark secret that some third party murdered them over, I don’t know what it could be. Believe me, I would have no problem with killing this deal and heading back to New York if I found something I didn’t like.”

  Unless it made money, Jack thought to himself. “What about an ethical problem, rather than a financial one?”

  “Ethics?” He didn’t appear to know the word. “What do you mean?”

  “If Joanna engaged in tactics that were not actually illegal, but shady.”

  He stopped there because Bowman chuckled. “Sterling is a mortgage loan origination firm. Everything they do is shady. Banks don’t loan people money because we’re nice guys who care about increasing participation in the American Dream. We loan money because it makes us money and, in addition, gives us capital to play with. We gamble with other people’s money, your money. If things go well, everybody wins, but mostly us. If things don’t go well, we still get year-end bonuses; they just won’t be as big.”

  “Speaking of bonuses …” Jack pulled a copy of Joanna’s Panamanian account out of his jacket pocket and passed it across the desk. “Do you recognize this account?”

  Bowman gave it a close but not terribly interested look. “No, but there isn’t much here to go on. Let me ask Dhaval.”

  He pulled out his phone, of course, instead of getting up and walking the fifteen feet to the conference room, where the quant toiled. At least he didn’t text but barked a summons into the phone’s tiny speaker.

  This sucks, Jack thought as they waited in silence, having to rely on members of the suspect pool to interpret our evidence. But he didn’t see an alternative.

  The serious Dhaval arrived to study the printout with mild curiosity. “What is this? I never saw this.” He added absently, “This is a lot of money.”

  Bowman got intrigued enough to get up and read it again, over his subordinate’s shoulder. “Joanna was skimming.” A statement, not a question. It didn’t seem to surprise him much.

  Dhaval asked, more to himself than his boss, “But where did it come from? This account number … possibly the capital deposits …”

  Bowman said, “I knew that bitch was up to something.”

  Jack asked if this would affect the merger.

  “Purchase. Not so much. It only shows that Sterling is more profitable than we even knew, if she could skim this much and not miss it.” Bowman shrugged. Then a pleasant thought seemed to occur to him. “Plus, Sterling gets it back, because it actually belongs to Sterling, right? We can work that out with the Panamanians. A boatload of cash always sweetens a deal.”

  Glad you’re happy, Jack thought. But what if this didn’t come as a surprise to Bowman? What if Joanna had put that money aside as a personal sweetener to the deal, and it had been meant for him? Or, as they had originally thought, what if it had been Joanna’s escape hatch for when Bowman found out Sterling was a house of cards? Which, according to Bowman and Dhaval, it wasn’t.

  Jack ground his teeth.

  Just then Riley poked his head into the glass box and told him they had a situation.

  Jack abandoned the two money managers. “Tell me it’s not another dead body. Though that might be preferable to all this white-collar stuff.”

  “Got a guy in the lobby named Kurt Resnick. He had been out there waving signs with the protesters, then walked in and made the receptionist call us.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He says he killed Joanna Moorehouse.”

  Chapter 13

  Kurt Resnick fidgeted in a folding chair that the helpful receptionist had installed in her supply closet to give the cops some privacy. They could have taken him downtown, but when a subject is in a mood to confess it’s best to go with it. Breaking up the flow could give him time to rethink his decision. They had dallied only long enough to get the digital voice recorder out of Riley’s car.

  About forty-five years of age, Resnick had an unruly shock of medium brown hair, medium brown eyes, lean arms, and a wiry build. Dressed in a tidy pair of jeans and a generic polo-type shirt, he was nice looking in a studious way. Definitely not threatening. Definitely not easy to picture fileting Joanna Moorehouse open like a freshly caught walleye.

  “Mr. Resnick,” Riley began, calm and courteous but with that little edge that said Kurt had better not be wasting their time. “You wanted to talk to us.”

  Jack sat in the third folding chair. The walk-in closet was truly a closet, with only a small AC vent that could keep up fine with paper clips and spare toner but not the combined body temperature of three adult males. All three men were much closer to each other than they would have preferred. Their knees nearly touched. Cozy, a real estate agent would say. Jack did not care for cozy.

  “Yes. I killed her.”

  “Joanna Moorehouse?”

  “Yes.” The man nodded emphatically.

  “Okay. Why’d you do that?”

  The man rubbed his palms on his thighs. “Because she killed my wife.”

  “Can you explain?”

  “I certainly can. I’ve been explaining for years, but no one would listen. That’s why I killed her.”

  “How did your wife die?”

  “She took my thirty-two that my brother had given me, put it in her mouth, and pulled the trigger.”

  “Your wife did?” Riley asked in surprise. “It was suicide?”

  “Yes. Because of Joanna Moorehouse.”

  Riley gave Jack an “oh hell” look and took out his notebook. “Okay, let’s do this right and start from the beginning. Name?”

  The detective dutifully recorded Kurt Resnick’s middle initial, his address—a motel on Brookpark Road—and his lack of a phone or phone number. He had been out of work for two years but recently began a position with a small construction company on the west side.

  “And what do you do there?”

  “Bookkeeper.” He laughed, and the painful, desperate sound of it made the hair on Jack’s arms stiffen. “I’m a bookkeeper. You’ll see why that’s ironic.”

  “I’ll take your word for that. Now, Joanna Moorehouse.”

  The man plunged in with quick words. “It was four years ago. I needed a mortgage. I had good credit—at least I thought I did. I had a good job at an architectural firm down here.” He meant downtown. “But I was … in love.”

  “With Joanna Moorehouse?”

  “No! God, no! With my wife. Let me—okay. My first wife and I did nothing but argue, things were not good, the boys were getting into their teens and old enough to handle it. I took a vacation to Los Angeles, to visit my sister and think things over, planning to start divorce proceedings as soon as I got home. I went to high school there and they had an alumni function one night and my sister kept asking me about my marriage, so I went in order to avoid talking to her. Ran into Rose. We hadn’t even dated in high school, just friends, we’d talk. I never saw her again after graduation. But …”

  “Yeah,” Riley said. “We get it. You reconnected with a childhood sweetheart and—”

  “No. We connected in a totally new way, adult way. She was radiant, vibrant, strong. Everything I hadn’t had in my life for a long, long time. The end of her own bad marriage had been finalized and her ex took everything in the divorce. All she had was a condo in Irvine and custody of her three g
irls.”

  Riley tried to steer him. “Okay, second chance at love. How does Joanna Moorehouse—”

  “We planned for her to move here as soon as I could find a place. My wife got a shark lawyer who made me buy out her half of the house, which she got to keep—don’t ask me how that worked, but by that point I would have paid anything to get away from her, cheap at the price in order to start life with a clean slate. I had a good job, and Rose made even more than I did as a gym manager. We’d be fine. I needed only a modest home with five bedrooms, so that her girls had space enough to make up for moving away from LA and my boys had a place to stay on the weekends. The future looked, well … rosy. That’s what I kept telling her, my little joke. Rosy… .”

  His voice trailed off and he stared at the floor. Jack wondered how much more they’d have to hear about the star-crossed lovers before getting to the crime. But Riley, who could pollute the air with curses at a driver who took a split second too long to make a left turn, showed infinity-plus patience with a confession. Especially a confession that could wrap up this whole unwieldy case.

  “I found a perfect one. In Bay Village, only a block from the lake, adorable bungalow that had been kept up to perfection by the same family for two generations. I knew it was right, but so did a bunch of people I had to outbid. When I called Rose and told her to quit her job, list her condo, and start packing, it was the happiest moment of my life.

  “Of course, I needed a loan. A guy at work had refinanced his house through Sterling, told me about them. It didn’t occur to me to check around—low interest rates, a personal recommendation, I was in a hurry and, hey, I know numbers. I’m a friggin’ bookkeeper, right? It’s not like I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  Riley nodded. Jack tugged at his tie. There wasn’t much airflow in the closet and he wished he could open the high, tiny window. But he’d sweat for a while if it meant they could close the Moorehouse case.

  “Only I didn’t,” Resnick went on. “I thought because I had good history and a job, I’d have a great credit rating. But the money I owed my wife each month took half of my paycheck, I had credit card balances from living in a hotel after I left her, and I couldn’t include Rose’s income because we weren’t married and her name wasn’t on the house, because she wasn’t here and I needed to get the stuff signed and I didn’t think it was important. So on paper I became ‘subprime’ as if I were a part-time Uber driver who declared bankruptcy the year before. See?”

  “Not really,” Riley admitted. “What does this have to do with—”

  “Sterling offered me a pick-a-payment option and I leapt at it, figuring I could keep the payments low for a year or two, Rose would sell her condo and find a job here, maybe I could find a better lawyer to renegotiate what I was paying my wife, and then I could make the full payments and whittle it down. I had it all figured. Because I’m a numbers guy, right?”

  “But something went wrong,” Riley prompted.

  “I didn’t even look at my copies of the loan forms. I didn’t notice that they had added a digit to my monthly income, which made up for the payments to my wife. Or that I had to pay a list of fees for flood and tax certificates, appraisals, documents, etcetera, all arranged in-house by Sterling because it was so convenient. But what could I say? I needed the loan. I figured a little creative accounting wouldn’t hurt anyone in the long run. I didn’t want to think that a company faking their own paperwork might be sort of a red flag. I started making payments on my no-money-down, fictitious income loan with the adjustable rate and payment. Oh, and on the bill I got every month, they made sure the first number I saw was the interest only payment, the lowest amount I could pay. It’s a bad loan to people with bad credit, but, I told myself, these people must know what they’re doing.”

  He paused to swallow hard, as if his mouth was dry. Jack felt the same, as if he might suffocate before they reached Joanna Moorehouse’s part of the story. He wished for a bottle of water. Then he wished for a glass of bourbon. Lots of ice.

  “Meanwhile, housing is still a buyer’s market and Rose couldn’t find a buyer for her condo. She left it on the market and moved here, with the girls. We moved into our five-bedroom honeymoon cottage and planned a wedding. My boys came over on weekends. The girls weren’t happy about leaving the glamorous West Coast so we tried to soften them up with smartphones and the new iPads for Christmas. About then my company, the architectural firm, which had been holding on by their nails during the post–building bust years, finally let go, dissolved, and I was out of a job. Rose, who could have managed Dulles International given the opportunity and had overseen the largest chain of gyms in southern California, couldn’t find a job. At any salary, certainly not one that would support our finances. Gyms aren’t quite as numerous in Cleveland as they are in California and the clients aren’t as well heeled as the Hollywood crowd.”

  “You went broke.”

  “We weren’t merely broke, we were in a deep dark pit of broke and still digging, paying for everything with credit in order to eat and keep clothes on our backs. A friend of mine took me out for beers one night and let me cry on his shoulder for an hour or two. Then he suggested refinancing. We’re money guys, remember? Moving around dollars is a hobby to us—only usually it’s other people’s dollars. He said I could refinance for enough to pay off my credit cards and my ex-wife—a higher payment, of course, but it’d only be for about three months. Without those debts my credit score would improve and I could get a reasonable mortgage with a lower payment and start fresh. The key was to get all the debt paid off and make sure the refi didn’t have a prepayment penalty. Sterling called it a power loan.”

  “I thought this office didn’t deal with customers,” Jack said.

  “No, it was all done over the phone, as with the first loan. They e-mailed me the documents and I brought them here, because, well, I couldn’t afford a FedEx envelope. We paid everything off, my credit score improved, and I came back to Sterling for the second refi, the third loan. Up to this point I didn’t blame Sterling for anything; I blamed myself. But when I asked to refinance Sterling balked, because, of course, they hadn’t made enough money on the second loan. They didn’t want to give up that sweet interest. So the guy on the phone said he’d crunch the numbers and e-mail me the documents. He did—except the monthly payment came out way too high. By this point in time and largely out of sheer desperation I had learned to read everything, so I knew what the payment should be. I protested. Next they got the payment down but added all sorts of nonsense fees and premiums. Kind of like ‘dealer prep’ and ‘restocking charge’—they mean nothing, but companies charge them because they can. They added a prepayment penalty. I protested again, e-mailed a copy of my copy of the second loan’s paperwork that clearly stated no prepayment penalty. They e-mailed back their copy, which made no such notation and showed that the extra interest I paid was for some sort of mortgage insurance. In other words, fraud. They must have thought I wouldn’t say anything since I hadn’t argued when they ‘adjusted’ my income on the first loan.”

  “Sterling doctored your loan paperwork.”

  “Yes. I’m making these crushing payments, we’re eating by virtue of the credit cards again, and Sterling keeps dancing around and around. I complained to the Better Business Bureau. I complained to the SEC. I complained to HUD, Fannie Mae, anyone I could find an address for. Most didn’t even respond. Finally, I sued Sterling, and Joanna Moorehouse in particular. Until then, I’d never heard her name.”

  Finally, Jack thought. Maybe Riley is right. Patience pays off.

  “Rose was making minimum plus commissions selling clothes at the Galleria. Her girls went back to live with their father and she felt miserable without them, worried about them partying in LA with no supervision. I had to discourage my boys from coming on weekends because we couldn’t afford to feed them and my ex made noises about getting sole custody if I couldn’t even handle occasional visits. I represented myself in the lawsuit b
ecause I couldn’t afford a lawyer, and if I won I couldn’t afford to split the settlement. I wanted to settle, either get enough to keep us going or to get the loan payment I was supposed to have, that’s all. I did not have the strength for a drawn-out battle by that point. But Joanna wouldn’t budge. That was the only time I saw her, in court.” He came to an abrupt stop and shook his head, as if still amazed at the complete train wreck his life had become.

  “And when was that?” Riley asked.

  “About six months ago. Rose and I both missed paid work time to be able to put our case in front of a judge. Moorehouse breezed in with some young guy and this pretty black girl…. She laid out the fake documents, and since all I had were e-mailed copies, it looked like hers were the originals and I had tried to alter mine. I said to her, right there in court, that all she had to do was call it a mistake, a typo, anything. I wasn’t the SEC, I wasn’t interested in getting her slapped with a fine. I didn’t want to get out of paying what I owed, I just wanted the loan I was supposed to get. In a court of law she said, ‘I’m sorry you can’t pay your bills, Mr. Resnick, but that’s hardly my fault.’ Rose burst out crying. Rose was the strongest person I’ve ever known, and she started crying right there in the courtroom. She didn’t care about being strong anymore. When we got home she locked herself in our bedroom and I heard the shot.”

  His eyes filled with tears, but they didn’t spill over. He didn’t have enough left for that. “We had never even gotten married. Couldn’t afford a place, a dress, or even flowers. Nothing.”

  They waited for him to continue, but he kept staring at the floor until Riley prompted, “So then you …”

  “Decided to kill her. Joanna Moorehouse. What the hell, I had already lost Rose and my kids and every penny I had or would have for the next twenty years.” He leaned forward, elbows on knees, and ran his hands over his face and through his hair. The two cops leaned back as far as possible to give him room.