A Perfect Wife and Mother

by Peter Israel

  “Gee, Frank, I don’t know. Two hundred grand is quite a come-down from where I am now. And five years? With a family to support?”

  I say it half as a joke—a pretty last-ditch one, I admit.

  “I’d have thought all you cared about was Justin’s welfare,” Holbrook reproaches me.

  “That may be so,” I answer, “but if that’s what you thought, then why are you offering me the money too? Out of the goodness of your hearts? Come on, Frank, Leon said you weren’t going to screw around with me.”

  All of a sudden, I can feel the tension level in the room—theirs as well as mine. Gamble’s anyway. As for me, I’ve got Georgie in my mind, screaming: You’ve got a chance to get Justie back and you’re arguing about money?

  But Georgie doesn’t understand. It’s a bribe. Call it want you want, guys, it’s still a bribe, and that gives me leverage.

  “We’re not screwing around with you,” Holbrook says. “I found the offer eminently fair. I can’t speak for Shaw Cross, of course, but—”

  “I can,” Gamble interrupts tersely. “If we can agree on everything else, I’ve got give on the numbers. Let’s hear what else you’ve got.”

  I look at him, eye to eye.

  “What’s going to happen when they come after me?” I say.

  “When who comes after you?”

  “The Justice Department, anybody. Do you think they’re going to take this lying down? They’ve got other stuff on you. What happens if they put me under oath, what am I supposed to say then?”

  “You just tell them the truth.”

  “The truth? What’s the truth?”

  “That you don’t actually know squat. Not a goddamn thing. That you spoke out under personal duress and extreme frustration.”

  “And that’s why you’ve just offered me two hundred grand a year for five years? Because I don’t know a goddamn thing? What the hell do you take me for?”

  Eye to eye, throat for throat.

  Keep your cool, Bear.

  “I think the point’s well taken, Leon,” Holbrook says mildly, glancing from me to Gamble. “Again, I can’t speak for Shaw Cross, but it seems to me any legal expenses Larry incurs ought to be fully reimbursable. I also think you personally, as well as Shaw Cross, ought to pledge to participate vigorously in Larry’s defense, if it ever comes to that.”

  “Done,” Gamble says. “But I still say it’s pretty fucking remote. Without Coffey …” I see Gamble glance down at his watch. “What else you got, other than the money?” he says to me. “Anything else?”

  “I want to think it over,” I answer.

  “Think what over?”

  “Think the whole deal over. What you’ve just offered me.”

  “Thanks, but no thanks. There’s no time for that. Either we walk out of here with a deal, right now, or there’s no deal.”

  That’s an old tactic too: You lock everybody in a room and nobody leaves till you reach an agreement.

  But does he mean it? What happens if I walk now?

  Better put: What happens to Justie?

  “Just one other thing,” I say. “I want my son released first. Before anything else happens.”

  It’s my last card, I realize, but it seems to take them by surprise. I see them glance at each other. It’s as though they don’t know how to answer.

  Holbrook shakes his head.

  “That can’t be, Larry,” he says. “The whole deal hangs on your fulfilling your part of the bargain immediately.”

  “How come?” I ask, my last shot. “Where’s my leverage, your way? Look at it from my point of view, Frank. Once I do it, I’m out in the cold. How do I know you’ll deliver Justin? Suppose you don’t, or you guys get run over by a truck, where does that leave me? Whereas from your point of view, once I’ve got Justin back, you’ll still have my money, won’t you? To keep me honest?”

  I’ve been looking at Holbrook. I don’t even see the Great White take the gloves off.

  “I think I’ve had enough of this,” he says. He stands up abruptly, bumping the table and rattling the cups. He glowers down at me, one part contempt, one part pissed. “I think we’ve spent enough time here, and frankly, Coffey, I’m tired of wet-nursing you. You do what we tell you to do, and I’m ready to write in three hundred grand a year and eight years. That’s firm and it’s also final. Two million four.”

  Suddenly I don’t care anymore. “Discounted, it’s more like a million six, Leon,” I point out to him.

  “Discount it however you fucking want!” He’s shouting now. “But that’s what’s on the table. Take it, don’t take it, I don’t give a shit. But if you don’t take it, you’ve got zero. You want to play hardball? Go ahead, bring your charges, shout your goddamn head off! We’ll fight you every inch of the way. Maybe it’ll even turn out the only one who did anything illegal at Shaw Cross, if anyone did, was Larry Coffey. Want to try that one on for size? And as far as your kid’s concerned, you’ll be on your own, buddy boy. Strictly on your own. This meeting’ll never have happened. We’ll both deny it till the fucking cows come home.”

  If it’s a bluff, it’s still vintage Great White, and right out on the table. I’d give my left nut to call him out on it—just this once—but there’s no way.

  “Let’s stop right there,” Holbrook says. He stays Gamble with his hand. Then, to me: “You know, Larry, there comes a time in any negotiation when certain things have to be taken on faith. I doubt I’m—”

  “Faith! For—”

  “Please,” he goes on. “You’re right, you know. You’re absolutely right. Doing it our way, you’ll have no leverage left. Except this.” Now his eyes are locked on mine. “Whatever else you may think of me now, I’m a man of my word. Once I make a commitment, I stick to it. Believe me when I say that if we could do it your way, we would. Everybody wants this sorry affair behind us. The best I can do is give you my solemn word: What we say will happen will happen.”

  And this is vintage Holbrook.

  “What are you doing in the middle of this, Frank?” I blurt out. “What’s in it for you?”

  For just a hair of a second, I see strain in his face. I mean, he looks old, distracted, as though his mind is totally elsewhere. But then he focuses in again, and he’s smiling at me faintly.

  “I’m just protecting my investments,” he says.

  “Your investments?”

  “In you, for one thing.” The old ironic, New England voice. “In Shaw Cross for another.”

  In Shaw Cross?

  The Cross, I know, is the largest privately held firm left on the Street. But doesn’t the family still own the lion’s share? And Gamble, they say, has a piece.

  Holbrook too?

  Since when?

  What was it he once said: networks within networks?

  I feel the lump in my throat. I can’t help it. Jesus Christ, he’s been my rabbi for thirteen years!

  “And what if I still refuse?” I manage to get out.

  “Don’t, Larry,” he says. “By any criterion, you’ve done very well this morning. Now just let’s play it out.”

  The same afternoon, downtown, I meet by appointment with one Joseph A. Richter, attorney at the Department of Justice, in his office. I’m accompanied by Joseph Penzil, Esq., of Lambert Laughin Spain.

  I’m there to recant.

  Everything.

  Everything I might have told or intimated to Richter about Shaw Cross & Company and its customers was a fabrication, a fantasy. Everything I might have told or intimated to Special Agent Karnishak of the FBI on the same subject was a fabrication, a fantasy. Shaw Cross & Company, to the best of my knowledge, has never been party to any dirty-money or money-laundering schemes. To the best of my knowledge, none of the customers I’ve dealt with at Shaw Cross has engaged in any illegal activities or activities contrary to federal banking regulations. The same goes for any individuals I might have named to him or Agent Karnishak. No officer or director or other employee of any of the lendi
ng institutions I’ve done business with at Shaw Cross have ever suggested to me, in direct statement or by innuendo, that the funds invested with Shaw Cross were derived from illegal sources or activities.

  It was all pure invention on my part.

  At the end, I apologize to Richter, and to the Department of Justice, the FBI as well, for any inconvenience I might inadvertently have caused them.

  Richter’s clearly taken by surprise. He takes notes at first—I, myself, am working from notes Penzil and I put together over lunch—but partway through, he tilts his chair back on its rear legs and just listens, hands linked behind his head.

  I look up, done. His pale and freckled skin has gone ruddy. Suddenly he catapults forward on his chair and slams his fist so hard on his yellow pad that the pencil he’s been holding snaps in two.

  “Inconvenient?” he explodes at me. “Inadvertent? Goddamn it, Coffey, is all this your idea of a joke? Do you really think you can make a mockery of this whole organization and then just say, ‘Gosh, I’m sorry but I take it all back’ and walk out the fucking door?”

  He has a lot more to say. About wasting the department’s time and the taxpayers’ money. About the willful obstruction of one criminal investigation (his) and giving false information in another (Justin’s kidnapping). As far as his—Richter’s—investigation into certain Wall Street practices is concerned, it’s ongoing and nothing I can say will stop it. Furthermore, if it turns out I’m lying now, and if I go on lying in the face of other evidence, then the department will come after me personally with every resource at their disposal.

  “You better believe it, friend,” Richter says. “Every fucking resource. So make up your mind right now, because I’ll be goddamned if I’m letting you off the hook. Which version is the truth? What you’ve told Karnishak and me or the bullshit you’re giving me today? And which one are you going to testify to under oath?”

  Penzil warned me. He knows Richter from the Street, says he’s got a short fuse. He’s kept mostly quiet to this point, but now, leaning forward, he asks Richter if we can have a few minutes alone.

  “Be my guest,” Richter says. He stands, leaves.

  Penzil pulls two pads from his briefcase.

  “We may be bugged,” he writes, pushing one pad in front of me. “Keep talking but write the important stuff down.”

  We communicate through a mix of speech and writing. Penzil says the important thing is that I keep my cool. Richter’s bluffing, he says. What I told them—him and Karnishak—will lead them nowhere by itself. What Penzil suspects is that, prematurely, Richter has blown up their conversations with me into a full-scale scandal, at least inside the Justice Department, and now he’s going to have to eat it.

  “Don’t worry about him,” Penzil half-says, half-writes. “Keep to your story. If it comes to it, maybe you said some things you shouldn’t have, to him and Karnishak, but you were distraught, crazed, not yourself. There was your situation at Shaw Cross, your wife had just had a baby, then your kid was snatched right out of your house. More than any sane man could tolerate. You were angry, despondent, even paranoid. Drinking too much. Maybe you made some accusations that had no substance, but it was a crazy time for you. Okay, and now you regret it. That’s why you’re here, to make a clean breast. Now who, I ask you—even in a court of law—is going to hold that against you? Do you see what I mean?”

  It’s not in me to argue. I’m thinking of Georgie and Justie, neither of whom is ever likely to understand what I’m doing. I’m thinking of Penzil, the fuck who sold me out, but here I am agreeing to whatever he says.

  Then Penzil calls Richter back into his office.

  “Well?” Richter says to me. “What have you decided?”

  “What we’d like to do, Joe,” Penzil answers, “is give you a sworn statement.”

  This catches Richter short.

  “A sworn statement? Great! When can I have it, Counselor?”

  “What’s wrong with right here and now?” Penzil says.

  “Right here and now? Nothing. Nothing at all.”

  “Can you lend us a secretary who takes shorthand?”

  “Shit, no. I’ve already wasted enough taxpayers’ money on you bastards. I’ll give you a keyboard, that’s all. You can type the damn thing out yourselves.”

  We end up squeezed into a little cubicle, which is the best Richter says he can find for us. Penzil does the typing, on an ancient IBM. The statement pretty much summarizes what I told Richter before—“I, the undersigned, Lawrence Elgin Coffey,” recant fully, of my own free will and in the absence of coercion from any third party—and it ends with the same blanket apology that drove Richter up the wall. We make two copies of it on a department photocopier, one for each of us, and I sign, Penzil witnesses.

  Richter makes a show of keeping us waiting. We wait in the corridor outside his office. Finally he meets us in his doorway, in his shirtsleeves, takes the copy of the statement. He glances at it.

  “They really got to you, didn’t they?” he says to me. “Well, let me tell you something, Coffey. This won’t be the last you’ll hear from us, you can make book on that. We’ve got long memories around here. Memories like fucking elephants.”

  This morning, I guess, I could have hung Penzil up by the thumbs, but by the time we leave Richter, the fight’s pretty much gone out of me. All I can think of is holing up somewhere with a bottle. Instead, we do it together. Joe’s idea. Come on, the Runt says, we better talk this through. We start in the city and work our way to Hoboken and points west.

  I kept saying stuff like: “This has been the worst day of my life. I’ve been betrayed by the people closest to me—Frank Holbrook, for Christ’s sake!—and I’ve sold out. I’ve sold my fucking soul down the river, and all for a lousy two million four. Discounted to a million six.”

  All with your help, Joe.

  “And then there’s you,” I say, “you son of a bitch. I told you everything! You betrayed me!”

  Not so, Penzil insists. What about Justie, he says? I’ve got to remember Justie. I didn’t do it for the money, I did it to save my son.

  Every time I think of Justie, though, I think of Georgie. I need to tell her, but I can’t tell her anything. Not only did I swear myself to secrecy in the hotel suite, but if I tell her Justie’s coming home, she won’t believe me unless I also tell her I’ve cut a deal. I’m not ready for that.

  I’m supposed to meet with Karnishak tomorrow morning. What am I going to say to Karnishak?

  “Why do you have to tell anybody anything?” Penzil says. “Why can’t you just let it all happen?”

  “Yeah, it’ll all be over in twenty-four hours. That’s their time limit on delivering Justie, right?”

  My best fucking friend.

  I can’t believe he sold me out. For Christ’s sake, he knows everything, I told him everything!

  He keeps saying he only got the call from Gamble yesterday. Gamble only recruited him because he knew we were friends, that’s all.

  “Besides,” he tells me, “when you look at it objectively, Bear, aren’t you a damn sight better off now than you were twenty-four hours ago?”

  But there’s a missing link, somewhere out there in the fog. Why did he only get the call yesterday? Was it because of what happened at the mall? And why him? Maybe he’s a genius, but he got a late start in the law, and he’s still only an associate at Lambert Laughin Spain, and guys like Gamble and Holbrook deal with partners, not associates.

  And then it hits me—dunnnh—right between the eyeballs. Because who else could have tipped Gamble off? Who else could have said: Hey, I’ve got this associate working for me who also happens to be Larry Coffey’s best friend?

  I can see the bastard across the net, old hawk face ready to pound a volley at my feet.

  “Where does Spain fit in, Joe? Come on, it’s too big a coincidence! Mark’s got to be in it up to his neck—I can smell it—and why the hell won’t you tell me? You owe me, you son of a bitch. You
owe me!”

  I work him on it. I pound at him. “Who’s protecting who, Joe? I mean there’s got to be more to it! Wall Street companies are always being investigated, and maybe I knew stuff about them, maybe Richter has a file yea thick, but to nail them? For Christ’s sake, kidnapping’s a felony! And all this shit they laid on me about the girl, Harriet? Whatever her real name is? Maybe she is a nut case, what do I know, but there’s got to be something else! What the hell were they so scared of?”

  “I think you’re confusing two separate things,” Penzil says.

  “I think I’m confusing a lot of things! You’re damned right I am! But they were scared this morning, Joe! I had them by the balls! You owe me, Joe! You’ve got to tell me.”

  Back and forth, and he keeps saying he doesn’t know, that he’s only the go-between, the messenger, and I don’t believe him. I bring up the man in the leather coat too, the tweed cap, the one who grabbed Justie at the mall. Who was he? How do I know it wasn’t one of them?

  “That’s crazy,” Penzil says. “Guys on Wall Street aren’t into kidnapping, for Christ’s sake! It was Harriet, whatever her name is, who snatched Justie. All they’re doing is getting him back for you.”

  “Yeah, out of the goodness of their fucking hearts.”

  Finally, though, he stumbles. Has he had too much to drink? Else I’ve worn him down. Else they told him it doesn’t matter anymore, what I know or don’t.

  “What you’re missing, Bear,” he tells me, “is that your alma mater—Shaw Cross & Company—is in the process of being sold.”

  The news hits me like a load of concrete.

  “The Cross is on the block? You’ve got to be kidding!”

  “More than on the block. It’s practically a done deal.”

  I can’t believe it. I think of MacFarlane, all the stuff he told me. But they weren’t dealing with an investigation, they were selling the company!

  “It’s been one of the best-kept secrets I’ve ever run into,” Penzil is saying. “I never even heard a rumor about it before yesterday, when Gamble himself let it out.”

  My mouth is open wide enough to catch a pigeon.

  “I can’t believe it,” I say. “I can’t fucking believe it. Who’re they selling to?”