“Which is ridiculous.”
“They’ll say it anyway. Michael, you’ve always had your own mind. When we invited you to join management, you bucked company policy and refused to give up your book of business. When subprime started to look ugly, you stepped over division lines and wrote me a damned convincing memo about it. I actually respect all that. But I’m one of the few who does. To some people, you’re just trouble. And now I have to tell those same people that it was my idea to put you on the air.”
I drew a breath. “I’m sorry.”
“Me, too. Because I need to know who I can count on.”
My hand was shaking as I gripped the phone. I’d let him down, but I could make it up to him. I was far less sure about redeeming myself on national television, about ever seeing my money again-or about surviving a second attack in an elevator.
Stop it. Don’t freak.
“You can definitely count on me,” I said.
He paused-and the silence killed me.
The call ended, and I was back on Broad Street. A crowd had gathered around the FNN boxing ring, and the TV cameras were in position. Bell had already rolled up his shirtsleeves and tied on his boxing gloves. A seven-foot bear waited in the center of the ring.
“All righty,” Bell shouted as he climbed through the ropes. “Let’s see about those bare necessities!”
16
RUMSEY COOLIDGE HADN’T SEEN MICHAEL CANTELLA IN YEARS. THE man towering over Rumsey didn’t believe him.
“I swear,” said Rumsey, his bloodied face pressed to the floor. “I’m telling you the truth, mon.”
Rumsey had returned to Harbor Island in a rainstorm. A five-day sail in the northern Bahamas had left him exhausted and annoyed at the way customers just didn’t seem to tip their captain the way they used to-as if the weather was his fault. He’d climbed the front steps to his rented town house slowly, thinking only of a good night’s sleep before heading out on another charter in the morning. The sprawling tropical canopy in the front yard shielded him from the falling rain, and even though sunset was almost two hours away, the storm made it feel like night. The door was unlocked, just as he’d left it. Crime wasn’t exactly unheard of in the Bahamas, but something about island living seemed to encourage unlocked doors and open windows, as if to deny, or at least defy, the existence of evil in paradise. Rumsey entered his living room and tried the wall switch. The lights didn’t come on. No great surprise. Power outages were a way of life in his neighborhood, especially during thunderstorms. The hallway was dark, but he could have found the bedroom blindfolded. He dropped his duffel bag on the bed, and as he pulled off his shirt, a blur emerged from the closet. Before he could react, a huge hulk of a man hit him like a freight train and took him down.
The man was now sitting on Rumsey’s kidneys, the cold metal barrel of a pistol pressing against the back of Rumsey’s skull.
“I’ll ask you just one more time,” he said. “When was the last time you talked to Michael Cantella?”
Rumsey coughed nervously, and a little blood came up. At least one rib was broken, he was sure of it. His smashed-in nose was a mess after a face-first collision with the floor.
“The trip,” he said, grunting. Talk was difficult with the man’s considerable weight pressing down on his internal organs. “It was that trip with him and his girlfriend-wife-who disappeared. We ain’t never talked since then, mon.”
The gunman rose, and Rumsey could breathe again.
“Stay right there,” the man said.
Rumsey lay perfectly still, breathing in and out, tasting the salty blood that trickled from his nose into his mouth. He had yet to get a good look at the man in the darkness, but the tumble to the floor had told him something about the man’s size and strength. He listened carefully, following the intruder’s footfalls across the room. For a brief moment, Rumsey’s heart raced with excitement.
Is he leaving?
“You disappoint me,” the man said. He pulled the blinds shut, making the room even darker, then walked back over.
Any optimism vanished. Rumsey waited for him to say more, but there was only a long, uncomfortable silence. Several strands of speculation raced through his mind, none of which led to a happy ending. The inescapable conclusion was that his attacker was simply debating whether to shoot him here, in Rumsey’s own living room, or to take him somewhere else to do the job.
“Please,” said Rumsey. “What you want with me, mon?”
The man’s chuckle was laden with insincerity. “Good question.”
He took a few more steps, as if circling his prey. Out of the corner of his eye, Rumsey caught an up-close glimpse of the man’s steel-toed boots. That explained the pain in his ribs.
“I know you’re lying,” the man said.
“No, no! I tell the truth, mon.”
The man was silent.
Rumsey swallowed hard. He wanted to speak, but he was too afraid of saying the wrong thing. He heard a faint scratching sound, and then there was a flicker of light. The man had struck a match. Rumsey gritted his teeth as the man came toward him, and he instinctively closed his eyes as the flame neared his face.
“Open your eyes,” the man said.
Rumsey did as he was told, his cheek still pressed to the cold terra-cotta tile. Oddly, there was money on the floor, right in front of his nose. American money, which was no surprise. The man’s accent was definitely not Bahamian. It was a hundred-dollar bill.
The man dropped the match onto the bill.
“What are you doing?” Rumsey asked nervously.
The man was silent. The lit match scorched the bill, and it was quickly aflame. The small fire threw some heat onto Rumsey’s face, but not enough to hurt him. In a minute or two, the fire burned out, and the room returned to darkness.
“I need you to help me,” the man said.
He was suddenly moving quickly, and Rumsey got another dose of his attacker’s overpowering strength. He grabbed Rumsey’s wrists and, in what seemed like a split second, bound them together with plastic cuffs. He grabbed Rumsey’s ankles and bound them in the same way. Somewhere in the back of Rumsey’s mind a voice cried out, begging him to resist. But it happened too quickly. Rumsey was hog-tied.
The man stood upright, and Rumsey could almost feel him towering over his body. He imagined that the gun was pointed directly at the back of his head, and he wondered how many days it would take for the postman or a neighbor to notice the telltale odor and find him dead on the floor, shot execution style.
“Please, don’t-”
“Shut up. I need your help.”
“Okay, mon. You got it. Anything.”
The man paused, seeming to enjoy the way silence tormented his victim. Finally, he said, “Here’s the problem.”
There was another pause, and fear coursed again through Rumsey’s veins. He prayed that it was a problem he could actually solve.
“It’s a crime to burn money,” the man said.
“What?”
“You can’t just burn money. It’s a federal offense. They’ll throw me in jail.”
Rumsey could hear himself breathing. He had no idea how to respond, so he fumbled for anything.
“But-but that’s American money. You in the Bahamas now. No worries, mon.”
“Makes no difference. It’s a crime to burn money no matter where you do it.” The man leaned closer, now speaking in a low, threatening voice: “We need to cover up our crime.”
Before Rumsey could say anything, he felt a cold wetness on his shirt and trousers, and then another glob of gel all over his face. It stung his eyes terribly, and the odor told him it was gasoline-goopy gasoline.
“No, please don’t burn me, mon!”
His plea went unanswered, except for that dread scratch of sound again-the striking of the match, a sudden burst of light, the roar of the flames, the intense heat that consumed him.
What followed was the piercing sound of his own screams.
17
I DIDN’T GET HOME UNTIL SIX-THIRTY. SAXTON SILVERS STOCK ended the day down almost a hundred bucks a share, so if there was a financial assassin, as Bell had put it, he was halfway there. In between phone conversations with panicked clients, I spent most of the afternoon with our director of security trying to track down my money.
Nana and Papa were trying to track down theirs, too. They were watching Wheel of Fortune in the TV room, dressed and ready to take me to dinner for my belated birthday (read: happy birthday) dinner.
“Will you buy a vowel already?” Nana said to the contestant on television. The sound of her voice startled Papa, and his sleepy eyes popped open. If we didn’t get going in the next forty-five minutes, dinner was going to be the gastronomical equivalent of a midnight snack for them.
I went to the bedroom and gently nudged Mallory to move it along. She was brushing her hair in front of the framed oval mirror on the bureau.
“I’m going as fast as I can,” she said. “I don’t see why they’re so damn set on taking you out. Especially with everything that’s going on. And you just had a party last night.”
“Which they weren’t invited to. Raising the question: Why not?”
She was still checking herself in the mirror, speaking without looking at me, her tone icy. “The party was a surprise. You have to be careful about who you let in on a surprise, or it won’t be a surprise anymore.”
I sat behind her on the bed, watching her in the mirror as she got progressively angrier at her hair.
“Who were they going to tell,” I asked, “their neighbors in Century Village?”
“You, Michael. Papa would have slipped up in one of your daily phone conversations and told you he was coming to the surprise party. Then no more surprise.”
“He kept today’s visit a surprise.”
“He probably forgot to tell you he was coming. Can’t you see his Alzheimer’s is getting worse?”
“Papa doesn’t have Alzheimer’s. That’s just the way you are when you’re eighty-three years old.”
“My God, you are so clueless.”
She tossed her brush aside, giving up the struggle against her hair. This was usually the moment at which I had to beg her not to make an appointment with some scissor-happy “artiste” named Francois or Diego and cut it all off in the morning.
“You look great, Mallory.”
She rolled her eyes at me as she headed for the walk-in closet. I sensed another wardrobe change coming.
“Don’t patronize me.”
The atmosphere had officially moved from icy to frozen solid. I followed her into the closet.
“What’s wrong?”
She was flipping through the rack furiously, still not looking at me as she spoke.
“What’s wrong? Our entire life savings has just been wiped out, and this morning Saxton Silvers suddenly moved from the top of the mountain on Wall Street to somewhere deep inside the San Andreas Fault. Nothing is wrong. Life is wonderful. Another beautiful day in paradise. Just ask Papa.”
“Things are going to be okay.”
Her forage through the hanging clothes came to an abrupt halt, and finally she looked at me-though it felt more like she was looking right through me.
“It is not going to be okay. You ruined it, Michael. You ruined everything.”
I stepped closer to give her a hug, but she pulled away and hurried out of the closet. I followed her back into the bedroom.
“Mallory, I need you to stand with me on this.”
“You don’t need me. You don’t even want me. I honestly don’t know why you ever asked me to marry you.”
“How can you say that?”
She sat on the bed, tears about to flow. She sucked them back and said, “I saw you on TV.”
“Was I that bad?”
She brought her hands to her head, exasperated. “Papa’s the blind one in the family, not me.”
I was getting annoyed by the way she kept dragging my grandfather into this, but I knew it wasn’t anything she had against him. She was lashing out, and Papa was the nearest handle in our version of Wilma grabbing a pot to clobber Fred.
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“It’s not the money. It’s not Saxton Silvers. It’s you-what’s in your heart-that’s wrong.”
“You decided this while watching me on Bell Ringer?”
“Yes. When the Money Honey said you were too smart to use your wife’s birthday as your password, I could see the guilty expression all over your face.”
I took a breath, uneasy with where this was headed.
Mallory looked at me coldly and said, “Tell me what the password was.”
“There were several different accounts,” I said.
“Tell me the passwords.”
Again I hesitated, but there was no legitimate reason not to tell her at this point. “The last three numbers of each password were different, and I changed those numbers every ninety days.”
“What about the rest of it?”
“They all pretty much shared the same root password.”
“What was it?”
I hesitated.
“What was it, Michael?” she said sternly.
“Orene52.”
A Sudoku whiz, Mallory had a mind for codes and numbers, but she deciphered this one even faster than I’d expected.
“You son of a bitch,” she said.
“It’s not a big deal.”
“It’s 25 enero backward. January 25 in Spanish-your wife’s birthday. Your half Hispanic, dead wife.”
“It’s just a password.”
“Don’t try to minimize it. She’s been dead for over four years, and you still have a bank account open in her name. You never touched the money, never told me about it. And now I find out that the password for every single one of our accounts is her birthday. How is that supposed to make me feel?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Stop saying it’s nothing! Your heart is not in this marriage.”
“That’s crazy. I love you.”
“That’s the point. You don’t. It’s not just that you’re emotionally frozen and living in the past. It’s worse than that. Even though the DNA tests proved that the human remains found inside that shark were hers, you have never given up hope that somehow, some way, Ivy Layton is going to come walking through that door.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is true.”
I took another step toward her.
“Stay away from me!”
I stopped in my tracks. I’d never seen her so upset, so inconsolable.
“This has been building inside me for a long time,” she said. “It’s not a knee-jerk reaction to what’s been happening today. I’ve been unhappy far longer than you can imagine.”
“Mallory, please.”
“I mean it, Michael. I mean this more than anything I’ve ever said to you. I never thought I’d have to say these words again, but once you’ve been in a bad marriage, you know better than to stay too long the next time.”
“Don’t say it,” I said, but I was talking to the walls.
“I want a divorce.”
18
MALLORY WAS ALONE IN THE BEDROOM WHEN SHE HEARD THE DOORBELL ring. She hoped it wasn’t her husband.
Michael had kept his promise and taken his grandparents to dinner. Mallory had made it clear that he was to find somewhere else to sleep tonight, but she’d spared everyone the drama and told Nana and Papa that she wasn’t feeling well-which triggered a most uncomfortable remark from Michael’s grandmother.
“Morning sickness in the evening, maybe?” she’d said, ever hopeful for a great-grandchild.
Clueless. The entire Cantella clan is clueless.
Not that she didn’t want children. She used to love working with the little girls at the dance studio before she married Michael. Sometimes she just wished that someone in the world would hear her cries for help.
Mallory went to the do
or, saw her best friend through the peephole, and let her inside.
“Did you tell him?” asked Andrea.
“It’s done,” she said as she led the way to the kitchen. There was an open bottle of chardonnay in the refrigerator. Mallory poured two glasses, and the women sat opposite each other on bar stools at the kitchen counter.
Andrea reached across and patted the back of Mallory’s hand. “How are you doing?”
She drew a breath. “I guess I’m okay. It’s all so confusing. Michael’s not a monster. He didn’t abuse me. We didn’t fight over money. He doesn’t hang out late with the guys.”
“He didn’t cheat on you,” said Andrea.
Mallory hesitated. “That’s the weird thing.”
“He didn’t-did he?”
Mallory drank her wine, and her thoughts made her wince. “With my first husband, I know of two other women. There were probably more. With Michael, it wasn’t cheating in that sense.”
“Cybersex?”
“No, no. Not that.”
“Then what?”
She trusted Andrea, but Mallory was going to need a lot more wine before painting the whole picture. “Just forget it. Michael’s nothing like my first husband.”
“Are you having second thoughts?”
“Absolutely not. I know what you’re thinking: There are plenty of women who would want my life. And maybe I would, too, if I hadn’t married Michael with such high expectations. My mother wasted forty-one years of her life with a man who didn’t love her. I crammed forty-one years of unhappiness into my first marriage. I don’t need more of it from Michael. I deserve better.”
Mallory was tearing up, but she stopped herself. There had been enough of that.
Andrea raised her wineglass, as if to help avert the water-works.
“Well, I hope you find Mr. Right.”
They drank to the toast. “Tomorrow is what I’m really dreading,” said Mallory. “I’m sure the gossip wire will be at high voltage.”
“Rest assured, they won’t hear a thing from me.”
Money to Burn Page 9