Man, she’s pissed.
I arrived at my brother’s office a few minutes late, dressed in the same slacks and sport coat that I’d worn to dinner with Papa. The only clean shirt in my locker had been a work-out T so faded that it was powder blue. I’d convinced myself that the jacket made it look stylish. In truth, it was like a bad pastel fashion statement from the days of Miami Vice, which of course Kevin jumped on.
“Are you supposed to be Crockett or Tubbs?” he asked when he came out to greet me in the lobby. We stood facing each other for a moment, neither of us sure if we should shake hands or embrace. Then Kevin came forward and gave me a hug. It felt a little awkward, and we both seemed relieved to have that part over with.
“Come on back,” he said.
I followed him down the hall, and he pointed out the autographed sports memorabilia on the walls, as if we were a couple of kids on the way to his playroom. His office at the end of the hall was not exactly Eric Volke’s spread, but it was nicer than I’d expected. Silk rugs, custom draperies, tasteful antiques. I would have guessed a decorator’s hand, except there were too many family photos around. I canned the decorator Mallory had hired for me: “Family” photos were allowed only if the people in them died before the Great Depression and were part of someone else’s family.
“How are Nana and Papa?” Kevin asked as he closed the door.
“Fine,” I told him, and suddenly I realized that my brother and I were alone in the same room for the first time in I couldn’t remember how long. He gestured toward the armchair, offering it to me, but I wasn’t ready to sit.
“How’s Janice?” I asked.
His answer was way too long, and as he rambled on, my gaze was drawn to those framed family photos that Mallory’s decorator would have deep-sixed on day one. Kevin and Janice. Kevin and his golden retriever. Janice in her wedding dress. The older photos were on the credenza, and I walked behind his desk and picked up the one in a silver frame. It had to be at least twenty years old. Kevin, our younger sister, my stepfather, and their stepmother. The four of them together, smiling widely and standing in front of the Eiffel Tower. I had a similar photo of me with Nana and Papa buried somewhere in a box of mementos-except that the Eiffel Tower we saw was at Epcot Center, and we spent the night at the Howard Johnson’s in Kissimmee.
Kevin walked toward me and said, “That was my middle-school graduation trip.”
“Nice.”
I placed it back on the credenza, and silence came upon us.
“Michael, let me just say-”
“I don’t want to go there,” I said.
“Please, listen to what I have to say.”
I looked away from the eight-by-ten of Daddy Warbucks on vacation with his chosen family and pretended not to know where this was going. I knew.
“Doing divorce work has given me some valuable insights,” he said. “Every family has problems. Ours is no different. We just have to get past the silly old jealousies.”
My anger shot up. “You think I’m jealous of you?”
“I think my growing up rich and your growing up poor is one of the reasons you went to work on Wall Street. Maybe you don’t call it jealousy, but it’s something.”
“I call that complete nonsense.”
“So do I. Right up there with the stupid jealousy I had for you when we were growing up.”
That took me aback. He smiled a little, clearly hoping to draw one out of me. I didn’t exactly light up, not sure where he was going.
“Did you ever stop and count how many houses I had lived in by the time I graduated from high school?” he asked.
“Not really.”
“Six,” he said. “And you know why? Because Dad was always trading up. Every house we lived in was a stepping-stone to more land, more bedrooms, a better neighborhood. It was never home.”
“Nana and Papa bought their place in 1957. They only moved to Florida when I went away to college.”
“Exactly. Never once was the house you lived in up for sale. When I was thirteen, about to change houses for I think the fifth time, I remember Papa telling me the story about the developer who came knocking on your front door.”
Now I did smile. “All the farmland around us and all the old houses in the neighborhood were being bought up to build new family homes on three-acre lots. Papa was the only guy in the subdivision who wouldn’t sell. The developer finally came by with his checkbook and said, ‘Okay, old man. You win. You’re the last holdout. What’s your price?”
“And when Papa told him there was no price,” said Kevin, clearly having heard every detail, “the developer said, ‘You don’t understand: Money is no object.’”
We were sharing a smile now, as I finished the story. “And Papa looked at him and said: ‘You don’t understand: This is not an object.’”
For the first time in years, my brother and I laughed together, and I felt good about that.
“Now, can we move forward?” said Kevin.
In his mind, clearly it was “problem solved.” He didn’t seem to understand that while laughter was good medicine, medicine wasn’t always a cure-especially when the diagnosis was completely off.
“Sure,” I said, happy to shift gears. He offered me a seat again, and we each took a matching armchair, facing each other.
“Let’s start with this sequence of threatening messages,” he said, a yellow legal pad in his lap.
I gave him the longer version of the money-burning ceremony at Sal’s Place, the flaming package, the most recent text-and finally the FBI’s discovery of the listening device in Sonya’s car.
“Looks like Chuck Bell may have been right,” said Kevin.
“How so?”
“If someone is bugging the general counsel’s Mercedes, maybe your identity theft is linked to a larger attack against Saxton and Silvers. I’ll follow up with the FBI.”
“You want me to be part of that?”
“Negative. I don’t want you talking to law enforcement.”
“Did you hook up with the detective who came by my apartment?”
“I did.”
“Does he think I killed Chuck Bell?”
“I’m not sure. It may have been just a pretense, but he said the reason he went to your apartment was to follow up on the incendiary package you received yesterday morning. They have an interesting lead. It was white phosphorous, which is pyrophoric.”
“What does that mean?”
“It ignites simply when exposed to the air. The police presume it was inside some kind of vacuum-sealed plastic liner, and when you tore open the package-poof. Flames. Once it combusts, it’s hard to extinguish.”
“I’ll vouch for that.”
“Highly toxic, too. You’re lucky you got out of that elevator so quickly.”
“So what leads are the police chasing?”
“White phosphorous is very hard to get your hands on, unless you have something to do with the munitions business. Russian or Israeli, most likely.”
“Munitions business? Doesn’t sound like anybody I know.”
Kevin pulled his trusty Mont Blanc from his breast pocket, ready to take notes. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” he said. “Let’s start at the beginning.”
I talked, and my brother occasionally jotted down a word or two. At nine forty-five he let me switch on the television for a quick market check. FNN was broadcasting in split-screen format, an aerial view of the Chuck Bell homicide scene on one side, the NYSE trading floor on the other, as if to pose the question, Can you name the real crime scene? We had the sound muted, but the news was clearly bad on both sides.
SAXTON SILVERS DOWNWARD SPIRAL CONTINUES IN HEAVY TRADING, read the banner at the bottom of the screen.
FNN FAMILY IN SHOCK OVER DEATH OF BELOVED COLLEAGUE, the next banner read.
Kevin said, “Tell me more about the e-mail from Mallory.”
I looked away from the flat screen. “Mallory studied drama at Juilliard,” I said.
“She has a flair for performing. Every now and then, she would send me an e-mail that was kind of sexy, kind of funny. This one was an early ‘happy birthday’ video. It was a parody of Marilyn Monroe singing ‘Happy birthday, Mr. President’ to JFK.”
“You have political aspirations?”
“No. But the joke was that she always thought I would someday have Eric Volke’s job-president of Saxton Silvers.”
“So you opened the attachment to her e-mail?”
“It was from her regular e-mail address, so I had no reason to question it. But Elliot-that’s my tech guy-tells me that’s where the spyware came from.”
Kevin scribbled a thought on his legal pad, then looked up. “I’ve seen lots of spying in divorce cases.”
“But why would Mallory plant spyware in a way that could be so easily traced back to her e-mail address?”
“Not too technically savvy, maybe?”
“Granted, she’s not a computer genius, but she’s not stupid. We live together in the same apartment. She could have just crawled out of bed one night and loaded the spyware on my laptop.”
“Maybe she didn’t think she had the technical expertise to load the spyware correctly, so she hooked up with some fifteen-year-old geek to plant it by e-mail.”
“Or the guy who sent me the text message.”
“Let’s not focus too much on how it was planted. The key point here is that if the spyware can in fact be traced back to your wife, then your identity theft claims don’t add up.”
“Why not?”
“Think about it. You want people to believe that someone planted spyware on your computer, stole your passwords, wiped out your bank accounts, and masterminded a complicated short-selling scheme against Saxton Silvers in a financial scandal that has rocked Wall Street-setting you up as the bad guy. Do you actually expect me to walk over to Federal Plaza and tell the FBI that the person behind all that is Mallory?”
“She could have had help.” I didn’t know why I was pushing this angle; I guess I had nothing else.
“It seems much more likely to me that Mallory planted the spyware for the same reason most married people plant spyware: to find out if she was married to a cheater.”
He was making too much sense to argue.
Kevin said, “Did Mallory worry about another woman?”
“No,” I said, then caught myself. “At least not a living one.”
Kevin did a double take.
“No, I don’t mean that,” I said, then I paused. “She always harbored jealousy over Ivy.”
“Did you two talk about that?”
“Not very often. At least not until recently.”
“How did it come up?”
I told him about the passwords being tied to Ivy’s birthday and how that had set Mallory off. “She said I haven’t given up hope that Ivy’s alive,” I added.
There was silence. This was dangerous territory between my brother and me. As Kevin knew, even after the shark had been dissected, I continued to have doubts about what really had happened to Ivy. Kevin had stepped in and pushed the assumed role of “big brother” way too far, doing whatever was necessary to deliver the tough-love message: “Ivy is dead, and you need to move on.” I could have handled that, but what drove the wedge between us came later, after the police had asked me to take the lie detector test. “I’m talking to you as a lawyer now,” he’d told me. “If something happened-if you did something you regret-you can tell me. You need to tell me.”
It wasn’t so much what he’d said as the way he’d said it. It was clear to me that-at least at that moment-my brother was more than entertaining the thought that I had killed Ivy. And that was okay in his mind because he was being a lawyer. He had absolutely no clue how that changed his being my brother.
He still thought I was jealous of his family trip to Paris twenty years ago.
“By the way,” I said, reminded of something from yesterday. “The FBI asked if I would take a polygraph exam about the identity theft.”
“I’ll tell them to forget it,” he said. “If you pass, the government will say it’s not reliable; if you fail, you’re their prime suspect.”
It was another awkward moment. Kevin had made his skepticism about polygraphs clear four years ago, when I’d passed the one during the Ivy investigation.
Kevin rose and moved to the leather chair behind his desk, suddenly more comfortable with a big antique oak barrier between us.
“Let’s shift gears,” he said. “Kyle McVee.”
“What about him?”
He flipped back a few pages in his notes. “You said that when McVee dropped you off this morning, his parting words to you were ‘Nothing personal.’”
“Twice he told me that.”
“Do you believe him?”
I thought about it. “I don’t think Kyle has had a ‘personal’ feeling toward anyone since his son died.”
“What’s the story there?”
“Marcus McVee was the heir apparent at Ploutus, about my age. Not a bad guy, actually. Completely unlike Kyle’s nephew-Jason Wald-who now seems to be next in line.”
“What happened to Marcus?”
I paused for no apparent reason, except that it was a subject that seemed to give everyone pause. “He killed himself.”
“Over what?”
“I don’t know. Is it ever just one thing?”
Kevin stroked his chin, thinking. We’d been at this for almost an hour, and I had the feeling that my brother was about to get all lawyerly on me.
“Here’s what I’m going to do,” he said. “First, I’ll call the FBI to see what’s going on with the identity-theft investigation, and also to find out if you’re a target for illegal trading of Saxton Silver stock. Second, I’ll follow up with this detective to see if you’re being linked in any way to Chuck Bell’s shooting. And then I’m going to call Mallory’s lawyer and see if we can avoid the divorce-court version of mutually assured destruction.”
“That’s one hell of a list of problems,” I said. “Hard to believe that we’re actually talking about me.”
“I hear that a lot from people sitting in that very same chair.”
I was suddenly thinking about Anoop Gupta from New Delhi and the status of my credit cards. “This is going to eat up a lot of your time,” I said. “How much do you charge?”
“I don’t want your money.”
“I insist.”
“I refuse.”
“But I want to pay you.”
“All right,” he said, “we’ll barter. I’ll be your lawyer, and you come for dinner with Janice and me at our place. You can even bring an expensive bottle of wine if you want.”
My little brother had boxed me in. Papa would have been ecstatic.
“Okay,” I said, managing a bit of a smile. “It’s a deal.”
I hurried out of my brother’s office in plenty of time to be long gone when the next e-mail arrived from JBU-the mysterious someone who supposedly wanted to help me.
That was the one thing I hadn’t told Kevin about. I didn’t need him thinking I was crazy all over again. I figured I’d deal with that if and when the follow up e-mail came. And it came right on schedule, at exactly ten-thirty A.M.
Orene 52, the subject line read.
I was emerging from the subway station on Seventh Avenue, about half a block away from Saxton Silvers’ shiny glass office tower, closer than any cab could have gotten me to the building. Double-parked media vans and news trucks blocked several lanes of traffic on the street. The sidewalk outside the building’s main entrance was jammed with reporters and camera crews jockeying for the perfect TV shot-right in front of the distinctive gold letters on the black granite wall that spelled SAXTON SILVERS. They pounced on anyone who came through the revolving doors, hoping for thirty seconds of breaking news. Through the windows on the third floor, I saw men and women dressed in business suits peering down on the
frenzy. That was the Saxton Silvers foreign-exchange trading floor, normally a place of intense activity where traders were glued to their computer terminals, not standing at the window and pressing their worried faces to the glass.
Hopefully, none of them had it in mind to find a higher floor and jump.
Word was out that Kyle McVee had pulled the plug on Ploutus Investments’ $2.5 billion prime brokerage account. According to the latest FNN online update, two more major hedge funds were about to follow suit. The media smelled blood, and I sensed that at least a few drops were my own. It made me want to stay clear of anyone with a microphone. I stepped onto the sidewalk, found a lamppost to hide behind, and opened the latest e-mail message-the one that was supposed to tell me when and where to meet.
Today at 4 p.m. Table for two in front of the statue of Prometheus. That was the entire message. Again it was signed “JBU.”
“Michael?”
I turned at the sound of the distinctive voice and saw Papa standing next to a hot-dog cart. He was wearing a bright blue University of Florida Gators tracksuit, running shoes, and a pair of wraparound Oakley sunglasses so new that the tag was still hanging from the frame. All he needed was a garbage bag filled with knock-off Gucci purses and a selection of Rolex watches up to his elbow and he would have looked just like the sidewalk entrepreneur who’d sold him the glasses.
“What are you doing here?” I didn’t mean to sound accusatory. I was just surprised to see him.
“I was trying to get up to see you, but I couldn’t get near the building.”
“Is something wrong?”
He came closer and lowered his voice. On the busy streets of New York, Papa really sounded like a mobster when he whispered. “The FBI came to see me.”
“FBI? Why?”
“At first I thought it was about tracking down your lost money, so I was happy to talk to them. But then they started asking me all kinds of questions about the Bahamas, about Ivy, about-”
Money to Burn Page 14