Timothy Files

by Lawrence Sanders

  That plot has a lot going for it—until Cone stares at the color photograph of five friendly people and sees how content they are with each other. And didn’t he see them all drive away in a stretch limousine, laughing and chattering?

  Who the hell socializes with his blackmailer? No, they’re all in it together. All five are on a high, laughing up a storm as if they have the world by the nuts.

  “Greed,” the Wall Street dick says aloud. “It’s got to be greed. Them and their African masks and private elevator and stupid piano. Screw ’em!” he adds wrathfully.

  Joe Washington is a good man, thorough and conscientious. But he’s not as driven as Cone. Who is? So when Joe reports he can find no pattern in Constance Figlia’s bank visits, Timothy has to check it out himself.

  He can be methodical when he has to be. He keeps a detailed log of Figlia’s bank visits, and eventually all those hours and days spent skulking around the lobby of Clovis headquarters on East Fifty-seventh Street begin to pay off. There is a pattern, a rough one, but what it might signify, Cone can’t yet grasp.

  The woman, frequently accompanied by Anthony Bonadventure, goes to the tellers’ windows at Merchants International and Manhattan Central at least once a day. On Thursdays and Fridays she makes bank visits twice or maybe three times. And on the days before a bank holiday, she’s especially busy, running in and out of the two banks like some kind of a nut.

  Cone is still trying to puzzle this out when, on a Wednesday afternoon, he picks up his salary check at Haldering & Co. and takes it around the corner to a branch of Workmen’s Savings, where he keeps an interest-bearing checking account. He deposits his check and then draws $100 in cash. The teller punches out his number on a computer terminal to make sure he’s got enough in his account, then flips out five twenties.

  Cone stares at the bills and begins to get a glimmer.

  “Listen,” he says to the wan teller, “if I had wanted to draw against the check I just deposited, could I do it?”

  The teller takes another look at the salary check Cone has just deposited. “It’s local,” he says, “but not our bank. Unless you can get one of our officers to okay it, better figure about five days before you can draw on it.”

  “Does it always take five days to clear a local check?”

  “It depends.”

  “On what?”

  “Is it a weekend? A holiday? Then it might take longer. But generally it’s three to five days before a local check clears. Faster for city, state, and federal checks.”

  “What about checks drawn on out-of-state banks?”

  “Figure ten days to two weeks before you can draw on them.”

  Before Cone drives home, he stops at a discount store and picks up a pocket calculator for $10.95. It’s got a lot of keys he doesn’t understand, but it adds, subtracts, and multiplies, and that’s all he needs.

  Back in the loft, he gives Cleo a dish of fresh water and some old barbecued rib bones and pulls a chair up to his desk. He gets to work with a chewed pencil stub, a pad of scratch paper stolen from his office, and his new calculator.

  He works for almost an hour, interrupting his task only long enough to pop a can of cold Bud. The phone rings and rings. But he doesn’t answer it. He sticks with his figuring, punching the little calculator keys carefully with his bony fingers.

  When he finishes, he looks at the results with awe. He can’t believe it. So he goes through his computations once again. It comes out the same way. He sits back and smiles grimly. It’s a sweet scam. Simple but sweet. He can appreciate the temptation—but that’s no excuse.

  The next day he’s back on the trail of Constance Figlia. But now that he suspects what’s going down, her many bank visits don’t seem so strange.

  He’s double-parked in the Honda across Fifty-seventh Street on Thursday afternoon after the banks have closed. He watches Bonadventure pick up Constance Figlia in the silver LeBaron. Cone makes an illegal U-turn, ignoring the horns of furious motorists, and takes off after them. He thinks he knows where they’re heading, but he wants to make sure.

  It’s a loose tail so they won’t spot the Honda. But when he gets to New World Enterprises, the silver car is parked inside the fence, next to the office. Cone drives past slowly, sees no sign of activity, and then starts back to Manhattan.

  “It’s computer time,” he says aloud, certain he’s right.

  He finds two urgent messages on his desk, both asking him to call Detective Davenport immediately. He lights a cigarette and smokes awhile, staring at the ceiling. Then he picks up the phone and dials.

  “Davenport.”

  “Yeah, this is Cone. You wanted to talk to me?”

  “What are you—some kind of fucking genius or something?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Cone asks.

  “I start checking out banks in the Union Square area, telling myself I’m stupid to listen to your idiot ideas. And the second bank I hit they say, Yeah, on the day Griffon got chilled, they had an application for a new account from New World Enterprises. How do you like that?”

  “I like it.”

  “I even saw the application,” Davenport says. “Wanna guess who signed it?”

  “Constance Figlia, the corporation secretary,” Cone says.

  “Bingo! Go to the head of the class. And also Anthony Bonadventure, the corporation treasurer. I’m going back to the bank with a mug shot of Bonadventure to see if the officer who handled the application can definitely identify him. But I don’t have a photo of Constance Figlia.”

  “I do,” Cone says.

  “Oh? Where’d you get that?”

  “I stole it—on that charity house-tour I told you about.”

  The city detective laughs. “You’re a pisser, you are. Can you get it over to me so I can nail this thing down?”

  “Wait a minute,” Cone says. “Let me think …” They’re both silent a moment. Then: “Can you come over here tomorrow morning? Say about ten?”

  “You got something for me?” Davenport asks.

  “Another of my idiot ideas. Also, you better be here when I talk to our chief CPA, Sidney Apicella. I want to get his take on what I have to tell you.”

  “Will it help put Bonadventure on ice?”

  “For years to come,” the Wall Street dick says with more assurance than he feels.

  “You think he pushed Griffon?”

  “No,” Cone says. “I think Figlia did that. But maybe you can get Bonadventure as an accessory.”

  “Okay, Cone, I’ll be there. You’ll have the Figlia photo for me?”

  “Of course. Haldering and Company is always anxious to cooperate with New York’s Finest.”

  “Son,” Davenport says, “you’ve got more crap than a Christmas goose.”

  Cone stops by Apicella’s office to make sure he’ll be in on Friday morning and available for a short conference. Sid grumbles but agrees to meet with Cone and Davenport at ten o’clock.

  Then Timothy pauses at Samantha Whatley’s office and peers in. She’s watering her scrawny philodendron. She looks at him without expression.

  “Who are you?” she says.

  “Your humble and obedient servant, ma’am,” he says.

  “You’re a stranger to me,” she says in a low voice. “I called you last night. No answer. I guess you were out.”

  “I was in,” he says. “I just wasn’t answering the phone.”

  “Prick,” she says. “I needed to talk.”

  “I needed to clear the Clovis-Evanchat thing. You gave me a lousy week—remember?”

  She brightens. “You’re going to do it?”

  He nods.

  “And get Ed Griffon’s killer?”

  “Sure. With a little bit o’ luck. How about Saturday night? I’ll tell you all about it then.”

  “Okay,” she says. “I forgive you, your place or mine?”

  “Mine,” he says. “What do you feel like eating?”

  She grins at him.


  “You’re a depraved lady,” he tells her.

  “Guess who taught me,” she says.

  They’re sitting in Apicella’s office. Cone is dragging on a Camel. Davenport is starting on a new stick of Juicy Fruit. Sid is stroking his swollen beezer tenderly. They look at each other.

  “Well?” Sid asks. “What’s this all about?”

  “Tell us about kiting checks,” Cone says.

  The CPA stares at him. “Kiting checks? Don’t tell me you’ve never kited a check?”

  Cone stirs restlessly. “That’s neither here nor there. I just want to start from the beginning. How do you kite a check?”

  Apicella sighs. “Okay, I’ll give you a basic course. You got, say, five hundred bucks in your checking account. But you got a mortgage payment of, say, a thousand that’s due immediately. So you write a check for the thousand because you know that before your mortgage payment check clears, you’re going to be able to deposit enough in your account to cover it.”

  “That’s illegal?” Davenport says. “I’ve been doing it all my life.”

  “Who hasn’t?” Apicella says wearily. “That doesn’t make it any less illegal. It’s against the law to write a check for funds you don’t possess at the time the check is written. What you’re doing is taking advantage of the float—the time it takes for a check to clear from one bank to another. Two to five days for local banks.”

  “Meanwhile you’re using the bank’s money,” Cone says. “Right? I mean, you’re writing a check against money that doesn’t actually exist in your account.”

  “Correct,” Sid says, nodding. “But if you cover your check in time, no one’s the wiser. That’s the simplest form of check kiting. There are others.”

  “Yeah?” Davenport says. “Like what?”

  “Like overdrafting,” the CPA says. “Suppose you have a lot of bucks in a checking account that pays no interest—or very little. So you draw a check on much more than you’ve got in the account because you’ve got an opportunity to make a hot, short-term investment—commercial paper, a money market fund, or maybe even a race at Belmont—that pays more than the bank. In effect what you’re doing is borrowing the bank’s money to make more money for yourself. If you’re lucky, you earn enough to cover your overdraft plus a profit. If you’re unlucky, you go to jail.”

  “Look,” Timothy Cone says, “I got a plot I want to throw at you and see what you think. Now suppose I have a million dollars.”

  “That’ll be the day,” the NYPD man says.

  “Well, just suppose. I got a million, and I open accounts at two different banks. In one I deposit the minimum required to keep the account active. In the other I deposit what’s left of my million. Most of it. Okay so far?”

  “So far,” Sid says. “You haven’t broken any laws.”

  “I don’t mean to,” Cone says. “These are interest-bearing, day-of-deposit-to-day-of-withdrawal checking accounts. Okay? Now, on a Thursday, I write a check for about a million against my big account, and deposit it in my little account. Both banks pay, say, six percent. So my million is making about a hundred and sixty-five dollars a day in interest. But before my check clears, I’m making that much from both banks. You follow? I’ve still got the million in my big account because the check hasn’t cleared, and the little account starts paying interest the moment I make the deposit. If it takes the check five days to clear, I’ve made about sixteen hundred bucks in interest from both banks. That million dollars is working twice.”

  Apicella and Davenport stare at each other. But Cone doesn’t wait for their comments.

  “Now what I want to know is this: Is what I’m doing against the law? I mean, when I write a check for a million against the big account, the money is there. I’m not drawing against funds that don’t exist. So is what I’m doing illegal?”

  “It’s got to be,” Apicella says. “I don’t know the applicable law, but what you’re doing, in effect, is doubling your money. You’ve got a million in two different banks—the same million!—and you’re drawing interest on both balances. That’s got to be against the law.”

  “It is,” Davenport says, “and you’ve got to consider intent. Why are you flying that million bucks back and forth? Your interest is to defraud the banks, isn’t it?”

  Cone suddenly smiles. “Okay, that’s the way I see it. Now listen to this: Instead of switching a million dollars back and forth between two banks, I’m switching a hundred million. The interest on that, at six percent, is six million annually, or about sixteen thousand five hundred a day. If I can con both banks out of an extra five days of interest, I’m making eighty-two thousand five hundred a week. That comes to about four-and-a-quarter million a year. But what if I do it more than once a week? What if I use more than two banks where the float can be as long as ten days? That’s ten days’ interest on a hundred million bucks! How much am I going to take the banks for in a year?”

  “Whee!” Davenport cries, throwing up his hands. “It’s Looney Tunes time, folks!”

  Sid rubs his nose. “Is that what Clovis and Clovis are doing?”

  “That’s what they’re doing.”

  “Thank God the Evanchat deal was canceled,” Sid says. “But wouldn’t the bank’s computers pick up on all those big checks flying back and forth?”

  “Not necessarily. Essentially, banks’ computers are data-processing machines. They keep a record of deposits and withdrawals, but they’re not programmed to flash a red light when a fraud like this occurs. If no bank employee takes a look at the computer printout and screams, no one’s going to realize what’s happening.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Davenport says, shaking his head. “Clovis must be making zillions.”

  “They are,” Cone says, “because they had the heavy loot to start with. That’s why they set up New World Enterprises as a dummy corporation with such a big capitalization. Then, when that worked out so well, they switched their other subsidiaries’ banks to Newark, Chicago, and San Diego to take advantage of the longer float. It sure beats building luxury high-rises. I’ll bet the whole scam was Bonadventure’s idea. It’s got his prints all over it.”

  “I feel sick,” Apicella says.

  “Why?” Cone asks. “Because you don’t have a piece of the action? Be happy, Sid. Haldering is out of the picture, and your ass is safe—until the next time.”

  Back in Cone’s office, he and Davenport face each other across the desk.

  “I don’t want to tell you how to run your business,” the Wall Street dick says, “but—”

  “But you’re going to,” the city detective interrupts.

  “Well, yeah. If I was you, the first thing I’d do is tell Merchants International and Manhattan Central to run a computer check on the deposits and withdrawals made over the past year by Clovis and Clovis and New World Enterprises. If I’m wrong, then the whole thing is dead in the water.”

  “And if you’re right?”

  “Then do the same with the out-of-state banks Clovis’s subsidiaries use. It won’t take them all that long to spot what’s going on and you can dump the whole investigation in the DA’s lap.”

  “Then what do I do, teacher?” Davenport says with heavy irony, unwrapping a fresh stick of chewing gum.

  “Look,” Cone says, still leaning forward over his desk. “As far as I’m concerned, this bank fraud is a sideshow. I want Griffon’s killer.”

  “As if I didn’t know.”

  “I still say Grace is the key. The woman’s a balloonhead. A little pressure and she’ll explode. If you get sufficient evidence on this check-kiting scheme, you should have probable cause to get into the Clovis apartment without a warrant. Maybe the lady’s got some coke on the premises. Even if she doesn’t, you can lean on her about her association with Bonadventure. She’ll break—I swear she will—and admit he’s her candyman. Then you move in on Mr. Pinkie Ring himself. That guy has got nerves of Silly Putty. Mark my words, he’ll cop a plea if you tell him his cock is on
the block for the murder of Ed Griffon. I guarantee he’ll name Constance Figlia as the actual killer—after he makes a deal with the DA.”

  Davenport shakes his head. “I don’t even know what I’m going to have for lunch today,” he says, “and you’ve got all this wrapped up in a neat package with a ribbon on it.”

  “It’ll work,” Cone says. “They’re all going to take a fall, one way or another. There’s only one thing I want.”

  “Uh-huh, had to be. What?”

  “I want to be there when you pick up Anthony Bonadventure. I figure if you move fast, you should be able to cuff him by tomorrow. I’ll stick close to my phone. Will you let me know when you’re moving in?”

  “Yeah,” Davenport says, rising heavily to his feet. “I owe you that.”

  “Wait a minute,” Cone says, fishing the leather-framed photo from his top desk drawer. “Don’t forget to get into the New World warehouse in Brooklyn and grab that computer. That’ll give the DA all he needs for a bank-fraud indictment. And show this photo of Constance Figlia to your flaky witness and tell him she’s under arrest. Maybe he’ll be willing to identify her.”

  “Maybe,” the NYPD man says, inspecting the photograph. “Worth a try. Which one is she?”

  “Second from the left.”

  “And who’s the blond broad in the bikini?”

  “That’s Grace Clovis.”

  “Oh, yeah,” the city cop breathes. “I think I’ll interrogate her personally.”

  “You’re a dirty old man,” Cone says.

  “I was a dirty young man,” Davenport says. “I haven’t changed.”

  He doesn’t leave the loft on Saturday morning, not even to run out for a paper. He’s afraid he’ll miss Davenport’s call and blow a chance to be in on the kill. So he drinks black coffee, smokes cigarettes, and vapors aloud, addressing Cleo but really talking to himself.

  “I may be wrong on some of the details, kiddo,” he says, “but nothing important. Ed Griffon, a smart guy, caught on faster than I did and got himself knocked off. Because he wasn’t smart enough to watch his back. You don’t trust anyone in this world, Cleo—not even yourself. You trust me to feed you, give you fresh water, change your litter. So you’re content. But what if some night I don’t come home, and never do again? Who’ll feed you then? Ahh, you’ll make out somehow, you little shit. You’re a survivor.”