* * *
Charese stared at the note, stunned. Red ink on cream-colored paper. Soft flesh bloodied by rabid, vicious words.
After 12 years, Roberge was leaving. To marry a woman. A real, biological, born-without-a-penis woman.
Charese screamed, a scream that began deep within her and forced its way through her throat and out her mouth. A symphony of neighborhood dogs barked in response. A neighbor below banged on the ceiling. She was totally alone.
Tears flowed down her cheeks, a salty stream of familiar doubts and regrets. It was one thing to change her name from Charles to Charese, to dress in women’s clothing, to attend Roberge’s family gatherings posing as his girlfriend. But to agree to a sex change operation? She had always feared that she had gone too far, had become too dependent on a man who fell in love with her when she was a man but then decided he wanted her to become a woman.
Now she was stuck—after years of hormone treatments, and only three weeks away from her operation, she was no longer male but not yet female. And for what? For a man who had decided to marry another woman, probably some preppy college girl with freckles and a closet full of tennis sneakers.
What would she do? What could she do? She had no real friends in Boston and hadn’t worked in eight years. She looked in the mirror and saw what she saw—a 38-year old fag wearing a dress who had begun to grow breasts and lose facial hair. She had become the cliché dependent housewife, yet she was neither woman nor wife. Roberge had isolated her, her family had long since disowned her and her life-style, and she had neither marketable skills nor money of her own.
All she had was Roberge and the ability to use her tongue and mouth and teeth to give a man exquisite pleasure. And now Roberge was gone.
CHAPTER 3
[August 17, 1989]
“What happened to your ribs?” The customs agent’s eyes bore into Bruce’s. Trying to read Bruce’s face. Just as he had read the bandages outlined beneath Bruce’s shirt.
Bruce immediately realized his mistake—the agent suspected him of taping drugs to his torso. So much for attention to detail.
Bruce reacted intuitively, smiled broadly. “You should see the other guy.”
The two men held each other’s eye for a long moment, then Bruce nodded, scooped up his bag and walked briskly toward the gate to grab his flight to Boston. After a few steps, he took a breath and dared a glance up into a mirror above the doorway. The agent was still watching him, the hint of a smile on his face.
* * *
Bruce took a cab back to Cambridge, got out a block from his apartment. He slipped into a convenience store across from his front door and watched the street and building for a half hour. No FBI. No Asian thugs. No loan sharks. At least not that he could see.
He took a deep breath and started to walk across the street. No movement from the shadows, no car doors opening. He unlocked the front door, climbed the stairs to his apartment. He looked for the hair he had placed between the door and the jamb. Gone.
He put his ear to the door. He could hear the television set, then a brief conversation. Amateurs, probably his loan shark friends. He backed away, retreated down the stairs.
They had surprised him once, but this time he had the advantage. First, he knew where they were. And second, he knew they weren’t very smart.
He stashed his bags in an alley, grabbed a loose brick and returned to his building. He unscrewed the light bulb in the stairwell outside his apartment, then pulled the fire alarm. He crouched and waited. He figured he had four or five minutes before the fire truck arrived.
Within a few second he heard his door open. He recognized the voices of the men who had roughed him up.
“I don’t see nothin’. What should we do?”
“You stay here. I’ll go check it out.”
Bruce heard heavy steps coming his way. Good, it was the big guy, the bodybuilder. The one who had smashed Bruce’s ribs, then ripped off his own shirt, stood over him and flexed his muscles like some wrestling star. Awfully brave when he’d had a buddy to help him.
Bruce edged down another half flight to the landing, counting the steps as he went. He raised the brick and waited. He didn’t want to hit him over the head—that might kill him. But a broken jaw was fine.
Thump. Bodybuilder’s foot hit the first step. Two more thumps in quick succession. He was jogging down the stairs, his hand squeaking as it slid down the wooden banister. On the seventh thump, Bruce swung the brick, adjusting his aim in mid arc as his target hit the eighth step and came into view.
The brick hit flush on the man’s lower cheek. Bruce heard the slap, felt the bones and teeth crumble beneath the blow. It felt good. It had been a while since he had evened a score. Bodybuilder fell sideways, bounced off the floor and slid to a stop in the corner of the landing.
Bruce bent over the man, nudged him with his foot. Breathing, but unconscious. Blood leaked from his mouth. Bruce turned him on his side so he wouldn’t choke, then noticed a couple of teeth on the floor. He scooped them up and tucked them into Bodybuilder’s shoe. Bruce smiled—figuring out how his teeth got into his shoe would likely baffle the thug for months to come.
Bruce could hear sirens now, so he climbed back up the stairs, edged past his door and waited. He knew the other intruder would not want to be seen in Bruce’s apartment when the firemen arrived. A few seconds later, the man stuck his head into the hallway.
“Vince, you out here? Vince?” No response. “Ah, shit.” He closed the door behind him and headed for the stairs.
Bruce let him go. He would find his buddy, panic a bit, then try to drag him out before they were seen. He would never think to go back and search for Bruce in his apartment.
At least not right away. But Bruce knew he would have to find a new apartment. Soon. Whether Bruce repaid the loan or not, Bodybuilder would likely return in a couple of days, maybe with some friends. It had become personal.
Bruce retrieved his bags from the alley, emptied them on the bed and threw on a clean shirt. He spent half an hour gathering important papers and keepsakes, then tossed them into a duffel bag along with a few changes of clothes and some toiletries. The rest of the stuff he could replace.
He made sure his visitors hadn’t returned, then walked down the street to a local bank. He cashed one of the bank checks and stuffed $9,000 into a shoulder bag.
A handful of stops on the subway, then a quick walk through Quincy Market and he was in the North End. Up Hanover Street a couple of blocks until he found the number he was looking for. A dry cleaner. He double-checked the number scribbled on the piece of paper, shrugged and entered. An older woman greeted him with a smile, then sensed she should call her husband. “Frankie, you got a customer.”
Bruce waited, looked around. Strange front for a loan shark—he had expected a bar or restaurant or pawn shop. For the second time today, there was a wisecrack on the tip of his tongue about money laundering, but he swallowed it. He wanted to complete his business and get out of there before Bodybuilder and his friend checked in.
Frankie ambled out from a back room, a small spiral notebook in his hand. “Arrujo,” he snorted. Bruce could see he was surprised to see him. “Where you been? My boys have been out lookin’ for you.”
“Yeah, I just ran into one of them. I got your money.”
Frankie glared at him for a second, then slapped open the notebook. He pulled a calculator out of his shirt pocket, punched some numbers with his fingers. “You owe $5,800.”
It was a few hundred higher than Bruce thought it should be, but he counted out the money and dropped it on the counter. He looked Frankie in the eye. “We square?”
Frankie eyed Bruce’s shoulder bag, trying to peer inside. Bruce could see the curiosity, see the greed—how much more did Bruce have stashed in there? With interest running at $100 per day, he probably wished Bruce hadn’t come in quite yet.
Finally he sighed, pulled the money toward him, nodded. “We’re good.”
&nbs
p; Two more stops for Bruce. He bought a couple of money orders at the Post Office and mailed them to his credit card companies, then rode the subway back to Cambridge and dropped off $2,100 in back rent to his landlord. He was done with the apartment, but he wanted to protect his credit.
So now he was even—everyone had their money.
It was time to get ahead.
He walked down the street to a rental car agency and treated himself to a red Camaro. It had been years since he had driven anything other than an old Toyota, and the simple act of starting the engine brought him back to his wild college days.
He had pulled off his first art heist with Gus over Thanksgiving break his sophomore year, just after Grandpa had died. It was a classic Gus job—brazen and bold. They had hit the private residence of the Harvard University president during the Harvard-Yale football game. The president had left the house open so the caterers could set up a post-game party spread, and Bruce and Gus had simply walked out the front door in broad daylight with a couple of Grandma Moses paintings tucked under the tablecloth of a banquet table. Gus had fenced the paintings for $30,000, about 15% of their value, and years later Bruce had appreciated the irony of paying his first Harvard Law School tuition bill with the proceeds of that theft.
After the theft he had returned to the University of Massachusetts with money in his pocket for the first time in his life. Fast cars, fast girls, fast drugs, another art heist, more cars, more girls, more drugs. By the time he was a senior, he had committed four thefts and, thanks to Gus’ fencing abilities, had stashed over $60,000 in Caesar’s Palace casino chips in a safe deposit box. But he knew that, as careful as he was, he could not go forever without getting caught. So in his senior year he moved back into the dorm, gave up the cars and drugs and Gus, forgot about the money, applied to law school, and hoped the FBI would leave him alone.
And they had. So far, at least.
He snaked his way out of the city, lost in memories of the past and plans for the future. The wind blew his hair, the radio sang his songs, the sun warmed his face. He drove east, then north up the coast, the Boston skyline fading into a hedge line in his rearview mirror.
Twenty miles north of the city, he pulled off onto the shoulder. He got out, removed his shirt and stretched out on the hood.
On his right the Atlantic Ocean churned, slowly calming itself after an August storm. On his left, his home town, Marblehead—rocky, stable, unyielding in the face of thousands of Atlantic assaults. Where the stormy sea and the cragged coast met, a score of sailing boats frolicked, harnessing the passion of the Atlantic, skimming across the surface of the sea, mocking both the cumbersome continent and the fuming ocean.
Since Bruce was a boy, Grandpa had preached to him that life was no more complicated than this coastline. Many people, like Gus, were the sea—passionate and creative, but temperamental and unfocussed. Many more were content to be the land mass—orderly and stable, but rigid and common. Only a few were the sailboats.
Bruce looked out over the harbor, his eyes resting on a small blue Sunfish gallantly bucking its way over the swells and into the wind. He recalled a time in his childhood when a similar sail had abruptly ended—a renegade blast of wind had smashed into the backside of his sail, sweeping him into the spring sea. He could still taste the sea deep in his lungs, still remember the power of the ocean as it swallowed him up and then spit him out.
He had been lucky that day—he had been able to stagger home with only a gashed knee and a concussion. And a lifelong respect for how delicately balanced the sailing ship was between the continent and the sea. A bit too much continent, the boat would run aground. Too much ocean, it would capsize and be swamped.
His trip to Hong Kong had been like that—too much ocean, too much risk. So had his run-in with the loan shark. He had sailed into a storm and hadn’t been swamped. But that didn’t make it smart, it just made him lucky. Too many things could have gone wrong.
Now he was about to enter a world of lawyers, a world of laws and rules and procedures. A landlocked world, rich in tradition, where risk was defined as wearing a lilac tie on casual Fridays. No crime bosses. No loan sharks. And no art thieves.
A little ocean could go a long way in such a world. But he would have to be careful, controlled. No Mick Jagger posters. No bricks to the face.
Gus, of course, had been right—Bruce wasn’t planning on pushing paper for the rest of his life. In fact, if all went well, his stay at the firm would last only a couple of years. He had a plan, and everything he needed was now in place. Law degree. Job in a respected law firm. A chunk of money to bankroll himself. All that remained was to wait for the proper opportunity, then to execute correctly.
Actually, the word “plan” was too concrete. What Bruce really had was a theory based on three observations. First, from his art theft experiences, he knew the importance of access to inside information. Second, he knew that every significant transaction in America required the use of lawyers. And third, while people liked to say they hated lawyers, they never questioned the integrity of the largest law firms. So Bruce figured that a lawyer in a large, respected law firm would be in a unique position to scam his way to a little nest egg of his own.
Best of all, he could profit in a way that would be impossible to detect. Bruce had laughed when he read about an attorney embezzling money from a wealthy widow; did he think that the heirs would not notice that their inheritance was missing? And a recent attempt by a paralegal to buy the stock of a client involved in secret merger discussions was as clumsy as it was naive; did she think that the SEC hadn’t seen this type of scam before?
No, Bruce was looking instead for a back door type of ruse where the victim wouldn’t even know he had been victimized. Sort of like a dentist molesting a patient while the patient was unconscious. But without any semen stains or evidence of penetration. Bottom line: no victim, no chance of getting caught.
Bruce had accepted a position in the firm’s real estate department. Unlike the corporate world, real estate transactions were private. No governmental oversight. No stockholders expecting periodic reports. No board of directors. No yearly audits. And it was a one-time event—the property was sold and the transaction forgotten, the legal file shelved for a year and then archived in some climate-controlled warehouse.
And the booming Boston real estate market would soon have to succumb to the cyclical nature of every market. Prices of homes had doubled and even tripled in the past five years. While part of the increase was attributable to the hot Massachusetts economy, some of the boom was a result of sheer speculation. Bruce recalled the college reading he had done on the tulip bulb phenomenon in the Netherlands in the 1630s. A speculative frenzy drove tulip bulb prices up to the point where a single bulb was worth a laborer’s yearly salary. Then the bubble burst and the value of a tulip bulb plummeted to that of an onion.
While Bruce was confident that Boston properties would never be bartered for table vegetables, he did believe that a price correction was inevitable. With that correction would come chaos and confusion. And chaos was a fertile breeding ground for opportunity.
He became calmly reflective. In the past, he had been Bruce Arrujo, art thief. In the future, he would be Bruce Arrujo, attorney-at-law in Boston’s premier law firm. Grandpa, who respected the lawyer the same way the sailor respected the shark, would have called it a journey beginning with the thievery of art and ending with the art of thievery.
CHAPTER 4
[August 21, 1989]
It was late August, and Pierre couldn’t understand why the phones weren’t ringing. Normally August was a sprint—rent an apartment, sell a condo, sniff out an investment property for a wealthy client. The routine had been the same since the early 1980s: college students and Yuppies and investors all fighting for a piece of the limited Boston real estate pie.
The last few years had been easy money. Boston boasted a thriving economy—high tech, health care, education, finance. But the housing supply
was limited, both by the Atlantic Ocean and the desire of Bostonians to preserve the historic architecture of its old neighborhoods. It was a simple case of demand growing and supply remaining fixed, and Pierre, though without any formal training in economics, understood what happened to prices during that kind of market imbalance.
Just as he was astute enough to recognize the advantages of not anglicizing his name by changing it to Peter—there was a certain European snob appeal among many Bostonians, so why not take advantage of a name like Pierre Prefontaine? Even if he was a third generation American, and even if his grandfather came not from a boutique in Paris but from a factory in Quebec.
But this year it didn’t matter if he called himself Donald Trump—the phones simply weren’t ringing. Things were changing.
Landlords were fighting to keep tenants—at last year’s rates. Parents who would normally be calling him desperately looking for a condominium to buy for little Suzy so that she would have a place to live come September 1 were silent this year, off vacationing on the Cape or in Maine while Suzy talked her landlord into paying for a cable TV hook-up. And investors had largely abandoned the market, leading to the farcical scene Pierre had witnessed earlier in the week. It had bothered Pierre then, and it continued to gnaw on him as he reflected on it during his distressingly inactive day.
* * *
Pierre had received a call from a well-known player in the real estate market, a man whom the newspapers had anointed the “Baron of the Brownstones” because of the vast number of brownstone apartment buildings he had purchased and then converted to condominiums. The Baron had amassed a small fortune by purchasing 1920s vintage apartment buildings in working class neighborhoods of Boston and converting them to condominiums. The conversion process itself took about one week—a few buckets of paint, a new intercom system and, voila, instant condominiums. It was a far cry from the genesis of the condominium concept—ritzy oceanfront high rises in southern Florida—but the Baron had no trouble selling these condominium units to investors speculating in the booming real estate market. In fact, demand was so high for these units that it was not uncommon for the Baron to double his money in a period of a few months.
[Boston Law 01.0] Unlawful Deeds Page 3