“This is a scam, Judge. Mr. Cantella knew that his wife had uncovered his secret and was about to file for divorce. That is when Mr. Cantella cooked up this identity-theft scheme and conspired with his lover to hide his assets from his wife.”
“What?” I said, sounding like my brother.
“Mr. Warfield, I warned you—”
“I didn’t say anything!”
It was just like old times, my kid brother blaming me.
“Sorry, Your Honor,” I said, but I was looking at Mallory as I spoke. “It’s just that my wife knows this isn’t true.”
Her eyes were cast downward, not even a glance in my direction.
“Mr. Warfield, please control your client. Mr. Highsmith, I’m warning you as well. I am not going to turn this hearing into a mini-trial on Mr. Cantella’s alleged infidelity.”
“Understood. For purposes of this motion, I have just three e-mails for the court to consider.” Highsmith brought out three poster boards, one for each blowup. “Mr. Cantella received the first e-mail on the night of the birthday celebration his wife Mallory had planned for him—the same night that his equities were liquidated and moved into the secret account. The message simply reads: “Just as planned. xo xo.”
I whispered to my brother, “I showed that one to Mallory and gave it to the FBI.”
Highsmith said, “Clearly the ‘xo xo’ suggests that this plan was from someone who had an intimate relationship with Mr. Cantella. The second and third e-mails are more recent, coming after my client asked her husband for a divorce. Read together, these two recent e-mails propose a secret meeting at the Rink Bar at four o’clock today. These messages are signed JBU.”
Kevin looked at me, but I was dumbfounded. My tech guy had already removed the spyware. “I have no idea how she got those,” I whispered.
“Objection,” said Kevin, rising.
“This isn’t a trial,” said the judge.
Highsmith jumped on it. “Exactly, Your Honor. And at this preliminary stage of the proceedings, I believe we have made a sufficient showing to warrant the relief requested—a temporary freeze on Mr. Cantella’s assets and a full accounting of every penny that was transferred offshore.”
Kevin said, “Mr. Highsmith should at least be required to establish the authenticity of those e-mails. We have no idea where he got those last two about this supposed secret meeting.”
The judge looked at Highsmith and said, “How did you get those e-mails?”
Highsmith smiled, and the hand went back into the pocket, reaching for the brass balls. “As the court knows, I’m a very resourceful trial lawyer.”
“So resourceful,” said Kevin, “that Mr. Cantella’s wife planted spyware on her husband’s computer.”
I cringed. Kevin had pushed the wrong button, as was evident from the judge’s sour expression.
“Stop the sniping,” the judge said. “Let me just get to the bottom of this question of whether the e-mails are authentic or not. Mr. Cantella: Did you receive these e-mails or did you not?”
I hesitated. This was going to be news to my brother—and he wasn’t going to be happy. “I did, Your Honor. But they’re not from a lover.”
“Who are they from?
“Well…I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” said the judge.
Highsmith chortled.
Kevin said, “What my client means to say is—”
The judge gaveled him down. “I told you that this is not going to be a mini-trial. The time will come for you to rebut these allegations, but for now I will grant the motion and prohibit Mr. Cantella from making any further sales or transfers of assets valued at more than five hundred dollars. Mr. Cantella has five days to submit to the court a full accounting of all assets transferred from his accounts within the last forty-eight hours.”
“That’s impossible,” I whispered to Kevin.
“Judge,” Kevin said, “that’s—”
“That’s my ruling. We’re adjourned.”
With one final bang of the gavel, it was over—or, as the expression on Highsmith’s face suggested, we were just getting started.
“All rise!” called the bailiff.
As the judge stepped down from the bench, I heard a muffled noise from the rear of the courtroom—someone else rising from the wooden bench seats in the gallery. I turned and looked. It was Ivy’s mother.
A sickening feeling came over me. Olivia wasn’t just helping the FBI.
Could she be helping Mallory?
Kevin pulled me out of Judge Stapleton’s courtroom and into the men’s room across the hall. He checked the stalls to make sure we were alone, and then he tore into me.
“I want the truth: Were you having an affair?”
“No.”
“Are you working with someone to hide your assets from Mallory?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Then who is JBU, and why does he or she want to meet with you in secret?”
“I don’t know for sure. It’s hard to explain.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about those other two e-mails?”
I breathed in and out, wary of his reaction. “Because I knew that you and I would not see eye to eye on them.”
He folded his arms and leaned against the paper-towel dispenser, as if he had more than enough time for the whole story. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I’m all ears.”
“On the first e-mail—the one that says ‘I can help’—I had no idea who JBU was. But it hit me immediately when the second one came in. It was hard to ignore the fact that the meeting place was the Rink Bar at Rockefeller Center, the table right in front of the gold statute of Prometheus.”
Kevin shrugged. “What about it?”
“That was where Ivy and I had our first date.”
“Oh, no,” he said, groaning.
I could see that I was losing him. I continued, “Ivy and I had a business relationship before I asked her out. If things between us didn’t work out, she didn’t want the hedge fund she was working for to exclude her from deals involving Saxton Silvers. That’s why she chose the Rink Bar for our first date, a tourist attraction where we were less likely to see anyone we knew. But we hit it off, partly because we discovered that we were both fans of Norman Brown.”
“Who?”
“He’s a jazz guitarist, and he happened to be playing at the Blue Note the following week. We agreed to make his show on our second date, but we also agreed to keep the fact that we were dating ‘Just Between Us,’ which was the title to Brown’s debut album.”
“JBU,” said Kevin.
“Right. It wasn’t someone’s initials.”
He was with me—sort of. A look of concern came over his face. “But you don’t think that—”
“That the e-mails came from Ivy?” I said, finishing his thought. I could almost see his head throbbing.
“Please, Michael. Don’t tell me we’re going down this Ivyis-alive path again.”
I said nothing, knowing he would resist.
Kevin suddenly dug into his briefcase, as if an idea had come to him. He pulled out a hard copy of another e-mail—the one from Mallory that had transmitted the happy birthday video and planted the spyware on my computer.
“Just as I thought,” said Kevin. “This e-mail from Mallory has that song title in the subject line. It says ‘Just Between Us.’ Mallory is JBU.”
“I told you we wouldn’t see eye to eye on this.”
Kevin scoffed. “Don’t you get it? The e-mails came from Mallory, who is scheming—probably with Highsmith’s help—to create a bogus paper trail that makes it look like you have a mistress.”
“I don’t think Mallory would do that.”
“Oh, get a grip, will you?”
“I’m serious. Mallory has a lot of resentment toward me—enough to put spyware on my computer. But make up evidence? That isn’t even close to the woman I married.”
Kevin came toward me, laying his hand
on my shoulder. “Michael, Ivy is dead. She is not JBU.”
“There’s one way to find out.”
He knew what I meant. “If you go to the Rink Bar at four o’clock, you will be playing right into Highsmith’s hands. He will cite it as proof that you have a lover, and that the two of you are plotting to hide your assets from Mallory. As your lawyer, I absolutely forbid you to go.”
“I don’t care,” I said, looking him in the eye. “I’m going.”
30
A FEW MINUTES BEFORE FOUR P.M., TONY GIRELLI WAS SEATED ALONE at a café table at the Rink Bar outside Rockefeller Center.
Every spring when the ice melted and the Zamboni went into storage, the famous skating rink in front of the gold statue of Prometheus became a popular lunch and happy-hour destination. A scattering of brightly colored umbrellas shaded tables for about six hundred margarita-loving patrons. Above them at street level, the year-round swarm of tourists stood at the rail, people watching. Girelli took it all in. His boss had extensive commercial real estate holdings, and Girelli wondered if he owned a piece of this place.
Real estate, however, was a sore subject for Girelli.
“Sparkling water,” he told the waiter. “With lemon.”
Girelli still carried a copy of a certain blast e-mail in his wallet, one that he—and hundreds of guys like him—had received last fall from a trader at the residential mortgage desk at Saxton Silvers. As per Michael Cantella, it read, we will no longer be purchasing NINA loans. Please do not call. No exceptions will be granted. At the time of that announcement, Girelli had been pulling down $125,000 in commissions—a month. He and his buddies would go into Miami Beach clubs almost every night, order four or five bottles of Cristal champagne at $1,500 a pop, and think nothing of it. Not bad for a guy who had once been flat broke but who was determined never to return to the world of a leg-breaking, brass-knuckled debt collector for the mob. He’d been shooting pool at a bar one night when a buddy had asked, “Wanna be a mortgage broker?” and he’d jumped on it.
Girelli’s specialty had been NINA loans—“no income, no assets”—for, as he put it, “people who didn’t have a pot to piss in.” He’d load up an eight-dollar-an-hour housekeeper with a million dollars in mortgages on six houses, one for everyone in her family, including two sisters who were still trying to get here from Mexico. And what self-respecting taxi driver should be without three or four pre-construction-priced condos on Miami Beach? The loans were destined to go into default, of course, but that wasn’t Girelli’s problem. He teamed up with a buddy at Sunpath Bank, and they borrowed at a 30 to 1 ratio—$100 million against $3 million in capital—to fund all the subprime loans they wrote. Then Sunpath bundled all the subprimes together and sold them up the daisy chain to Wall Street, paying back Sunpath’s lenders with Wall Street’s money and keeping the profit. What a hoot. What a party. Until the e-mail:
As per Michael Cantella…
Never mind that Sunpath had already funded yet another $100 million in subprime loans in “business as usual.” Never mind that there was no way to pay back Sunpath’s lenders unless Wall Street bought the bundles. Girelli and his partner tried other investment banks, but Wall Street firms were like sheep: The minute a leader like Saxton Silvers decided to stop buying NINA loans, they all followed suit. Funny thing was, no one in the subprime pipeline had ever heard of this asshole Michael Cantella. The guy didn’t even have direct supervision over the residential mortgage desk at Saxton Silvers. Some even said that the e-mail’s attribution, “As per Michael Cantella,” was just Kent Frost and his subprime factory taking a swipe at Cantella for sticking his nose where it didn’t belong. Whatever the case, the plug was pulled. Sunpath closed its doors in a week. Three hundred employees lost their jobs. The people at the top lost everything. Michael Cantella didn’t even know their names.
Girelli intended to keep it that way.
“Here you are, sir,” said the waiter.
Girelli squeezed the lemon and discreetly surveyed the crowd. Michael Cantella was nowhere to be seen, and in light of the disclosure of the e-mails at this afternoon’s court hearing, Girelli doubted that Cantella’s divorce lawyer would let him go to a secret meeting that was no longer a secret.
Wasting my damn time here.
The thought had barely registered when Girelli spotted a woman approaching the table referenced in the e-mail, the one right in front of the gold statue of Prometheus.
A tight smiled creased his lips.
Pay dirt.
31
I WAS AT STREET LEVEL, STANDING AT THE RAIL THAT SURROUNDED THE concrete hole in the ground at Rockefeller Center, looking down on the Rink Bar. Had it been December, I would have been crushed beneath a ninety-foot-tall Norway spruce and five miles of twinkling lights.
On reflection, I’d decided that Kevin might be right: The e-mails from “JBU” might all be a setup to help Mallory prove that I was having an affair. Might be right. It wasn’t enough to keep me from going to the Rink Bar at the designated time. It was enough, however, to make me take precautions.
Two reporters had hounded me all the way out of the courthouse, a constant peppering of questions about Saxton Silvers. I figured it was only going to get worse as the media buzz honed the link between me and the firm’s downfall. If I was going to the Rink Bar, I needed to be unrecognizable, but my suitcase full of socks and underwear didn’t offer much in the way of a disguise. I stopped by the Days Inn and borrowed Papa’s trench coat. The hem was frayed, the elbow was patched, and part of the lining was torn and hanging out of the sleeve. My guess was that he’d purchased it before I was born. He also loaned me a white golf cap with the red, white, and green Italian flag sewn onto it, his latest acquisition from Mulberry Street. It hadn’t been my intention, but I could have passed for a homeless guy.
The last two days had been nuts on every level—too crazy for me to give serious consideration to Mallory’s accusations. She was wrong: I did love her. But she was also right: I had not stopped loving Ivy. Maybe that kept me from loving Mallory enough. Love was Nothing if it wasn’t the truth, and in my case the truth was painful: nothing compared to what I had felt for Ivy. If that made me a bad person, I hoped Mallory would forgive me. But if Ivy was still alive, I hoped she would forgive me, too—and tell me who or what had made her vanish four years ago.
And why was she coming back now?
“Excuse me, but would you take our picture?”
A young woman wearing a University of Wisconsin sweatshirt was shoving a camera in my face. Her girlfriends were already posed at the rail.
“Sure,” I said.
I took a few steps back and aimed the zoom lens. I was facing east, toward the Fifth Avenue entrance, looking out over the top of the Rink Bar below us. Flags of the United Nations’ 192 member states encircled the rink area and flapped in the breeze. I zoomed in, then out—then in again.
“Tell us when,” the woman said.
I wasn’t focused on them. I zoomed in over their heads, peering between the flags of Japan and Jamaica. On the other side of the plaza, a man was standing in the second-story window above Dean & DeLuca. It was the perfect vantage point from which to look down into the Rink Bar. He was almost entirely concealed by the curtains he was standing behind, but I noticed him because of the camera with the long telephoto lens in his hands. This afternoon’s hearing had apparently expanded the media interest beyond me and Saxton Silvers to me and Mallory.
“Ready when you are,” the girls from Wisconsin said, but I was still focused on that photographer in the window. I saw him adjust his lens, and although I couldn’t be certain, he seemed to be shooting rapid-fire frames of the Rink Bar. I did a little triangulation in my head, and my gaze followed the aim of his lens. It was pointed in the direction of the statue of Prometheus—and then I froze.
A woman had taken a seat at the same table that I had shared with Ivy on our first date. She was alone.
And it was precisely four P.M.
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Tony Girelli stared over the top of his menu.
He couldn’t be sure it was her. The stylish wide hat shaded her face, and her sunglasses were huge. At this hour and in the shadows of tall buildings, there was really no need for that much protection from the sun. And she had shown up at the right place at precisely the right time. He decided to give it a test.
“Vanessa!” he called out.
It was almost imperceptible, but Girelli definitely saw her flinch. He laid his menu aside and kept watching.
Finally she glanced in his direction. Girelli tightened his stare, and although her eyes were hidden behind the sunglasses, he sensed her fear. Girelli knew all the signs—the tightening of the expression, a leg gone restless, the posture suddenly rigid.
Without warning, she bolted from her chair and ran for the exit.
Girelli launched himself after her, pushing aside a waiter, two women at the bar, and everyone else in his way.
On impulse, I ran.
“Hey, give me back my camera!” the college girl shouted.
I was already at full speed, thinking only of getting to the bar’s exit at the top of the stairs on the other side of the plaza.
“Stop that guy!”
I could have tossed the stupid camera back at her, but I kept running, passing one flagpole after another, watching the commotion in the Rink Bar below as that man—whoever he was—bowled over tables, chairs, and people alike in pursuit of…
The thought that it might be Ivy had me flying on pure adrenaline. There was no denying that I had seen a woman take a seat at our table at four o’clock, watched her jump up and run, and saw another man chase after her.
My God, could it be?
She was halfway up the stairs, the man a few steps behind her, and I was approaching the top of the stairway from the opposite direction when someone screamed:
“A bomb! That man in the trench coat has a bomb!”
It was bedlam throughout the plaza.
Hundreds of tourists screamed and scattered, and the stairway was suddenly jammed with the surge of utter panic. I lost sight of the woman and the man in the ensuing stampede, and suddenly I was broadsided by what felt like a charging rhinoceros. My chest hit the sidewalk, and the air raced from my lungs. The moment was a blur, until I realized that I was pinned beneath two of New York’s finest.
James Grippando Page 16