One of Our Own

by Jane Haddam

  More silence. Tommy watched as Javier put his head down on the arm of the couch next to him and closed his eyes. Now it was only Pickles who was awake.

  “What’s he like,” Russ asked, “this kid Gregor and Bennis have taken in?”

  “They haven’t ‘taken him in,’ like the laundry,” Tommy said. “They’re being foster parents, however you put that. And what do you want to know for? You’re never going to meet him. He isn’t bothering you.”

  “I wish I could see what he looks like.”

  “He looks like a kid. He’s seven. He’s kind of short. He likes Dr. Seuss. He likes Pickles. He likes Charlie. He likes me. He likes Big Macs. Don’t get started. He’s not the apocalypse, come to murder us all in our beds.”

  “I didn’t say he was, Tommy. I really didn’t.”

  “You were going to. But you know what? He’s not like that. I’m not like that. Nobody is like that. I’ve got this teacher who says we shouldn’t call people like you crazy, but I think you’re crazy. Bald frigging nuts.”

  “Does your mother know you use words like that?”

  “I told you. I’m fourteen. She can probably guess. And I wish she would decorate the house. I wish she’d put one of your neon signs right up there and let everybody know where we are. You know why? Because they wouldn’t be the apocalypse either. They wouldn’t storm the house and take us all hostage. They’d probably bring casseroles.”

  “You’re too young for this,” Russ said. “I understand you’re too young to understand.”

  “I understand a hell of a lot more than you do,” Tommy said. “And yes, I said ‘hell,’ and no, I don’t care. I’m going to hang up now. They’ve fallen asleep in there. They need a blanket.”

  “I need to talk to Gregor,” Russ said. “I need to talk to him face-to-face. It’s important. It’s not information I can get to him through a third party. I have told Father Tibor about this. I thought I’d leave your mother a message and she could tell Gregor the same thing—”

  “You know what thinking the way you do got you? You killed two people. You killed two people, Russ, and you nearly killed Mr. Demarkian, which is like eviscerating a teddy bear. And then what? You blew up Mom’s life. You blew up my life. I don’t see a civil war in the streets, Russ, but I sure as shit see what you did to us. And don’t tell me not to say—”

  “Tommy, for God’s sake.”

  “I’m going to hang up, Russ. And to hell with you.”

  Hanging up was the one really good thing about a landline. There was a solid, definitive bang when the handset went back into the receiver.

  Tommy got the books from where he’d dropped them on the couch. The two of them really did need blankets. Pickles would probably like one. He went on into the family room and put the books on the table there.

  He felt better than he had in nearly two years. Lighter. Less tense. Maybe not tense at all. He thought he could work on his physics problems without being too distracted.

  He got a couple of throw blankets from the chair across the room and put them over Javier and Charlie.

  Next year, he was going to go out to Hardscrabble Road and buy a six-foot pine tree for Christmas—and if his mother wouldn’t decorate it, he would decorate it himself.

  2

  Clare McAfee was not a sentimentalist. She did not believe in the American dream, or the melting pot, or the happy fantasy of all people living together in peace and harmony. There was a Lithuanian neighborhood in Philadelphia. She had visited it once and hated it. There was another Lithuanian neighborhood in the suburbs, where a distant cousin lived with a Polish husband and a thoroughly execrable child. She had gone out there one day for a barbecue and hated the place even more. She did not want people to have warm, fuzzy feelings about her. She didn’t want cards on Christmas or baskets of eggs on Easter. She wanted people to make sense.

  Cary Alder wasn’t the first person Clare had engaged with in extracurricular activities. He wasn’t even the only person she was engaged with now. The extracurricular activities made perfect and uncomplicated sense. Some people had money and some people didn’t. Most of the people who had money were idiots. Your problem was to get their money away from them without turning into an idiot yourself.

  Clare didn’t think Cary Alder was an idiot, but she was beginning to think he was something worse. Crazy, maybe. Or involved in something secret and irrevocable, like gambling. She had checked him out as carefully as it was possible to check anybody out. She had found nothing. She had asked people at the bank. She had asked other people, people she had only gained access to by stealth and persistence. The closest she had come to finding a secret life was the persistent rumor that he ran “a coyote operation,” which apparently meant that he did things to make sure he had people here illegally to work on his properties. Clare had come to the United States legally and on her own, so she wasn’t sure how this worked. The best she could figure it out, people who wanted to come here paid you a lot of money. You made arrangements for travel and transportation and all the rest of it until they landed on US soil and took a job. You charged them much more than it cost to get them here. Then you paid them much less than you would have to pay anybody else. There was nothing in any of this that would cause anybody to hemorrhage money like water.

  There were things Clare knew she couldn’t do, so she didn’t even think about doing them. She couldn’t ask Cary Alder himself. She had tried. He wasn’t going to tell her anything. She couldn’t go down to the neighborhoods where Alder had his bread-and-butter properties. Like many Lithuanians, she was pale-skinned and fair. She’d stick out like a sore thumb in four solid blocks of people from Central America. And what could they tell her, anyway? What did they know besides whether they were being evicted this week or whether they could get someone in to fix the furnace?

  Cary Alder kept a couple of accounts at the bank, as did most people who had their loans there. The bank encouraged it. Clare had checked into this and found that there was about half a million dollars sitting there. It had been sitting there, untouched, for over a year. Obviously, that was not a main account. She had checked through Alder’s loan documents and come up with accounts at four other banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Barclays. Those had been checked into at the time the loan was made. That was years ago. To check into them again would be to send up red flags she wasn’t interested in launching just yet.

  She had only one chance. She had to go to the main offices of Alder Properties and hope that Cary Alder was not there himself. This was an insane idea, but it might work out. She had seen Cary Alder at lunch. He had looked positively immobile.

  She even knew who it was she wanted to see. Assuming the woman would talk to her. Assuming the woman knew anything.

  Here was another red flag she didn’t want to send up: being out of the office too often or too long on a workday. She would have to invent a tooth abscess.

  She got to the offices of Alder Properties and looked around. There was nothing to see. She went into the building and then up in the elevator. There were ordinary people doing ordinary things. Clare couldn’t see a police presence, or a security team. Most places these days were armed and ready for mass shooters. Alder Properties didn’t seem to be.

  Clare had been to this building once, and to this office once. She went through the frosted-glass doors to the reception area and stopped at the desk of a middle-aged woman working at a computer. Past this desk there were several others, and past those there were more frosted-glass doors. The one at the very back belonged to Cary Alder. It was open and the lights inside it were off.

  “I would like to speak to Ms. Agerwal,” Clare said. “Do you think you could tell her it’s Ms. McAfee calling?”

  “Of course.”

  The woman got up and scurried away. Clare wasn’t sure Meera Agerwal would remember who she was. They had met exactly once and talked on the phone twice. In all those cases, the subject matter had been casual and peripheral.

  M
eera Agerwal came out of the office closest to Cary Alder’s own. Her heavy black hair had been braided down her back and twisted into a bun at the nape of her neck. The skirt of her crisp blue suit went significantly down below her knees. The middle-aged white woman was scurrying back to her desk at the front of the room.

  “Yes?” Meera Agerwal said.

  Clare didn’t waste any time. She could see it in the woman’s face. Clare thanked the woman now back at her desk and marched to the rear, moving as swiftly as if she were late to catch a bus. She went through the door of Meera Agerwal’s office without stopping and closed it as soon as Meera herself stepped over the threshold.

  “You know who I am,” she said. “I’m sure you know who I am.”

  “You’re from one of the banks,” Meera said. “Is there something wrong at the banks? Are you looking for a property for yourself? I am almost certainly not the person you should be talking to in any case.”

  Clare dropped into a chair. “You’re the only person I can talk to. I came up here on a hunch, but I was absolutely right. I can see it in your face. You’re just as scared to death as I am.”

  Meera Agerwal’s body stiffened. Clare did all she could to not make a face. She didn’t like Indian women. She never had. They were sly, and they were almost always dishonest. They were worse when they were tarted up in Western clothes like this.

  “He has to have somebody moving the money around for him,” Clare said. “He isn’t going to give that to somebody in accounting unless he’s got an accomplice, and I don’t believe he has. That means he has to give it to somebody who is used to dealing with the accounts but won’t know what it is she’s doing when he starts pulling fast ones—”

  “I can assure you I am fully competent at my job,” Meera said stiffly. Clare could practically feel the starch rising up out of her bones.

  Meera sat down behind her desk. Clare thought a certain kind of man would find her beautiful, but that she wouldn’t care.

  “This week,” Clare said carefully, “Cary Alder failed to make one of his loan payments. Not on one of his regular loans, you understand. On one of the loans we made— Well, I’m not going to go into all that. Let’s just say he’s got half a dozen loans with us that are more than the bank would have stood for, but they’re disguised as loans to other people, and all of that works fine as long as nobody gets off schedule. But he got off schedule. And that set off alarm bells all over the bank. It took the devil’s own time for me to fix it.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m sure you do,” Clare said. “What’s more, now that I’m looking at you, I think you’ve always known. If you haven’t known what was specifically going on with the loans, you’ve known something was and you’ve known you were moving around money to facilitate it. Because you’re the one. You’ve got to have access to his payout accounts if you’re going to do your job. You have to know what money goes in there and what money comes out. Accounting will get hold of it all eventually, but on a day-to-day basis, it’s got to be you. And that means you have the information I have to have.”

  The stiffness in Meera Agerwal’s bones was now so complete, she actually seemed to be taller. “I am not the person you want to talk to about accounts,” she said, staring straight over Clare’s head to the opposite wall. “We have an accounting office that deals with all aspects of our financial arrangements, including loans and cash flow. You should make an appointment—”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Clare said. “Don’t you realize we could both end up in the penitentiary if this blows up in our faces? It may be too late to do anything about it as it is. I need information and I need it fast. And you need to cover your ass. Because if I could figure out who was involved, it’s going to take the FBI about ten seconds to do the same.”

  3

  In the second-floor principal’s office at St. Catherine’s School, there was a floor-to-ceiling bookcase, a yard and a half wide, filled with St. Catherine’s School yearbooks. The ceilings on that floor were fourteen feet high. At some point, somebody must have come in with a ladder to fill the highest shelves. The bookcase itself had been bolted into the wall in three places. That was to prevent a repetition of the time in 1973 when it fell over onto the principal’s desk during a police raid that was tearing up the street. On the very top shelf, the “yearbooks” were not exactly books. They were thick pamphlets recording the life of St. Catherine’s when the school was first founded in 1891. There hadn’t been many students then. The nuns had been dressed in their original, traditional habit, complete with a white linen pie frill framing the face.

  “Bet that thing wilted like dead dandelions every time it got wet,” Sister Margaret Mary said to herself every time she saw a picture of a nun in that old habit. By the time she’d joined the order, they were wearing this modified thing, where the veil was held back away from the face by a stiff headdress that needed no attention at all.

  Sister Margaret Mary had spent over an hour looking for the yearbooks that contained pictures of Marta Warkowski, and she had found them. Here was Marta in 1952, one of eight children in the brand-new St. Catherine’s kindergarten. Here was Marta in 1954, in her white first communion dress and veil. Here was Marta in 1959, getting ready to graduate from eighth grade. The nuns were still wearing their pie frills.

  Sister Margaret Mary had no idea what she had expected to find in these old yearbooks. She could see the changes in the neighborhood through the changes in the children in the school. In Marta’s day, the children had been not only white, but white and fair. Now, of course, the only blondes you ever saw around St. Catherine’s were people’s mothers with dye jobs. From what Sister Margaret Mary could tell from YouTube, there were plenty of real blond women in Central and South America. They just didn’t seem to move north to Philadelphia. The child Marta Warkowski was plain and glum and very solemn. Her clothes looked as if they had been handed down or bought used. They probably had been.

  None of this told Sister Margaret Mary why Marta Warkowski had ended up in a garbage bag, or what they should do about her if she ever got out of the hospital and came back to the parish.

  There was the sound of footsteps clattering on the stairs. Sister Margaret Mary put the yearbook she was holding down on her desk and looked up to see Sister Peter rushing in, flushed.

  “Sister,” Sister Peter said. “Father Alvarez is downstairs. We’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

  “I’ve been wasting my time,” Sister Margaret Mary said. “What’s the problem?”

  “ICE just hit St. Rose’s. They’ve got a daycare over there. ICE was waiting when the parents showed up.”

  “For the children?”

  “Father Alvarez can explain,” Sister Peter said.

  Then she turned around and disappeared out the door. Sister Margaret Mary put her head in her hands and counted to ten. Then she moved herself out into the hall and down the stairs.

  Father Alvarez was standing in the school’s front foyer, his coat open, his collar looking as if it were too tight for his throat. Sister Margaret Mary called out to him. He looked up to watch her descend.

  “Are they coming here?” Sister Margaret Mary asked. “We don’t have anyone here. We don’t have a daycare. We’re on break.”

  “They may be coming to the church,” Father Alvarez said. “That’s where I put him.”

  “Him?”

  “A man named Tomas Domingues. You may have met him. He works as a janitor over at the Glendower Arms. He helps out with the Cub Scouts.”

  “I know Tomas,” Sister Margaret Mary said. Then it struck her. “Tomas is undocumented? He’s been here forever. He’s been here longer than I have.”

  “Thirty-two years,” Father Alvarez said.

  “For God’s sake,” Sister Margaret Mary said.

  Sister Peter cleared her throat.

  “It’s not just him,” Father Alvarez said. “He’s got a wife, Maria Cristina. She
’s American born. So are all four of his children.”

  “But shouldn’t that help?” Sister Margaret Mary asked. “Isn’t there something about sponsorship? Couldn’t they sponsor him?”

  “Second or third year he was here, he had a DUI,” Father Alvarez said. “He totaled a car he didn’t own and put a teenager in the hospital with a broken leg.”

  “And they’re just arresting him for that now?”

  “They’re not arresting him for that at all,” Father Alvarez said. “He was arrested at the time. He went to court. He pled guilty. He got probation. But he got probation on a felony.”

  “Oh, Lord,” Sister Margaret Mary said.

  “We got him out a back door at St. Rose’s,” Father Alvarez said. “I thought we’d try something I’ve seen on the news. I don’t think we can do it without your help. All of your help. The whole convent and maybe some of the other parents.”

  “What?”

  “They did it at this church in Connecticut,” Father Alvarez said. “They declared the church to be a sanctuary, and then the man lived there. I think for months. It worked for at least that long. I don’t know why. I’m sure there isn’t any law in the United States that allows churches to serve as sanctuary spaces for people trying to avoid law enforcement, but I do know the man managed to stay in the church for a long time, and ICE didn’t raid the place. At one point, I think they gave him amnesty for a week so he could spend Christmas at home with his family. I don’t know if they would do that here.”

  “Do they know he’s here?” Sister Margaret Mary asked. “I mean, do they know you’ve brought him to this parish?”

  “They didn’t when we left,” Father Alvarez said. “Now I’ve got him over in the church basement, in one of the Sunday school classrooms. And I tried calling around. I think this would work better with a suburban church, where most of the families weren’t Spanish. I even asked the Carmelites. I don’t know if a cloistered convent would count as a sanctuary, but all I could think of was that this is all about public perception. ICE wouldn’t want video of the news of them storming into a consecrated monastery no man has set foot in for fifty years.”