Finlay snorted and tossed a cloth napkin at his brother. “Think you’re up to uncling, smartass?”
“Of course, jerkwad.”
Nadia squeezed his hand under the table.
Lilly proposed a toast with their cups of coffee and tea, and then everyone came around to hug and congratulate them.
Nadia waited till all the immediate family had given their hugs, and then she smiled at Jin across the table. “Congratulations.”
Jin grinned back at her.
And in that moment, watching the family draw around this accomplished adult woman, Nadia felt comfortable in her choice. She poured herself a glass of wine, lifted it in Jin’s direction, and silently mouthed, “Thank you.”
Later, after Finlay and Jin left, Nadia started slipping her own gear on to leave.
“Just where do you think you’re going?” Eleanor demanded.
“Oh,” Nadia replied, startled, “I just figured it’s getting late. I’d better head out too.”
“I won’t hear of it.” Eleanor gestured out the window at the drizzling. “It’s late, the streets are wet, and you’ve been drinking wine.”
“Not that much,” Nadia protested.
Eleanor folded her arms and gave her that reproachful look that all mothers know how to give.
“I didn’t bring any pajamas,” she protested weakly.
“I have some silk pajamas you can borrow, and they’re probably a little long on you, but I’m sure they’ll do.”
Nadia surrendered, gladly, in truth, and trudged off to get changed. They really were nicer pajamas than any she’d ever owned. The minute she changed into them, she realized how very sleepy she actually was and how wise it was that Eleanor had insisted she stay. She dragged herself into Quin’s room and collapsed into the bed, with Quin following shortly thereafter.
Ainsley flipped on the local news. Khady slipped off to the kitchen to help Eleanor clean up. Lily and Miri sat together on the couch watching while Ainsley sat across from them, cleaning and polishing her boots. Miri was dozing within minutes, as she generally did in front of the news. The anchors talked about the protestors outside the clinics.
“Such bullshit,” Ainsley grumbled under her breath. Lily noticed but didn’t comment.
Then they flipped to a story about a verdict in favor of a fraternity at Queens College; they had been accused of raping three girls but had walked due to contaminated evidence and questions about the victims’ credibility because two of them had histories of mental illness for which they were medicated.
Ainsley shook her head, fuming. “Such bullshit.”
“There’s nothing you can do,” Lily said carefully. “They were acquitted.”
Ainsley’s face darkened. “The justice system doesn’t always work, Lil.”
“I didn’t say it did. I just said if they’re acquitted, there’s nothing you can do.”
Ainsley became restless in her seat. “But… Lil… I mean, don’t you wish there was a… Look, what if those guys you busted in Queens, the traffickers, like… What if after all that work you put in, what if they walked? Because someone screwed up, or because someone bought off a judge? Wouldn’t you…”
Lily looked at her sister curiously. “Wouldn’t I what?”
Ainsley huffed. “Wouldn’t you want them to get justice some other way?”
Lily thought of the faces of those young kids that they pulled out of the house in Queens. She still felt sick to her stomach, even now. It was hard to answer. “I… Ainsley, I don’t know. I mean, you know…emotionally, yes. If someone beat them to a bloody pulp, I probably wouldn’t shed a tear about it. But…sometimes the right thing and the just thing aren’t always the same.”
Ainsley looked uncomfortable and angry.
Lily looked at her, point blank. “Ainsley, I know you got picked up in Brooklyn.”
Something in Ainsley’s face immediately closed off. “Yeah, but it was a mistake. They let us out.”
“Who got you out?”
Ainsley put down her boot and drew her legs up underneath her. “You know, I really don’t think I want to talk about it.”
Lily was worried. “Ainsley…I’m not asking as a cop. I’m just asking as your sister. I want to know that you’re okay.”
“My sister is a cop. Didn’t you get the memo?”
Lily looked at her for a long minute before answering. “I’m just looking out for you, Ainsley.” She gently nudged Miri, who sat up, slightly startled and seeming to have forgotten for a moment where she was. “Baby, we gotta get going,” Lily murmured gently to her.
She got up and briskly went into the kitchen, said goodbye to her mother and Khady, and then, as she and Miri headed out the front door, she looked Ainsley one last time. “Just…if you find yourself in a bad situation, or if there’s something you decide you need to tell me, I’m here for you.”
Ainsley shrugged. “Yeah, okay. Thanks.”
Feeling wrung out, Lily took Miri’s hand and walked out into the drizzly night.
24
Dirty Laundry
Lily was at a bit of a dead end in both of her investigations.
She had nothing much on Connolly. He was ex-military. His aunt was Brooklyn Borough Commander. He was SIU for a while, became inspector at Midtown South, and was particularly known for shuttering all the escort services and cathouses in the precinct. His father lost a bunch of money in the dotcom bust. He was Manhattan borough commander for a year while still running Midtown South due to some weird departmental thing. Then the mayor tapped him for the job he had now. He had an impeccable record, as far as she could see.
Weeding through the files on the Manhattan biker cases wasn’t yielding much, either. Whoever was orchestrating these things, they were exceedingly careful and knew something about how to avoid being ID’d. Never took off their helmets, taped up their plates before heading into camera range, rode bikes of exceedingly common make and model with no detailing whatsoever.
Of course, there was that very distinctive vintage Indian she saw in the picture of that one Brooklyn case, but there wasn’t any real thread connecting it to the other cases other than a similar time frame. She had Ray get hold of better images. It looked exactly like her father’s.
“Yes, Ainsley’s been riding your dad’s old Indian,” her mother had confirmed when she called. When Lily asked if she’d been in any trouble with the cops lately, Eleanor had sounded surprised. “Yes, she was picked up in Brooklyn. You mean you weren’t the one that bailed her out?” But then she’d quickly changed the subject and roped her into coming to dinner.
Not even sure what she was investigating anymore, Lily called the precinct and asked to speak to the officer who had filed the report. A young cop named Waters got on the phone, dripping attitude. “Yeah?”
“I’m just wondering, the report says that there were four arrests, but I don’t see any names, mug shots, nothing like that,” she pressed. “Just wondering what that’s about?”
Waters spent a moment eating something crunchy and loud into the phone before he answered: “Yeah. It was apparently a mistake.”
“What do you mean ‘apparently?’”
“We arrested four girls who were getting on their bikes who were unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“But shouldn’t that make them witnesses?” she asked.
Waters spent another moment chewing loudly. “Look, what difference does it make? The shop owner wasn’t looking to press charges anyway.”
Lily frowned. Curiouser and curiouser. “So…I’m sorry, Officer Waters, help me out here. You guys picked up four girls on bikes at the scene, and then decided that they were not suspects after all?”
“Yeah, that’s right. A Jamaican girl, a Puerto Rican girl, a white girl, and…this was the best—there was this Muslim girl. Like, we took the helmet off and she had the thing on her head.” He chuckled.
“‘Thing?’”
“Yeah, y’know. The scarf thing the M
uslim chicks wear. She had it on under her helmet. Never saw nothing like that before! Anyways, some lady came and picked them up, and the chief said don’t bother booking them.”
“You never booked them?”
“No. We were busy that night. They were in holding, but we didn’t get around to booking them.” There was a pause while she heard him slurping something through a straw. “Anyway, why’s this so interesting to Midtown South?”
Lily sighed. “It probably isn’t. I’m just grasping at straws. Thanks, Waters.”
A Jamaican girl, a white girl, a Puerto Rican girl, and a Muslim girl in a hijab on a bike. Lily was positive that she’d been with three of the four of those girls at dinner on Saturday. She was less positive that it had anything to do with her other investigations. But her gut was nagging her.
She sighed, and then reached into her pocket and fished out that little scrap that Maggie Burnett had slipped into her purse at the benefit, with the cell number on it.
She slipped off to the ladies’ room, and after checking that all the stalls were empty, she dialed.
It rang a couple of times while she kept nervously looking at the door, and then the very recognizable voice answered. “I trust you know how to be discreet,” was how the young D.A. answered the phone.
Lily paused. “Yes. Listen, I just want to know something. Why did you want me moved here?”
“I think you know why. I would have assumed you’d be working on it by now.”
“I am. But…look, I just want to know why this is important to you. It’s not just about justice for me, is it?”
“What makes you say that?”
Lily hesitated. “Because I don’t really buy that you’re that altruistic,” she said after a moment.
Maggie Burnett paused, and Lily could picture her fixing her with that brilliant smile, the one that said she was seven chess moves ahead. “I think that if you find the answer you’re looking for, it will open the door to something much bigger. A lot of people have suffered, and I’m hoping this leads to justice for them, too.”
Lily didn’t understand. “Look, I’m just…I’m at a dead end. I think this goes very high up, but I… It would help if I knew what I was looking for.”
A pause that hung on for just a beat too long. “Start with your brother.”
“What?”
“Ask him why he had his editors back off on the Lyonsbank stories.”
“Okay.” Silence.
“You know, when this is all over, I really would like to take you for dinner. I have a table at Le Cirque.”
“Thanks, but I’m spoken for.”
“Ah, well. A girl can’t be blamed for trying. Best of luck in your searches.”
Lily hung up, all thumbs fumbling to get the call to disconnect. The door swung open, and she nearly jumped out of her shoes.
Ray walked in. “Hey, Sparr. You look like you saw a ghost or something. You okay?”
Lily sighed. “Yeah, Ray, sorry. It’s just…personal stuff.”
Ray looked concerned. “Anything I can help with?”
“No, don’t worry about it.” She sighed heavily and looked at Ray. She was letting herself get carried away on this investigation and had little to show for her efforts on the biker case. She had to at least look busy. “Have we looked at a breakdown of the time frames on these biker things? Like how much time went by between when the victims walked on whatever they got charged with and when they were attacked?”
Ray thought for a minute. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Let’s start doing that. We can break it in half if you want. I can take the most recent half and you can take the older ones.”
“Okay. What do you think that’s going to tell us?”
Lily went to the sink and ran the cold water, splashing some on her face. “Well, I’m hoping it’ll give us some sense of a pattern as to how they choose their targets and maybe help us predict where they might hit next.”
Ray looked impressed. “Okay, sure. I’ll get started.”
She could tell from Finlay’s tone that this was not a call he was expecting nor a conversation he wanted to have.
“You sound like Mom,” he complained.
“Finlay, I’m not saying whether you should or shouldn’t have backed off on them. I’m just asking why.”
After an uncomfortable pause, he admitted, “I felt that…it wasn’t a fight we wanted.”
“We, meaning SparrMedia?”
He sighed. “We, meaning our family, Lil.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Lil, most of our family’s trusts are held by Lyonsbank. It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to drag SparrMedia through a lengthy legal battle that was likely to hurt our stock value. It was that I didn’t want to endanger our family’s future. I mean, you and I will be fine no matter what, but Quin and Ainsley? I don’t know whether they’re going to be able to live adult lives without the support of the family. And that’s fine, that’s okay. It’s not a judgment. But…it felt too risky to get into a protracted fist fight with people who could hurt our family’s finances that way.”
Lily sighed. “Dad would have done the court battle, probably.”
“Yeah, he would have. There were already rumblings that it was going to happen, even before he died.”
“How illegal would it have been for Lyonsbank to have screwed with our money?”
“It depends, Lil. It depends how they handle it, what they do with it. The wrong handling, and you’re losing all your family’s money in the dotcom crash. The right handling, and you’re putting it all back together and then some in the mortgage boom. Insider trading is illegal, of course, and negligence is something you can litigate, but…there are so many ways to screw things up that it’s pretty hard to prove wrongdoing. I still can’t believe Martha Stewart ever went to jail.”
Lily thought a moment. That certainly was a motive: if her father had refused to back off of the stories, it wasn’t such a stretch to think that someone at Lyonsbank wanted him dead, and that whoever it was might have the influence to get Connolly to cover it up.
“Why are you asking me about this?”
“I can’t tell you right now. I promise I will soon.”
Finlay sighed. “Okay. Look…you’ll tell me if you think there’s a problem, right?”
“Of course,” she promised.
Lily read the articles, at least some of them. There were a lot of questions surrounding how Lyonsbank had managed to come out of the mortgage crisis so unscathed. There had been evidence suggesting they’d held some of these junk mortgage bundles until as recently as six months prior to the crash. Some said it was simply prescience that they’d unloaded them. Some said Frederick Schulze had practically invented the practice of short-selling during his time at Goldman Sachs.
Most interesting were the questions about exactly whose money they were handling (or laundering, depending on how you looked at it). The regulators who were investigating the bank were also under scrutiny in these articles. Many of them had been documented as having been lavishly entertained at Frederick Schulze’s estates on Cape Cod or in Westchester.
She called the writer at Ticker who had been the most persistent in his pecking away at the financial behemoth: Gary Crick. “Gary, it’s Lily Sparr.”
“Lily Sparr?” The surprise was evident in his voice. They didn’t know each other, but he knew who she was. “What…uh, what can I do for you?”
“I wanted to ask you about the Lyonsbank articles.”
He chuckled. “Aren’t you a cop now?”
“You heard right.”
“Yeah…unfortunately, as part of the deal your brother made, I’m not supposed to talk about them.”
Lily frowned. “Okay, but…maybe you can answer some questions in the abstract? For those of us not deeply entrenched in the world of finance?”
“Well, I can try.”
“So…I’m wondering something. Forget about the collective issues
like bundled mortgages and short-selling, I know you can’t talk about that. Is it possible for a bank to manipulate the finances of a particular individual or trust without it coming up on the radar?”
Gary paused. “Well, sure. I mean, the BSA only has provisions for tracking certain types of transactions over $10,000. Money laundering is spectacularly easy, and the bigger the institution, the harder it is to track it. The financial instruments like the ones that we think brought about the crash, for example…?”
“Sorry, BSA?” Lily interrupted.
“Banking Secrecy Act. Basically, financial institutions are supposed to keep records of cash purchases of negotiable instruments and file reports of cash purchases of these negotiable instruments if they add up to more than ten grand per day. They’re also supposed to report suspicious activity that might signify money laundering, tax evasion, or other criminal activities.”
“Ten grand a day? That seems like a lot.”
Gary laughed. “Yeah, doesn’t it?”
“So, am I understanding you correctly? If someone was laundering money or arranging payoffs to someone, as long as they were keeping the amount under ten grand a day, the bank wouldn’t even necessarily have to be complicit in the whole thing?”
“Not necessarily. But it would help. Remember, they still have to keep records of the cash purchases, even the ones under ten grand. It’s just that if they’re over ten grand, they’re supposed to file reports.”
“But…if they don’t?”
Gary cleared his throat. “Well, again. It’s hard to prove, and you’d have to know what you were looking for. If you had someone on the inside at the bank willing to play fast and loose with the records…I mean, in the eighties, regulators caught some mob guys working with people inside one of the banks, but it’s rare. They’d have to be pretty sloppy.” He sounded uncomfortable. “This isn’t about the crash articles, is it, Detective?”
“Do you think it goes on now?” she pressed, ignoring his question.
“Probably. There’s still mob in the city, and there’s still banks, so…” His distress was becoming audible. “Look, I’m sorry, Detective. I—I want to help you, I really do, but I’m really not supposed to be talking to the cops.”
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