City of Dreams (63 page)

But Sally stayed home. Erica Callow went instead and walked into the restaurant ten minutes late.

Joey glanced up from his Diet Coke, then he looked again when the blonde in the shiny red shoes came over and sat. “Excuse me, miss, but—”

“Sally sent me.”

And Joey Berra, former FBI agent, who had lived through hell in the sky and descended into hell on the ground and was now emerging, sat back as if she’d smacked him and said, “Jennifer?”

She grinned like a movie star. “I’m Erica. Order me a glass of a nice Tuscan red.”

It took Joey about ten minutes to get over his shock, while Erica explained that without her, Sally would go crazy. “Sally does the dirty work. I do the dress up.”

Joey looked her over. “You dress up nice.”

She waited until after they had enjoyed the first course of pasta carbonara, then she said, “I think I know where the bonds are.”

Joey was lifting his glass to his lips. It stopped in midair.

Then she told him about her trips to the New-York Historical Society. Her search for Woodward had led to Abigail Woodward, mistress of the manor, wife of a loyalist who hanged himself. That led to the mahogany box Mrs. Woodward had donated to the Society.

Then Erica described its contents—the finial, some old clippings, a letter to a Gil Walker. She slipped out a notebook. “And get this, ‘Our good deeds will come back to us many times over in the blessings of freedom, stored safe and sound in a mahogany box. I await your return to show you our investment in the future. Love, L. R.’”

He grinned. “You look beautiful.”

She leaned across the table. “If Sally was here, she’d smack you in the chops.”

“If Sally was here, I wouldn’t want to kiss her.”

She liked hearing that, but not yet. “This is it, Joey. L. R. Loretta Rogers! The bonds are in the box. They have to be.”

“Did you see them?”

“No. I think it has a false bottom.
And
it’s mahogany. We have to get it and open it.”

He looked at her a long time and said, “Then we have to steal it.”

She gave him her best dental school grin. “Right answer.”

That night, Erica Callow stood in front of Joey Berra in the semidarkness of his little apartment in the East Village, and as Sinatra sang “Nice and Easy Does It,” she raised her skirt, revealing long legs, smooth nylons, garters, and . . . Joey gasped.

T
HEY SPENT TWO
months planning the theft of the box. Erica returned several times to the Historical Society, pretending she was a scholar writing about Fraunces Tavern. Meanwhile, Joey scoped out the security measures. Then he made a plan. And when the moment came, he made the phone call that distracted the librarian. It could not have gone more smoothly.

They brought the box back to his apartment. It took them fifteen minutes before they figured out that a sliding piece of molding on the outside actually released the false bottom.

“Here goes,” said Joey.

They slid the bottom out. And—nothing. Empty.

“Shit,” said Joey. “Back to the drawing board.”

“At least we have a nice finial.” Erica held up the little brass crown.

S
PRING CAME, AND
the world, or at least that part of it that cared, waited for the Supreme Court decision. Historical institutions filed amicus briefs. Scripophilists started making markets in the bonds again. Some bought on the bet that the court would uphold the Avid argument, some bet the other way and sold.

And Sally, who usually met Joey at Katz’s to discuss strategy, told him that they had hit the wall. Erica, who usually appeared only when things were going well, never showed her face, her front teeth, or her blond wig. So there was no romance, because Erica handled that, too. Sally would never even go into Joey’s apartment. Still, thought Sally, Joey treated her with a gentleness and respect that she hadn’t known even when she was Jennifer. So she never stopped trusting him.

Joey preferred seeing Erica, because when she appeared, he knew that romance might follow. And Erica had tracked the Timothy Riley story to a pile of notebooks in the New York Society Library. But when they could make no sense of what they found, there was less reason for Erica.

By late April, Austin Arsenault began appearing more often on television and on MarketSpin.com, which gave Sally an idea.

She gambled on revealing herself to someone she had known in her previous life. So she pushed her cart uptown to Columbus Circle, chained it to a lamppost, and carried little Georgie into the Time Warner Center, where she waited until Kathy Flynn stepped off the elevator.

Kathy gave her the right-through-you look and kept walking.

So Sally hefted the shopping bag holding Georgie and trundled after her and got behind her on the escalator.

“I got a scoop for ya!” Sally yelled. “I got a big scoop.”

Kathy Flynn made a cell phone call and started talking.

When they got to the bottom, Sally came right up behind her and said, “Austin Arsenault is a fraud. What he says he’s doin’ for America he’s doin’ for no one but himself. Talk to him. Talk to his accountant.”

Kathy looked at Sally as if she recognized something. The voice? The face? Sally and her little dog turned and disappeared into the crowd.

A
FEW NIGHTS
later, Sally and Joey stopped Carl Evers on his way home.

He lived on a quiet side street in the East Sixties. Trees, brownstones, wealth. Not bad for an accountant. He moved with a long-legged stride that seemed more frightened than confident, as if he were afraid that someone was following him.

When Sally saw him, she started along the sidewalk with her shopping cart.

Carl Evers gave her the sidelong glance, and she rammed the cart right into him.

“Watch it, you old bag.”

Joey came up behind him. “Don’t be callin’ her an old bag, Evers.”

“And you!” Evers’s eyes widened. “Whoever you are, it’s time I called the cops on you. This is harassment.”

Sally said, “We hear that Kathy Flynn is investigatin’ you and your company. Gettin’ ready to do a big piece.”

Evers looked from one face to the other. “Where did you hear that?”

“And even worse,” said Joey, “there’s a member of the Paul Revere Foundation called Antonov, whose father was known as the Avenger.”

Evers’s eyes widened even more. “What does that have to do with me?”

“We’re thinking of telling him that we know a few things about the guy who’s been certifying that he audits Arsenault’s financial statements.”

Evers started walking. “You know nothing. You’re two street bums. Beat it.”

“Come on, Carl,” said Sally Lawrence.

He stopped at the sound of the voice. “Do I know you?”

“No,” said Joey. “But we know Arsenault was paying you twenty Gs a month. More than Madoff paid his know-nothing accountant. And the SEC might be slow, and understaffed, and they got burned when they missed Madoff. But if someone drops a dime on Avid, they’ll be all over you like fleas on a rat. And the FBI comes right behind them.”

Evers started up the steps to his brownstone.

“But the FBI would be better than Antonov’s boys,” said Sally.

Evers hesitated at the door.

“Cookin’ the books, aren’t you?” said Joey. “And Arsenault is bettin’ on those bonds to cover some kind of huge shortfall. If he finds them and wins his case, he makes one-point-four bil. Is that enough to cover his losses?”

Evers walked down the stairs and over to Sally. “I
know
you.”

And Sally Lawrence made a decision. She had trusted this man once. Maybe she should trust him now. So she said, “Yes, you do. And a friend of mine would like to thank you for seeing that her estate was distributed properly.”

“A friend?” Evers knitted his brow.

“What’s Arsenault doing, Evers?” said Joey. “Why does he want the bonds?”

“He’s trying to save America. That’s what he told me.”

“And two and two equals five,” said Joey.

Evers looked from one face to the other. “What do you want from me?” ’

“I want you to show up once, Carl,” said Sally. “Where we ask you to, and tell somebody the truth about Arsenault. Somebody you know.”

“Why should I do that?”

“If I know you,” said Sally, “I think it’s what you want to do, because Jennifer Wilson once told me you were an honest man.”

“Jennifer Wilson?”

And they stood for a moment in silence, in the shadows beneath the trees on a dark East Side street. Then Sally told him everything.

And it was as if he were thankful for the chance to tell someone the truth. They had been right. He had been helping Arsenault to hide his losses for years. “It didn’t start as a Ponzi scheme. He’s not a Madoff, but he’s been in trouble since 2001, and in desperation since 2008. Without the bonds, he goes to jail. Me, too.”

“He’ll go to jail anyway,” said Joey. “You, too. They’ll get you for half a dozen counts like securities fraud, investment adviser fraud, obstructing tax law administration. But if you help us, we won’t tell the SEC till Kathy Flynn runs her story. We’ll give you time to disappear or make a deal. I can help you. I still know people in the bureau.”

Sally said, “Jennifer knew you as an honest man. You can be that again.”

Carl Evers agreed, but he said he would only come to a meeting under his own terms, on turf he chose. He feared that he was being watched already, and he was terrified.

T
HEIR PLAN WAS
to use the truth from Evers to turn Delancey to their side because they believed that Delancey knew more.

So the following Monday, Sally Lawrence finally went back to Delancey’s. She doused herself in rum, even though she didn’t drink. Then she tried to open the door. Locked.

Delancey buzzed her in and said, “I thought you were dead.”

“It’s been five months. How ya been?”

“So, so.” Delancey wrinkled his nose. “You been drinkin’?”

“Sober for six months, drunk for six.” She cocked her head. “The music? Usually you got some longhairs goin’ on. That’s ‘Lady Be Good.’ Benny Goodman, right?”

“What do you have for me?” asked Delancey.

She sidled up to the counter and leaned against it, far more familiar than she had ever been before. “You’re an expert in old money, right?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Me, too. So, how about this, how about we team up, because I think I know where there’s a shitload.”

Just then, she heard a voice coming from the back of the store. Someone was there, talking on the phone, a woman, good looking, tall, blond, in a skirt. Sally had scoped out the place, watched it for half an hour before she made her move. And this broad had been in the back the whole time. Shit.

But Delancey was leaning across the counter. “What do you mean by ‘shitload’?”

Sally shook her head. “Not here, no way. What I have I don’t show you here. This is your turf. If we start talkin’, we do it on my turf.”

“I don’t make house calls.”

Sally pointed to the sign behind the desk. “Yes, you do.” Then she heard that voice from the back.

The blonde was saying, “Peter,” in a really cold, calm voice.

The bitch was listening, thought Sally, and telling some guy named Peter what was happening. Well, thought Sally, she could listen, but she couldn’t see.

So Sally pulled a picture out of her pocket. “You see this? You know what this is? It’s Woodward Manor on the old Bloomingdale Road.”

The woman in the back said, “Peter,
screw you
.”

Sally looked back there. Then she said to Delancey, “I think this is where your bonds are . . . or where they were a long time ago. But I ain’t tellin’ you more till you give something up.”

“What do I look like? Stupid?” said Delancey. “I hear stuff like this all the time. Old broads are always comin’ in, tellin’ me about rooms papered in money.”

“Well, Mr. Oscar Fuckin’ Delancey”—Sally really drunked it up now—“I know things. So we should team up. But I ain’t tellin’ nothin’ unless you come to the Bowling Green. Eleven o’clock tonight. That’s my turf. That’s where I do my talkin’.”

“Yeah, yeah. In your wet-brained dreams.”

“I’ll show you somethin’ to make your greedy old dick go stiff, and I’ll introduce you to someone, too.”

She could see that Delancey was intrigued now, but he was still playing the cynical New Yorker. She wished they could have made it easier, but the only time that they could get Carl Evers to agree to come out was late at night, in a public park, not too big, with a good view of the streets all around. He was, as Joey said, scared shitless.

“See ya tonight.” Sally staggered out and slammed the door.

A
T ELEVEN FIFTEEN
, on the Bowling Green, Sally was glaring down at the woman from the bookstore. The plan was falling apart. “If I hadn’t seen you in the store, I wouldn’t be talkin’ to you now. I came here to talk to Delancey. Why didn’t he come?”

“Something made him nervous,” said the blonde in the jacket and jeans.

Something was making Sally nervous, too. She couldn’t see Joey. She didn’t see Delancey. She wasn’t sure if Evers would show up under any circumstance. And the construction overhang at One Broadway could hide all kinds of trouble. But stay in character. “I make a lot of people nervous. Do I make you nervous?”

The blonde chewed her lip. “This whole thing makes me nervous.”

“Well, I do business on my turf, or I don’t do business at all.”

“I . . . I can understand that.”

“You can understand? Well, isn’t that fuckin’ sweet of you.” Sally found a Pepsi bottle in the barrel, checked for a bar code, then threw it into the cart and peered toward the south entrance, where she expected that Evers would show himself.

Then she pulled out the rum bottle and took a swallow and almost gagged. She hated rum. But it sure did smell. “We’re all nervous these days.”

The blonde—her name was Evangeline—turned down a drink.

So Sally gave a laugh, just to show the missing teeth. Then she launched into a diatribe on the economy, to fill time. Then she said, “So, are you Delancey’s assistant or something?”

“More like a new partner,” said Evangeline.