The Fraud (31 page)

“That is Joseph with her, right?”

“Yes. Of course. But I have never seen that woman. I am sure of it. Who are you saying she is?”

I paused. Clearly, this was a case where ancient male code needed to be set aside. I’m not sure one’s rights under that code superseded death anyway.

“The woman in that photo has been telling me she was Joseph’s girlfriend, that they met several years ago, and eventually started dating,” I said. “She said they were planning on getting married.”

I never realized it was possible for a woman as dark as Tujuka to blanch. But I swear she had lost some of her color.

“No,” she said. “Absolutely not. Joseph did not have a girlfriend.”

“Mrs. Okeke,” I said, as gently as possible, “are you sure that maybe Joseph hadn’t told you because he was afraid it would upset you? You wouldn’t be the first woman who didn’t know her ex-husband was in a new relationship.”

“Joseph had been trying to reconcile with me,” she said definitively. “He had been trying for two years. He said he was tired of being divorced, tired of living under a different roof from his family. He wanted to be closer to Maryam before she went off to college. He wanted us to share holidays when our other children came home. He wanted us to grow old together, like we planned all along.

“At first I told him no, absolutely not. We were divorced and that was it. Going through it the first time had been too painful to even think about the possibility of going through it again. But lately I admit I had been … rethinking that. He had started spending nights here again. He was spending the night here when he got killed, but then he went and did this crazy thing with his car.”

“Wait, wait, the night Joseph was killed, he was
here
?” I said.

Zabrina had told me she was with Joseph that night and that he had only left her to retrieve some papers for an early meeting he had. But I was starting to recognize that—like apparently everything else out of her mouth—was a lie.

“Yes, he was here,” Tujuka said. “Right up until he left. As I said, I begged him not to.”

“Zabrina said she was with him,” I said.

“Unless Joseph had learned to split himself in two, I do not see how that is possible. He was here until eleven that night. Maryam would remember. Hold on.”

Tujuka rose from her easy chair and walked just out of the room, to the base of the stairs. She called up, “Maryam, could you come down here please?”

“Coming,” Maryam said, and I could hear her bounding down the steps. She entered the room just behind her mother.

“Oh, hi,” she said, when she saw me. “Mama, this is the reporter I was telling you about.”

“Yes,” Tujuka said patiently. “Maryam, the night Daddy was killed, you remember it, yes?”

“Of course I do.”

“And where was Daddy that night, before he left?” Tujuka asked. “Mr. Ross would like to know.”

“Well, here, of course,” she said, like it was the most obvious thing to her.

“And what was he doing?”

“What he always did. Bother me about my homework.”

The lack of guile that struck me about her the first time I met her was there once again.

“Maryam,” I said. “Do you know a woman named Zabrina? Zabrina Coleman-Webster?”

Maryam looked appropriately mystified. “No,” she said.

“Have you ever seen this woman?” I asked. I got off the couch and handed Maryam my phone, which still had the photo of Zabrina on it.

“No,” Maryam said. “Who is she?”

“She claimed to be your father’s girlfriend.”

“Well, then she’s on crack. Daddy didn’t have a girlfriend,” Maryam said, with that marvelous teenaged certitude.

I accepted my phone back from her. The whole exchange was far too natural to have been choreographed in any way. Every reaction was right where it should have been.

What it came down to is that, as is often the case for a reporter, I was getting two versions of the same story. In one, there was Zabrina saying she was Joseph’s girlfriend, saying she had various conversations with Tujuka in which they had bonded over being single moms, saying she had thought about trying to continue her relationship with Maryam.

In the other, there were Tujuka and Maryam Okeke saying, in their own ways, that Zabrina was on crack. And I have to admit, that story was feeling a lot more credible.

But why would Zabrina lie unless …

Unless she was trying to mislead the reporter who was looking into these two seemingly unrelated carjackings. And the only reason she would do that is if she was hiding something: like being involved in the carjacking-for-insurance ring that was responsible for it—either as the recruiter or as the orchestrator.

Had I known Tiemeyer was also in Rotary, I might have had a chance to see it sooner. I just had the misfortune of learning about that round of golf at Fanwood Country Club first. I had thought Fanwood was the root of the tree, when really it was just a branch. The root was Rotary Club, of which Zabrina was president.

It was like twisting the kaleidoscope. Everything about my interactions with Zabrina looked different. When I had come calling about Joseph Okeke, I now saw she had two options. She could have put me off or pretended to know little about the man, which would have sent me elsewhere in search of answers.

But she was smarter than that. It was the old Sun Tzu advice: keep your friends close but your enemies closer. She wanted to keep close watch on what I was learning, controlling that information as best she could to suit her purposes.

For example, when I had mentioned the name Earl Karlinsky, she produced this story about how, yes, a man with that name had asked Joseph about his car, quizzing him about its features.

Did she know how far she was dragging me in the wrong direction? Of course not. But that was the whole point of drawing me close in the first place. She would have found a way to make a bogeyman out of any name I tossed out there, using her platform as Joseph’s quote-unquote girlfriend to do it.

I thought about how easy it was for her to fake that relationship. She knew enough about his work life from casual conversations at Rotary meetings. She knew details about Maryam, because Joseph bragged about Maryam to anyone who would listen—whether it was his next door neighbor in his town house complex or someone who just happened to be sitting at his lunch table.

And then there was that photo, which seemed to confirm the intimacy between the two of them. But that was another piece of evidence that was easily misread. If I attended a Rotary Club meeting—as, say, a guest speaker talking about the newspaper business—and the president of the club asked me for a picture, I would have wrapped my arm around her the same way Joseph did.

Had I bumped across anyone who disputed that Zabrina and Joseph were dating, she had a built-in explanation for it—that they were “keeping it quiet,” and therefore the person in question must not have been part of the inner circle.

Later, after she had time to think about it a bit, she probably realized she had gone too far. Which is why she played the privacy card, trying to pull their relationship off the record: she knew if I put it in the newspaper, someone—like Tujuka—would call balderdash on her.

Or maybe she was just using that conversation as a pretext to see what else I had learned and as an opportunity to mislead me even further. I thought of her sitting on that park bench, offering me a sandwich, and then smoothly wallpapering over some of the lies she had told me.

That exchange had ended with her offering me those insurance documents. Was it even possible she had them?

Actually, it was: she might have asked Joseph for a copy of his policy, so she could read it over to make sure he had the right kind of coverage for the scam she was running.

But why would she show them to me? It would only lead me closer to the truth.

And then I felt a wave of panic. Between my interest in the insurance angle—even if I had it completely backward—and my insistence in talking to Tujuka Okeke, Zabrina would have known I was eventually going to figure things out. In her mind, I had gone from curious reporter to serious threat.

Which meant she was either using those insurance documents as bait to bring her enemy even closer, or she was using them to lure me into a trap.

A trap that that I had sent Tina, my very pregnant girlfriend, unwittingly wading into.

A trap that could include a man who wore a blue ski mask and was both proficient and practiced at killing people.

My eyes flashed back to the clock on the entertainment center. It read 8:03
P.M.
If Tina was on time—and I never knew her to be late—she would have pulled into Zabrina Coleman-Webster’s driveway about three minutes earlier.

I stood up, grabbing Sweet Thang’s arm as I did so.

“Mrs. Okeke, I’m so sorry,” I said. “But we have to go. I think my girlfriend might be in serious trouble.”

CHAPTER 41

Blue Mask had his gun turned sideways, because he thought it looked cooler that way. And he was holding it at head shot level, because that’s what he was about to deliver.

He walked around from his side of the car, feeling the smoothness of the trigger with his finger. The driver had opened the door but was struggling to get out of the car, for some reason. As soon as he was clear of it, Blue Mask was going to drop him so they could get the hell out of here.

Then Blue Mask saw the driver wasn’t a him.

No matter. The sooner he got this over with, the better.

“All right, all right,” the woman was saying. “The keys are in the car. Just take it.”

She was finally on her feet now. Black Mask had backed away to give her room to get out of the car. Blue Mask was even with the front tire and had stopped walking. He had his feet wide and braced for kickback. A shooter’s stance.

“Yo, this ain’t right,” Black Mask said.

“What you mean?”

“It wasn’t supposed to be no shorty. Especially not no pregnant shorty.”

“Don’t matter,” Blue Mask said.

“No, no,” Black Mask said. “You don’t understand. The message I got said it was supposed to be a dude named Carter Ross. This ain’t—”

“Carter Ross,” the woman said.

“Shut up,” Black Mask said. “I ain’t talking to you. You got nothing to say.”

Blue Mask still had the woman’s head lined up nicely with the barrel of the gun. One squeeze would be all it took.

“Don’t shoot her, dawg,” Black Mask said.

“Why not?”

“Dawg, she’s pregnant.”

“Yeah, so?” Blue Mask asked. He was actually kind of excited by the idea. If killing a white banker had gotten that much attention, imagine what killing a white pregnant lady would do.

“It’s just … this ain’t who we’re supposed to be doin’, that’s all,” Black Mask said. “Let’s just take the car and—”

Then Blue Mask watched as a large, dark stain crept down the woman’s pants, sopping her legs.

“Aw, man, now look what you done,” Blue Mask groused. “She pissed herself.”

“You dumbass,” Black Mask shot back. “She ain’t peeing. Her water broke. She’s gonna have a baby.”

“Like, right now?”

“Yeah. You ignorant or something? Don’t you know nothing about babies?”

Blue Mask paused for a moment. A cruel smile appeared out of the oval slot of his mouth hole. “Yeah, I know one thing about babies.”

“What’s that?”

“That you can sell them.”

The woman began screaming, “Help,” but no more than the “H” and the “E” had gotten out when Blue Mask leapt at her and jammed the barrel of the gun against her lips.

“You shut your mouth, shorty, or I’ll drop your ass right here and we’ll cut that baby out of you,” he growled.

“You trippin’?” Black Mask demanded.

Blue Mask didn’t take his eyes off the woman as he spoke. “I met this dude in prison. He told me that for a healthy white baby, you could get, like, fifty thousand, easy. And that’s for, like, a white trash baby. For a baby like this, from a fancy lady in a Volvo? I bet we could get a hundred.”

“You definitely trippin’. Don’t you know nothing about women having babies? They do all this screamin’ and stuff. And it lasts for, like, an hour. Where we gonna go that she can do that?”

“That’s why I was asking if you knew who lived here,” Blue Mask said. “She can have the baby right here. This is my sister’s house.”

“Your sister!?”

Blue Mask could hear the surprise in his partner’s voice. “Yeah, dawg. But she’ll be cool.”

Black Mask let out a short, huffing chuckle. “Yeah, I know she’ll be cool. She’s the one who’s been giving us all these jobs.”

Now it was Blue Mask’s turn to be surprised. He said nothing. Just smiled even wider as he kept the gun pressed to the woman’s mouth.

So much for his sister going legit. All that fancy education and all those fancy people she hung around, and all it did was give her a fancier hustle.

“That dude, the one who told you about selling babies. He still in prison?” Black Mask asked.

“Yeah. But I can get to him. He’ll make some calls, hook us up.”

Blue Mask wasn’t lying. There were nearly as many cell phones inside a prison as outside of it.

“Come on,” Blue Mask said. “Let’s take her inside. We gonna sell us a baby.”

CHAPTER 42

I ran down the steps of Tujuka Okeke’s house, with Sweet Thang right behind me.

My phone was already at my ear. I had hit the speed dial for Tina’s number. After a brief moment of silence, the ringing began.

One ring. Two.

“Come on, Tina,” I said.

Three rings. Four. Then voice mail.

We were already at my car, which I unlocked using the remote access button. Hakeem Kuti, Obatala Insurance’s faithful private investigator, was ambling toward us with no particular speed.

“I need you to drive,” I said to Sweet Thang. “And drive fast.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Mr. Kuti, I don’t have time for questions,” I said in his direction. “But if you follow us right now, we’ll lead you to the people who have been at the middle of the fraud you’re investigating.”

“Yes, sir,” Kuti said, and immediately began jogging back to his car.