Thick as Thieves (17 page)

It was raining in Mexico City, a halfhearted drizzle on a warm spring day, when Carlos Morilla summoned him to his office tower out in Santa Fe. He was chairman and CEO of Morilla Farmacias, and Integral Risk’s largest client in Mexico. Carr was the account manager.

Morilla’s face was dark and shuttered as he told Carr to have a seat. His voice was rumbling, and his English without accent. There was not the usual offer of coffee. Morilla slid a blue Integral Risk folder across the desk.

“You are telling me that my Patricia is homosexual?” he said. “My only daughter—a lesbian? This is your finding?”

Carr took a deep breath. “The report draws no conclusions, sir. You
requested that we observe Patricia and her friend for a period of time and document their activities. That’s what we’ve done.”

Morilla frowned. “Is there another conclusion one could reach?” Carr said nothing and Morilla’s face had grown even darker. Morilla sighed. “She is very young, Patricia, and she has led a sheltered life. She is very impressionable—susceptible to the influence of … of the wrong sort of person. So there is something else I would like you to take care of.”

Carr thought he’d never gotten proper credit for the patience he’d shown. He hadn’t interrupted Morilla’s commands, even when the executive’s voice had shaken, his face had reddened in a way that reminded Carr of his father’s, and he’d snapped his Montblanc pen in two. Carr remained quiet and composed throughout, and when Morilla was done, Carr had taken a deep breath and explained things slowly and carefully.

“Integral Risk is a corporate security firm, sir, and while we deeply value the business we have done together, this is simply not the sort of job we can undertake. It is neither in your best interests, nor in ours. I think, with time to reflect, you might also see that this is not the wisest course for your family.”

It was this last suggestion—that someone else, the hired help no less, might know what was best for the Morilla family—that Carr realized too late he should have kept to himself. Morilla had colored deeply, but said nothing for a long time. Then he picked up the phone and called the general manager of Integral Risk Latin America—Carr’s boss’s boss.

Carr hadn’t minded the weeklong enforced vacation. He went to the seashore. He swam every day, and read and drank at night. What he’d minded was learning, when he returned, that Luisa Rios, an art student at UNAM, had had her face slashed from her left earlobe to the corner of her mouth and her right arm broken in three places.

The wind rises, and the sounds of the rain and ocean and thrashing palms merge into a great wave, and Carr’s chair is slipping out from under him, falling backward, and Carr with it. The jolt knocks the breath out of him, and his glass breaks on the balcony deck. He carries the pieces inside and dries his face. Then he picks up his cell phone.

“You up for a road trip?” he asks when Valerie answers.

The cheerleader figure is sloppy now, and the etched features are blurred. Her skin is lined and lax, like her paint-stained jeans, and her brown eyes are wary. The avid smile—so much on display in the wedding announcements Carr found online—is nowhere in sight, and her hair, lacquered chestnut in those photos, is curled by the ocean air, sweat-dampened, and streaked with gray. The cheerleader’s older sister, Carr thinks: wiser certainly, but angrier too, with little left in the way of expectations. He is certain that more than just time has worked these changes on Tracy Holland—six years of marriage to Howard Bessemer doubtless played a part.

Holland lays her roller in the metal tray, and wipes her hands on her T-shirt. She sweeps hair off her forehead and gazes at Carr suspiciously.

“We rang the bell,” he says, smiling. “But no one answered.”

Holland frowns and looks at Valerie. “You’re the one who called yesterday, about the film? Megan …?” Her voice is scratchy.

Valerie walks through the French doors. She steps around the ladder and the paint cans and extends a hand. “Hecht, Megan Hecht. Looks like we caught you in the middle of something.”

“A place this age, there’s always something,” Holland says.

Carr nods. The white shingle pile, all porches and dormers, must be 150 years old at least. It sprawls against a hillside, above a rocky stretch of
Maine coast and a choppy sea—Townsend Gut emptying into Boothbay Harbor.

Valerie pushes her plaid sleeves above her elbows and looks around the dining room. She smiles appreciatively at the meticulous paint job—dove gray with intricate eggshell trim. “This looks like a pretty big project.”

“Scraping and sanding were the hard parts; this is just boring,” Holland says. She looks at Carr. “Who is he?”

“Brian,” Carr says, putting out a hand.

“Brian helps me with research,” Valerie says, “and scouting locations.”

“And getting coffee,” Carr adds, but still there is no smile from Tracy Holland. She wipes a forearm across her brow, drinks from a sweating bottle of Sam Adams, and moves through the French doors to the porch. Carr and Valerie follow.

“A documentary about Wall Street wives,” Holland says, doubtfully. “Not the most sympathetic subjects in the world, are they? Probably do better with a reality TV show—some crap about a bunch of women you love to hate. That’s more like it.”

“You may have a point,” Valerie says. “But as I mentioned on the phone, our director thinks women like you have some interesting stories to tell. A perspective on the crash that we haven’t seen before.”

“
Women like me
,” she says. “I’m not sure what that means.” Holland leads them to a pair of wicker armchairs. She and Valerie sit, and Carr leans on the porch rail.

“Do you mind if we tape?” Carr asks, and reaches for the camera case slung over his shoulder.

Holland frowns. “Yes, I mind. I’m still not sure if I want to be involved in this.”

“Sure,” Valerie says soothingly. “Talking is great.”

“But why talk to me? It’s not like Howard and I were boldfaced names in New York. The most coverage he got was when he got arrested.”

“The kind of storytelling we do—it’s about taking the particular experiences of individuals and finding the broader themes. You and your husband led a certain kind of life in New York: his job, the Upper East Side co-op, private schools, charity boards. Now that’s all over—the market, his career, that whole life. And you seem to be a kind of refugee. There are other Wall Street wives in that spot. More than a few.”

Tracy Holland sips some beer and looks out at the water. She chuckles again, more bitterly this time. “By which you mean what—women who made deals with the devil, only to find the devil couldn’t hold up his end?”

Valerie’s smile turns confiding. “Is that what happened,” she asks, “a breach of contract on Satan’s part?”

Holland smiles back. “Isn’t that how those deals always end?” she says. “But you should probably talk to those other wives. It was a long time ago, and I don’t think I’m typical of anything.”

“No?”

“I’m pretty sure none of my old friends do their own painting, diminished circumstances or not.”

“You keep in touch with many of them?” Carr asks.

She squints at him, surprised he has spoken. “No.”

“What about your ex-husband? Do you think he was—”

The squint turns into a scowl. “My lawyers deal with him. I don’t.”

“I was just going to ask if he was typical of men who worked on Wall Street then.”

“You think there was only one type—a bunch of Gordon Gekko wannabes in suspenders and slick hair? Kind of outdated, isn’t it?”

Carr makes a conciliatory nod. “I’m sure they’re all unique, but maybe they had motivations in common.”

“You mean greed.”

“It’s what makes the markets go, and what inflates bubbles—according to popular wisdom, anyway.”

Holland takes an angry swig. “You seem to know it all. I don’t see why you need me.”

Valerie looks at Carr and coughs discreetly. “I’m sure we know hardly anything,” she says, “but I’m hoping you can educate us. What made Howard tick? What led him to Wall Street?”

Holland holds the beer bottle against the side of her neck and sighs. “He wasn’t typical. Not one of those people who always had their sights set on a Wall Street career. Basically, most of Howard’s trust fund was gone by the time he left college. He needed to work, and he didn’t think he could get a job anywhere else.”

“It’s not like bagging groceries at the supermarket,” Valerie says. “There was a lot of competition for those jobs.”

“There still is. But Howard didn’t have to worry about that—he had family connections at Melton-Peck.”

“So it was the only firm that would hire him?”

“So Howard thought. He also thought it was the only thing he was cut out for.”

“Banking?”

“He said he wasn’t enough of a quant to be a trader, and that he didn’t have enough energy to be in sales. He said that catering to the whims of people richer than he was was the closest thing to planning parties for his fraternity, and that was all he was ever good at. Hence private banking.”

Valerie nods slowly. “Sounds like he gave it a lot of thought.”

Tracy Holland sighs again, more deeply this time. “Another way Howard wasn’t typical. Wall Street people aren’t much given to self-reflection, not the ones I knew anyway. Howard was different that way.”

“Introspective?”

“Enough to know his own failings, though not enough to do anything about them. Does that make him better or worse than the guys who never give it a thought?”

“Doing something is always the hard part,” Valerie says. “What were they—his failings?”

“Jesus—where to begin? Always taking the path of least resistance? No impulse control? Chronic self-pity? How about his sense of entitlement? Or his whining about the burdens of growing up with the appearance and expectations of wealth, but without the actual money to back them up?” She takes another sip of Sam Adams and sighs. “You don’t have the time, and I don’t have the energy.”

“Doesn’t sound particularly appealing,” Valerie says. “Or easy to live with.”

“He wasn’t.”

“So why did you?”

“I found Howard kind of cute, at first—like a blond, blue-eyed teddy bear. He was funny and self-deprecating—more the class cutup than the quarterback types I usually went with, and I liked that. He was sweet, and easy to be with, and if I’m being honest, there was the economic factor too. Fading trust fund or not, Howard seemed to be at the start of a good career when I met him. And where was I then—a pre-K teacher at a private school, and filling in part-time at Sotheby’s. That’s what a fine arts degree got me—that, and my house painting skills.”

Valerie nods. “So cute and funny didn’t do it in the long haul?”

“They never had a chance: the longer he worked at the bank—the more time he spent with those people—the more drinking and whining there was, and the less there was of cute and funny. And having a baby just made it worse. He was useless as a father—well-meaning, I guess, but useless.” Holland pauses and laughs bitterly. “Of course, the gambling, the drugs, and the hookers didn’t help much.”

“Are you serious?” Valerie asks, and Tracy Holland nods.

“Who do you mean by
those people
?” Carr asks. “Who was he spending time with?”

Another frown from Holland. “His clients, his colleagues—all those people.”

“Was Curtis Prager in that group?”

The frown deepens, and an icy silence settles on the porch. When Holland speaks again, her voice is tight and low. “I’m the wrong person to talk to about him. Maybe I’m the wrong person to talk to altogether.”

The silence expands until Valerie clears her throat and points at Holland’s beer bottle. “You have another of those around?”

Holland is surprised, but after a moment she stands. Valerie raises a hand. “Brian can get it, if you tell him where.”

Holland pauses and nods uncertainly. “In the kitchen, in the fridge.”

Carr takes his time, going back through the dining room and down a hall. The kitchen, when he finds it, is another work-in-progress: new cabinets and countertops, raw wallboard where tiles will go, the smells of sawdust and paint still strong in the air. The old refrigerator is forlorn in a slot that’s sized for a larger model. There are layers of paper stuck to it with magnets, and Carr flicks through them. Bills from a dentist, an electrician, a plumber, an invoice from a fuel oil company. There’s a calendar too, with drawings of lobster traps and fishing buoys on it, and a dense scrawl of appointments in red ink. Beneath all these there are photographs of a boy.

They are badly rippled by the salt air, but still his resemblance to Howard Bessemer is plain. The same blond hair, though considerably more of it, the same round face and benign, guileless smile. The photos cover a range of ages: at six or seven he is dressed as a colonial soldier, trick-or-treating with a tricorn hat and plastic musket; at eight he’s at the helm of a sky-blue sunfish; and at nine and ten and eleven, he’s playing soccer—blond hair flying amid clouds of dust and turf. His face is a mask
of concentration and resolve. And then a door slams, and there are knobby footsteps behind Carr, and the boy himself is there.

He’s twelve now, small and solid and still a soccer player. His cleats and knees are muddy, and his jersey is stained with grass and sweat. His cheeks are red and his thick blond hair is matted. His head is canted as he stares at Carr, and his face and eyes are without expression.

The eyes are dark and wide-spaced, like his mother’s, and Carr thinks the camera missed what’s important in them: the wells of suspicion, the watchfulness, the deliberation, and the stillness—the sense that the boy is always preparing for the ground to shift beneath him, or to fall away altogether, always waiting for another shoe to drop.

Carr smiles. “You must be Simon,” he says. “I’m Brian.”

The boy nods slowly, weighing Carr’s words and his own reply. “Where’s my mom?” Simon Bessemer asks eventually.

“On the porch, with my boss. I’m supposed to bring beer. What position do you play?”

The boy pauses again, considering. “Defense.”