Bad Business (21 page)

I
went over to police headquarters and sat with Belson. Neither Devaney nor O'Mara had a record. So we looked at pictures. We looked at pictures of people with long hair and big glasses. I didn't see Lance. We looked at pictures of people who had the initials L. D. and D. O. and didn't find Lance or Darrin. We looked under first names. We looked under last names. We tried under sex scams. Extortion. Shooting incidents. Every possible cross reference we could think of. Neither of them was there.

“Maybe if I had the kind of clout that a sergeant of homicide had, I could get the radio station to help us with O'Mara's background.”

“And what do you think the station will say first?” Belson said.

“Freedom of speech. Freedom of the press. Freedom from unwanted search and seizure. Freedom to misinform us about the weather and almost everything else.”

“And if I cut through all that and we get something,” Belson said, “what issues will come up in court?”

“Freedom of speech,” I said. “Freedom of the press. Freedom from unwanted search and seizure. Freedom to misinform us. Freedom to sell advertising. . . .”

“So forget the station. Anything we want to find out we have to have a persuasive reason to be asking.”

“Even if it wasn't evidence that would hold up in court,” I said. “If I knew something about him, I could find a way to get him.”

“From what you told me maybe we could get him for pimping,” Belson said.

“Couple things wrong with that,” I said. “He gets paid for his seminars, which are legal. Hard to prove any more than that.”

“How about the broads he sends out to clients. He doing that because he's a fool for romance?”

“Almost certainly not,” I said. “But to prove he's doing anything worse than running a dating service and calling it something else, we'd have to force a lot of people to testify who don't want to.”

“And ruin the reputations,” Belson said, “of people who didn't do anything worse than get laid.”

“Lot of us guilty of that,” I said.

Belson grinned at me.

“Thank God,” he said.

“So we don't want to do that,” I said.

“Probably not,” Belson said.

“Of course O'Mara doesn't have to know we don't want to do that.”

“That's right,” Belson said. “He doesn't.”

“I'll keep it in mind,” I said.

“Here's another thing to keep in mind,” Belson said. “So far you haven't told me anything much that this guy is guilty of that matters much. You got any reason to think he murdered anybody?”

“I know.”

“You holding back?”

“Of course I'm holding back,” I said. “But nothing that would change what you know.”

“So why do you think he's a suspect?”

“Because,” I said, “I suspect him.”

Belson nodded.

“Thanks for clearing that up,” he said.

By the time I got out of Police Headquarters the thunder had arrived and the lightning and rain were with it. The rain was nearly overwhelming the windshield wipers. The traffic was crawling. The thunder was close and assertive, followed almost at once by the lightning, which gleamed like quicksilver on the wet cars and slick streets. It was almost seven when I got back to my office. I was just hanging up my raincoat and shaking the water off my hat when Hawk came in, wearing a black silk raincoat and no hat. He was carrying something in a plastic grocery bag.

“Glorious feeling,” Hawk said.

He took off the raincoat.

“Laughing at clouds,” he said.

He went to my closet and opened the door and got a towel and dried off his gleaming head.

“So high up above,” he said.

“Stop it,” I said.

Hawk shrugged.

“Just being cheerful,” he said. “You got any food?”

“I'll call for a pizza,” I said.

“Two,” Hawk said.

He went to my office refrigerator and took out two bottles of Stella Artois and handed me one.

“You got anything to tell me?” I said.

“Darrin and Lance,” he said. “The love that dare not speak its name?”

I drank some beer.

“This will give rise to considerable speculation on our part,” I said.

“I thought it might,” Hawk said. “That's why I wanted two pizzas.”

“I'll get right on it,” I said and reached for the phone.

I
took a slice of green pepper and mushroom pizza and bit off the triangular point.

“So what do you know?” I said.

“Nothing you can use in court,” Hawk said.

“Nothing to prove in court,” I said. “I just need to know.”

“They're a couple,” Hawk said. “They have dinner together. They go to the movies together. They take evening strolls together. They go food shopping together.”

“Doesn't mean they're intimate,” I said.

“People see you and Susan together,” Hawk said, “they know you intimate. They see me and you together, they know we not.”

“And thank God for that,” I said. “But I see your point.”

“Couples be different together than friends,” Hawk said.

“They ever affectionate in public?” I said.

“Nope.”

“But you're sure?”

“Yep.”

Hawk stood up and went to the refrigerator and got us two more beers. The plastic grocery bag was still on the floor beside his chair.

“What's in the bag,” I said.

Hawk smiled widely.

“Hopin' you'd ask,” he said.

“I fought it as long as I could,” I said.

“So today,” Hawk said, “I'm staying dry in a doorway across the street, and the two lovebirds come out with an umbrella, which confirm my suspicion that they gay.”

“Real men don't use umbrellas.”

“Exactly,” Hawk said. “And I see that they going just down the block to a fancy restaurant. So I drift on down there and look through the window and they just sitting down. I watch for a minute and the waiter give them each a big dinner menu. He take a drink order and when he leaves they start reading their menus. So I think to myself they gonna be an hour, more likely two, which give me time to look around.”

“So you hotfooted it back to their place,” I said.

“Ah don't ‘hotfoot,' ” Hawk said. “Ah moved rapidly but with grace to their place and entered.”

“Any trouble getting in?”

“Haw!”

“So you found something,” I said.

“I did.”

“And it was a plastic grocery bag,” I said.

“That's what I found to put it in,” Hawk said.

“Resourceful,” I said.

Hawk put down the pizza slice he had in one hand, and the bottle of beer he had in the other. He picked up his plastic grocery bag and took out a leather-covered scrapbook. He placed it gently on my desk and leaned back and revisited the pizza and beer. “Found it in the bottom drawer of Lance's bureau,” Hawk said. “Under his shirts. Nice shirts. Too small, though.”

“You were thinking about stealing his shirts?”

“Sure. But they too small for either of us.”

“Good of you to think of me,” I said.

I opened the scrapbook. On the first page was a newspaper clipping from the
Kansas City Star
for March 10, 1991. It described the murder of a Kansas City couple. The next page was the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
for January 1992, a prominent doctor found murdered in his car in a parking lot in Belleville, Illinois. And so it went. Nine murders in all, full press coverage, neatly clipped and pasted into the scrapbook. Murder number 8 was Trent Rowley. Number 9 was Gavin.

“Lance is a creepy guy,” I said.

“But a very nice dresser,” Hawk said.

“He finds this missing he'll scoot,” I said.

“Probably ain't the first thing he checks when he comes home,” Hawk said.

“When he does look, he'll be gone,” I said.

“Turn it over to Quirk?” Hawk said.

“Doesn't prove he did the murders, only that they interested him.”

“Still be enough for them to bring him in, wouldn't
it? Fingerprint him. Maybe find out who the hell he is?” Hawk said.

“Or maybe they don't and all they got is the scrapbook, and no judge will admit it as evidence, since it was the result of an illegal search by a notorious felon. And they have to turn him loose.”

“Notorious felon?”

“Well known,” I said.

“And proud,” Hawk said.

“You find a gun?”

“No.”

“You toss O'Mara's place?”

“Yep.”

“You didn't have time to pull everything apart.”

“Nope.”

“So we know all this about him,” I said. “And we don't know who he is.”

“You figure he done them killings in each city that he's got clippings from?” Hawk said.

“Yeah. We can give Quirk a list of the murders, let him see what he can find out. But it'll take time.”

“Might be able to lift some prints off the cover too,” Hawk said.

“Might,” I said. “But I don't want to give it to them yet.”

“Because you want to hit him with it.”

“Sometime,” I said. “If I need to.”

“We could go over to the house they share, right now,” Hawk said. “And return the scrapbook and ask them about it, and see what happens.”

“If we were lucky Lance might take offense,” I said.

“And go for his gun,” Hawk said. “And we wouldn't have to look for it no more.”

“Tempting,” I said. “But not yet. Stay on Lance awhile longer. I want to see what Marty Siegel digs up. There's a connection here someplace, and I want to know what it is.”

“After a while,” Hawk said, “you sort of forget why you got hired, don't you?”

“I still haven't found out who killed Trent Rowley.”

“And if you did, and it was some stranger, had nothing to do with all this, would you quit?” Hawk said.

I smiled.

“I'm a curious guy,” I said.

“You surely are,” Hawk said.

“Don't lose Lance. Even if you have to let him know you're there, don't lose him.”

“Remember to whom you are speaking,” Hawk said.

“And keep in mind that Lance has probably killed nine people.”

Hawk grinned. “I got him there,” Hawk said.

“I'm sure you do.”

“I
t's Byzantine,” Marty said. “You find it Byzantine?” I said.

“Me, the world's greatest CPA. I'm in awe.”

“Is it legal?” I said.

“Oh, God no,” Marty said.

“Can you explain it to me?”

“I can oversimplify it drastically,” he said.

“Oh good,” I said.

The rain had broken the humid stretch and the day was dry and pleasant. Marty had an office on Staniford Street, and we'd agreed to meet sort of halfway between us. Which is why he and I were sitting on a bench in the Common, not very far from the Park Street Station, watching the street life move past us on Tremont Street. Pigeons and squirrels circled us in case we were interested in feeding them, which we weren't. But neither a pigeon, nor a squirrel, is easily discouraged.

“As far as I can tell, your culprits are Trent Rowley and Bernie Eisen. Do you know what a special purpose entity is?”

“No.”

“A special purpose entity is a device often used for securitization of debt.”

“I urge you to oversimplify,” I said.

“It was always my intention,” Marty said. “Say you have a shop, Spenser's Sandwich Shop. You have a bunch of customers who buy their sandwiches on credit, for which convenience you charge them one percent a month. So at the end of the day you have earned a hundred bucks plus one percent a month. But there's nothing in your cash register. What you do is, you create a special purpose entity, and call it, say, Susan's Equity Trust. You can invest your own money in this company, but at least three percent of it has to be independent capital. Then you sell your hundred dollars' worth of accounts receivable and its interest payments to Susan's Equity Trust. Now at the end of the day you have a hundred in cash. Susan's Equity Trust, in turn, sells shares in itself to investors eager to make one percent a month on the sale of sub sandwiches. So Susan's gets a markup. The investors get their money back in installments plus the one percent interest. Got it?”

“Yeah, sure, banks do that, with mortgages, don't they? Car dealers?”

“Lot of people do it and it's perfectly legitimate.”

“Even when banks and car dealers do it?”

“Amazing but true,” Marty said.

“But in the case of Kinergy?”

“Rowley and Eisen were creating SPEs to hide debt.
Remember what I told you. They had a ton of earnings, but not much cash.”

“The old mark to market accounting trick,” I said.

“Very good.”

“So the absence of cash would begin to create debt.”

“Right again,” Marty said. “Or one or another project was a losing proposition.”

“And payment on the debt would use up cash.”

“It would.”

“So they needed to keep these matters off the books, or their profit picture would suck and people would stop buying their stock.”

“Gracelessly put, perhaps,” Marty said, “but not inaccurate.”

“And the SPEs were their solution.”

“Better,” Marty said. “They could sell one operation or another, that had a lot of debt, to the SPE and show it on their books as income.”

“And that's legal?”

“Remember what I said about conditions?”

“Essentially that the SPE needed to be independent of the creating company.”

“Yep. These weren't. They were owned mostly by Rowley and Eisen, or Mrs. Rowley, or Mrs. Eisen, people like that. And the money they raised to create the SPEs was guaranteed by Kinergy stock.”

“Including the three percent?”

“Yes.”

“So they weren't independent of Kinergy.”

“Nope, and, as they developed, some of these outfits began to have interests antithetical to Kinergy's, but
very beneficial to Rowley and Eisen. You want to hear how?”

“Jesus Christ, no,” I said. “I never want to have this discussion again.”

“Which is why you are not a world-class CPA.”

“Thankfully,” I said. “Isn't there somebody supposed to approve stuff like this?”

“Board of directors,” Marty said.

“They approved?”

“The Kinergy board of directors, as far as I can see, would have approved compulsory pederasty if urged by Trent and Bernie.”

“Isn't there any outside accounting?”

“There is, one of the best accounting firms in the Northeast. Kinergy pays them about three million a year.”

“So much for them,” I said. “And where was our man Coop in all of this?” I said.

“Yonder somewhere gazing at a star,” Marty said.

“You don't think he knew?”

“I don't think he wanted to know. A company like Kinergy is out there on a shoeshine and a smile. The way they do business they have to increase earnings every year, so their stock will look good and the investment banks and big brokerage will suck around them.”

“So he looked the other way?”

“I don't think he even had to,” Marty said. “These deals are very complicated. The flowcharts look like they were created by Hieronymus Bosch. I had trouble figuring some of it out.”

“Holy mackerel,” I said.

“And,” Marty said, “Coop's probably not that smart.”

“And him a CEO,” I said.

“Disheartening, isn't it,” Marty said.

“Is there trouble ahead?”

“For Kinergy? You better believe it,” Marty said.

“Are they going to go under?”

“Absolutely,” Marty said. “And pretty soon.”

“Any indication that Eisen knows this, or Rowley did?”

Marty smiled at me.

“They both owned tons of Kinergy stock,” he said.

“How nice for them,” I said.

“Rowley was selling it as fast as he could without causing a stir. Eisen still is.”

“A lot of money?”

“Yes.”

“A hundred dollars?” I said.

“No. That's a lot of money to you. A lot of money to them is millions.”

“Millions?” I said.

“Depending on the price of the stock, quite a few millions.”

“So it would be in their best interest to keep pumping Kinergy up until they unloaded their stock,” I said. “Then they can let it flop.”

“Most of the employees' 401(k)s and other pension vehicles are invested in Kinergy stock.”

“So when it tanks?”

“They're fucked,” Marty said.

“You CPAs talk a language all your own,” I said. “You happen to run across the name Darrin O'Mara anywhere?”

“Sure. He owns one of the SPEs.”

“How about Lance Devaney?” I said.

“Yep.”

“SPE?”

“Yep.”

“Funded in one way or another by Kinergy?”

“Yep.”

“Hot damn,” I said.

“Hot damn?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Detectives talk a language all their own, too. Can we prove all this stuff in court?”

“If I can continue to access the books,” Marty said. “We going to court?”

“I have no idea,” I said.