Dead Anyway (25 page)

“It’s the best I could do on short notice,” she said, kicking off her heels and sitting on the couch with her feet pulled up beneath her.

“What’s the occasion?”

“I finished my paper.”

“Congratulations,” I said.

“It belongs to this apartment. It felt wrong to bring to another place. It was the right time.”

“You’re going to have me believing in cosmic confluences.”

“To be honest, I was getting pretty sick of the whole thing. How much does an undergrad need to know about Münchausen syndrome by proxy?”

“A lot less than you do,” I said.

“And how was your evening, dear?” she asked. “How’re your Balkan criminals?”

“I’ll know in a few days. But no matter how the meeting turns out, we’re making the move.”

“That’s good, because I think I found the perfect thing. To die for,” she added, with a studied upper-crust inflection. She put her shoes back on and went into her bedroom. She came back with her laptop, which she handed to me.

On the screen was a photograph of a furnished, 10,500 square foot, limestone mansion on thirteen landscaped acres in Greenwich, Connecticut, built in 1928 by an investor who didn’t know a year later he’d be broke. A fate shared by the current owner, a descendent of John D. Rockefeller, who’d had the considerable misfortune to put much of his financial fate in the hands of a guy named Madoff. The offer was rent with an option to buy.

“You specified Gatsbyesque,” she said.

“I like it.”

We committed the rest of the evening to eating finger food and planning the next few days’ activities. In the process, Natsumi put a large dent in the Jim Beam with no apparent effect, and I went hog wild and had two whole beers. The second one having the impact of pre-operative sedation.

“You look like you’re falling asleep,” said Natsumi.

“Because I am. I haven’t your experience drinking motorcycle gangs under the table.”

After saying our goodnights, I carefully dealt with all the cashmere and silk I was wearing and fell into bed as if pulled there by a whipcord. I turned off the bedside light and was about to roll over and pass out, when the door opened and Natsumi came into the room. She swatted me and said to give her some room. The bed was a double, so there was just enough to give.

She slid under the covers. I felt bare legs, panties and a T-shirt.

“Only to sleep,” she said.

Which we did, until later that night, when I swam up from the deep well of sleep and into her arms, clothes gone and futures irrevocably altered, a cosmic confluence, a consummation realized, not only devoutly to be wished.

C
HAPTER
19

I
promised my landlady Señora Colon-Cordero a thirty percent commission on the sale of my food truck. I suggested she call Billy Romano, in the event he’d had second thoughts about that retirement in Florida.

“That’s a very big commission,” she said. “I want you motivated.”

“Maybe I buy it myself.”

I thought that was a great idea.

“Only I can’t break you in like Billy did for me. I have pressing business elsewhere. With the deal I give you, you can afford to fly him back north to consult.”

“So the food truck business not turn out like you hoped,” she said.

“Frankly, I liked it. But it’s not my destiny. I think you’ll find, however, that I’ve left the route in good order.”

I didn’t tell her about Leo Dunlop’s simulated heart attack following a slurp of my iced coffee.

I
T ONLY
took a few hours to clear our belongings out of the apartment and pack up the Outback. I also used the time to contact the real estate agent for the big house and make arrangements for a viewing.

“It’s a faaabulous property,” she told me. “You’ll just love it, love it, love it!”

We stopped at Gerry’s shop on the way to Greenwich to pick up a sample of each item in the inventory. Though remarkably valuable on a pound-for-pound basis, the boxes were also remarkably heavy.

“Next time we deal in exotic down comforters,” said Natsumi.

I rented a room in the best hotel I could find in Greenwich, just to get a start on proper appearances. It wasn’t that burdensome a decision.

“The Presidential is available,” said the desk clerk, “though we’ve been having some issues with the Jacuzzi.”

Natsumi expressed disappointment, but we acquiesced after the clerk dropped the price-per-night to slightly below extortionate.

The suite was twice the size of our apartment in West Hartford and far better equipped.

“Did you know you could perform aromatherapy and pick your teeth at the same time?” Natsumi asked, bent over a woven basket of specialty comforts.

We ordered in food from a local restaurant, and suffered the rest of the night in a bed that managed to be firm and fluffy at the same time. Over breakfast we planned the upcoming day, focusing on seeing the house and building out our wardrobes, two prospects Natsumi was honest enough to say were less than daunting.

“And we need a nicer car,” I said.

A
FEW
hours later, we drove down the long driveway to the big house in a new Mercedes E-class station wagon. A sedan version of the same car was waiting for us. A short, somewhat overweight woman in a luxuriant hairdo and white suede, floor-length, fur-lined coat got out of the car and greeted us.

“Like I said, faaabulous,” she said, grabbing my hand and then lurching into Natsumi to apply a bear hug. Natsumi spun her nature in an opposite direction and gave her twice the hug back, nearly squeezing the wind out of the idiot woman.

“Well, nice meeting you, too. Shall we go in?”

The interior of the house was both grand and intimate. It was spotlessly clean, with not a whiff of mothballs or disinfectant. Stained oak paneling covered the walls, also festooned with traditional, representative art. Orientals on the oak and tile floors, rooms filled with sturdy, comfortable furniture smelling of embedded lemon oil. Lamps sprouting from oversized Chinese vases on the side tables. A massive three-foot frond encased in a glass frame above the fireplace. A library lined with bookcases stuffed to the gills and reaching to the sky. I didn’t bother to see the rest.

“We’ll do six months in advance,” I told the agent. “Is tomorrow too early to sign the contract?”

As we floated down the million-mile, tree-lined driveway, Natsumi said, “I know this all has a strategic purpose, but it’s fun, you gotta admit.”

“I admit.”

As if the day weren’t extravagantly materialistic enough, we slipped into New York and spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening harvesting clothes and accessories from midtown department stores.

After a leisurely, overpriced dinner in Soho, we made it back to the hotel a little before midnight.

“Okay, that was another first,” said Natsumi, sprawled on her back on the sitting room sofa.

“All this does have a strategic purpose,” I said.

“I assumed so.”

“I don’t want to be a wet blanket.”

She picked up her head.

“Then don’t. I know the score. Just let me wallow in the fantasy a little. You don’t know how much of a fantasy this is.”

Recovering from a momentary lapse in compassion and understanding, I walked over and brushed her silky black hair out of her face.

I
SPENT
most of the next day trying to crack into Florencia’s numbered account at the bank in the Cayman Islands. The problem was devilishly simple. I had the bank’s routing code and account number, but not the user ID and password. Without these, nothing short of an armed invasion would provide access to the account.

I could have guessed at a few combinations based on my knowledge of Florencia, but the odds were long, and after five failed tries, the bank’s security system would lock out my computer forever. I could get another computer, but the outcome would likely be the same.

The elegantly cunning Grand Cayman banking system anticipated these occasionally orphaned accounts, some bursting with illicit funds. They’d let plenty of time elapse, then swallow up the money. Should injured depositors or their heirs eventually turn up, things got worked out, usually yielding to the supplicants a generous percentage on the dollar. Another fine example of honor among thieves.

It wasn’t until I remembered Florencia’s home computer stuffed in the Subaru with a bunch of other computer gear I’d been hauling around, that it came to me.

I retrieved the computer from my car and set it on the desk, turned it on and slipped the MattBD boot disk into the CD slot. In a few minutes, I had control of the machine.

Florencia wasn’t much of a tech head, but I didn’t think she’d leave access to a secret numbered account in Grand Cayman simply lying around her hard drive. I could start searching for alphanumeric combinations, but that was another slog.

I went to my own computer and pulled a list of routing numbers for all the banks on Grand Cayman Island. I copied the list onto a flash drive and copied it into Florencia’s computer. Then I put all the numbers into a query box that searched the entire hard drive.

Twenty minutes later it showed up in a folder called “Recipes,” in which there was a Word document named
“Receta para estofado de cordero a la ostra.”

I opened the document. The bank number, which correlated with the First Australia Bank (Cayman) Limited in George Town, was at the top. Then the account number, then the words, “Eagle House.”

I stood up from the desk and walked to the end of the room where I could look out over the side yard. Eagle House was the dreary apartment block just off the University of Pennsylvania campus where she lived while attending Wharton. My circumstances were little better, living with three roommates in a squalid walk-up in South Philly, which I barely took note of, so absorbed was I by my graduate work in advanced statistical analysis.

Here again, I was confronted by an impenetrable puzzle. With a brain that had lost the language of solutions.

Or maybe not.

The account code had to be of some length. There were ten characters in Eagle House. If A was one, and Z was twenty-six, the code could be 51712581521195. But that seemed too long, and too easy, even for Florencia.

Ten digits. The length of a phone number.

The phone number at her apartment in the Eagle House. Damn, I thought, what the hell was it?

I went back to my computer and started writing emails, continuing well into the night.

T
HE LAST
email I wrote was to Evelyn telling her substantial funds would be flowing out of the shared account, just as I’d warned.

I didn’t tell her why, or much of anything else, aside from reporting that I was feeling better than ever physically, and that I was making progress. She didn’t deserve so much ambiguity, and I was ashamed of that, but if I started to tell the full tale, I wouldn’t know where to stop. And there was always the matter of making her an accessory before, during and after the fact.

I was sorely tempted to tell her about Florencia’s skimming operation. But then again, I didn’t know for sure—the matter still wasn’t totally settled. I decided to hold back the shock and disappointment until I was sure I had the whole truth.

So I stuck with empty assurances and fell into bed feeling dishonest, but well-meaning.

P
ROVING THE
maxim that people have a tendency to expand the amount of junk in their possession to fill the amount of available space, it took us almost a week to move ourselves and what we thought were our meager belongings into the giant house.

All the clothing delivered on our doorstep was part of the problem, though the larger issue was the disposition of my computer gear and related electronics, once spread across Gerry’s shop, the little house next to the gravel pit in Wilton and the apartment in West Hartford. I had twelve rooms to choose from to effect the consolidation, though surprisingly, this abundance made the selecting that much more difficult. I finally settled on the poolroom above the three-car garage, mostly because of the absence of a pool table, opening up space for a row of folding tables and a rolling office chair to flit from workstation to workstation.

I put all the precious metal up there as well, in a small stack of cardboard boxes shoved into the corner. There was too much for a safe; and anyway, a safe was the best way to tell the world you had something to hide.

Natsumi set about domestic arrangements, in an unapologetic reinforcement of gender stereotypes. Confronted with a kitchen twice the size of her prior living space, she stocked the cupboards, filled in the china cabinet and decorated the counter space with all manner of modern gadgetry.

She interviewed cleaning and landscaping services—the latter at that time of year confined to plowing the driveway and hauling broken limbs from the yard—eventually settling on a husband/wife team from Colombia to manage the entire place.

We installed a tanning booth in one of the spare rooms, where I spent some relaxing time obviating the need for daily makeup. The wig was a necessary annoyance, made less so by Natsumi’s deft handling.

It was a decidedly agreeable interlude, and I succumbed to its pleasures in defiance of my abiding weariness and angst.

O
NE OF
the delights of research is it often takes you into stunningly unfamiliar terrains. To say that my knowledge of Greenwich, Connecticut high society was rudimentary was to grossly overstate the situation. As with any anthropological study of a human subpopulation, one first had to gain some knowledge of their habitats, exclusive parlance and patterns of association.

So I went to a good primary source—gossip columns—steeling myself against the natural revulsion this form of commentary spawned in me. I cross-referenced New York and Connecticut sources, developing a list of keywords that helped narrow the search, and after several hours of concentrated study came up with a short list of names.

Then I wrote Henry Eichenbach and attached my list: “We know your proficiency with organized crime, how’re you on philanthropists? I know, they’re often one and the same. (Sparing you from having to make the joke yourself.) How would you rank this list, and who would you add or subtract?”