Saving Jason (27 page)

V
irgil chartered a plane for us. The Kid had a history of being a “bad flyer,” a history I never wished to revisit. Temple Grandin, the world-famous Aspy who redesigned cattle feedlots to reduce stress and subsequent damage to the animals, might want to take a look at airports and boarding procedures. It wasn’t the flying that weirded out my son, it was the chaos that preceded it. The background noise would have been enough without the pointless lines, waits, jostling, contradictory orders and explanations, and the calculated passive-aggressive behavior of two-thirds of the employees, from check-in, to security, to flight attendants. To my mind, the Kid’s tantrums were more than fully justified. I didn’t know why more travelers didn’t react as he did, screaming, weeping, sobbing, kicking, scratching, biting, and banging their heads on the bulkhead. Consumers first traded convenience and luxury for price, then they swapped freedom of movement and legroom for the sake of another few dollars’ discount. Next, they gave up “perks” such as checked baggage and food. And still the marketing departments continued to focus on price, until finally travelers ceded basic human dignity. The Kid was incapable of making that adjustment, so he released his more primitive response.

But flying is always a trade-off. Even private jets have their drawbacks. The interior of the little Honda was a plastic-lined metal tube four and a half feet high, five feet wide, and twelve feet long. Too big for a coffin, too small for a submarine. At a tad over six feet, I was confined to my seat for the entire trip. The Kid, however, loved it. It was like a Lilliputian world created just for his enjoyment. He used his table to watch cartoons on his iPad and to line up his cars, but when he needed a change, he explored the minuscule bathroom—I didn’t even
try—and laid out on the rear bench seat that doubled as a narrow bed. The flight from Santa Fe to Westchester, an hour north of Manhattan, took a little under four and a half hours. When I got out, my first stop after landing—and working out the kinks in my back and knees—was a long visit to the lavatory. The Kid came off the plane skipping.

“Are you hungry?” I asked when we were settled in the back of a Town Car on our way to the Upper West Side.

“’Nilla.”

I laughed. “Not ice cream. Lunch, maybe. A grilled cheese?”

“’Nilla,” he said.

He was teasing. Joking. Interacting just for the fun of it. A rare and delightful occurrence.

“How about pasta? Spaghetti with butter?”

“Worms.”

“Yes, but you like worms.”

He stuck out his tongue in the universal sign for
Yuck
.

“Those kind of worms,” I said.

“’Nilla.”

“You got two chances of getting ice cream for lunch, sport. Thin and none.”

He thought for a moment. “I’ll take thin.”

“Very good. Have you ever considered a career as a negotiator?”

He made the
Yuck
face again.

“All right. So, what do you want to be when you grow up?”

“A Dodge Viper.”

“That’s my boy,” I cried. “Follow your dream.”

He sat back and happily made car noises. I feasted on seeing the city again. The view of the Palisades across the river as we came down the Henry Hudson. Passed under the GW Bridge. The rise in anticipation as the car approached the turnoff at the 79th Street Boat Basin and I began to register that we were home. Back in our neighborhood. No wonder the Kid was happy. Four months of trying to fit our square
pegs into southwestern round holes was over. Now the trick was to find a way to stay alive while fitting the rest of the pieces together.

But I had one more priority. I dialed Skeli’s clinic.

“Is the doctor in?” I asked.

“Who’s calling?”

“Hi, Kasey. This is Jason Stafford. Is she there?”

“OMG! She’s not going to believe it. Where are you?”

“Seventy-sixth Street. Can I talk to her?”

“Oh my god, just a minute.”

She put me on hold. It was so normal, so New-York-the-way-I-will-always-remember-it that not only did I not mind, I reveled in it. Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto Op. 35 in D Major played in my ear. I knew that’s what it was because Skeli and I had discussed the selection for August in one of our conversations weeks earlier. It was time to open discussions on September’s hold music. We always started poles apart—contemporary country for Skeli, classic jazz for me—and ended up with classical. Soon we would no longer have a choice. Clients had already complimented Kasey on her taste in music.

“Jason?”

“Ciao, bella,”
I said.

“Oooh, I love it when you speak gelato. Where are you? You made the papers again yesterday. Not front page, though. I thought I might get a call. Are you all right?”

“Whoa. Wait.”

“Well, tell me. I know you’re okay because the
Post
said so. How’s Jason?”

“The Kid is great. He’s practicing to be a Viper when he grows up.”

“
Euw
. A snake?”

“No, a Dodge Viper.”

“Is that a car?”

“The greatest American car ever built.”

“Can you be serious for just one moment?”

“Okay. The Ford GT may not have the same raw horsepower, but the Kid says it’s a better car. How’s that?”

“Why are you calling on this line? Is it safe?”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll explain everything when I see you.”

“What? Really? But how? I mean, when?”

“Well, the Kid and I are about to have a late lunch over at the Athena. Can you get away?”

She shrieked. “What are you talking about? Don’t play games like that on a pregnant woman. Oh god, it’s true, isn’t it? It is. You’re not mean like that. You’re really here in New York.”

“So you want me to order you a salad, or what?”

T
he next morning, Roger picked up the Kid and took him out to Queens for the day to visit my father. Skeli left soon after. I worked the phones for three hours, setting up a working lunch at Virgil’s apartment, and clearing the bureaucracy necessary to get my son enrolled in his school again—a feat that took infinite patience, persistence, and a pledge of an amount equal to three months of consulting fees. Carolina, our housekeeper, would need a few days to readjust her schedule to accommodate me, but was happy to hear we were back in town. I saved the most important for last, on the premise that failure would be too disheartening to contemplate.

I needed to persuade Heather to return for one more year of shadowing the Kid. She was busy finishing her thesis and I knew that once she was done, we would lose her. That was a given. But she had been too important to the Kid’s happiness to let her disappear from his life. The key to getting her to return was not the money—she cared for the Kid, and the money was already exorbitant—but safety. I guaranteed her that I would take care of all outstanding issues in that regard within one week.

“I don’t know how you can make that promise, Mr. Stafford. I do read the newspaper, you know.”

“I understand how you feel. If I can prove to you that both you and the Kid will be as safe as your average New York City resident can expect, will you come back to work with him next week?”

“Average?”

“All right. Above average? How about top quintile?”

“And no bodyguards following us around with guns?”

“We won’t need them,” I said.

“Deal,” she said.

Closing a two billion euro/sterling forward swap with the Bahrain Monetary Agency had given me less anxiety than that brief conversation. And my joy at hearing the magic word “deal” had never been greater.

I
f I’d had Virgil’s money, I would have gone for Central Park West with views of the park and the Thanksgiving Day Parade. The Dakota or the San Remo. A building with character and history. The penthouse on Park Avenue was the kind of luxury sky-top aerie you might find in Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi, London, or Chicago. It was nice, if you liked living as far from the streets as possible. I preferred the streets. But I didn’t have his money and could not even imagine what the place must have cost him.

The uniformed lobby attendant took me up to Virgil’s floor, using his passkey to override the lock on the PH button. I stepped out into a marble foyer with a sparkling fountain and three sets of imposing mahogany doors. The center door was a double door that swung open a moment after we arrived.

Virgil, looking older and grayer, stepped out and grabbed my hand. “Jason, it is so good to see your face again. It has been a very long summer.” We shook, and he peered into my eyes as he spoke. He must have seen something reassuring because he smiled with real pleasure.

“A summer I would just as soon forget,” I said.

“Indeed. Come in. Larry is already here. We’re just waiting for Agent Brady.”

The dining room walls were covered with gilt-framed oil paintings of hunting and fishing scenes from the mid-1800s through to contemporary. There were too many and too diverse a collection for the whole to make any sense. But what should have been a jumble was surprisingly homey. Comfortable. The paintings were not there for show, they were there because they were loved.

Larry walked in from the living room and greeted me warmly. We
all took places around the long table. I opened my laptop, plugged in my cell phone to access Wi-Fi—bypassing Virgil’s system—and logged on to Manny’s private chat room. He had stuck a piece of tape over the camera at his end, but he’d be able to see everyone in the room.

“We’re ready. Just as soon as Marcus gets here,” I said.

A long sideboard ran down one side of the room. On it were an assortment of beverages, including sodas, both sparkling water and still, a selection of beers in a bucket of ice, and a bottle of Veuve Clicquot Rosé. There was a platter of assorted sandwiches and wraps, three different salads, and a bowl of iced jumbo shrimp, cracked crab, and calamari. Virgil was brought up that way. It wasn’t his fault he didn’t know how to do anything but grand.

A soft gong sounded from the entryway.

“That will be him on the way up,” Virgil said. “Excuse me.”

Larry got up, took a small plate of salad greens and one piece of calamari, and poured himself a glass of Pellegrino. “Can I get anything for you?”

“No, thanks. I’ll get it in a minute.” I spoke to the laptop. “Manny? Are you going to be okay with this? An FBI agent in the room, I mean.”

The voice of Amy Schumer assured me that he was fine with it.

“You’re not going to use that voice in this meeting, are you?”

“Too much?”

“A bit,” I said. “Do you have anything with a bit more gravitas?”

“Is this better?” It was Morgan Freeman.

“How about something in between? Do you have a Ben Affleck in there? George Clooney, maybe?”

“Just give me a minute.”

Virgil came in with Brady, who came straight over and shook my hand. “I’m glad to see you, Stafford. Sorry I’m late.”

“No one’s late,” Virgil said. “You’re merely the most recent to arrive. We’ll get started when everyone has a plate. I’ve given the staff the afternoon off and my wife is away with the girls on Nantucket. We will not be interrupted.”

We all fixed plates of food and took our places around the table. Brady had a beer and a thick sandwich. I took some of the Tuscan salad and heaped cold seafood on top. I eyed the champagne but took a Pellegrino instead. Keeping the faith.

“Jason, I’m going to defer to you,” Virgil said. “You asked for this meeting. It’s your agenda.”

“Thank you, Virgil. Let me start by saying that what I know and what I can prove may be two different things. I don’t have anything that will stand up in court. Yet. That’s why I’ve asked you here.”

Everyone gave a brief nod of acceptance.

“Virgil has a very big problem coming up next week. His firm—the one that he personally saved from the ashes of his father’s garbage heap and that, brick by brick, he rebuilt—may be taken away from him. If things go against him—and I think the deck is well stacked that way—the results of a shareholder vote will be announced, officially ousting Virgil and replacing him with a guy named Jim Nealis. Everyone with me?”

Larry and Brady gave another nod. The voice of Matt Damon came from the laptop. “I understand.”

Larry smiled. He was accustomed to Manny’s eccentricities. He may have been the only one in the room who knew Manny’s real name.

“I have a rather large problem, too. People are trying to kill me. I’ve thought for some time that some Central American drug runners might still be after me, but I have recently found out that this is not the case. That leaves only the men who killed Aimee Devane and who came after me in New Mexico.”

“The dead perp has been identified,” Brady said. “No record. No connection to any other investigations, according to the DEA, NYPD, Nassau County Police, and us. The guy was a cipher. His father has an auto body shop in Brentwood. The son lived at home.”

“He worked for that guy Gino,” I said. “There’s a connection. Your people are the best for finding what that is.”

“We’ll find it.”

“But meanwhile, my butt is out there,” I said. “We need to aim for the head. These guys are just muscle. They’ll fade away as soon as we put the spotlight on the man in charge.”

“I thought you said this guy we’ve got—this Gino—was the one giving all the orders,” Brady said.

“Gino is the sergeant. He’s dangerous, but you’ve got him and he’s not going anywhere for a very long time. But the crew is taking orders from someone else. Someone higher up.”

“Gino’s not going to roll,” Brady said.

“What about Scott?” I asked.

“We’ve got no way to squeeze him. He denies being there and he’s alibied for the whole night. I believe you, but no AUSA is going to take a chance on your word against his.”

Larry spoke up. “The stock fraud thing won’t work, either. The FA and the other broker-dealer will go down, but at worst, Scott will get a small fine and an asterisk on BrokerCheck.”

“Let me tell you all a story,” I said. “For the moment, let’s just call it that. A story.”

“Is it a true story?” Virgil said.

“Maybe. Some of it is based on hard information, some is speculation—or at least extrapolation from the known facts. And some of it is based on nothing more than gut. But it may still all be true.”

“Let’s hear it,” Brady said.

“Twenty years ago, Frank Scotto and a few semi-legit partners set up a financial services firm. They planned on running it on the up-and-up, but Scotto was too stuck in his ways—he couldn’t help himself. He met a young investment banker named James Nealis and the two of them cooked up a plan. Scotto had a book of bad loans he’d made to blue-collar businessmen. You can imagine the kind of loans Scotto was making. Nealis cleaned up their balance sheets and brought these little companies to the market. ‘Micro-cap stocks.’ There’s little or no oversight on these IPOs and the documentation is minimal. And there are always investors out there who will fall for the right spiel. It
worked this way: The shares were sold to the public. The company owners got a big cash infusion—which they used to pay off the bad loans to Scotto. In return they got a cheap ninety-nine-year lease, with maintenance and storage, on a fleet of trucks, the main overhead expense for their businesses. Meanwhile, the banker, Nealis, earned a big fee—a chunk of which he kicked back to Scotto. End of the day—Scotto’s happy, Nealis is happy, and Mack the electrician is happy. The investors, not so much. But that’s life.”

“Excuse me,” Virgil said, “but Nealis has been a most reluctant, but quite efficient, proxy for me this summer. He has kept the firm running, and reported to me daily. I trust him.”

“The guy’s a snake, Virgil. Let me keep going.”

“Can you prove any of this?” he asked.

“Not the juicy bits. Manny and I were able to reconstruct some of it. But the firm was shut down by the feds and there’s not a lot of information available on something this old.”

“Why didn’t Nealis go to jail?” Larry asked.

“Because he had already moved on to the next big thing.”

“Can you put Scotto and Nealis together?” Brady asked.

“I’ll get to that. The relationship only becomes apparent when you look at the whole picture. Let me continue.”

“Keep going,” Virgil said. He wasn’t at all convinced, but he was listening. He’d come around.

“About this time, the tech bubble was getting some legs. Scotto and partners bought another small bank and—surprise, surprise—a guy named Jim Nealis was soon running the new issue business for them. He specialized in zombies. The walking dead. Companies that were a bad idea in the first place. He buys up the outstanding shares for nothing, puts in his own new managers, and resurrects the stock with a new public offering. The regulators were buried back then with the avalanche of IPOs. They didn’t have the manpower to police this kind of business. Remember, this was the era of financial deregulation. ‘Caveat Emptor’ on bumper stickers. Ever hear of TriLucta? Query?
Ultime? . . . No? Neither has anyone else. They all went bust within weeks of coming to market the second time around. These companies didn’t have a product, or a business plan, or any chance of ever making a profit, but they didn’t need any of that because they only had to stay upright long enough to issue more shares. Scotto and his partners—and Nealis—cleaned up on the banking fees. The managers moved on to the next sham outfit. And once again, the investors got nothing but a good story and a tax write-off.”

“Didn’t the feds catch on eventually?” Larry asked.

“I suppose they might have, but the market got there first. The bubble burst. This little bank was caught holding tens of millions of worthless shares. They closed the doors one night and never came back.”

“And what happened to the stars of this little drama?” Larry asked.

“Scotto retired,” Brady said. “It was around that time. Maybe a year or so later. He moved to Florida.”

“I think he finally discovered that markets go down as well as up,” I said. “Nealis stayed in banking.”

“I’m amazed that he could even get hired after that,” Larry said.

Virgil and I looked at each other and laughed. “When a crash like that happens, it wipes out a lot of people. So everyone is forgiven. Clean slate for all,” Virgil said.

“And when you blow up large, everyone thinks you must have been a player, so you become even more valuable,” I added.

Larry shook his head. “I don’t think I understand your business.”

Virgil gave another sweet-and-sour laugh. “Neither do I.”

I got up and took another bottle of Pellegrino. “Jump ahead a decade or more to our current situation. Nealis is now a top banker, specializing in biotech, the next hot thing. Only, he’s at a large, reputable firm. He can’t play his old tricks. Competition is cutthroat, inside the firm as well as outside. He knows he’s never going to get pegged for the top slot, and while he’s making good money, it’s not crazy money. And he wants crazy money.”

“So he agrees to come work for Becker Financial?” Virgil said. He was definitely coming around.

“A firm he already knows a good bit about from his old friend’s youngest son. His ‘cousin’ Joey.”

“Who is running his own little scam,” Brady said.

“Right,” I said. “But I think Joey was a reluctant conspirator. Check the old employee records and you’ll probably find that those guys in New Jersey were part of the original crew from twenty years ago. They traded in those same micro-caps because they knew where all the bodies were buried. They just needed someone to help park the securities who wouldn’t ask a lot of questions.”

“This is a good story,” Brady said. “But that’s it. A story.”

“Admittedly. But I can point your people to the right records. And once on the trail, they’ll find more.”

“But you haven’t tied Nealis to Scotto, to murder, or to any other current crime,” he said.

“What was Scotto’s first wife’s name?”

“
What?
How do I know?”

“
I
do,” I said. “Rosa.”

“And?”

“Rose Holdings is the company that owns that bison ranch–slash–truck garage out in Manorville. The only document referencing that name is the deed on that piece of property. Rose Holdings, with a post-office box address in Lawrence, Kansas.”

“Why Kansas?” Virgil said.

“Because Scotto and Nealis thought no one would ever look there.”

Matt Damon’s voice came from the laptop. “And Kansas has only recently digitized all of their old incorporation records. I found the file this week. Take a look.”

The screen flashed and a document appeared. Larry and Brady leaned in to examine it. At the bottom was a list of the owners.

“These are all Scotto’s old partners. Now they’re all with him down
in Boca. Sitting around the pool smoking cigars,” Brady said. “Can we get a printout of this?”

“Virgil?” I said.

He nodded. “Send me the file.”

“So what are these old guys up to now? And what’s the connection to Nealis?” Brady asked.

“Rose Holdings is behind almost all of the purchases of large blocks of Becker stock in the last six months. They’re about to take over the company.”

“Wait,” Virgil said. “Nealis has been fighting the board on this for months.”

“Right. You told me two of the board members were making noises to give you the boot and install Nealis at the helm way back in June.”

“Yes.”

“And that Nealis held them off. He sided with the rest of the board, right?”

“Yes,” Virgil said. “And he sided with the rest of the board when they demanded a shareholder vote on the question.”

“Exactly. Meanwhile, his old buddy and his friends are busy scooping up shares. He might have lost a board vote, but he’ll be stuffing the ballot box for the annual meeting.”