City of Dreams (49 page)

“I know,” she said, “but if I don’t keep laughing I’m going to start crying, because this is starting to wear me out.” She said it, and saying it made her feel better, too.

“Crazy shit like this, it wear anybody out,” said Henry. Then he stood. “Y’all just relax while I go upstairs and vacuum. Little Sonia work as a nurse and she like for me to do the housework. Nothin’ make me happier than makin’ the missus happy.”

Evangeline wiped her eyes and looked at Peter. “A license to carry,
and
he does the vacuuming.”

“Out on the road,” said Henry, “my handle was Big Mama’s Baby. Now they should call me Little Sonia’s Daddy. You two got any nicknames?”

Evangeline said, “Someone has been calling himself Buck, like the knife.”

Peter just shook his head.

Henry looked at him. “You ain’t no Buck. Let me think on somethin’ better. I be back at quarter to twelve. Then we see about this Joey Berra cat. But we do it my way.”

“Good said Peter.”

“Oh, Antoine say you took pictures in Times Square last night. You got ’em?”

E
VANGELINE MADE SOME
coffee, then went into the bedroom to change.

Peter went online, to MarketSpin.com. First he checked the stocks: Dow Jones down another 175 points. How long would the Chinese let it keep spiraling?

Then, in the little video box on the lower left corner, Kathy Flynn began to talk to the camera: “Good morning. Asian markets responded predictably overnight to the Chinese action. The Nikkei was down two percent, the Hang Seng was down two and a half. European markets are on the same path.”

In the bedroom, Evangeline was picking the labels off a pair of blue jeans she had bought on their way across town. Enough with Chanel suits and heels. She had bought running shoes, too.

But when she heard that voice, she came out. “Can’t keep your eyes off her?”

“It’s happening.” Peter pointed to the stocks running across the top of the screen.

“And we can’t stop it.” Evangeline stood there, in a blouse and underpants, with the jeans still in her hand.

“All the more reason to get those bonds,” he said. “If the stock market crashes, nobody’ll be buying rare books.”

“And at home,” Kathy went on. “The assassination of Carl Evers, chief accountant for Avid Investment Strategies, has set off a round of speculations regarding the health of the company headed by anti-deficit crusader Austin Arsenault. We caught up with Arsenault this morning outside of his co-op.”

Cut to Arsenault, not a hair out of place, under his awning. “We are deeply saddened. We have every expectation that Mr. Evers’s killer will be apprehended.”

Kathy said, “There is some speculation about the SEC and accounting practices at your organization. Is that true?” Then she shoved a microphone into his face.

“Kathy, I’m surprised that you’d ask a question like that,” said Arsenault. “Simply raising that specter produces rumors, and there is nothing worse for a financial market in the throes of turmoil than rumor.”

“So his death has nothing to do with your effort to redeem two ancient bonds?”

“Those bonds are a symbol. We’re pursuing that case for America, and Carl Evers would tell you that the deficits we run in this country are unsustainable.” Arsenault pointed his finger at her. “I’ve been fighting the deficit since Reagan.”

“So Evers said nothing about the potential of the bonds to improve your balance sheet?” asked Kathy

Peter said to Evangeline, “You have to admit it, she’s good.”

“Don’t say that to me when I’m standing in my underwear.”

On the screen, Arsenault gave Kathy a scowl. “The bonds in my possession would be worth in the range of fourteen million dollars. Avid is a multibillion dollar fund. One is symbol, the other is reality.”

Cut back to Kathy, sitting again in the studio: “There you have it. Symbol and reality. But what, we are beginning to wonder, is the reality with Avid?”

Peter clicked off the little TV screen.

Evangeline pulled on the jeans, then the sneakers, then she paced around to test the fit of both.

Peter went through the e-mails: there were a few from Owen T. Magee, all on the same theme:

Where are you? What have you discovered? Please respond. Our hope is to make the announcement at the annual meeting of the Foundation. We have rented the Museum of American Finance for Friday morning.

“I don’t trust him,” said Evangeline.

“You were the one who told me to sign a contract with him.”

“But I never said I trusted him.” She sprang up and down in the sneakers. Then she looked over his shoulder. “What else is there?”

“A few more things from Antoine.”

She read with him. And both of them thought it was strange to be reading the obituaries of Timothy Riley and his brother, Eddie, who had lived until 1965, right across the street from the church where they had been baptized and elegized.

They found little to glean from the obits, but Peter always said that Antoine had an instinct for the extra bit of information and a willingness to dig more deeply than most. Antoine had also sent the obituary of the son of Tim and Doreen, August 12, 2008:

Brother Richard Daniel Riley, CFC, the oldest living Irish Christian Brother, died in New York after a short illness at the age of 101. A 1929 graduate of Fordham, he taught in Boston and New York. He leaves a host of nephews descended from his uncle, Edward Riley, longtime political operative. His mother, Doreen, died overseas in World War I. His father, Timothy, an accountant for J. P. Morgan, died in the 1920 anarchist bombing. Taking the vow of poverty, Brother Riley had no estate, but for a collection of his father’s papers, including a set of journal notebooks. Brother Riley donated his father’s papers some years back to the New York Society Library.

“New York Society Library?” said Peter.

“One of the first public libraries in America,” said Evangeline. “Opened in 1754 in City Hall. Even Washington and Hamilton borrowed books.”

“So after we meet Joey Berra, we go to the library.”

And then the telephone rang on Henry’s desk. They let it ring through until they heard Antoine’s voice: “Uncle Henry said to call you on his landline. Just checkin’ to see if you two are in tight with Big Mama’s Baby.”

Peter grabbed the phone. “We like Henry. He likes to laugh, but he’s got some danger in him I think.”

“More than a little. But he keeps it hidden . . . I got one more thing for you: I called a college friend of mine. She works at Treasury. I asked her to see if she could find out the names of people who’ve brought suit to get these bonds redeemed.”

“And?”

“Before Arsenault, Treasury had issued only two opinions on these bonds in twenty-three years. They rejected a claim by the Massachusetts Historical Society in the early nineties and another by the law firm of Magee and Magee in 1987.”

That brought Peter halfway out of the chair. “Magee and Magee? In 1987?”

“Yeah,” said Antoine, and he shuffled some papers on the other end of the line. “The attorney on the case was named Jennifer Wilson.”

FOURTEEN

October 1987

J
ENNIFER
W
ILSON CAME OUT
of the heartland in 1983 and took New York by storm.

That was how she imagined her biography would someday begin.

But for now, she’d have to settle for the first clause.

She grew up in Youngstown, graduated from Ohio State, and a week later took a bus that dropped her at the Port Authority Terminal on Forty-second Street. After stepping over two drunks and avoiding eight panhandlers, she walked thirty blocks south to Greenwich Village. Three years later, she graduated from NYU Law School.

That was not by storm.

At least, she told herself, she got to live in the Village, where a girl could embrace the favorite cliché of every small-towner who ever moved to New York: She could find egg foo yong or pastrami on rye at any hour of the day or night. She could make the scene at all the cool places. She could hear jazz at the Blue Note on a Tuesday night. She could cab it down to Odeon at one o’clock on a Sunday morning and end up partying with the cast of
Saturday Night Live
. And she could always find
somebody
to party with . . . someplace.

And since the life of a junior associate at a New York law firm meant ferocious spells of eighteen-hour days, finding a party and finding it fast mattered to Jennifer Wilson. So did having a nice place to walk her little terrier named Bits.

Every morning, she led Bits twice around Washington Square, patted him good-bye, double-locked her apartment door, and walked uptown to the Flatiron Building.

That October morning was warm and humid, and Jennifer was perspiring politely when she got to work. So she was glad that the elevator was empty. With its mirrors and trim work and little vaulted ceiling, it always made her feel like a character in a Joan Crawford movie, riding to meet her destiny, even though her destiny was no more than a day of reviewing agreements, digesting changes to the tax code, and drafting a simple will for a woman leaving her assets to her only child. She straightened her hair in the mirror, buttoned the top button of her brown Donna Karan suit, dabbed a touch of wetness from her hairline, and got off on the eighteenth floor.

She could have turned to the left to go through the blank door that led directly to her office. But she turned right, because she liked to go in by the front, through the glass doors with the gold lettering:
MAGEE & MAGEE, ESTATES, TRUSTS, AND TAXES
. It made her feel like a full-fledged lawyer when she greeted the secretary at the reception desk, and she could show her flag to any of the partners who came in early.

Magee & Magee was busier than usual that morning. As she headed down the hall, she passed a dozen lawyers already working the phones.

At the corner office overlooking Fifth Avenue and Twenty-third, she glanced in at Owen T. Magee, second Magee on the masthead, second-best office.

He had the phone to his mouth: “I know that the overseas markets are down and—yes, the Dow futures, too—but my advice is not to panic. We were down ten percent last week and the foreign markets are simply following our correction, and—”

Jennifer kept walking. Shouldn’t eavesdrop at the door of a partner.

In her little office, she opened a drawer and pulled out a pair of Versace knockoffs. She didn’t always wear them at work. Sometimes she went for flats, but when she was feeling a little low, or a little hungover, or a little depressed because another weekend had passed and she still hadn’t found the love of her life, the heels lifted her spirits and lifted her to near six feet.

She went to the ladies’ room, then got a cup of coffee, and by the time she got back to her desk, she knew that this would not be just another blue Monday.

At eleven o’clock, Owen T. Magee called a meeting in his father’s office in the apex of the Flatiron triangle. The elder Magee, semiretired, was out of town. So Owen T. took the chair, framed by the window with the view of the Empire State Building. He wiped a bead of perspiration from his upper lip and told the ten lawyers and ten associates that the Dow was down a hundred and fifty points. “And there’s no support. It seems that we are crashing.”

“Clients are terrified,” said one of the lawyers.

“It’s not our job to dispense investment advice, but we must take a position,” said Owen T. Magee. “Remind our clients that our job is to help them build for the future while protecting the past. Counsel them to calm down and think long term.”

“Hard to do when so many of them live off their trusts,” said another lawyer.

“No matter how far and fast it goes down,” answered Magee, “our position is that it will come back. We don’t want anyone trying to get into the corpus of a trust just because of a bad day in the market. Remind them that this firm represents stability.”

So all day, the lawyers of Magee & Magee told their clients to stay the course.

It took courage, because the Dow Jones dropped . . . and dropped . . . and dropped some more. It never blipped up for an instant. At the closing bell, it had dropped more than on any single day in history, both in raw numbers and as a percentage: five hundred points, twenty-two percent, and not a sector spared.

No one spoke on the elevator that night. Too many people had lost too much. Too many had seen retirement accounts gutted, plans deferred, dreams destroyed.

And Jennifer knew what most of them were thinking: they had just lived through a turning point in their own lives and in the life of the country, too. She hadn’t lost much because a first-year associate didn’t make much to lose. But she realized that she should not let a day like this go by without calling her mother. So she rode the elevator to the bottom, then rode it right back up. Better to call Ohio on the firm’s dime.

Owen T. Magee was still on the phone: “Sit tight. See what the market does tomorrow before you go out and get a job. Unless, of course, you’re bored.” When he saw Jennifer, he waved her into the room.