The Fraud (20 page)

When I reached the brick pillars of Fanwood Country Club, I saw the layout was just as I remembered. I cruised past the entrance, turned around in the driveway of a house that, quite incongruously for this part of the country, had a cactus in the front yard. Then I eased the Volvo off to the side of the road, just beyond the aforementioned netting and strip of trees, and began my stakeout.

My perch was elevated slightly, midway up a decent-sized hill, which helped my vision. I was glad for the trees, which kept me from feeling too obvious. The Volvo helped in that regard as well.

Being as there was nothing immediately happening in the parking lot, I settled in and began my wait.

As a reporter, I spent a lot of time waiting: for bad people to do bad things, for sources to talk to me, for flaks to call me back, for documents I had requested from public agencies, for editors to give me feedback on stories, whatever.

There were times when I hoped, at the end of my life—say, age eighty-five or so—I would have all that waiting time gifted back to me. I figured that would get me to ninety, at which point I would happily accept a quick, painless death.

Naturally, if I happen to reach that ripe age and still enjoy breathing, I reserve the right to change my mind about all this. But I don’t think I will. Ninety seems like a more than fair number of years to have used the Earth’s ever-dwindling resources. At that point, it’s someone else’s turn.

These were the kind of cheery thoughts with which I passed the time as the same lack of noteworthy events continued to unfold in the Fanwood Country Club parking lot. There was no sign of Earl Karlinsky. The only club employee I saw was Mr. Haughty in his little golf cart, buzzing up to people as they drove in and offering them a ride to the clubhouse, lest they actually get any exercise by walking.

Sometimes, Mr. Haughty helped them with their golf bags, which they kept in their trunks. A roughly equal number of members did not require his assistance with anything. Either they stored their sticks at the club or were only coming to Fanwood for social reasons, in which case Mr. Haughty served as their chauffeur.

I watched this routine for a while—twenty, forty minutes maybe, long enough that my thoughts started wandering even further afield, to things like the economics of fossil fuel extraction as compared to the rising price of milk. And, really, someone is going to have to explain to me how a nonrenewable resource that takes millions of years to form and is only found deep within the rocky folds of our planet costs less per gallon than the mammary gland secretions of the world’s most populous domesticated ungulate.

And that’s when my subconscious, working on some level I didn’t understand, spoke up and told me: Mr. Haughty was part of it.

Of course he was. He had unfettered access to the parking lot, all day, every day. He drove an endless number of laps through it while ministering to his duties. When he stopped behind members’ cars, they popped their trunks for him and he dove right in.

Meanwhile, the drivers of those cars were still inside the car’s cabin, futzing with their sunglasses, fumbling with their phones, taking a final sip of coffee, whatever. They weren’t worried about the kid rifling through their trunk. He was just pulling out their golf clubs, after all.

How easy would it be for Mr. Haughty to size up the car, decide it was worth a sufficient amount, and then slip a tiny tracking device of some sort into the trunk? There were no shortage of places. He probably tucked it under the mat, next to the spare tire; or, if the trunk was cluttered, he could toss it in the back, where it would stay undetected until the car could be swiped.

It wouldn’t take him more than five seconds to do it. Then he could go about his business, smiling his haughty smile, knowing his future victims were completely unaware he had just set them up.

Hell, they probably even tipped him for it.

*   *   *

How I would prove this, I didn’t know. Again, it might be another one of things that would be left to the authorities. When they carried out their well-planned raid on Fanwood Country Club, they would discover a bag filled with tiny GPS chips in Mr. Haughty’s locker.

In the end, the kid would probably flip on Earl Karlinsky faster than a champion gymnast. But that was as it should be: as I had the scheme figured out, Karlinsky was the mastermind. He deserved to take the hardest fall. Or maybe Karlinsky was just another minion and the real boss was somewhere else.

And it all started in the parking lot.

From a storytelling standpoint, I could place Kevin Tiemeyer and Joseph Okeke in that parking lot, in preparation for their seemingly innocent round of golf together. Within a month, I had them both dying in violent carjackings. Then I could list the other Fanwood-connected victims, interview a few of them, and package the whole thing quite neatly. Then, there would be the matter of follow-ups for the arrest, the inevitable indictment, and so on.

And in each story, I’d get to write that glorious sentence, “Authorities learned of the carjacking ring after a report in
The Eagle-Examiner
…” Because, yes, sometimes newspapers like reminding you of just how damn important we still are.

I brought up my phone to check my e-mail. There was one from Buster Hays. The subject header was now “Re: Dear Ivy,” and the body was brief: “I’ve got some information for you but I’m too thirsty to tell you over e-mail. Maybe if I had seen any evidence you were going to do something about that thirst, I’d feel differently. Buster.”

In other words, I was going to have to pay my scotch bounty before he gave up anything. Typical Buster.

There was also an e-mail from Kira O’Brien. She had found David Isaac Gilbert, associated with several addresses in and around Newark. But what I found infinitely of more interest was where he had lived previously: a federal penitentiary.

Kira had enclosed a link to an article from a newspaper in Massachusetts. Federal prosecutors were announcing that an investigation into billing irregularities at a not-for-profit assisted-living facility in Swampscott had resulted in a plea bargain wherein David I. Gilbert, fifty-eight, of Saugus, the former director of the facility, admitted to Medicare fraud and misappropriation of patient funds. In exchange for an admission of guilt, he would be given an eighteen-month sentence in federal prison, which he would begin serving immediately.

About midway down in the article, there was Dave Gilbert’s mug shot. Being as this was before his incarceration, he was a few pounds heavier. The pointy handlebar mustache looked like it weighed the same.

Phrases like “Medicare fraud” and “misappropriation of patient funds” were too vague to know exactly what he had done. The article didn’t go into detail, probably because the prosecutors hadn’t given any. But it sounded to me a lot like Dave Gilbert was bilking the federal government out of taxpayer funds
and
a bunch of unwitting senior citizens out of their hard-earned retirement savings. Nice. I wonder if he kicked his residents on their way to church, too.

The article was three years old. So it was easy enough to assemble a time line: he served his eighteen months, got released, then settled in New Jersey, far enough away from Massachusetts that no one would have heard about his old scam. Then he quickly began constructing a new scam.

As a convicted felon, there was a huge swath of employers who wouldn’t even consider hiring him. But that still left the Greater Newark Children’s Fund, where they were all as na
ï
ve and trusting as Sweet Thang and didn’t bother with background checks. Once installed as the director of the Chariots for Children program—where he could masquerade as one of the good guys—he could find a way to twist it for his own profit.

Had he then hooked up with the Karlinsky crew? Or was he a separate cell in a criminal syndicate that kept its parts ignorant of each other? Or was he, in fact, completely independent and just happened to be running what appeared to be a chop shop?

I didn’t know at this point. All I knew is that Gilbert had been a crook and, for as much as I wished I could believe in rehabilitation, my experience—to say nothing of the stubbornly high rates of recidivism in this country—told me how unlikely that was.

Once a crook, always a crook. Even Sweet Thang would have to concede that. I forwarded her a link to the article, just barely resisting the urge to add an “I told you so.”

Instead, I just wrote, “Call me when you have a moment.” I would need her help to unravel Gilbert’s role in whatever was going on.

Finally, I looked up from my phone. Little had changed in the Fanwood Country Club parking lot. Mr. Haughty was still there, waiting in his golf cart, poised to swoop down on whatever unsuspecting pigeon came in next.

CHAPTER 25

Scarface Sammy picked his way slowly down the hill, one deliberate movement at a time, his eyes fixed on Volvo man the entire time.

Stalking people was something of an art form and he had made a study of it through the years: what worked, what didn’t.

Ultimately, he felt his best teachers were the great cats of his native Africa. He loved watching animal documentaries just so he could watch them do their work. They would lie there, almost entirely obscured in the long grasses of the savannah. They would take one step, then wait. Smell the air. Let the grasses sway. Watch the gazelles graze. Only then did they take another step.

Patience was absolutely critical. The great cats didn’t leap out and begin sprinting toward their prey until they were certain of success.

The fact was, if you just ran up to people, they would see you coming easily and make a decision about whether they were going to stick around. And many of his targets, particularly the ones who knew Sammy and what his job entailed, chose not to.

Sammy understood the impact his face made on strangers, particularly white strangers. His skin was not like the black people they knew. It was much darker. His scars, which were given to him in childhood to ensure his good health, only added to the effect. They made him that much more foreign—and, yes, scary. They were not the kind of tiny lines favored by modern Yoruba, if they even practiced scarification at all. No, Sammy’s scars were the old-school kind: deep and, for those from cultures unaccustomed to them, shocking.

If Sammy just walked up to the man in the Volvo—or ran up to him, for that matter—all he would get in return was a face full of mud, sticks, and leaves that the Volvo’s tires spun up as it fled. Especially if Volvo man noticed that the bulge in Sammy’s jacket was the size and shape of a shoulder-holstered Beretta.

So Sammy kept himself hidden, carefully gliding from one tree to the next, never exposing himself for more than a fleeting instant or two. The closer he got, the slower he went. When he got within two hundred feet, he would count to ten before he let himself move again. At a hundred feet, he started counting to twenty.

It certainly helped that Volvo man wasn’t paying any attention to his surroundings. His entire focus seemed to be on the parking lot of the country club. When a car passed by on the road, Volvo man didn’t even swivel his head to watch it.

The first time he even looked down—to look at his phone, perhaps?—Sammy had just closed the gap to about eighty feet. Sammy didn’t dare go faster. But he was getting more confident.

He was maybe fifty feet away, still neatly hidden, when he suddenly realized he wasn’t the only person interested in the man in a Volvo.

Another car was pulling up. A big SUV. Sammy stopped his counting, checked to make sure his hiding place was adequate, and watched for what came next.

CHAPTER 26

Mr. Haughty had disappeared to who-knows-where, leaving the parking lot devoid of activity for the moment. I was essentially just staring off into the distance—to the point where I was probably less aware of my surroundings than I ordinarily would be.

So I didn’t pay particular attention that a large SUV had left the parking lot and was cruising up Fanwood Country Club’s long driveway; or that it turned left out of the pillars, in my direction; or that its driver and passenger were giving me the evil eye as they passed.

I only really started noticing it when it turned around—in the driveway of the cactus house, just like I had done—and was coming back in my direction, pulling over to the side of the road as it did so.

And then, in very short order, it became something I couldn’t have ignored if I wanted to. It was rolling up like it didn’t even see me, accelerating at a time when it should have been easing to a stop. That’s when it occurred to me: the SUV was going to ram me.

My hand went for the Volvo’s ignition. The gesture was as automatic as it was futile. Even if I could get the car started in time, there was no chance I’d be able to get it in gear and on the move. The roar of the SUV’s engine was coming at me too quickly.

I made a sound that was some undignified mix of a squeal and a shriek. It wasn’t my well-being I was worried about. It was the car’s. Tina’s only instruction when I asked to borrow her Volvo was for me to “try not to get any bullet holes in it.” I doubted she would consider having her entire back bumper crumpled much of an improvement on that.

There just wasn’t anything I could do to avoid it. My hand was moving too slowly toward the ignition. The SUV was moving too fast.

Then it braked, sliding to a stop on the soft ground just inches short. The only thing filling my rearview mirror was an oversized, polished chrome grille plate.

In my rearview mirror, meanwhile, I could see two people get out. From the passenger side came Mr. Haughty, wearing a Fanwood Country Club polo shirt. From the driver’s side, there was Earl Karlinsky, dressed in the same logo jacket as the day before, although his gray hair struck me as being extra bristly on this day.

Mr. Haughty was hanging back, somewhere around my bumper, doing I-don’t-know-what. Karlinsky stormed up to my window. I composed myself for the coming confrontation. Bullies like Karlinsky love it when they make you nervous, and I wasn’t going to give him that pleasure.