The Lies that Bind (23 page)

“
You mean personally or legally?”

“Both.”

“Personally I know he's an arrogant asshole born with a silver racket in his mouth and he got himself in deep do-do. Ankle deep; no, knee deep. Everybody has a bucket, and Whit Reid's bucket was full.”

“Then why isn't he in prison?”

“Actually, he was—for a weekend.” Jonathan smiled the smile of a man who took enough pleasure in his work to keep him at it for a hundred years. “I arrested him on a Friday, held him till Monday, threw him in a holding pen with pimps and dealers. White-collar criminals hate being in jail. His cellmates were all over him like a cheap suit, and on Monday he told me everything I wanted to know. It led to some successful prosecutions. We were after Sonny Wilson, the banker, and Whit Reid was a piece of the puzzle.”

“But you didn't prosecute him?” The pasta arrived. While I ate mine (green and white tortellini in a cream sauce), Jonathan talked.

“No. A: We've got too many of these S&L cases. We don't have the time or the staff or the funds to prosecute all of them, especially the million-dollar players. We go after the ones like Sonny Wilson, who stole billions. B: If we put white-collar criminals away, they go to some country-club prison and cost the taxpayers fifty thousand dollars a year. If we settle, we can get them to pay back some of what they stole without the expense of taking them to trial. We settled with Reid, and the taxpayers came out ahead. It doesn't happen very often. His former buddy Sonny Wilson went to the big house, and his mother has been complaining that her boy has to clean the latrine. Do you have any idea how much money he made? When he gets out, even after he's paid all his fines and settled his lawsuits, he'll still have hundreds of millions hidden away somewhere. Among other things, he took little old ladies' deposits and invested them in junk bonds that weren't worth the paper they were printed on. Virtually every project he lent money to has now gone belly-up. The total S&L debacle is going to cost the taxpayers two hundred billion dollars, and the amount is climbing daily. That's fifteen hundred dollars for every taxpayer.” He looked at his watch. “Make that fifteen-fifty. And now Sonny Wilson will have to clean some latrines and we're supposed to feel sorry for him. But the worst part for Wilson is that he had to give up his hairpiece. He wears a baseball cap now.” Laswell laughed.

I brought him back to the bit players. “So you settled with Whit Reid.”

“Yeah.”

“What were the terms?”

“I can't reveal them. The settlement we made comes under the Bank Board's veil of secrecy. That information is sealed. Didn't he tell his wife?”

“
She says he didn't.”

“How does she think he got so broke?”

“The recession.”

“It's people like him that caused the recession, by glutting the market with useless buildings that never should have been built. Every real estate venture contains the seeds of its own destruction.”

“So does every relationship. So does every life.”

He smiled. “That's true. You could file under the Freedom of Information Act if you really want to know the terms of the settlement.”

“That'll take forever.”

“You're right.”

I looked into Jonathan Laswell's hard and bright little eyes and saw a way to pierce the Bank Board's bureaucratic veil. He hated the arrogant rich even more than I did. “Maybe you could just tell me in general what the crimes and settlements were all about, if you can't talk specifics.”

“I'd have no problem with that.”

“Developers, for example. What did they do?”

“Land flips, kickbacks. They'd fraudulently flip a property to get the price and the amount of the mortgage up.” He leaned across the table, dipping the corner of his sleeve into his pasta dish as he did. “I've seen them set up a row of tables in somebody's office and transfer title back and forth all day. A property could go from two million to ten million in an afternoon. Business is just a game to these guys, like moving pieces around a board.”

It wasn't that big a step from moving pieces to moving people, I thought.

“The way kickbacks work is, the developer borrows more than the property is worth, then kicks back the excess to his buddy the banker, or the banker turns it over to his buddy a politician. For example, the developer borrows one hundred thousand more than he needs. He solicits checks from his employees to equal that amount. He gives the checks to the banker, who contributes them to the Republican party or the Democratic party, whoever. When it came to S&L fraud, there was only one party—the fund-raising party. The banker gets a credit with the party for future favors. The developer pays his employees back with the hundred thousand, making it look like a bonus or overtime. The developers were a part of the scam, but the people we were really after were the bankers. In most cases, the developers were more than happy to cooperate. You know Wilson's bank financed El Dorado, Reid's development. When the bank went under, the RTC foreclosed, and now they're trying to get rid of it.”

“I know. I went out and took a look at it.”

“It's a beaut, isn't it? It was going to be Whit's little kingdom, a planned development where he could let in whoever he wanted, keep out who he didn't. He had restrictive covenants to end all restrictive
covenants.
He wasn't going to allow his property owners to subscribe to
Penthouse
or
Playboy
.”

“You're kidding.”

“Nope. It says so right in the deed.”

“So this is what it's like back in the U.S.A.” We call the state I live in one of the missing fifty, because it so often gets confused with its third-world neighbor.

“That's what it's like in Arizona anyway.”

“I'll say one thing about Arizona: your white-collar crooks have more imagination than ours.”

“It's amazing how they discover religion and good works when they're looking at a prison sentence.”

“What did you settle with the developers for?”

“As much as we could get, although it was never as much as those guys stole. They went through money like a knife through butter, and a lot of what they owned they bought at inflated prices. They believed in the boom they'd created, but when it came time to sell, the market was severely depressed. We took their cars, their houses, their polo ponies, their boats, their jewelry. Remember they were staring prison in the face, and that scared the shit out of them.”

“Do you ever take it in payments?”

“We might give a guy some time to unload his assets, come up with the money he'd been hiding.”

“What would happen if he missed a payment?”

“The big house. I may be talking out of school here.” Laswell's eyes circled the room, either to make sure no one was listening or to keep tabs on the blond waitresses. “But Whit Reid is all paid up.”

“Recently?”

“In September.”

“Do you ever make community service a part of the package?”

“Often.”

“Could a person perform that service in another state if he moved?”

“Could.”

“I didn't think Whit Reid was noble enough to volunteer to help out minority small businesses on his own.”

“Trust me, he's not,” Jonathan Laswell said.

******

I flipped through the in-flight magazine on the way home and thought about what I would tell Cindy and Saia and Martha. Nothing, I decided. If Cindy already knew, I wouldn't be doing her any favor by revealing what she'd been trying to conceal. If she didn't know, what good would it do to tell her at
this
point? However, if she ever asked me to file for divorce …. As for Saia, I had no need to reveal what I'd discovered to him unless it could keep Martha from being indicted. Whit Reid was a crook and a snitch who'd turned in his banker buddy, but that didn't make him Justine Virga's killer. For one thing, he had a good alibi for the night the murder or accident or whatever it was took place. As for motive, if he was as broke as he appeared to be, why hadn't Martha been the victim? Cindy was her only heir.

What to tell Martha was more problematical. Martha Conover was not likely to go into business with a crook, and I was pretty sure she didn't know about Whit's relationship with the federal government. But what kind of friend would tell her before telling Cindy? If it had any bearing on her case, I'd be obligated to tell her, but as far as I could see now, it had none. As for its having a bearing on her life, that was a gray area. What I should do, I thought, is confront Whit and make him tell Martha and Cindy himself, but I wasn't quite ready to let him know what I knew. I decided, for the moment anyway, to keep on looking and keep my mouth shut.

I hung around the gate after I deplaned at Albuquerque, but I didn't see anybody I recognized getting off the plane. I didn't see anyone who seemed interested in getting to know me better either.

21

T
HE KID CAME
for dinner, and I cooked his favorite meal of Chile Willies. I made it the way I always did—broke the blue-corn tortillas in pieces, sautéed them until they were crisp, added the red-hot salsa, melted Monterey Jack cheese on top—but it tasted better than usual. Maybe adventure makes the taste buds grow fonder.

“This tastes good tonight, Chiquita,” the Kid said.

“Thanks.”

He ate fast, and when he was finished he sipped at his Tecate. When the Kid ate, he ate. When he talked, he talked. And when he made love, well, he focused on that too. “How was your trip to Arizona?”

“I didn't take the job with the bank,” I said.

He nodded; that didn't surprise him. “Did you think you would?”

“Not really.”

“Then why did you go?”

“To work out a better deal for Sharon Amaral.” It wasn't the entire explanation. He knew it, and so did I. He waited, sipped at his beer. “I also wanted to find out what kind of trouble Whit Reid, Cindy's husband, is in. I thought he'd been lying to her about his real estate deals, and I found out he had been. I also found out he broke the law, got caught and had to pay the federal government a big fine.” The Kid nodded again, indicating he knew that wasn't the whole story either. Maybe I was getting too predictable; maybe he was starting to know me too well. Maybe he'd noticed the red finger-shaped welts on my neck, which weren't quite hidden by makeup or a scarf. I'm not the kind of woman who wears scarves or makeup, and the Kid knew that too. “Somebody was chasing me. I went into the desert to look at Whit Reid's resort, and I thought I saw a white car follow me off the freeway. But it turned in the opposite direction. Later, when I was alone at the property, I heard somebody drive in and walk down the hallway toward me. I asked who was there. He didn't answer, but he kept on coming. When somebody else drove up, he ran away.”

“Why you go there alone, Chiquita?”

“Because I didn't have anybody to go with. Besides, what's the point in living, Kid, if you can't go anyplace alone?”

It was a rhetorical question, and he didn't answer it. “Did you see the guy?”

“Not very well, but I got his license number. Last night I stayed in a Motel 9, and in the middle of
the
night somebody called with a bullshit story about my rental car being in an accident. He said he wanted to come by and talk to me.”

“Did you let him in?” he asked, but he already knew the answer. As he'd told me once before, I never know when to quit. The Kid had warned me, but he'd never tried to stop me. Maybe he knew it wouldn't work; maybe he didn't really want me to stop. If I were the kind of woman who took no risks, he wouldn't be interested in me. If I were more cautious, I wouldn't be interested in him.

“Yeah, I let him in; I had a weapon.”

The Kid raised his eyebrows. We'd had an argument before about my carrying a gun, his theory being that when you have a gun it's just as likely to be used against you as by you.

“It was a skunk gun,” I said. “It's full of skunk juice, and the smell drives an assailant away.”

He shook his head. The things people did in this country remained incomprehensible to him, but it was his country now, whether he liked to admit it or not. “Was it the same guy?”

“Probably, but he wore a ski mask and I never got a good look at his face. Both guys were the same size and shape, and they drove the same car. They acted like they'd had a slight leg injury. Both walked with a limp and ran without it. I had to fight him off, Kid. He had his hands around my neck.”

“I can see that,” he said, looking at the marks on my neck, which had gotten more vivid as the day went on.

“When I pulled out the skunk gun he kicked it out of my hand, but it went off anyway. He had a powerful kick. I never heard him speak, but I did hear someone behind me in the airport when I was going over there talking Argentine.”

“He could be a soccer player. Some soccer players can forget they are hurt when they are playing, and Argentinos are good at soccer.”

“I know,” I said. And I knew they could be connected to the guys at Mighty, but I didn't think Ramón Ortiz was the one to ask.

“But what they do best is polo. They are the best polo players in the world. Everybody wants to have an Argentino on their team. It's one way to get out of Argentina.”

“Do you think he could have been one of Las Manos?”

“Why would they be after you?”

“Because I am the only one who is investigating Niki Falcón's death. If the police are doing anything, no one's telling me about it.”

“I don't know, Chiquita. I think if Las Manos wanted to kill you, you would be dead.”

“What I don't understand, Kid, is if Niki Falcón was killed by hit men, why didn't they just go back to Argentina and disappear afterwards? It wouldn't make any difference then if I found them out.”