Red hot lies, p.12
Red Hot Lies, page 12
I explained that he worked for Mark Carrington, who owned a private wealth-management firm. Forester was one of those clients, and Sam was the adviser who backed up Mark to manage Forester’s money, assets and investments.
Andi didn’t write anything down. She clearly understood already what Sam did for a living. “Did you and Sam discuss the investments he was making on Forester’s behalf?”
“Sometimes.”
She gave me a stern look.
“He hadn’t told me anything about the Panamanian shares.”
“And what about Sam’s finances? Was he a big spender?”
“No. The only thing Sam really splurges on is guitars. He plays music.” I thought of all the time I’d spent in the acoustic lounge of the Guitar Center on Halsted, while Sam tried out every Martin or Gibson they carried.
“Was the wedding costing you a lot of money?”
“Yes, although my mother was helping us out with a few things.”
“Did you and Sam have joint bank accounts?”
Maggie leaned forward a little. “Ms. McNeil’s finances aren’t in question here.”
“They’re not in question per se,” Andi said. “But if they’ve got joint accounts and there’s been a big deposit lately…”
I looked at Maggie, who gave me a look that said, It’s up to you.
“Sam and I do not have a joint account. Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“We planned to do that after we get married.” I glanced at my engagement ring, thinking of the platinum band sprinkled with tiny diamonds that was supposed to go under that ring.
“Where does Sam bank?”
I had to think about that. “Um…I think Chase?”
“You think?”
“Sam received his bank statements at his apartment. We’d talked generally about how much money we had, but I never asked to see his statements.”
“Did he have any debt?”
“A student loan from his MBA.”
“How much?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Cars?”
“He has a Volvo that’s five years old. I think it’s paid off.”
“But you’re not certain?”
“I’m pretty sure it is.”
“Credit-card debt?”
“No.”
“Where do you do your banking?”
“That’s not pertinent,” Maggie said.
“Do you have any debt?” Andi asked.
Maggie held up a hand. “Her financial status is not in question here. Not in any way. I’m going to advise her not to answer that.”
“It’s okay-” I said.
Maggie looked at me pointedly and shook her head, then turned back to Andi. “I’m going to advise her not to answer any questions about her financial status. If you have other questions, fine, but let’s move on.”
Andi regarded me.
“I have a small student loan,” I said quickly, before Maggie could stop me. I knew that she was thinking it was an invasion of my privacy, a completely unnecessary one, to answer questions about my finances, but I didn’t care. I had nothing to hide. “And I’ve got three grand to pay off on my credit cards,” I continued. “I got in a little trouble with a store on Damen that won’t stop selling me clothes.”
“Did Sam ever talk to you about Panama?”
“No. We talked about a few places in South America when we were planning the honeymoon, but we never discussed Panama. I don’t know anything about it.”
“An interesting country,” Andi said. I got the feeling she knew more about Panama than from just working on Sam’s case. “They’ve made it very attractive for expatriates to buy there. Affordable luxury housing, low taxes on all levels.”
“Explain something to me,” I said. “How is it possible that someone can just take possession of your luxury property and sell it? I mean, that’s what you’re accusing Sam of, right?”
“We’re not accusing anyone of anything right now.”
“Fine, but how does this Panamanian-property thing work? Are people just snatching people’s shares and running around selling them?”
Andi shook her head. “It’s not as simplistic as it seems. Many people there buy property like we do here, with a title that’s transferred to the buyer’s name.”
“But it’s different if a corporation owns the property?”
“Right.” She paused. “You’re a lawyer, you know how it goes.”
“I’m an entertainment lawyer. If you’re a cabaret singer on the side and you want me to negotiate your recording contract, let me know. But this stuff?” I shook my head.
“Well, look, I don’t necessarily have to share this with you, but here’s how it works. If the title is in the name of a corporation, there is no transfer of title, only a transfer of shares of the corporation.”
“So whoever has the shares can sell the corporation and essentially the property.”
Andi nodded. “The buyer can then keep the same officers of the corporation or appoint new ones.”
“Aren’t there safeguards against the wrong people selling the shares?”
“If you can provide legal documentation that you own the corporation, and not someone else, you can put a lien on the property, eventually have your shares reissued and the others voided, but that takes time. So if the person who has the shares acts quickly, they can essentially do what they want with them.”
“But there’s no evidence at this point that Sam has sold the shares, right?”
“I can’t really say.” Andi eyed Maggie, then me. “We’re just trying to figure out why your fiancé would steal the shares. Do you have any answers for us?”
“I don’t.”
Andi pulled her pad of paper closer to her. “We’d like to compile a list of the people Sam was closest to. People he would turn to if he needed help.”
“He would turn to me,” I said without thinking.
There was silence in the room. Obviously, I was wrong about that.
“R.T.,” I said. “R. T. Rubinoff. They’re friends from MBA school at U of C. But he says he hasn’t heard from Sam.”
“Who else?”
I mentioned Tom and Don, Sam’s rugby friends.
“Tom’s last name?” Andi asked.
“Uh…” I could see Tom’s ruddy face. Over beers one night, I’d talked to him about his mom who’d recently passed away. But what was his last name? Sam had been handling the gathering of names and addresses for the wedding invitations, and so I had never really asked.
“Don’s last name?” Andi said.
“I can’t say. Cavanaugh or something like that?”
She gave me a face, one that was expressionless, at least to the observer, but I knew there was something different behind it. Her face turned back to her notes.
“If there’s nothing else…” Maggie checked her watch.
“Look,” I said. “Can you tell me what you know? About Sam being gone or about Forester’s death?”
“I’ve already told you what I know about the Panamanian shares.” She paused.
I inched forward in the seat of my chair so that I was now a foot closer to her. “Do you know something else?”
“I’m sorry…”
My eyes bored into hers. “If you know anything else. Anything.”
She shook her head. “Ms. McNeil, seriously, I don’t know anything more than you do at this point. We’re at the very early stages of our investigation. And we’re doing everything we normally do at the beginning of an investigation.” She put the top back on her pen.
Silence in the room.
Finally, Andi exhaled loudly. “Look, I will say something. Sam sounds like an okay guy. At least what you know of him sounds great, right? But from what we can tell, he’s stolen a heck of a lot of money. And when we see that, it tells us that Sam is probably involved in some bad stuff. Or mixed up with some bad people.”
“Like who?” I said incredulously.
“We don’t know at this point. But I’ve seen this kind of thing before. Too many times. And the wives and the mothers are the worst. They can never believe something bad about the guy. And they’re always the ones who pay the most. Then there’s the fact that an investigation like this, and any resulting litigation, will take years and years to complete. So seriously…” She nodded fast like she was very certain about what she was saying. “If I were you, Ms. McNeil-” more nodding “-I’d move on with my life.”
We stepped outside the FBI building. Across the street, a gray Honda sat at a light. The light turned green, but the car didn’t move. Maggie stood, staring at it. “That car,” she said.
As if it had heard her, the Honda finally hit the gas and sped through the light.
The minute we got into a cab, Maggie turned to me. “Have you noticed anything…well, off the last few days?”
“Aside from the fact that my fiancé is MIA with a small fortune and people think he might have killed Forester?”
She looked at me intently. “Right. Aside from that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Something Lippman said in there about ‘we’re doing everything we normally do at the beginning of an investigation.’ What they normally do is tail a person when they believe a suspect might contact them.”
I told her about the garage and my paranoia last night.
“Yep.” Maggie nodded. “That’s probably the feds.”
“Are you serious? I’m being followed?” Oddly, I felt momentary relief. My mind wasn’t slipping into some suspiciously obsessive realm.
“Sure,” Maggie said. “Best way to find a fugitive is to watch the wife or girlfriend.”
I flinched at the thought of Sam as a “fugitive.” “Don’t they have to tell me?”
“God, no. They can tail you to their heart’s content. The only thing they have to let you know is if they tap your phone. And, even then, they don’t have to tell you until they’re done. Later, you might be entitled to see the logs under the Freedom of Information Act. But now? During a new investigation? Nah. They get to look wherever they want for Sam.”
“So what should I do?”
“Don’t dance in front of your window in your underwear.”
“There’s nothing I can do?”
“Not really.”
I stared out the window as the cab entered the Loop and drove down Franklin Avenue. I dropped Maggie off and kept going toward my office. This is baloney, I said to myself. Bullshit, actually. I wasn’t just going to “move on” the way Andi Lippman had said; I had to do something, but what?
I didn’t know the answer to that, but I knew someone who might be able to help me.
When the cabdriver pulled over to the curb in front of my building, I leaned forward. “Keep driving, please.”
21
Whenever I need a sharp slap in the face or swift boot in the teeth, I go in search of Bunny Loveland.
Bunny was the housekeeper my mother hired when we first moved to Chicago following my dad’s death. When we’d lived in Michigan, no one we knew employed a cleaning lady or any household staff. You scrubbed your own toilets. And if you needed someone to watch your kids while you ran an errand, you called the neighbors, who said, Sure, we’ll stop over and check on them every so often. But in Chicago, it was different. My mother was a single mom, a working single mom. She needed someone to keep the apartment reasonably germ-free and to be at the house if she worked late.
When she heard the name Bunny Loveland my mom must have thought she’d hit it big. Surely this woman was an affectionate grandmother type. She certainly looked the part-gray polyester pants with the built-in seam and once-a-week beauty-shop hair that lay in rounded, steel-gray rows. Alas, Bunny wasn’t what my mother was hoping for. I’m not sure my mother even truly interviewed Bunny, because a quick conversation with the woman would have made it obvious that she was a cranky, mean-spirited person who cracked a smile only when she saw a Polish sausage from Vienna Beef.
Bunny came to our house twice a week from the time I was eight until I was a sophomore in high school. She brought groceries, mopped our floors and eyed my brother and me with a wariness that said, I know you little motherfuckers are up to something. Knock it off.
For the most part, Charlie and I stayed out of her way. Yet, as the years went on, Bunny started to toss out her opinions. They never came when you wanted to hear them, and they were always harsh, but you were glad for them when you recovered from the punchlike trauma.
I remember being eleven years old and tortured with the early advent of puberty. Something bizarre was going on with my body. It wasn’t the boobs-I wouldn’t get those until late, a surprise arrival senior year-it was simply that something seemed to be cooking inside me, boiling over, making me hot, making my red hair curl in sweaty ringlets around my face.
Bunny glanced over at me one spring afternoon and seemed to really see me for the first time in months. She frowned deeply, the motion making the thin skin around her mouth hang in folds. She crossed the room in a flash and grabbed my shoulder with a tight grip.
“Bunny! What…” I said, trying to squirm away from her.
“Come here.” She tightened her grip until it cut into my skin, pulling me closer. She leaned down and sniffed. “You smell ripe, girl.”
I froze, hoping this was all a mortifying, horrifying, terrifying dream.
“Has your mother bought you anything for that?”
“For what?”
She sighed-the same sigh that Moses must have made when he pondered the pickle of the Red Sea. “Watch your brother.”
She grabbed her keys and left the apartment. She returned twenty minutes later with a brown paper bag. She took out a blue tube that read Secret on the side. “Put this under your arms before you get dressed,” she said, plunking it down on the counter. “Every morning. Got it?”
We stared at each other. I knew she wasn’t steering me wrong. “Sure, got it.”
I quickly learned that when Bunny said something, she was rarely incorrect. And at the very least she was always atrociously honest, which was exactly what I needed now with Sam gone and no clue what, in my life, was worthy of belief.
Bunny was in her late seventies now and had only stopped cleaning houses a few years prior when a number of deaths in her distant family resulted in one cousin’s money being left solely to her. She still lived on Schubert Avenue in the place she’d bought in the sixties with her first (and only) husband, and which she had kept in the divorce a few years later.
I stood in front of the house now. It was a squat, old, brown cottage, overgrown with trees and surrounded by soaring brick brownstones, all built within the last ten years. Bunny had been offered loads of money to sell her place to developers who would raze her outdated shack. She could move to a bigger and better house with that kind of money, they told her. And she told them to shove it. I was sure her neighbors gritted their teeth every time they looked at the straggly bushes at the perimeter of the property and the little windmill outside Bunny’s front door.
I knocked. I hadn’t called, but I knew she’d be home. Bunny rarely left the place these days.
She opened the door, the smell of vinegar (her favorite cleaning solvent) wafting from behind her. She looked much the same as she had years ago-same hair, although it was white now; same grim set to her mouth.
“What are you doing here?” she asked by way of a greeting.
“Great to see you, too.” I kissed her on the cheek, and she quickly wiped at it with the back of her hand.
The front room of Bunny’s house was a sitting room decorated with sixties furniture-curved leather couches and mod coffee tables, stuff she and the husband had purchased way back when. For years, it was painfully dated, but now that retro was hot again, the room made Bunny seem like an elderly woman with extremely hip tastes. The Chicago Trib lay in sections on the table next to a cup of coffee.
Bunny nodded at the table. “Want some coffee or tea?”
“Sure.”
“It’s in the kitchen.” She sat down on the couch.
When I was back with a cup of tea, Bunny put down the paper and stared at me with a frown, waiting.
“It’s Sam,” I said.
The corners of her mouth lifted for the briefest second before dropping again. “I like that boy.”
This was true-I’d brought Sam around a few times and Bunny had taken to him like she didn’t to most people. He didn’t try to butter her up, and he shared her love of hot dogs and Polish sausage, and the two of them could go head-to-head for hours, debating Sugerdawg vs. Vienna Beef vs. Nathan’s vs. Portillo’s vs. Red Hot.
“Sam seems to have taken off,” I told Bunny. I told her what I knew.
Bunny’s gaze moved away from mine toward the light coming through her front window. She stared out, looking almost wistful in a way I’d never seen before. “I miss having a man around.”
I held my breath. Never, ever, ever had I heard such a sentiment from Bunny’s mouth, and I would have bet my favorite True Religion jeans that I never would.
“Bart was a shithead,” Bunny continued, still staring out the window. “I’m glad I divorced him. But it sure is nice to have someone to spend your life with.” She turned and met my eyes. “Sam was pretty special.”
“He is.” I shrugged. “Who knows, maybe he’s a pretty special con man.”
“You believe that?”
“No.”
“I don’t believe it either,” Bunny said. “So what are you doing about it?”
“I tried asking the cops and the feds, but they don’t know anything more than I do. I called this detective I know, but it doesn’t seem like he’s able to help me.”
She scoffed. “So try harder, Izzy. You’re no stranger to getting your hands dirty. Do it.”
“How?”
Her eyes narrowed with annoyance. “I don’t know.”
“But what if Sam is a thief? What if he stole Forester’s money?”
“Then when you find him, you can cut his little pecker off.”
“It’s not little, actually,” I said before I could stop myself. I slapped my hand over my mouth. “Sorry.”
