Eyes of the Innocent: A Mystery (28 page)

I typed “13 Hanover Street” into her nav system, which had a male voice—Nancy, wherefore art thou, Nancy—and the address turned out to be a short distance away. As we drove into the Ironbound and began snaking through its tight streets, I filled the time telling Tina about some of my previous day’s discoveries, from my chat with Detective Raines to my meeting with Rhonda Byers to the realization, thanks to Akilah’s sister, that Mrs. Byers probably wasn’t our black-hatted villain after all.

And then we pulled up to Donato Semedo’s residence—or what was supposed to be his residence, anyway. But it wasn’t. Not unless he lived on the third baseline: 13 Hanover Street was a small neighborhood softball field.

Not that it was any great surprise. If you were planning to dump a body in a rental car, you probably weren’t going to give your real information.

“Are you sure you remembered the address right?” Tina asked.

“Yeah, definitely. It was Dan Marino and Dartmouth College,” I said.

“Come again?”

“Dan Marino was a football player who wore number 13. Dartmouth College is located in Hanover, New Hampshire. That was my mnemonic.”

“Oh, of course,” she said sarcastically. “So what now, Dan Marino?”

I leaned on my palm and looked out at the empty softball field, then said, “I wish I knew.”

*   *   *

Tina declared she was needed back at the office, which seemed like a fine place for me to be, at least until I figured out something better.

As we drove toward the newsroom, we artfully avoided the conversation—or, rather, The Conversation—we needed to have about our future and plotted strategy on Windy Byers instead.

“Why don’t you type up the stuff you got this morning and we’ll put it online,” she concluded as we got off the elevator. “No sense in saving it for tomorrow’s paper—the whole world might have it by then.”

“No problem,” I said, and we went our separate ways.

As soon as I walked into the newsroom, I saw Sweet Thang and noticed she was putting great effort into not looking at me. It was a rather dismal performance. Her desk naturally pointed her in the direction of mine, so she had to turn her body away at a strange angle to avoid facing me.

I decided to spare her the agony. She had too many months left on her internship to sit that way the whole time. It would be bad ergonomics. So I went over to the chair next to her and noisily lowered myself into it. She started blushing the moment I sat down, even though she was still pretending to give all her concentration to the morning paper.

“Hello,” I said, finally.

“Oh, hi,” she said, lifting her face a little bit toward me but still not meeting my eye. “I didn’t even see you come in.”

Up close, she looked even more pathetic. Her hair was still a little wet, making her blond curls droop. Her shoulders were slumped and she wasn’t sticking out her chest like she normally did. She was wearing pants, which was unusual—Sweet Thang was more of a skirts and dresses kind of gal—and a bulky sweater. There may have even been a sports bra underneath.

More than anything, she came across as embarrassed, like she had been scolded. And I was a little surprised to discover my primary thought toward her, which used to involve things you only see late at night on Cinemax, was now something more like pity. Or maybe it was just concern. I wanted to protect her.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Ohimjustfinethankyou,” she said, a little too quickly.

“Come on, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Lauren,” I said, and when I used her real name, she made eye contact for the first time. “It’s okay. Whatever happened last night, it’s fine by me. It was maybe going to be something, but it wasn’t. It’s not a big deal.”

“You’re not … mad at me?” she asked, gazing up at me with what the romance writers would call imploring blue eyes.

“Mad at you? No.”

“Not at all?”

“Not at all.”

“Good!” she said buoyantly. “I have a present for you.”

“You do?”

“Two, actually!”

“I can’t wait.”

“The first is, I couldn’t sleep last night, and I felt bad you never got to taste the banana bread I made for Bertie. So I made you some. I used buttermilk. I hope that’s okay.”

She reached into her bag and extracted a Saran-wrapped loaf so large she needed two hands to grip it.

“Oh,” I said, surprised more than anything.

“Don’t worry. This isn’t bread with strings attached. It’s just friendship bread,” she added.

“Right. Friendship bread. Thank you.”

“The second gift,” she said, reaching into her bag and pulling out a stapled document, “is this.”

She handed it to me. My eyes scanned the first page, which I immediately recognized as a mortgage—mostly because the word
MORTGAGE
was written at the top.

“Chuck called me this morning,” she said proudly. “He found it in a filing cabinet last night. I went over to the courthouse on my way in and got it from him.”

“Great work,” I said, glancing up at her to see a proud smile form on her lips.

I turned my attention back to the document. The mortgagee was, of course, Wendell A. Byers Jr. The mortgagor was a bank from Indianapolis. The mortgage amount was $324,000. But it was when I got to the part about the interest rate that things got, well, interesting.

The rate was a mere 3.15 percent. I went to an online mortgage calculator, which told me that made the monthly payment about $1,400. That, plus an escrow payment—call it $500 for property tax and $100 for homeowners insurance—brought the total payment to $2,000.

It was a sweetheart deal. And I would imagine Windy, who was paid $80,000 a year as a Newark councilman, plus whatever work he could boondoggle on the side, could swing $2,000 a month.

But as I read further, I saw it didn’t last. The initial rate was just for thirty-six months. For the remaining 324 months, I had to refer to something called the “adjustable rate rider,” which was attached hereto in Exhibit B.

Lawyers always make things so clear.

I turned to the back of the document, where Exhibit B told me that the rate was “LIBOR plus 8.99 percent.” Like I said, clear as mud.

“Do you know what LIBOR is?” I asked Sweet Thang, who did not attempt an answer.

“Do me a favor,” I said. “Go over to Buster Hays and ask him. He’s the kind of guy who knows this sort of thing. But don’t tell him I’m the one who wants to know. He’ll give you a hard time.”

Sweet Thang went over to Buster who, as one of the legions of older men enamored of her youthful beauty, was all too happy to help. They had a brief conversation—Buster was lit up like Christmas Eve the entire time, the horny old goat—and Sweet Thang returned.

“It stands for London Interbank Offered Rate,” she said.

“That really doesn’t help me.”

“It’s an index,” she explained. “It has something to do with an average of a bunch of things and I guess it’s something bankers worry about a lot.”

“Okay. So LIBOR plus 8.99 means … what?”

“Well, he said the LIBOR fluctuates, but lately it’s been below two percent,” she said.

That meant once the introductory rate on Akilah’s house expired, the new interest rate would reset to somewhere around 11 percent. I turned to my mortgage calculator and typed in the new number. The monthly payment was now more than $3,000—more like $3,600 with the escrow factored in.

I went back to the beginning of the mortgage and looked at the dates. The reset, I realized, had happened December 1.

Windy Byers’s booty call had just gotten a lot more expensive.

*   *   *

It was the great Nora Ephron, penning lines for the Carrie Fisher character in
When Harry Met Sally,
who observed that everyone thinks they have good taste and a sense of humor—and not everyone could possibly have good taste and a sense of humor.

The same could be said in the sad-but-familiar case of Wendell A. Byers. Everyone thinks they’re smart enough not to get swindled in real estate deals—and, clearly, not everyone is. Certainly not Windy Byers.

It turns out that the all-powerful councilman was not much different from so many other Americans at the peak of the subprime boom: he allowed himself to be sold an overpriced house with a bad loan, and then, when the financial feces hit the fan, he got stuck with it.

I laughed.

“What’s so funny?” Sweet Thang asked.

“Windy Byers,” I said. “Getting suckered by a teaser rate, then panicking when it runs out. I guess keeping a woman on the side suddenly wasn’t as fiscally sound, so he told her to take a hike.”

“Do you think that’s what happened?”

“Well, only two people know for sure, and one of them is now a corpse stinking up a rental car,” I said.

“And the other…” Sweet Thang began.

“… is Akilah Harris,” I finished. “Think you can find her?”

Sweet Thang looked down at the desk.

“But where do I—” she began whining, and I cut her off.

“Let me rephrase: you have to find her. You’ve got her cell number. She slept in your apartment two nights ago. You’re best friends with her mom. You’re pretty tight with her sister, too. If anyone can locate this girl, it’s you. I know you can do it.”

“You really believe in me?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

She grabbed a notepad off her desk, stood up, stuck her chest out like the proud young woman she was, and walked out of the newsroom—leaving me alone with a massive loaf of banana bread.

I walked to the break room, grabbed a plastic knife and paper plate, and sawed off a nice slice of mid-morning snack. I took it back to my desk but had barely gotten the first bite in my mouth when Tina was standing in front of me, scowling at what remained of the loaf.

“What the hell is this?” she demanded.

“It’s … it’s friendship bread,” I said meekly.

“And what the hell is that?”

“I don’t know. That’s what Sweet Thang called it.”

“
Friendship bread?
That little sorority girl is giving you something called
friendship bread
?”

“I suppose some would call it banana bread. Would you like some?”

“All that refined sugar and bleached flour?” Tina mocked. “I think not.”

“Come on. Bananas have potassium. And there are nuts, too—think of all the protein.”

Tina narrowed her eyes at me further. I felt like she was reading the bottom line of an eye chart that was printed on the inside of my skull.

“You were with her last night, weren’t you?” she said at last. “That’s why you couldn’t make our dinner.”

“No,” I said, unconvincingly.

Lips pursed, Tina stared me down.

“I told you, I got caught in traffic,” I said. And strictly as a matter of fact, that was true: at the time our date was canceled, I was caught in traffic.

“I know when you’re lying,” she said, in a low, scary voice that suggested demonic possession had just occurred.

“I’m aware of that. And it terrifies me.”

“And you want to tell me you weren’t with Sweet Thang last night.”

“I never said that.”

“Aha!” she shouted, like the courtroom lawyer who had just scored a major point on cross-examination.

“I was with Sweet Thang at an interview, then got caught in traffic on the Garden State Parkway on my way to see you,” I said, which was all true. I just didn’t feel like it was the right moment to add: then I nearly deflowered the girl and only stopped short when I was tripped by my conscience while rounding third base.

“All I’m going to say is: beware of women who bake for you,” she said, and stalked off.

Nearby, Buster Hayes rose from his chair and made a whipping sound as he walked away.

“Oh, what?” I said, but he had already made his point.

I turned to my computer and began my search for the mysterious Donato Semedo. One bogus address aside, I didn’t expect finding him would be difficult. For a reporter who knows his way around public information databases, people with unusual names are a treat. The Robert Johnsons of the world can kill you, but give me a Donato Semedo and I’ll be able to tell you whether he wears boxers or briefs within a few keystrokes.

Except, as it turns out, for this particular Donato Semedo.

He didn’t vote. He didn’t get speeding tickets. He didn’t own property. He didn’t have a credit card. He didn’t have liens against him. He never declared bankruptcy. He wasn’t a registered sex offender. He didn’t have a criminal record. He never served time in a state or federal prison. He was not a public employee or retiree in the state of New Jersey. He was not licensed to provide medical care, dental care, massage therapy, or child care.

Half an hour in, I was starting to give up hope and run out of databases. Then I remembered one more, a database of last resort in more ways than one: the Social Security Death Index.

Sure enough, I found Donato Semedo. Born January 27, 1917. Died July 8, 1987. Last residence: Newark, New Jersey. Card issued: New Jersey. He was probably some nice old Portuguese man who doddered around the Ironbound without bothering a soul, then had his identity stolen once he departed this mortal coil.

The question—who was Donato Semedo?—ceased to matter. It was now: Who was pretending to be Donato Semedo?

*   *   *

As I leaned back to ponder that question, I became aware my friendship bread was under attack.

“I’m starving,” Tommy said as he hacked off a piece with my plastic knife. “Do you mind?”

“Not at all,” I said. “I thought you were babysitting the New York press corps.”

“I was. Buster Hays took over for me,” Tommy said, carefully transferring a slender slice to his plate. “He said a scene like that was no place for a little girl like me.”

Tommy lifted the bread to his mouth, then paused. “I swear, one day I’m going to stick my foot up his ass so far he’s going to be able to taste my Tod’s.”

“Tod’s … those must be … shoes?”

“You are so straight it hurts,” he said as he chewed. “Oh, my God, this is so good! Who made it?”

“Sweet Thang.”

Tommy stopped mid-chew. “You know you have to be careful of women who bake for you,” he said. “They’re all crazy.”