Need You Now (5 page)

“Singapore Mall,” I said.

“What?”

“That’s where I’ve seen that guy before. It was one of our first dates. I was taking your picture in front of the fountain at Singapore Mall, and he’s the guy who came up and offered to snap one of the two of us.”

“Patrick, that was months ago and on the other side of the world.”

I jumped from the table, ran out the door, and stopped cold on the sidewalk. I looked left, then right. Parked cars lined the street, a delivery truck passed, and an old woman was scooping her poodle’s droppings into a plastic bag. I had no idea which way to go. I stood frozen, not sure what to do. There was no sign of the man in the bar, and as the moments passed, I became less and less sure that I’d actually seen him before in Singapore or anywhere else.

You’re getting a little crazy.

I went inside and returned to my seat at the table.

“What the hell was that about?” asked Lilly.

“Sorry, I—I just had this strange feeling that we were being watched.”

She looked at me with concern. “Welcome to my world. The paranoia will take over if you let it. You need to get a grip. This is important. Please listen to what I’m telling you.”

“I’m sorry, but I actually have been listening. You said the guy who killed Gerry Collins was Tony Martin.”

“That’s my point. His name is not Tony Martin. It turns out his
real
name is Tony Mandretti.”

“Who is Tony Mandretti?”

The waitress returned. Either she’d read my mind, or Lilly had ordered a shot of tequila for each of us while I was chasing after nothing.

But why would he order a beer and not drink it?

“Now there’s a really good question,” said Lilly. “Who
is
Tony Mandretti?”

She leaned over her brimming shot glass, and I saw a distinct sparkle of excitement in her eye. “This is where things really get interesting.”

6

N
ight fell
as we left Puffy’s Tavern.

Our bar talk had drifted well away from Ponzi
schemes and bank secrecy, and I lost count of the empty shot glasses. Tequila
had been known to loosen my tongue, and regrettably I found myself confessing
that thoughts of Lilly had crossed my mind whenever I heard Lady Antebellum
singing “Need You Now.” This she found even more hilarious than bird shit on my
head. There’s a line in the song about being a little drunk, and we definitely
were, so we sang our own rendition on the way back to my place, adjusting for
the fact that we didn’t really care what time it was:

. . .
a quarter
after something / I’m out of milk / and I need your cow.

Okay, so we were more than a little drunk.

My apartment was on the third floor. After several
stabs at the keyhole, I managed to unlock the door and get us inside. It
occurred to me that the first woman to visit my New York apartment was the same
woman who had dumped me in Singapore, but there was no time to appreciate the
irony. It took longer to find the light switch than to end up in the loft,
though the decision wasn’t completely without discussion.

“Should we do this?”

“Yes.”

“You make a very persuasive argument.”

Knew I shouldn’t call / but
I’ve lost all my clothes / and I need your towel.

The rest was a blur, which was a shame. I’d
experienced “make-up sex,” before, but this was better than make-up sex, since I
wasn’t just mad at Lilly; I had actually lost her. That put us in the realm of
reunion
sex, a rare combination of the
excitement of a first-time lover with the joy being with someone who knows
exactly what you like. This was one of life’s greatest pleasures—and I was
bumbling my way through it on too much tequila. Suffice it to say that it wasn’t
our best performance—far short of our Chinese
Sound of
Music
watershed—but Lilly fell asleep in my arms, and all was
well.

For an hour or so, anyway.

The pain in my neck—literally—woke me. I sat up in
bed and gave the burning sensation a minute to subside. Lilly was sleeping
soundly, and it was nice to see the curve of her body beneath the bedsheet
beside me. Morning couldn’t possibly have come so soon, and a check of the clock
confirmed that the night was still young: 8:38
P.M.
I quietly rolled out of bed, took a quick shower, and went to
the dresser. We’d left a lamp burning downstairs, and it provided just enough of
a glow for me to move around the loft without stubbing a toe. My overnight
suitcase was packed when Lilly finally stirred.

“Wow,” she said as she rose up on her elbow. “I’ve
heard of guys dashing off after sex, but I must be the first girl in New York to
send a man running from his own apartment.”

I went to her side of the bed and sat on the edge
of the mattress. “I was supposed to be on a seven o’clock flight out of
LaGuardia. If I hurry I can catch a later one.”

“Do you really have to go?”

I nodded. “It’s just for a day. I’ll be back
tomorrow night.”

“How will I reach you? Your phone’s in the
garbage.”

“I still have my BlackBerry,” I said. Everyone on
my team had both an iPhone and a BlackBerry, as the head of BOS security had
laid down the law that a bank-issued BlackBerry was the only way to access the
bank’s e-mail system.

“I guess I’ll be okay,” she said.

Even in the dim light, I could see the concern on
her face. She’d spent the previous three nights in a hotel on Eighth Avenue, and
I sensed that she didn’t want to go back. “You can stay here, if you want.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, this is a very secure building. You’ll feel
safer.”

“Safe is good. Apart from that . . . are
you sure?”

She was giving me an out, but after what had
happened to me that afternoon, it would have taken a total jerk to say,
On second thought, go sleep in your hotel room and see if
anyone comes knocking in the middle of the night.

“Yes, I’m sure.”

She kissed me and smiled. “I’ll go over to the
hotel in the morning and check out. I only have one suitcase, so don’t worry
about me taking over your closet.”

My mouth opened, but no words came. “Uhhhh,” was
all I could say. My invitation had been for tonight only. Although I wasn’t dead
set against her staying longer, there was still too much left unsaid between us
to know where we were headed.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I think my head is starting to
throb from all that tequila.”

“I hope it doesn’t explode on the airplane.”

“What airplane?”

“The one you’re trying to catch.”

“Right. That one. I’d better get going.”

She pulled me toward her, looking me in the eye.
“It’s true what I told you at Puffy’s,” she said. “When I found out I was under
investigation for helping Cushman hide his money, my biggest fear was that
they’d lock me up in a third-world jail and throw away the key before I was even
charged with a crime. I had to get out of Singapore.”

“I understand.”

“What I’m trying to say is that I couldn’t stay in
Singapore. But I didn’t have to come to New York.” She blinked twice, as if to
underscore, in a tender way, what she was telling me. “Now I’m glad I did.”

I was tempted to climb right back into bed with
her. “Me, too,” I said.

We kissed good-bye, and I slipped away. I grabbed
my overnight bag, gave Lilly one last look, and went downstairs. My coat was on
a hook in the foyer, along with an extra key to the apartment.

“Lilly,” I said in a voice loud enough to carry
upstairs, “there’s an extra key right by the—”

“I saw it,” she called out.

You did?

“Hurry back,” she said.

I made sure the door was locked when I left. My
thoughts and emotions swirled as I headed down the hall to the elevator. I was
glad to have Lilly back, and it was good that she’d filled in some of the
biggest blanks for me at Puffy’s. At that particular moment, however, I was
mostly relieved that Lilly hadn’t asked too many questions about my trip.

That 7:00
P.M.
business flight had been a complete fabrication, and I wasn’t on my way to
LaGuardia. I hated lying to Lilly, and if she’d pressed for details, I would
have been forced to come up with an even bigger one.

No way could I have told her that I was going to
see Tony Mandretti.

7

J
oe Barber watched the eleven o’clock financial report from bed. Even with the volume blasting, he could barely hear the television over the noise of his wife pounding the treadmill.

She’d been fitness crazed since her fortieth birthday, but the late-night routine hadn’t begun until after her husband’s first infidelity. It was the same drill every day: start drinking at noon, go to bed at ten, lie awake calculating the staggering number of calories in a bottle of Chardonnay, freak out, jump on the treadmill, and punish her body until midnight. Of course their seven-bedroom estate in Greenwich had an exercise room, but after three years in Washington, Vanessa was still getting reacquainted with her old house. Their first night back, Vanessa had been so drunk that she’d fallen down the stairs. It was a miracle that she hadn’t broken her neck. Moving the treadmill into the master suite was easier than caring for a quadriplegic wife, even if he did have to stomach the nauseating smell of alcohol exuding from her pores every night.

“Joe, that’s your new bank they’re talking about!”

Barber raised the volume. A further expected drop in the price of BOS stock in tomorrow’s markets was the lead story on Financial News Network. “Investors are clearly wary,” the FNN reporter stated, “seemingly unconvinced that the bank’s settlement with the Department of Justice marks the end of the assault on bank secrecy.”

“Oh, my God,” Vanessa said as she stepped off the treadmill. “I told you not to take that job.”

Barber shushed her, and the report continued: “This is just more bad news for Switzerland’s largest bank, which last quarter reported a fifty-three percent drop in earnings, due to a slowdown in its trading and investment banking businesses.”

“Damn it, Joe. You could have written your own ticket. Goldman, JPMorgan. They all wanted you. What the hell were you thinking?”

“Will you please just listen,” he said.

The telephone rang. The “news” had digressed into pointless speculation and rumor, the raison d’être of real-time financial reporting. Barber lowered the volume with the remote control and took the call. It was the general counsel of BOS/America.

“Yes, I’m watching FNN,” said Barber.

“That’s not what I’m calling about. I have an update on Patrick Lloyd.”

“Anything of interest?”

“Yeah. Patrick Lloyd is not his real name.”

Barber’s wife had reverted to treadmill mania, and the noisy machine forced him out of bed and into the bathroom, behind a closed door, where he could hear.

“What are you talking about?” he said into the phone.

“The bank’s normal prehire background check goes back to college. Everything on Patrick Lloyd checked out that far. But when I asked Corporate Security to take it back earlier, there’s nothing on this guy.”

“There’s nothing,” said Barber, “or they just couldn’t find it?”

“Swiss banks are nothing if not secure. Trust me: if it existed, our security department would have found it. The Patrick Lloyd who went to work on Wall Street simply didn’t exist before he enrolled as an undergraduate at Syracuse University.”

“Then who the hell is he?”

“We don’t know. Security has just scratched the surface.”

Barber fell silent, thinking. His general counsel asked, “Do you want me to prepare the paperwork to support his termination?”

“No,” said Barber. “We stick to the plan.”

“I still don’t agree. You know my view from this morning’s meeting: we should have fired him on the spot. Keeping him around now is playing with fire.”

“He’s a snot-nosed junior FA. Not for one minute do I believe that he and his girlfriend cooked up this kind of trouble alone. They’re working for someone. Lilly Scanlon is gone, but Patrick Lloyd—or whatever his name is—is still under my thumb. Let him run, and see who he leads us to.”

“The lack of clarity as to his true identity makes me very uncomfortable.”

“Then we’ll get some clarity.”

“I’ll instruct Corporate Security to continue looking into it.”

“Things can get really dirty when you dig deep, and I don’t want BOS fingerprints on the shovel. Let in-house security try its usual contacts, but if nothing pans out, outside security is the way to go here.”

“Do you have someone specific in mind?”

“I do.”

“Who?”

Barber returned to the bedroom. His exhausted wife had collapsed on the bed, and the treadmill was silent. The FNN assault on BOS continued, working in file footage on the “billions in bailout money” that the troubled Bank of Switzerland had received just two years earlier “in order to avert financial disaster.”

“Someone who will give the boy just enough rope to hang himself,” Barber said into the phone.

8

T
he Holland Tunnel was less than two miles from my apartment, and luckily for me there was a flight out of Newark, just on the other side of the river. I was in Raleigh/Durham in time to catch the late news coverage of the “continuing plummet of BOS stock.”

My visit to Tony Martin was all the more timely, but a decent night’s sleep had been impossible. I couldn’t stop wondering what those stock analysts would have said if they had heard rumors that BOS/Singapore was directly connected to the disappearance of billions of dollars tainted by the Cushman scheme. If they had known about my ride through Times Square with a gun to my head. If they had known what I was doing in North Carolina.

“Turn here,” I told the taxi driver.

“That’s the road to the prison.”

“That’s where I’m headed,” I said. “Central Prison Hospital.”

Tony Martin was one of the lucky ones. His plea of guilty to the charge of murder in the first degree had landed him in the custody of the Florida Department of Corrections, where he would have been treated just like any of the other 800,000 inmates nationwide who suffered from chronic illness that required regular medical attention. Two years into his sentence, when the disease progressed, strings were pulled for transfer to a facility that could better treat his cancer. Central Prison in North Carolina had a 230-bed hospital and an even bigger one under construction, and it was just minutes away from the Duke University Medical Center in Durham for more specialized treatment. It was about as good as it got for inmates who required maximum-security confinement. It was the best deal around for a seriously ill mobster who was without health insurance and had lost his entire life savings to Abe Cushman’s Ponzi scheme.

The taxi stopped at the entrance gate to the prison grounds. Directly ahead was a sprawling redbrick building that looked like a multilevel office complex, but for the guard towers, sharpshooters, and double perimeter of chain-link fence topped with razor ribbon. The corrections officer at the checkpoint was telling the cabdriver how to get to the hospital on the other side of the parking lot when my BlackBerry rang. It was Lilly.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“Atlanta.” I lied. It was getting to be a habit, and I didn’t like it. But the truth was not an option.

“You need to come back to New York.”

“I’ll be back tonight,” I said.

“Come as soon as you can. Everything’s changed.”

The guard at the gatehouse allowed my taxi to pass. I wasn’t entirely comfortable talking in a cab, but the driver was having a heated cell phone discussion about his fantasy football “mock draft”—whatever that was—and seemed sufficiently distracted. I spoke as softly as I could.

“What do you mean everything’s changed?”

“I was so sure I was right.” She was talking fast, which was what Lilly did when she got nervous. “Tony Martin was Tony Mandretti, Mandretti worked for the mob, the mob killed Collins for losing their money with Cushman, and now the mob is after me to get its money back. Now that’s all out the window, and I don’t have a clue who is trying to get back the two billion dollars that Gerry Collins funneled through me.”

The cab stopped, and my heart thumped. It was freaky the way Lilly had mentioned Mandretti’s name the moment I had arrived at Central Prison.

“Slow down, Lilly. Why is that out the window?”

“I was lying in bed, going over in my mind everything the guy in Times Square said to you. His exact words. He said: ‘It’s time to see the money. Cough it up, or you will both end up like Gerry Collins.’ ”

“Right, I remember.”

“Don’t you get it?”

I didn’t see her point at all, but even with the cabdriver trying to work out a fantasy trade for Peyton Manning, I wasn’t in a position to talk about it. Lilly was talking too fast for me to jump in anyway.

“He threatened to do the same thing to you and me that he did to Gerry Collins.
He
killed Gerry!”

“I’m not sure you can make that leap of logic,” I said.

“Yes. That’s clearly what he was saying. You have to take into account the way he said it, not just what he said.”

“I agree, but still . . . I’m not sure.”

“This is so obvious to me. If the guy who killed Gerry Collins is still out there—threatening you, threatening me—then Tony Mandretti is sitting in jail for something he didn’t do.”

“Lilly—”

“I know, I know. The man entered a guilty plea, and I understand he lost all his money to Cushman thanks to Gerry Collins. But I don’t care. Something’s not right.”

The cabdriver was off the phone. He called my attention to the meter, which was still running. “Sir, if you’re gonna sit here and talk, I gotta charge you.”

“Lilly, I need to go. I’ll be back in New York early this evening.”

“I’m scared. Maybe it’s time to go to the police.”

“You’re ignoring your own instincts,” I said, lowering my voice, my hand over my mouth to prevent the cabdriver from overhearing. “You said it yourself before: he threatened to kill us if we call the cops. It’s too soon to say he’s the same guy who killed Collins.”

“I’m going to call the police.”

“Lilly, don’t!” My tone was harsher than I’d intended—harsh enough for the driver to throw me a look in the rearview mirror.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

“I’m sorry. I have a lot on my plate today. Please, don’t do anything while I’m away. Don’t worry about going over to the hotel to check out. Just stay in the apartment until I get back.”

She didn’t answer right away. When she finally did, it was in a weak voice. “If you really think that’s the right thing.”

“I do. It’s okay. We’re going to be just fine.”

“I want us to be more than just fine.”

It was a nice sentiment, just enough to ease some of the tension. “Me, too,” I said. “I’ll call you this afternoon from the airport.”

We said good-bye, and the driver turned off the meter.

“That’ll be fifty-two fifty.”

I paid and asked him to come back in an hour for my trip to the airport. I grabbed my bag and started up the sidewalk to the visitation center, where visits to both the penitentiary and prison hospital were coordinated. The corrections officer seated on the other side of the Plexiglas divider looked up and asked, “Can I help you?”

I had to catch myself and make sure I asked to see Tony Martin, not Mandretti. The officer inspected my bag, checked my identification, and gave me a printed form to complete. My name wasn’t on the list of preapproved visitors, so there was even more paperwork. He made a phone call while I was filling it out, and he seemed a bit flummoxed after hanging up.

“Is there something wrong?” I asked.

“Have a seat, please. Someone will be out to see you in a minute.”

I went with the flow and found a chair by the vending machines. I checked my watch. Lilly had sounded completely freaked on the telephone, and I wondered how long it would take her to call again to see when I was coming back to New York. I felt guilty again for having lied to her, pretending that I didn’t know that Tony Martin was Tony Mandretti. She was so sure of her detective work on the mob connection to the Cushman money, but she was still poking at the tip of the iceberg.

I knew all about Tony Mandretti, the former New York mobster who had become Tony Martin upon entering the witness protection program. More than a decade had passed since Mandretti’s testimony against the Santucci family. It had been front-page news, though many in law enforcement had been opposed to a deal that, in their view, didn’t give Tony enough jail time. I had no firsthand knowledge, but those same critics must have seen it as poetic justice when, years later, they’d nailed him as Tony Martin for the murder of Gerry Collins. Assuming, of course, that they knew he was really Tony Mandretti. Very few in law enforcement had that information.

Outside of law enforcement, even fewer had it.

A buzzer sounded, and a man dressed in a polyester business suit entered through a secure metal door. He conveyed all the warmth of an IRS auditor. “Mr. Lloyd?”

“Yes,” I said, rising.

He introduced himself as the warden, which told me right away that something was up.

“I’ve been advised that you’re here to see inmate Tony Martin.”

“That’s right,” I said. “It was my understanding that he is hospitalized.”

The warden drew a breath. “He was.”

“Was? Is he back in his cell?”

“No. I’m sorry to have to tell you that Mr. Martin passed away last night.”

If the warden was expecting the news to upset or move me in some way, I completely let him down. Not because I was cold and indifferent to the death of a confessed killer. Not because I couldn’t believe, or wouldn’t believe, that he was dead. My reaction—or lack of it—was for a reason he couldn’t have begun to fathom.

I positively
knew
it was a lie. A complete, bald-faced lie.

I thanked the warden for his condolences, grabbed my bag, and headed for the parking lot—before he could ask how I had known Tony Martin, or why I had come to see him.