“You know you can’t have your car back, even if that piece of crap could still run,” Sleeman told McGuire. It was almost eleven o’clock. Sleeman was reviewing the statements McGuire and Susan had signed. “Not until we nail things down, couple of days maybe.”
“If you can’t put a new transmission in it, forget about giving it back,” McGuire said.
“You want me to run you guys somewhere?” Sleeman looked at McGuire. “You going back to Revere Beach?”
“We’ll take a cab,” McGuire said.
“I gotta walk you out, this time of the night. I’ll get you out the back way. We got all the media squirrels downstairs in front, waitin’ for me to come down, do my dog-and-pony show. You guys want interviews? They’ve been yellin’ for interviews.”
McGuire shook his head, and Susan said “God, no.”
Sleeman led them down the corridor towards the elevators, McGuire holding Susan’s hand as they walked. “You know one of the best parts of this?” Sleeman said. “Frankie tight-ass took a couple days off to go down to the Cape for a break. He’s the lead guy, the one who bragged that he’d bring Hayhurst in all by himself. He’ll be banging his head against the wall when he hears about this. You make the collar and you’re not even carrying a badge, and I get to make the announcement to the media squirrels.” Sleeman laughed as though he had just heard an especially rude and funny story.
“Let’s find a quiet place for coffee,” McGuire said to Susan when they were outside.
“I can’t talk now. How can I talk about me after what just happened?” Susan squeezed his hand. “I’m still shaking.”
“You’ll be shaking more later, when you have time to think about it. That’s what happens.”
They chose a rear booth in the first restaurant they encountered. Both ordered black coffee.
“Something else was bothering you back there on Berkeley Street,” McGuire said. “You kept looking around as though you were expecting to see somebody you knew.”
She nodded.
“Who? The cop who arrested you?”
“No. Somebody else.”
McGuire waited. When she didn’t speak, he reached across to touch her hand. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe you should wait for some other time to finish your story.”
She shook her head and managed a smile. “If I don’t get through it tonight, I might never get the courage to tell you again.” She looked at the clock at the front of the restaurant. “I have to be checked in by midnight. Tomorrow’s my first day without bed check. I can start looking for a place to stay.”
“I’ll help you,” McGuire said. He smiled tightly. “We’ll fill up our day. You go looking for an apartment, and I’ll start shopping for a car.”
“Doesn’t it bother you, what happened tonight?” she asked him. “You almost witness a murder, you get shot at, you nearly kill a man, and you act like . . . like some guy who’s just finished his shift driving a bus or something.”
“It’ll bother me later,” McGuire said. “When I’m alone and start thinking about it, yeah, I’ll get the shakes a little, wonder if I could have handled things differently. Right now, I want to concentrate on you. I want to hear what happened between you and Ross Myers, and how Orin Flanigan got involved. You can finish telling me about it, or you can sit there wondering how close Hayhurst’s bullet came to you. Believe me, thinking about that stuff does no good at all.” He reached across to squeeze her hand again. “Tell me about you. I want to know.”
She sipped her coffee and stared down into it as she spoke. “I had only been working at the S&L for a few weeks when Ross started pressuring me to do things, things I could never imagine myself doing.”
It began with a $20,000 check, postdated two weeks later. Someone had given him the check as an investment in his company, Myers explained. He couldn’t wait two weeks. He needed the money immediately, and he asked her to credit his account until the check could be cashed, telling her it would be covered anyway, so no one would be the wiser. She resisted that request and another, upset and disturbed that he could ask her.
A week later, he asked Susan to deposit a $30,000 check for him. Automatically, she told him she couldn’t do it, but he laughed and threw her the check and told her to look at it. It was genuine, a cashier’s check. He said there would be more like them and she could relax, everything was fine now, everything was genuine.
He broke through her resistance one Friday morning when he said another cashier’s check would be coming for the same amount on Monday, but he needed two months’ rent on the business-school office that day in order to extend the lease. A travel agency wanted the space, and if the money wasn’t in the landlord’s hands by noon, he would lose the lease and the business. All he needed was a weekend float. The money would be deposited on Monday, and everything would be fine. The business was turning around, perhaps they could sell the condo and buy a house up near Cape Ann, where she always wanted to live, where the children could visit.
She told him she didn’t know how she would do it, but even as she said the words, she knew how, had known how for several weeks, and had played with the idea in her mind. Until then it had been only a fantasy, the kind of wild dream everyone has but few ever play out in reality.
Three months earlier, the S&L had installed a new computer system. A consultant had been hired to design and implement the system, and he remained to train the staff in its operation.
The system included a new method of handling securities that Susan found confusing at first. The young man training her was patient and considerate, and he told her he would set up a hidden file in the system that she could use to practice transactions. He had done this with other installations, he assured her, and the staff appreciated it. They could perform trial transactions and balances, generate monthly statements, and locate and correct their mistakes, without any data appearing on the bank records. The hidden file could never access actual accounts, so there was no potential for theft. But it could print hard copies of statements. It would be submerged within archive files, with a password only he and Susan would know. When she was confident of the system, he would erase the file. No one would be the wiser. She would shine in the eyes of management.
It worked. During training sessions, she would make fictional deposits into the fictional account files, practicing the new procedures and routines. “You’ve got it,” he said. “Next time I’m in, I’ll erase the file and finish off the training program.”
But he never returned. He called the following week, saying he was off to Dallas to repair a major systems failure. He would return in two weeks, three at the most, to erase the file. “Or I can give you the code and you can do it for me.” She said she would do it for him, and he provided the erasure procedure. It would work only on the test file. Nothing else would be affected. She could erase it when she needed to.
The hidden file remained in place, and the morning that Ross Myers asked for the float, an elderly couple arrived to purchase a two-year term deposit of $40,000. She knew what she could do: She entered the amount in the training file and printed a receipt, telling them an official certificate would be mailed the following week. Then she deposited $30,000 of the couple’s deposit into the business-school account and called Myers to tell him the checks could be passed.
“He almost jumped through the telephone at me,” she said to McGuire. “Five minutes later he came into the branch with a dozen roses, handed them to me, and gave me a big kiss. One of the women came over and told me how lucky I was to have such a romantic boyfriend, and I remember how my stomach was tying itself into knots.”
“And the check he promised to cover the thirty thousand never appeared.”
“No.”
“And you didn’t stop there.”
“No. I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”
When no money was deposited Monday morning she called Myers from the bank, frantic with worry. A woman answered the telephone at the business school, a voice she didn’t recognize, and the woman told her Mr. Myers was busy, could he call her back? Yes, Susan said, yes, right away, it’s urgent. When she gave her name, the woman asked if Myers would know what it was about.
There was no call. That evening she drank alone in the condominium until midnight, and then fell asleep. Myers arrived home after three in the morning with a gold ring for her and a host of excuses. When she asked about the check, he said it had been delayed a week, maybe more, but he would need more money, at least $10,000 more. In a panic she told him she would go to her manager and explain what happened, and Myers told her to go ahead. It was her they’d throw in jail, not him. Besides, he promised, he would cover the amount for sure and make it all up to her, and he would take her and the children to Florida for the weekend.
She hardly slept that night. Myers was right. There was no evidence of his involvement. If she admitted what happened, she would at least lose her job and the respect of the people she worked with, people she had grown close to. Except for her children, they were her only friends and family now. She worried as well about the elderly couple whose money she had diverted to Myers. She assumed the bank would return it, if she were to be found out. But she still felt guilty about deceiving them.
One step at a time, she told herself. She would find a way to cover their money from some other source. She would set a deadline for Myers to make up the money. She would get out of this mess somehow, and then she would get out of the relationship with Myers. She would not go to jail. She would not let her children see their mother as a criminal.
The next day, when she arrived at work, the branch manager called her into his office. She entered trembling, and at the sight of three men she had never seen before she almost collapsed with fright, until one of them smiled and stepped forward, his hand thrust out to shake hers. Another pulled out a plaque identifying her as Employee of the Month. Along with their congratulations they gave her a $100 gift certificate from Filene’s.
The nightmare had begun.
She transferred $30,000 from a corporate account to cover the elderly couple’s needs. But Myers needed more money, enough to free up some accounts receivable, he told her. Soon, he would be able to pay it all back. The next month she transferred another $30,000 to the business-school account, diverting funds meant for term deposits and issuing false certificates from the hidden training files. When enough cash became available from other depositors, she would issue real certificates, falsifying the date where necessary. Each morning she entered the S&L offices expecting to be confronted by bank officials or the police, and each day she told herself Myers would fulfill his promise to replace the money.
“I became numb,” she said. “When you get so frightened, when you feel so beaten down, you become like a sleepwalker sometimes. That’s how I started acting. Sometimes I just didn’t care. Sometimes I almost wanted them to catch me, just to make it stop.”
She was seeing less and less of him. He was spending more time in Florida, where he boasted of joining an exclusive club in Palm Beach and purchasing a condominium in Fort Lauderdale. He owned three racehorses, and shares in two others. He kept a car in Florida and leased another in Boston, telling her he was opening a second business school near Miami, and soon they would be living there year-round. He bought her jewelry, diamonds, watches, and fur coats, telling her they were purchased with gambling profits. He assigned the management of the Back Bay Business School to a woman with bleached hair and breasts that sat unnaturally high and firm on her chest, a woman who, the few times Susan met her, regarded her with something between amusement and contempt.
One day in early summer, when the children were due to stay with her for a week, Myers announced he wanted to take them to Florida for a few days. She was frightened and resisted, but the children begged her, they wanted to visit Disney World again as Uncle Ross promised. Myers was adamant, he had already made arrangements. She could fly down and join them for the weekend. He had always been gentle to the children, as he could be gentle and loving with her on occasion, and she finally relented.
The next day she called the condominium number, but there was no answer until the evening, when Ross answered and said everything was fine. He and the children had spent the day at the beach, and were having a wonderful time, and he would call her the following day. When he didn’t, she rang several times, again with no answer, until he called her at work and told her, his voice changed and a hint of desperation in it, that he needed $50,000 and he needed it now, so she should have the money wired to Florida the following day.
She told him it was impossible. She was worried that someone could be overhearing their conversation. He became angry with her, cursed her, told her she had better start doing what she was told, that she would regret defying him. When he hung up she was shaking and crying, and she retreated to the washroom, where a teller came to tell her some man wanted to speak to her on the phone.
The man did not identify himself. He spoke softly, with a deep voice and a vaguely foreign accent. He told her to just do what Myers wanted and everything would be all right. When she protested, he said there would be a good chance, a very good chance, that her children would not be returning from Florida until it was done. She canceled the paperwork on several large term deposits that day, issued fake receipts from the training file, and transferred the money to Ross’s account.
When he returned with the children two days later, he brought her gifts, but the children were changed somehow, a little distant to her, and she told herself she had to find a way to end this nightmare. She began to cut herself off from her children, because she was afraid Myers would use them again, and because she couldn’t bear their innocence, their trust in her and love for her, when she knew what she was and what she was doing.
Myers’s demands for money intensified. Once, when she told him she couldn’t go on, he pulled her out of the S&L office and slapped her face until a passerby told him to stop. In the condominium he would beat her, leaving bruises on her arms and neck, and she would try to explain them away to concerned co-workers, saying she had been playing touch football with her son and had fallen several times, or that she had been hit with a tennis ball. He balanced the beatings with apologies and promises that he would soon be able to pay all the money back, promises that he had deals under way.
She attempted suicide, swallowing massive quantities of prescribed tranquilizers and waking alone the next day, terribly sick and even more severely depressed.
By the end of the summer, Myers was spending almost all of his time in Florida, and Susan was being treated for symptoms of extreme stress, mixing tranquilizers with alcohol, drinking and crying alone in the Marlborough townhouse, wanting someone to rescue her and desperately afraid of spending years in prison, as Myers had promised she would if she were caught.
She endured two surprise audits of the S&L, telling herself each time that this was when she would be caught. But she and the computer programmer had both done their jobs well, and she received another Employee of the Month award, cited for the constant flow of compliments sent her way by customers.
One evening at the townhouse, she received a telephone call from a woman whose voice she didn’t recognize.
“She told me she knew who I was,” Susan said to McGuire. “I was half-drunk, I was past caring who I was or who she was. She said she was Ross’s former wife, his second wife, the one who had called Thomas. She said she knew what I was doing and that she wanted ten thousand dollars from me or she was going to the police.”
“How did she know about it?” McGuire asked.
“She had been seeing Ross again. I learned about it later. I learned so much later. Anyway, I told her to do it, do whatever the hell she wanted, because I didn’t care anymore. You have to understand. I was cut off from my family, my friends, my children. I was constantly paralyzed with fear that I would be found out, and yet I was hoping I would be, if only to end this nightmare. If you have never been under the control of someone, maybe you can’t understand. I was basically a little suburban housewife and mother who got herself involved with a psychopathic personality, somebody who knew how to push every button to encourage me, frighten me, intimidate me, manipulate me. Do you understand?”
McGuire said he was trying.
“You never will,” she said. “Not totally.” She smiled and set her empty coffee cup aside. “But I appreciate you trying.”
At times, Myers would surprise her with expensive gifts and promise to restore the fun and excitement they used to have. At other times, he humiliated her by boasting of the women he was seeing in Florida.
She began asking herself how she had gotten to this place, how the good student, the daughter of a deeply religious father, the girl who never told a lie and never stole a thing in her life, had permitted herself to become so beaten and helpless. She had only wanted to be liked, the way her customers and her co-workers at the S&L appeared to like her without knowing the hidden truths.
She dreaded returning to the condominium each evening, dreaded the telephone calls from Florida demanding more money, dreaded finding him sitting in the shadows to frighten her when she entered, telling her he was flying back to Florida on an afternoon plane the next day and he needed another twenty, thirty, forty thousand dollars to take with him, sometimes cajoling her with gifts or flattery, other times threatening her and her children, or beating her.
She began stopping at a bar on lower Beacon Street after work, sipping a few drinks to build courage to continue home. Men would approach her and she would usually fend off their attempts at conversation and return the drinks they bought for her. But there were times when she was lonely and frightened.
“One day,” she said, “I heard someone refer to a man I had seen in there before. They said he was a cop, a detective. I thought, perhaps if I could make friends with someone like that, a police officer who would understand what I was going through, he might be able to help me. I was so afraid of being caught, afraid of the shame. I couldn’t stand the idea of prison, of being locked away. So I made a point of smiling at him, and he came over and sat beside me. We talked a little, and he said I looked like a woman who needed help.”
McGuire’s eyes locked onto hers. “When was this?”
“Three years ago last summer. He was nice to me, and he didn’t ask questions, not at first. I liked him, I wanted to get him to like me. So I didn’t tell him about Ross, not right away. We had to be careful, because he was married.”
“What was his name?”
“Frank DeLisle.”
McGuire sat back in the booth.
“It lasted less than a month,” she said. DeLisle took her to New York one weekend. When she returned to the condominium Sunday evening, she found Myers in a drunken rage, demanding to know where she had been, and with whom. She refused to tell him. He told her he needed money the next morning, at least $30,000, and she said she couldn’t do it anymore. He beat her on the back and on the thighs, where the bruises wouldn’t show, until she agreed to get the money for him. Then he became gentle and tender, as he always did when she agreed to his demands. He apologized for the beating, and told her what a wonderful woman she was, and how much he had missed her.
The next day she totaled the funds she had taken from depositors and transferred into the training file. She broke into tears when the amount came to over $700,000.
Myers called in the morning, asking if she had transferred the money yet, and she told him again that she couldn’t do it anymore. When he told her he was coming down to the S&L to make her do it, she called DeLisle and begged him to meet her at work as soon as possible. When he promised to be there within an hour, she alerted her manager that she was ill and might be going home early.
Myers arrived in a fury, hissing across the counter at her when she ignored him, trembling inside. Then DeLisle entered, flashed his badge, and stared at Myers with such hostility that he spun on his heel and left without a word.
“Frank wanted to know what was going on,” Susan said. “I asked him to take me somewhere, alone. I had things to tell him.”
In DeLisle’s car she told him about the thefts. She gave him details on the training file, the threats Myers had made on her children, the beatings, and the manipulation. DeLisle listened in silence. He advised her not to go home that evening, suggesting she get a place to stay downtown. To her surprise, that was his only reaction. She wouldn’t see him again until her trial, when he appeared as a prosecution witness, testifying against her, reading aloud from the notes he had made after she left his car.
She found a room in a tourist hotel, went to work the next morning, and was arrested for grand larceny by three detectives, who entered the S&L just before lunch.
They took her downtown for questioning. Bail was set at $500,000, a lawyer was assigned to handle her case, and she spent four months in jail awaiting trial.
“I kept reading about myself in the newspapers,” she said to McGuire.
“I remember it,” he said. “I remember hearing the story, and how nobody could believe that someone smart enough to fool the state banking authority could steal so much money and claim it wasn’t for them. Just the newspaper reports, that’s all I remember.”
“When the police went to look for Ross, the condominium was cleaned out. The jewelry and the furs he bought me were gone, and most of the furniture had been sold. He got rid of everything he could in exchange for whatever money he could get his hands on. He destroyed all the photographs of me and my children, so everything vanished except my memories. Then he hired a lawyer and told them that a friend of his was in trouble, meaning me. This friend, he told the lawyer, might try to implicate him. He and the lawyer went to the police together. The lawyer. . . .”
“Marv Rosen,” McGuire said. He shook his head. Frank DeLisle. Father Frank. DeLisle DeLovely, the good family man, the good cop who would not tolerate swearing in his presence, the guy everybody would go into the jungle with. Sleeping with Susan and then dumping her, dropping a tip when he discovered what she was up to, and then abandoning her. And Marv Rosen, defender of hopeless causes. No wonder he bragged that Myers hadn’t stiffed him on any fees. Myers paid his legal fees with money Susan stole for him. Nobody stiffed Marv Rosen on fees, not ever.
“How did you know?” Susan asked. “About Rosen?”
“I’ve seen Myers’s file. And I talked to Rosen yesterday.”
“About me?”
“No. Only about Myers.”
“Then you know what happened to Ross.”
“Rosen gave the Internal Revenue an income-tax-evasion conviction, and the DA’s office dropped the larceny charge.”
“Because Ross’s signature was not on any of the bank documents, it wasn’t a strong case. He spent the money, but I was the one who took it.” She was toying with her fingers. “They tried us separately. Frank DeLisle was a prosecution witness against me.”
“Did your lawyer describe your relationship with DeLisle?”
She shook her head. “The prosecuting attorney said he would ask for a lighter sentence if it never came up. They wouldn’t sacrifice a good police officer’s career for such an indiscretion. That’s what they called it. Instead of ten years, he would only ask for five. My lawyer said it was a good deal. They wanted to protect the reputation of a good cop, and they would take five years off my sentence to do it.”
“Didn’t anybody believe you?”
“Not really. I had a court-appointed lawyer, a young kid, really. They had my confession. I never told anyone that I was being beaten, I was too embarrassed. So the prosecution claimed I really had fallen or been hit with a tennis ball. Those are the excuses I had used. They said no one had beaten me. They said I had bought all these nice clothes and jewelry for myself, and that I had given money to Ross because I was afraid of losing him to other women. He testified against me, told them I had boasted about coming from a wealthy family in Connecticut, and that’s where he believed the money had come from. My God he lied, he lied so much, he destroyed me there. My lawyer . . . he tried but he couldn’t do very much. I had a good pre-sentence report and the judge agreed to the five years, just five years, that’s all, my lawyer kept saying, telling me I’d probably be out in two but I kept thinking five years, five years, five years . . .
“After my trial, they brought me to the court as a prosecution witness against Ross,” she said in a dull flat voice. “His lawyer, Mr. Rosen, tore me apart there on the stand, calling me all kinds of names, asking me what date I had done this, and why I had done that on another day, and of course I couldn’t remember. In those last few months I had been like a robot. He showed pictures of me wearing fur coats and jewelry Ross had bought me. He said I had bought them with the money I stole, and asked where they were, and when I told him I didn’t know, he said I had destroyed them because they were evidence that I was the criminal. I knew Ross had sold I everything to pay Rosen’s legal fees, but I had no proof. They had vanished. I couldn’t afford to hire anyone to trace them.”
“Myers got off easy,” McGuire said.
She nodded. “Ross got one year in minimum security. He sent me a letter once, telling me he was spending his days playing ping pong and basketball. I was in a federal prison . . .”
“Cedar Hill?” McGuire knew the place, a gray stone fortress on the edge of the Berkshires, with the oldest wing set aside for women prisoners.
“Yes.” She swallowed. “This morning in jail, it all came back again, the humiliation, the loneliness, all of it. The prison psychiatrist kept telling me to adjust, but how could I ever adjust to that? While I was in Cedar Hill, I received a letter telling me my husband had obtained full custody of my children. At my trial, they didn’t believe my testimony about Ross making me do those things, using my children the way he did. The lawyer who acted for my husband submitted the transcripts from my trial, and he used them to take my children from me.”
“Orin Flanigan,” McGuire said. Things were beginning to fit.
“Yes.”
“And you couldn’t locate your husband or children when you came out of jail, so you went to Orin Flanigan.”
“He wouldn’t talk to me at first. He said it was client privilege, a conflict of interest, and so on. But one day when I was pleading with him, nearly hysterical, his wife came in and saw me. It was after office hours, everyone else had gone home. I left, and I guess Orin’s wife wanted to know what was going on. The next day Orin left a message at the halfway house, inviting me to come and meet with him. He told me I reminded his wife of their daughter, and we began to talk. He began to believe me. He searched court records, he talked to people, he sympathized with me . . .”
“Did he tell you where your husband and children were?”
She shook her head. “Orin said he was bound by law to reveal nothing about them without my husband’s consent. All he said was that Thomas had moved west. He said he would try to find a way, a legal way, to put me in touch with them. But I think he was mostly angry at Ross Myers. He kept saying, ‘These are the things that make the law such an ass at times,’ meaning the way Ross was treated, compared with me.” She looked up at McGuire. “I really think Orin loved me,” she said. “Maybe like he loved his own daughter. He knew Ross had cheated the system, and he said it was unfair, that somebody should make him pay somehow. He wanted to see that Myers paid one way or the other, or to make sure that he didn’t ruin the lives of other women. Then he told me about you. He said you were somebody who might be able to find Ross and do something, and maybe find Thomas and my children too.”
“What did he mean, ‘do something’ about Myers? Do what?”
“I don’t know. He told me that you had found Ross, that he was working as a yacht salesman in Annapolis, but he had gone sailing for a week or more. I said it had to be a joke.”
“Why did it have to be a joke?”
“Because Ross could never stand being on a boat for more than five minutes, even sitting at the dock. He made friends with some high-rollers in Florida. We went to a party on a boat in Lauderdale one day, and we weren’t even out of the harbour before Ross was sick to his stomach. He was green. He was so sick that the man who owned the boat turned back to shore and let us off. So Ross isn’t a yacht salesman. He just isn’t.”
McGuire worked on that for a minute, remembering the aloof attitude of the woman at the yacht brokerage. “So why did Orin go?”
“Because he said he might have found a way to get back at Ross. Orin said he had seen his share of unfairness, he had even done his share of unfair things. He said he wished he was like you, somebody who could act on the spot. Somebody who could do things besides argue in court and shuffle papers.” She smiled. “He would have loved to hear what you did tonight with that Hayhurst thug. He might dislike brutality, but I think he would secretly approve. Anyway, he said he was thinking of asking you to do what he was planning to do, except that it would mean revealing too many things about me. And he didn’t want to.”
“You told him Myers wasn’t on that yacht.”
She nodded.
“Where did he think Myers was? And how did Orin Flanigan expect to deal with him?”
“I don’t think he expected to meet Ross. I think he knew something about Ross, about what he was doing in Annapolis or wherever he is, and he went down to stop it.”
“Not by contacting the police. As far as I know, the cops knew nothing about Myers, and had no reason to pick him up. What was Flanigan like when you saw him last?”
“Determined. A little excited. He said, ‘I’m going to blow the lid off Myers.’ I asked him how, and he told me to just watch him.” She looked at the clock again, and began to stand up. “I’ve got to be back there in fifteen minutes,” she said. “Can we get a cab?”
Saying goodbye was awkward. When she left the cab, he watched her enter the halfway house, watched the door close, then told the cabbie to take him to Revere Beach.