“I’d say I didn’t believe it except it makes such perfect sense,” Scott said.
“It’s definitely him,” I said. “The whole thing is basically a scaled-up version of that nasty little hamburger scam. I’ve been digging into how Junior spent the past decade. He’s really made something of himself. Went from REITs into loan origination and Collateralized Debt Obligations. Made hundreds of millions, got an award from the LA Chamber of Commerce for services to affordable housing.”
“Let me guess,” Scott said, “subprime loans?”
“Got it in one. Only the subprimiest. I chased down a random sampling of ten of them and all ten were in foreclosure.”
He whistled. “That takes some doing.”
I nodded. “Like Goldfinger says, ‘Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.’ ”
“And ten times is deliberate depravity.”
We chuckled, then both of us remembered that the guy we were laughing at had Scott and millions more utterly at his mercy, and stopped.
“You think he’s more than a bit player in this?”
I paused. “I don’t think I could prove in a court of law that he was calling the shots, not without a subpoena. But based on the way that the shell companies that hold significant stakes in the Bahamian company are structured, I would say that he controls the majority of voting shares in Thames Estuary LLC, and even though they’re a minority shareholder in Thames Estuary Limited, the shares they do own are a comfortable majority of the voting shares.”
“How does that work?”
“Oh,” I said. “I must have skipped that part. The SPAC has a two-tier share structure. The ten-dollar shares they sold to everyday shmucks are called ‘preferred shares,’ but that’s because they get liquidation preference—they’re first in line to get paid if the company goes bankrupt. But the shares that the founders hold are ‘voting shares’ and they get ten votes for every vote the preferred shares have. All told, the preferred shares only come out to forty percent of the voting power, so even if every one of those ten-buck chucks voted in favor of something, the founders can veto them.”
“Oh, it’s the Google scam.”
“Pretty much.” I’d gotten a good belly laugh out of Google’s pre-IPO letter to potential investors warning them that the company’s “genius” founders were holding on to a majority of the voting shares to prevent their small-minded investors from joggling their elbows. It had sent me down a research rabbit hole and turned me into a half expert on the practice.
“The Google boys mostly copy-pasted the share structure of News Corp—and even Rupert Murdoch pieced his share-structure scam together from previous ones. Everyone wants to get the public’s money but no one wants to be accountable to the public.”
“Don’t know that I can blame them, to be honest.” There was some shouting down the cellblock from him and he paused a moment until it died down. “One thing I can’t figure is why all the secrecy? I’m no Joseph Goebbels but I can think of easy ways Junior could spin this scam to make himself look good, like he’s bailing out the mismanaged public system and the privateers who stepped in to loot it.”
“Yeah, I don’t imagine that all the skullduggery is motivated by shame. I agree that given half a chance, Junior would love to brag on this. I bet that guy goes to bed every night and masturbates furiously at the thought that more than a million of his fellow Americans are absolutely in his power. It would be very on-brand.
“Whenever I find someone hiding their interest in a company, there’s only two explanations: either they’re not paying taxes, or they’re screwing their investors by selling to themselves at a fat markup.”
“Not both?”
“Oh sure, both too.”
“Sounds like the kind of thing that the SEC and the IRS might be interested in,” Scott said.
“Indeed it does.”
> Mr. Hench, this note is being sent to you because you are Scott Warms’s emergency contact.
> Mr. Warms has been involved in a violent incident and has been removed to the California Medical Facility in Vacaville. He has regained consciousness and he can receive visitors.
> The link below will take you to a page detailing the conditions for prisoner visits at the CMF.
> This email address is not attended and replies will not be read. If you have further queries, please contact the CMF and cite Scott Warms’s inmate number.
It was unsigned.
Three inmates known to be members of the Aryan Brotherhood cornered Scott in his cell while he was reading. They smashed his tablet and then used the sharp plastic fragments, along with their fists and feet, to beat him unconscious. He had a broken jaw, two broken ribs, and lost four teeth. He was concussed and his kidneys were bruised. He was pissing blood.
The beating came within forty-eight hours of our last conversation. Scott was unreachable for the next three days. I almost missed the email because it looked so spammy, but I’d written a mail rule that flagged any messages containing “Scott Warms” and moved them to a separate folder.
I was allowed to bring Scott up to three magazines and two paperback books. After dithering for a time, I doctored the books—a nice old copy of John D. MacDonald’s The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything and an oversized paperback of Ostrom’s Governing the Commons. I was pretty sure he’d enjoy both of them, regardless of the chemical additions I made.
I didn’t let myself ask whether he’d be able to enjoy any books, ever, with his head injury.
*
Scott was doped up. I hadn’t been in his presence in a year, not since SCAR took over and killed in-person visits. I had braced myself for him to look bad—no one looks good with a broken jaw—but even so.
Even so.
The lines in his skin, seamed as an elephant’s. The tone of his skin. Loose. Papery. His collarbones standing out, his wristbones knobby between his thin arms and crabbed hands.
He couldn’t really talk, not with his jaw wired. So I talked, foolish and nervous small talk about the traffic and my houseplants and the neighborhood stray cat that turned out not to be a stray at all, just someone’s pet who had figured out how to slip his collar and beg for a free dinner at a half-dozen houses.
Smiling hurt him.
A male nurse came in, burly and harried. He did something to Scott’s IV. “He’ll be out in five minutes, better say your goodbyes,” he said.
Scott rolled his eyes, but then they started to droop.
“Buddy,” I said. “I’ll come back again soon. Soon as I can. Get better. Remember, you’ve got someone who cares about you. Rest and get better.” I’d said get better twice. I resisted the urge to say it a third time. I squeezed his hand but he was already dropping off and didn’t squeeze back.
*
The elevator discharged me into a secure lobby; I’d have to pass through two security checks and two sets of doors before I was back in the parking lot.
Junior was waiting for me in the second lobby. The last time I’d seen him he’d been florid and chubby, manic and delighted about his hamburger scheme and then enraged that I wouldn’t help him wrangle his spreadsheets.
Now, he was lean and rugged, enormously contented. He’d had his teeth whitened, or maybe capped—that Tony Robinson thing. Maybe he’d had botox; hard to imagine how else he achieved that look of supreme, smooth relaxation. He wore a stiff white shirt open at the collar, no tie, under a blazer that showed off rowing-machine shoulders and the trim waistline of a thirty-year-old. Dark Japanese denim jeans tailored to break over old-fashioned brogues, along with a short-back-and-sides, completed the look—wealthy hipster, equally at home on a TED stage or drinking a twelve-dollar bulletproof coffee in the Mission.
“Marty,” he said, smiling broadly but without any other part of his face moving at all. Definitely botox. Those teeth. “It’s nice to see you. I wonder if I might have a minute of your time.” Not a question. There were two corrections officers between me and the door. They watched us with flat, bored eyes. I wondered how they felt about Junior’s whole outfit. His shoes probably cost more than they made in a month. Maybe his haircut, too.
“Lionel,” I said, catching myself before I called him “Junior.” “This is a surprise.” It was, but perhaps it shouldn’t have been. I was rapidly reassessing the violence that befell Scott. I wondered if any members of the Aryan Brotherhood were recuperating in the CMF.
“The acting warden’s a friend of mine. She lets me work out of a spare office when I’m in town. It’s just this way.”
One of the bored COs pressed a button, and a short buzzer sounded, while the latch of a steel door leading off to the side audibly clicked open as its solenoid fired.
“This way,” he said again, holding the door open. He waited for me to pass through and then let it slam shut. The latch clunked again as it locked behind us.
*
He led me down a long administrative corridor of gleaming white tile and chipped particleboard doors with brass nameplates, stopping at one door where the nameplate had been removed, leaving behind two rectangles of dirty white two-sided tape. He swung the door open without an “after you” or even a gesture. Power move.
Inside: A steel desk in front of an empty bookcase. A steel-mesh security window looking out on an empty exercise yard. More power games: his office chair, behind the desk, was a tall, high-backed executive model, while I was expected to sit in a low, straight-backed, armless chair that would let him stare down his nose at me. I briefly considered sitting in his chair—after all, he’d sent me in first, why shouldn’t I assume that he was giving me first dibs?
But Lionel Coleman Jr. had a dear friend of mine utterly in his power.
I sat in the low chair. The split vinyl seat sighed out a stale breath. Junior closed the door. It audibly locked. He sat in his high throne and peered down his nose. He looked great. He glowed. Whatever he was injecting or ingesting or rubbing in, it was working.
“How’s Scott doing?” Those teeth. So white.
“Badly,” I said.
“He could be worse,” Junior said. Oh, those teeth.
“I suppose things could always be worse,” I said.
“Oh,” Junior said, “oh, I don’t know. There’s a point where things can’t get any worse.” He paused.
I was supposed to let the penny drop and gulp nervously. I didn’t see any reason to play that role.
“You mean he could be murdered,” I said.
He didn’t say anything. Just showed me those teeth.
Then: “It could actually get worse,” he said. “I believe you’ve had your own run-ins with the law. Something in Avalon, wasn’t it? I only remember because it’s so unusual. There’s really no crime in Avalon. But given your own carelessness, I think it’s fair to say that things could continue getting worse for you, even if things can’t get any worse for Scott.”
I’d had to surrender all my electronics and pass through a metal detector to enter the CMF. Junior would be very certain that I wasn’t recording him.
Again, this was all supposed to be subtext. I didn’t see any reason not to make it text. Subtext is like the thing that lurks in the shadows, always scarier for its ambiguity. Whatever is revealed by turning on the lights will never be as scary as what your fears attribute to the dark.
“You know I’m not recording you, so you’re threatening to have me imprisoned if I keep investigating your business. You listened in on my call with Scott, so you know that I’m pulling it apart, the way I did your hamburger racket. You arranged to have Scott beaten nearly to death and you want me to know that you could do the same or worse to me.
“Do I have that right?”
He put his teeth away and I got to watch him test the poker-face limits of botox. It was impressive. He didn’t look angry so much as a little constipated. Judging from his white knuckles and the pulse at his throat, I guessed that he was in a fury.
Pretty powerful stuff, that botox.
“Mr. Hench, I’m sure we both want what’s best for Scott.” It came out in a teakettle hiss. He hadn’t liked being called out, not one bit. He swallowed. “A quick recovery, a safe incarceration, and a full rehabilitation.” He swallowed again and unsheathed his teeth a little. “Research shows that successful rehabilitation is linked to strong support networks of friends and family outside of the prison environment. You’re Scott’s most frequent visitor—”
“I haven’t visited Scott for more than a year. Haven’t you heard? They shut the whole visiting thing down.”
He acted as though I was confused, rather than angry. “Excuse me, most frequent video visitor. It’s clear that Scott’s safety and well-being matter to you.”
He paused to see if I had anything snappy to interject. I didn’t. I could see where this was going and I didn’t like it.
“Prisons are intrinsically unsafe places, and no amount of oversight can eliminate all the danger. Now that he’s involved in gang wars, that’s going to be especially difficult. I hope you will be my partner in my efforts to prevent Scott from coming to any more harm.”
I mastered myself, played it straight. “I would very much like him to be safe. How do you propose that we can keep him from coming to harm?”
“The Aryan Brotherhood doesn’t administer beatings like the one that Scott suffered for nothing. I don’t claim to have any special insight into the activities that brought Scott into their crosshairs. But if you have any influence over him, you can help him stay safe by encouraging him to avoid those activities in future. And if you happen to have any role in those activities, I can only suggest that you, too, should refrain from further pursuits.”
I mastered myself. I mastered myself. I didn’t master myself.
“You’re saying that if I keep looking into Thames Estuary, you’ll have your prison Nazis beat Scott to death.”
“Mr. Hench,” he said, “I don’t think you grasp the scope of this crisis. The Aryan Brotherhood doesn’t solely operate inside the prison system. It’s entirely possible—likely even—that conflicts that begin within the prison system can spill out and affect involved parties on the outside.”
“You’re saying you’ll have them beat me to death,” I said.
“Mr. Hench,” he said, “I want Scott to be safe. I want him to serve his time without further incident and to thrive upon his release.” Teeth. Teeth. “And I want you to thrive as well.” Teeth. “And I want you to be safe.”
The smart-ass in me wanted to say, You’re threatening to have us both beaten to death, right? But I mastered myself.
“I understand,” I said.
He showed me out of that office and back down the hall. I retrieved my phone and wallet from the lockers. I got in my car. I drove home.