Two Women

Twenty-Eight

‘Where is she, Alice? Where’s Jane?’ demanded Hanlan.

‘I don’t know!’

‘Alice, you’re in more trouble than you can shake a stick at, working from kidnapping down,’ took up Barbara Donnelly. She’d come back to Federal Plaza with Hanlan, leaving their squads in place, after waiting forty-five minutes beyond the given time for Geoffrey Davis’s unappearing mystery visitor and for Jane Carver’s promised second call, which never came. Throughout that time Hanlan had remained constantly on the telephone from the Northcote building, confirming the finding of the Volkswagen – but not of Jane – at Morristown and moving McKinnon’s squad there from West Milford. He sent with them the FBI forensics team, which had completed their examination of the cabin. Despite its trashing, they’d found nothing.

‘I told you, we split up this morning at the motel. She said she wasn’t seeing the FBI without her lawyers with her and drove off the way we’d come.’ Alice was confused by their combined aggression, which started with Hanlan pedantically advising her of her Miranda rights against self-incrimination.

Hanlan acknowledged that fitted with what he’d been told by both Davis and Burt Elliott, to whom he’d also spoken from the Northcote building. The way you came from West Milford doesn’t go through Morristown, which was where your car was found.’

Alice shook her head. ‘I don’t know how it got there. I want to tell you what I do know.’

‘Finding Jane Carver’s the priority,’ said Barbara.

‘Find her lawyers. It’s Geoffrey Davis at the firm. There’s another named Burt: I don’t know his surname. She spoke to both from the motel.’

‘She spoke to Davis from Morristown, too,’ said Hanlan.

‘I don’t know how she got there. What she was doing there?’

‘How about you took her there?’ challenged Barbara.

‘We split up. She took the car.’

‘Why’d you run from the cabin?’

‘Jane tricked me into running her into town. Persuaded me into letting her drive back but then took off…’ She hesitated. It was all going to come out so there was no point in avoiding it. ‘She wanted me to tell her about John and I. About what I knew about the firm and the Mafia. I’d told her bits but tried to keep some back. It didn’t make sense, I guess.’ Was she making any better sense now? It didn’t seem like it, from the attitude of these two in the cramped interview room with the tape machine with its blinking light, recording everything. ‘Please!’ she said, urgently. ‘Let me tell you what it’s about.’

Hanlan looked at Barbara, in whose Manhattan jurisdiction the kidnap had occurred, even though it was ultimately a federal crime. She shrugged. He said to Alice: ‘OK, from the beginning.’

Which was how Alice told it, from her first visit to Wall Street to interview George Northcote. She held nothing back about her affair with Carver, even repeating, to Barbara Donnelly’s visible scepticism, that she was never a threat to the Carver marriage. Alice expected some interjections when she began talking of John’s initial discovery of Northcote’s organized-crime connection and of Northcote’s insistence that he could extricate himself, but none came.

‘And then I got involved,’ declared Alice and stopped. No way back, if she continued talking. It was commitment time and she didn’t have a lawyer to advise her and she’d been read her Miranda rights, making what she said admissible in court or before a Grand Jury and from this moment on she’d be at the mercy of these unsympathetic investigators if she said anything more, or at the mercy of gangsters who didn’t know mercy if she said anything less.

‘Go on,’ encouraged Hanlan.

‘I found out how it worked,’ insisted Alice. ‘I did it illegally and I know I’ve committed criminal offences – technically kidnap, even, although it wasn’t – but everything I did was to understand and try to sort out what happened to George and Janice and then to John. I want to co-operate in every way and I want to be taken into the Witness Protection Programme because if I’m not I know, as you know, that I’ll be killed.’

‘Let’s hear the story and then we’ll talk about witness protection,’ said Hanlan. She’d jerked him around, made him look ridiculous, and he didn’t intend offering anything until he was as positive as it was possible to be that she wasn’t holding out on him, not by so much as a single crumb.

Alice eased the canvas bag up from her lap and tentatively put it on the desk between them. Initially unspeaking she unpacked all the duplicate printouts she’d assembled at the cabin with her hurriedly replaced laptop. As Hanlan and the New York detective frowned down at the jumble, Alice announced: ‘IRS records that show how the Mafia laundered their money over a very long time.’

‘Obtained how?’ pounced Hanlan, determined against any more embarrassing foul-ups.’

‘Hacking,’ admitted Alice, at once.

‘Legally inadmissible,’ rejected Hanlan. ‘An illegal act, which hacking is, does not provide acceptable evidence of the further illegal act it exposes.’

‘I know that! John and I knew that: discussed it! I’m showing you how it was done and how, properly and officially, you or your financial experts – I don’t know who, for fuck’s sake – can work with the IRS and the company registry authorities and get exactly what I got but in a way that is admissible!’ She shouldn’t have said fuck. She shouldn’t have come here like this, to be confronted hostilely like this, without lawyers telling her what to say and what not to say. It irritated her that Jane had been right and she had been wrong. Jane hadn’t been right, Alice decided at once. She’d kept the baby – hers and John’s baby – safe and Jane was missing. With her own and John’s baby.

She wouldn’t tell them about England, Alice decided. They weren’t impressed by – weren’t accepting – what she was offering. Admitting any involvement whatsoever in bomb-outrage murder would get her publicly charged and publicly exposed. A target, even if she were in custody, which was never an obstacle to the Mafia, before she could appear before a court to get any sort of public, protective stage.

‘Tell me something I can legally use,’ insisted Hanlan.

‘The names of the companies through which the laundering worked, worldwide,’ snatched Alice, feeling a flicker of relieved hope. ‘I didn’t get them by hacking.’

‘Neither did we,’ said Hanlan. ‘We got them from John’s severance letters. The Bureau’s finance and fraud division have been working on them for almost two days now.’

‘They’re offshore, you can’t get to them!’ insisted Alice. ‘The IRS route, through their supply-chain subsidiaries, is the only way. And you wouldn’t have known that if I hadn’t shown you!’

Hanlan knew she was right. Was aware, too, of Barbara Donnelly’s shifts of impatience at what he guessed to be irritation at his persistent obduracy. ‘What’s in Carver’s safe deposit?’

Alice patted the printouts between them. ‘A much larger selection of these, showing the worldwide spread of the system: Europe, the Far East. And original stuff that George Northcote kept back. And a tape recording of John talking to a mob lawyer who wanted it all back.’

‘Which mob?’ came in Barbara. ‘Give us names!’

‘I don’t have any names,’ admitted Alice. ‘John started to hold back, thinking that the more I knew the greater danger I would be in.’

‘But there are names in the safe deposit?’ persisted the detective lieutenant.

‘Yes,’ guessed Alice. She had the right to a lawyer. It didn’t matter that she’d waived her Miranda rights by agreeing to talk on the record. She had to have an attorney to negotiate for her, get her the protection she deserved. And without which she – and John’s baby – would die. ‘I’m not going to say any more. Not without a lawyer.’

‘What more have you got to say?’ asked Hanlan.

‘I’m not going to say any more. Not without a lawyer,’ doggedly repeated Alice. She hesitated, looking at the recording apparatus. ‘Except that I think you’re a bastard son of a bitch!’

As Ginette Smallwood led Alice away to another room, to make her lawyer’s call in private, Barbara Donnelly said: ‘I agree with her. You’re a bastard son of a bitch. She’s shown you the way, legal or not. And you know damned well the Bureau and the IRS will take it.’

Hanlan said: ‘Do you think we got it all?’

‘We got enough.’

‘I want it all.’ It was, Hanlan thought, about time.

It was the courtesy that frightened Jane Carver the most. The threat to cut off part of her tongue, which she hadn’t the slightest doubt the man had meant, had been made politely and during what little conversation there’d been during the journey the one who did the talking had always addressed her as Mrs Carver. The two men sitting either side of her in the rear of the car did so without crowding her and the one who’d winded her had apologized. Unasked, the man in the front had said she was being taken to meet someone who would tell her what they wanted and that if she co-operated there wouldn’t be what he called unpleasantness. No one wanted unpleasantness.

Jane could see the Manhattan skyline and the Hudson river from the top-floor window of the warehouse office in which they’d locked her, thirty minutes before. It was bare, clearly unused – a blank desk without a telephone, three upright chairs and a cabinet – but there was an adjoining toilet, for which she was grateful. Having sat for so long, she was ignoring the chairs, standing at the window gazing down at the car park. There were a lot of lorries bearing the BHYF logo.

What was she going to do? Co-operate, obviously. Tell them whatever they wanted to know, but she didn’t know anything more than Alice had told her. Would they hurt her? Do something like maiming her, if they asked something she couldn’t answer? Of course they would. It had to be the safe deposit. If they…

Jane’s thoughts were broken by the sound of the door opening behind her and she turned to face the two men who entered. One was the polite front-seat passenger who’d done the talking in the Mercedes, the other slightly taller, bespectacled, fair hair just beginning to recede. The eyes were unusually – upsettingly – pale, grey more than blue.

‘Please sit down, Mrs Carver,’ said Charlie Petrie. ‘Can we get you anything? Coffee? Water?’

Still the overwhelming courtesy. ‘No. Thank you.’ Jane sat.

So did the two men, on chairs facing her.

Petrie nodded sideways. ‘My colleague has spoken to you about co-operation?’

‘Yes.’ It was a croak, dry-throated. She should have asked for water. Too late now. She shouldn’t do anything to upset them.

‘Are you going to co-operate, Mrs Carver?’

‘Yes.’ Better this time. The fear was taking the feeling from her body. She pushed herself very slightly against the chair but could scarcely feel it against her back.

There was a smile, the teeth very even. ‘That’s good.’

What could she do or say to protect herself, help herself? ‘I don’t know about Alice Belling! We split up! She’s going to the FBI!’

Petrie smiled to Caputo and then at Jane. ‘No, she’s not,’ he improvised, immediately realizing how he could improvise further. ‘Alice is quite safe, with us.’

‘You found her in Morristown?’

‘Yes,’ said Petrie.

‘She knows more than I do! What’s she told you?’

‘We’re asking the questions, Mrs Carver.’

‘I’m sorry.’ She mustn’t annoy them. They were asking the questions: all the questions. And she had to get the answers right. What had Alice told them? Alice was streetwise, better able to look after herself.

‘Do you know what’s in your husband’s safe deposit?’

‘I know you want it.’

‘Do you know what’s in the deposit?’ persisted Petrie.

‘Not the details. I know it’s something that my father did for you … for your people.’ They couldn’t get it without her! Why hadn’t she realized that before! Because she was too frightened to think of anything. But now she had.

‘We do want what’s in the safe deposit. All of it.’

‘I understand.’

‘That’s what I want you to do, Mrs Carver. Understand. You and I are going to the bank, now. You are going to authorize my coming into the vault with you, along with the bank’s securities person with the duplicate key. It’ll be just the two of us after it’s been unlocked. You don’t open the box. I do. And I retrieve the material that belongs to us. Then we leave. It’s all got to be done very quickly, no hold-ups. If anyone asks about your being kidnapped you say you are all right. Safe. That it’s over and that I am your lawyer. Do you understand all that?’

‘What happens then?’

Petrie smiled. ‘You go back to East 62nd Street.’

‘What about Alice Belling?’

‘There’s something else you must understand,’ said Petrie, his second improvisation perfectly thought out. ‘If you don’t do exactly what I say – exactly what I’ve spelled out – Alice Belling will die. Die very badly. You must understand that most of all.’

‘I do,’ said Jane. She was dry-throated again.

‘You’re going to do everything you’re told, aren’t you, Mrs Carver?’

‘Yes. Are we going now?’

‘Right now,’ confirmed Petrie.

‘Can I have a glass of water first?’

As it always appeared to be, the Manhattan traffic was close to gridlock when they came out of the tunnel and Petrie told the driver not to turn immediately but to try the next downtown to Wall Street. He was in the passenger seat now, two different men on either side of Jane, both still giving her leg room. Petrie felt better than he had at first, when he’d finally accepted that Stanley Burcher had run and the other consigliere had insisted he take Jane Carver to the bank. But not that much better. Petrie had already initiated the search for Burcher, whose proper function this was and for which he’d been paid so much money for so many profitable, untroubled years. Burcher would be found, in whatever rat-hole he was hiding. And made to suffer for this, suffer more than the motherfucker had ever imagined in his wildest nightmares it was possible to suffer. But that was later. Petrie’s concern was now. He calculated he had only fifteen minutes to do all that he had to do at the bank. He had the benefit of surprise but someone would raise some sort of alarm after all the publicity about Jane Carver’s disappearance. Just fifteen minutes.

They turned on Broadway and Petrie twisted round and said to Jane: ‘You got it right?’

‘Yes,’ Jane said. She was sure she had.

‘You worried about your daddy’s firm?’

‘That’s the only thing there’s left to worry about, isn’t it?’ Jane hoped she hadn’t sounded too challenging.

‘It’s over now. The moment I get what I want, it’s all over. The firm’s safe, your daddy’s reputation is safe. Everything’s all over.’

‘I’d like to think so.’

‘Think so.’

She was riding downtown with people who cut out other people’s tongues, Jane thought. Did God knows what else. People who held Alice hostage. How much more convoluted – who was hostage to whom or for what – could this kidnap be! ‘You – the people you work for – entrapped my father, didn’t you? Blackmailed him into doing what he did?’

‘I wasn’t involved in the beginning,’ denied Petrie, who hadn’t been.

The traffic was, strangely, easier going downtown. They joined Wall Street and Jane thought how familiar – how safe – it all seemed. How many times had she come this way, past these buildings, with her father? This was her father’s place, her father’s territory. Everyone on Wall Street knew her father, respected her father: George W. Northcote, the king, the Colossus. Jane saw the Northcote building, the far-away monument, the Citibank closer. Petrie, in the front seat, said something to the driver she didn’t hear before turning to her. He said: ‘You tell them I’m your lawyer, coming into the vault with you.’

Jane said: ‘I know what I’ve got to say.’

‘You know what happens, you get anything wrong.’ For the first time, ever, Petrie was frightened. He wanted to be there, watching, when they found Burcher.

The car stopped directly outside Citibank. The unspeaking man to her left got out to open the door to Jane, even offering his hand, which she didn’t need. Petrie was already on the sidewalk, coming in close beside her. He said: ‘Remember!’

Jane didn’t reply.

It was an expansive, crowded lobby, the teller area beyond, the securities area even further back, deep inside the building. Until that moment Jane had forgotten her crumpled, slept-in appearance and the television coverage of her supposed kidnap and actually looked around to be recognized. She wasn’t, not until they got to the floor managers’ desks and even there, initially, the man at the one they approached frowned up at the way she was dressed, not identifying her.

She said: ‘I’m Jane Carver. Get me the securities manager please.’ She was aware of Petrie, so close beside her she could feel his tension.

He said: ‘Don’t forget what will happen to Alice.’

She said: ‘No.’

‘Or what to say.’

‘No.’

The door behind the desk flurried open and a prematurely balding man hurried out. He said: ‘Mrs Carver! What…?’

Jane said: ‘Don’t let this man get out of the building! He’s kidnapped me! He’s going to kill me.’

For the briefest moment no one moved. Spoke. Petrie appeared frozen. Then, instinctively, he turned to run. The man at whose desk they were standing pressed the attack button. The alarms screamed out, the tellers’ shutters slammed down and the metal gates slid closed in front of all the exit doors. Petrie zigzagged in total panic, going first in the direction of the main, already sealed door, then to a side exit, then back towards the way out into Wall Street. It was at that door he was seized by the uniformed security guards. One, unnecessarily, had his weapon out. Petrie didn’t struggle.

Jane actually walked from where she was standing, towards the arresting group. Very quietly she said to Petrie: ‘She will die, won’t she?’

With only two blocks to cover, the combined FBI and NYPD task force arrived from the Northcote building within minutes. Geoffrey Davis was with them. As soon as he saw Jane he said: ‘Thank God you’re both safe!’

‘Both?’

‘Alice Belling gave herself up to the FBI maybe three hours ago.’