David Duffy - In for a Ruble

Foos programmed the Basilisk to flag anomalies. A person without a gun license who suddenly purchases several boxes of ammunition. Someone, otherwise healthy, who starts charging large quantities of cold remedies. Most times, such breaks from normal patterns indicate a stolen identity. But not always. Two months earlier, four new phone numbers showed up in Jenny Leitz’s records. She’d been calling them, and they her, several times a week. Three belonged to doctors specializing in neurological diseases. The fourth was a medical imaging lab. All were located in the East Sixties and Seventies, the neighborhood around New York Hospital.

Unsure what to conclude from that, except that all might not be well with Jenny Leitz, I turned to her husband’s siblings.

First up, Marianna, number two after Sebastian in the family line. Plenty of anomalies here. For the last few months, Marianna and her husband appeared to be living separate lives—she at their home in Bedford, with their two kids, a boy and a girl aged fourteen and eleven, he at their apartment on Park Avenue. Jonathan Stern was the CEO of Kallon Corp., a medical device maker. He traveled a great deal. His hotel charges showed a fondness for nighttime Champagne from room service. His non-hotel charges included more than a few lingerie stores. Perhaps he was bringing Marianna a souvenir camisole from Chicago, a negligee from Pittsburgh, and a new lace bra-and-panties set from Dallas. My money was on local usage. I asked the Basilisk to line up the Champagne orders and underwear purchases. Big surprise—every date matched.

Marianna appeared to have her own problems. She was buying more booze than most Russians. Her chosen drop was brandy, Cognac (Rémy Martin) in the good days, but since her husband moved out, less expensive, some would say cheap, fare—Fundador from Spain and Presidente from Mexico. I actually like both, but I’ve been known to tipple too much cheap vodka. Their joint checking account provided an explanation. The automatic deposits from Kallon Corp.—$27,000 a month—stopped in November. The account had shrunk from $66,000 to less than $15,000 since. Marianna was feeling the pinch, in more ways than one. A trip to Bedford was in order.

Next in line was the middle sister, Julia, who’d kept the Leitz name when she’d married Walter Coryell fifteen years ago. She and her husband and two kids lived in a loft in Chelsea that had set them back $3.6 million in 2004. They’d financed 50 percent and kept current on both mortgage and monthly maintenance. Julia was a wealthy woman, a bank balance of $50,000 and upward of $8 million in savings and investments. Not in her brother’s league, but rich by everyone else’s standard. She still shopped discount—H&M and Century 21 and the occasional department store when it had a sale, not that she bought that much. Neither did her husband. She had two BlackBerries, both worked overtime. His worked hardly at all. The kids, boys, aged twelve and ten, attended New York City private schools that set the parents back seventy-five Gs a year. They both had cell phones and texted each other and their friends 24-7, including when they were in class. They had PlayStations and Xboxes and iPads, Facebook and Twitter accounts, and all the other accouterments of upper-class life in twenty-first-century America. I’m enormously fond of my adopted country, but as a former member of the CPUSSR, I often think America could benefit from good old Soviet-style centralized discipline, starting with a rule that every kid should not be permitted to have every gadget that Silicon Valley comes up with. I’ve yet to find anyone who agrees with me.

Julia Leitz owned a financial public relations firm with two partners. Her office was on Third Avenue in the Forties. Her husband had an Internet company, an amalgamator of travel options—hotels, flights, rental cars—called YouGoHere.com. It had weathered the dot-com meltdown and seemed to be holding on, if not setting cyber-tourism afire. His office was just over the East River in Queens. Nothing appeared overtly out of kilter in the Leitz-Coryell household, but looks can be deceiving.

Thomas Leitz was the baby of the family, six years younger than Julia. He was thirty-five now and worked for the New York City Department of Education, as he had since receiving his M.A. from City College where he also got his undergraduate degree. He lived alone in a rent-stabilized one-bedroom apartment in the Village. He ate out most nights and ran up modest tabs at a few saloons with names that suggested a single-sex clientele. He also had a long-running spending problem—repeated patterns of running up huge credit card debt, carrying it for a few months or more, then paying it off—all at once—canceling the cards and starting again. The Basilisk served up a dozen cycles, going back seven years. Every eight to twelve months, he maxed out two, three, four cards at their $10,000 or $15,000 limits. The damage was done at designer boutiques and the Bergdorf Goodman men’s store—$500 shirts, $1,200 trousers, $2,400 sweaters, and $4,000 jackets—and Broadway theaters. When he went to a show, which he did once or twice a week, he purchased the premium tickets the theaters began selling a few years ago—at $400 a pop. None of which he was buying on his $42,000 teacher’s salary.

Two months earlier, he was carrying $35,000. Debt service alone was running $700 a month. He didn’t appear to have any other assets to speak of, but in late November, his balances were paid off and the cards canceled. At the moment, he had new Visa, MasterCard, and AmEx cards, with an aggregate balance of $8,000. The foothills of the next debt mountain. The timing of the last payoff was too close to the bugging of Leitz’s computers to ignore. Nosferatu, if it was Nosferatu, had his choice of targets.

I went two for six on phone calls. A standard not-here-right-now message from Pauline Leitz. A harried-sounding secretary at Julia Leitz’s office, with the lady in question shrieking in the background. She had no time to talk to me. A high-pitched recording announced Thomas Leitz was “out and about, but don’t pout, leave a message, don’t be a lout.” A slurry-voiced Marianna Leitz answered her phone but had a hard time grasping who I was and why I was calling, which had more to do with the brandy sloshing around her glass than my attempt to explain. It took a few minutes, but she agreed to see me the next morning at nine thirty. Jonathan Stern’s assistant took my name and number without comment. Jenny Leitz had a high, sweet voice. She said, “Sebastian said you might call. He told me I shouldn’t talk to you.”

“I’m trying to help him, Mrs. Leitz. I told him I have to go about my job as I see fit.”

“Yes, he said you said that too. I don’t see how I can help.”

“I don’t either—until we chat.”

Several seconds of silence before, “Sebastian can be very… Especially these days. Are you free tomorrow?”

I said I was, except first thing.

“Best not come here. Let’s see, I have… There’s a coffee shop on First Avenue and Sixty-sixth Street. I’ll meet you there at noon.”

I knew the place from her Basilisk file. I told her noon was fine.

It was a start. With a mental nod to Marianna Leitz, I fetched the vodka bottle and two glasses from the kitchen. Foos was tapping away at his keyboard, but he indicated yes when I held up the bottle. I poured two shots.

“Want to get something to eat?” I asked.

“Social invitation? Haven’t had one of those in months.”

“Just trying to butter you up until you let me sic the Basilisk on Victoria.”

“You track her down, she tells you to get lost. What’s the rush?”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence. What about dinner?”

“Can’t. Date.”