Peter Spiegelman - Thick as Thieves

“What men?”

“He’d seen some of them around the ranch before, but they scared him and he always kept his distance. Bertolli’s hard boys. The mechanic tells his brother they looked like they were there to work.”

Carr stands slowly and puts a hand on the back of the bench. “Which Friday morning was this?”

“Four months back, the second Friday of the month. That makes it the morning of the twelfth.”

After a while, Carr clears his throat. “That’s the morning of the day before,” he says.

“Mr. Boyce says not to read too much into it.”

Carr looks down at Tina, and at his own face, black in her black lenses. “It doesn’t take any reading,” he says quietly. “They knew he was coming. They were waiting for him.”

At 9:35 a.m. Howard Bessemer will leave his blue, Bermuda-style cottage, turn right on Monterey Road, turn right again on North Ocean Boulevard, and drive south, past the Palm Beach Country Club, to the Barton Golf and Racquet Club, there to meet Daniel Brunt for a ten o’clock court. He will play no more than two sets of tennis with Brunt, and afterward drink no more than two iced teas, and then he will shower, dress, get in his car, and drive across the Royal Park Bridge for lunch in West Palm Beach. This is Howard Bessemer’s routine on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and this being 9:33 on a Tuesday, Carr knows that Bessemer will soon appear. Because if Carr, Latin Mike, Bobby, and Dennis have learned anything in the weeks they’ve been watching him, it is that Bessemer is a man of routines.

Tuesdays and Thursdays: tennis and lunch. Mondays and Wednesdays: golf and cocktails. Friday mornings: sailing. Friday afternoons: more cocktails. And Friday nights straight through Sunday afternoons: high-stakes poker, cocaine, and whores-two, sometimes three, at a clip-all in a basement below a Brazilian restaurant, not far from the medical center. They can set their watches by Bessemer, and they love him for it.

The garage door opens, and the blue BMW pulls out. Bessemer has the top down, and his thinning blond hair is a tattered pennant in the breeze. Right and right again, and Bobby waits another fifteen seconds before he pulls the gray painter’s van away from the curb. Carr calls Latin Mike.

“We’re gone,” he says into his cell.

“We’re in,” Mike replies, and in the side mirror Carr sees Bessemer’s front door swing shut.

This stretch of Ocean Boulevard is flat and straight-a corridor of stucco walls, hedges, and gated drives, whose usual quiet is deepened by a sense of off-season abandonment. Traffic is sparse, and Carr can see Bessemer’s BMW blocks ahead, shimmering in the heat. The Atlantic appears to their left in flashes, in the alleys between properties-white, heaving, covered in sunlight.

Bobby tugs his painter’s cap lower. “Got another doughnut?” he asks. Carr hands him a powdered sugar, rolls down his window, and lets in the salt breeze and the smell of ripening seaweed.

Bessemer is nimble for a thickset man. He tosses his keys in a neat arc to a valet in a pink polo shirt, hitches his tennis bag on his shoulder, trots up the steps of the Barton, and disappears into its Spanish colonial facade. The valet slides into the BMW and wheels the car around the crushed shell drive. On another Tuesday he would head due west, fifty yards down a service road to the club’s parking lot-but not today. Today, half of that lot is being resurfaced, and only the cars of Barton members are being parked in the other half. The cars of staff, and of guests like Howard Bessemer, go around the corner, to the unattended lot of an Episcopal church. Carr and Bobby are parked across the street when the BMW arrives.

The valet drops it into a slot next to a Porsche and sprints off toward the club. Carr takes a black box smaller than a deck of cards from the backpack at his feet.

“Two minutes,” he says, but he doesn’t take that long. When he returns he has another small box in his hand, like the first but caked in mud and dust.

“Korean crap,” Bobby says, disgustedly. “Second one that’s died on me this year. The fucking Kia of GPS trackers.”

Bobby drives around another corner and down an alley. They park beside a dumpster and Carr takes a camera from the backpack. He sights through the viewfinder, and through a gap in the green court windscreen, and finds Bessemer and Brunt on their usual court. He has plenty of pictures of Bessemer-the benign, round face, the watery, perpetually astonished blue eyes, the ingratiating smile-and of the tanned and simian Brunt, but just now Bessemer is talking to someone Carr hasn’t seen before, a tall, knobby man, awkward and embarrassed-looking in tennis whites. Carr takes half a dozen photos and checks the results on the camera’s little screen.

Bobby picks through the doughnut box. “Used to be, a guy like Howie did a little time, laid low awhile, then hooked up with a charity board,” he says. “Raised money for cancer or something. Now he can’t even get membership in a fucking tennis club-has to be like a permanent guest. Fraud and embezzlement-you’d think he was skinning live cats. I guess that fucking Madoff really queered it for guys like him.”

Carr smiles and passes the camera to Bobby. “Do we know this guy?” he asks.

Bobby looks at the screen and speaks through a mouthful of Boston cream. “Howie had a lunch and a dinner with him last week. I call him Ichabod. Don’t know his real name.”

“Time to find out,” Carr says.

Time, in fact, to pick Howard Bessemer’s pockets and rifle through his sock drawer, down to the lint and the last stray pennies. The dossier from Boyce has given Carr and his crew a head start: the basics of Bessemer’s story. The early chapters are straightforward enough: a young man of mediocre intellect and even less ambition-not to mention a DWI arrest on his eighteenth birthday-finds a spot at the university that generations of his family have attended, and where his grandfather has recently built a gymnasium. Not much new there.

The middle passages are similarly predictable: a degree after five and a half years, a record distinguished only by his term as social director of his fraternity and three more DWI arrests-though no convictions-and yet Howard still wangles a place in the training program at Melton-Peck, where his great-uncle was once a board member. A job as an account manager in the private bank follows, as does a marriage, a promotion or two, a co-op on the Upper East Side, a baby, and finally a rancorous, pricey divorce. Again, nothing novel, except that it is during this period that Bessemer met Curtis Prager. They overlapped at Melton-Peck by two years, and when Prager started up his first hedge fund, Bessemer referred clients to him-and eventually became one himself.

It’s in the later chapters that things get more interesting, and that the Bessemer story plays out in the New York newspapers, and in the records of the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York. It becomes the tale of an affable private banker who for years poached funds from the accounts of certain customers to bolster the investment returns of certain others. A banker who, when caught knee-deep in the cookie jar, sang long and loud to the feds about the inner workings of an elaborate tax evasion scheme that involved several of his well-heeled clients and a pair of Swiss bankers, and featured hundreds of large wire transfers that somehow managed not to appear on anybody’s suspicious activity reports.

Cooperation and a guilty plea bought Bessemer a reduced sentence-eighteen months in Otisville-but he could’ve gotten off with even less. The feds had dangled another offer before him, just before his trip upstate: a suspended sentence in exchange for testimony against Curtis Prager and Tirol Capital. But Bessemer declined. Mr. Boyce’s dossier dryly lists two possible reasons, neither of which involves Howard’s unwavering loyalty.