James Grippando - Money to Burn

Kevin walked toward me and said, “That was my middle-school graduation trip.”

“Nice.”

I placed it back on the credenza, and silence came upon us.

“Michael, let me just say-”

“I don’t want to go there,” I said.

“Please, listen to what I have to say.”

I looked away from the eight-by-ten of Daddy Warbucks on vacation with his chosen family and pretended not to know where this was going. I knew.

“Doing divorce work has given me some valuable insights,” he said. “Every family has problems. Ours is no different. We just have to get past the silly old jealousies.”

My anger shot up. “You think I’m jealous of you?”

“I think my growing up rich and your growing up poor is one of the reasons you went to work on Wall Street. Maybe you don’t call it jealousy, but it’s something.”

“I call that complete nonsense.”

“So do I. Right up there with the stupid jealousy I had for you when we were growing up.”

That took me aback. He smiled a little, clearly hoping to draw one out of me. I didn’t exactly light up, not sure where he was going.

“Did you ever stop and count how many houses I had lived in by the time I graduated from high school?” he asked.

“Not really.”

“Six,” he said. “And you know why? Because Dad was always trading up. Every house we lived in was a stepping-stone to more land, more bedrooms, a better neighborhood. It was never home.”

“Nana and Papa bought their place in 1957. They only moved to Florida when I went away to college.”

“Exactly. Never once was the house you lived in up for sale. When I was thirteen, about to change houses for I think the fifth time, I remember Papa telling me the story about the developer who came knocking on your front door.”

Now I did smile. “All the farmland around us and all the old houses in the neighborhood were being bought up to build new family homes on three-acre lots. Papa was the only guy in the subdivision who wouldn’t sell. The developer finally came by with his checkbook and said, ‘Okay, old man. You win. You’re the last holdout. What’s your price?”

“And when Papa told him there was no price,” said Kevin, clearly having heard every detail, “the developer said, ‘You don’t understand: Money is no object.’”

We were sharing a smile now, as I finished the story. “And Papa looked at him and said: ‘You don’t understand: This is not an object.’”

For the first time in years, my brother and I laughed together, and I felt good about that.

“Now, can we move forward?” said Kevin.

In his mind, clearly it was “problem solved.” He didn’t seem to understand that while laughter was good medicine, medicine wasn’t always a cure-especially when the diagnosis was completely off.

“Sure,” I said, happy to shift gears. He offered me a seat again, and we each took a matching armchair, facing each other.

“Let’s start with this sequence of threatening messages,” he said, a yellow legal pad in his lap.

I gave him the longer version of the money-burning ceremony at Sal’s Place, the flaming package, the most recent text-and finally the FBI’s discovery of the listening device in Sonya’s car.

“Looks like Chuck Bell may have been right,” said Kevin.

“How so?”

“If someone is bugging the general counsel’s Mercedes, maybe your identity theft is linked to a larger attack against Saxton and Silvers. I’ll follow up with the FBI.”

“You want me to be part of that?”

“Negative. I don’t want you talking to law enforcement.”

“Did you hook up with the detective who came by my apartment?”

“I did.”

“Does he think I killed Chuck Bell?”

“I’m not sure. It may have been just a pretense, but he said the reason he went to your apartment was to follow up on the incendiary package you received yesterday morning. They have an interesting lead. It was white phosphorous, which is pyrophoric.”

“What does that mean?”

“It ignites simply when exposed to the air. The police presume it was inside some kind of vacuum-sealed plastic liner, and when you tore open the package-poof. Flames. Once it combusts, it’s hard to extinguish.”

“I’ll vouch for that.”

“Highly toxic, too. You’re lucky you got out of that elevator so quickly.”

“So what leads are the police chasing?”

“White phosphorous is very hard to get your hands on, unless you have something to do with the munitions business. Russian or Israeli, most likely.”

“Munitions business? Doesn’t sound like anybody I know.”

Kevin pulled his trusty Mont Blanc from his breast pocket, ready to take notes. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” he said. “Let’s start at the beginning.”

I talked, and my brother occasionally jotted down a word or two. At nine forty-five he let me switch on the television for a quick market check. FNN was broadcasting in split-screen format, an aerial view of the Chuck Bell homicide scene on one side, the NYSE trading floor on the other, as if to pose the question, Can you name the real crime scene? We had the sound muted, but the news was clearly bad on both sides.

SAXTON SILVERS DOWNWARD SPIRAL CONTINUES IN HEAVY TRADING, read the banner at the bottom of the screen.

FNN FAMILY IN SHOCK OVER DEATH OF BELOVED COLLEAGUE, the next banner read.

Kevin said, “Tell me more about the e-mail from Mallory.”

I looked away from the flat screen. “Mallory studied drama at Juilliard,” I said.

“I think I knew that,” said Kevin.

“She has a flair for performing. Every now and then, she would send me an e-mail that was kind of sexy, kind of funny. This one was an early ‘happy birthday’ video. It was a parody of Marilyn Monroe singing ‘Happy birthday, Mr. President’ to JFK.”

“You have political aspirations?”

“No. But the joke was that she always thought I would someday have Eric Volke’s job-president of Saxton Silvers.”

“So you opened the attachment to her e-mail?”

“It was from her regular e-mail address, so I had no reason to question it. But Elliot-that’s my tech guy-tells me that’s where the spyware came from.”

Kevin scribbled a thought on his legal pad, then looked up. “I’ve seen lots of spying in divorce cases.”

“But why would Mallory plant spyware in a way that could be so easily traced back to her e-mail address?”

“Not too technically savvy, maybe?”

“Granted, she’s not a computer genius, but she’s not stupid. We live together in the same apartment. She could have just crawled out of bed one night and loaded the spyware on my laptop.”

“Maybe she didn’t think she had the technical expertise to load the spyware correctly, so she hooked up with some fifteen-year-old geek to plant it by e-mail.”

“Or the guy who sent me the text message.”

“Let’s not focus too much on how it was planted. The key point here is that if the spyware can in fact be traced back to your wife, then your identity theft claims don’t add up.”

“Why not?”

“Think about it. You want people to believe that someone planted spyware on your computer, stole your passwords, wiped out your bank accounts, and masterminded a complicated short-selling scheme against Saxton Silvers in a financial scandal that has rocked Wall Street-setting you up as the bad guy. Do you actually expect me to walk over to Federal Plaza and tell the FBI that the person behind all that is Mallory?”

“She could have had help.” I didn’t know why I was pushing this angle; I guess I had nothing else.

“It seems much more likely to me that Mallory planted the spyware for the same reason most married people plant spyware: to find out if she was married to a cheater.”