Mahogany's Dream Page 7

  “What tapes?”

  “The security tapes from the branch. They clearly show you using a Nokia phone to take digital photos of the signatures and account numbers of everyone who had their direct deposit stolen.”

  Damien didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to because the horror filling his eyes betrayed him.

  “Two pictures per person,” Blake added with a smile. “Every branch has a camera trained on the forms kiosk, genius. You weren’t even smart enough to make real phone calls. You deserve to go to prison.”

  Just then, Tina reappeared and put their check face down on the table under two foil-wrapped chocolate mints. “I’ll take that whenever you’re ready,” she said to Blake brightly.

  “I thought you had to pay at the counter,” Damien said.

  If Tina’s eyes had lasers, Damien would’ve had two holes in his forehead. “Normally you do,” she said with all the restraint she could muster. She turned back to Blake and smiled. “But I thought I would save you the trip, sir.”

  Blake pulled his wallet from the inside pocket of his blazer and retrieved a gold colored credit card. He handed it to Tina and said, “You can take it now.” She took it and trotted off.

  “I like this place,” Blake said. “It has atmosphere.”

  “I don’t even know why I’m being seen wit’ you, man,” Damien lamented. “I don’t even know why I’m here.”

  “You’re here because you need a job and I’m the only person who could get you one. Especially a union job.”

  Tina came back with Blake’s credit card receipt. She had drawn a smiley face next to the total. He filled in the tip line, signed it, and gave her the white copy. Without looking at the receipt she said, “Thank you, Mr. Hawthorn. Please come back again.” Then she walked away, switching her ass cheeks like two coconuts in a strong Jamaican wind.

  Blake was momentarily bedazzled by Tina’s vigorous womanhood, but he eventually refocused on Damien. “Well?”

  Damien watched the traffic whiz by on Broad Street. He wondered if there really were tapes, and if so, if Blake really had them. “And all you want me to do is scare her?” he asked fatefully.

  “Just like I explained it to you,” Blake said. He pulled out a remote control key fob with a Volvo logo and placed it on the table.

  Damien looked at the key fob like a chicken in a coop looks at a wolf.

  Then he picked it up and left.

  CHAPTER

  13

  Beautiful mind, bad dreams.

  After investigating Dyson Conwell for more than three months, Jill felt like she knew less about him than when she had started. Her efforts so far had only succeeded in leading her deeper into a frustrating labyrinth of shadows.

  The basics she knew. He had been born in Philadelphia in 1977 and placed for adoption so quickly that a nurse in the maternity ward filled out the paperwork. His adoption records were sealed, even to the FBI, so the Commonwealth had responded to her subpoena with just a photocopy of his birth certificate with the names of both parents redacted.

  He’d spent his youth in a succession of foster homes and state-run orphanages around the city. Jill visited some of these places. Although she found no evidence that Dyson had ever been delinquent, a few of the places had been little more than penal institutions. The rougher ones were like prep school for prison. But none of what she saw deflected her from her quarry. A difficult childhood was no excuse. It was just a fact, like any other fact.

  She eventually located Dyson’s original caseworker, an adipose woman named Connie Starks who made no secret of her fondness for the bright young boy she remembered. When Jill bluntly asked her why no one had ever adopted Dyson if he was so great, the gray-haired retiree narrowed her eyes and resentfully explained that African American boys are almost never adopted, regardless of what they’re like. “Must be a reason,” Jill had said. It took all of Connie’s willpower to keep from slapping Jill across the mouth.

  Jill had better luck with some of Dyson’s former foster parents, most of whom were delighted to talk about the kind of child he’d been. From all accounts, Dyson was a well-behaved child with a couple of odd quirks, such as his penchant for building his own toys from regular household goods. One man showed her a picture of an entire miniature city Dyson had made from pencils, rubber bands and soap. A gruff woman in South Philadelphia with a house full of rowdy children had summarized their sentiments best: Beautiful mind, bad dreams. The bad dreams had been the reason that none of the families had kept him very long. Some apologetically said they had given Dyson up because he needed professional help they couldn’t provide. Others just shuddered.

  The beautiful mind part had been easy to verify. If Dyson Conwell was anything, he was smart. Downright brilliant if Jill chose to believe some of what she had been told about his mental prowess. Talking to his teachers was like interviewing members of a fan club. To a person, they all claimed that he was the brightest student any of them had ever known. The evidence seemed to support them. His academic records looked like they had been produced by a typewriter stuck on the letter A. He scored a perfect sixteen hundred on the S.A.T. and, according to the legend, had enough spare time to turn his empty scrap paper into a geometric figurine that fascinated the Ombudsman to no end. Jill couldn’t believe the guy still had the paper.

  In Dyson’s senior year of high school, he’d written an honors thesis on nuclear spin stabilization theory. Jill tried to read it, but she got lost after the Introduction. The absurdly long equations in it made about as much sense to her as Egyptian hieroglyphics. Arthur Jackson, Dyson’s high school thesis advisor, admitted to Jill that a part of the paper “went a little beyond” his level of expertise.

  “Which part?” Jill had asked him.

  “The whole damn thing,” Jackson answered with a chuckle. “You only need a B.A. to teach high school.”

  Jackson claimed that Dyson could have easily skipped high school, or at least finished it early, but the kid was a “ladies man” in no rush to leave. That was the first Jill heard of Dyson’s other prowess.

  “Really,” she said. “You mean he wasn’t a nerd?”

  The portly science teacher laughed like Santa Claus. “No dear, I was a nerd. Dyson was more like a playboy intellectual.”

  _________

  Jackson had been flabbergasted when Dyson turned down scholarship offers from MIT and Cal Tech for the privilege of paying student loans at Princeton. He just couldn’t understand it. But Jackson never knew that Dyson had become enthralled by the ideas of a Princeton philosopher named Cornel West. Furthermore, Princeton was the only school that had agreed to let him double major in Physics and Religion.

  And of course Michelle Hillman was headed to Princeton too.

  _________

  When Jill asked Dyson’s former Princeton roommates about his extracurricular activities, one of them tactlessly told her that Dyson had been “Captain of the Ass Squad.”

  Out of pure compulsion, Jill interviewed some of the women Conwell had dated in college. She had to pick a few names at random, because a normal human life span was too short to interview them all. Conwell had indeed been a ladies man.

  Jill preferred the term womanizer. She was dumbfounded when some of the well-educated, seemingly intelligent women she spoke with got all starry eyed at the mention of the time they had spent with Dyson. They claimed they were attracted to him because he knew their dreams. She didn’t realize they meant that literally.

  _________

  After Princeton, Conwell made Arthur Jackson happy by earning a Ph.D. in Mathematical Physics at MIT.

  During his first year of grad school he’d shared an apartment in the Roxbury section of Boston with a woman named Michelle Hillman, who had gone to both high school and college with him. Hillman was in law school at Harvard when the two of them lived together.

  Immediately after graduate school, Conwell had spent two years in Taiwan working for Hon Microelectronics Corporation. He came back
to the States in 2002.

  Then he became The Invisible Man.

  There were no telephone records, bank accounts, credit cards or vehicles in his name. Jill searched the national NCIC database, but Conwell had no criminal record of any kind. She checked the FBI’s Omnivore Database, but there were no emails to or from him—ever. His tax returns reported an income of exactly $50,000 for the past five years, with no itemized deductions or business income. His credit reports were emptier than the North Pole in winter, listing only a Philadelphia address and a three-year old civil judgment.

  Everywhere Jill looked, she found nothing. But the nothingness bid her onward.

  Conwell’s latest W-2 listed his employer as Delaware Valley Microsciences of Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. The address on the form was a mail forwarding service. When Jill pulled the corporate records she discovered that Conwell was the company’s only employee. The sole nominee director of the company was a lawyer named Michelle Hillman. This was exciting news until she found out that Michelle was a partner at Rome, Ballard, Dechert & Ingersoll, a big downtown law firm with enough clout to make any local judge piss on himself.

  But to Jill that was a roadblock, not a dead end.

  She took a second look at the civil judgment on Conwell’s credit report. The judgment was the outcome of a four-year old auto insurance claim. The whole thing was unremarkable except for the vehicle Conwell had been driving. She got his policy number from the police report and subpoenaed his insurance records. In addition to the Range Rover damaged in the accident, the policy also insured a 2007 Aston Martin DB10 and a 2008 BMW 745. Those were unusual cars for someone making only fifty grand a year.

  All three vehicles were registered to a limited partnership called TBHC of America, which itself was controlled by an offshore trust known as Terraced Bay Holdings. The registered agent for both companies was none other than Michelle Hillman.

  In the privacy of her cubicle, Jill pumped her fist in elation.

  CHAPTER

  14

  Jill’s celebration had a shorter life than a fruit fly with a bad heart.

  Two days after she had discovered Dyson’s offshore trust, lawyers from Michelle’s firm got a judge to agree that the Bureau had abused its subpoena power because it had failed to issue a target letter to Dyson. It was a debilitating blow to Jill’s investigation. She still had a trail to follow, but without her subpoenas, she was like a one-legged woman at a track meet.

  Yet she was not deterred. She convinced Brian to give her permission to stake out Dyson’s house. She asked for a week, but it only took her ten minutes to figure out he didn’t live there.

  The address on Dyson’s driver’s license was a ranch style house on a quiet, tree-lined street off Stenton Avenue in the Mt. Airy section of northwest Philly. The neighborhood was nice enough, but something was amiss: The house had no driveway and no garage. A man with three luxury cars would need somewhere to keep the two he wasn’t driving.

  __________

  After Jill had staked out the house for about five hours, a shriveled old woman knocked on her car window with a cane. She lowered the window a bit and the smell of Ben Gay stung her nostrils.

  “Yes?” Jill asked the woman as she covered her nose with her hand.

  The brown skinned woman had beady eyes that shot in every direction as they scanned the interior of Jill’s car. “What chu’ doin’ here, miss? This here ain’t no parkin’ lot.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says me, that’s who?”

  “And who the hell are you?”

  “Geraldine Wallace, the Block Captain.”

  Jill had to swallow a laugh. She had grown up in Santa Barbara, California and had never heard of a block captain until she came to Philadelphia, where it seemed that every other street had one. With the city’s crime rate, she thought it was an infinitely ludicrous concept.

  “Well, Captain Wallace,” Jill said derisively, “I think you should mind your own business.”

  “Ain’t no drugs on this block,” the woman said.

  “Great for you.”

  Jill pressed the button to close the window, but the old woman moved with surprising quickness and jammed the opening with her cane. “I’ma call the cops!”

  Jill pressed her FBI badge against the window. “I am a cop. And you’re interfering with police business.”

  Geraldine squinted at Jill’s identification. Then she conspiratorially said, “Who ya’ lookin’ for? I know e’rybody.”

  Jill answered by looking at Dyson’s house.

  “You lookin’ for dem boys in 702? I ain’t s’prised. I ain’t s’prised at all! You know I took some peach cobbler ova’ there when they first moved in. The pretty one try to tell me he some kinda’ scientist. Uh-huh, yes he did. The Lord knows I ain’t neva’ seen no negro boy be no scientist. Just cause I’m old don’t mean I got cotton in my head.

  And the big one try to say he a s’curity guard. Now you tell me, what kinda’ scientist need a s’curity guard?”

  Jill couldn’t resist. “The big one?”

  “Uh-huh. Like a big ole bulldog. His real name Enias Anderson, but they call ‘im Rock.” The woman shook her head. “These young folk t’day always gotta name different than what they mama gave ‘em. I’ll be damned if I call ‘im that. If I call him anything, ita’ be Avalanche. Know why I say that? Cause it’s only a matter of time for dat boy bring down a whole heap a trouble on this block.”

  When Jill finished writing the name Enias Anderson in her notebook, she asked, “Does the pretty one have a name too?”

  “Dyson Conwell,” Geraldine answered without missing a beat. “You spell it like Tyson with a D instead of a T. You know my granddaughta’ like to soak her pants when she saw a handsome boy like dat drivin’ dem big ole fancy cars.”

  “Tell her not to get her hopes up too high,” Jill quipped. “I don’t think Michelle would like that.”

  “What’s that you say, offica’?”

  “Nothing,” Jill told her new informant.

  CHAPTER

  15

  Washington, D.C.

  Wearing official company coveralls and carrying a miniature satellite dish under his arm, Benjamin Lui nervously crossed the lobby and walked up to the front desk of Koxinga’s hotel. He announced that he was there to install Star Satellite TV service in Room 610.

  The front desk clerk looked over the fake installation work order that Lui had made and then verified the appointment with the manager on call. Everything appeared to be in order, so she showed Lui her brightest smile and pointed him towards the elevators.

  The clerk had never known the hotel to allow any guest to have private cable service installed. But then again, Room 610 was in the condominium portion of the main tower, so she didn’t let it concern her.

  Upstairs, Lui knocked on the door to Room 610 for several nerve racking minutes without getting an answer. He began to wonder if he were at the wrong room. Koxinga had sent him a text message with the room number as soon as his plane had touched down that morning.

  After another few minutes with no response, Lui decided to give up. As he turned to head for the elevator, Koxinga emerged from the fire stairs and called him back.

  He was out of breath.

  CHAPTER

  16

  The sun had set and the sky was nearly ebony. A lone streetlamp buzzed overhead, drowned out by the sounds of the city. Scattered shards of broken glass sparkled in the moonlight like tiny fallen stars. The air was still, expectant.

  It was so quiet in the cabin of Norma’s car that Damien could hear his own breathing, steady and rhythmic.

  He puffed on a cigarette as he ran down a mental checklist of all the things a salary of twenty-three dollars an hour would empower him to do. He could catch up on his bills, pay his overdue child support and give his mother some rent money so she would finally get off his back about staying in her basement again. Charlene had kicked him out of her apartment right after he’d
lost his job at the bank. With his new salary, he was sure he could win her back in no time. On second thought, he decided that he didn’t want her back. She wasn’t attractive enough for the new image he planned for himself, though he conceded that it would be nice to be around his son again.

  Yes, a new image. A hard working, successful Damien. A union man. He pictured himself with a hard hat and a thermos. He liked what he envisioned. The video playing in his mind was clearer than a DVD: He saw himself cruising the strip at Belmont Plateau in a brand new Nissan Maxima, with a girl prettier than Charlene in the passenger seat.

  And all he had to do was this one little thing. Just scare her.

  He had convinced himself that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity. That’s why he had followed Blake’s instructions so meticulously. Just like he’d been told, he’d waited precisely three months. Blake had told him that every Wednesday evening Norma worked until eight o’clock completing her rounds of her school’s residential dormitory. When he asked his coconspirator why his wife worked so late, Blake had said something about her insisting on spending time with each one of her brats.

  ________

  At nightfall, Damien had taken the Broad Street subway to the Spring Garden station and then walked the few blocks to the parking lot behind Norma’s school. Just as Blake had promised him, the black Volvo was the only car remaining in the lot. The school’s tiny parking lot lay across an unlit alley from its sparkling new dormitory. The alley was so deserted that he had had to pay extra attention to his surroundings to ensure he didn’t get mugged himself.

  He had used the remote control Blake had given him to unlock the car and slip into the backseat. As instructed, he had switched off the overhead dome light so it wouldn’t illuminate the cabin when Norma arrived. Then he stayed down low and daydreamed about his new life.