WEDNESDAY

8.

It was after midnight before Lester extricated Ted from the grips of the Mount Sinai South ER in Oceanside. On a routine drive-by at the beach, looking for teenage trysters or underage drinkers armed with a twelve-pack of Bud and another dozen of Fireball nips, a lone Nassau County policeman had instead discovered Ted shivering on the windswept blacktop. He was still wrapped in the moving blanket, which had no doubt saved his life as the temperature had plummeted once the early-November sun had dropped below the horizon.

“Where the hell is Mohammed?” Ted asked once they were in the Uber from the hospital and headed home. He was cold, in pain, and cranky, yet relieved at being rescued, not murdered, and that the policeman had not checked the contents of the mobster’s briefcase. Ted had explained the whole episode to the cop as a bachelor party prank, though he suspected that his delivery had been less than successful.

“He’s got problems.”

“Tell me about it,” Ted scoffed.

“And he’s not answering his phone.”

“How does he get fares?”

“It’s an app,” Lester said, raising one eyebrow.

“Of course it is.” Everything was an app these days. He was forty and some days felt like eighty.

“And he drove for Kenzie all day.”

Kenzie was safe and had Mohammed to ferry her to and from her meetings—while Ted with battered head and zip-tied limbs lay freezing his balls off in Jones Beach Parking Lot 4. “So, why isn’t he answering his phone?”

“As I understand the situation,” Lester said with a dubious sniff, “he’s being pursued by a car dealer who keeps demanding he extend his automobile warranty.”

“That’s a scam, Lester. Everybody knows that.”

“I don’t think ‘everybody’ includes Mohammed.” He dug in his jacket pocket and produced Ted’s phone. “You dropped this, I think.”

“Thank you,” Ted said. He checked the charge. Red zone. “And Kenzie’s okay?”

“Worried, but otherwise good. I didn’t know what to think. I come back with a basket full of laundry and you’re gone and the door is wide open.”

“Sorry, I’d have locked up, but those guys were in a hurry and I was unconscious.”

“Nice to see you’ve still got your sense of humor.”

“And a bump on my head. One of the cops thought it was a sap. He said his father always carried one as a detective.”

“Blackjack.”

“Same thing. Very effective. But no permanent damage. No fracture. They gave me Tylenol.”

“We could make a stop if you need something stronger.”

“Thank you, no. I will suffer soberly.”

“I was thinking more like CVS,” Lester said.

“Here,” Ted said, handing over the briefcase. “Put this in the bank.”

Lester snapped open the catch and stared at the field of green. “In small deposits, over a week or so.”

“So, are you going to tell me about these guys? How did we end up lending money to wiseguys?”

“I’m as surprised as you.”

“Not quite.”

9.

“I can explain,” Lester said, selling it hard.

Kenzie wasn’t buying. “You lent money to the mob. The two of you?”

“We structured it,” Ted answered. “It’s not our money.” Was that supposed to make it sound better? “But it’s well collateralized.”

A lawyer’s response. She wanted to scream.

“I’ll be sure to remember that when your body floats up in Jamaica Bay.”

She had begun with compassion, care, and concern. She’d checked his wound—a blossoming purple bruise, but little swelling, and no sign of bleeding. She’d offered tea, wrapped him in a blanket on the sofa, kissed him gently but warmly, and asked what had happened. It was soon after that the conversation made a dramatic turn and her sympathy took a back seat to increasing alarm.

There was a single light on in the living room, possibly the only internal light going on the street. Lester and Ted were sprawled on the couch, Kenzie facing them in Ted’s office chair. The couch was the main piece of furniture in the room that served both as their living/dining room and the waiting room—and sometime conference room—for Ted’s law practice. There was one chair, in case they had a guest, a two-shelved bookcase loaded with retired library copies of paperback crime novels from late in the last century, all donated by Kenzie’s mother, and a twenty-nine-inch television perched on the wall over it, a housewarming gift from her father. The apartment had been carved out of one quarter of a two-family house—now three—in Richmond Hill, equidistant from the courts where Ted spent time and Ridgewood where Kenzie’s Stop the Spike offices were headquartered—in a church basement they rented from the Korean-born Catholic priest, Father Byun.

Ted’s office was in what was advertised as the “second bedroom,” an alcove off the far side of the living room. The sole bathroom was reached through a pocket door behind the metal circular staircase that led up to their bedroom. Through an archway was a galley-sized kitchen. Outside the off-street kitchen door—the only entrance—was a rack where Kenzie locked the frame of her bicycle—both wheels having been stolen the night they moved in. The apartment had no closets and little charm—but it was cheap and had enough windows on each floor to qualify as “sunlit” for any realtor. And it was available when they needed it. Ted had been forced out of his old place by a landlord who objected to Russian gangsters trashing the apartment and scaring his secretary.

It was their first home together. And they were now sitting in it discussing gangsters.

“Can I say something?” Lester asked, bravely attempting to deflect her anger—most of which had been directed at Ted so far.

“It was you they were looking for,” Kenzie snapped.

“Six months ago,” Lester began, and then stopped for a second to clear his throat. “Six months ago, I was checking for tax liens at the county clerk.”

Kenzie rolled her eyes in a silent where-the-hell-is-this-going.

“Patience is a virtue,” Ted said, taking another sip of red wine. Kenzie had tried to get him to have hot tea, but he elected to finish the last glass in the bottle.

“So is getting to the point,” she shot back. Lester had accepted the tea, but hadn’t drunk any, gripping the warm mug in two hands.

Lester bravely plowed ahead with his tale. “There’s only two computers for the public. They’re ancient. Green screens. And the software hasn’t been updated since the Koch administration. It’s not what most people these days think of as user-friendly.”

Kenzie gritted her teeth. Trying to rush Lester when he had the floor was a losing proposition. She’d listen. But she didn’t have to do it patiently. “Moving right along,” she said.

“There was this woman trying to work the program. Tall, blonde—bottle blonde, but not cheap—wearing an expensive-looking skirt and blouse and dripping with gold jewelry. Bracelets, rings, a necklace, all with little sparklers. Some not so little. In other words, she didn’t fit. She didn’t belong there. And she was having a miserable time getting what she wanted out of that machine.”

“So you offered to help her.”

Lester sighed at this bit of understanding. “Exactly. And she jumped at it. Thanked me and showed me a list of properties. She said she was checking on unpaid taxes on her brother’s buildings because he was in trouble. What she didn’t mention was that her brother was in MCC waiting on trial in federal court.” Manhattan Correctional Center was where the bad guys were held pending trial.

“This is Scarduzio’s sister you’re talking about.” Kenzie was appalled. And pissed. Peter Scarduzio. “The Gent,” according to the New York Post. “Mafia boss,” per the Daily News. “She’s the one on TV. Married to the Mob or something, right? Holy hell.”

“I don’t have a television.” Lester raised his voice at the injustice.

“What’s her name? Jeanine Something.”

“Gerhart,” Ted answered. “Her husband runs a string of car washes.”

Kenzie glared at him. “Car washes. I imagine that’s important.”

Lester came to his rescue again. “She seemed like a nice lady, and she was having trouble with the machine. I was being polite.”

“She’s a very attractive woman,” Kenzie said pointedly.

“I try not to let such things influence me,” Lester answered.

Ted laughed. Kenzie gave him the death stare once more. He stopped laughing. She turned to Lester. “Go on.”

“All told, there’s a little over a quarter mil in unpaid taxes and water on eight buildings. I thought it would make a nice hard money loan for one of Ted’s investors.”

Kenzie whirled on Ted again. “Where do you find these people? Somebody just writes a check for hundreds of thousands? Who the hell do you know with that kind of disposable income? That’s a small fortune.”

“For us, yes. For them, not so much.” Ted met her ferocity with his usual calm.

His calm made her crazy. He knew it. So did she.

“Who? Jill’s family?”

That was a cheap shot. Unwarranted, but it popped out before she knew she was forming the words. Ted’s ex-wife. The family had money. Big money. And power. Lots of power. Ted claimed they had not spoken in well over a year. Kenzie believed him but had to remind herself of that fairly often. Jill’s presence was like the aroma of Valentine’s Day flowers left in the vase until the water went bad.

“Those people want nothing to do with me,” Ted said. “I promise.” He wanted her to believe. Was he trying to convince himself as well?

“So why does this mob guy need to borrow from you? Or whoever is putting up the cash?”

Ted let a long sigh escape. “Technically, the money went to the brother-in-law. It’s his name on the corporate papers.”

“But . . .” Lester said.

Ted nodded. “But Mr. Scarduzio is in federal custody. He needs money to pay his lawyers.” Ted looked tired—exhausted. He wasn’t going to last much longer. She felt her anger softening.

Lester continued to explain. “Only all of his accounts are frozen. And he can’t use the property as collateral until he cleans up the tax liens. That’s where we come in.”

“You’re helping a mob guy stand off a federal prosecutor? Do I have that right?”

The two men looked at each other.

“Yes,” Lester said.

“No,” Ted said at the same moment.

“I see why you didn’t want the cops to know you’d been kidnapped. This is so going to come back and bite you in the ass.”

“I wasn’t kidnapped.”

“What do you call it? They tied you up, beat you, threatened you with a gun, and left you to freeze to death.” She heard herself sounding like a harpy. She needed to listen, not rush to the attack.

“We were negotiating. The younger Mr. Scarduzio was impatient for results.”

“Why not go to the Feds and dump the whole thing in their lap?”

“Ahhh, because the Feds would go after our lender, put liens on the property, and probably begin investigating us. Nightmare. On the other hand, if we hold off on the foreclosure and wait patiently, our client gets his money, plus interest, in six months, and everybody’s happy.”

“And some mobster gets to walk.”

“Unless convicted. That’s the American way.”