then they would bump up the price significantly on the contracts they sent to the mortgage lenders, thus generating huge extra fees on top of the mortgage. To make it all work, they had an accounting firm, two separate mortgage brokers and three different appraisers on the payroll. They had paperwork in order, she said, W-2s, pay stubs, everything, but it was all falsified. They ended up with the land, which they could resell, and which they usually did, flipping parcels within thirty days if they could, often for even larger profits based on the faulty appraisals, huge back-end fees and loans they'd have to touch. 'They got people who got other people, too,' Lenore said. 'I wouldn't be surprised if they had a few flexible people at the banks, too.'
'I guess I won't give them any money,' Sam said, trying to sound as innocent as possible.
'Samuel,' she said, 'you can drop that ruse if you like. Our conversations are confidential.'
'Are they really?' Sam said.
'Probably not,' she said, 'but if someone didn't want you getting this information, you wouldn't get it.'
Sam knew that was one of the fringe issues related to working with me-there were forces on the inside working for and against me. And if I was being tracked, Sam was being tracked, and all of this was getting approved by someone.
'How not surprised would you be about persons in the banks?' Sam asked.
'Enough to know that it's going to ring some bells on Wall Street,' she said.
That sounded fairly dire. If Sam actually had stocks or bonds or whatever it was people did on Wall Street, he'd figure out how to utilize that information. He made a mental note to tell Veronica, since he was fairly certain she actually knew about that sort of thing.
'You got anything on their investors?' Sam said, figuring, What the hell? Might as well just drop all pretense.
Lenore told him it was just as simple as could be. People were being duped, but paid. Investors put in their money, were probably promised a healthy return, and then, at least to start with, got it. The market in Miami was hot, just like in every other metropolitan area with a halfway decent view. And just like every other place, the market had turned to shit. 'It's just a matter of time before they stop getting dividends on investment,' she said. 'They've been running this now for quite some time without a hiccup.'
It made sense to Sam, knowing that they were coming to Cricket every two weeks for cash. They were probably seeding their largest investors to keep the money flowing in, waiting for the next explosion in the market. But that hiccup? It was here.
'So Stanley Rosencrantz,' Sam said. 'Ballpark net worth?'
'Enough to fill a ballpark,' Lenore said. 'Won't matter, though, when he's doing Fed time.'
Sam liked it when Lenore threw out terms like Fed time. This got Sam thinking. 'Would it be possible to get a few of the addresses they've bought and sold?'
'No,' Lenore said, but he heard her clicking in the background, and in a second his phone beeped, letting him know he'd received a text. That's how the IRS worked. They said no, but they meant yes. 'Before I lose my job, is there anything else you might need to know, Samuel?'
He wasn't going to do it, but… 'You have anything on Brenda Holcomb?'
Lenore gave out a perceptible sigh. He heard the familiar click-clack of keys again. 'She's not right for you,' Lenore said. 'You be good and stay with Veronica.'
'You're a sweetheart,' Sam said. 'But it's not like that.'
'It's always like that with you, Samuel,' Lenore said. He had to admit that she had a point. She'd been looking into women for him for too long. It was just his policy to make sure women he slept with weren't sleeper agents for terrorist organizations, or, at the very least, didn't have husbands in the mafia. 'And, Samuel? You might want to tell your friend Eddie Champagne, if you see him again, that he's now officially on the no-fly list, along with his friends at White Rose. In case you're curious.'
'You caught that?'
'I catch everything,' Lenore said. 'Patriot Act, Samuel-you should learn to embrace it.'
What Sam opted to embrace, after he hung up with Lenore, was the list of addresses she texted him. In the last year, there were three houses on Fisher Island, two office parks in North Miami, a dentist's office in Coconut Grove, a nightclub, a T-shirt shop, a strip club and an address Sam recognized immediately, since he'd spent the better part of the morning looking at it on Google Maps, trying to figure out how he was going to get his goddamned car back: the offices of Longstreet Security.
He had to hand it to Eddie Champagne. He was a scumbag, but man, he had huge balls.
Early the next morning, Sam recounted all of this to Fiona and me as we drove around Miami in Cricket's Mercedes (which I figured probably wasn't being monitored by any satellites-it at least didn't have any tracking devices on it), looking at the properties Eddie Champagne had purchased, flipped and lured investors into. We saw homes worth only a few hundred thousand dollars that he'd managed to get loans on for nearly a million dollars. We saw the remnants of the Lyric Theater in Overtown, one of the poorest neighborhoods in all of Miami, but which had once been the hub of what was called Little Broadway in the thirties and forties, and which Eddie had managed to get a loan of four million dollars on, when its value was more historical than nominal. And finally, we drove past Longstreet.
'The one building he actually still owns,' Sam said. 'Or, rather, that White Rose owns. Longstreet pays them a sizable amount of rent each month.'
'Not a coincidence, I gather,' I said.
'It wasn't even for sale when he bought it,' Sam said.
'How much did he pay for it?'
'Double its worth,' Sam said.
'I admire his spite,' Fiona said.
'Hard not to,' Sam said.
I admired that he hadn't just done the easy job I thought he'd done: What I'd figured from Barry's description of Eddie's work and from what Stan had said, was that it must be a low-impact, high-yield operation. In truth, Eddie Champagne was just a few steps away from being a legit businessman-the steps being the ability to stay legit in a down-turning market, a desire to do things legally, that sort of thing. But like every other organized-crime syndicate that operates in the real world, eventually, they wanted to be taken seriously when they began to make enough money to not want to risk death.
At least he wasn't another drug dealer dreaming Tony Montana.
Dixon Woods, on the other hand…
We had other reasons to be at Longstreet, of course, in that I expected the elusive Dixon Woods would be coming in to mount up before meeting with his new best friend, Hank Fitch, and I wanted to be ahead of that, too.
Sam parked the Mercedes across the street from the facility in the lot of Clifton's Chips, a potato chip company, which, at only nine in the morning, was already like a hive of bees. There were men driving forklifts into and out of the warehouses with pallets filled with bags of chips. The parking lot was filled with Hondas and Toyotas and Saturns. There were already three women and one man-all wearing security badges and khaki on some part of their bodies, because security badges and khaki are like the uniforms for the depressed middle class- standing out front smoking around a trash can.
Two school buses pulled up then, and I watched as at least sixty children piled out and headed somberly to the front door. Nine o'clock is early for everybody.
'I always wondered how they got all of those chips in those lunch-sized sandwich bags without breaking any,' Sam said, also watching the kids. 'Now I get it. They have the kids put them in one by one. Ingenious.'
'They're going on a tour,' I said. I knew this because when I was a kid, I had done the exact same thing. I hadn't thought of it in years, and at the time the Clifton's Chips factory was in an older part of Doral, but I remembered walking through the factory and being transfixed by machines processing the chips, shooting them rapid fire onto conveyer belts, the women in hairnets plucking out burned chips one by one as they passed. I remembered how loud it all was, but how easy it was for me to concentrate in the noise, how some of the kids were crying and complaining of headaches, and I was just watching the machines, thinking about how they could be modified to spit fire instead of chips.
I also remembered that day because Nate got into a fight with a kid named Justin Pluck, and they had to shut down the whole facility because Justin stabbed Nate in the leg with a sharpened pencil, and Nate's blood got all
