“Jennifer is on our side. She’s a comrade in the fight. We’re not trying to expose her. We’re trying to expose her father.”
“Tinsley was helping you expose her own father.”
“I don’t recognize anyone by that name,” Naftali said.
“I’m sorry. Jennifer was helping you expose her own father.”
“What can I say? She’s a very independent girl.”
“Did you know who her father was?”
“Of course we did. Her boyfriend told us.”
“Her boyfriend?”
“Tariq.”
“How do you know Tariq?”
“I don’t. One of the other organizers knows him. They went to DePaul together.”
“So he brought Jennifer to you guys?”
“He made the introduction. She wanted to know more about our principles and mission.”
“And she agreed to join your group?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Then what did she want with your group?”
“My personal opinion?”
“You’re the one I’m talking to.”
“I think she was trying to feel us out. I don’t think she was a hundred percent sure she wanted to totally expose her old man. Like I said, the meeting was more introductory in nature.”
“What did her father do that she was willing to expose?”
“What they all do—broke the law over greed.”
“Anything more specific?”
“How much you make a year?” Naftali said.
“None of your damn business.”
“Well, I know you’re not making millions. Yet you live by the rules just like the rest of us. Well, her old man is already worth several billion, yet that’s not enough for him. He has to bend the rules, go outside the rules, do anything he needs to do—the laws be damned—to make more.”
“Such as?”
Naftali paused and stared quietly at Montero. “Do you plan on arresting me?” he said.
“No, you’re here voluntarily,” Montero said.
“What if I refuse to answer questions?”
“You’re not forced to answer anything, but why would you hide something from us if you have no ill intentions?”
Naftali nodded slightly. “I don’t know all the details, and I don’t think she gave us all the details, but Jennifer found out that her father illegally hid behind a charity to make millions. Totally wrong. Both he and the charity broke the law and knew they were doing so. It was all one big scam.”
“Which charity?”
“Lunch for All.”
“What exactly was the scam?” Montero asked.
“Gerrigan’s company donated a large strip mall to the charity. Gerrigan gets a tax write-off, and the charity gets the land and doesn’t have to pay taxes on it because of their federal exemption. The charity then turned around and leased it to one of Gerrigan’s other companies. Gerrigan’s company now makes money from all the commercial tenants that are paying their leases, and his company avoids paying property taxes. Not only that—the charity never collects lease payments from Gerrigan’s company, so effectively he has the land for free and just collects millions of dollars a year from his tenants. Greedy and completely illegal. He’s using the charity’s tax-exempt status as a shield for his corporate profits. And it gets better. We think Gerrigan was kicking back money to the executives of the charity. Everyone makes millions without getting taxed.”
“And what were you planning to do with this information?” Montero said.
“Expose him for what he is: a greedy overlord who thinks he’s above the law. If Jennifer was willing to give us all we needed, we could clearly show how the system is designed for the very rich, while everyone else struggles just to make ends meet. If you or I did a fraction of the things they do, we’d be locked up, but he and his cronies do this all the time, and they just keep getting richer and more powerful. This was gonna be one of our watershed cases. And it’s a big deal. They all could be brought up on IRS fraud charges as well as a bunch of other charges involving the charity. All kinds of laws were broken. And this was not gonna be a case of a fine. This shit has some serious jail time attached to it.”
“We’ll take a look at the charity and see what we can find,” Burke said to me. “These radical groups tend to make things appear a lot bigger than they really are.”
“It was big enough for Tinsley to consider exposing her own father.”
Burke shook his head. “No one has any fucking loyalty anymore.”
37
I STILL BELIEVED THAT finding Chopper’s killer was the fastest way to find Tinsley Gerrigan, and finding Tinsley was the fastest way to find who had killed Chopper. Now I wondered if all this was somehow wrapped up in the charity scam. That was why just an hour after observing Naftali’s interview, I was now observing Mechanic riding shotgun next to me with his Smith & Wesson .500 Magnum revolver sitting on his lap as we crawled through the darkening Englewood streets.
“You feeling a little jumpy tonight?” I asked, nodding toward the gun. This was not his usual hardware.
“Show of force,” he said.
And quite the show it was. Five pounds of polished stainless steel with a twenty-five-gram cartridge that could travel 1,525 feet per second. You could knock a water buffalo down with one round more than a hundred yards away. If you didn’t have strong enough anterior deltoids, the recoil could literally rip your arm out of your shoulder joint.
I continued slowly through the neighborhood, trying to collect my thoughts. I kept playing back not Naftali’s interview but JuJu Davis’s, dissecting his answers, trying to retrace his movements that night. As I’d watched him spar with Novack and Adkins, there was something he said, just an offhand comment in one of his answers, that had tickled a few gray cells somewhere deep in my temporal lobe. But even now, as then, I couldn’t put my hand around it.
We drove down the same loop we had the last time we were here: Seventy-First Street from Halsted to the expressway, then back up Sixty-Ninth Street. Next, we turned down Seventieth Street. Darkness had settled over the narrow roads, and except for a
