Vengeance: Mystery Writers of America Presents

“And you like living rich.”

“Who doesn’t?”

Nicole had grown up in the second-floor apartment of a three-decker on Sydney Street in Savin Hill, a neighborhood locals called Stab-’n’-Kill. Her parents were losers, always getting caught in the petty scams they tried to run on their soon-to-be-ex-employers and on the city and the welfare system and DSS and the Housing Department and just about anybody they suspected was dumber than they were. Problem was, you couldn’t find dead fucking houseplants dumber than Jerry and Gerri Golden. Jerry ended up getting stomach cancer while in minimum-security lockup for check-kiting, and Gerri used his death to justify climbing into a bottle of Popov and staying there. Last time Nicole checked, she was still alive, if toothless and demented. But the last time Nicole checked had been about ten years ago.

Being poor, she’d decided long ago, wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Plenty of people had nothing and didn’t let that eat their souls. But it wasn’t for her.

“What does your husband do?” Kineavy asked.

“He’s an investment banker.”

“For which bank?”

“Since the crash? Bank Suffolk.”

“Before the crash?”

“He was with Bear Stearns.”

Finally, some movement in Kineavy’s face, a flick in his eyes, a shift of his chin. He lit another cigarette and raised one eyebrow ever so slightly as the match found the tobacco. “And people call me a killer.”

SHE THOUGHT ABOUT it later, how he was right. How there was this weird disconnect at the center of the culture around various acts of amorality. If you sold your body or pimped someone who did, stuck up liquor stores, or, God forbid, sold drugs, you were deemed unfit for society. People would try to run you out of the neighborhood. They would bar their children from playing with yours.

But if you subverted federal regulations to sell toxic assets to unsuspecting investors and wiped out hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of jobs and life savings, you were invited to Symphony Hall and luxury boxes at Fenway. Alan had convinced the entire state of Arkansas to invest in bundled sub-primes he knew would fail. When he’d told Nicole this, back in ’07, she’d been outraged.

“So the derivatives you’ve been selling, they’re bad?”

“A lot of them, yeah.”

“And the CD, um, whatta you —”

“Collateralized debt obligations. CDOs, yeah. They pretty much suck too, at least a good sixty percent of them.”

“But they’re all insured.”

“Well . . .” He’d looked around the restaurant. He shook his head slowly. “A lot of them are, sure, but the insurance companies overpromised and underfunded. Bill ever comes due, everyone’s fucked.”

“And the bill’s going to come due?”

“With Arkansas, it sure looks like it. They bundled up with some pretty sorry shit.”

“So why not just tell the state retirement board?”

He took a long pull from his glass of cab. “First, because they’d take my license. Second, and more important, that state retirement board, babe? They might just dump those stocks en masse, which would ensure that the stocks would collapse and make my gut feeling come true anyway. If I do nothing, though, things might — might — turn out all right. So we may as well roll the dice, which is what we’ve been doing the last twenty years anyway, and it’s turned out okay. So, I mean, there you go.”

He looked across the table at her while she processed all this, speechless, and he gave her the sad, helpless smile of a child who wasn’t caught playing with matches until after the house caught fire.

“Damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” Alan said, and ordered another bottle of wine.

The retirees lost everything when the markets collapsed in 2008. Everything, Alan told her through sobs and whimpers of horror. “One day — fuck, yesterday — old guy worked his whole life as a fucking janitor or pushing paper at city hall, he looked at a statement said he’d accrued a quarter million to live off of for the final twenty years of his life. It’s right before his eyes in bold print. But the next day — today — he looked and the number was zero. And there’s not a thing he can do to get it back. Not one fucking thing.”

He wept into his pillow that night, and Nicole left him.

She came back, though. What was she going to do? She’d dropped out of community college when she met Alan. The prospects she had now, at her age and level of work experience, were limited to selling French fries or selling blow jobs. Not much in between. And what would she be leaving behind? Trips, like the one to Paris, for starters. The main house in Dover; the city house twenty miles away in Back Bay; the New York apartment; the winter house in Boca; the full-time gardener, maid, and personal chef; the 750si; the DB9; the two-million-dollar renovation of the city house; the one-point-five-mil reno of the winter house; the country club dues — one country club so exclusive that its name was simply the Country Club — Jesus, the shopping trips; the new clothes every season.

So she returned to Alan a day after she left him, telling herself that her duty was not to honor a bunch of people she didn’t know in Arkansas (or a bunch of people she didn’t know in Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, Maine, and, well, forty-five other states); her duty was to honor her husband and her marriage.

Honor became a harder and harder concept to apply to her husband — and her marriage — as 2008 turned into 2009, and then as 2009 turned into 2010.

Outside of losing his job because his firm went bankrupt, Alan was fine. He’d dumped most of his own stock in the first quarter of ’08, and the profit he made paid for the renovation of the Boca place. It also allowed them to buy a house she’d always liked in Maui. They bought a couple of cars on the island so they wouldn’t have to ship them back and forth, and they hired two gardeners and a guy to look after the place, which on one level might seem extravagant but on another was actually quite benevolent: three people were now employed in a bad economy because of Alan and Nicole Walford.

Alan cried a lot in early 2009. Knowing how many people had lost their homes, jobs, retirement savings, or all three ate at him. He lost weight, and his eyes grew very dull for a while, and even when he signed on with Bank Suffolk and hammered out a contract feathered with bonuses, he seemed sad. He told her nothing had changed; nobody had learned anything. No longer was investment philosophy based on the long-term quality of the investment. It was based on how many investments, toxic or otherwise, you could sell and what fees you could charge to do so. In 2010, banking fees at Alan’s firm rose 23 percent. Advisory fees spiked 41 percent.

We’re the bad guys, Nicole realized. We’re going to hell. If there is a hell.

But what were they supposed to do? Or, more to the point, what was she supposed to do? Give it back? She wasn’t the one shorting stock and selling toxic CDOs and CDSs. And even if she were, the government said it was okay. What Alan and his cohorts had done was, while extremely destructive, perfectly legal, at least until the prosecutors came banging on their door. And they wouldn’t. As Alan liked to remind her, the last person to fuck with Wall Street had been the governor of New York, and look what happened to him.

Besides, she wasn’t Alan. She was his wife.

Maybe she was doing a service to society by hiring Kineavy. Maybe, while she’d been telling herself she didn’t want to leave the marriage because she didn’t want to be poor, the truth was far kinder — maybe she’d hired Kineavy so he’d right a wrong that society couldn’t or wouldn’t right itself.

Seen in that light, maybe she was a hero.

IN ANOTHER MEETING, at another part of the waterfront, she gave Kineavy ten thousand dollars. Over the years, she’d been able to siphon off a little cash here, a little cash there, from funds Alan gave her for the annual Manhattan shopping sprees and the annual girls’ weekends in Vegas and Monte Carlo. And now she passed some of it to Kineavy.

“The other ten when I get there.”