Beneath The Surface (8 page)

“I just might take you up on that. In the meantime, I got to do something with this money. You know anybody I could use?”

“Wanda handles all that shit. I’ll talk to her about it; see if she could put you on to somebody,” Black said and thought about Meka Brazil.

“What?” Leon asked, noticing the thoughtful look on Black’s face.

“I know somebody who has the skills to help you, but we’ve never done anything like that with her. Her name is Meka Brazil. She’s been working with Wanda as a financial adviser.”

Leon laughed. “Financial adviser, huh?”

“Yeah, nigga; a financial adviser. Now that so much of our business is legitimate, we needed to do some different things with our money.”

“So she
don’t
know where your money comes from?”

“Meka is smart, so she may have figured it out by now, but we made a decision not to tell her any of that. I could arrange a meeting.”

“You just introduce me, socially of course, and I’ll take care of that myself. If she don’t know what you do, it’s better for you if I keep some distant between us. But sooner or later, I gotta go back to work.”

“I know somebody you can talk to about that,” Black said and thought about Angelo Collette, and how killing Stark cost him money. “You
drivin’?”

“Yeah.”

“Let me take a shower and we’ll ride out there,” Black said and got up. An hour later, he and Leon were pulling up in front of Angelo’s spot in Yonkers. He introduced Leon and Angelo, and the three men talked for a while. Then Black stood up. “I’m gonna leave you gentlemen to talk,” he said and left the room. Thirty minutes later, Leon and Angelo came out of the office.

Angelo walked over to Black at the bar. “Thanks, Mikey.”

“For what?” Black asked, but was confident that he was out of the drug business.
This time for good.

On the previous night’s 6 o’clock news, Carmen reported live from the 18
^th
Street art gallery, on what she had learned from Detective Mitchell. “This is Carmen Taylor reporting live from the 18
^th
Street art gallery, where the body of a woman was found murdered. The victim has been identified as Tangela House of Lower Paxton, Pennsylvania. The cause of death was asphyxiation with the strap of a purse.”

While she waited for Aneisha Perry, the gallery director, Carmen wandered around the gallery looking at the exhibition. She was overly impressed with the artist’s work, but she wasn’t an art critic, so the report she prepared before there was a murder to cover, wouldn’t include her critique.

“Miss Taylor?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Aneisha Perry, the gallery director.”

“Thank you for seeing me,” Carmen said and shook Aneisha’s hand.
 

“We can talk in my office,” Aneisha said, and Carmen followed her. “I was half expecting you to have a film crew with you, Miss Taylor.”

“No, I sent them home. I wanted to ask you a few questions about the murder.”

“Other than finding the body, I really can’t tell you much more than that,” Aneisha told Carmen.

“Can you show me where the body was found?”

“I can.” Aneisha led Carmen upstairs. “The police asked me not to let anybody in here, so you understand that I can’t let you go in.”

“I understand.”

“I was on my way to my office to make a call, when I noticed this door cracked opened.” She opened the door and flipped on the lights. “She was lying on that desk there,” Aneisha said, pointing from the doorway.

“Can you tell me anything else about her?”

“I could see her skirt gathered around waist and her blouse opened; poor thing. Oh, and the strap from her purse was wrapped around her neck.” Aneisha turned off the lights, shut the door, and continued to her office.

“What did you do after you found the body?”

“I called the police, naturally.”

“And you don’t remember seeing anybody on the floor, or leaving before you came up here.”

“No, Miss Taylor, I didn’t see anybody,” Aneisha said as they got to her office. “Can I offer you something to drink?”

“No thank you; I’m fine.”

“What can I tell you, Miss Taylor?”

Carmen took out her iPhone, accessed the picture of Tangela that she’d taken of her mug shot from the file on Harmon’s desk, and handed it to Aneisha. “This is a picture of the woman. Her name is Tangela House. Do you remember seeing her that night?”

Aneisha put on her glasses. “This is a much better picture of her than the police showed me. But like I told them, the night was a blur. Openings always are. I may have walked right into her and not noticed.” She looked carefully at the picture again. “No, I’m sorry, I don’t remember seeing her that night.”

“So you wouldn’t know who she may have come with?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Was there a list of invited guests?”

“There is, but the police have it.”

“Do you have a copy?”

“Yes, it is not for publication. I have a responsibility to protect my supporters from any type of undue media exposure,” Aneisha said definitely.

“And I wouldn’t ask you to allow me access to your list; but would you mind looking at your list? I imagine you know most of the guests personally.”

“I do.”

“Those people we can eliminate. But maybe there is a name on that list that may stand out,’ Carmen suggested.

Aneisha moved her mouse and her computer screen came to life. She clicked on the list and began mumbling as she went down the list. Then she got to a name that raised an eyebrow. She looked at Carmen. “This may take some time, and I don’t want to keep you. Why don’t you leave me your card and I’ll give you a call if I find something,” Aneisha offered.

“That sounds good,” Carmen said and took out a card. “Thank you again for seeing me, Miss Perry.” Carmen stood up and so did Aneisha. “I can find my way out,” she said, hoping to take look around.

“It’s no bother at all,” Aneisha said and escorted Carmen out. She got in her car and drove away, wondering whose name it was on that list that raised Aneisha’s eyebrow.

Later that afternoon, Black and Wanda met with their financial adviser, Meka Brazil at Wanda’s downtown office. Meka wanted to discuss the state of their investments since the market crashed. Their loss was over $14 million, and Meka felt responsible.

In the three years that she had been in New York, things had gone from great, to really fucked up for Meka. While the market was up, Meka flew high along with it, and when it dropped, she came down hard. It wasn’t that she had made a lot of bad investments. Meka saw credit default swaps as risky financial products very early on, so she wasn’t tied to them as so many in her profession were. However, when consumer confidence in the stability of the markets dropped, and investors began pulling money out, Meka lost big.

As a result of those losses, she was let go by the firm she was working for, and they went under shortly after that. Now Meka only had one client left, and she knew that she had to do anything she had to do, to keep them. Although neither Black nor Wanda ever mentioned how they made their money, Meka always had her suspicions. That led her to do a little research, and she found that her suspicions were not unwarranted.

Meka knew from her previous experiences that they weren’t using her to launder their money. She knew that game and how it worked, because it was how Meka earned a living while she lived in Miami. When things got a little hot in Miami, Meka moved north and tried to put that life behind her. But she understood all too well, that if things didn’t turn around for her soon, she may have to return to her previous profession.

It was a little after four when Meka arrived at the office. Black stood up when he saw her enter the room. “Good afternoon, Meka,” he said and pulled out her chair.

“Hi, Mike. Hi, Wanda,” Meka said as she sat down.

After a bit of idle chitchat, Meka sadly reviewed their losses and offered the best possible explanation. Her plan was that once she detailed their loss, she would go into an optimistic forecast for future investing, and then jump into her plan for new investments.

“At this point, your loss is in the area of $14 million.”

“Yeah, but only on paper,” Black said, and Meka looked confused by the statement.

“Excuse me?” she asked.

“We didn’t lose $14 million,” Black said, and Wanda looked at him like he had lost his mind. “We only lost a million dollars.”

“That’s a very enlightened attitude for you to have, Mike,” Meka said, but she was glad he was taking it so well. It made her feel better, and made her a little more optimist that she would still have them as a client when the meeting was over.

“I’ll say it is,” Wanda added and rolled her eyes.

“How do you think I should look at it, Wanda?”

“Like it is. The fact is that we lost $14 million,” Wanda said.

“Call it what you want, Wanda. But the truth is that we gave Meka a million dollars to invest, and that is what we lost. The rest of that was only a number on a piece of paper that Meka put in front of us once a month.”

“I see your point, Mike, I really do, but it has substantially affected our net worth,” Wanda said and glared at Meka.

Meka knew that things were starting to get away from her. She was prepared for Bobby, who usually attacked everything she presented. When she arrived and Bobby wasn’t there, she figured that she would be able to make her presentation and sell it without resistance.
I wasn’t expecting this from Wanda,
Meka thought. She was always supportive, even gun-ho about her investment strategies in the past; but that was before she lost their money. Meka pressed on.

“As we move forward, I think that it is absolutely essential to understand this business environment as it has become, and is likely to be, rather than what it has been. The approach I would recommend is to develop a strategy that
precedes
without preconceptions. This is a time when relying on the past or on conventional wisdom, could be the wrong decision. What I’d like to do now, is go over some of the opportunities that I’ve identified for the future,” Meka said and took her plan out of her briefcase.

“I don’t think that will be necessary, Meka,” Black said. “I think at this point it’s safe to say that the market ain’t for us,” he said, and Meka’s heart stopped.

“I disagree. There is a lot of money out there to be made. Some investment houses are having their best quarter ever, and are looking at record annual profits.”

“I don’t dispute that, Meka. I’m sure what you say is true. But listen to what I’m sayin’: It just ain’t for us.”

“I’m sorry that you feel that way,” Meka replied with words she had said so many times, when her former clients told her that they were getting out of the market. She was devastated and it showed on her face.

“Don’t look like that, Meka. There is something that I do want you to work on for me.”

“What’s that?” Meka asked, suddenly overjoyed that he was at least willing to work with her; hoping whatever he had in mind would be lucrative for her.

“At one of our previous meetings, you talked about us making some investments in foreign countries: China; India; Russia.”