Dance for the Dead (10 page)

There was still something
missing from the story Mary Perkins was telling: who were the seven
men following her? “By men he must have known you weren’t
going to pay the money back.”

“In a way they all knew
too much. See, Cyrus has been around long enough to have seen
problems come and go – the oil crisis and the stock market
slide in the early seventies, the inflation after that. He’s a
survivor. There was no question this wasn’t going on forever.
If he rode it out, then when it ended he’d be on top of a big
company and could count the change later. But if he stopped now, he
was out of business. Sometimes these guys would do anything to keep
the money moving through – loan anything to anybody and then
cook the books to keep the loan from going bad.”

“So you got big loans and
walked away with the money.”

“That was my specialty.
There were other people who made a lot of headlines by building
screwy empires – lending themselves money to build ghost
communities in the desert and paying themselves and their families
fifty million in salaries for doing it. But what I’m trying to
tell you is that it was all going on a long time, and the ones you’ve
read about weren’t the only ones who did it. They weren’t
even the only ones who got caught. They were just the ones who got
convicted. They were very unlucky.”

“Why unlucky?”

“It meant that one of
these overworked low-level federal accountants had to get around to
looking at all the loan papers, spot yours, notice there was
something really wrong with the loan, ask questions, get the wrong
answers, and convince his supervisor to do something about your loan
instead of about somebody else’s. Even then the procedures were
amazing. That stuff we’ve all heard about the cold-eyed bank
examiners popping in at dawn and padlocking everything is a myth. It
never happened that way. Not once.”

“You’re saying it
was staged for the television cameras?”

“No, the pictures were
real. What you didn’t see was what happened first. The
regulator asks questions. Six months go by while somebody at the bank
dances around. The supervisor sends his first-level letter.”

“What’s that?”

“They all have names like
Notice of Discrepancy or Letter of Caution or Admonition. The letter
describes what they found and says they want it fixed. Another six
months go by, and the regulator checks the bank again and sees that
you didn’t fix it. He looks deeper for other problems, or he
forces you to agree to move the loan over to the debit column instead
of the credit column. Another six months go by and you get the
Caution. Then the Admonition.”

“That’s ludicrous.”

“Of course. The regulating
procedures were left over from the days when everybody in the
business was Cyrus Curbstone. If he got a letter pointing out a
discrepancy, he would have been after it like it was a gaping hole in
his own roof. The system was set up to say, ‘Please look into
this,’ then ‘Have you fixed it?’ then ‘Okay,
here’s how you fix it,’ then ‘If you don’t
fix it, I will,’ and finally, ‘Here I come.’ ”

“You have to wonder how
any of these people got caught.”

“It was like being chased
by a glacier. You could live a whole life without seeing it get any
closer. It was coming, sure. But there was so much time to get out of
the way.”

“And some waited too
long.”

“Only a few. About a
thousand people actually got to the point where they went to trial.
This meant that then-savings and loans were so out of control that
the government put them at the top of the list for closure. They had
to be losing millions a day for that. Then a couple of agents had to
figure you were so obviously guilty that it was worth spending four
years of their lives preparing the case.

A U.S. attorney had to be sure
the case was a slam-dunk, so it wouldn’t ruin her won-lost
record. Then her boss would have to be convinced that you had stolen
so much that when the case was over they could recover enough
millions in civil court to repay the millions all this prosecution
was costing, and enough millions more to make it look to Joe Taxpayer
like they’d gotten his money back, and enough millions more so
it would look like they put your head on a pole to scare off the
other high rollers.”

“How did that work out?”

“Not so great. In order to
convict, they had to take the judge and jury through all these loan
papers, land-flips, asset appraisals, and files. The average person
can barely follow his own taxes. All this paper was written up to
fool qualified accountants. The paper made most of these guys look
like victims. For all I know plenty of them were. About a third got
off. and of the others only about half got convicted of anything that
carried jail time. The average sentence was three years.”

“You said they were picked
so there could be civil suits. Didn’t they still have to face
that?”

“Sure, but they all said
they were broke. Even if they had a hundred million dollars in a box
under their bed, they also had papers to show they owed somebody two
hundred million.”

“I know the government
confiscated land and buildings and things. They’ve been selling
them off for years.”

“If you read that much,
you don’t have to ask me how that’s going. The savings
and loans the government took over were the worst, because that was
all they had enough money for. The worst were ones where somebody had
pulled land-flips to jack up an acre in the middle of a toxic waste
dump from a thousand dollars to a million, and had a shady contractor
put a substandard building on it so they could jack up the price of
the land all around it.”

“It’s an interesting
story,” said Jane, “but it’s history. It’s
been over for years.”

“Oh?” said Mary
Perkins. “Then let me ask you something. Where is it?”

“What?”

“The money.”

“It wasn’t real to
begin with, was it? If you take something that’s worth a
thousand dollars and say it’s worth a million, and then it goes
back to a thousand, nothing happened.”

“Something happened.
Somebody walked out the door clutching a check for a million dollars
he didn’t have before, so he got a profit of nine hundred and
ninety-nine thousand. The collateral wasn’t real, but the money
he got from the bank was. He didn’t even have to pay taxes on
it. A loan isn’t income. It’s a deduction.”

“I forgot about that for a
second.”

“Sure you did. You’re
supposed to. Everybody gets used to the idea that money is gooey,
flexible stuff. They talk about it inflating and deflating and
flowing and being liquid. No reason why it can’t evaporate.”

“Somebody got it, but if
nobody can put his hand on it, then it did evaporate. So that part of
it is over.”

“It’s not over,”
said Mary Perkins. “We’re just moving into the second
round now.”

“What’s the second
round? The ten thousand who got away are still doing it?”

“No. Let’s say a
lull has settled over the borrowing industry. There’s no such
thing as a savings and loan anymore. The ones that are left are just
banks that haven’t changed their names yet. That goose has been
killed.

Scams always work best in boom
times, when everybody’s too busy to do much checking, almost
any business you say you’re in might make a profit, and the
value of any kind of collateral is going up. But there’s still
unfinished business.”

“Then what’s
unfinished?”

“I’ll give you
another typical case: a guy who got into the borrowing business right
after the law changed. He didn’t amount to much before that.
The government shuts him down in ‘eighty-nine or ‘ninety
when they take over the S and L he was borrowing from. He weasels
around during the four years it takes to prepare a noose for him. His
lawyer and the prosecutor work out a plea bargain. He’ll
cooperate in the investigation, do six months for one count of making
a false statement on a loan form, and settle for twenty million in
damages.”

“The government bought
that?”

“Would you?”

“No.”

“Neither did they. If he’s
offering twenty, he’s got forty. The only way he could have
gotten it is by stealing it. They take him to court. He’s
convicted. He gets his standard three-year sentence and is ordered to
repay fifty million dollars. He says he’s broke. They say, ‘No
way is this man broke.’ They lock him up and look for hidden
accounts, fake names, the rest of it. They find nothing. He serves
his three years. Some time during those three years the statute of
limitations runs out on everything he did at the bank.”

“You mean he’s free?
Nobody can do anything?”

“He can never be charged
again by the government for the crimes he committed in getting the
money. Of course he still can’t show that he’s got twenty
or forty or a hundred million. He’s still got the judgment
against him for that much, and swearing he didn’t have it was a
new crime. But generally speaking, his legal problems are over. Now
he’s got illegal problems.”

“What are those?”

“Well, let’s study
this guy. He got only a three-year sentence for the following
reasons.” She ticked them off on her long, thin fingers, the
nails looking like knife points. “He has never committed any
offense before. He is clearly not armed or violent or dangerous. He
has no known connection with organized crime or the drug trade.
Everybody who ever heard his name thinks he’s got a fortune,
but federal investigators who sniff out money for a living didn’t
find it. What does all that mean to you?”

“It means he’s got
the money pretty well hidden.”

“Good for you. You win a
trip to the Caribbean.” Jane looked closely at Mary Perkins. “I
think I know what his illegal problems are.”

“Yes,” said Mary
Perkins. “He’s not violent enough to scare anybody off
and he’s got no connections that are worth anything. If you
steal his umpteen million he can’t even call the police because
he’d have to tell them he had that kind of money, and this time
his sentence wouldn’t be three years; it’d be more like
thirty. He’s the perfect victim.” After a long pause Mary
Perkins added, “He’s a lot like me.”

Jane
drove along the dark highway skillfully, sometimes lingering in the
wake of a big eighteen-wheel truck for many minutes if the driver was
pushing to make time, and sometimes moving out into the other lanes
to slither between drifting cars where the truck wasn’t nimble
enough to navigate. Always she stayed within a few miles an hour of
the rest of the traffic to keep from tempting the state police, but
almost always she was the one who was passing. It was difficult to
study and recognize the headlights coming up from behind, so she kept
them back there. Now and then she would see one of the exceptions
coming up fast in the rearview mirror, and she would evacuate the
lane he seemed to prefer and find a space in the center, where she
could move to either side if he swerved toward her, and waited there
until he had gone on his way.

“Why aren’t you
saying anything?” asked Mary Perkins.

“I’m waiting to hear
your story.”

“I told you.”

“You told me a lot of
stuff about how you used to steal money. You didn’t tell me
anything about yourself. I thought you were just warming up to it.”

“What do you want to
know?”

“What’s your name?”

“Mary Perkins,” she
answered, the annoyance making her voice strain. “I told you
that in the ladies’ room in Los Angeles.”

“Okay,” said Jane
quietly. She drove in silence for a long time.

“Oh,” said Mary
Perkins brightly. “You mean the one I was born with. I haven’t
used it in years, so it sounds strange when I say it: Lily Smith.”

“What made you pick Mary
Perkins?”

“Well, I was in a business
where it didn’t seem to be a good idea to use the name on my
birth certificate. Smith is okay, but it sounds like an alias.
Perkins is the kind of name that makes the mark think good thoughts.
Mary Perkins is Mary Poppins, with ‘perk,’ which is peppy
and cheerful instead of ‘pop,’ which is unpredictable.
And ‘kins’ is sweet and innocent, like babykins and
lambkins. Also, all names that end with ‘kins’ are
Anglo-Saxon in a homespun straight-from-the-farm sort of way, not in
the my-ancestors-were-on-the-Mayflower way.”

“And Mary is just from
Mary Poppins?”

She smiled. “It’s
kind of hard to find anything that sounds more innocent.”

“The word
immaculate
comes to mind,” said Jane.

“Well, there’s that
side of it, of course,” said Mary Perkins. “But there are
other things that aren’t quite as obvious. First, Mary says
‘mother.’ In fact, it says ‘mother of somebody
important.’ And it’s common and feminine. See, if you’re
going to rob banks – ” She stopped, as though she
realized it was going to be hard to make herself understood, then
started over. “Did you ever take a look at the way your bank is
set up?”

“I think I have,”
said Jane.

“You’ve got the open
floor, which is just there to make you think the bank is big and
solid. Then you see the people. At the tellers’ counter there
are twenty women and a couple of men too young to shave. Then there
are a few desks behind that, where everybody is always on the phone.
Those are usually women in their fifties. They look like chaperones,
there to supervise the twenty women and two boys up front, and to
smooth over mistakes.”

“I take it those aren’t
the people you were trying to impress.”

“Not if what you came for
is money. When you get behind those desks, there are offices.
Sometimes they’re not even on the same floor. But somewhere
down a long, quiet, carpeted hallway there will be a huge wooden desk
with nothing on it except a couple of those old-fashioned black pens
that stick up out of a marble slab, and a lamp with a green shade.
Behind that desk will be a middle-aged man. See, banks are in layers.
You can meet fifty-two senior executive vice presidents, and all of
them are women. You’ve got to resist the temptation to tell
them enough so that they can say no, and hold out until you see this
man.”