Shadowed Paradise (15 page)

Persuade? Persuade Jim to talk to the FBI? An
odd—insulting—choice of words. “I don’t know why he should have to
be persuaded,” Claire replied coolly, making no secret of her
annoyance. “He would be happy to talk with you at any time.”

“
Mrs. Langdon,” Douglas Chalmers
explained patiently, “we cannot approach your husband at work, so
we need your help in arranging a meeting with your husband. Some
place away from work and away from his home. We have no wish to
make any further intrusion on your–ah–cookie baking.”

Inwardly, Claire recoiled. What was
happening here? InterBank was just that, a
bank
. A pillar of respectability. Just because
they dealt with money on an international scale . . .

The FBI was sitting in her parlor.
Talking investigation.
Oh, dear
God.

The agents were getting up, saying goodbye,
reiterating how important it was for Jim Langdon to call them.

“
You know the rest,” Claire said to
Brad, abruptly breaking off her story to take a long swallow of
beer. “In a year’s time we went from luxury to major disaster.
Everyone talks of Diane Lake as if she were some kind of
particularly bitchy whore, and she’s probably never been guilty of
anything more than overweening ambition. You think I’m some fragile
flower on an ivory pedestal, don’t you? Sweet little Claire, the
straight, old-fashioned home girl. Well, let’s be very clear here.
I’ve consorted with robbers, cheats, con artists, smugglers,
terrorists, thugs of all classes and probably murderers. Men who
moved money on a grand scale, a million, a hundred, five hundred
million at a time. Men who stole whole countries blind. And I was
so stupid I didn’t even know it.”

Tears rolled down Claire’s cheeks. She turned
her head away, appalled that the shame was still so scalding, the
hurt and humiliation coursing through her in bitter waves. “Go back
to Diane,” she gasped, hiccuping back a sob. “I bet she’s not on
anybody’s list of suspects. Go away, Brad. I’m not a good person to
know. I spent the last two years trying to fight all those
government alphabets off. And in the end I lost. The house, the
apartment, the Rolls, the bank accounts, the so-called friends.
Everything. Gone.”

Brad wanted to take her in his arms, kiss the
pain away, but her shoulders were stiff, unyielding. This was no
skinned knee waiting for the quick fix of a hug and smile. And then
there was that most vital question of all. What happened to Jim
Langdon? Was Claire a widow, or sitting out the time her husband
was in jail?

So he asked her.

Claire fumbled in her pocket for a tissue,
blew her nose, wiped her tear-streaked face. She kept her eyes
focused on the distant horizon far out to sea. When she spoke, her
voice was toneless.

“
I knew things were bad from the moment
I told Jim about the FBI. He turned absolutely white. I’d been so
sure it was all a mistake. I was wrong.”

With one finger Claire traced the face of
Handsome Dan, the Yale bulldog, staring pugnaciously from the side
of her beer stein. “Jim didn’t give me any excuses or explanations.
He just took Doug’s card and said he’d call him.” She paused,
biting her lip. “Several days later, when I asked if he’d met with
Doug, Jim said he had. After that, for a long time—months—he never
said a word about it.”

So it was Doug, Brad thought sourly.
Somewhere, somehow FBI Special Agent Chalmers had become Doug.

“
Every once in a while,” Claire added,
“I’d ask Jim if he’d met with the FBI again. He’d mumble a
short
yes
, and I’d back off.
It was obvious he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, talk about it. And I was a
coward. If he told me the truth, I knew I wouldn’t like it, so I
never pressed him. I admit it,” Claire murmured, head down, “I
didn’t want to know.”

Brad ached for her. Under the circumstances
who could blame a woman for wrapping herself and her child in a
cocoon and attempting to shut out the world? “I was in the hospital
about that time,” he said. “I thought I had a charmed life until I
zigged when I should have zagged. When the InterBank story broke, I
was just getting well enough to be bored. I devoured the
newspapers, paid close attention to the TV news. Friends filled in
some of the lesser known details.” He paused, slowly reconstructing
memories more than two years old. “There was some sort of drama . .
. something about a plane . . .” He broke off, swore feelingly
beneath his breath. He had bulled his way into the china shop.

On the day after the visit from the
FBI, Claire bought a diary. She kept it under the mattress which,
she knew, was a pretty stupid place for it, but in a home filled
with antiques she had never been able to discover any secret
drawers. Feeling compelled—by guilt?—she examined her many guests
with a new eye, listened with a sharper ear, forced herself to
remember names and faces and dates until she was free to write them
down. She knew she was powerless to change what was going to
happen, but it made her feel better. She was, at least,
doing
something
.

Other than her diary, it seemed as if the
pebble cast by Special Agent Chalmers disappeared into oblivion
after creating that first ripple in their lives. The
continent-hopping clients of InterBank continued to party, to
gamble at the private tables in the Langdon’s game room, to
enjoy—in the luxury of the Langdon bedrooms—the women who were
seldom their wives. Claire waited for the other shoe to drop,
wondering if anyone else could see the strain beneath the smiling,
debonair figure of her husband.

Ten months passed before cracks began to
appear in the colossus that was InterBank. Slowly, quietly,
unnoticed by the majority of the public, a grand jury began to
return an ever-increasing number of indictments. The Bedford
parties went on, but faces became taut, the atmosphere strained.
The gambling was less frenetic, the stakes less daring.

But the cash kept coming in—stolen money,
drug money, money that would never be taxed—for without the
InterBank laundry machine the vast amount of greenbacks might as
well have been Monopoly money. InterBank never refused a deposit.
It continued to fulfill its boast of being a full-service bank,
always ready and willing to serve its customers, any time, any
where, any how.

A week before Jamie’s sixth birthday Claire
was in F.A.O. Schwarz. It was mid-November, the store already
resplendent with Christmas displays of the finest and most
expensive toys in the world. Claire was admiring a stuffed giraffe
five feet high when she became aware of a man standing too close
behind her, invading her space. A vaguely familiar voice spoke
close to her ear. “Mrs. Langdon, it’s Doug Chalmers, FBI. I’d like
to talk to you. Perhaps you’d like to consider a train set. That
area looks pretty quiet at the moment.”

Dumbly, Claire nodded, wandering casually
toward the elaborate layout of toy trains. “Mrs. Langdon,” Chalmers
said, as Claire watched three separate trains wind their way
through a maze of tracks and tunnels, past miniature villages and
farms, “I don’t want to frighten you, but your husband’s our
primary witness. He knows how the laundry chain works, who and how
much. That’s dangerous information.”

A shrill whistle punctuated the FBI agent’s
words. A freight train rumbled past a crossing, disappeared behind
a hill, the tiny crossing gate slowly rose to its upright position.
“If we give Jim protection,” Doug Chalmers continued, “everyone
knows he’s our source. If we pull him out, we lose any information
we might get at this critical time when everyone is beginning to
panic.”

After one horrified glance at Chalmers,
Claire kept her attention on the trains, which continued their
endless journeys to nowhere.

“
We need him, Claire. He’s vital to
taking down InterBank, but there’s a risk. Jim doesn’t want to
worry you, but I felt you have a right to know. Things should be
okay. You live in a fortress, Jim goes to work in a chauffeured
Rolls. The driver is one of ours. All I’m saying is, don’t be naive
about this. Be careful. Keep your eyes open.’”

“
Are you saying Jamie and I are in
danger?” Claire whispered, incredulous.

“
Probably not, but we’re talking about
some very bad people. It’s not just a matter of money, but a matter
of Jim’s knowing—possibly literally—where the bodies are buried.
Just watch yourself, all right?”

Claire felt a firm, comforting hand on her
shoulder, a card was thrust in her hand. “In case you lost the
first one,” Doug Chalmers murmured, and was gone.

Her mind blank, Claire stared at the small
white cardboard rectangle while the trains continued to roll around
the tracks—moving mindlessly, inexorably, in the unseen, unknown
direction of their programming. Unable to change directions, stop,
reverse course, or let trapped passengers off. One tiny glitch and
they would all hurtle toward destruction. Stupid, stupid little
trains charging toward disaster.

Fortunately, as the weeks dragged on,
Claire’s terrifying conversation with Doug Chalmers appeared to be
much ado about nothing. Indictments continued to be handed down.
New York insiders were becoming aware that InterBank was in
trouble, but the full extent of the disaster was such a well-kept
secret that the employees, from bank president to the lowliest
teller, were all at work when the FBI and the International Banking
Commission came to shut the bank down.

Government power brokers associated with
InterBank, its foreign employees, and depositors drifted away as if
on a cloud of smoke and mist. The mostly American management of the
foreign-owned InterBank took the fall.

As the government’s star witness, Jim Langdon
was hidden away. Protective custody, the feds called it. Because of
Jim’s cooperation, Doug assured Claire the worst he could get was
minimal time in a Club Fed. But it was too soon to let down her
guard, he cautioned. Claire should continue to keep her eyes open
and her wits about her at all times.

As Claire hung up the phone after one of
Chalmers’s weekly calls, she had to admit that as much as she
wanted to hate him, she couldn’t. Doug Chalmers was doing his job
with perhaps more compassion than the Langdon family deserved. And
yet . . . how could she have been so blind? If only she’d paid more
attention, asked more questions, insisted Jim find another job.

In need of busy work, Claire fished her
diary out from under the mattress and began to record her
conversation with Doug Chalmers. There was little else to write
now. The parties were long gone, as were nearly all her so-called
friends and sunshine neighbors. She and Jamie existed in limbo, cut
off from the world. Eating. Sleeping. Drying tears.
I’m sorry Daddy’s trip is taking so long, Jamie.
But you know he loves you and misses you and will come home as soon
as he can.

Some day. In a year or two. Or three.

“
Mrs. Langdon?”

Startled, Claire dropped her pen, splayed her
hand over the diary. “Yes, Laura?” she inquired, overcoming a
sudden spurt of fear that Jamie’s nanny might see what she was
doing. What had happened to her lovely secure world? How could she
fear being discovered writing in her own diary in her own bedroom
in her own house? The whole thing was absurd.

“
I’m sorry to trouble you, Mrs.
Langdon,” Laura said, “but I thought I should tell you that Jamie
is late returning from school.”

Claire glanced at her watch. Forty minutes
past the time Bob Jeffers usually brought Jamie home. “Did you ask
Mrs. Jeffers if Bob was running late today?”

“
Yes, ma’am,” the nanny replied, unable
to conceal her anxiety. No one in the household remained untouched
by the disaster that had enveloped the venerable old home and its
inhabitants.

This wasn’t happening, Claire
thought.
Not Jamie, not Jamie, not
Jamie!
It had to be something as simple as a flat
tire, an errand Bob needed to run. She was panicking over nothing.
Nothing.
Oh, God!

Bob Jeffers didn’t answer his cell phone.

Maybe they’d stopped for ice cream . . .

The school principal, still at her desk,
assured Claire Jamie had been picked up at the usual time. The
mothers of Jamie’s two best friends hadn’t seen him. Nor the candy
shop, grocery store, or video arcade. Claire—hands shaking, heart
pounding—called Doug Chalmers and the Bedford police, in that
order.

Bob Jeffers was found slumped unconscious
over the wheel at the side of the winding country road that led to
the Langdon mansion. There was no sign of Jamie.

The game room of the Bedford house was soon
bristling with high tech electronics and bustling with the
efficient comings and goings of an FBI crew who gave every evidence
of knowing what they were doing. Unfortunately, Claire thought
bitterly, not one of them knew any more about Jamie’s whereabouts
than she did.

“
I want Jim!” Claire demanded, glaring
at Doug Chalmers.

“
I can let you talk to him, Claire,”
the FBI agent told her, “but I can’t let him out.” He looked as if
he actually regretted it. “Taking Jamie has got to be a move to
keep Jim from testifying. They’ll be watching the house, waiting
for him to appear. I’ve got to keep him safe.”

“
Jamie’s out there somewhere with God
knows who,” Claire said from between clenched teeth. “So just what
are you going to do about it?”

Chalmers sighed. Taking Claire’s arm, he
steered her toward a burgundy leather sofa at one end of the long
room. “We have to wait for the kidnappers to contact us, Claire.
There’s nothing else we can do.” He signaled the hovering Consuela
to pour a cup of coffee.