Someone to Watch Over Me

The right-hand column, listing the outcome of each case filed, had only three results: “Case Dismissed,” “Charges Dropped,” “Not Guilty.”

In every one of those cases, Valente had been represented by arguably the best criminal defense law firm in New York, but it was difficult to believe that even Buchanan, Powell could have gotten a patently guilty man completely off on every single case.

There were also occasional charges brought against him for minor offenses, including possession of a controlled substance, careless and reckless driving, and disturbing the peace. Sam had already read the individual files on each case; and, in her opinion, the controlled substance case had been particularly ludicrous. According to what she’d read, that arrest had evidently been based on Valente’s having had a prescription for a painkiller on him when he was busted for speeding—at six miles over the limit.

Once again the right-hand column had only three results for these lesser cases: “Case Dismissed,” “Charges Dropped,” “Not Guilty.”

The single exception to all that was the item at the bottom of her list—a charge of manslaughter in the first degree, brought against Valente when he was seventeen, for the shooting death of William T. Holmes. Unlike the other crimes, that one had been violent and Valente had pleaded guilty to it—his first and only time to plead guilty, rather than fight the charges and beat them. He’d been sentenced to eight years in prison, with eligibility for parole after four.

Sam flipped through the folders on her desk, looking for the case file on the manslaughter conviction, interested in the reason he’d done the crime, wondering if perhaps—that time—a female had been in any way responsible for his single violent act.

Unable to find the file, she leaned toward Shrader’s desk, but none of his folders had red labels. Womack’s desk was directly behind Shrader’s, and she swiveled around in her chair.

“What are you after?” Womack asked, returning from McCord’s office with a pile of folders in his hands.

“The file on Valente’s manslaughter conviction,” Sam told him.

“Haven’t got it,” Womack told her.

Sam got up and headed for McCord’s office. He wasn’t in there, so she started toward the table where the rest of Valente’s files were all neatly stacked, but as she passed McCord’s desk, she noticed a red-labeled file folder on it that was glaringly out of geometric order. Instead of being neatly placed on a corner or in the center of McCord’s desktop, it looked as if it had been thrown down. In fact, it was not only off center, it had papers spilling out of it. On a hunch, Sam checked the label on the folder and saw that it was the file on Valente’s manslaughter conviction. She wrote a note on McCord’s yellow pad to tell him she’d borrowed the file and returned to her desk.

Inside the file, she found the arresting officer’s report, but all it said was that Valente had quarreled with Holmes and shot him with an unregistered forty-five semiautomatic belonging to Valente. There were no witnesses to the actual shooting, but the arresting officer had been driving by, heard the shot, and had reached the scene before Valente could flee. McCord had drawn a broad circle around the arresting officer’s name and then written an address inside it.

Based on the information in the file, William Holmes had been a good kid with a clean record. Valente, however, had previously committed some other juvenile offenses, prior bad acts that the judge had taken into account, along with Valente’s age, when handing down his sentence.

Sam closed the file, thinking. . . . At the age of seventeen, Valente had taken a life, which meant he was capable of the act, but based on the details in that file, he’d done it in the heat of anger. Premeditated murder was a different kind of crime.

Lost in thought, she doodled on the tablet, trying to get a fix on who Valente really was, what made him tick, what made him turn violent—and why Leigh Manning would prefer him to a cheating, but otherwise respectable, husband.

She was still pondering all that when Shrader stood up. “It’s nine-forty,” he said, and then half seriously added, “Let’s not be tardy and give the lieutenant a reason to start the day pissed-off again.”

“God forbid,” Sam said flippantly, but she lost no time grabbing the borrowed file on Valente, a pad and pencil, and then getting up. McCord’s grim mood yesterday had coincided with a trip he’d made to Captain Holland’s office. When he walked in, he’d reportedly closed the door behind him in a clerk’s face. When he walked out, he’d supposedly slammed it.

“Usually this place is an icebox. Today it’s hot,” Shrader complained, stripping off his jacket and tossing it next to a crumb-covered napkin. Sam, wearing a light-rust-colored shirt, suede belt, and matching wool pants, left her blazer on the back of her chair and headed for McCord’s office.

She thought McCord’s tense mood yesterday might have been the result of having caught hell from someone because the investigation wasn’t moving fast enough, but five weeks wasn’t a long time for a homicide investigation—particularly an investigation meeting McCord’s incredibly meticulous demands for documentation and research. To McCord, everyone they interviewed was either an important potential witness who could help them or a very damaging potential witness who could help the defense—and he wanted to know everything there was to know, either way.

A few weeks ago when Womack had shown Valente’s doorman a picture of Leigh Manning and asked him if he’d ever seen the woman at his building, the doorman had firmly denied it. When Womack reported that in a meeting several days later, McCord had reamed him out for not asking the doorman how much Valente tipped him.

Womack went back to the doorman, got that information, and reported the figure to McCord. McCord then ordered Womack to run a background and financial check of the doorman to ascertain his living style—just in case several thousand dollars, instead of several hundred dollars, had changed hands between Valente and the seventy-two-year-old man.

Chapter 53

* * *

When McCord strode into his office at precisely nine-forty-five, his mood did not appear to be much improved. He nodded curtly at the three detectives seated in front of his desk. “We’re going to have some uninvited guests,” he began; then he stopped as the Special Frauds Squad auditor—a balding, sweating man in his forties—walked into the office, juggling a tall stack of large manila envelopes.

“What did you find out?” McCord asked as the man looked around for a place to unload the items. He unwisely chose to dump them on McCord’s desk, but McCord was too intent on hearing what he had to say to notice.

“Several things,” the auditor replied. “First, your dead guy was spending more than he was making. Second, he either had an incompetent CPA, or else he was scared shitless of being audited because there’s a lot of deductions he really should have tried to claim and didn’t. Third, his spending habits changed a couple of years ago. Fourth,” the auditor finished, his eyebrows levitating with irrepressible glee, “he’s got a platinum credit card from an offshore bank!”

“Could you amplify the first item a little,” McCord snapped impatiently.

“Sorry, Lieutenant,” the startled man said. “I mean that, until a couple years ago, Manning was doing extremely well—several of his commercial projects paid off big time for him, and he was also making a shitload of mo

ney in the stock market. The market started to slide at about the same time his business turned stagnant, but he went ahead and moved his offices to a new location anyway. The rent on the space he moved his offices into is staggering, but Manning didn’t seem to care. He then plowed over a million bucks into gutting, redesigning, and redecorating the place.”

He paused to open a manila envelope on the top of the pile; then he extracted a written report and glanced at it as if to confirm what he was about to say. “At that point, Manning began running his architectural firm as if it were some sort of ‘hobby’ that didn’t need to make a profit. It was costing him a lot to keep the doors open, and he was definitely spending more than he was taking in. Now, here’s what makes all that so interesting. . . .”

He peered silently at his audience to emphasize the magnitude of his next announcement. “Until a couple years ago, Manning was a big earner and a conservative spender. Suddenly, the reverse was true. He started spending money like he had an unlimited supply of it. His spending habits changed, and that’s what I look for!”

Sam was about to ask why having a credit card from an offshore bank was significant, but Womack spared her the need and the auditor answered the question.

“Let’s say you’ve got a couple hundred thousand dollars in cash that you obtained illegally,” the auditor proposed. “If you go to any U.S. bank and deposit more than ten thousand dollars in cash, the bank is obligated to report your name and social security number to the IRS. But you can’t risk any inquiries from the IRS about how you came by the cash money, which leaves you very few choices: You can bury it in the backyard and spend it a hundred dollars at a time, or you can take it to a legitimate bank in any country with laws that don’t require their banks to report to our tax authorities. Banks in Nassau, the Caymans, and Belize have been very popular for that purpose.”

He looked around at his audience, realized he wasn’t yet telling them anything they didn’t already know, but he forged ahead, his enthusiasm mounting. “Now you’ve got the money in a nice safe offshore bank earning interest, but you can’t spend it here, because you can’t write a check on a foreign bank to buy much of anything in the U.S. But he said significantly, “if your offshore bank issues you a platinum credit card with a high limit, or no limit, you can use it to buy virtually anything you want here. Logan Manning,” he finished triumphantly, “bought two luxury cars in two years on his credit card, and then he sold them a couple weeks later, took the check he was given, and deposited that into a regular bank account.