“Really? I heard she died.”
“Oh.”Busted!“Well, I guess it wasn’t her, then.”
“Gotta run. Editorial meeting in five. Six thirty Wednesday okay?” she says. Vicky, a high-powered editorial director in a small publishing house, is constantly running to or from a meeting. Our conversations are always short. This time I’m grateful.
She hangs up before I can say something else stupid.
CHAPTER 4
AS I EXIT THE SUBWAY at the City Hall station, I’m still conflicted. The FBI’s New York field office is at 26 Federal Plaza, two blocks away. I start walking, and my phone beeps. It’s a text from Metcalf. Could I meet him at a coffee shop on the corner of Warren Street and Broadway, a couple of blocks in the other direction?
Really?
It’s unusual to meet off campus, but I don’t question it. Maybe this gig is more undercover than I realized. I head north, wending my way past hundreds of men and women in charcoal suits—lawyers, judges, and government workers, all rushing off to jobs that must seem important. Just as mine once did.
I spot Metcalf at a booth way in the back. He’s frowning at a corn muffin. Who could be annoyed at a corn muffin? It doesn’t take much to set this guy off. Years ago, when I worked for him, someone taped a hand-lettered sign to his door:EASILY IRRITATED. We all thought the guy who did it would be fired. He wasn’t. Turned out, Metcalf enjoyed being known as a dick.
I slide in opposite him.
“What do you know about the art world?” he asks.
“And good morning to you too,” I say. The art world? I’ve got a couple ofHappy Birthday, Miss Gilbertfinger paintings from my music students taped to my refrigerator. That’s about it.
“We got an anonymous tip,” he says. “Some guy who runs an art gallery in Mamaroneck may be laundering money for a Mexican cartel. Las Serpientes,” he says. “You look surprised,” he adds.
I am. “A small art gallery? In a small Westchester County suburb? Hardly sounds like it would be worth a cartel’s time.”
Metcalf sneers just a bit.
Uh-oh. My first demerit.I backpedal. “What I mean is, if it was one of those established New York galleries—”
“Then it wouldn’t be under-the-radar, would it?” he says. He breaks off a piece of corn muffin and butters it. “C’mon, Elinor. You should know how these things work. You’ve been to the rodeo before.”
Now I’m the one who’sEASILY IRRITATED. True, I worked in fraud for a while, but never in money laundering. Still, I know how huge a problem it is. At one point, the MedellínCartel had so much cash, they spent two thousand a month just on rubber bands.
“The guy is an art dealer named Ben Harrison,” Metcalf says. “We think the cartel is buying art from Harrison, then holding it in storage.”
“In Westchester?”
“Westchester, Geneva, could be anywhere. When they’re ready, they sell it for wildly inflated prices. Harrison gets a cut on both ends, dirty money gets clean, and some rich sucker somewhere owns a piece of art he thinks is valuable because he trusted a sketchy dealer. So everybody’s happy. Well, except the US government.”
“And my job would be…”
“Find proof. We want to know everything about Ben Harrison. Who he meets. Who he talks to. Neighbors he’s suing. Hookers he’s screwing. Habits, hobbies, fetishes. Anything we can use to flip him. Hell,” he says, taking his final bite of the corn muffin and brushing crumbs off his green-and-yellow polyester tie, “if he has an unusual bowel movement, we want to know about it.”
“You’re a classy guy, Metcalf, you know that?” Most people would be insulted by this. But Metcalf is not most people. He smiles.
Surveillance gigs usually mean sitting in a car outside a suspect’s home or digging through phone records and checking credit histories. But there’s only so much you can glean from that.
“And, uh, exactly how close do you want me to get to this guy?” I ask.
“You’ll be living with him.”
“What?”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” he says. “He’s married. Second marriage. Trophy wife. New baby.”
“So I’ll be—what? His social secretary?”
