“Shit, Catherine. Coop never lets affection get in the way of anything. You know that,” Mike said. “Used to be I was her favorite guy on the planet. Now that X-ray vision of hers just slices through me like a laser.”
“You’ll always be my favorite, Mike,” I said, walking over beside him to hand him one of Laura’s chocolate chip cookies. “Would I take your kind of abuse from anyone else?”
“What’s in it for Lem?” Mercer asked.
“Get the congressman off the hook. Paid dearly to do that by Moses Leighton,” Catherine said. “After all, in Lem’s very first conversation with you in court yesterday, he was hell- bent on convincing you that Salma was wacky. He set you up for that from the minute you talked, didn’t he?”
I paused for a moment. She made a fine point. It would never have occurred to me that Ethan’s girlfriend was emotionally unstable had Lem not planted that seed.
“Good thinking, Catherine,” Mike said. “Now we need a common denominator between a dinghy full of Ukrainians and a bus-load of Mexicans.”
“Snakeheads aren’t partial to any ethnic groups, Mike. People are trafficked from every corner of the globe, wherever there’s poverty and hunger and a strong desire to get to a better place,” Mercer said. “The day laborers can work anywhere in this country they can get to, and there’s always a market for pretty girls, whether they’re twelve or twenty-five.”
“It’s a sick world we live in,” Mike said.
“Will you be able to focus tomorrow?” Nan asked me. “Do an interview here with one of the Ukrainian girls? I’ll do the other.”
“Sure. Mike will stay out of my hair and we’ll get the first few done.”
“I thought you said Donny Baynes was coming over tonight,” Mercer said.
“He should be here any minute. I don’t know what’s holding him up,” I said. “There’s Battaglia on the City Hall steps. Turn it up, Mike.”
On the television screen, I could see the phalanx of cameramen turning on their high beams as Battaglia joined Mayor Statler and Commissioner Scully at the top of the staircase.
“Good evening, folks. It’s cold out here, so we’re going to make this announcement mercifully short. You all know the district attorney,” Statler said, stepping back so that Battaglia could move to the microphone. “Paul, it’s yours.”
As they shifted positions I could see Tim Spindlis over Battaglia’s shoulder.
I nodded to Catherine. “Put Tim on your list. What if the rumor about him and Spitzer and the prostitutes has a basis in fact?”
Mike smiled. “So Battaglia tries to hide him in plain sight. I like that idea, Coop.”
“This afternoon, we unsealed the indictment of two aides to members of the City Council,” Battaglia said. He looked at the paper in his hand and read the names aloud, explaining that the charges were conspiracy, money laundering, and witness tampering.
“No wonder the lights are burning so bright in the council chamber,” Mike said, whistling before he spoke. “The DA trots Spindlis out, I guess, to keep his whipping boy’s credibility rating high. Tim rubs against the pure prosecutorial patina of Battaglia’s shoulder in front of all the reporters. What’s this about?”
“For months, my chief assistant has been overseeing the investigation looking into the council’s finances, which involves more than twenty million dollars in discretionary funds that were earmarked to entirely fictitious-I said fictitious-organizations. Tim, I’d like you to explain how this scheme worked.”
Spindlis’s opening line was inaudible-delivered with his usual lack of enthusiasm-and one of the reporters yelled to him to speak up.
“Last year, in addition to all of the city’s carefully budgeted monies, each council member received almost half a million dollars in discretionary funds-some allocated to youth programs, some for senior initiatives, some to be used as chosen by the individual council member.”
“Pork barrel spending, Coop. Isn’t that what it’s called?” Mike asked. “Which little piggy is it?”
“Much of the funding reached legitimate groups-neighborhood sports programs for kids and soup kitchens for the homeless-but it turns out that a good number of the designated charities were fake. They simply didn’t exist. For example, Informed Citizens for a Clean Water Supply is a bogus operation,” Spindlis droned on, naming several other phony setups.
“How would anybody know?” Mercer asked. “Sounds like a decent cause.”
“Save the Aqueduct Bridge,” Spindlis said into the bank of microphones. “The Alexander Hamilton Memorial Restoration Fund is a nonexistent organization that was supposed to provide money to aid the city’s Historic House Trust in preserving the Grange Mansion, which was Hamilton’s home. There simply are no such funds.”
I looked at Mike when I heard the word mansion. There weren’t that many of them on the island of Manhattan.
“And instead,” Spindlis said, “that fund primarily served as a conduit to provide cash and other personal benefits to the aide involved. Stolen city funds walked out of here by council employees.”
“What’s the timing on this?” Mercer asked. “What’s the rush to judgment, do you think, that made the district attorney unseal this thing today?”
Paul Battaglia took control of the microphone from Spindlis. “Kendall Reid is charged with skimming almost two hundred thousand dollars cash, so that you’re clear on this, designated for an agency he selected that doesn’t even exist. So far as we can tell, this is a practice that has been going on for more than twenty years, a result of the charter revision of 1989.”
“There’s part of your answer, Mercer,” I said, as Battaglia identified the other City Council aide involved. “Kendall Reid was Ethan Leighton’s aide before he gave up his council seat to run for Congress. The DA’s decided to turn the screws on Leighton as well as on the City Council members.”
“Depends on which way Battaglia spins it,” Nan said, aware of how well the boss liked to control leaks to the press. “That’s the way we’ll know whether he’s trying to tie this to Leighton, or take the heat off the congressman.”
“The tabloids will have a field day. That’s what I’m going to do in my next life. Write headlines for the Post. The bad guys make it so easy. CITY HAUL, that’s what I’d dub this scandal. SLUSH PUPPIES,” Mike said, boxing the banner headlines with his hands. “Meanwhile, someone walks out the door with all that slush.”
“Or it’s cash stashed away in shoe boxes in someone’s closet,” Mercer said. He was thinking of the find at Salma Zunega’s apartment today.
“Sounds like Battaglia’s firing a salvo over the bow of Leighton’s ship,” Mike said. “Wipes out all his political enemies in one fell swoop.”
There was a knock on the door and Donovan Baynes let himself in before I could get over to open it. “Sorry to be late. I got held up on another matter,” Baynes said. “What’s the matter, Alex? You all look shell-shocked.”
“If all politics is local like they say, it just never occurred to me how filthy it is right around here, in government offices.” Mike was chewing on his second chocolate chip cookie.