Hap Judd was a client of Hannah Starr’s highly respected and successful money-management company, but he didn’t lose his fortune, not a penny of it, to what Berger was calling a Ponzi-by-proxy scam. He was saved when Hannah purportedly pulled his investments out of the stock market this past August 4. That same day exactly two million dollars was wired into his bank account. His original investment of one-fourth that amount made a year earlier had never been in the stock market, but in the pockets of a real-estate investment banking firm, Bay Bridge Finance, whose CEO was recently arrested by the FBI for felony fraud. Hannah would claim ignorance, would say she no more knew about Bay Bridge Finance’s Ponzi scheme than did the reputable financial institutions, charities, and banks that were victims of Bernard Madoff and his kind. No doubt Hannah would claim that she was duped like so many others.
But Berger didn’t buy it. The timing of the transaction Hannah Starr had instigated on behalf of Hap Judd, apparently without any prompting from him or anyone else, was evidence that she knew exactly what she was involved in and was a conspirator. An investigation into her financial records that had been ongoing since her disappearance the day before Thanksgiving hinted that Hannah, the sole beneficiary of her late father Rupe Starr’s fortune and his company, had creative business practices, especially when it came to billing clients. But that didn’t make her a criminal. Nothing stood out until Lucy’s discovery of that two-million-dollar wire to Hap Judd. Then, suddenly, Hannah’s disappearance, which had been assumed to be a predatory crime and therefore Berger’s turf, had begun to take on different shadings. Berger had joined forces with other attorneys and analysts in her office’s Investigative Division, primarily its Frauds Bureau, and she also had consulted with the FBI.
Hers was a highly classified investigation that the public knew nothing about, because the last thing she wanted transmitted all over the universe was her belief that contrary to popular theories, Hannah Starr wasn’t the victim of some sexual psychopath, and if a yellow cab was involved, most likely it was one that had carried her to an FBO where she’d boarded a private plane, which was exactly what was scheduled. She was supposed to have boarded her Gulfstream on Thanksgiving day, bound for Miami, and after that, Saint Barts. She never showed up because she had other plans, more secretive ones. Hannah Starr was a con artist, and very possibly alive and on the lam, and she wouldn’t have spared Hap Judd a terrible financial fate unless she’d had more than a professional interest in him. She’d fallen for her celebrity client, and he might just have a clue as to where she was.
“What you never imagined is Eric would call my office Tuesday morning and get my investigator on the phone and repeat everything you told him,” Berger said to Judd.
If Marino had shown up for this interview, he could help her at this point. He could repeat what Eric had said to him. Berger was feeling isolated and trivialized. Lucy wasn’t respectful and kept things from her, and Marino was too damn busy.
“Ironically,” Berger continued, “I’m not sure Eric was suspicious of you as much as he wanted to show off. Wanted to brag about hanging out with a movie star, brag that he had information about a huge scandal, be the next American Idol by ending up all over the news, which seems to be everybody’s motivation these days. Unfortunately for you, when we started looking into Eric’s story, the Park General scandal? Turns out there’s something to it.”
“He’s just a punk shooting off his mouth.” Judd was calmer now that Lucy was out of the room.
“We checked it out, Hap.”
“It was four years ago. Something like that, a long time ago, when I worked there.”
“Four years, fifty years,” Berger said. “There’s no statute of limitations. Although I’ll admit you’ve presented the people of New York with an unusual legal challenge. Generally, when we run into a case where human remains have been desecrated, we’re talking about archaeology, not necrophilia.”
“You wish it was true, but it’s not,” he said. “I swear. I would never hurt anyone.”
“Believe me. Nobody wants something like this to be true,” Berger said.
“I came here to help you out.” Hands shaking as he wiped his eyes. Maybe he was acting, wanted her to feel sorry for him. “This other thing? It’s wrong, fucking wrong, whatever that guy said.”
“Eric was quite convincing.” If Marino were here, goddamn it, he could help her out. She was furious with him.
“Fucking piece of shit, fuck him. I was joking around after we left the bar. We lit up a blunt. I was joking around about the hospital thing. Just talking big. Jesus Christ, I don’t need to do something like that. Why would I do something like that? It was talk, it was weed and talk and maybe some tequila thrown in for good measure. So I’m strung out and in the bar and this guy… Fucking nobody piece of shit. Fuck him. I’ll sue his ass, fucking ruin him. That’s what I get for being nice to some nothing piece-of-shit groupie.”
“What makes you think Eric’s a groupie?” Berger asked.
“He comes up to me at the bar. You know, I’m minding my own business, having a drink, and he asks me for my autograph. I make the mistake of being nice, and next thing we’re walking and he’s asking me all this shit about myself, obviously hoping I’m gay, which I’m not, never been even once.”
“Is Eric gay?”
“He hangs out at the Stonewall Inn.”
“So do you,” Berger said.
“I told you, I’m not gay and never have been.”
“An unusual venue for you,” Berger observed. “The Stonewall Inn is one of the most famous gay establishments in the country, a symbol of the gay rights movement, in fact. Not exactly a hangout for straights.”
“If you’re an actor, you hang out in all kinds of places so you can play all types of characters. I’m a method actor, you know, I do research. That’s my thing, where I get my ideas and figure it out. I’m known for rolling up my sleeves and doing whatever it takes.”
“Going to a gay bar is research?”
“I got no problem with where I hang out, because I’m secure with myself.”
“What other types of research, Hap? You familiar with the Body Farm in Tennessee?”
Judd looked confused, then incredulous. “What? You’re breaking into my e-mail now?”
She didn’t answer.
“So I ordered something from them. For research. I’m playing an archaeologist in a movie and we excavate this plague pit, you know, with skeletal remains. Hundreds and thousands of skeletons. It’s just research, and I was even going to see if I could go down there to Knoxville so I have an idea what it’s like to be around something like that.”
“Be around bodies that are decomposing?”
“If you want to get it right, you’ve got to see it, smell it, so you can play it. I’m curious what happens, you know, when a body’s been in the ground or lying around somewhere. What it looks like after a lot of time passes. I don’t have to explain this to you, explain acting to you, my damn career to you. I haven’t done anything. You’ve violated my rights, going into my e-mail.”
“I don’t recall my saying we’d gone into your e-mail.”
“You must have.”
“Data searches,” she replied, and he was looking her in the eye or looking around but not looking her up and down anymore. He did that only when Lucy was here. “You borrow computers that are connected to a server, you order something online, it’s amazing the trail people leave. Let’s talk some more about Eric,” Berger said.
“The fucking fag.”
“He told you he was gay?”
“He was hitting on me, okay? It was obvious, you know, him asking me about myself, my past, and I mentioned I’d had a lot of different jobs, including being a tech at a hospital part-time. Fags hit on me all the time,” he added.