Sidney Sheldon's After the Darkness (34 page)

She stood transfixed as the man slowly turned. Even before she saw his face, she knew. The languid, unconcerned way he moved, as if the commotion behind him, and John Merrivale's cowering terror, didn't bother him in the least. Grace had met only one man with that confidence. That total, unshakable sangfroid.

“Hello, Gracie.” Lenny Brookstein smiled. “I've been waiting for you.”

G
RACE WATCHED HER LIFE FLASH BEFORE
her eyes. Was this a dream? Or a nightmare? Part of her wanted to touch Lenny, to stick her hands in his sides like a doubting Thomas and prove that he was real. But something made her hesitate.

“I saw you! I saw your body.” She was shaking. “I went to the morgue, for God's sake.”

“Why don't you put down the gun?” Lenny's voice sounded soothing. Hypnotic. “We can talk.”

Grace was about to do as he asked when John Merrivale took a step toward her. Instinctively she swung the gun in his direction and stepped back, her finger hovering over the trigger. “Don't move!” she shouted.

John stepped back.

“Sit down on that chair. Put your hands where I can see them.”

John did as he was asked, sinking down into the lawn chair beside Lenny's.

Grace looked at Lenny. “You, too.”

Lenny raised an eyebrow, in admiration as much as surprise. He, too, put his hands on his lap. Keeping the pistol trained on the pair of them, Grace reached into her backpack and pulled out the Dictaphone. She pressed the record button and set it down on the ground between them.

“Talk,” she commanded.

Lenny couldn't take his eyes off Grace's face.
So beautiful. But she's changed. I suppose she had to. She's stronger. That sweet, trusting little girl could not have survived.

“What do you want to know?”

“Everything. I want to know everything, Lenny. I want to know the truth.”

Lenny Brookstein started talking.

W
HAT YOU HAVE TO REMEMBER
, G
RACE,
is how long ago this all started. You were a tiny child when I founded Quorum. Four, maybe five years old. I'd had a couple of funds before that, made a little money, but I always knew Quorum would be different. I set out to rule the world and I did.”

Lenny looked at John Merrivale and smiled. John smiled back, a look of blind adoration on his face. Grace remembered that look from the old days.
He loves him. John's always loved Lenny. How could I have forgotten that?

Lenny went on, warming to his theme. “In the early days of the fund, it was a struggle. It was the beginning of the nineties, the economy was in the tank, people were losing their jobs, their homes. No one wanted to invest. Remember now, I'd staked every cent I owned on Quorum. Every cent. If she went down I'd be back at the bottom. Poor again, in my forties. Penniless.” Lenny's face darkened. “You can't imagine the fear, Gracie. How terrifying that was, coming from where I came from. The idea that I might have to go back, back to the dirt, the violence, the hunger. No. It wasn't going to happen to me.” His said this angrily, almost as if it were Grace who had tried to bring him down. “And thanks to John here, it didn't.”

John Merrivale flushed with pleasure, like a teenage girl being complimented by the high school quarterback. Grace listened in silence.

“I had a great model. Foolproof, actually. But at that time, a guy like me with no formal education was seen as way too much of a risk. I couldn't sell a dollar for ninety cents, but
this
guy”—he nodded at John—“
this
guy had the heads of those Swiss pension funds eating out of his hands like a flock of lambs. It was thanks to those early institutional investors that we rode out the storm. But it was the small investors that really made us what we became. The mom-and-pop stores, the little charities that gave us their money. You know Madoff and Sandford and all those guys, they were a bunch of snobs. If you didn't belong to the right golf club, or come from the right family, those bastards would turn your money away. Turn it away! That made me sick. Like, who the hell were they to tell ordinary people they can't get a taste of the good life? That the American Dream was closed to them? Quorum wasn't like that. We loved the little guy, and we made him rich, and he made
us
rich, for a long, long time. People always gloss over that part.”

Lenny's anger was back and growing. Grace had heard about as much self-righteous ness as she could stomach. “Those people, those ‘little guys.'” She spat the words back at him, still feeling like she was talking to a ghost but unable to hold herself back any longer. “They lost everything because of Quorum.
Everything
. Families were made destitute because of what you did. Charities closed their doors. People, young men with families, have killed themselves because of—”

“Cowards.” Lenny shook his head in disgust. “Imagine killing yourself because you lost money? That's not tragic. It's pathetic. I'm sorry, Grace, but it is. You make an investment, you take a risk. No one forced them to give me their goddamn money.”

Grace was horrified by how much she wanted to shoot him. One squeeze of the trigger and she could stop him talking then and there. Stop this obese, heartless apparition, this ghost, destroying the Lenny she remembered, the Lenny she had loved, the Lenny she had believed in, had
needed
to believe in, her whole adult life. But as deeply as his words hurt her, she felt compelled to hear them. She had to know the truth.

“Anyway,” he went on, “for years, it was good. Everyone was happy. Then, around 2000, things started to go wrong. That was the tech boom, the rise of the Internet, and it was a crazy time. Just crazy. Overnight,
every business model, every investment strategy you ever knew, got turned on its head. Young kids, still in college some of 'em, were founding businesses that never made a red cent, then turning them around and selling them for billions of dollars in eighteen months flat. Everywhere you looked, people were launching rockets and everyone was trying to grab one by the tail. All the old dinosaurs like me. Pick the right start-up and hold the hell on for the ride.” Lenny's eyes lit up with excitement at the memory. “That was around the time I met you, honey. The happiest time of my life. I've always loved you, you know.” He looked at Grace, his eyes welling with tears.

Grace thought,
He means it. He's insane. After everything he's done to me, he thinks he can talk about love?
Aloud she said only, “Go on.”

Lenny shrugged. “It's pretty straightforward after that. I made a lot of Internet investments, bought a bunch of speculative businesses, and I took a bath. Between 2001 and 2003 I must have lost”—he looked at John Merrivale for confirmation—“…I don't know. A lot. Ten billion.”

“At least,” said John.

“How is that possible?” Grace interrupted.

“How is it possible? You take a bet and you lose, that's how. We just took big bets.”

“I mean how come nobody knew about it?”

“Because I didn't tell them,” said Lenny. “What am I, stupid? I was careful, Gracie. I covered my tracks. We got creative with our financial statements. It's easier than you might think, in a business as complex and diverse as Quorum, to make your assets look bigger than they are and to hide your liabilities. We stopped logging trades, destroyed a bunch of paper and computer records. We kept the funds we did have moving constantly, from one jurisdiction to another. The SEC sniffed around a bit in 2003 and 2005 but it never opened an official investigation.”

“So you lied. You lied to your investors, the ‘little guys' who'd trusted you. Just like you lied to me.”

“I was protecting them! And you!” Lenny shouted.

“Protecting
me
?” If it hadn't been happening to her, Grace might have laughed.

“Sure. Don't you see? As long as nobody panicked, as long as they all stuck with me, I could make that money back. I'd already started to do it,
Grace. That's the fucking irony. All those destitute families you want me to cry over,
they're
the ones who got us all into this mess, not me! If they hadn't all tried to cash in at once, pulling their money out like a herd of frightened, stupid sheep following each other over a cliff…” He threw his arms up in despair. “I could have made things right. I could have. But I never got the chance. After Bear went down, then Lehman, it was mayhem. Those bastards destroyed everything I'd ever worked for. They sank my ship, and I couldn't stop them. All I could do was make sure I didn't go down with them. I had to survive, Grace. I had to survive.

“John came up with the idea of the boat. We'd do it on Nantucket, make it look like suicide. At first we thought I could just disappear, you know, missing presumed dead. But I couldn't leave anything to chance. Knowing the storm that would be unleashed at Quorum, I didn't want some vigilante out there looking for me. We had to have a body.”

Grace started to shiver.
The stump in the morgue. Davey Buccola's pictures. The severed head…He couldn't have!

“You mean…you killed somebody?”

“He was a nobody. A homeless bum from the island, a lazy drunk. Trust me, he'd have been dead in a few months anyway the way he was treating his liver. I just speeded things up a little. Took him out on the boat, gave him a bottle of bourbon and left him to it. When he was passed out cold…I did what needed to be done.”

Grace put her hand over her mouth. She felt the vomit rise up inside her.

“Yeah. It wasn't pretty.” Lenny winced in distaste. “But like I say, it had to be done. The cops would have to think that the corpse was me, so I had to…alter it. The hardest part was getting my wedding ring onto his finger. He was stiff by then and so fucking fat. Plus, of course, there was the storm. We hadn't figured on that. A couple of times I nearly did go overboard. I tell you, I've never been happier to see Graydon in my life.”

Graydon. Graydon Walker.
It was a name from another life. Grace and Lenny's helicopter pilot, Graydon Walker, was a quiet, taciturn man. Grace had never really warmed to him. But like many of the longtime Brookstein staff, he was fanatically loyal to Lenny.

“Graydon took me to a quiet airstrip on the mainland. Des had the
jet waiting, brought me straight here.” Desmond Montalbano was the pilot of their G5, a young, ambitious ex–fighter pilot with a taste for daredevilry. “I knew Graydon would keep the secret but I wasn't sure about Des.”

Grace gasped. “You didn't kill Des?”

“Kill him? Of course not.” Lenny sounded offended by the suggestion. “I structured his compensation over thirty years. Made it worth his while to keep his trap shut. He's paid out of a trust in Jersey. That money's completely untraceable,” he added with a touch of pride.

“It's all completely untraceable,” said Grace bitterly. “Who hid the rest of the money? You? John?”

Lenny smiled. “Darling Grace. Haven't you figured it out yet? There
is
no ‘rest of the money.'”

Grace looked at him blankly. “What do you mean?”

“I mean this mythical seventy-plus billion everyone's so busy looking for. It doesn't exist. It never did exist.”

Grace waited for him to explain.

“Oh, Quorum was making money all right. We were trading. Up until the Internet losses we were doing well, perhaps twenty billion in our heyday, never over seventy. In any event, by 2004, it was all gone.”

“
All
gone?”

“There was a few hundred million left. I was using that to pay dividends and cover occasional redemptions. And to bankroll our lifestyle, of course. I always wanted you to have the best, Grace.”

Grace thought about the nightmare of the past two years of her life. “You wanted me to have the best?” she murmured.

“Yes. People think success is measured in wealth, but it's not. Not in America. It's measured in the
perception
of wealth. If people perceived me as wealthy and successful, they would continue to lend to me. And they did. Until Lehman went down. After that, everyone got jumpy. People started to do the math and I knew I had to create an exit strategy.

“I put some money aside for myself and John. We didn't need much. We always planned to live simply, didn't we?” John nodded. “Madagascar's a simple island, Grace, you know that. That's why you and I both loved it so much. You know, I'm so happy you're here, darling.” He stood up and threw his arms wide, as if expecting her to embrace him. “It'll be
like old times, the three of us together again. I've missed you, Gracie, more than you know. Won't you put the gun down? Let bygones be bygones?”

Grace laughed, a loud, joyless roar of a laugh. She laughed till her body shook and tears streamed down her face. Then she stood up and pointed the gun between Lenny's eyes.

“Bygones?
Bygones!
Have you totally lost your mind? You set me up! You stole and murdered and lied and cheated and you left
me
to take the fall. I went to the
morgue,
Lenny! I saw that corpse, that bloated hulk of the poor man you killed, and I wept. I wept because I thought it was you. I LOVED you!”

“And I loved you, Grace.”

“Stop it! Stop saying that! You left me for dead. Worse than dead. You had John rig my trial! They locked me up and threw away the key and you let it happen. You
made
it happen. My God. I believed in you, Lenny. I thought you were innocent.” She shook her head, bitterly. “All this time, everything I've been through, it's all been for you. For your memory. The memory of who I thought you were. Do you know why I came here today?”

Lenny shook his head.

“To kill John. That's right. I was going to shoot him, because I thought he'd murdered you. I thought he'd stolen the money and framed you.”

“John? Betray me?” Lenny seemed to find this idea amusing. “My dear girl. The entire world has betrayed me, and you single out the one man, the
only
man, whose loyalty has never been in question? That's priceless.”

“What about
my
loyalty, Lenny?
My
love? I'd have given anything for you, risked anything, suffered anything. Why didn't you trust me? You could have talked to me when things started going wrong at Quorum.”

“Talked to
you
? About business? Come on, Grace. You never looked at the price tag on anything in your life.”

It was true. Grace looked back at the naive, idiotic person she'd been back then and felt ashamed.

“Look, perhaps I should have trusted you, Gracie. Perhaps I should've.” For the first time, a look that might have been guilt passed
briefly across Lenny's features. “I did love you. But it's like I said. I had to survive. People wanted a scapegoat for their own stupidity. Quorum investors, America, the world. They wanted a sacrificial lamb to atone for their own greed. It was you or me, darling.” He shrugged.

“And you chose me.” Grace's finger caressed the trigger. “You heartless son of a bitch.”

John Merrivale whimpered in fear. “P-please, Grace.”

Lenny asked, “What do you want me to say, Grace. That I'm sorry?”

Grace thought about it. “Yes. I would like you to say you're sorry, Lenny. I'd like you to say you're sorry for that poor man you butchered. Sorry for the millions of people whose lives you destroyed. Sorry for me, for what you did to
me
. Say you're sorry. SAY IT!”

She was screaming now, hysterical. Lenny looked at her dispassionately, the way one might observe a rampaging animal in a zoo.

“No. I won't say it. Why should I? Because I'm not sorry, Grace. I'm not. And if I had a chance to do it all over again, I'd do it exactly the same way.”