Chapter 100: What a Family Office Is
Marco Ruiz worked nights on level four of a hospital parking structure on Damen.
Twelve-hour shifts, seven at night to seven in the morning, in a booth with a space heater and a monitor that showed six cameras.
He had been head of security for the Blackwood properties for nine years. He had made ninety-four thousand dollars a year, plus a truck.
He was making twenty-one dollars an hour to watch a garage.
I took him coffee on the twenty-second of December because you do not turn up empty-handed to a man you cost a job.
“Don’t,” he said, when I started.
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You’ve got that face. I’ve seen that face for a year.”
I put the sleeve on the shelf under the monitor and turned it so the light hit it.
He looked at it for a long time without touching it. That is a habit. Marco does not put his fingerprints on things.
“Family office,” he said finally.
“What?”
“That’s what this is. You know what a family office is?”
I said I did not.
“People like that don’t have a checkbook, Lily. They have a firm. Halloway Kesten, twelve floors on Monroe. Six families, maybe eight. The firm holds the accounts, pays the bills, files the taxes, runs the trusts, hires the lawyers.”
“So the house doesn’t pay anything.”
“The house pays nothing. The house codes.” He tapped the air above the last column, still not touching the page. “That number, 7420 — that’s a general ledger account. The office pays a vendor, then sends the coding sheet over so the housekeeper can allocate it to a property. Roz’s job is to say which house it belongs to.”
“She said she’d never seen 7420.”
“Because it isn’t a house expense. Somebody sent that sheet over by mistake, or somebody sent it over so that it would look like one.”
He drank some of the coffee.
“Either way,” he said, “the sheet is a shadow. The thing itself is on Monroe Street.”
I asked him about the reference number. REF 0001-448-2071.
“That’s internal,” he said. “Batch and sequence. It’s the office’s own filing. It’s not a bank trace.”
“What’s a bank trace.”
“Fifteen digits. Every wire, every ACH, gets one, and it lives at the bank on both ends. Sending bank, receiving bank, the date it settled, the account numbers. That number is the only thing in this whole business that cannot be argued with.”
“How do I get it.”
Marco put the cup down on the shelf and turned around in the chair and looked at me properly for the first time.
“You don’t,” he said.
“Marco.”
“Listen to me.” He was not angry. He was worse than angry; he was patient. “There are two ways that number leaves a bank. One is a court tells them to hand it over. The other is somebody steals it.”
“I’m not asking you to steal anything.”
“You’re asking me if I know anybody. That’s the same sentence with more words in it.”
I did not say anything, because he was right and we both knew he was right.
“I’m forty-five,” he said. “I’ve got a PERC card and a firearm card and a girl in her second year at UIC. That’s what I’ve got. That’s the whole inventory.”
“I know.”
“And if I get you that number in a way that isn’t clean, then it isn’t evidence. It’s contamination. Everything it touches dies. Including you, because then you’re not a witness any more, you’re a co-conspirator, and Kessler will say so, and she’ll be right.”
The heater clicked. Somewhere below us a car alarm went for nine seconds and stopped.
“Then what,” I said.
“Then you find somebody who can make a bank answer a piece of paper.”
“The State’s Attorney says she can’t.”
“Then it isn’t the State’s Attorney.”
He picked the sleeve up by its edges and handed it back to me.
“There’s money in this,” he said. “Where there’s money there’s a court that does nothing but money. That’s all I know. I’m a security guy. I know who’s allowed in a room, not who’s allowed to ask a question in one.”
I put the sleeve away.
“Marco.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry about the job.”
“You’ve said that four times.” He turned back to the monitor. “I made a choice. You didn’t make it for me. Stop taking it off me, it’s mine.”
I got to the door of the booth and he said one more thing without turning round.
“He’s not going to do it because you asked.”
“Victor.”
“Victor.” He watched the cameras. “That man has been slow his entire life and being slow has never cost him anything yet. He’ll move when somebody scares him about the boy. Not before. So stop trying to make him feel bad and start watching for whatever it is that’s going to scare him.”
I went down four flights of concrete stairs to Damen Avenue.
It was eleven degrees and the coffee I hadn’t drunk had gone cold in my hand.
Twenty-nine days later a letter arrived at Astor Street from a law firm on West Madison, and it scared him.