Best of Crimes

C. Maher K.

Description

Walter, a math prodigy who works on Wall Street, has been like a father to Amanda, his daughter's playmate and the only child of a neglectful single mother. But when he loses his job after the 2008 financial crash and his wife leaves him, taking their daughter, his relationship with 13-year-old Amanda enters a precarious new stage. Walter struggles to give her the affection and guidance she clearly needs, without succumbing to her budding sexuality. In the year before she enters high school, these two lonely souls will transform each other. Walter proves himself a true hero who is willing to sacrifice his freedom for the girl he loves. The Best of Crimes is an unconventional love story that will challenge your preconceptions and restore your faith in heroes.

Informations

• Publié par: RedDoor Publishing
• Date de parution: 02 septembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781913062163
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Best of
Crimes
K.C. MAHER
Published by RedDoor
www.reddoorpublishing.com
© 2019 K.C. Maher
The right of K.C. Maher to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the author
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover design: Clare Connie Shepherd
www.clareconnieshepherd.com
Typesetting: Tutis Innovative E-Solutions Pte. Ltd
In memory of my father
1. FAST FORWARD
One
May–August 2015
On the plane home, I tried to tell Amanda what I had already said as well as what we had agreed not to say. But before I could speak a syllable, she draped an arm around my neck and reached over with her other hand to press her index finger against my lips. Later, driving north on I-95, I said, ‘You’re worth—’ and she slapped my leg while putting a finger to her own lips. We had agreed not to talk. She had told me it had been perfect. Making any comment now would only detract from that. Also, she refused to entertain in any way the concept of ‘Goodbye.’ Because it wouldn’t change anything.
Too soon, we were there. I stopped the car in front of the village library. Amanda opened the passenger door and I rested my hand momentarily on her shoulder. She scarcely nodded, straightened her spine, and slid out of the car, gently closing the door behind her. And without a word, without glancing back, Amanda skipped away and up the library’s concrete steps. The huge, heavy wooden door opened to a narrow strip of darkness, into which she disappeared.
Resolute, I drove a few feet farther, coming even with the police station’s Main Street entrance. Turning right onto Ferris Court, I parked on a street dappled by leafy shadows and checked that my backpack held the used boarding passes and hotel receipts. Quickly, I stepped onto the sidewalk and opened the police station’s side door.
Chief Carl Peterson was standing, arms crossed over his chest, just outside his small office. ‘Go home, Walter. Your wife, the middle-school social worker, the principal, and I all agree. We’re in complete agreement.’
‘I’ve committed a serious crime.’
‘As far as I and everyone who lives in this village are concerned, you have not.’
‘In New York, second-degree kidnapping is a class B felony. I knew that when I abducted thirteen-year-old Amanda Jonette for thirty-one hours.’
‘I have no doubt,’ Carl said, ‘that she was delighted to be wherever you went.’
‘May I sit down?’
‘Go home, Walter.’
‘Not before I write a full confession.’
‘You know, part of my job is preventing suicide.’
I shook my head. It was important to own up to my guilt. We argued our opposing points of view until Carl, losing patience, stormed out and went home.
Alone in the station, I sat at his desk and carefully recorded my crime in a notebook, which I had bought at the Orlando airport. The chief’s stapler was in his top drawer and I used it to attach receipts and tickets to the notebook’s cover. While I was contemplating my semi-legible handwriting, Detective Jim Buckley appeared.
He knocked on the doorframe. ‘Hey, Walter. Where’s the chief?’
‘Not here.’ I stood up and handed him the notebook. Buckley refused it. He didn’t even open it, but perhaps had noticed the stapled receipts. If he refused to respond, I told him he must put me in a squad car and drive me to the county facility. Buckley protested, but seeing that I was determined, did it anyway.
At the jail in Valhalla, the sheriff and guards treated me like any thirty-four-year-old man who had kidnapped a thirteen-year-old girl. Wearing an orange jumpsuit, I spent the night handcuffed to a metal pole.
The next morning, my wife, Sterling, arrived screaming at me and at the authorities, who mostly ignored her. When she stopped yelling and wept, I asked her to ring my former boss at Bank of America, because I was supposed to meet him for lunch tomorrow.
Hearing this, she began keening.
‘Sterling, please. You’ve helped a lot but I’m counting on you to see me through this.’
Furious as she was, she would manage far better than I ever expected.
Following a cursory investigation by the FBI, the magistrate broke standard procedure and allowed character testimonies. These took nearly three months, but saved me from going on trial. And not being tried by a jury, my attorney said, was critical. ‘Because the more you tell them there was no sexual misconduct despite appearances, the worse it can get. Like if you say, “Don’t even think about it,” the more they’re gonna think about it. Basic human nature.’
Lucky me, getting away with thought crimes. Nevertheless, a class B felony in New York means five years mandatory. So last week, I began my incarceration at the Federal Correctional Institution in Otisville.
2. TIME LIKE WATER
TWO
1999
Walking to Lehman Brothers that first day, I felt as if I finally belonged to the whole of spiraling existence. Along the Hudson River, I strolled the esplanade beneath an early summer morning sky so blue that the clouds appeared to swirl upward. And everywhere I looked, life beat in time with my heart. Plants reached for the sun. Giant allium flowers, heads like pink globes, waved on tall stalks.
Two girls jumped inside double-Dutch ropes turned by two other girls. The quick and nimble pair inside the ropes called out back-and-forth rhymes, spinning one direction and then the other. They clapped hands, in time.
At the South Cove Park, a tall young Asian man rollerbladed in precise opposing arcs around miniature orange cones set in a line. Thin and graceful, he moved fluidly, his ponytail swinging past his waist.
I was eighteen years old, a privileged math prodigy with two graduate degrees. Having leapfrogged my adolescence, I imagined life ahead as an undulating Fibonacci sequence, in ever expanding perfect proportion. My stride, in new black oxfords, matched the subliminal, subterranean rhythm.
I wore a business suit tailored by a Parisian man on Greenwich Street, a white dress shirt, and a green and blue silk tie of interlocking ellipses. Lena, one of my mentors and lovers at Harvard, had given me the tie. Martha, who didn’t know about Lena, had given me the silver cuff links shaped like infinity symbols.
Near the marina, the shifting tide seemed to reflect the newness of the day. My life felt almost equal in promise to the enormous Twin Towers that loomed over everything.
Inside the World Financial Center’s mahogany vestibules, brass elevators transported people to and from the global institutions upstairs. On the eighteenth floor, I reached the Lehman sanctuary, another towering circular space.
A sharp-featured woman in a pastel-green suit and muted pink lipstick stood from behind a curved desk. Her knuckles pressed into the top as she squinted at me.
‘Don’t tell me,’ she said. ‘You’re the wunderkind . Sit there. I’ll let him know hope has arrived.’
She sat in her swivel seat and crossed her legs inside tailored pants, a pose that revealed matching pastel-green four-inch-high platform pumps. She pushed a button and spoke in a noticeably softer, sweeter voice. ‘Mr. Ferraro? Your boy wonder is here.’
An opening appeared in the seemingly seamless curved wooden wall several feet behind her. Vince Ferraro emerged, shook my hand, and said, ‘No doubt Sterling gave you trouble.’
‘Hardly,’ she sniffed.
‘My pleasure, Sterling.’ I winked at her. She turned her head in a way that hinted at a repressed smile.
Inside his office, Vince declared the mortgage-backed portfolio I had developed for my thesis was outperforming most of the others at Lehman.
‘Good for it.’
‘Better than good, Walter. Because now that you’re on board, the day will come when I’ll need to use the tortoise and hare analogy.’
He referred to an approach that was hard-wired in me, of limiting risk first and seeking profit second—reversing the Lehman Brothers paradigm. I opened my brand-new briefcase and handed him the spreadsheets I had created since our last meeting.
Vince’s expression grew sly as he perused the structure I had built using actual Lehman holdings. He seemed pleased and I wondered yet again how he had managed to persuade his superiors that I should be given the job—inexperienced, underage, and at a starting salary I had been told was exceptionally high.
My only recommendation had come from my Ph.D. advisor, who happened to be Vince Ferraro’s cousin. Professor Pierson, who had advised me since I arrived at Harvard, was adamant that I live ‘outside’ a while before entering law school.
In any case, Vince coveted my risk-averse, apparently profitable structures and approved of my person. I impressed him further (or more likely amused him), by saying flat-out that I couldn’t formulate these things any other way. No business culture would make me flip.
He said I was exactly what he wanted and must answer only to him.
Sterling escorted me down a wide, carpeted hallway to my office. Her large breasts and platform pumps complemented her impressive bearing. When she noticed, however, that her very high heels still left her several inches shorter than me, she hurried ahead—no doubt unaware of how appealing I found this perspective. The deep center vent in her jacket flared apart and flapped shut with every step.
My guess was that she was thirty, maybe a little more. That’s what I hoped. All through graduate school, my romantic partners had been women in their early thirti