I WENT TO MEET Margie because there’s just no negotiating with a mouth-breather, and because Margie Fischer was partly responsible for this mess to begin with. If she hadn’t blackmailed us into helping Lily, Emily and I would have stopped (I’m pretty sure we most likely would have probably stopped) fudging expenses before anyone noticed a thing.
Anyway, finding the statue of the giant sled dog took longer than I’d anticipated, but when I did, I wasn’t sure how I could have missed it. Margie was sitting on top of the heroic bronze husky, straddling it like a horse.
She disembarked at the sight of me. “I’m getting a windburn out here,” she said. “Where the heck have you been?”
“I’m sorry, I got lost. I’m sorry.” I apologized more than necessary considering Central Park was literally a maze. We sat on the rock landing beneath the statue.
“Emily got arrested,” I said.
“Did you think me asking you here had nothing to do with that?” Margie was sweating gratuitously in spite of the cool evening air. Her short legs didn’t reach the ground from the landing, so they just hung suspended, like two khaki’d hams.
I let my eyes wander in the direction of the prehistoric boulder where Kevin and I used to have lunch and I imagined I could still see us there now, laughing and eating, and him not hating my guts.
Margie tried to follow my line of vision, like she suspected I might have been followed, and it struck me how amusing it was, that this Humpty Dumpty of a woman was one of the few people on the planet Robert Barlow actually feared.
I’d managed to avoid her since our last, Rollerblade-themed encounter—she’d said she wanted to talk about the site, and I did not want to talk about the site—yet now here we were back in Central Park, together again, talking.
“I’ll get right to the point.” Margie smacked her palms together in a way that startled me. “I asked you here to give you something. Something that’ll save your pretty little asses from this pickle you’ve gotten yourselves into.”
She heaved herself back up to a standing position, wiped the dirt off the seat of her khakis, and reached for a knapsack she’d stuffed behind the bronze dog’s posterior. It was the kind of knapsack you see high school kids wearing, JanSport or whatever, and there was a button pinned to its front that read If You’re Not Outraged You’re Not Paying Attention. Beside that was another button, a close-up of Dolly Parton’s face from her Best Little Whorehouse in Texas era, or maybe Nine to Five.
Margie unzipped her fantastic knapsack and pulled out a thick manila envelope, which she tossed onto the landing beside me.
“There you have it,” she said. “The answer to your problems, right there in black and white.”
“You’ll forgive me if I find that hard to believe,” I said, ignoring the envelope.
“You don’t even know what’s in there.”
“Whatever it is, I’m pretty sure it’s not going to solve all my problems.”
“Right, I forgot. You’ve been brainwashed like all the men in that sausage-fest of an office into thinking Robert’s the second coming. That he’s just smarter than everyone else. What a load of BS.” Margie wiped her forehead sweat back onto her slicked ponytail and scanned the area for anyone in earshot, then lowered herself back down to a sitting position beside me on the landing.
“You’re probably too young to remember this,” she said. “But twenty years back or so there was a major dustup when this big Swiss bank entered into a deferred prosecution agreement—” She paused. “Do you know what that means, deferred prosecution agreement? Of course you don’t. Basically, this bank was charged with conspiring to defraud the United States by impeding the IRS. They were helping people open accounts using sham identities.”
“Um,” I said, raising my hand Lily Madsen style, “what?”
“Okay, try to stay with me here, buttercup.” Margie slowed her explanation down to a Junior Scholastic classroom-magazine comprehension level. “This Swiss bank was helping businessmen avoid paying their taxes. Then they got caught. So to save themselves, they made a deal to give up the identities of their shadiest clients— the ones with undeclared accounts, doing cross-border business. You see where I’m going with this?”
I did, but I stopped Margie there. Didn’t we already have this conversation on day one at Michael’s?
“It’s no secret that Robert has offshore accounts,” I said. “But they’re all perfectly legal. He has an army of people making sure of that, starting with Glen Wiles.”