“No, not really.”
“No?” Moniz asks. “Or not really?”
“No.”
“Can your husband access this, as you say, trust? Is that the correct word?”
“Yes, that’s the right word. No, John has no standing.”
“And how much money is in that account?”
Ariel doesn’t like this line of questioning, not one bit. She doesn’t want to answer Moniz, but she also doesn’t want to stonewall.
“Why does that matter?”
“Perhaps that is for us to judge.”
“Perhaps”—Ariel crosses her arms—“not.”
Moniz taps his pen on the paper. “What is the origin of the funds? Is this an inheritance?”
Ariel turns to the woman. She was expecting that a female cop would be a natural ally, but it doesn’t look that way.
“Why is it, senhora, that you do not wish to answer these questions?”
“Because they’re none of your business.”
“None of our business? We are not businesspeople. We are police.”
“I mean it’s none of your concern.”
Ariel had hoped that these local cops would be her allies, the only people in Lisbon whom she’d be able to trust.
“Is your previous husband the source of this money?”
Ariel reminds herself that there’s no way—none—for the Lisbon police to be certain where the funds originated. Only a handful of people in the world possess that particular fact, and every single one of them is legally prohibited from revealing it. Most of them are lawyers. All of them, in fact, except her.
Which doesn’t mean other people can’t guess. And with the right sort of research, they might guess correctly. Maybe these cops have already guessed correctly; or maybe someone else has fed them a correct guess. But a guess, even an informed and accurate one, is not the same as a fact, as knowledge. A guess is not evidence.
“I am confused about something, senhora.”
A guess, though, can certainly be a very compelling clue.
“Perhaps you can help me to understand.”
She doesn’t like where Moniz is going, wearing this Columbo-like cloak of confusion. Ariel suspects that the whole thing—his messiness, his distractedness, his air of ineffectuality—is a smoke screen. The rumpled clothes, the food in the beard, all of it an act, the guy an actor. And here she’d been thinking that she was the actor.
Ariel is apparently never going to be too old to learn the same lesson again and again: Everyone is an actor.
“I see that this account is originally opened using a different name.” Moniz turns the page of his notebook, glances down. “Can you please tell me who is this person?” He looks up, locks eyes with Ariel. “Laurel Turner? Is this you?”
*
Ariel remembers everything about the final day she was called Laurel Turner: the conference room in the Midtown office tower with spectacular views of Central Park, of the East River, of the Upper East Side, with lawyers shuffling papers and padding fees.
She glared at the far end of the conference table, not attempting to hide her hostility. This man should be arrested, is what should happen. He should be perp-walked, jailed, compelled to post bail, put on trial not just of law but of public opinion, forced to listen to her open-court testimony, hounded by reporters, picketed, protested, his wife should leave him, his fortunes decline, friends shun him, his life should fall apart, and after all that misery he should spend the next twenty years in a federal prison, surrounded by violent felons who’d rape him on a regular basis.
That’s what should happen.
But instead? Instead he was sitting there in his custom-made suit, throwing money at his problem, solving it easily, fully expecting no further repercussions, ever. Just like he’d no doubt solved other problems in the past and would again in the future; just like his daddy had solved his youthful problems. Tutors and coaches, payoffs and bribes. Where’s the line between right and wrong?
It was being drawn right here. Except the line is not between right and wrong. Just legal on one side, illegal on the other.
Ariel could barely listen as lawyers explained the nondisclosure provisions, the severity of the penalties, criminal as well as civil. At the time, these penalties were the least of her concerns. She needed the money, she needed to put this whole thing in the past, she needed to invent a new life. She couldn’t imagine a scenario in which she’d want to revisit this.
Her gaze wandered up Park Avenue, past identifiable intersections and familiar buildings until she found the right pile of limestone, then four floors down from the top, and there it was: her windows, her curtains, her home.
Her ex-home. She wondered if Bucky was there right now. Would he continue to live in that apartment? Their apartment?
She scrawled LAUREL TURNER on the signature lines, initialed LT in corners, wasted no time getting the hell out of there, tucking her set of signed papers into her bag, rising without saying anything to anyone, just a curt nod at her own attorney, an utterly radiant woman—her hair, her skin, even the silk threads in her jacket seemed to glow, her skin taut from who knows what procedures. It was impossible to guess the age of a woman like this. Some things, like her skin, suggested mid-forties; others, like her octogenarian husband, suggested much older.
Ariel stopped in at the restroom; this might be her last chance for a while. Bucky called yet again, startling her, the loud peal of her flip-phone echoing throughout the tiled room.
She couldn’t have that conversation again. It wasn’t surprising that her husband was refusing to accept her decision, but Ariel no longer had the patience to try to make him understand. She’d owed Bucky an explanation, of course. And she’d given it, more than once. She didn’t owe him anything more.
In the elevator, Ariel tied a scarf over her head, donned giant sunglasses despite the November drizzle through which she walked around the corner to the bank branch where she deposited the cashier’s check into an account that was otherwise empty. While inside, she never took off the scarf; the only time she removed the sunglasses was to prove that her face matched her ID, an interaction not recorded by any camera. No one challenged her on the sunglasses indoors on a rainy day. Other people wore wool caps in the summer, fleece vests in heat waves, gym shorts in snowstorms. Everyone too cool for school. Today Laurel Turner was willing to look like one of those people.
She stepped out to the midday sidewalk, and looked for a taxi from behind her sunglasses.
“Hey!” It was a male voice to her right. She turned to see a man fifteen feet away, under an awning, out of the rain, smoking a cigarette. “You’re beautiful, you know that?”
She turned back to survey the passing traffic.
“You should smile more.”
Ariel still didn’t respond, or turn again in this man’s direction, but in her peripheral vision she could see him toss his cigarette, start walking toward her.