Chapter 10 - The Desperate Gamble
-10-
Deep inside the maximum-security intake facility of Rikers Island, the days crawled by with agonizing slowness for Eleanor, Chloe, and Mark. Stripped of their designer clothes, their endless supply of cash, and their ability to manipulate everyone around them, the trio was learning the brutal realities of life behind bars.
It was a bleak Tuesday morning in late January when Eleanor managed to secure a ten-minute visitor slot using her allotted legal phone privileges.
She sat in the cold, institutional visitation booth, gripping the heavy plastic receiver as a guard escorted her visitor into the opposite side of the glass partition.
It wasn't a lawyer. It was Arthur—or rather, someone posing as a former business associate of mine whom Eleanor had managed to contact through a smuggled burner phone note passed to a sympathetic trusty inmate.
Actually, it was a disgraced former business partner of mine named Julian Vance—a distant cousin from my father’s side of the family who had been disowned years ago for running a shady real estate scam in Queens. Julian had always envied my success, and Eleanor had spent the last two weeks bombarding his office with frantic letters begging for financial rescue.
Julian sat down in the booth, picking up his receiver with a slick, self-satisfied smirk.
“Well, Aunt Eleanor,” Julian said through the static-filled intercom speaker. “You certainly managed to make a mess of things this time. Landing yourself in federal-state custody over a domestic squabble in Brooklyn?”
“Save the lecture, Julian, and listen to me very carefully,” Eleanor hissed, her eyes blazing with desperate fury behind the glass. “David has completely lost his mind. He’s letting us rot in here, and his fancy lawyer Daniel Cho is dismantling our entire estate piece by piece. If you don't help us, we are going to prison for a decade and losing every single penny we ever had.”
Julian leaned back, crossing his arms over his cheap polyester suit jacket. “And what makes you think I can do anything about it? David controls Hartwell Properties. He holds all the legal cards.”
“David controls the front door, but he doesn't control everything,” Eleanor whispered fiercely, pressing her face closer to the glass. “Before we left for Miami, I made a copy of the master physical blueprints and security master keys for the Park Slope building. I also found an old safe deposit box key in my late husband’s personal files—a box containing unregistered bearer bonds worth nearly three hundred thousand dollars, registered under an old family trust that David doesn't even know exists.”
Julian’s eyes narrowed instantly, a greedy glint flashing in his pupils. “Bearer bonds? Unregistered?”
“Yes,” Eleanor said, her voice dropping into a conspiratorial purr. “If you go to the bank, open that safe deposit box using the key I’m going to smuggle out to you through a contact, and cash those bonds, you can hire the best criminal defense team in New York to get us out of this nightmare. And I’ll give you thirty percent of the total sum for your trouble.”
Julian stared at her through the glass for a long, silent moment, calculating the risk versus the reward. Three hundred thousand dollars in bearer bonds, completely untraceable, sitting in a neglected bank vault in downtown Manhattan.
“Where’s the key, Aunt Eleanor?” Julian asked smoothly.
May you like
A cruel, victorious smile touched the corners of Eleanor’s lips. “Bring me a signed power of attorney and a clean set of release papers, and I’ll tell you exactly where it’s hidden.”
It was a desperate, unhinged gamble—a criminal conspiracy hatched from the bowels of Rikers Island that would inadvertently set off a chain reaction leading straight back to our front door in Park Slope.
