Exposed (Madame X, #2)(46)
“So I went for it. I gutted the place, ripped every stick of flooring out, knocked down every single non-load-bearing wall, the stairs, the ceilings. Ripped out all the landscaping. I mean I took that f*cker down to bones. This was six months after I found out about Leanne cheating on me with Marcus, the man who’d been a sort of flipper-mentor for me, as well as my business partner. I walked away with nothing but what I’d saved and the return on the house I was in the middle of finishing. And this huge risk, it was the first job I was doing without Marcus. I was in a bad place. Fucked up emotionally, having flashbacks from the war, not sleeping. I got myself in over my head, really. Looking back, I should have gone smaller. Done a couple properties of the type I was familiar with. A ten-thousand-square-foot mansion on six acres, one that needed a complete gut and rebuild? It was idiotic of me.”
He rubs his face, crosses his legs, and covers his lap with the sheet.
“To this day I’m still not sure how I pulled it off. I was drinking all the time, like, the whole project is kind of a haze, because I was half wasted the whole time. I was a goddamned mess. But somehow, I scraped together the money to finish it, pulled a lot of all-nighters. Point is, I finished the flip in like three months, which considering the size of the job is pretty incredible. I finished over budget, though. By a lot. Bought it for four, spent another three hundred thousand on reno costs, most of which went to rewiring and redoing the kitchen. Get the kitchen right, and you can sell just about any house. So I had an overhead of seven fifty. Highest comp in the area was a flat million, but that place was fifteen hundred square feet less than my property, and was on half the acreage, and wasn’t updated.” He glances at me. “Shit, I’m boring you, aren’t I? You don’t give a shit about the flip. Short version for real now. I sold the house for one point eight. Made a killing. But I was burned out, by then. That job just . . . fried me. I didn’t want to touch another flip. So instead of sinking that money back into another flip, I went a different direction. One of the guys I’d hired for the flip had an uncle who was selling his computer parts manufacturing business. I bought it. Streamlined the business, fired a bunch of people and rehired better ones, put in a manager I trusted, got the place running like a top. Started churning out a profit in no time. One of the people I’d hired was the main sales account manager, and she got us six new accounts that were insanely lucrative. That process landed me a lead on a computer supply company that was going under, so I bought that and, essentially, flipped it. Made cuts, hired new people, got new accounts. Used my parts supply facility to get the computers built more cheaply, so I turned a higher profit on each sale. And then a real stroke of luck for me. I met a guy who owned a whole chain of used-car lots, a couple restaurants, and a gas station. Dude had terminal cancer and was selling everything at a bargain basement price. Bought him out lock, stock, and barrel. He was a hell of a businessman, so his stuff was all in good shape. Saw a return on that investment in a matter of months.”
He glances at me. “Seriously, babe, just bear with me. I’m almost to the interesting stuff. Once the companies I bought were all turning a profit, I sold them. I wasn’t interested in the actual running of the business, just the buy, improve, and sell. I kept that one guy’s chain of business, though. Sort of out of posterity or something. He died a few months after I bought him out, but I still own all those businesses. Well, anyway, I kept making bigger and bigger investments. Buying larger companies for larger payouts when I ended up selling them. Finally, the business took me to New York. A research and development company working on future tech for cell phones and such. Better touch screens, holograph displays, all sorts of stuff we won’t actually see for years yet, even now. The owner of that company, right after we signed the deal, pulled me aside. Said he had a good lead for me. Couldn’t tell me much, but it was a chance to buy into a company with real earnout potential. Millions, he said. Hundreds of millions.
“Well, of course I was skeptical. Someone says shit like that, you gotta throw some side-eye, you know? Like, what’s your angle? He put me in touch with Caleb. The investment opportunity was a partner stake in a futures trading company. Stocks. Hard to explain if you’re not into business. Point is, there is a f*ckload of money in futures, if you do it right. Caleb, it seems, does it right. This was new, for me. I was still a builder, essentially. I just built businesses instead of buildings. Stocks, futures, market indexes? It was all new.”
A long pause now. A sigh. “I was in it deep with Caleb before I figured out that he was rigging things, insider trading, corporate espionage. All sorts of dirty shit. Pissed me off. I confronted him.”
He is quiet for a long couple of minutes, staring into space.
“He’s a sly, manipulative bastard. Talked me around. Wasn’t hard, I guess. I mean, I was making serious bank. More than I’d ever made in my life by a factor of at least ten. I wasn’t stupid, I was scattering the accounts all over the place. Hiding some in tax shelters, offshore accounts, all that jazz. Nothing illegal, just spreading the money around so it wasn’t all in one account. But he had me by the balls, you know? Had me dead to rights. I was in it, I was on the hook as much as him if anything happened. Just go with it, he said. It’s only temporary. He was building up capital for a big buyout, a merger that would make both of us billions, billions with a big fat B. So I went with it. Obviously, hindsight is twenty-twenty. A basic life principle for you, Isabel: If something seems too good to be true, it probably is. In this case, the big buyout was all a setup. He was working twice as hard as me behind the scenes, doing an end run on me. This is a complex world we live in, and the high-dollar, big-business scene here in Manhattan? It’s a small world. You don’t run the kind of game Caleb was running without attracting attention. He was getting too big too fast, making too much money too easily. People were suspicious. But it was his world, his game, and I was new to it all. What you have to understand here is that I’m glossing over the details because the real nitty-gritty of how Caleb set me up is boring business bullshit. It’s not an exciting narrative. He was running a scheme that ran the entire gamut of white-collar crime: embezzlement, money laundering, insider trading, corporate espionage. He’s smart, and he’s careful. Very little, if anything at all, can be directly traced back to him. I wasn’t innocent, mind you. I knew I was part of something dirty. I won’t bullshit you about that. But I wasn’t part of the grand scope of things either; I was just a piece, a minor player. I was good at the organizational stuff, getting the right people hired for the right job, keeping track of what went where and who did what. Caleb was the one running the big numbers, you know? But he had it all set up so that there were layers and layers between the actual dirty work and him. The SEC got a tip-off, probably. I don’t know. They came sniffing, and it all went to shit. Lots of people went down. His setup was elaborate, lots of people involved, and all of them knew to one degree or another what was going on, that it was a dirty operation. I think there were something like a dozen people who were arrested for a wide variety of white-collar crimes, including yours truly.”