Casale reflected on the toughness Forsythe had already shown. He didn’t doubt a word of what Sal had just said. “What about Pedace?”
Trujillo chuckled. “I thought I recognized the name when we talked this morning. He disappeared about a decade ago. The SEC put out a warrant on him. They wanted to talk to him about his possible role in a mortgage securities scam.”
“Anything else?”
“What are you doing out there?”
“Cut the bullshit, Sal. What else did you find out about Pedace?”
Casale listened to the dead air over the line. He visualized the wheels turning in his brother-in-law’s brain. The bastard was about to raise his fee again. Before Sal could respond, Casale said, “I warn you, Sal. You try to jack up your fee on me, I’ll never do business with you again. Sister or no sister.”
“Okay, okay, Johnny. You’re gonna love it. Pedace and Massarino grew up on the same block in Brooklyn. They attended Regis and Harvard together.” Trujillo blurted a laugh. “But here’s the capper. Massarino and Pedace went to work at Rosen, Rice & Stone after they graduated from Harvard. I called a retired priest who taught at Regis when Massarino and Pedace were there. If you can believe it, he still remembers the two of them. You know what he told me?”
Casale vented a loud breath and said, “What, Sal?”
“He said Massarino was the second brightest student they ever had at Regis. But Pedace was the brightest kid he’s ever known. Made Massarino look average. He said Pedace had skipped two grades and was a shy, socially-inept boy who kids picked on. At least, until Massarino took Pedace under his wing. He protected Pedace like a kid brother.”
“Looks like he’s still doing that,” Casale muttered.
“What was that, Johnny?”
“Nothing, Sal. Thanks. You did good. Send me your bill.”
Casale hung up and paced the length of his hotel room. He’d already decided that Charles Forsythe was no pushover. Physical violence would probably just stiffen his back more. “I got one play,” he said under his breath.
CHAPTER 20
It was mid-afternoon when Janet’s intercom chimed. “Yes, Mary?” she answered.
“Ms. Jenkins, you have a visitor.”
“Did you get a name?”
Mary’s voice dropped as she said, “I asked him but he said he’d rather not give me his name. It’s the same man who asked about you when you were in the hospital. The guy from the front wall.”
“Okay, Mary. Tell him I’ll be right there.”
She shook her head as she stood, wondering what Cecil was up to now. She fast-walked to the lobby and found him pacing, briefcase in hand. He immediately turned toward her and rushed over.
“We need to talk.”
“Okay, Cecil. Can we get together after work?”
“Oh, no, that won’t do. We need to talk right now.”
The wild-eyed, flushed look on Rosandich’s face worried Janet. Usually quiet, almost passive, he now appeared to be wired, as though on drugs.
“Are you okay, Cecil?”
“Yes, I’m fine. But we must talk right now. It’s important.”
Janet glanced at Mary and wondered if she should have her call Frank Mitchell, but decided against it and invited Cecil to follow her.
They had barely sat down in her office, Rosandich having placed his briefcase on the floor beside his chair, when he popped back up and shut the office door. Before she could object, he scooted back to his chair, leaned forward and, in a low voice, said, “I have a solution to your problem.”
Janet ran through a mental checklist of all her problems and finally asked, “Which one?”
“The abused women,” he said. “Allowing them to gain their independence.” He jumped to his feet again and paced in front of her, waving his arms around like a marionette.
Janet stood, moved around her desk, and took Cecil’s arm. “I want you to sit down and calmly tell me what’s going on.”
When they were both seated again, she poured him a glass of water from a carafe on the credenza behind her desk and pushed the glass toward him. As he drank, she watched his eyes to see if she could detect any sign that he might be high. But his pupils looked fine.
He placed the glass back on the front of her desk. “From what you told me, it appears the solution to the problem of your clients gaining their independence is two-fold. They need to be separated from their abusive husbands and they need the financial resources to make it on their own.”
When he paused, Janet nodded.
“Okay,” he said, as he took his briefcase from the floor beside his chair and placed it on his lap, opened it, and withdrew a quarter-inch stack of paper. He replaced the briefcase next to him and handed over the papers.
“What’s this?”
“Research I did at the public library.”
She riffled through the papers. “You did this all today?”
He looked at her as though he didn’t understand the question. “The library is a wonderful place to do research. Did you know they now have computers which you can use for free?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I found that your organization serves an average of seventy-five women and one hundred eighteen children per year. You house and feed the women and their children for no longer than ninety days, at which point they must find their own accommodations. In most cases, they wind up returning to their husbands and the abuse cycle begins all over again.”
Janet raised her eyebrows and nodded.
“Your website says you have dozens of volunteers who provide daycare services, counseling, job training, etc., which means, if you had the physical facilities and the financial wherewithal, you wouldn’t have to turn your clients loose until after they had the training, education, and psychological stability to get a job and be on their own.”
“Those are big ifs.”
He held up a hand. “I’m not finished,” he said impatiently.
“Sorry. Go ahead.”
“There’s a financial pro forma in that package. You can study it later, but the summary conclusion is that you need three times as many residential units as you have on site here. And you need an annual revenue increase of three million, seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”
Janet was beginning to lose patience. All the figures he was throwing around were pie-in-the-sky numbers that weren’t attainable. “That’s all good, Cecil, but—”
He held up his hand again and whispered, “Another minute, please.”
She sighed exasperatedly and leaned back.
“Did you know there’s a foundation in Omaha, Nebraska, that will match one-for-one any gift over five million dollars donated to organizations that help abused women?’
She shook her head.
“So, if your organization was the beneficiary of a forty-three-million-dollar donation, the Omaha foundation would match thirty-eight million of it. That would give you eighty-one million dollars. If you put that money into a real estate investment fund that generates five percent, for instance, your annual income off that investment would be over four million dollars. Or, more than the increase in your budget that I mentioned.” He spread his arms and added, “Of course, if the real estate fund paid six percent, rather than five percent, that would give you an extra one point one million dollars in income.”