“City Hall?” I asked. “Did you go to City Hall last night?”

Donny was trying to read my expression. “You don’t mean to imply I should have told you I was going there, do you? Statler called. I walked over and gave him a quick update, Alex. You’ve got nothing to do with the pieces of the case that my guys are working on.”

I was determined to get back on course and stop Mike’s interference.

“I’m glad you went,” I said, thinking of the plastic bag in Mike’s jacket pocket. “Go back to Salma, Donny. I wasn’t done with that.”

“Not much more to say.”

“She looked familiar to you, have I got that right?”

There had been no photographs of the elusive Salma in the newspapers, and it was impossible to believe the battered face of the woman in the well, represented in crime-scene photos, would be recognized by anyone who had only met her in a crowd.

“Yes. Vaguely familiar.”

“Did you ever talk with her?”

“I wish we could sit down with Ethan,” he said, throwing up his hands. “I’m sure he’d confirm I didn’t know her.”

“Next time you have dinner with Ethan,” Mike said, stepping all over my words, “maybe he can refresh your recollection.”

“I’d say that’s a few months down the road, Chapman. I’ll be arm’s distance from him, just like everyone else in law enforcement. He’ll straighten this out. This situation makes him look awfully screwed up, but he’s a good man at heart.”

“Damn. I was counting on you to nab me an invitation to that fancy private cabal.”

“Just what would that be?” Donny asked, bracing his arms on the edge of the desk.

“That gentlemen’s social club you boys got going. By invitation only. Seems totally unfair that Coop can’t buy herself a seat, but I had high hopes of joining you. Don’t you want to tell us a little something about it?”

THIRTY-EIGHT

“I haven’t had anything to do with that group in years,” Donny Baynes said as he sat down in his high-backed leather desk chair. “So far as I know, it doesn’t exist. Who’s been feeding you that crap?”

“Kendall Reid,” I said.

Donny cradled his forehead in his hands, elbows on his desk. He took a few seconds to collect himself. “Reid’s a thief and a liar. I don’t know what the hell he’s trying to do by dragging me into this.”

“He says you know-maybe you were even there-the night Ethan met Salma.”

“Look, if she’s the girl I think, I never put her together with Ethan. She was probably at fund-raisers. But I always figured she was Kendall Reid’s girl. Maybe he was just the beard for Ethan. Maybe that’s how stupid and naive I am.”

“What about this men’s club?” I asked.

“I just told you it’s defunct. Can’t have anything to do with this.”

“You also told her you didn’t know who Salma was, when it turns out you might,” Mike said. “It’s a good time to spill your guts and let us decide.”

The task force prosecutor was silent.

“Don’t try to filter the facts, Donny,” I said. “You’re too tight with Ethan to make the judgment calls. Let us help you decide.”

“This is harmless, Alex. I promise you it was harmless,” Donny said. “The Tontine Association. That’s what it was called.”

“Tontine. Haven’t heard that word in ages. Michael Caine-The Wrong Box. Which brother lived longer.” Mike was trying to loosen Baynes up by making light of things. “Which one got all the money. Is that the right movie, Coop?”

“Yup. Robert Louis Stevenson story.” Mike knew the movies, I knew the books.

“What’s a tontine anyway, Donny?”

“They’re schemes for raising capital-like a combination of a group annuity and a lottery. A Neapolitan banker named Lorenzo de Tonti invented them in the seventeenth century.”

“They legal?” Mike asked.

“Not anymore, ’cause they’re basically swindles. But-but-it was just a name we used. There was no tontine involved.”

“Financial geniuses, the Italians. They got Tonti, Ponzi-Gotti-all came up with clever ways for guys to make a buck. I’d think as a prosecutor you’d know enough to stay away from that kind of stuff.”

“It was Moses Leighton who formed the club. I was in private practice at the time. It was just a well-intentioned way of raising money for the restoration of some old properties in the city.”

“Like how?”

“It’s a simple concept. In a real tontine, each member invited in pays a sum-say five hundred dollars from twenty members each. The money’s invested, and every year-every good year-you get a dividend. When an investor dies, the money is reallocated among the survivors. Last man standing gets the whole pot-a gamble that in the old days could leave someone with a fortune.”

“Your tontine wasn’t real?” Mike asked. “Is that what you’re saying?”

Mike was baiting Donny and it was working. Asking simple, general questions about the concept to get his subject to open up. And Donny Baynes was talking.

“They’ve been banned in this country for decades. Moses Leighton had this idea to start an organization for private funding to help the city raise money for neglected projects, things that just wouldn’t get repaired or restored because of budget restraints.”

“And Ethan was a new city councilman at the time,” I said.

“Exactly. It was a lot about paving a future for his son, of course.”

“With a swindle?” Mike asked.

“Listen to me, will you?” Donny liked being in the superior position to Mike again. “This is why the first tontines were created-for governments to use to raise capital. They were good things. Louis XIV created a tontine in 1689 to fund military operations when he was broke. It was honest. It worked. The last surviving investor lived to the age of ninety-six with that fortune. The British government copied the idea to go to war against France a few years later.”

“So why’d they stop working?”

Donny was gesturing with both hands. “Investors caught on. They bought shares for infants and children, instead of for themselves. If the kids lived till old age, they often made pots of money. The governments weren’t able to keep up with the costs. That’s why you’ve got a pension today, instead of a tontine-instead of a death gamble.”

Mike nodded his head. “Okay, so what did old Moses have in mind?”

“The city owns a good number of properties in the five boroughs that have historic significance. They’re run by a nonprofit trust that raises private funds for them, in tandem with the city parks department, since several of them sit in local parks.”

“Is Gracie Mansion part of that trust?” I asked.

“It is. And these are great old houses that date back centuries, so they’re enormously expensive to maintain. Moses Leighton had a creative idea to help the city do just that.”

“With an eye to restoring Gracie in case his son needed a mayoral roof over his head,” Mike said.

“Bloomberg was a little more popular than Moses expected. That’s why Ethan took the congressional seat.”

“So the club?” I asked.

“Moses invited thirty or forty guys to participate as members. I think he wound up with a little more than half that at every dinner. Some of them were politicians, and others were wealthy businessmen, but all approved of his plan.”

“What was it?

“A dinner club. A perfectly respectable dinner club,” Donny said, looking Mike in the eye. “Every second month Mr. Leighton arranged to have dinner catered for us at one of these different properties. Most of them are restored, to one degree or another, and run as museums.”

“You rented them?”

“Even you can do it, Chapman. It’s one of the ways they make money. Most people don’t even know these places exist, especially in the other four boroughs.”

“Leighton paid for the dinners?” Mike asked.

“He did. He underwrote them. But we each had to make a contribution to his enterprise. Five hundred, a thousand, each according to his means, I guess. If you were in public service, you paid less, and he had some very high rollers from the investment banking world. You gave him your check, which went to the trust to restore the houses, of course.”