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“Thank you.”
“Remember that modeling thing we needed? The pics for the website?”
“Sure. Wholesome pretty girl.”
“You doing anything on Sunday?”
“Not really. Maybe taking Marisa to the museum.”
“We might do the photo shoot that day.”
“Not a big deal. I could do both, right?”
“Pretty much. The weather looks good this weekend. No rain in the forecast.”
“Is there ever rain in the forecast?”
“Hah! Nope. That’s why I love it here.”
“Where are we going to do this?”
“Red Rocks.”
“Your house?”
“Oh, no. The actual park. The canyon. The desert with all those gorgeous cliffs.”
“I haven’t been there yet.”
“You’ll love it.”
“You’ve been?”
“Yeah. A little scouting with Tony.”
She reached for a strawberry doughnut. A strawberry reel. There was just so much that she didn’t know.
“So, Sunday?” he asked, confirming.
“Sure. Sunday.” She felt bad that her lack of any ambition to be onstage was disappointing him, and so the idea that she could do him a solid by looking outdoorsy and clean-cut gave her comfort. And with that acknowledgment came a thought she was having frequently: morality, at least hers, was more malleable than she had supposed even six months ago.
Yeah, I think I understood crypto better than Frankie. I know I understood it better than Betsy. I was constantly explaining stuff to her, and showing her what she should google.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Crissy
Ask me to do a deep dive into how Diana Frances Spencer smuggled her lovers into and out of palaces and guest cottages, and I’m your PI. Or, at least, your research assistant. And so I was confident I might unearth some interesting skinny on Frankie Limback. I went online and learned that Betsy’s new boyfriend had indeed been an investment banker. He had a wife (who would soon be his ex-wife) who was a pediatrician, and two teenage children: a daughter who was a high school soccer star who also took pride in her dance TikToks, and a son who seemed to steer clear of the social networks. I supposed this young man had been Betsy’s client and the conduit to the Limbacks. Frankie had gone to Farmingdale and then Hofstra. He and his family had wound up in a suburb of Burlington, Vermont, because his wife had started her practice there and had family in the Green Mountains.
It wasn’t a lot, but it was a start, and I was about to close my browser in my hotel suite when I had an idea. I’d been frustrated that the Futurium website hadn’t had an employee directory when I had surfed around it, but I’d noticed they had a page full of podcasts they called the PFP, because the host was named Peter: Peter’s Futurium Podcast. I went back there now and found easily fifty of them. The crypto company seemed to record at least one and sometimes two each month, all between fifteen and thirty minutes long. And there, recorded the previous winter, was one in which Peter was interviewing an investment banker about why he had left traditional finance for cryptocurrency. He discussed how his old bank, Fitzgerald McCoy, had shut down their operations in Moscow years ago—well before Putin invaded Ukraine—because even the prewar sanctions had made business in Russia untenable. That banker was Frankie Limback, who, when he wasn’t traveling overseas, divided his time between Burlington and New York City. (“It’s an easier commute than you think,” he joked, thanking an airline, and then bragging about how frequently he was overseas anyway, for a while in Moscow, and now in Phnom Penh and Grand Cayman.) “It was just too hard for Russian companies to access international capital because of the sanctions—the U.S. and European sanctions,” he explained. “And so, after Cleo Dionne and I closed the door on the Moscow bank, I began looking at alternatives to traditional finance. I saw right away that the future—at least my future—was crypto.”
Next, I googled this Cleo Dionne. The first thing I found was confirmation that she had been running the Moscow branch of the bank and, along with Frankie, had moved on to Futurium. The second? The woman’s obituary. She had died four months earlier in a bathtub in a hotel room at that exclusive resort Futurium executives visited on Grand Cayman (a resort, the obituary writer explained, that was really a small club for the wealthy in the world who wanted to steer clear of the social pages and the limelight). Cause of death? Drowning. She was fully clothed and had a blood alcohol level of point four percent. Not point oh four, a level that’s likely to impair your driving. Point four. By accident or on purpose, she had, essentially, drunk herself to death.
She was thirty-five years old. She was blond.
She could have been Betsy’s and my sister.
* * *
