Chapter 3 - THE SECRET SAFE DEPOSIT BOXForty-eight hours after the arrest, Eleanor called David from the Rose M. Singer Center at Rikers Island.
David answered on the second ring, sitting inside his lawyer’s sleek office in downtown Manhattan.
“David! Oh thank God, David!” Eleanor sobbed over the static-filled line. “You have to get us out of here! This place is a nightmare! They put your sister in a cell with violent criminals! Mark is crying in the men's wing! David, tell the police it was all a misunderstanding! We were coming back on New Year’s Day!”
David didn't interrupt. He listened to her panic with complete detachment.
“Are you finished, Mother?” David asked quietly.
“David, how can you speak to me like that?! I am your mother! I gave birth to you!” Eleanor shrieked. “We just needed a break! Taking care of a newborn is exhausting! We knew Ethan was smart enough to handle it for a couple of days!”
“He is fourteen, Eleanor,” David said, his tone dropping an octave, dead and heavy. “He had to boil tap water on the stove just to hold Noah over warm steam so his lungs wouldn't close up from the cold. He gave up his own jacket to wrap around his brother while he shivered in the dark. You abandoned them for champagne and spa massages.”
“We were going to bring him back a gift!” Eleanor wailed. “David, please! Drop the charges! If this goes to trial, Mark will lose his law license, Rachel’s career will be ruined, and I... I have high blood pressure! I can’t survive in here!”
“You won’t have to worry about your blood pressure in trial,” David said calmly. “Because today, my forensic team opened the safe deposit box you registered under my father’s old business name.”
Silence fell over the line. Eleanor’s hyperventilating instantly stopped.
“What... what safe deposit box?” her voice faltered.
“The one in Jersey City,” David continued, flipping through a stack of paper bank statements provided by his investigator. “The one where you’ve been funneling my late father’s life insurance payout—the money that was supposed to be placed in a trust fund for Ethan and Noah’s college education.”
“David, don’t you touch that money! That’s my security!” Eleanor screamed, dropping her frantic act, her true, vicious tone emerging. “Your father left that for ME!”
“Dad left explicit instructions in his 2018 codicil that the insurance was solely for his grandchildren,” David said coldly. “You forged my signature as co-trustee three years ago. You took over three hundred thousand dollars from my sons’ future to fund Rachel’s failed clothing boutique and Mark’s gambling debts in Atlantic City.”
“You can’t prove that!” Eleanor hissed.
“I don’t have to prove it to you,” David replied. “The FBI’s financial crimes division is already reviewing the bank signature cards. By tomorrow morning, every asset you, Rachel, and Mark possess will be frozen under federal seizure orders. You won't even have enough money to buy a bottle of water from the prison commissary.”
“You monster!” Eleanor screamed into the phone. “I am your mother!”
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“You died to me the moment I saw my son crying in that freezing apartment,” David said.
He pressed the red button, ending the call, and looked up at his lawyer. “Draft the paperwork for full criminal restitution and asset forfeiture. Take everything.”
