Chapter 3 - The Ghost of Richard Carter
By Thursday morning, the seventy-two-hour clock was down to thirty-six.
The diner was packed. Word of the blockade had traveled through the neighborhood like wildfire, and every steelworker, truck driver, nurse, and city worker on the South Side had decided that Carter’s Table was the only place they were going to buy their breakfast. We were running three grills on the sidewalk just to keep up with the demand for egg sandwiches.
But I wasn't watching the register. I was in the tiny, windowless office in the basement, sitting beneath the low-hanging water pipes with a green metal lockbox on my lap.
This box had belonged to my late husband, Richard. When he died of a sudden heart attack when Hannah was seven, he left me the diner, a small life insurance policy, and this box. He had told me to keep it locked, to keep it dry, and to never open it unless the world was falling down around our ears.
"You're looking for the ledger," Artie said, his heavy boots clattering down the wooden stairs. He sat on a stack of flour sacks, his knees groaning as he bent them.
"I didn't think I'd ever have to look at it, Artie," I said, blowing a layer of fine, gray dust off the rusted brass latch. "Richard loved this neighborhood, but he knew how the city worked. He knew that the people who build the big houses in the suburbs usually do it with money that was stolen from the people who live in the brick flats."
I opened the lid. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth to protect it from the dampness of the basement, was a thick, black leather-bound ledger from 1998.
The pages were filled with Richard’s neat, slanted bookkeeping. In the late nineties, before the national logistics companies took over, the shipping lanes of Northern Illinois were controlled by a complex web of union cooperatives and private transport firms.
I flipped the pages until I found the section marked Holloway Select - Phase 1.
"Look at this, Artie," I said, pointing my finger at a series of entries from May of that year. "When Margaret’s husband, George Holloway, bought the land for their first three stores in Naperville and Schaumburg, he didn't get a loan from the Chase Bank. The interest rates were too high, and his credit was garbage from a failed development in Florida."
Artie leaned in, his eyes narrowing as he read the numbers. "These are union pension transfers. Three million dollars. Signed off by the executive board of the old Transit Union."
"And look who the trustee was," I said, pointing to the signature at the bottom of the page. "Margaret Holloway. She wasn't just George's wife. She was the corporate treasurer. She took three million dollars from the truck drivers' pension fund to build her first grocery stores, and she paid it back through a shell company registered in the Cayman Islands under her maiden name, Robbins Holdings."
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"That’s not a loan," Artie whispered, his face darkening. "That’s money laundering. The interest was never reported to the state, and the union members never saw a dime of the profits from those stores. If the IRS gets a look at this ledger, the entire corporate structure of Holloway Select Markets will be seized by the federal government within forty-eight hours."
"Grant Holloway thinks he’s a king because his name is on the sign," I said, closing the book with a heavy, dry snap. "But he’s sitting on a throne made of stolen pension money. And I have the receipt."
