her with balancing my struffoli on her lap all the way to Lighthouse Hill.
According to Dexter Beatty, bringing a home-baked gift was a sign of affection. A black cake would have been a better choice, given Linford’s Jamaican roots, but I didn’t have three weeks to macerate fruit in Manischewitz or travel to Brooklyn and back for a jar of authentic West Indian burnt sugar.
Instead, I made the famous little “Italian Christmas tree” pastry that I’d loved as a child, hoping it would start us out on the right foot (as long as I could prevent the whole thing from ending up on the dashboard, that is).
Esther had been doing fine in the bumper-to-bumper traffic across the Brooklyn Bridge, but now that we’d hit 278, she was tearing down the highway like a Goth out of hell.
“Esther, slow down! We’ve only gone from Lower Manhattan to Brooklyn Heights. Not to Monaco’s Grand Prix!”
“Sorry,” she replied, easing up on the pedal. “It’s just that this part of the drive is seriously tedious . . .”
As its name suggested, Staten Island was in fact an island, connected to the borough of Brooklyn via the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Commuters without cars took the famous Staten Island Ferry.
“It would have been much easier to take the ferry from Battery Park,” Esther pointed out.
It would have, except she knew as well as I did that cars had been banned from the ferry since the 9/11 attack.
“We have no choice. We have to go through Brooklyn.”
Esther sighed and hit the gas again. “So, boss. You never told me how you managed to wrangle this invitation.”
“It was Dexter’s doing,” I explained as we zipped along the highway. “I did a little snooping and found out he knew Linford.”
“Oh, I see. No big deal, then.”
Actually it was a big deal.
I’d started my research on Saturday morning. After typing Linford’s name into a couple of Internet search engines, I learned he’d founded and managed a hedge fund called Linvantage. The fund was based in Antigua and had its prospectus posted online. It appeared to be very profitable, and I noticed the minimum investment was high enough to keep the client list exclusive.
Further research uncovered Linford’s name on the roster of half a dozen import/export companies, all of them based in the Caribbean.
Of course, when I thought of the Caribbean, I always thought of Matt’s friend Dexter—an absolute pillar of the Brooklyn Caribbean community. Any bigwigs from the Islands in the New York area probably made themselves known to Dex at one time or another to purchase authentic West Indian products for a party, family gathering, or traditional celebration.
So I called Dexter that afternoon to ask if the name Omar Linford rang any bells. Strangely, Dex claimed he’d never heard of the man, politely excused himself, and got off the phone. At first I believed him, but that night my research revealed that Linford owned a tiny Jamaica-based specialty food importer called Blue Sunshine.
Back in 2000, shortly after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration lifted its ban on a potentially toxic Jamaican fruit called ackee, I remembered Dexter boasting that he had “a big-up import guy” who sold canned ackee for seventy-five dollars a case.
At such a low wholesale price, Dex was able to peddle the Jamaican staple in his Brooklyn stores for six or seven dollars a can—about half the going rate everywhere else in the United States. Price points like that made Dexter’s Taste of the Caribbean stores very popular, especially around Christmas when the price of ackee almost always rose because of increased demand.
“I’m not sellin’ that hinky stuff, no neither,” Dex had insisted. “Gettin’ me the top brands for my customers. Nineteen-ounce tins of Island Sun.”
On its Web site, the Blue Sunshine company boasted that it had the lowest wholesale price for Island Sun brand Jamaican ackee on the East Coast. I put two and two together (old-school math this time) and made a pest of myself by phoning Dexter a second time.
“I really put the pressure on during the second call,” I continued explaining to Esther. “And Dex finally admitted that he has a ‘confidential business relationship’ with Omar Linford. Not just the man’s Blue Sunshine company, but Omar himself.”
“That sounds kind of fishy,” she said, arching an eyebrow. “What kind of relationship?”
“Not the kind Vicki Glockner was thinking about. I’m pretty sure Linford isn’t supplying marijuana for Dex to sell out of his stores.”
“Pretty sure?”
Esther was right. I wasn’t all that sure about anything when