Mark Shaiken's Blog: Head Talks! mark shaiken : : author blog - Posts Tagged "thriller"

Book Description:

In Cram Down, Kansas City attorney Josephina Jillian Jones, 3J to her friends, has dealt with people perpetrating online disinformation, white supremacists, and clients hiding assets, so when a couple who heads up a company that builds inner city housing for marginalized communities comes to her for legal help because their longtime banking partner has shut off their funding, the case appears at first blush to be tame by comparison. But when the bank president disappears and his greed-driven brother seems the likely culprit, things heat up. And when it appears the Kansas City mob is involved, the race is on to save both the company and the bank president. Lives are at stake and the clock is ticking. 3J has a reputation for being fierce and determined, but she’s going to need both help and a little luck to save the day this time.

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Here is a sample of the Prologue for you to enjoy.

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Wednesday, November 20, 2024

The two brothers sat in the bank’s executive conference room. Archival black-and-white photos adorned the walls, each in an unpretentious brushed nickel frame and mounted with a simple off-white mat. They captured scenes of 1930s Kansas City and famous Black owned businesses of the time.
The Commonwealth Savings and Loan Bank was now at the intersection of East Armour Road and Cherry Street in Kansas City, Missouri, and the room where they sat was home to a large, oval, mahogany conference room table and eight chairs with embroidered seat cushions, three on each side and one at each end of the long table. Since 1901, the table had been a part of the bank. Back then, the bank sign read The Commonwealth Colored Penny Savings and Loan Bank.
It was the same table where the bank’s founders, the brothers’ great-great-grandparents, had discussed and approved loans for small, Kansas City, Black owned businesses and homeowners in the post Civil War era. It was the same table where their ancestors had fended off threats of assaults, lynchings, and hangings and strategized ways to advance the plight of Black families. Not every Kansas Citian believed the city needed a Black owned bank. Not back then and not in the present either. In the late 1970s, their parents had sat there and discussed expanding the bank’s lending reach to all minority customers throughout the metropolitan area.
There the brothers sat. Thanksgiving was approaching, but they were not there to give thanks.
Rather than sitting across from each other at the middle of the table, they sat at opposite ends, as far from each other as the table and room permitted. Amadi Washington Browne had been born moments before his fraternal twin, Jordan Lincoln Browne. They didn’t look like each other and they didn’t think alike. Their only commonality was the womb they had shared and the house in which their parents raised them. Nothing else bound them together. Nothing else about them was similar.
Five years earlier, they had inherited the bank from their parents, although in unequal shares. Under the will, Amadi was the majority owner. But this meeting would be different from past meetings. Things had changed.
The meeting’s agenda item was a single loan their parents had made to Abode LLC decades ago. Over the decades, the revolving line of credit had grown to a loan with a preset borrowing limit of twelve million dollars. Abode could tap in to the loan and draw money out as needed up to the limit. As Abode repaid, the loan balance went down and the amount Abode could tap in to went up. Abode had historically used the loan to buy land and pay contractors to build houses on the land.
They sat but made no eye contact. Amadi surveyed the photos on the walls while Jordan stared at his clasped hands. It was yet another in a long string of uncomfortable moments the pair had shared.
Recently, things had changed at the bank. While Amadi kept the title of bank president, he had recently sold a portion of his bank shares to his brother. Jordan was now the controlling, majority shareholder, which meant that the bank was now Jordan’s. And with that change, Amadi felt a new era of Commonwealth banking on the horizon. He didn’t like the feeling. He saw significant changes coming, and he didn’t like what he saw. New wasn’t always bad, but this new was no improvement — not for the bank customers, not for the community, not for the city, and not for Amadi. While Jordan called it state-of-the-art banking, Amadi called it a disaster waiting to happen.
The conference table was big enough for the ghosts of their ancestors to attend the meeting in spirit and occupy the empty chairs between the brothers. Perhaps the spirits could provide a measure of control from the great beyond. In the meeting, Amadi would learn if anyone, dead or living, could rein in Jordan.
The Abode line of credit had matured each December 4 over the years, and on each maturity anniversary, the bank had renewed it without fanfare and with minimal discussion. There would be three hundred sixty-five more days of Abode’s bank funded eleemosynary work. But if Jordan got his way, this time, the loan committee would have a different tone: One of nonrenewal. A tone of “Find another bank.” A tone of “We don’t want your business anymore.”
Amadi had prepared the usual loan renewal form for Jordan’s review. The form made the case for loan renewal and continued support for Abode. Jordan had the form, but he hadn’t read it. He didn’t need to. He knew his brother, he knew Abode, he knew what the form said, and he already knew what he wanted to do with the loan.
Amadi had just reminded Jordan of the bank’s simple obligation to the community and to Abode and its founders, Bella and James Franklin: to continue to fund Abode’s operations. “Bella and James are good folk. The best,” Amadi said. “We’ve gone to church with them, prayed with them, and gone to schools with their kids. We’ve mourned with them and we’ve marched with them.”
But his audience of one wasn’t hearing him.
“It’s just good business to put minorities in their first home,” Amadi argued, touching on Abode’s business model of building homes for lower middle-class families to provide access to the American dream — home ownership — for members of omitted groups that all shared the dubious honor of being on America’s historically long list of the shamefully treated. They were the invisibles, those left behind and marginalized in America. It was Abode’s vision to build homes in transitional neighborhoods and provide stability, not only to the families who bought the homes but to the neighborhoods as well. With Commonwealth’s help, Abode offered a piece of the American dream.
“Amadi, just this once, don’t lecture me. Listen to me. I don’t give two shits about dreams. People who dream have nightmares. I have no nightmares. I have data. I have a sense of where this bank is going now that I’m finally at the helm. I am a twenty-first century banker.” As he spoke, he unclasped his hands on the conference room table and, palms down, appeared to push as if he were attempting to lower the table and reduce its historical influence on the discussion.
“I give a shit about what I would do with the Abode collateral if I had to foreclose. The data is this: I can’t off-load the collateral. None of our banking partners have showed an interest in sharing the Abode loan. They won’t buy a participation in the loan. They won’t join in a lending syndicate. Why? They don’t want the collateral. They don’t want the prospect of foreclosing on collateral and owning houses in these kinds of neighborhoods with these kinds of proximate neighbors. And guess what? Neither do I.”
“We’ve never had a participant in the Abode loan before,” Amadi said. “We don’t need one now. Abode is a good loan. It’s good for Abode, it’s good for the bank, and it’s good for the community. A win-win-win. It’s a solid borrower. They’ve never missed a payment. Nothing has changed. Not Abode, not the Franklins, not their mission, not the collateral. Nothing. Same data it’s always been. And to handle things differently for ‘these kinds of neighbors’ and ‘these kinds of neighborhoods’ is wrong thinking. Not to mention illegal.”
“Right now, I don’t give a shit about the law. And you’re wrong,” Jordan yelled back decisively. “Everything has changed. Maybe you’ve forgotten. I control the bank now. I’m in charge, and I want out of the inner city. I want the bank to be everywhere. I want out of the Abode loan so I can use the capital to make more profitable loans. Profit is colorblind. Profit is not in it for social change. Profit is not part of a decades-long movement. Profit doesn’t march in the streets demanding its rights. It doesn’t care about any of that damn stuff. It’s just data: numbers; bottom line dollars and cents.” Jordan paused, slapped the conference room table with both hands, making a noise like a gunshot, and added forcefully, “Or s-e-n-s-e in your case.”
They had never been close. As adults, the two brothers had grown further apart, and they could no longer even agree to disagree. Such an agreement would be one too many accords in their lives of constant disunity. Amadi surveyed the chairs around the table. Empty they were; empty they remained. Apart from Amadi and Jordan, the room was silent. He looked for help from his ancestors but received none. He made his case to his brother alone.
Jordan had always been the emotional one and Amadi had been the calm, reasonable one. But now, Amadi couldn’t speak unemotionally. Not with Jordan yelling at him. Not about the direction Jordan wanted to take the bank and not about about Abode.
Amadi countered his brother’s voice by raising the volume of his own. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong, Jordan. You can’t change the DNA of this bank any more than you can change our family’s history or the color of your skin. No matter what we do, we’re still Black and always will be. That means we have an obligation to reach out and help our community. The community made this bank what it is. The Browne family builds hope one community member at a time. Abode builds hope one family, one nail, one board, and one house at a time. Building hope. Abode’s always done it. Commonwealth has always done it. I’ve always done it. And goddamn you, Jordan, this family has always done it. It’s our unique commodity.”
Amadi paused just long enough to see that Jordan wasn’t hearing him. “I’ll tell you what makes no sense: suddenly changing the relationship this bank has had with Abode for more profit. You don’t need more money, but this city needs Abode to fulfill its mission, and Abode needs this bank to partner with it to do so.” Amadi stopped. He had lost his cool. Sometimes pushback helped. Sometimes it made him feel better. Not this time.
“I don’t give a damn about Abode’s mission. I don’t give a damn about what you say this city needs. And most importantly, I don’t really give a damn what you, with your minority ownership interest in this bank, think. You hear this loud and clear: You will not be the minority shareholder of this bank with ninety-five percent of its mouth. Not out there and not in here at this table! Our commodity will now be crypto! Here’s the deal. you are either with me on my vision for the bank’s future or the future will get crammed down your throat. Either way, it’s happening.”
If Amadi was waiting for the ghosts of his parents to take charge and scream, “Enough, Jordan!” from the afterlife, he waited in vain. They didn’t and wouldn’t.
Jordan brought Amadi’s thoughts back to the living. “This bank has been taking care of the community for more than a hundred and thirty years. I don’t see the progress. I don’t see the profit. It’s time for this bank to take care of itself . . . and the Brownes. The hell with community commitments! I hate those words you throw around.”
“Not my words, Jordan. The words you so disdain are from our grandparents, uttered when they took over the bank, and they invoked those words every day thereafter. Our parents as well.”
“More irrelevant pearls of wisdom from a long gone past. Only you quote them. Only you remember them. Jesus, Amadi,” Jordan said shaking his head disapprovingly as he scanned the photos on the walls with a look of contempt, “sometimes I think you’ve got so much of the past roiling around in your brain that you don’t have enough gray matter left to appreciate the present and future sitting there right before your eyes. With all the history shit you spout, I worry you consult with the dead to make your decisions for the living. Well, not anymore. This bank, under myleadership, will no longer be captive to your version of history. It’s going to make history, and to do so, it must and will distance itself from its past.”
Jordan looked away and said nothing. He didn’t need to. Amadi had lost the bank to his brother, and he knew it. He had lost the debate, if it ever even was a fair exchange of ideas by advocates of different positions. And Amadi was about to lose Abode as a bank customer.
The history of the bank, once made sitting around the table, was slipping away. The table was no longer a symbol under Jordan’s reign. Now it was nothing more than wood, screws, glue, brass, and glass.
“Maybe so, Jordan. Maybe so,” Amadi said softly as he slowly shook his head in defeat.
Jordan’s face slowly curved into a victory smile. He had won. “Good. Then it’s settled. The loan committee hereby denies the renewal request. It’s your customer. Tell the Franklins to move the loan out of this bank. I’ll give them thirty days from maturity to do so.”
“And then?”
“And then this bank will do what a bank does when it wants its money back and a borrower doesn’t pay. I trust you know how that goes.”