Clayton leaned back in his chair. “Okay,” he sighed. “Three months back this man Broussard came to us wanting a loan for Rue Napoleon Partners. They’d bought an area of old warehouses in New Orleans and were renovating it as condominiums and a shopping mall. The project was going bad; the area’s shabby and they’ve had overruns on construction that left them cash-short. Their problem was that they’d borrowed several million already and without more money from us they’d have to stop building. If that happened they’d be forced to sell the property at less than they’d borrowed, and paying back the rest might have wiped out Broussard and his partners. So it was a salvage loan and I didn’t like it.”

“Why’d Broussard come to you?”

“He came to Henry. That bothered me, too. Broussard’s a ‘new South’ hustler, one cut below nouveau riche. I didn’t understand why Henry wanted the business.” He winced. “It turned out there was a lot about Henry I didn’t understand.”

I finished the first file. “This says the bank loaned Broussard four-and-a-half-million dollars on January sixth.”

Clayton nodded. “Henry pushed it through over everyone’s objections. Our only collateral was the property. As I said, that’s no collateral: if Rue Napoleon Partners were forced to sell it they couldn’t have paid off what they’d already borrowed, let alone us. About two weeks after we made the loan a federal bank examiner came to audit our loans and said the same thing. He gave Henry a choice: nine hundred thousand dollars more collateral, or nine hundred thousand dollars less loan. Henry looked ill.”

“Which way did he go?”

“There wasn’t any choice. They had no more collateral. We had to reduce the loan by nine hundred thousand dollars.”

“What did Broussard do?”

“It’s in the next file. He threatened to sue on the grounds that we’d committed the extra money and then ruined him. That went on for over a month. Henry became totally irrational, tried everything to save the loan and couldn’t. But Broussard never sued and the partnership’s finishing the project. Maybe he found money somewhere else.”

I lit a cigarette. “I think he did, Clayton.”

Clayton’s face went slack with comprehension. “Lydia?”

“The sequence fits. Look: in early January Henry brought Broussard to the bank and got him a loan you should have never made. Late that month the examiner forced you to reduce it by nine hundred thousand dollars. For over a month thereafter, Broussard fought to get the loan restored and Henry tried to help him. They gave up in early March. And on March fifteenth Henry stole eight hundred thousand from Lydia’s account.”

“So you’re saying that Henry had a cut in Napoleon Partners, and was bailing himself out.”

“That’s consistent with what he did. Do you have papers showing who the partners are?”