Scent of Evil, page 25
part #3 of Joe Gunther Series
“Gotcha.”
He propped his elbows on the arms of his chair and built a steeple of his fingers. “I do suspect some insider trading, but not on the order to which we’ve become aware in the news.”
I could feel the crease growing between my eyes.
“The trick to this game, as a retail business, is to show people you’re a consistent winner. It’s nice to hit the jackpot, of course, but unless you do it frequently, you’re quickly seen as a flash in the pan. And if you do hit it frequently, pretty soon your place of business is crawling with investigators all wondering how you did it. Word of that gets out fast, too, and can be as bad for the bankbook as unemployment. So you work for a middle ground, enjoying the peaks as they come, but going for solid, respectable returns.”
I kept my mouth shut at the end of this primer, knowing the punch line would come in good time.
“The first thing that caught my eye with ABC was that they hit this steady, predictable stride right off the bat.” He paused.
“And that’s pretty rare?”
“As a snowball in hell. It’s like any other business; it takes you a while to find your sea legs.”
“But what about Clyde? Didn’t he have years of experience and contacts he could bring to bear? And there was Wentworth in the background, too.”
Willette wagged his finger at me, delighted. “All true, but Clyde’s contacts would be on the investment side, not the investor. You can have a great product, but you need clients to buy it; that’s why an operation like this usually takes time to show a profit. As for Wentworth, he’d have the same problem in reverse. He might have the local appeal, but any clients he could round up would want to see a solid track record before they signed on. It’s like a catch-22; you can beat it but not easily, especially with a partner like Jardine, whose résumé would look good only on an application to Taco Bell.”
“But they did it nevertheless.”
“That they did, largely on one account.”
He paused again, and again I played along. “Okay. I give up. Which account?”
“They landed the Putney Road Bank pension fund almost as soon as they’d hung out their shingle.”
Mention of the Putney Road Bank made the short hairs on my neck tingle. Two of the names on Milly’s list were employed there.
“In your digging through ABC’s files, did you run across either Kenny Thomas or Paula Atwater, in connection to the bank?”
For once, Willette looked blank. “Nope, doesn’t ring a bell.”
I tried a more general approach. “Why would a bank put that much money into a new outfit like ABC? I mean, what would the pitch be to the board of directors or whoever?”
Willette thought about that for a moment before answering. “It would have to hinge entirely on connections—the credibility of the person making the pitch. ABC wouldn’t have anything else.”
“And that would’ve been Wentworth, since Clyde’s a newcomer and Jardine’s a nobody, at least in the bank’s eyes.”
Willette shrugged. “Sure, Wentworth. But not him alone. The real enthusiasm would have to come from within the bank, from officers carrying Wentworth’s torch, and that’s something I don’t think they’d do without some real incentive.”
“Like a kickback?”
“Kickback, payment up front, drugs, sex, or rock ’n’ roll; who knows? You know what they say: ‘Money talks and bullshit walks.’ A lot of bankers I know are either stupid, greedy, or both. If Wentworth paid off a fat sum to the right people, then that, mixed with his own reputation, might do the trick, especially with an outfit like Putney Road Bank. It’s hardly Chase Manhattan, after all; it’s more like a one-horse barn, but perfect to get ABC off to a nice start.”
“You implied ABC got a few other lucky breaks.”
“Yeah, equally intriguing, and again only because of the suspicions it raises. Traditionally, in this business, the slow hard road to success is attained through old-fashioned hustle. You get a tip, you offer it around; people turn you down but watch to see what happens to the stock in question. If it goes up, you don’t make any money, but you gain a little credibility. So you do it again, and again. Eventually, if you keep hitting base runs, and especially if you hit the occasional homer, people start paying you for your advice. It’s pretty elementary.
“The trick, of course, is to come up with enough winner suggestions to get enough clients to keep you from going bankrupt. The hassle, in other words, isn’t just in trying to locate customers, but also in locating juicy investments. Here again, I found ABC to be remarkably well blessed.”
“Reflecting Clyde’s abilities to choose stocks, Wentworth’s influence and number of contacts, and Jardine’s salesmanship in putting the two together.”
Willette chuckled. “Very good—just what they’d want you to think. Old-fashioned American know-how at work.”
“Well, couldn’t it be?”
“Sure, it could be, but not probably. See, Joe, I live in this part of the jungle. On the face of it, you’d be right, maybe. A lot of guys, mostly in the old days, did get to the top à la Horatio Alger. But it took a lot of work, and I mean real ball-busting, year-after-year stuff—not very appealing to either the young modern male or the old guy in his twilight years who still has a greedy twinkle in his eye.”
I sighed, a little depressed at how cannily accurate it all sounded. “So how do you think they did it?”
“It’s a little off the wall—really just a guess on my part—but I’d say they were giving license to a moral difference of opinion with the law.”
I shook my head, not even bothering for an explanation. He was now in his role of alchemist, turning the lead weight of Wall Street number crunching into the gold of human nature, unfortunately in one of its least appealing aspects. I got up from the table and crossed over to the window that looked down onto Main Street and the drive-in bank opposite. The people on the sidewalk strolled back and forth like Bedouin wanderers: slow, dehydrated, flattened by the post-sunset heat.
Justin Willette continued with his treatise. “The laws against insider trading are seen by many investment types as an unrealistic, knee-jerk political reaction catering to a bunch of socialist bleeding hearts. They were designed to give everyone a fair shot at grabbing the gold ring, from the little guy with enough change for a stock or two, to the corporate giants investing the assets of entire countries. Problem is that nowadays most everybody uses the same outfits to buy and sell; both the little guys and the giants give their money to say, Merrill Lynch, or Shearson, or Kidder Peabody to invest. So who’s getting screwed by the insider-trading laws, these people ask? Everybody, big and small.”
“And you’re saying Wentworth and/or Clyde followed that line of reasoning?”
“I have my suspicions. But I think they were very subtle about it. Too subtle for me to nail down their exact technique with the little I’ve seen, and maybe not even then. After all, neither one of them needs to land in the slammer at this point in their lives, nor do they appear to need any more money. The trick was to play the game just enough to get ABC on its feet. After that, it would be Jardine’s baby, with the two older guys in the background giving him perfectly legitimate advice now and then.”
The frustration was making my head pound, even with the air-conditioning. “But why, Justin? That’s what bugs me. Why the hell take the risk at all? You steal a hundred bucks or you steal a million; it’s still stealing, and if you get caught, you still get the book thrown at you. I understand why it all made sense for Charlie Jardine, but Clyde and Wentworth are a total mystery to me. Could Clyde have been ignorant of the whole thing?”
Willette shook his head. “Not a chance. Wentworth might have been. I didn’t find any documentation linking him financially to ABC. There were a lot of letters from and to him in the files, but they were all legit. Morris, McGill, after all, drew up the papers that created ABC. As for motivation, I can only take a shot at Clyde; the other two are too murky for me.”
I left the window and faced him, still standing. “So what’s your shot?”
“Revenge. I think he got back into the game to stick it to ’em. He felt he’d been nailed for some paperwork screw-up after a lifetime of minding his p’s and q’s, and that this was the perfect payback.”
I couldn’t keep the skepticism from my face, not that it fazed him in the slightest. “Hey, it’s just a guess—an educated one, I might add. Old-timers like Clyde have a tough time retiring, and from what I heard from my sources, he was pissed something royal by the treatment he got. Guys like that can be competitive as hell; it’s what keeps ’em on top. Revenge is as natural to them as Velveeta is to you.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“Joe, I know it’s not much, certainly nothing you can bring to court, but it’s all I could glean. Maybe if you could get another warrant and get a whole team to really give ABC a microscopic look, you might find your smoking gun, but I kind of doubt it. It was too small an operation, run by some canny old farts. They wouldn’t have left too much lying around.”
“Then why the court order to return the papers to Clyde?”
“Instinct. We like to see ourselves as riverboat gamblers, secretly, of course. It’s bad form to let someone see your cards, even if you’re about to fold.”
I thanked him for all his time, energy, and insight and left. The image of a circle of card players stuck with me, though. It brought to mind again the notions of calculation and manipulation. The further I progressed into this case, the more I felt the pressure of vested interests at work—of egos bruised, ambitions run amok, and of minds working overtime toward specific, malevolent ends.
23
THE PHONE STARTLED ME, shattering the late-night stillness of the empty office. It was Sammie Martens.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Someone I’d like you to talk with, on Elliot Street.” Sammie gave the address in an obviously strained voice. “He’s a little reluctant to leave home right now.”
“Be right there.”
The address she’d given belonged to one of the most notorious of our city’s flophouses. The entrance was a narrow doorway wedged into the far-left side of the building. The rest of the first floor was occupied by a series of ever-changing storefront businesses. I climbed the dimly lit wooden staircase, keeping my hands away from the stained and rotting smashed plaster walls, acutely aware that I was ascending into a closed and poisonous atmosphere of urine, sweat, and years’ worth of unwashed bodies. The stench, sharpened by the sauna-like conditions, made my head swim. It also made me think that Sammie Martens had been crawling these halls, and others like them, for days now in search of her elusive bridge-dweller. For her sake, if for no one else’s, I hoped she’d hit paydirt.
I reached the top floor, walked down the corridor, stepping around a pile of something that looked vaguely organic, and stopped before the open door of number 33. Sammie Martens, pale, exhausted, but obviously exultant, was standing in the middle of the room. Sitting on what passed for a bed was our odorous friend Milo.
I nodded to them both, although Milo, either depressed or half comatose, was staring at the floor.
“Thanks for coming, Lieutenant. Milo here has something he wants to get off his chest.”
There was dead silence in the room, apart from Milo’s breathing, which sounded a little like air escaping from a water pipe.
Sammie kicked him in the shin, hard. “Don’t you, Milo?”
He grabbed for his leg and slipped off the bed, howling in protest. Normally, I would never have tolerated such a move by a cop, but I also knew Sammie Martens well and realized that what I was witnessing must have been the culmination of a lot of back-and-forth between these two, in which Sammie had probably been receiving the short shrift. It was an angry outburst I would let pass, but just once.
She was down on her knees in front of him now, her face inches from his. “Come on, you son of a bitch. I’ve looked like a jerk once because of you, and it’s not going to happen again.”
Her face was shining with sweat, which matted her hair at the temples and streaked the back of her shirt. Whatever Milo had told her could have been put in a report, or she could have brought him to me, as she had done before. But that would have been under normal circumstances, and right now, I realized, not much was normal about Sammie’s behavior. I’d let her overextend herself and hadn’t reassured her enough about her earlier mistake with Milo.
I knelt down next to them. “Milo, what’ve you got?”
“I got a fuckin’ broken leg is what I got.”
Reluctantly, I reached out and lifted his chin until we were looking straight at one another, from so close I thought my eyes might water. “Concentrate, Milo. Talk to us now and we’ll get out of your hair.”
His one good eye blinked at me a couple of times. “Toby paid me off to lie to you people.”
I looked sharply at Sammie. “Toby? Wasn’t that the same guy who was offered five hundred bucks to identify the bridge bum?”
Her expression was bitter. “The one and only. Talk about coincidences.”
Milo shook his head free of my hand and snorted. “Coincidence, bullshit.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was the one got offered the five hundred. I told Toby about it, and he came up with the idea to switch places.”
“Why?”
“How do I know? He paid me twenty bucks. If he’s stupid enough to pay me to jerk you around, I’m not gonna ask why. I wasn’t gonna get no five hundred, ’cause I didn’t know who’d been under the bridge.”
“Where’d he get the money?”
“Beats me.”
“Where’s Toby live?”
This time he actually chuckled, or made a noise like it. “Shit, he lived in a goddamn Dumpster once. How the hell am I suppose to know that?”
Sammie shoved his shoulder to get his attention. This time I grabbed her hand, which she ignored. “You knew his Dumpster address, didn’t you?”
“If you don’t know, then who might?” I tried.
He stared malevolently at Sammie, as if I weren’t even in the room. “Try Mother Gert’s.”
Sammie scrambled to her feet and headed for the door. I patted Milo on the shoulder and put a ten-dollar bill into his hand. “Thanks.”
I caught up to Sammie in the hall. “Hold it.”
She turned and faced me. “What?”
I let a moment of silence elapse, during which I just looked at her. She stared back, defiantly at first, and finally she let her gaze go to the floor.
“How much sleep have you had in the last three days?”
She didn’t reply at first, as if choosing from a selection of answers, some of which she knew she’d regret upon utterance. Suddenly, her shoulders slumped and she let out a sigh. “Guess I messed up.”
I couldn’t resist smiling. “Christ, no—you got him to talk. Of course, if you’d kicked me that hard I would have talked too. Don’t do that again, okay?”
“No,” she muttered. “You going to pull me?”
I squeezed her shoulder and steered her down the hall toward the stairs. “No. But I am going to give you a sit-down job for a while; you’re working on half a battery.”
The air outside was no cooler, but its mere cleanliness was a relief. “Go back to the Municipal Building and get me some help. Toby might be at Gert’s, but I’m not counting on it, and if he’s not, we better find him fast. If what Milo says is true, maybe Toby did see something, which means his life is hanging by a thread. Make some calls—the Retreat and the hospital and anywhere else you think he might have gone to ground. I’ll let you know what I find out at Gert’s.”
· · ·
Mother Gert’s, on Western Avenue, was located between the twin municipal clusterings of West Brattleboro and Brattleboro, in a kind of no-man’s land, neither suburb nor city. Its geographical identity was linked to the interstate, which sliced through the map like a meat cleaver.
Gert’s was a privately funded halfway house for society’s rejects, mostly the homeless and alcoholics. It dated back to the altruistic sixties and was presently run by a no-nonsense, lapsed Catholic nun named Gertrude Simmons, who lived in a room on the top floor of what had once been an almost statuesque Greek Revival mansion.
I parked at the front of the building, locked my car, and went around to the rear door, the official entryway. A tough looking young woman wearing a Hard Rock Café T-shirt and camouflage combat trousers walked down the central hallway into the reception room I’d just entered.
“Hi, Joe.”
“Suzanne. How’re you?”
“I’m doin’. What’d you want?”
Suzanne didn’t like cops, having spent many of her pre-reform years in and out of our detox cells in the Municipal Building’s basement.
“Is Gert around?”
“Maybe. Why?”
“I’ll let her tell you.”
She scowled at me and jerked her thumb down the hallway. “In her office.”
“Thanks.” The hall was lined with doors leading to bedrooms, dormitories, and small counseling rooms, all catering to the various needs of the establishment’s frequently strung-out clientele. It wasn’t fancy; it was run on a shoestring. But if I’d been in need of advice, comfort, or simply a place to spend the night, Mother Gert’s would have been my first stop. I obviously wasn’t alone in my appreciation—every open door I passed revealed one or more tenants.
I found Gertrude Simmons in the glorified closet they called her office, pounding away at an ancient manual typewriter.
“Hi, Gert.”
She got up and gave me a hug, a greeting I’d seen her give most everyone she met, and no less personal for that. “Hi, Joe. Long time. I was sorry to hear of your troubles.”
