JM02 - Death's Little Helpers aka No Way Home (11 page)

“You’re still here,” she said. There was a dark shine to her eyes and more color in her face. A light perfume wafted toward me, something with lilac. I nodded.

“Sit,” I said, but she didn’t.

“What do you want from me?”

“I told you, I’m trying to find your boss. And I’m trying to find someone who cares enough that he’s missing to help me out. I thought that might be you.” Pratt squinted at me but did not speak. “Sit,” I said again. I pulled out the metal chair next to mine. “I’ll buy you a drink.”

She rested her hand on the back of the chair and shook her head. “Why do you say missing?”

“I don’t know what else to call it. The guy’s gone away— no one knows where— and he hasn’t come back when he said he would. And no one has heard from him since the day he left. What do you call it?”

Pratt bit her lower lip. “There’s nothing I can tell you. I don’t know where he is, and the last I heard from him was his voice mail, telling me he was taking time off.”

A waitress orbited the table; I caught her eye and she came closer.

“Another ginger ale for me, and …” The waitress and I looked at Irene Pratt, who looked irritated, and then resigned.

“I don’t know … a Bud, I guess.” The waitress went away, and Pratt looked down at me.

“Sit,” I said. Pratt pulled the chair out and sat at its edge. “Nuts?” I offered her the bowl. She ignored them.

“I don’t know where the hell he is,” she said softly. She played with the clasp of her gold watch. Her hands were small, and her nails were clipped short and unvarnished.

“How long have you worked with him?” She looked up at me and I noticed the lines around her eyes and mouth. I put her age at thirty-five.

“What’s that got to do with anything?” she said.

“It has to do with how well you know him, which has to do with how much help you might be to me.”

Pratt wrinkled her brow and the waitress came. I drank some ginger ale. Pratt drank her Bud from the bottle.

“I’ve worked for him since I got out of B-school— almost a dozen years,” she said. “And I guess I know him as well as anybody— better, maybe.”

“You knew him when he was married?”

She smiled sourly and nodded. “And during the divorce,” she said.

“You know his wife?”

Another sour smile. “The Brooklyn Frida Kahlo? I met her once or twice, before the bullets started flying.” She drank some more Bud and picked a nut from the bowl.

“Their breakup was ugly?”

Pratt laughed. “Like you wouldn’t believe.” She took another drink and shook her head. “I’m amazed they got through it without somebody being dead. ’Course, I’m amazed they got together in the first place, or ever had a kid.” Another drink and more head shaking. “I don’t know why people do it.” I wasn’t sure what it was exactly, but I didn’t ask. Her beer was gone, and I waved to the waitress for another.

“He fool around?”

She frowned. “Is that why you want to talk to me? You think we had something going?”

The thought had occurred to me, but I didn’t say so. The waitress brought another beer, another ginger ale, and a fresh bowl of nuts. Pratt took a swallow.

“Well, that’s bullshit,” she said. “Old bullshit, too. Jesus, I’d have to be crazy… . His wife tried to make something out of that in the divorce, but it didn’t fly. And she had plenty more to sink her teeth into.”

“Meaning he did fool around?” Pratt nodded. “A lot?” Another nod. “With anyone in particular?”

“Back then? With no one in particular, and everyone he could.” She drank some more Bud and looked at the bottle and then at me. “Not that Greg was some kind of sex machine. In fact, I always thought there was something … I don’t know … kind of neutral about him— sexually, I mean.” Pratt picked another nut from the bowl. “But what the hell do I know? I guess what I’m saying is I think the fooling around was more an ego thing than a sex thing for him.”

I nodded. It usually is. Pratt hitched her chair closer to the table and put her bottle on the tabletop. It was nearly empty.

“Was the divorce rough on him?”

“Oh, yeah, it was a big ego bruise. Losing the kid, and a big pile of dough, and his wife— to another woman— he was a goddamn mess.”

Pratt sat back and crossed her ankle over her knee. A strand of hair had worked itself loose from her clip and fell across her cheek, and her eyes were unfocused behind their glasses. She looked young and bookish in the fading light. She had hold of a thread now, and I didn’t want her to lose it.

“Was he as bad then as he has been lately?” I asked.

She shook her head slowly. “No … that was different. That was just one thing— just one part of his life, I guess. And even though it pissed him off something fierce, the rest of his life— the work— was going fine. Better than fine. Now it’s all turned to shit.”

“I guess it’s been a rough few years for everyone in your department,” I said. I pushed the nut bowl toward her. She took a handful and looked over my shoulder at the crowds— heavier now— that passed along the sidewalks. The bar was packed, and the voices and the music and the traffic sounds ran together in a blur of white noise. The sun was all but gone, and sodium lamps and neon tinted the faces around us. Pratt killed the Bud, placed the bottle carefully on the table, and looked at me.

“A nightmare,” she said softly. “You wouldn’t—”

The words caught in her throat and she looked down and swallowed a couple of times. Our waitress spun by, and I motioned for another round. Pratt looked up at me.

“For a while there, you couldn’t escape the stories— in the papers, on TV, all over the Web— it was fucking open season on stock analysts.” A bitter smile crossed her face and faded to a grimace. “If you read enough of them, you’d think all we did was sit around and dream up lies to tell the widows and orphans— when we weren’t busy sucking up to CEOs and cashing our bonus checks, that is. They died down finally, the stories and the bad jokes, but it’s a different world now. The department’s not even half the size it used to be, and the pay …” Pratt shook her head and picked up her empty beer bottle and put it down again.

“Did they get those stories wrong?” I asked quietly.

“The press?” Pratt’s face was sour, and so was her voice. “They always get it at least half wrong.”

I had no argument with her there and I nodded. Pratt continued.

“I’ve been an analyst for nearly twelve years. Besides my MBA, I’ve got a BS in computer science and a master’s in electrical engineering. I’ve covered semiconductors, consumer electronics, the video game industry, and— modesty aside— I probably know as much about the companies I follow as the CEOs who run them.

“My average workday is fourteen hours— wall-to-wall, six days a week. And you know what I do when I get home at night, after I feed my fish and call my mom? I read: annual reports, quarterlies, mid-quarter updates, economic analyses, purchasing statistics, and you wouldn’t believe what else. I read the science journals for original research and the trade rags for gossip. I read about who’s hot and who’s not, whose project is over budget and whose got canceled and who just jumped from one ship to another. And of course, I read all the product profiles— the head-to-head comparisons, the top-ten lists, the focus groups …” Her voice wavered, and she coughed and shook her head. “I read reviews of video games, and hang out in fucking chat rooms— just to hear what the goddamn fourteen-year-olds think.

“And when I’m not reading, I’m crunching numbers— earnings projections, cost estimates, market share, financing costs, interest rate scenarios, cash flows… . Jesus. It’s made me half blind.”

Our drinks came. Pratt took a long swallow and seemed to steady.

“You like those violins?” she asked. She laughed bitterly. “I’m not a fool, and I’m not looking for sympathy. I know plenty of people work hard, and hardly any of them get paid like I do. But my point is, I never phoned it in— not once. My point is …” She took another drink and put her bottle down. Her hands were wet with condensation, and she stared at them for a long moment and wiped them on her jeans. “I don’t know what the hell my point is.”

“You said the press got it only halfway right.”

Pratt sighed and shook her head. “My mom has never had a clue what I do for a living— just no idea at all. She used to ask about it the first few years I was in the business, and I used to try to explain, but it went in one ear and out the other, and after a while she quit asking. But you know what she said to me at the height of the frenzy, when those stories were running practically every day? She said, You just start writing what you think about those companies, honey, and don’t let anyone make you say anything different. You just start telling the truth— no one can blame you for that. Can you believe it? My own mother— and she assumes it’s all some kind of scam. She assumes that I’ve been lying.

“The press went on and on about conflict of interest and lack of independence like they’d discovered a new planet or something. Like it was a big secret that securities firms do business with the companies their analysts cover— like we were trying to hide something. Jesus, if that was a secret, it was the worst-kept one of all time.”

“I think it was news to some investors. And I think the horse-trading part of it— swapping buy recommendations and God knows what else for investment banking business— was a little hard for anyone to swallow.”

Pratt’s face reddened and her dark eyes shone. “Hey, I’m not saying there weren’t abuses. And if somebody decides the rule book was no good and we need a whole new edition, that’s fine by me. I lived by the old version and I’ll live by the new version too. But don’t turn me into a criminal retroactively, for chrissakes— just for playing the game the same way everyone else did.” Pratt wiped something from beneath her eye and drank some more beer.

“And just for the record, you know the last time I said, What the fuck, what’s a couple of cents EPS one way or the other— the last time I thought about how much business one of my companies does with Pace and what kind of recommendation might win us some more— the last time I put out an opinion I didn’t believe in one hundred and ten percent? Never. Not once. Not fucking ever.”

She took another long pull and smiled crookedly.

“Mom doesn’t talk about my work anymore,” Pratt said. “Now all she wants to know is when I’m getting married.” Another strand of hair fell into Pratt’s face, and she pushed it behind her ear. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “What the hell does this have to do with Greg, anyway?” she said. A truck rumbled by, and the air was burnt in its wake. I looked at Pratt, but she wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“Does he feel the same way you do about all this? Does he feel as … let down?”

She took her glasses off and cleaned them on her T-shirt. Her face looked bare and confused without them. She put them back on and shook her head.

“It’s worse for him. Until all this shit, Greg bought into the whole star-analyst thing; he believed his own press. For years he lived on a steady diet of money and TV and people saying yes to anything he wanted, and putting up with all his crazy bullshit in the office. It’s like eating nothing but chocolate. And then overnight we went from being the village wise men to being the village idiots— or worse.

“It was hard on everybody, but Greg most of all. He’d been into it the most, and I guess he needed it the most. So when it all stopped, when people stopped calling …” Pratt ran her finger along the edge of the Bud label and began picking at it with a fingernail.

“I heard he went nuts.”

“From who?” she said, but she waved away her own question. “Fuck, it doesn’t matter. You heard right. He was off the wall for a while— obsessed with his reputation, convinced he was going to be left holding the bag for Piedmont and every other thing, while everyone else made out like bandits— really paranoid. He’s finally settled down to merely impossible.” Pratt drained her third Bud, and waved the empty at the waitress. Her glasses slipped down her nose and she pushed them up with her thumb.

“Why do you put up with it?” I asked her.

Her laugh was loud and girlish. “Beats me,” she said. She looked at me, waiting for a response. When none came, she shook her head. “You never heard that joke— about what the masochist said, when someone asked why she hung around with the sadist? Beats me.”

She laughed some more, and the waitress delivered another round. Pratt sipped at her fourth beer and found the chain of her thoughts again.

“If you don’t know him, he comes off like an asshole— vindictive, arrogant, nuts. But that’s not really Greg— not all of him, anyway. Like the arrogance. Some of that is just his sense of humor— he’s really sarcastic. And some of it is just … he’s like a kid who’s always got to be the smartest one in class and makes sure everybody knows it.

“A lot of his press was for real, though. What he can pull from a balance sheet is amazing, and the information he keeps in his head … You want to know the average revenue per employee of the top three database software companies or how much debt each one is carrying, just ask Greg. He’s faster than the Internet. I learned more from him the first month I was at Pace than I did in two years at NYU.

“And it isn’t just having the numbers handy. There’s as much art as science in this kind of analysis, and when it comes to the big picture— the macroeconomics, the forces and trends that can change whole industries— Greg sees things way before anybody else. He sees the shape of things to come.”

I swirled ice in my glass and looked at Pratt. “How did he end up on the wrong side of so many calls, then?”

She shrugged. “I don’t really know. Maybe he got a little too fond of one of his own theories, or maybe he didn’t pay enough attention to new data; maybe he was a little slow to reevaluate certain companies— I don’t know. Like I said, it’s as much art as science, and you don’t always get it right; no one does. At the end of the day, Greg was less wrong than a lot of people. The guy is a fucking genius, March.”

I nodded. “Genius isn’t always easy to be around.”

Pratt smiled ruefully. “You got that right,” she said. “But Greg can surprise you. He can be … nice. You don’t expect it from him, but he can be incredibly generous and loyal.”