Money to Burn (14 page)

25

I
T WAS ONE A.M., AND IT OCCURRED TO ME THAT
I
HADN’T SLEPT
since I was thirty-four years old. Papa had warned me about the insomnia. Getting old sucks.

Getting screwed double-sucks.

Convincing the night manager of Hotel Mildew to return my last two hundred bucks wasn’t going to happen. Nor would he budge on the $500 room rate. We cut a deal that allowed me to stay the night for the cost of my deposit—as long as I was out of the room by six
A.M
. instead of the usual checkout time of eleven
A.M
.

I wasted my first precious hour on the telephone with my credit card company, the first thirty minutes of which was spent trying to get through the phone menu to talk to an actual human being. Finally Anoop Gupta from New Delhi assured me that by morning I would have a working card. I could only hope that he meant
my
morning, not his. I desperately needed rest, but at 2:35
A.M.
I was still wide awake, staring at the ceiling in the dark.

I can’t believe she’s divorcing me.

According to Mallory, I should have seen it coming, but I could recall only one major blowup in the last year. We had our favorite charities, but when Papa told me about the volunteer work he was doing for a south Florida organization called “Charlee,” I immediately wrote a ten-thousand-dollar check. Mallory went ballistic—not because of the amount of the donation, and definitely not because she questioned the merits of an organization that helped abused children. She just wished I had made the donation
anonymously
. She didn’t explain why, and she shut me down the moment I even hinted at anything personal in her past. But it was as if she didn’t want anyone asking questions about her own childhood.

I was beginning to wonder how well I had really known Mallory in high school—if there was a reason our friendship had never evolved to the next level, if something far more oppressive than twenty-plus hours a week in a dance studio had prevented such a pretty girl from seriously dating anyone, as far as I could remember.

My mind refused to shut off, but I had major problems to solve, and I needed to focus. The fact that the draining of my portfolio was part of a bigger setup to bring down Saxton Silvers made no difference to Mallory, but Papa’s question was racing through my brain: Who were my enemies? Kent Frost was no fan of mine, but I had battled dozens of guys like him over the years. I was more worried about the enemy I had no memory of ever having met. The more I focused on guys like Frost, the more likely it would turn out to be Colonel Mustard waiting for me in the library with the dagger
and
the pistol because I had somehow killed his leveraged buyout of a candlestick-holder factory.

I had officially moved from paranoid to punchy.

Go to sleep!

A banging noise emerged from somewhere in the hall, and I bolted upright in the bed. I waited, then heard it again. Someone was knocking on the door.

“Housekeeping,” a woman announced.

“Go away,” I said.

She knocked again, and I looked at the clock: six
A.M
. exactly.

Damn!

My last two hundred bucks had been enough to get me a room for only half a night, but I couldn’t believe the manager was holding me to such a ridiculously early checkout. I hadn’t slept at all. Or maybe I had and just didn’t realize it. That’s how tired I was. I rolled out of bed, opened the door as far as the chain lock would allow, and begged for another five minutes.

“I’ll be back at six fifteen,” said the housekeeper.

A fifteen-minute bonus. Maybe my luck was turning.

I jumped in the shower, which was literally a scream—alternating blasts of ice-cold and scalding-hot water. The poor guy in the next room must have thought it was Friday the thirteenth and that he was sharing a wall with Freddy and Jason. I pulled on my clothes—the same clothes I had worn yesterday—and used the remaining five minutes of my reprieve to check my e-mail.

The first one was from Mallory. True to her promise, she’d e-mailed me the contact information for her lawyer. I scrolled past it, didn’t even catch his name.

Probably Anoop Gupta.

It was the third e-mail from the bottom that caught my attention. I didn’t recognize the sender—the address appeared to be a random combination of letters and numbers—but the subject line chilled me. It wasn’t “random” at all.

Orene52
, it read.

I opened it eagerly and retrieved the short message:
I can help. Let’s meet. Time and place TBD. Check your e-mail at 10:30.

The message was signed
JBU.

I froze. Obviously it was from someone who knew my stolen passwords, which was a very small universe. Mallory. Saxton Silvers’ general counsel and security director. The lawyer from Cool Cash and the FBI agents on the case. None of those people would have any conceivable reason to set up a secret meeting with such a cryptic message. But one other possibility came to mind: someone who definitely knew my passwords and who definitely would operate in such secretive fashion. The identity thief who stole my money.

JBU.

I strained my brain but could think of no one with those initials. I scrolled through my address book, but the only thing under “U” was Union Square Café.

Another knock at the door. It was firmer than the last one, meaning this time the housekeeper meant business. I thanked her on my way out the door as she handed me my free morning newspaper.

The headline grabbed me:
FNN’s CHUCK BELL SLAIN.

I stopped in my tracks. It was as if someone had just hit me again with that hot-and-cold shower. I stepped to the side of the hallway and read quickly for the gist: shot outside the studio sometime after midnight, body discovered by a security guard around 12:45
A.M
., no leads on the shooter.

I reopened my e-mail from
JBU
to check the time it was received: 3:35
A.M
. It obviously wasn’t Bell who’d sent it. Then another thought came to mind.

I wondered if it had come from the guy who’d shot him.

My cell rang, and my home number came up on the display.

“Mallory?”

“You need to get over here right now,” she said.

From her tone, I knew it wasn’t about a change of heart.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

“You tell me, Michael. There’s a homicide detective here who wants to talk to you.”

26

I
CALLED MY BROTHER FROM THE VINTAGE
1970
S
LOBBY OF
H
OTEL
Mildew. It was the first time we’d spoken since Ivy’s memorial service. Against my wishes, Papa had already told him that I would probably call, so it wasn’t out of the blue.

“Don’t speak to the cops,” said Kevin.

“I didn’t kill Chuck Bell.”

“That’s not the point. I don’t care if your hair is on fire and Detective Joe Friday is holding the last bucket of water in New York City. Don’t talk to the cops. Period.”

I hated when he talked to me like that. I was three years older than Kevin, but ever since his law school graduation he’d copped a big-brother attitude toward me. In some ways, he did seem older: He was taller, started going gray in his late twenties, and married a woman nine years his senior. I guess what really irked me was that Kevin had stopped acting like Kevin.

“What do you suggest I do?” I asked.

“Call Mallory and ask her to give the detective my phone number.”

“You know Mallory asked for a divorce, right?”

“Yeah, I read it in the
Post
this morning.”

“What?”

“Kidding, just kidding.”

Okay, so sometimes he
did
still act like Kevin.

“Papa told me,” he said.

“Did he also tell you about the text message? About the guy who’s apparently had me in his sights since tracking me down at Sal’s Place last fall? And about the bug the FBI found in our general counsel’s car?”

“Yeah, and you and I need to meet ASAP. Where are you now?”

I was embarrassed to tell him, so I didn’t get specific. “Midtown.”

“My office is down toward Foley Square, but do you want to come uptown first and say hi to Janice?”

Janice was his wife of two years. I’d missed their wedding, and I had yet to visit their Upper East Side apartment, so this shot at me was probably deserved. But I had to wonder if Kevin would have invited me to his apartment, much less to his wedding, without Papa pushing it. Sometimes I thought Kevin embraced me only out of guilt—his own need to rectify the perceived injustice of two boys having come from the same womb, one raised by his biological father in the land of plenty, the other sent away by his stepfather to live with the maternal grandparents and grow up thinking that frozen fish sticks every Friday were a treat.

“Let’s meet in your office,” I said.

“I can be there by nine.” He gave me the address, then said, “I’m glad you called, dude. I’m happy to help. Really.”

I thanked him and hung up, wondering how long this was going to last.

Really.

I called Mallory, and she promised to pass along Kevin’s message to the nice detective. She also agreed to let me stop by and get some clean clothes and personal items. I found a small suitcase in the hallway. A pressed suit, shirt, and tie were hanging from the doorknob.

She might as well have taped a D
O
N
OT
E
NTER
sign on the door.

My gym was on the way to Kevin’s office, and my prepaid MetroCard got me there to take a real shower and put on the fresh suit and clean shirt. The suitcase was technically too big for my locker, but I made it fit. My credit card still wasn’t working—Anoop Gupta had failed me—so I put a strawberry smoothie and a granola bar on my tab. From a stuffed chair in the lobby, I took a few proactive measures to make sure my personal crisis didn’t drag my career down with it.

Most major corporations lumped their green efforts under a vice president of social responsibility. I had meetings with five of them in two different cities scheduled over the next two days, so I did the socially responsible thing and let them know there was no way in hell that I was going to be there. That was the easy task. The next series of phone calls was much more difficult. I was trying to put my key people at ease, but they all watched the news, and I could hear the fear in their questions.

“What’s going to happen?”

“Is it true we’re up for sale?”

“I’m pregnant, Michael. If we go belly up—no pun intended—do I lose my health care coverage?”

I hung up, exhausted. I hadn’t even come close to dealing with every managerial responsibility I had as head of the Green Division, but refusing to drink the Kool-Aid came with a price: Committing only one hand to management meant that my clients and contacts in the world of production also had to be reassured. There were no small fish in my pond, and before I could dial his number, Moby Dick was calling me.

“Kyle McVee here,” he said, his voice crackling on my cell phone. “I’m on my way downtown. I’ll pick you up and we can talk.”

He knew I hadn’t worked downtown since 9/11, but this was McVee’s style—you went where he was going, you didn’t ask what or why, you talked when he wanted to talk. He was the president and CEO of one of the world’s most successful hedge funds, Ploutus Investments, LLP. The firm’s namesake was the Greek god Ploutus, the personification of wealth, not the Roman god Pluto, ruler of the underworld—though in recent years people were saying that the latter was more fitting. I couldn’t say that I actually
liked
McVee, but bringing him to Saxton Silvers had definitely worked to my benefit. The big Wall Street brokerage houses hungered for hedge funds, which traded much more furiously than typical investors. Ploutus meant millions to Saxton Silvers in brokerage commission dollars.

“I’m at the gym, but I actually have a meeting at nine o’clock near the federal courthouse,” I said.

“Perfect,” he said. “We’ll drop you off.”

I gave him the gym’s cross streets in lower Midtown and waited. And waited. It was sort of what Wall Street as a whole had been doing for hedge funds since the late 1990s—waiting on them, picking up the tab for lavish “capital introduction parties” in places like St. Moritz or Palm Beach, publicly denying that we steered our clients their way in exchange for all that brokerage business they did with us. When I started B-school, there were about six hundred domestic hedge funds. Ten years later there were more than 6,300, about a third of which couldn’t have told you the date of their last audit. Some were charlatans, boobs, or worse. But hedge funds like Ploutus were hiring some of the sharpest minds on Wall Street—including Ivy Layton, who had been with McVee only a few months before she’d died. Successful managers worked like dogs but were paid like hogs, taking a 20 percent cut of profits (the carry) on top of annual management and administrative fees—compared with mutual fund fees of, on average, 1 percent of assets.

A long black limo pulled up. The door opened, and out climbed McVee’s twenty-five-year-old nephew, Jason Wald. He was talking loudly on his cell, seeming to make it a point that I overheard.

“Look, I’m not trying to be an asshole,” Wald said into the phone, emphasis on the word
trying
. “We’re selling the company, and you’re out. It’s over, T.J.”

Wald was having too much fun with this call, and it was obvious that the timing was choreographed for my benefit. I knew he was talking to T. J. Barnes, CEO of one of the top one hundred companies in Dallas. T.J. was a middle-aged cowboy who had never worked for anyone a day in his life until—on a tip from me—McVee’s hedge fund purchased a controlling interest in his company.

Papa’s voice was echoing in my head again:
Who are your enemies, Michael?

I climbed into the limo and sat on the black leather bench seat facing McVee and his nephew, my back to the driver.

In recent years, the face of the relationship between Ploutus and Saxton Silvers had been less and less about me and Kyle McVee. Jason Wald wasn’t about to grab the helm from his uncle, but his influence was enough to steer Ploutus deep into the subprime waters of Kent Frost and his structured products factory. Since I was the one who started the relationship between the two firms, McVee must have felt compelled to drop the bomb on me, rather than on my CDO-making, market-shaking, bonus-taking colleague.

“There’s no way to soft-pedal this, Michael. Ploutus and its affiliates have no choice but to withdraw all of our capital from our prime brokerage accounts at Saxton Silvers.”

It was as if he’d just punched me in the chest. Prime brokerage was a highly profitable bundle of services we provided to hedge funds and other professional investors who favored short-selling and other leveraged megadeals.

“That’s two and a half billion dollars,” I said.

“As of this morning, yes.”

“That money is the collateral for the deals we finance and the trading strategies we execute for you.”

“I hate to state the obvious, but what I’m telling you is that Ploutus won’t be doing any more deals or executing any further strategies through Saxton Silvers.”

“This is the kind of move from a major hedge fund that others will follow.”

I was sure he’d heard me, but he was suddenly gazing out the window. We were near the NYU campus, slowly rounding the corner. McVee’s attention had shifted to the nearly completed building facing Washington Square.

“Coming along nicely,” he said with a wan smile.

The university was getting a new arts center named for McVee’s son Marcus. I had attended the groundbreaking ceremony as one of McVee’s guests two years earlier. Marcus had been dead for several years now, and still it wasn’t easy to get McVee to focus on much of anything when his son was in his thoughts. But I had to try.

“Kyle, I hope you aren’t making this decision based on the ridiculous things Chuck Bell has been saying.”

“Nothing to do with Chuck, God rest his soul.”

“No disrespect for the dead, but the man you’re commending to the hand of God almost single-handedly ruined my reputation on the Street.”

“Chuck called it like he saw it. And he made me a ton of money.”

“Are you saying you’re short-selling Saxton Silvers?”

“Everyone with a lick of sense is short on Saxton Silvers. Wake up and smell the coffee.”

His nephew inhaled deeply, as if literally showing me how to do it.

Such a punk.

I could have tried to convince McVee to wait and see how the market performed before making his decision, but he was finished with me. Except for one more thing.

McVee leaned forward, looked me in the eye, and said, “It’s nothing personal. I mean that.”

The car stopped within walking distance of the federal courthouse. My brother’s office was in the building on the corner. The driver came around and opened the door for me. McVee slapped me on the arm as I climbed out of the limo.

“Like I said: nothing personal.”

“Ditto,” said his nephew.

I watched from the sidewalk as the limo pulled away. A single “nothing personal” would probably have done it. Saying it twice was one time too many.

Ditto
had almost made me puke.

I checked my watch: 8:40
A.M
. The market would open in fifty minutes. I had to give Eric the news about Ploutus before disappearing into a meeting with my “big brother” the lawyer. My cell rang as I was dialing. It was the tech leader from my investment team. I had every computer-savvy genius I knew trying to figure out how the identity thief had accessed my password-protected accounts, and Elliot Katz was among the brightest.

“Breakthrough,” he said. “I think I know how they got your passwords.”

I spoke while zigzagging my way down the crowded sidewalk, weaving in and out among hurried commuters, joggers, and dog walkers. “Tell me,” I said.

“Spyware. It infected your laptop and monitored your keystrokes.”

“How did it get there?”

“I’ve seen it countless times,” said Elliot. “Even police stations fall for this stuff and get their databases hacked into. Usually somebody opens an attachment to an e-mail offering ‘free porn’ or some other goodie from an unknown source.”

“I don’t open attachments from people I don’t know.”

“I know. That’s a given. Which leads me to the jaw dropper: The e-mail attachment that launched the spyware on your computer didn’t come from an unknown source.”

“Who sent it?”

“I’ve traced it to an e-mail you received eleven days ago,” he said. Then he paused, as if reluctant to deliver the news. “It was from your wife.”

A noisy bus was pulling away from the curb, making it hard to hear. I stopped walking and plugged my finger into my other ear.

“Did you say
Mallory
planted spyware on my computer?”

“That would be correct,” he said.

Eleven days ago—nine days before she had gone through that charade she called my surprise thirty-fifth birthday party. I was starting to feel beyond abused. Manipulated was more like it.

“Thanks for getting to the bottom of this.” I had to get off the phone and figure this out.

“You’re welcome. And, Michael, don’t worry. I won’t breathe a word to anyone about this.”

I thanked him again, hung up, and was about to make another call when I nearly walked straight into a wooden barricade. The street was blocked off for the filming of some music video or commercial, and the crew was still packing up after an all-night shoot. The detour diverted the crowd to the other side of the street, and as I crossed, one of the crew leaned over the barricade and stopped me.

“Hey, buddy,” he said in a heavy “New Yawk” accent. He was pointing an accusatory finger at me, a giant Styrofoam cup of coffee in his other hand.

“Me?” I said.

“Yeah, you. Ain’t you the guy who was on FNN talking to Chuck Bell yesterday?”

I assumed he didn’t mean the giant bear who’d gone down on a left hook from Bell in the first round. “Yeah, that was me.”

His next move was like lightning, and suddenly his cup was empty and my shirt and suit coat were soaked with lukewarm coffee.

“That’s for making me lose my ass on Saxton Silvers, you short-selling son of a bitch.”

Online amateurs.
Gotta love ’em.

I could have kicked his ass for ruining what was for all practical purposes the only clean business clothes to my name, but in a way I understood his anger. As far as he knew, I was a Wall Street jerk who had bet against my own company. It made me wonder how many more—
thousands
more—just like him were out there.