Timothy's Game (3 page)

Late in the afternoon he comes lumping into Sally’s office, collapses in the armchair alongside her desk.

“Jesus, Jake,” she says, “you smell like a distillery. You been hitting the sauce hard today.”

“A lot of people I had to see.” He takes off his hat. His balding head is covered with sweat. It’s been a warm April day; he looks wiped out.

“You want something?” she asks anxiously. “Coffee? A cold Coke?”

“Nah,” he says, “I’m okay. Just let me rest a minute.”

“You look like the wrath of God.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve been on the go since this morning. What’s been going on around here?”

“Nothing much. The new guy showed up. His name’s Tony Ricci.”

“That figures,” Jake says. “He’s Mario Corsini’s cousin. Did I tell you that?”

“Yeah, pa, you told me.”

“What kind of a guy?”

“A good-looking boy. Fresh—but that’s okay.”

“Wait’ll he puts in a week lifting hundred-pound cans of dreck, he won’t be so fresh. You can handle him?”

“Oh, sure, pa. No problem. So tell me, how does the new territory look?”

“Not so bad,” Jake says. He takes out his handkerchief, wipes his face. He straightens up in the chair. “Pitzak had some good wheels. Three Loadmaster compactor trucks only a few years old. The rest of the stuff is shit, but still rolling. Their dispatcher is a lush; he doesn’t know his ass from his elbow; you’ll have to take over.”

“Okay, pa, I can do that. What about the customers?”

“Mostly industrial, thank God. Some restaurants, some diners, two apartment houses. But most of the stuff is clean. Like scrap wood, steel shavings, and so forth. There’s one paint factory and one chemical outfit that might give us some trouble. We’ll have to dump in Jersey. And three or four printers. But that’s only paper, so that’s no problem there. We can bale and sell.”

“What kind of printers?”

“One does magazines, a couple do catalogs and brochures, and one does printing for Wall Street outfits. Annual reports, documents, prospectuses, stuff like that.”

“Yeah?” Sally Steiner says. “That’s interesting.”

L
ATE IN MAY, TIMOTHY
Cone comes off a case that’s a real doozy. Cone’s an investigator for Haldering & Co., an outfit on John Street that provides “financial intelligence” for corporate and individual clients.

Early in May, a venture capital partnership hired Haldering to look into something called Ozam Biotechnology, Inc. Ozam had been advertising in the business media with big headlines:
NEW ISSUE!
Shares of Ozam available at ten bucks.

The legal and accounting departments of Haldering & Co. couldn’t find any record of Ozam anywhere. It apparently had no bank accounts, wasn’t chartered by the State of New York, nor was it registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

So Timothy Cone went to work. He soon found there were two other eyes doing the same thing: a guy from the SEC and a woman from the Manhattan District Attorney’s office.

The three finally discover that Ozam just doesn’t exist. It is an out-and-out stock swindle dreamed up by a con man named Porfirio Le Blanc. How much loot he took in on those fraudulent ads they never do determine, but it must have been hefty because when Porfirio flies the coop, he flies first-class to Bolivia.

No one is interested in trying to extradite the rascal; just getting him out of the country is enough. So the Immigration and Naturalization Service is told to put Señor Le Blanc on the “watch list,” and Timothy Cone returns to his cubbyhole office to write out his report.

When he tosses it onto the desk of Samantha Whatley, who bosses the five Haldering & Co. investigators, he slumps in the doorway while she reads it.

“You’re a lousy speller,” she tells him. Then she shakes her head in disbelief. “Can you believe this? A guy takes out ads in newspapers, and people send him money.
Fan
-tastic.”

“It’s happened before,” Cone says, shrugging. “Years ago there was an ex-carny pitchman working the Midwest. He bought ads in small-town newspapers. All the ad said was: ‘Last chance to send in your dollar,’ with a P.O. Box number in Chicago. He was doing okay until the postal guys caught up with him.”

“Barnum was right,” Sam says. “Well, here’s a new one for you.”

She holds out a file folder, and Cone shuffles forward to take it.

“What is it?” he asks. “Some guy selling the Brooklyn Bridge?”

“No,” Sam says, “this is heavy stuff. The client is Pistol and Burns. You know them?”

“The investment bankers? Sure, I know them. Very old. Very conservative. What’s their problem?”

“They think they may have a leak in their Mergers and Acquisitions Department.”

“Oh-ho. Another inside trading scam?”

“Could be,” Samantha says. “Tim, this is a new client with mucho dinero. Will you, for God’s sake, try to dress neatly and talk like a gentleman.”

“Don’t I always?”

She stares at him. “Out!” she says.

Back in his office, he opens a fresh pack of Camels (second of the day) and lights up. He parks his scuffed yellow work shoes atop the scarred desk, and starts flipping through the Pistol & Burns file.

It’s a sad story of unbridled greed—and a not uncommon one. About a year ago, P&B is engineering a buyout between a big food-products conglomerate and a smaller outfit that’s making a nice buck with a nationwide chain of stores that sell cookies, all kinds, made on the premises, guaranteed fresh every morning. The takeover is a marriage made in heaven. Or, as they say on Wall Street, the synergism is there.

As usual, the ladies and gents in the Mergers and Acquisitions Department of Pistol & Burns work in conditions of secrecy that would do credit to the CIA—so word of the impending deal won’t leak out prematurely. But it does. The computers of the Securities and Exchange Commission pick up evidence of heavy trading in the cookie company in the weeks prior to the signing of the buyout documents and the public announcement. The cookie stock goes up almost ten points.

So the SEC launches an investigation to try to discover the insider leak. It turns out that a yuppie-type in the Mortgage Insurance Department of Pistol & Burns, who has nothing to do with mergers and acquisitions and is supposed to know zilch about them, is a drinking buddy of another yuppie in the M&A section. Not only that, but they’re both doing coke and shagging the same twitch who supplies the nose candy and also dances naked at a joint on East 38th Street called Aristotle’s Dream.

The whole thing is a mess. The two Pistol & Burns’ yuppies confess their sins and admit they made almost a quarter-mil dealing in shares and options of the cookie corporation in the month prior to the takeover. What’s worse, they were paid for their insider information by arbitrageurs and attorneys who work for other investment bankers.

This clique of insiders, all with MBAs or law degrees, make a nice buck until the SEC lowers the boom, and everyone has to cough up their profits, pay fines, and is banned from the securities business for three years. The two original Pistol & Burns insiders also get a year in the slammer, which means they’ll be out in four or five months. There is no record of what happens to the skin dancer at Aristotle’s Dream.

The entire scandal is a painful embarrassment for Pistol & Burns. It is one of the few remaining investment-banker partnerships on the Street. The original partners, Leonard K. Pistol and G. Watson Burns, have long since gone to the great trading pit in the sky, but the present partners try to preserve the stern probity and high principles and ideals of the two founders. Their oil portraits glower down on the executive dining room, spoiling a lot of appetites.

But Pistol & Burns muddles through, cooperating fully with investigators and prosecutors from the SEC and district attorney’s office. P&B also appoints one of the senior partners, Mr. G. Fergus Twiggs, to be Chief of Internal Security. He institutes a series of reforms to make certain such an insider coup will never again tarnish the reputation of such a venerable and respected institution.

(Which somewhat amuses students of the history of our nation’s financial community. They happen to know that Leonard K. Pistol kept a teenage mistress, and G. Watson Burns drank a quart of brandy every day, without fail, and once had to be dissuaded from making a cash offer to buy the U.S. Government.)

Timothy Cone, reading all this with enjoyment, pauses long enough to light another cigarette and call down to the local deli for a cheeseburger, an order of French fries, a kosher dill, and two cold Heinekens. He munches on his lunch as he continues reading the preliminary report provided by the client.

After enduring the shame of what comes to be known on Wall Street as The Great Cookie Caper, and after tightening up their internal security precautions, Pistol & Burns now finds itself facing another disgrace involving insider trading.

They’re in the last stages of finagling a leveraged buyout of a corporation that makes clothes for kiddies, including diapers with the label of a hotshot lingerie designer and little striped overalls just like gandy dancers once wore. The buyers are a group of the company’s top executives, and the transaction includes an issue of junk bonds.

Everything is kept strictly hush-hush, and the number of people with a need to know is kept to a minimum. But during the last two weeks, the volume of trading in Wee Tot Fashions, Inc., usually minuscule, has quadrupled, with the stock up five bucks. An investigator from the SEC is already haunting the paneled corridors of Pistol & Burns, trying to discover who is leaking word of the upcoming deal.

“This state of affairs cannot be allowed to continue,” Mr. G. Fergus Twiggs concludes firmly.

So Timothy Cone calls the phone number on the letterhead of the client’s report.

“Pistol and Burns.” A woman’s voice: brisk and efficient.

“Could I speak to Mr. Twiggs?”

“May I ask who is calling?”

“Sure,” Cone says cheerfully.

Long pause.

“Who is calling, please,” she says faintly.

“Timothy Cone. I’m an investigator with Haldering and Company.”

After a wait of almost a minute, he’s put through. Twiggs has a deep, rambling voice. Cone thinks it sounds rum-soaked, aged in oak casks, but maybe that’s the way all old investment bankers talk. Cone wouldn’t know; he doesn’t play croquet.

Their conversation is brief. G. Fergus Twiggs agrees to meet at 10:00
A.M.
the following morning to discuss “this disastrous and lamentable situation.”

“Uh-huh,” Cone says. “Okay, I’ll be at your office at ten tomorrow morning. Who’s the SEC investigator?”

“His name is Jeremy Bigelow. Do you know him?”

“Yeah,” Cone says, “I know Jerry. I worked a case with him earlier this month. Good man.”

“Seems rather young to me,” Twiggs says, and then sighs. “But at my age, everyone seems rather young to me.”

Cone smiles. The guy sounds almost human.

It’s a close and grainy evening; when he walks home from John Street to his loft on lower Broadway, he can taste the air on his tongue. It isn’t nice. He stops at local stores to buy a large jar of spaghetti with meat sauce, a jug of Gallo Hearty Burgundy, and a link of kielbasa for Cleo, his neutered tomcat, who eats everything, including cockroaches, fish heads, chicken bones—and thrives.

Cone notes mournfully that the outer door of his cast-iron commercial building has once again been jimmied—an almost weekly occurrence. Since it is now later than 6:00
P.M.,
the ancient birdcage elevator is shut down for the night, so he climbs the six flights of iron staircase to his apartment.

Cleo is waiting for him, and gives him the ankle-rub treatment, crying piteously, until he hands over the sausage. Then the cat takes its treasure under the old claw-footed bathtub and gnaws contentedly while the Wall Street dick mixes himself a vodka and water. He works on that as he heats up the spaghetti in a battered saucepan and sets his desk that doubles as a dining table. The china and cutlery are bits and pieces of this and that. The wineglasses are empty jars of Smucker’s orange marmalade.

Samantha Whatley shows up a little after seven o’clock. She’s picked up a container of mixed greens at a salad bar, and also has two strawberry tarts for dessert and a small chunk of halvah for Cleo.

An hour later, they’ve got their feet up on the littered table and are drinking noggins of cheap Italian brandy with black coffee. They decide to save the tarts, but Cleo gets the halvah, mewling with delight.

“Good dinner,” Cone says.

“Not very,” Sam says. “Do you have to buy canned spaghetti?”

“It wasn’t canned,” he tells her. “It came in a jar.”

“Whatever. Is it so difficult to buy a package of pasta, boil it up, and add your own sauce?”

“Oh-ho,” he says, beginning to steam, “now I’m supposed to be a gourmet cook, am I? Bull
shit!
Either eat what the kitchen provides or bring your own. And now that we got that settled, you staying the night?”

“Half the night,” she says. “Maybe till midnight or so.”

“Okay,” he says equably. “I’ll put you in a cab.”

“My hero,” she says. “You talk to Pistol and Burns?”

“Yep. I’m seeing G. Fergus Twiggs tomorrow morning at ten. I’ll be in late.”

“So what else is new?” She looks at the mattress on the linoleum floor of the loft. It’s been spread with clean sheets. “I feel horny,” she says.

“So what else is new?” he says.

Timothy Cone is a scrawny, hawkish man who’s never learned to shave close enough. Samantha Whatley is a tall drink of water with the lean body of a fashion model and the muscles of a woman at home on a balance beam. He is taller, but stooped, with a shambling gait. She is sharp-featured: coffin jaw and blue-green eyes. His spiky hair is gingery; her long auburn hair is usually worn up, tightly coiled. His nose is a hatchet, and his big ears flop. Her back is hard and elegant. His skin is pale, freckled. She is dark, with a ropy body that holds secret curves and warm shadows. He is all splinters, with the look of a worn farmer: pulled tendons, used muscles.

They have nothing in common except …