Hades (8 page)

9

The Rockworth and Williams offices were on the fifty-sixth floor of the World Financial Building. The expansive windows in the even more expansive lobby looked out, on this remarkably clear day, over what seemed to be the entire world. Directly east was Ground Zero, its presence still jarring. Looking north you could see almost all of Manhattan—Tribeca, midtown, Central Park, all the way up to Harlem, and even the distant specks of traffic inching along the Triborough Bridge. The view west took in the Hudson River and well into New Jersey. Looking south at the smooth expanse of the Upper Bay, you stared down at the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Justin had the feeling that if he had a better sense of geography and knew which way to look, and if his vision were substantially better, he’d have a decent shot at viewing the jutting shores of Cornwall all the way across the ocean.

He was kept waiting for twenty-seven minutes, three minutes less than he’d expected. He could have barged in, flashing his badge, but he decided to keep this friendly. If the secretary had exceeded his thirty-minute waiting limit, however, his friendly demeanor would have gone out the fifty-sixth-floor window. Luckily for all concerned, she came in the nick of time to lead him back to Daniel French, the Rockworth executive who’d been picked to talk to him.

“I’m not quite sure what I’m supposed to be able to tell you,” French told Justin. They were sitting in a conference room, which Justin figured was roughly the square footage of his house in East End Harbor. French offered water—cold or room temperature, which Justin declined; coffee, which Justin accepted, black. French had water. Cold.

“I’m gathering any information that might be helpful in the investigation,” Justin explained. “I’m looking for help so I can find out who killed Evan Harmon.”

“I still can’t believe this happened,” French said. “You never think . . . well . . . It’s just so shocking.”

“Shocking because Evan didn’t have any enemies?”

“Everybody in our business has enemies. I’m sure Evan had his share. No, I meant shocking because people go broke all the time in our business, or people wind up in prison because they embezzle funds. People don’t get murdered.”

“Sometimes murder can even reach such rarefied air,” Justin said.

“I’m not being some kind of prima donna asshole,” French said. “I know it happens. It’s just never happened to anyone I know. Or anyone quite so rarefied as Evan.”

“How well did you know him?”

“Fairly well. We were approximately the same age; we moved in somewhat the same circles, at least professionally.”

“Not socially?”

“No, not really. I mean, I’d see him around. At clubs or at a tennis match or something like that. But mostly we knew each other through business.”

“I’d like a list of the people here who dealt with him regularly.”

“Almost everybody on a certain level dealt with Evan. He was a player. I can get you the list, but it’ll be fairly long and I don’t know how helpful.”

“You don’t have anyone who’s primarily assigned to Ascension?”

“As I said, we have a few—”

“How about Ellis St. John?”

Dan French was good. He barely missed a beat. “Ellis certainly spends a lot of his time on the Ascension account. He probably could be—”

“He was Evan’s primary broker, wasn’t he?”

“He is
Ascension
’s primary broker, not Evan’s. He’s been one of our main connections to people there for the past three or four years.”

“One of?”

“Yes. Although I suppose he would be considered the main—”

“If he was the main contact, why did so many other people here need to be in touch with Evan? Or with other people at Ascension?”

“Because we have a lot of different departments, and sometimes it’s easier for people to simply talk directly to the person who can best address a specific need. If Ascension wants some research done on a particular type of investment, they deal with someone in that department. Ellis might coordinate it but not always.”

“Is that Ellis’s main job, coordinating?”

“No. It’s just a by-product of his link to Ascension. And to other companies, by the way. Ascension’s hardly his only account.”

“What exactly is his link to Ascension? Can you define it?”

“
I suppose. It’s not as if it’s a unique job—it’s fairly standard for any company of our size. As I said, R and W is the primary broker for quite a few funds.”

“So let’s go with the basics and explain to me what that really means.”

French smiled broadly. Justin didn’t know if he was smiling because he liked teaching people what he did or whether he just liked talking about how much money his company made. “The prime brokerage business is a direct beneficiary of the growth of the hedge fund business. And the hedge fund business has become, by far, the most—how shall I put this—active segment of the asset management business.”

“Active meaning lucrative?”

“When it works,” French said. “When it doesn’t work, it results in the biggest losses.”

“So it’s the most unstable.”

“We don’t really use that word around here. Let’s just say it’s the most volatile.”

“Okay. Keep going.”

“Twenty years ago, money that was managed by hedge funds was probably somewhere around thirty, thirty-five billion dollars. Now it’s substantially over a trillion. There’s no other segment of the financial world with anywhere near that kind of growth and profitability. But, as a result, there’s more and more competition. That’s normal and it’s probably healthy, but it also means you have to be more aggressive and you have to be good. You have to be better than your competitors, which means you need every edge you can get. So a lot of hedge funds hook up with companies like ours who can provide prime brokers, which helps give them the edge they need. We provide securities to cover short sales, make margin loans, clear trades, provide reporting services and custody assets, provide research. And we even help hedge funds raise money. As a prime broker, we probably execute twenty-five to thirty percent of a hedge fund client’s transactions. We also provide a daily NAV—”

“Sorry,” Justin said. “I’m a little rusty with my financial acronyms.”

“Net asset value.”

“That it? No free tennis lessons and shiatsu massage?”

“If need be. We provide whatever is necessary. We can set up a rudimentary risk management system for our clients; we’ll find office space as a hedge fund company expands; we’ll find someone an operations officer and traders; and, if necessary, we can even provide the accounting system.”

“I assume you’re not doing this out of the goodness of your heart.”

“That’s a phrase that no one even understands on the Street.”

“So explain to me how you make enough to justify this extremely impressive office and your suits that cost more than most people’s rent.”

“We get commissions from every single trade and order flow.”

“At no risk.”

“We handle the transactions; we’re not putting our own money in. And hedge funds probably account for a third of our trades now.”

“You want to tell me how much that might come to a year?”

“We don’t give out our financial figures,” French told him.

“But if I say ‘a lot’ I’m not going to be far off,” Justin said.

“No. That would be extremely accurate. But we also do a lot of margin lending, and that’s at least as profitable.”

“So you did all of that for Ascension?”

“As I said, and quite a few other hedge funds. We have many resources that smaller firms, money management companies and funds like Ascension, don’t have. We can get better deals, get in earlier than other companies, sometimes get in on an investment opportunity when other firms can’t get in at all. One of our jobs, one of the key aspects of Ellis’s job, is to bring money in to those deals. Let’s say one of our clients wants to raise three hundred million dollars in an IPO. We’ll certainly have a share of that, if not the entire thing. We might need to raise half, a hundred and fifty million. So we go out and get it.”

“And you might get it from Ascension? Telling them this is a good investment.”

“Sure. But as I keep saying, we go to many other hedge funds like Ascension. We don’t put all our eggs in one basket. Or even a hundred baskets.”

“So Ellis is a salesman in a lot of ways.”

“Yes. He’s a salesman and an adviser and an investor and a deal maker.”

“Can you walk me through a typical day-to-day deal?”

“I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to give you real cash numbers—”

“Just hypothetical. I want to make sure I understand the relationship.”

“Is this really relevant to your investigation?”

“It might be. I can’t say for sure until I know a lot more of the facts. And the background.”

“You don’t think Ellis has anything to do with what happened to Evan?” French asked. He didn’t seem particularly horrified or shocked at the thought. More curious.

“I didn’t say that. I’d just like to understand the kinds of relationships Harmon had with people who he worked with. It’s very unlikely that Evan was killed by someone he didn’t know. The odds are it was someone he knew extremely well.”

“All right,” French said. “Let’s say the head of research into new media comes up and says we should invest in . . . oh . . . companies that are working on technology to make it easy to download original product into iPod-like devices. Got that?”

“So far.”

“Let’s say they’ve come up with a way to do it for audiobooks.”

“Don’t listen to them. I like to read the real thing.”

Justin watched as French did his best not to roll his eyes. The executive stayed polite, and he barely hesitated before continuing his explanation. Justin was impressed. It was one of his best things: annoying people to see how they responded. French must have spent a lot of his days being annoyed by a lot of people because his response was to simply keep going. Didn’t change his demeanor when caught in a lie, didn’t flinch when aggravated by stupidity. No wonder he was a success on Wall Street, Justin decided.

“We have the resources to research which companies have the best technology and the greatest upside. Which companies are most likely to survive some very strict competition. We make our call; Ellis goes to Evan Harmon, says we think this is an area you want to invest in, here’s the result of the data we’ve put together; Evan comes back to us and says, ‘Okay, we’re in, we’re good for
X
dollars.’”

“
X
being a substantial amount of money.”

“Very substantial in some instances,” French said.

“That three hundred million you mentioned earlier—that’s not way out of line.”

“It can be less than that. Certainly for a company like Evan’s. But the total overall can be more.”

“And if Evan Harmon says no?”

French shrugged. “Then he says no. We move on to someone else.”

“But a rejection could hurt St. John’s pocketbook, right?”

French thought about this for a moment, then shrugged noncommittally. “It’s possible. Our salespeople are expected to bring in a certain amount of money, and their bonuses are based accordingly. But for it to affect Ellis, it would have to be a lot more than one turndown.”

Justin wondered if Daniel French’s brown hair ever got mussed. Or even moved. Or if his three-piece suit ever got a little tight. Probably not, he thought. He wondered if French was wondering right now if he, Justin, ever wore a sport coat that actually fit.

“What if Ascension took its business elsewhere?”

“It happens all the time. People move around. Hell, we’re not the only broker used by Ascension. They have several sources.” French looked at his Rolex. Still no sign of impatience, even when he said, “Is there anything else I can do for you? I do have a substantial amount of work to do.”

Justin nodded, determined to be just as polite as his corporate host, and he said, “I’d heard that Evan was not exactly thrilled with the job Ellis has been doing.”

French looked surprised. “Where did you hear that from?”

“Is it true?”

“Not remotely.”

“So he wasn’t thinking of firing him.”

“That’s absurd.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because it’s the kind of thing I’d know. I’d have to know it. We do a lot of business with Ascension—a lot of buying for them and a substantial amount of consulting and partnering. If Evan had any problem with any relationships, I’d know about it.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No.”

“Would anyone else?”

“Know about any problems? It’s possible. Several executives might be aware if they existed. Possibly Lincoln might know about it because of his relationship with Evan’s father. But, again, if I didn’t know about a problem, it didn’t exist.”

“Lincoln Berdon? That’s who you were referring to?”

“Yes.”

“He’s the CEO.”

“That’s right.”

“He very friendly with Evan’s father?”

“Yes. H. R. was part of this firm for a while.”

“Why’d he leave?”

“H. R.? Because he went back into government. Happens, you know. He made his money here and went back to public service.”

“Why didn’t he come back here when he left public service?”

“You’d have to ask him. But if I had to guess, I’d say he just didn’t want to work as hard. He’d had a heart attack, and even though his job here was fairly cushy, it was still work. A lot of meetings, a lot of socializing. Plus, Evan had started Ascension by then and I think H. R. wanted to help him out, lend his presence over there. Now, I really should—”

“Just another minute or so. This is very helpful. What does that mean, exactly? Lend his presence?”

“It’s not a secret. People like H. R. hook up with companies like ours or Evan’s because of their Rolodex. H. R.’s international relationships are priceless. Like the Bushes with the Saudis. Bush One was like a member of the royal family, and it paid off for them big-time. H. R. is as tight as it’s possible to be with the Chinese, and since they’re taking over the whole goddamn world, it’s a valuable connection.”

“How valuable?”

“Does his father’s role at Rockworth have anything to do with Evan’s murder?” French asked.