Timothy's Game (7 page)

Then the uniformed doorman tells her there’s a man downstairs who’d like to talk to her. His name is Mario Corsini.

“Jesus X,” Sally says. “All right, I’ll be down in a minute.”

She looks around. Everything seems under control. Eddie is holding up well, and they hired a special van with a lift so Becky in her wheelchair could be transported to the funeral home and eventually to the cemetery. Paul is there. Martha is there. And a crowd of relatives, friends, and neighbors. More people than Sally expected. Dotty Rosher isn’t there.
Got tsu danken!

The hearse is parked at the curb, followed by a long line of black limousines. The chauffeurs have congregated, and are smoking up a storm and laughing. The single Cadillac limousine parked across the street is a stretch job, silver gray.

“Mr. Angelo would like to talk to you,” Corsini says.

“Now?” Sally says indignantly. “Can’t it wait?”

“Just a couple of minutes,” he says. “We didn’t want to come inside.”

“I’d have kicked your ass out,” she says, and means it.

She crosses the street and climbs into the back, alongside Vic Angelo. Corsini sits up front behind the wheel, but turns sideways so he can keep an eye on Sally and listen to what’s going on.

“My sincere condolences on your loss,” Angelo says.

“Thanks.”

“Your father was an old friend.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But now we got a business problem. The garbage dump. Who inherits?”

“My mother, my brother, me.”

“And who’s going to run it?”

“Who do you think?” Sally says angrily. “Me. I’ve practically been running the joint for the past ten years.”

“It’s no business for a woman,” Angelo says, shaking his head regretfully. “Too rough. We’ll make you a nice offer.”

“Screw your offer,” Sally says wrathfully. “I’m hanging on to the dump. You’ll still get your tax. Jake is dead, but the business belongs to my family and that’s where it’s going to stay.”

Mario Corsini grins. Or at least he shows a mouthful of big, yellowed teeth. “I don’t think so,” he says.

Sally stares at the two bandidos. If she had her pistol she would have popped both of them, right there. She knows exactly what they can do to Steiner Waste Control: trouble with the union, trouble with city inspectors, maybe firebombs in the trucks if they want to play hard. There’s no way she can fight that. She could run to the DA and scream about the monthly payoffs—but where’s the proof?

“All right,” she says, “you want to take over, you can do it. But you’ll be throwing away a fortune.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Angelo says.

“You guys ever play the stock market?” Sally asks.

“I
’M GOING TO GIRD
a loin,” Timothy Cone says.

“You’re going to
what?”
Samantha Whatley demands.

“Haven’t you ever girded your loins? It’s something like hoisting yourself with your own petard.”

“Oh, shut up,” she says crossly, “and get to work.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” he explains patiently. “I’ll be out of the office the rest of the week. I’m supposed to investigate internal security at Pistol and Burns, and make suggestions for improvements.”

“Then
do
it!”

He slouches out of her office and ambles down Broadway to Wall Street. It’s a sultry day, and he’s happy he left his raincoat at home. He’s wearing his black leather cap and his old corduroy suit.

G. Fergus Twiggs must have spread the word because, after identifying himself, the Wall Street dick has no problems getting into Pistol & Burns. He’s allowed to roam the hushed corridors, examine offices, poke into closets, and check the fire escape doors to see if they can be opened from the outside.

Cone doesn’t leave the offices during the lunch hour because he wants to see if any high-powered executives come reeling back, their eyes glazed with a three-martini lunch. He strikes out on that; all the P&B employees seem sober, industrious, and dull.

“Look,” he says to Mr. Twiggs at the end of the first day, “I’ll put everything in a final report, but there are things you should do immediately, so I think I better pass them along to you personally every day.”

“It’s that bad, is it?” the cherubic senior partner says.

“It’s not a disaster,” Cone says, “but you’ve got to learn to operate defensively. I don’t mean you’ve got to make this place into a fortress, but you should take some more precautions. Or one of these days some outlaws are going to stroll in here and waltz out with the family jewels.”

“What kind of precautions?”

“Well, for starters, you’ve got one security guard on the front door. I’m sure he’s a fine old gentleman, but he is old and he is fat. It would take him a while to suck in his gut before he could get that big revolver out of his dogleg holster. Get a younger guy on the door. Get another two or three to wander around. They can be nicely dressed, but armed and maybe wearing badges.”

“What else?” Twiggs says, making notes.

“All your typewriters and business machines should be bolted to the desks. You can even get attachments with burglar alarms, if you want to go that far. But you’ve got a zillion dollars’ worth of portable machinery in here that could be carted off with no trouble at all. Bolt it down.”

“Good idea,” the senior partner says. “Anything else?”

“Yeah, those paper shredders you’re using to destroy confidential documents. … They’re antiques. Shredded documents can be pasted together again. The Iranians taught us that when they re-created CIA secret memos from strips of paper lifted from the shredders in our embassy. You need new models that turn paper into confetti.”

“Excellent suggestion. More?”

“Not today,” Cone says. “I’ll be back tomorrow and take a closer look. I’ll stop by at the end of the day and give you my report.”

“I think you’re doing a fine job.”

“It’s all practical stuff. It’s not going to stop insider leaks, but it may help. Like keeping a cleaning woman who’s on the take from delivering the contents of your wastebaskets to some wise guys.”

At the end of the second day, he says to Twiggs, “This one is going to cost you bucks. You’ve got your Mergers and Acquisitions people scattered all over the place. An office here, an office there. That’s an invitation to leaks. You’ve got to consolidate that whole department. They can still have their individual offices, but all of them have to be in the same area. And that area has to be behind a locked door that can only be opened by authorized personnel with a computer-coded card.”

“It’s beginning to sound more and more like a fortress,” Twiggs says with a wan smile.

Cone shrugs. “You want to cut down on the possibility of leaks? This is one way to do it.”

On his final day at Pistol & Burns, he says to the senior partner, “This one is going to cost you
big
bucks. Your M and A people are writing too many office memos, too many suggestions, projections, analyses of upcoming deals—and all on paper.”

“We’ve got to communicate,” Twiggs protests.

“Not on paper you don’t. Computerize the whole operation. If anyone has something to say on a possible takeover, buyout, or merger, he puts it on the computer. Anyone else who’s involved can call it up on his monitor—but only if he knows the code word. You understand? Nothing typed on paper. And everything in the computer coded so that it can only be retrieved by personnel who have a need to know, and have the key word or number allowing them access. Also, the computer can keep a list of who requests access to the record.”

G. Fergus Twiggs shakes his head dolefully. “What’s the world coming to?” he asks.

“Beats the hell out of me,” Timothy Cone says.

He plods back to Haldering & Co. to pick up his salary check. He figures he’s done a decent job for Pistol & Burns. If they want to follow his suggestions, fine. If not, it’s no skin off his ass.

But something is gnawing at him. Something he heard or saw that flicks on a red light. Maybe it was something Bigelow said, or Twiggs. Maybe it was something he observed at Pistol & Burns. He shakes his head violently, but can’t dislodge whatever it is. It nags him, a fragment of peanut caught in his teeth.

When he gets back to his office, there’s a message on his desk: Call Jeremy Bigelow. So, without taking off his cap, Cone phones the SEC investigator.

“Hiya, old buddy,” Jerry says breezily. “How did you make out at Pistol and Burns?”

“Like you said, it’s as holey as Swiss cheese. I gave them some ways to close the holes.”

“But no evidence of an insider leak?”

“I didn’t find any.”

“That’s a relief. I wrote in my report it was the arbs who caused the run-up of the stock. I guess I was right.”

“Uh-huh,” Cone says.

“So much for the good news. Now comes the bad. We got another squeal on insider trading.”

“Oh, Jesus,” the Wall Street dick says. “Don’t tell me it’s a Pistol and Burns’ deal.”

“No, this one is at Snellig Firsten Holbrook. You know the outfit?”

“The junk bond specialists?”

“That’s right. They’re supposed to have the best security on the Street, but they’re handling a leveraged buyout and someone is onto it. The stock of the takee is going up, up, up. Listen, could you and I meet on Monday? Maybe we can figure out what’s going on.”

“Maybe,” Cone says, striving mightily to recall what he cannot remember.

He wakes the next morning, hoping the night’s sleep has brought to mind what he’s been trying to recollect; sleep does that sometimes. But all he can remember is the entire pepperoni pizza he ate the night before.

He goes over to Samantha’s place on Saturday night. She won’t be seen with him in public, fearing someone from Haldering will spot them and office gossip will start. That’s okay with Cone; he’s willing to play by her rules.

She serves a dinner of baked chicken, Spanish rice, and a salad. They also have a bottle of chilled Orvieto which puts them in a mellow mood. They have a nice, pleasant evening of fun and games, and Cone is home by 1:00
A.M.
He gives Cleo fresh water and some of the chicken skin and bones he doggie-bagged from Sam’s dinner.

Sunday is just as relaxed. He futzes around the loft, smokes two packs of Camels, drinks about a pint of vodka, with water, and digs his way through
Barron’s
and the Business Section of the
New York Times.
In the evening he has a one-pound can of beef stew with a heel of French bread he finds in the refrigerator, so hard that he has to soak it in the stew to render it edible. Cleo gets the remainder of the chicken scraps.

On Monday he’s late for work, as usual. Jeremy Bigelow shows up at ten o’clock, carrying a fat briefcase. Cone calls down to the local deli for two black coffees and two toasted bagels with a schmear. They wait for their breakfast to arrive before they get down to business.

“Look,” Cone says, “it would help if you could tell me how the SEC works on insider trading scams. Then maybe I’ll know what you’re talking about.”

“It’s a two-level operation,” Jerry says, gnawing on his bagel. “We get a lead and start gathering facts. That’s where I come in. If we can’t find any evidence of hanky-panky, the investigation is usually dropped. If things look sour, the staff goes to the Commission and gets an order for a formal inquiry. That’s when we get power of subpoena.”

“Yeah, but what gets you moving? Where do the leads come from?”

“Computers mostly. We couldn’t live without them. You know how many companies are listed on all the stock exchanges in the country?”

“No idea.”

“Neither do I—exactly. But I’d guess about twelve thousand. How could you check all those every day by hand? Imfuckingpossible. So the computers are programmed to pick up unusual activity. Say a stock has been trading an average of fifty thousand shares a day for months and months. Suddenly the trading volume goes up to maybe a million shares a day. The computer flashes a red light, bells go off, and an American flag pops from the top of the machine and starts waving madly back and forth.”

“And that’s when you move in?”

“Sure,” Bigelow says. “We want to know who’s trading. Most of the time it’s entirely innocent. A rumor got floated on Wall Street, and a lot of amateur arbitrageurs are hopping on what they hope will be a bandwagon—and probably won’t.”

“So your computers do it all?”

“Hell, no. Just the first line of defense. We also get tips from brokerage houses.
Their
computers pick up unusual trading activity. They report to us because they don’t want to get their balls caught in the wringer. Also, we get anonymous tips from divorced wives and husbands who want the boom lowered on their former mates. And sometimes we get squeals from honest executives who know or suspect the guy in the next office is buying or selling illegally on the basis of the next quarterly earnings report.”

“You check out the executives first?”

“Of course. If they’re officers of the company, they’ve got to declare buys and sells. If they don’t, they’re in the soup.”

“Look,” the Wall Street dick says, “I know you haven’t got the time or staff to check out every piddling little trade. I mean you’re not going to investigate Joe E. Clunk of Hanging Dog, North Carolina, who bought ten shares of this or that. So what do you look for?”

“Generally I look for trades of ten thousand shares or more. But if a corporation officer is involved, he’s as guilty if he trades a hundred shares as he would be if he traded a hundred thousand on the basis of inside knowledge.”

“But he could get his relatives and friends to trade for him.”

“Of course,” Jerry says, grinning. “Happens all the time. That’s when we’ve got to play detective, track down relationships, and tell them all they’ve committed a no-no.”

“And what do they get for that?”

“Usually they have to surrender their profits, pay a fine, and are put on probation. A few go to the clink.”

“For how long?”

“I think the longest sentence for insider trading has been four years.”

“Which means the guy is out in eighteen months.”

“Probably,” Bigelow says, shrugging. “But that’s not my problem. I’m supposed to make the case. What the judge decides is something else again.”