Timothy's Game (8 page)

Cone lights up a cigarette, after offering the pack to the other man. But Jerry declines.

“I stopped smoking four years ago,” he says virtuously. “You know what those things are doing to your lungs and heart?”

“Please,” Cone says, holding up a hand. “I’ve heard all the lectures and none of them take. Let me enjoy my vices. Now what’s this Snellig Firsten Holbrook deal you mentioned on the phone?”

“Like I said, it’s a leveraged buyout. An old outfit named Trimbley and Diggs, up in Massachusetts. They make brooms, brushes, wooden clothespins, and stuff like that. But they also own some choice shorefront real estate. They went public about twenty years ago and have been paying a small dividend—but never missing a quarter. It’s a small outfit, Tim; General Motors it ain’t. If their daily trading volume hits, say, ten thousand shares, it’s a big day. Now the top executive officers want to buy them out, take the company private again, and develop their beachfront properties. Snellig Firsten Holbrook is handling the deal. But suddenly the daily volume is way up—almost a hundred thousand shares last Friday. Nobody can figure how the buyout leaked. Someone is gobbling up shares, and we want to know who.”

“The arbs?” Cone asks.

Bigelow shakes his head. “I doubt it. Not enough loot in it for them.”

“Yeah,” Cone says, “I can understand that. But what’s all this got to do with me? I work for Haldering, and we don’t have Snellig Firsten Holbrook as a client, or Trimbley and Diggs either. So why am I supposed to get involved?”

“One,” Jeremy says, holding up a thumb, “as a personal favor to me. Two,” he says, pointing a forefinger, “because it’s a puzzle, and I’ve got you made as a guy who likes puzzles. And three,” he adds, extending his middle finger, “who the hell do you think recommended you to Pistol and Burns?”

“Jesus,” Cone says, “you’re really calling in your chits, aren’t you?”

“Just take a look at it, will you? I brought you computer printouts of trading and a record of the stock since the leveraged buyout got started.”

“What’s it selling for now?”

“About eight dollars a share. A week ago it was four.”

“All right,” the Wall Street dick says, sighing. “Leave your bumf and I’ll take a look. No guarantees.”

“Thanks, Tim,” Bigelow says gratefully. “In return, the SEC can be very cooperative with Haldering and Company if the occasion ever arises.”

“Who the hell cares?” Cone says roughly. “When are you going to buy me a street lunch like you promised?”

“You give me a lead on this, I’ll take you to The Four Seasons for dinner.”

“Yeah? They got ham hocks?”

He would never lie to Samantha Whatley on a personal matter. But he will lie to her
officially,
as his boss at Haldering & Co. That he can do with nary a qualm.

He lounges in the doorway of her office. “Listen,” he says seriously, “I’ve got to go back to Pistol and Burns and finish up that job.”

“Yeah?” she says. “I thought you were all done with them.”

“I need a couple of more days. Clean up some odds and ends. Then I want to talk to Twiggs about the final report.”

She looks at him suspiciously. “So what you’re telling me is that you’ll be out of the office again this week.”

“Just until Wednesday or so. I’ll have it wrapped up by then.”

“You better,” she says. “I’ve got three new files waiting for you.”

“Gee, thanks, boss,” he says. “That makes me feel warm all over.”

Jeremy Bigelow has left his battered briefcase stuffed with all the skinny on the Trimbley & Diggs buyout.

“You can borrow the briefcase,” he tells Cone. “But I want it back eventually.”

“What for?” Cone asks. “Sentimental attachment? It’s a piece of junk. You should pay me for taking it off your hands.”

So he plods up Broadway in a warm drizzle, lugging the case and feeling no guilt at having conned Sam. The world isn’t going to come to an end just because he finagled a couple of days off. Besides, it is a good cause: cooperation with an agency of the U.S. Government.

Back in his loft, he pops a tall can of Bud. Then he opens Bigelow’s briefcase and dumps the contents onto his wooden table. He sets the empty case on the floor, and Cleo immediately jumps in and curls up contentedly.

“Leave your fleas in there,” Cone tells the cat.

He reads all the papers and reads them again. Then he sits back and considers the case. It’s pretty much as Bigelow described it. The first printed documents are dated about three weeks previously and deal with Snellig Firsten Holbrook’s suggested plan for the proposed buyout of Trimbley & Diggs, Inc.

Subsequent printed documents amend and refine the plan. Then there’s a letter assuring the principals involved that the required funds can be raised through the sale of high-risk bonds, and Snellig Firsten Holbrook has “every confidence” the bond issue will be oversubscribed.

All that is routine stuff, and Cone can’t see anything freaky going on. What interests him more are the computer records of trading activity in Trimbley & Diggs. The volume began to climb about ten days ago, and the stock, listed on the Nasdaq National Market, rose in value steadily from about $4 a share to its current price of slightly over $8. Nice. The buyers are probably rubbing their sweaty palms with glee and wondering whether to hold on or sell and take the money and run.

Cone leans down to address Cleo, who is snoozing in the briefcase. “Sometimes the bulls make money,” he says, “and sometimes the bears make money. It’s the pigs who always get stuck.”

But who are these lucky investors who doubled their stake in about ten days? Cone goes over the computerized trading records again, and what he finds amuses him. He can’t spot any trades of 10,000 shares or more, but there are plenty for 9,000 shares. Timothy figures that’s because a lot of wise guys have heard that the SEC is interested in trades of 10K-shares and over. If they buy or sell 9,000 shares, they think they’re home free. Cone is surprised Jeremy Bigelow didn’t spot that, and he wonders just how swift the guy is.

The big buyers of Trimbley & Diggs’ stock are from all over the country, but seem to be concentrated in New York, Atlantic City, Miami, New Orleans, and Las Vegas. Also, most of the buyers’ names end in vowels. That gets Cone’s juices flowing because all those cities are big mob towns—which may mean something or absolutely nothing.

Since no one is going to finance his travels to investigate out-of-state buyers, he concentrates on the names of New York investors. One that catches his eye is a man named Paul Ramsey, who lives on 47th Street at an address that would place his residence west of Tenth Avenue.

That sets off alarm bells because, after Cone returned from Nam, he lived for two years in a five-story walk-up on 48th east of Tenth, and he knows what a slummy neighborhood that is. It’s in the middle of Hell’s Kitchen, with rundown tenements, sad mom-and-pop bodegas, dusty beer joints, and boarded-up buildings awaiting demolition.

Unless the whole area has been gentrified since Cone lived there, it’s hard to believe one of the residents is a stock market plunger. Not many ghetto dwellers deal in gold coins either.

He goes through the computer printouts for the fourth time, checking Paul Ramsey’s trades. It looks to Cone like the guy now owns 27,000 shares of Trimbley & Diggs, Inc., bought at an average of six bucks a share. If he sells out today, he’ll walk away with a profit of about $54,000. Not bad for someone who lives on streets where a mugger would be happy with a take of $10—enough for a vial of crack.

Cone pulls on his leather cap and takes his grungy raincoat in case the drizzle has thickened. Just before he leaves the loft, he checks the short-barreled S&W .357 in his ankle holster. Reassured, he ventures out to visit his old neighborhood.

“Guard!” he admonishes a startled Cleo before he leaves.

Down on the street, he finds the drizzle hasn’t just thickened, it’s as if someone has turned a tap on over Manhattan. And there’s not a cab in sight. Cursing his luck, Cone bows his head against the rain and humps his way to the nearest subway station. He tries to figure the best way to get to 47th Street and Tenth Avenue, and finally realizes there is no “best” way. No matter what his route, he’s going to get soaked.

But almost a half-hour later, when he exits at 50th Street and Eighth Avenue, the downpour has ended. The city remains a sauna, and Cone reflects morosely that all he needs is someone to beat him with birch branches. He carries his raincoat and splashes through puddles and running gutters down to 47th Street and westward to Tenth Avenue.

Ramsey’s building looks the way Cone imagined it: peeling paint, torn shades, cracked windows. It is dreary and dying, and no way would you figure it as the residence of a Wall Street plunger.

There’s a spindly-legged little girl on the sidewalk. She’s about nine, and she’s skipping rope to the repeated chant:

“Hubba, hubba, hubba,

You better use a rubbeh.

Or your ma will be a bubbeh.”

A freckled, red-haired boy is sitting on the sagging stoop, watching her. He looks to Cone to be about eleven, going on forty-six.

“You live here?” Cone asks him.

The kid stares at him coldly. “What’s it to you?”

“I’m looking for Paul Ramsey. You know him?”

“I don’t know nothing, I don’t.”

“He’s supposed to live in this building.”

“I’m not saying, I’m not.”

“But you heard the name?”

“I told you I don’t know, I told you.”

Cone sighs. “Who are you—Joey Echo? All right, I’ll see for myself.”

He starts up the stoop. The kid stands up.

“Hey,” he says, “you want to know about this guy, you want to know? Cost you a buck.”

Cone digs out his wallet, fishes out a dollar, hands it over.

“I don’t know nothing, I don’t,” the kid yells and darts away.

Outraged, Timothy watches the juvenile con man race down the street. Then he laughs at how easily he’s been scammed. He figures that kid will end up President or doing ten-to-twenty in Attica.

He goes into the cramped vestibule that smells of urine and boiled cabbage. There’s a bellplate but no names are listed in the slots. But there are names on the mailboxes. Two are listed for Apartment 5-A.

One is Paul Ramsey.

The other is Edward Steiner.

He gets a cab going downtown on Ninth Avenue. The hackie wants to talk baseball, but Cone isn’t having any; he’s got too much to brood about.

There’s this woman, Sally Steiner, who goes for 10,000 shares in Wee Tot Fashions, Inc., in an insider trading scheme at Pistol & Burns. And there’s this man, Paul Ramsey, who buys 27,000 shares of Trimbley & Diggs, Inc., in what is apparently another insider scam at Snellig Firsten Holbrook. And this Ramsey lives in an apartment with a guy named Edward Steiner.

Maybe the two Steiners aren’t related, don’t even know each other. Coincidences do happen—but don’t bet on it. The Wall Street dick wonders how far he should push what he’s already calling the “Steiner Connection.”

He’s back in the loft, pacing back and forth, when a light bulb flashes over his head, just like a character in a cartoon strip. And suddenly he remembers what he’s been trying to recall these past few days, something he heard that struck a tinny note. It comes to him now.

Jeremy Bigelow said that when he interviewed Sally Steiner in the course of his investigation of the Wee Tot Fashions deal, she claimed she bought her 10,000 shares because she wanted to get Wee Tot’s reports. She was planning to quit the garbage business. She hoped to learn more about the manufacture, distribution, and sale of children’s clothing.

Now, as Cone well knows, people sometimes do buy stock to get a company’s reports and possibly learn about the business. And sometimes they buy stock just so they can attend the annual meeting of stockholders and may get a free box lunch. But those objectives can be achieved by purchasing one share, ten, or maybe a hundred. But buying 10,000 shares just to get quarterly reports? Ridiculous!

Cone curses his own stupidity; he should have caught it from the start. It’s obvious to him now that Sally Steiner bought her stake because she knew something or had heard something about the takeover of Wee Tot Fashions, and was out to make a quick buck.

He goes to the wall telephone in his greasy little kitchenette and calls Neal K. Davenport, a detective with the New York Police Department. He’s worked with Davenport on a few things, and the city bull owes him.

“Hey, sherlock,” the NYPD man says cheerily. “How’ya doing? I haven’t heard from you in weeks. You’ve found another patsy in the Department?”

“Nah,” Cone says, “nothing like that. I just haven’t been working anything you’d be interested in.”

“Glad to hear it. Every time you get me involved, I end up sweating my tush. So why are you calling now?”

“It’s about the commercial garbage-collection business.”

“Oh?” Davenport says. “Thinking of changing jobs, are you? I’d say you’re eminently qualified. You want a letter of recommendation?”

“Cut the bullshit,” Cone says, “and just tell me if I’m right. Private garbage collection, waste disposal, and cartage in Manhattan is pretty much controlled by the Families—correct?”

“So I’ve heard,” the NYPD man says. “They’re supposed to have the whole fucking city divided up into districts and neighborhoods. If you want to pick up shit, you’ve got to pay dues to the bentnoses. There was an investigation years ago, but nothing came of it. The DA’s witness disappeared and hasn’t been heard from since. So what else is new?”

“Thanks,” Cone says. “Nice talking to you.”

“Hey, wait a minute,” Davenport says. “You got something on the mob’s connection?”

“Not a thing,” Cone assures him. “If I come across anything, you’ll be the first to know.”

“I won’t hold my breath,” the city cop says.

Cone hangs up and stares at Cleo thoughtfully.

“Something stinks,” he tells the cat. “And it ain’t garbage, kiddo.”

S
ALLY STALLS VIC ANGELO
and Mario Corsini for two weeks. It’s a gamble; if she can’t come up with a winner, then she loses Steiner Waste Control and access to inside secrets in trash collected from Bechtold Printing. And that’ll be the end of her Big Chance.