To Catch a Bad Guy (6 page)

“Fair enough.” Hank
Bostoff rose from his seat. “Now I hope that you gentlemen will agree with me
that we’ve sufficiently beaten this dead horse. Unless there are any other
items to discuss, I’d like to call this meeting adjourned.”

Jon nodded in curt
acquiescence as he watched Paul rise from his seat, wishing his Vassar-educated
brother would keep his nose out of the business affairs altogether. Left to his
own devices, Jon might actually be able to squeeze some much-needed revenue out
of Bostoff Securities after all. Of course, his father had no idea about any of
this. The old man was under the impression that you could still run the
business as though it were the eighties and nineties. Well, things had changed
since then. Bostoff Securities was generating a fraction of the revenues that
it used to bring in. Other firms had adjusted to the changing landscape, but
Hank Bostoff liked doing things the sure way, which made Bostoff Securities a
dinosaur among its competitors. The firm desperately needed new clients. Now
that Hank was finally ready to retire, Jon was determined to make up for all
the missed opportunities.

It was six forty-five
p.m. on the dot when Jonathan Bostoff pulled into the driveway of his house. At
the Bostoff household, dinner was served at seven, and his wife did not take kindly
to tardiness. But then it was not as though Jon minded: he was all for working
hard, but he preferred to let his subordinates burn the midnight oil. Jon was
at his desk at eight a.m. every morning, and he usually left work no later than
six p.m. to spend the evening with his family. His wife, his three children,
and his sizeable house were the sources of his pride.

As he often did upon
arriving home from work, Jon paused on the front stairs of his seven-bedroom
house to survey his domain. He had signed the deed for the house two years ago,
but the reality of it was still pleasantly new to him. The prestigious
Westbury, Long Island location filled him with warming pride every time he came
home. His children were enrolled in the best schools in the state, and his wife
presided over some of the most prestigious social committees in the country. But
then Candace Bostoff, nee Covington, did not need Jonathan Bostoff to give
these things to her. They were hers by birthright, and the fact that she chose
to become Candace Bostoff, allowing Jon to be the one to give them to her, was
an honor in itself.

“Hello, darling!”
Candace’s voice carried through the hallway, as she rushed to greet him. As
usual, she looked stunning. Her honey-blond, shoulder-length hair fell loosely
down her back, and her serene, oval-shaped face was immaculately made up. Jon
never understood his friends’ drooling over twenty-year-old nymphets. Candace
was Jon’s age. Actually, she was six months his senior, and he thought she
looked more stunning than any twenty-year-old.

“Hello, baby.” Jon
leaned in for a kiss. God, he loved his wife’s smell – had loved it ever since
he had stolen a kiss from her in college. It was the smell of old money, class
and success: everything that Jon had yearned for for years, and everything that
was finally within his grasp.

“Honey, the kids are
home!” Candace disengaged herself from Jon’s embrace when his hand began to
wander past her waist.

“Yes, well, their daddy
missed his wife,” Jon whispered into Candace’s ear.

“Dad!” Jon’s youngest
son ran down the corridor toward him.

“Oliver!” Jon hugged
his son. When Oliver was younger, Jon used to lift him up and twirl him around,
but he was eleven now and too grown-up to be lifted up.

“Hi, Daddy.” Jon’s
daughter, Amber, greeted him from afar, and he respected her newly reserved
demeanor. She would be thirteen in a few months, and already the awkwardness of
adolescence was beginning to manifest itself in her. Not physically, of course
- Jon’s beautiful daughter was the replica of her gorgeous mother - but
emotionally.

At seven o’clock sharp,
Jon Bostoff sat at the head of the vast oblong table in his dining room with
Oliver and Amber seated on either side of him. His eldest son, Tyler, was
eighteen and had just started his first year at Princeton. The kid was a bona
fide brainiac. Having taken college level classes in high school, Tyler was
already a fully-fledged sophomore in his freshman year. Jon was proud of his
eldest son, but he was also worried. He did not want the kid to spend his
college years with his nose buried in books. Sure, knowledge was important, but
it was never what you knew; it was whom you knew. There was a reason why Jon
had sent his son to Princeton. He wanted Tyler to develop connections that would
set him up for life, and Jon was more than prepared to foot the steep tuition
bill for that.

Candace smiled at Jon
from the other end of the table. The table itself had cost somewhere in the
vicinity of twenty grand; it was hand-made from solid oak by an exclusive
furniture designer. The price tag was obscene in Jon’s opinion, but he wanted
to make sure that Candace had everything she deserved. God knew it had taken
him long enough to procure it, so when he signed the deed on the house, he told
Candace that she had carte blanche to furnish the place.

“Daddy!” Oliver brought
Jon back to reality.

“Yes, Ollie?”

“Can we go to the beach
house this weekend?”

Jon shot a questioning
glance at Candace. When it came to child rearing matters, he left all the
decisions to his wife. After noticing a barely perceptible nod from his wife,
Jon nodded.

“Sure, buddy. I don’t
see why not. It will be too cold to go into the ocean, but we could still have
a picnic on the beach. What do you say, Amber?” Jon shot a hopeful glance at
his daughter.

“Can I bring one of my
friends along?”

“Sure, pumpkin, by all
means,” Jon conceded. Lately, it seemed that his daughter had become incapable
of doing anything on her own. Everywhere she went, she had to be accompanied by
a clique of shrieking, gum-chewing, constantly text-messaging teenage girls.
Well, the house in the Hamptons had nine bedrooms. The beachfront property had
become Jon’s in the beginning of the year, and the past summer had been the
family’s first season at the property. For Jon Bostoff, that summer would
forever retain a magical quality. Sure, they had owned a summer house before,
but their old summerhouse was a mere shack in Connecticut with a whopping
fifteen minute drive to the beach to boot. Jon was no fool; he realized that
many people would give their right arm to have his old, perfectly cozy,
three-bedroom beach house in Connecticut that had since been sold to its new
owner, but, in Jon’s opinion, the shack in Connecticut was not good enough for
Candace, and by extension it was not good enough for him.

“And, Dad?”

“Yes, buddy?”

“For the winter break
we’ll go skiing just like last year, right?”

“Slow down, Ollie. It’s
only September.” Jon grinned. “But yes, we will go skiing just like last year.”
Jon’s mind started doing the calculations, as he tousled his son’s hair. If the
business panned out the way he hoped (and he could think of no reason why it
should not) he just might swing that ski lodge he had been eyeing in Vail,
Colorado. It was bound to be a nice Christmas surprise for Candace and the
kids.

“Ah, Dad, I might have
some Christmas break plans,” Amber ventured.

“Oh?” All at once Jon
awoke from his musings.

“We’ll talk about it,
Amber,” Candace shot a warning glance at her daughter. “You know how important
family time is to us. Your daddy works very hard to make all of this possible.”
Candace made a sweeping motion with her graceful arm through the air.

“But I want to go
somewhere warm.” Amber pouted. “I was going to stay with Christy. Her family’s
got a house in the Caymans.”

Jon gulped. There was a
downside to having your kid attend one of the most prestigious schools in the
state. You were bound to be outdone by the parents of the other kids, and there
was just no way Jon could swing a tropical mansion this year. Maybe next year.
Definitely next year, Jon resolved.

Later that night when
Jon waited for his wife to join him in bed, his mind returned to its usual
activity: tallying things up, as Jon called it, or keeping score. He was
thirty-nine years old. In a year, he would be forty. Things were finally
starting to get on track. At times, he wondered at Candace’s patience. In all
their years together, ever since he first had kissed her at a party at Duke,
she had remained faithfully by his side. Throughout their marriage, she had
never once complained about their starter three-bedroom house in Connecticut,
their kids attending public schools, or her driving a five-year-old Audi
instead of last year’s Mercedes or BMW. Not that her family had been of the
same opinion.

The Covingtons came of
old money made in oil and real estate, and they expected their only daughter to
be married to a man of solid stock. Granted, Jonathan Bostoff had two pennies
to rub to his name, but Bostoff was not the name that Mr. and Mrs. Covington
expected their daughter to carry. At Duke, Candace had many suitors vying for
her attention: wealthy, handsome undergraduates with seven-figure futures all
lined up for them, courtesy of their fathers. And then there was Jonathan
Bostoff, the first generation in his family to go to college, and with a pedigree
that was nothing to speak of. While the Covingtons had accepted Candace’s
choice of a husband, they had made it clear that they were not going to help
the young couple. Candace had a small inheritance left to her by grandparents.
When her parents passed on, she would receive her share of their wealth, but
while they were alive, in no way would the Covingtons aid Jon Bostoff, either
with their capital or with their connections. Not that Jon wanted his in-laws’
help. He wanted to give Candace the life she was meant to have all on his own.

During his years at
Duke, Jonathan Bostoff fervently had wished he could alter his family history.
The idea was not all that far-fetched, as many who rose to money and wealth
from obscure origins often replaced their less than stellar beginnings with
glamorous pasts, but in Jon’s case, it was utterly impossible. Hank Bostoff was
fond of reminiscing about his “humble beginnings” in interviews and speeches. A
son of a construction worker and a homemaker, Hank Bostoff went to the
University of Life, as he liked to put it, and did not have any formal
education beyond a high school degree. Even that he had finished at night.
While he went to school at night, Hank got a job as a shoeshine boy on Wall
Street. That was his first exposure to the world of finance, and even though at
the time he had no idea how to accomplish it, Hank vowed to one day join the
ranks of the expensively suited men who tipped him generously for polishing
their fine leather shoes. While he thought of a way to materialize his
aspirations, Hank bided his time by polishing his clients’ shoes vigorously
enough to see his own reflection in them and reading left-over copies of the
Wall Street Journal he found on the train and took home to his parents’
multi-family house in Brooklyn.

As luck would have it,
Hank did not have to wait long. After about a year on the job, an old floor
broker noticed how quick Hank was on his feet and offered him a job as a floor
runner on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. The job was exactly
what it sounded like: it involved running orders up and down the trading floor.
Sometimes the order entrusted to Hank could be as large as several hundred
thousand dollars, but that never worried Hank Bostoff: his feet were fast and
nimble, and he had a stellar memory aided by a mind that could tally up numbers
quicker than a calculator. Within two years, Hank was promoted to a broker.
From that point on, Hank Bostoff’s life was on the upswing. Within the next
three years, he paid off the mortgage on his parents’ house and bought a
three-bedroom house for himself in an adjacent neighborhood in Brooklyn. A year
later, Hank married his high school sweetheart, and nine months later his first
son, Jonathan, was born.

Jonathan remembered vividly
the gradual transformations of his family’s house in Brooklyn: the addition of
extra bedrooms and bathrooms, the expansion of the kitchen, and then, one very
exciting spring, the sight of sweaty men in work clothes digging up the ground
in the backyard for the pool. The pool was only fifteen feet long, but to Jon
it had seemed huge. He relished picking and choosing among his friends, who
suddenly almost doubled in numbers, the lucky ones who would get to enjoy the
cool water reprieve from the stifling summer heat. Jon had heard it many times
that money could not buy happiness, but he knew firsthand that money could most
certainly buy popularity and respect, and if that was not happiness, he did not
know what was.

Several summers later
came another big change: the Bostoffs’ move to Connecticut. By then Hank
Bostoff owned his own firm: Bostoff Securities. His wife had convinced Hank
that it was time for them to upgrade their living quarters. After all, Hank
often entertained at home, and he could not very well bring business associates
to Brooklyn. Jon had been fourteen at the time, and he became keenly aware that
while money was important, it was not enough in itself. It might have been
enough in Brooklyn, but in Connecticut people wanted to know where you came
from and what school degrees your father had. At neighbors’ barbecues, Jon
flushed red when he heard whispers behind his father’s back, ridiculing his
Brooklyn accent and saw Connecticut housewives raising eyebrows at his mother’s
choice of makeup and dress.

Thankfully, his mother
was as perceptive as Jon. Within a matter of weeks, she had reinvented herself,
shunning loud prints for subdued pastels and toning down her makeup to the
natural shades the neighborhood housewives favored. Even her diction had
changed, becoming softer. Within a matter of months, Mrs. Bostoff became the
neighborhood’s favorite, helping with the committee at the country club, active
on the local school board – you name it, Jon’s mother was on it. His father, on
the other hand, was not nearly as perceptive. He refused to alter himself for
anyone; moreover, he was ridiculously proud of his beginnings – something that
Jon wished his father would obliterate. There was nothing wrong with
reinventing one’s past to match one’s station in life; people did it all the
time. During a confidence Jon had shared with one of his dates, Stephanie
Douben – a pretty blonde with an upturned nose and sky-blue eyes – Jon learned
that her real name was Dobrowski, which her father, a manufacturing magnate,
had changed to Douben. The fact that his own father could not be as
enterprising vexed Jon to no end. Still, Jon had managed to make a good enough
career in high school. Contrary to his father’s advice to go for football, Jon
joined the lacrosse team and made captain. Thanks to his handsome looks, he
dated some of the most popular girls in his school, and his quick wit as well
as the generous allowance granted by his father made Jon well-liked by all his
classmates. In his senior year of high school, Jon received an acceptance
letter from Duke University. Jon still remembered his parents seeing him off to
college: his father full of pride and his mother teary-eyed.