Hard Stop sahm-4

by Chris Knopf

  “Deranged by ambition and greed. I thought we covered that.”

  “We did.”

  This time of the season most of the big powerboats had emptied out of the Little Peconic Bay. There were still small fishing boats hugging the buoys and rocking in the turbulence above the shoals, and a scattered fleet of sailboats responding to the better wind and lighter traffic. Again, I felt a pull as I watched the sails angled to the wind glide across the green coast of the North Fork.

  “Getting out on the boat much?” I asked Burton.

  “A cruise or two. Club racing. Enough to satisfy the impulse.”

  “Is that impulse a lifetime thing?” I asked.

  “Begins in utero,” said Burton.

  “Hm.”

  We studied the approach and subsequent disorganized tack of a small sloop. Neither of us wanted to break the spell by criticizing the maneuver.

  “I need to talk to Angel Valero,” I said. “I think I have an introduction, but I need a shtick. Something to get him talking.”

  Burton always looked slightly in need of a haircut. A thing he drew notice to by frequently using his fingers to comb his hair off his forehead, a futile gesture when sitting at the edge of the breezy Little Peconic Bay.

  “Large-scale investments are at once dauntingly complex and simple as it gets,” he said. “The complexity is all in the targeting of opportunity, the valuation and subsequent number crunching, the accounting and regulatory contortions, conflicts in corporate structures, tax implications—our bailiwick—and personnel considerations, mostly as it relates to management, though sometimes middle management and unions come into play. To say nothing of core business practices and strategic planning.”

  “What’s the simple part?” I asked.

  “The motivation.”

  “Ambition and greed?”

  “Natural economic evolution. The formation and reformation of corporate enterprise, a necessary function of a dynamic free market system. Anyway, people like to buy and sell things, and when those things are worth billions of dollars, it calls for robust capital markets. It also breeds people like Angel Valero.”

  “A dealmaker.” I said.

  “Not exactly. Angel operates on the outer fringes of the hedge fund and private equity business. Very aggressive, creative, risk-based. The type who buys a business, usually distressed, at a big discount, reorganizes the company, then rearranges the playing field, changing not only the business model but the market in which it operates.”

  “You can do that?”

  “Angel runs a unit at Craig they all call Special Ops, short for special opportunities, meaning anything you can turn into a huge profit if you have huge capital to invest and a willingness to take the accordant risk. A slot machine maker in country A is bankrupt, partly because country B next door has banned gambling. You buy the slot business, figure out a way to repeal the gambling law, and bingo, if you’ll forgive the expression. A bank in the next country is collapsing under defaults because management is made up of second cousins who happen to be the brothers and sisters of the borrowers. You buy the bank at a fire-sale price, broom everyone in management, entice a third party collections operation with giant commissions and have at it. It’s a lot harder than it sounds, but people like Angel Valero do it every day.”

  “Make good money, does he?”

  “A few hundred million a year, if you believe the street. I think that’s an underestimate. Craig is privately held, and pretty opaque, but the word is Special Ops comprises a tenth of the revenue and forty percent of the profit.”

  “So Angel will talk to me if I have a lead on an exotic, undervalued financial opportunity.” I gestured toward the driveway. “Like a 1967 Pontiac Grand Prix.”

  “An asset to tantalize the cagiest investor.”

  For some reason Eddie brought us a slimy piece of driftwood that he’d pulled from one of the tidal pools next to the beach. He dropped it in front of Burton and stood poised to chase it like he usually did with normal things like oak limbs and tennis balls.

  Burton obliged and we watched Eddie do his soaring wonder dog routine off the breakwater.

  “Sorry about that,” I said to Burton, watching him wipe his hands on his khaki duck hunters.

  “Interesting departure.”

  “That’s what he wants you to think.”

  Eddie’s toss-the-beach-debris game and a few more beers occupied the rest of the productive day. We wandered down some desultory conversational paths, some relating to the dismal prospects of any baseball franchise arrayed against the Yankees. Burton caught me up on the garden renovations at his estate over near the ocean, and his success at tiling the master bathroom. Years ago he’d set himself the challenge of mastering—or at least making an honest go of—the construction trades, an area of common interest that first brought us together. As with most things Burton did, it was misinterpreted as a way to get in touch with working-class sensibilities. Burton just liked to build stuff, and uncover wonderful new experiences, like meeting the dry cleaner or using an ATM card at the grocery store.

  “By the way,” he said to me as I walked him back to his car, “Angel worked as a professional wrestler while earning his MBA. His nom de guerre was ‘The Brainiac.’ Word is physical intimidation features largely in his negotiating repertoire.”

  While I watched Burton drive off in his late-seventies Ford Country Squire, an automotive atavism as illogical as the Grand Prix, Eddie trotted up to me with another hunk of driftwood, more slickened with saliva than brine. I reached down to take it, but he moved out of the way and headed for Amanda’s place.

  “Good luck with that one,” I called to him, but he continued undeterred, head upright and tail under sail, happy in his eccentricities.

  For all I know Eddie and Amanda spent the rest of the evening tossing and retrieving smelly chunks of petrified wood. Neither of them interrupted me as I sat at the pine table on the screened-in porch scribbling on a yellow legal pad. This was a habit of mine left over from my troubleshooting career. Writing things down helped me think, if only by holding certain thoughts immobile as suppositions to validate or upend.

  Deep into the night, I was still underlining and pointing arrows at one of these suppositions when a thought occurred to me. I picked up the phone.

  “Wha’,” said Jackie.

  “If you’re stoned I can call you back.”

  “Asleep. What time is it?”

  “Bedtime. If you live in the next time zone.”

  “Christ.”

  “Is your computer still on?” I asked her.

  “My computer’s at the office. My old computer that I hardly ever use is on the porch disintegrating in the salt air.”

  “Can you use it to get on the Internet?”

  “Oh, you heard about the Internet? Did you also hear that you, too, could access this modern marvel simply by buying your own fucking computer?”

  “Start ’er up. I’ll hold,” I said, lighting a cigarette and settling into a more comfortable chair.

  She said a few more things I couldn’t make out, I guess intentionally. About ten minutes later she came back on the line.

  “Finding the thing under all the stuff on my desk was the biggest challenge,” she said. “Started right up. Good old HP.”

  “See what you can find on Jerome Gelb, an employee of Eisler, Johnson.”

  “Iku’s place.”

  “Former place, according to Gelb.”

  I knew enough not to interrupt her when I could hear the tap-tap of the keyboard, so I let her work in silence.

  “He’s a senior partner,” she said, several minutes later. “Way up the food chain. Specialist in strategic mergers and acquisitions within global heavy industry. Ran Eisler offices in Zurich, Mumbai, Tehran—I didn’t know you could have an office in Tehran—Caracas and Tokyo, for ten years, before returning to New York to head up their International Energy Practice. A graduate of Wharton, he’s married with two children, his
hobby is foreign languages, and his favorite quote is ‘If you snooze, you lose.’ I wonder how you say that in Farsi.”

  “No mention of Marla Cantor,” I said.

  “Who’s that?”

  “His girlfriend.”

  “Oh.”

  “How’re you on American literature?” I asked.

  “Excellent, Bub. I was an English major.”

  “See if you can get Zelda Fitzgerald’s address and phone number.”

  She was quiet on the end of the line.

  “Sorry, Sam. I focused on the early nineteenth century. Mostly Romantics. Like me.”

  “Just look. I think she’s here on Long Island. Maybe in the City.”

  I could hear the patter of Jackie’s fingers on the keys, frantic little bursts alternating with cautious deliberation. In my mind’s eye I could see her staring, more like glowering, at the screen. Coaxing the computer to give up the goods.

  “Holy cow, there she is,” she said, after about ten minutes. “In Amagansett.”

  “You have her address?”

  “She’s a big donor to the East Hampton Library.”

  “And why not?”

  “It just says ‘Zelda Fitzgerald of Amagansett.’ Let me see if I can get closer than that.”

  I could almost hear the baying of hounds as Jackie mounted the chase. Even dragged out of a deep sleep, she was helpless in the face of her own inquisitiveness.

  “Unless there’s more than one Zelda Fitzgerald on the East End, I’ve got her address. Phone’s unlisted. I could try the wireless directory.”

  “You could?”

  “Oh, please.”

  When I was a kid, Amagansett, on the east side of East Hampton, seemed as far away as Chicago. Later it was a stop on the way to Montauk, where my father and I hired out to the sport fishermen, a part-time trade he brought me into out of some peculiar sense of paternal obligation. I didn’t like the work or the clients, but I liked being out on the water with the captains and crew.

  “I can’t find a phone number,” said Jackie. “Maybe Zelda doesn’t have a phone.”

  “It could be in Scott’s name.”

  “I’m assuming this is connected to Iku Kinjo,” she said.

  “It is.”

  “Keep Sullivan in the loop,” she said. “Even the guesses.”

  “I will. You should go to bed. It’s way too late to be messing around on the computer.”

  “Unbelievable.”

  I’d been messing around myself for the last five or six hours with little in the way of drink to keep me company. This left me strangely sober and awake, a condition I corrected with a sturdy nightcap. My mood lately had been drifting alarmingly toward unaccustomed moderation. I should keep an eye on that, I thought to myself as I fell back on the daybed, flicked out the light and looked at the big blue moon staring brilliantly above the black horizon.

  I tried to get Sullivan the next morning but he was up island visiting the DA. So I left a message on his office answering machine. I told him about Jerome Gelb and Marla Cantor. And Angel Valero. I told him I got Angel’s name from Bobby Dobson. Then I told him I was on my way to Zelda’s house in Amagansett, but if he could call me with any news I’d be grateful. I didn’t know if they monitored his voice mail at the station, so I didn’t mention forensics, but he’d know what I meant.

  I’d decided to head over to Zelda’s since I still hadn’t worked out my approach to Angel Valero. It was a Friday in late September, so there was a better than even chance she’d be in the City. Jackie’d told me there were a dozen Zelda Fitzgeralds in Manhattan alone. More specifics would have to wait.

  Anyway, it was a good day for a drive. I had Eddie with me, who was having a hard time deciding which window to stick his head out of. I tried to focus him by shutting the two in the back, but he barked at me until I opened them again.

  “Next time you drive. See how you like it.”

  He stared at me, considering the offer.

  “Not until you learn the stick shift.”

  The calendar said it was fall, but it still looked and felt like summer. A few of the trees, mostly unhealthy maples, had begun to turn red and yellow, but the rest were still green. The clearest sign of the change in seasons was the traffic on Montauk Highway, still heavy but moving. I took the back roads anyway, partly out of habit and partly to catch the views off Scuttle Hole Road, the white fences, barns, vineyards and potato fields. And to give Eddie a chance to yelp at the show horses, none of whom were inclined to retort.

  According to the map, Zelda’s house was equidistant between the beach and downtown Amagansett, which was essentially a short row of shops to either side of Montauk Highway, which I passed before dropping down toward the ocean. The houses lining the streets were mostly standard Hamptons shingle-style cottages of a certain vintage. Out in the fields beyond were clusters of newly developed attempts at postmodernism, and the occasional all-out mansion. The really serious stuff was at the end of white-pebbled driveways, standing like citadels behind towering fortifications of privet and arborvitae.

  Knowing this, I was interested to see the number for Zelda’s place beside a drive made up of two parallel bands of sand, with a strip of grass in between, that disappeared around a curve a hundred yards into a stand of scrub oak and evergreen.

  The Grand Prix wasn’t the world’s best off-road vehicle, so I took it very slowly. I pulled Eddie back from the window and raised it so he couldn’t jump out. I was afraid of creatures lurking in the woods whose scent might prove irresistible.

  As I approached the house, I was braced for Jay Gatsby. What I got was Brothers Grimm.

  The cottage looked like it had been built inside a pair of gigantic holly trees. The front door was in the middle of the gable end, with a pair of windows to either side, and a Palladian half-circle above. It was stucco imbedded with wide slabs of wavy planks of thickly painted wood. The front stoop, a single rounded chunk of grey stone, was only a few inches high. In fact, it looked like the house was set directly on the ground, a possibility given its vintage, which I guessed to be late 1800s. The driveway ended under a pergola, which was doing a poor job of sheltering a leaf-splattered Nissan Altima.

  I left Eddie in the car and did my best to wield the ten-ton brass door knocker. The door was snapped open by a very tall young woman in a kimono. Her features were unnaturally small for her size, probably exaggerated by the cut of her dark black hair, which curved down from a center part to form two sharp points just below her chin. The color of her eyes was at that moment a mystery, covered as they were by tiny black sunglasses.

  “I saw you coming,” she said. “I don’t usually stand by the door.”

  “Zelda Fitzgerald?”

  “And who would be asking?”

  “Sam Acquillo. I was a friend of Iku Kinjo.”

  Her sloped shoulders fell a few degrees forward.

  “It’s horrible,” she said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She leaned against the doorjamb, taking the weight off one long leg. “How did you say you knew Iku?” she asked.

  “I didn’t. I knew her from work.”

  She stood up straight again and reached for the door.

  “Not a client, I hope,” she said, her voice gaining a notch in volume.

  “Not Angel, if that’s what you mean,” I said.

  “Fucking Angel is how we put it.”

  She started to close the door. I put my hand out to stop her.

  “I’m the one who found her.”

  She let go of the door and leaned back on the jamb, and studied me. At least I think she did. It was hard to tell with her eyes blacked out.

  “It’s malarkey, you know,” she said, after a pause.

  “What is?” I asked.

  “Suicide. Would never happen.”

  “That’s what they’re saying?”

  “Possible suicide. It was on the news this morning.”

  News to me.

  “Wh
at do you think?” I asked. “If not suicide.”

  “I have a kettle boiling. You drink tea?”

  “Under duress.”

  “Come in anyway. Maybe I can find some coffee.”

  She fell back into the house and I followed her. The style of the interior carried through the general motif. I was glad she was leading the way. The woodwork was so dark I could barely see where I was going as we moved through the front hall, which was dominated by a stubby grandfather clock and the stuffed head of a black bear. The ceiling might have been seven feet high, probably less. Zelda almost had to crouch to get through the doors. In the kitchen things lightened up considerably, helped along by a wall-length window made of maybe fifty individual panes of glass. The kitchen was packed into a tight space, but sparkling clean and organized.

  The smell from a thick, blue-grey spice plant, I guessed thyme, filled the air. A fat little tea kettle whistled on the stove, as advertised.

  “I used to drink coffee,” said Zelda, “until my father died of cardiac arrest one morning at breakfast. The sight of him sitting there in disbelief sticks with a person.”

  She scooped up the kettle and dumped the steaming water into a mug. It smelled great.

  “I’m sold,” I said. “Give me one of those.”

  “It’s Hibiscus Paradise. Irresistible aroma.”

  “Apparently.”

  After handing me a mug, she leaned up against the counter and clinked around hers with a spoon. She still wore the black-dot sunglasses. The kimono told about as much as any kimono about the shape underneath. The V at her neck took a pretty severe plunge, but I was trying hard not to look. I was only able to judge the shape of her shoulders, which were wide and angular, like a swimmer’s. The fingers that held the mug were also long and thin.

  “I only knew Iku on the job,” I said to her. “I’m glad to know she had friends. Had a life outside.”

  Zelda clinked the mug a few more times.

  “How did you know she was a friend of mine?”

  I picked a New Yorker off the counter.

  “You get these at Bobby’s house.”

  She pursed her lips.

  “Quite the long shot,” she said.