Hello Marge Blitz.
Marge was large, but didn’t see herself that way. Like anorexics think of themselves as fat, Marge thought of herself as sleek and graceful. She avoided mirrors and small chairs which tended to disillusion the illusion. She was a rising star at the Securities and Exchange Commission until either she hit the glass ceiling or fell on her face from drinking too much, depending on whom you asked.
A big crash in either case. The arbitrator bought her explanation, finding sexual discrimination and harassment in the heap of warnings, write-ups, suspensions and other disciplinary action which stressed the seams of her personnel file, and ordered her reinstated with full back pay and responsibilities. “I told you so,” Marge told her old boss when she re-entered the workplace, and barged her way into his office waving a copy of the arbitrator’s award like it was the flag of freedom.
“Marge,” he responded, “that arbitrator must have been as drunk as you.”
She was assigned a new boss, a female boss who sat her down for a heart to heart. “Marge, you won your case, but are you sure this is what you want? I’d be pleased to help you find another job. Or maybe some, uh, professional counseling?”
“I love my job,” Marge answered, “and I’m damn good at it.”
“But…”
“I know a lot of people around here think I’m a drinker, but I assure you that’s not true. I’m a social drinker.”
Marge’s new boss assigned her to be temporary head of the DeltaTek insider trading investigation in Boston, which, based on preliminary reports, looked like an isolated and manageable molehill not threatening to become a mountain. “Marge,” the new boss said as she waved her out of town, “I hope you take advantage of this opportunity. This may be your last chance. No more maverick bullshit.”
Marge felt she had a lot to prove, and disprove.
“What do you think of Selma Floyd?” she asked her assistant Kurt Knight as they stared at the color-coded chart which hung on the wall in Marge’s Boston office, and which summarized DeltaTek stock trades over the seven-hour period from noon until 7:00 pm on October 4, with columns for time, volume, price, names of buyer and seller, and suspected links to insiders.
Selma Floyd, Brockleman’s secretary, was newly listed on the chart as a suspected insider on account of the dime-dropping interview given by her work colleague Avril Fenton. The interviewer’s accompanying memo concluded: “…Fact Ms. Fenton unaware of statutory bounty, although now may seek, enhances credibility as concerned citizen coming forward. Also, roses confirmed, Dallas to Boston.”
Kurt Knight knew the drill, and liked it. He was warned that no sane person could work with Marge Blitz, but he wanted to transfer to Boston where he had friends, from his lonely outpost in the SEC hinterlands, and he was historically comfortable with impossible women. So he took the job. She was considerably larger than he was. She could bench press him. She could take him in a fight. In his first few days on the job, he told his friends, it looked like she wanted to take him in a fight. His friends enjoyed the image of a ferocious Amazon chasing little Kurt around the office. “What exactly do you think she’ll do with you,” one asked, “after she gets you subdued?”
But in less than a month, Marge and Kurt were tight. She invited him into her office and told him everything about her ex-husband, her new support group, her fashion ideas, and she offered him drinks. He made himself comfortable in her easy chair, and sipped his drink and enjoyed the interplay. “This may come as a shock to you, Marge,” he said, “but a secretary isn’t always just an order taker. I think it’s very possible that Selma, if she were doing the bad thing, was doing it by herself.”
“Oh please,” Marge responded with a fury. “You’re so naïve. You’re the original country boy, snoozing in a hayfield. Believe me: I’ve seen a thousand secretarial cases. This only happens if, as and when Selma’s big, fat, powerful boss pulls her strings.” To dramatize her point, she uncapped a violet magic marker and scrawled Brockleman’s name on the chart in capital letters on top of and all over Selma’s. “Brockleman’s the big fish in this aquarium,” she said with glee and relish. “I want him.”
Marge’s first breakthrough came early on, when Ben Grevere’s full service broker fully cooperated, identifying Ben as the buyer of five hundred shares at 4:03 pm on the day in question, a transaction consummated while both the stock price and Eugene Binh were in free fall. Marge pushed aside Ben’s morphine drip, and an uncooperative floor nurse, to start Ben on questions while he lay like a sitting duck in his hospital bed. Ben didn’t put up much opposition. “I didn’t think what I was doing was wrong,” he said.
He was talking on his cell phone to the Mulverne team, giving play-by-play, when Johnny Angelo snatched the mouse from the distracted and distraught Eugene Binh. “I didn’t have to be Peter Lynch to know the stock price was going to go up,” Ben explained. “Johnny eliminated a big hazard. So I speed-dialed my broker to make the trade. By the time I got through, Eugene was crashing through the glass above my head. The last thing I remember before the lights went out was screaming ‘yes’ when my broker confirmed the trade order back to me.”
Ben agreed to disgorge his gain, which in his case meant not flying his wife to visit her ailing mother in Greece, which he had proposed to his wife as an anniversary present and which brought tears to her eyes an hour before Marge appeared at his door. He also agreed not to say anything to anyone at DeltaTek or anyplace else, all as more fully set forth in the papers which Marge pushed under his nose. “But one last thing,” Marge said with the utmost gravity, “I need the name of someone else.”
“I don’t know anyone else.”
“I need a name.”
“Even if I knew someone, I wouldn’t want to give…”
“I need a name, or this doesn’t end now.”
“I don’t know a name…”
“I need a name.”
“I…well, maybe Johnny Angelo…”
Ben slumped back feeling dirty and used, clicking the life out of his morphine control button, while Marge marched out a satisfied woman girding her loins for her next investigative opportunity. For the record, Ben didn’t wholly imagine Johnny’s culpability. In the days leading up to Eugene’s crack-up, with the stock price rising and Code B looking like a contender, stock talk was free and loose in DeltaTek’s corridors. Option holders rooted and groused like feverish fans in the heat of a pennant race. When Johnny Angelo attached Ben to the window-washer cords he wondered sotto voce whether Eugene was buying or selling. Which started Ben thinking about the possibilities.
Johnny turned out to be a tougher nut to crack. Johnny called his pal Joey at 2:15 pm to report the stock’s downside potential in the face of Eugene’s threat, but didn’t get around to calling Joey back with the upside news until close to 5:00 pm, when the stock had stopped crashing and was already back to where it had been at the time of the original call. Joey shorted, then covered, and made about nothing, and was pissed at the missed opportunity. “You fucking putz,” Joey advised Johnny. “It’s raining hundred dollar bills, and you go inside to stay dry.”
“Joey, with all due respect, when I was kneecap deep in fucking blood you were not my only fucking responsibility. I’m glad you didn’t get hurt. That would have been worse. I still want the Pats with the points on Sunday. Yes?”
“OK.”
Confronted by Marge in the DeltaTek parking lot, Johnny angrily denied everything, and carried his denial into the building and upstairs to Janet Casey, whom he was friendly with, and had talked to before about personal legal things, like whether he could get back his deposit on a house his wife changed her mind on about two hours after she called it her dream house, the house she wanted to raise her children in, and the only house for her.
Janet’s first reaction, recalling her first job as a bank teller, was to reach under her desk for the panic button, but her cooler head
prevailed. “Johnny,” she said, “would you be willing to sign a statement under the pains and penalties of perjury that you didn’t buy or sell DeltaTek stock that day, directly or indirectly, and didn’t talk with anyone outside of the company about DeltaTek stock or about what was happening with Eugene?”
“How bad is the pain of perjury?”
“If you lie, you could go to jail.”
“What if I sign the statement without that part?”
“Wait here a minute.”
Janet apprised her boss Mulverne, who mulled it over for a full five minutes. He looked out the window. He brushed lint off his suit jacket. He straightened his tie. He clipped his nails. He sipped his soda. He thumbed through the papers on his desk. Finally he spoke. “Janet, call the SEC. Tell them we want to speak with them about unusual trading activity.”
“What about Johnny?”
“Fire him.”
Chapter 25
Back to missing Harvey.
According to Barbara, he slept at his friend Carl’s house on Friday night. He called Barbara early on Saturday morning. He said he was fine. He said he was going to walk home. He was last seen leaving Carl’s house around 10:00 am by Carl’s mother, who asked if he wanted a ride. He said no.
“It’s now midnight,” Leonardo commented. “Did you just realize he was missing? What’ve you been doing for the last twelve hours?”
“Lenny, if you want to play blame Barbara, then fuck you.”
“Have you called the police?”
“No.”
They called the police, and then Harvey’s friends and the parents of Harvey’s friends, and found nothing. They rode in a squad car over the route from Carl’s to Barbara’s and back again. Nothing. The K-9 patrol, consisting of Police Officer Charles Shear and his dog Bruno, a muscular German shepherd, caught up with them at Carl’s. Barbara handed Charles one of Harvey’s dirty T-shirts fresh from the hamper, and Charles offered it to Bruno. “He’s got a great nose,” Charles said to Barbara, comfortingly.
Not unlike a wine connoisseur contemplating a new bouquet, big Bruno worked the scent of the T-shirt, savoring it, breaking it down, memorizing it, with his pinkie extended, as it were. Then, with Charles following on a short leash, he loped back and forth in front of Carl’s house, sniffing, sniffing, sniffing, and around to the back, and into the thickets on the side, and back to the front where he paused and looked up to Charles as if to say, “Nothing so far, Charles, but let me have another whiff of the kid’s shirt.”
Charles obliged, rubbing the shirt against Bruno’s long, sensitive nose, and urging him to succeed. “You’re the man, Bruno,” Charles said, as a hushed collection of neighbors and cops stood on the side with Barbara and Leonardo, watching and waiting in the cold.
Leonardo shivered. He was dressed warmly, but he was underdressed. He could see his breath. He could feel his tears freeze. He rocked from foot to foot. He didn’t know what else to do. He imagined terrible things happening to Harvey. The terrible things entered his mind and took over the controls, like hijackers.
Like the pond in the woods. Please God, not there. Or a man slows down to ask directions, and smiles the devil’s smile, and offers a ride. Please God, anywhere but there. Or just to be lost and alone on a cold, dark night with the prospect of disorientation and panic. Harvey could die. My boy could die.
“Please Bruno,” Leonardo said aloud. The dog looked over to him. “Please Bruno,” Leonardo repeated with intensity, like Bruno was the last best hope.
As if in response, Bruno started up again with renewed vigor, sniffing intently through a stand of trees, coming to a sudden stop at the base of a large tree, where he wheeled his body back and forth and barked into the darkness, and got everybody excited. But then he quieted down and moved on. “Could have been a squirrel,” Charles told the people by way of explanation.
Other false alarms followed, with successively less barking and excitement, and after a while Bruno seemed ready to call it a night. His nose was down. Another rub in the shirt failed to arouse him. It looked like he was forcing himself to sniff. He gazed up at Charles as if to say, “Sorry, Charles. I can’t pick it up tonight.”
Leonardo looked over to Barbara and she to him, with daggers. They weren’t speaking, and the question of blame hung over them like a thunderhead, he feeling she was to blame for not paying attention to Harvey today, or by extrapolation any day, and she defying him to blame her, defying him to say a single word about her.
“Can you test whether Bruno’s nose is working?” Barbara asked Charles. “Like see if he responds to a piece of steak? Maybe he has a blockage?”
Charles eyed her cautiously, as did Bruno.
“Let’s walk with the dog back to Barbara’s house,” Leonardo proposed. “Maybe he’ll find something along the way.”
It was about a mile, about a fifteen minute walk, starting at Carl’s house on Greene Street, down a block to the corner, a left onto Highview, up and around the hill to the stop light on Monroe, cross the bridge over the streetcar tracks to Wells Road where you take a right (if you took a left you would approach the nature sanctuary, and the pond), and stay on it to Crescent Circle. Third house on the right. The streets were lined with single-family homes, ranches, colonials, some Victorians near the end. Neat, developed, suburban. A grammar school and playground on Monroe. A park on Highview.
———
Leonardo and Barbara walked side by side, behind Bruno and Charles. Past halfway, after the peak of the hill on Highview, Leonardo recognized the spot where he parked his car the night he walked back to Stan’s house, before it was Barbara and Harvey’s house, and hid in Stan’s bushes.
Which provoked fragments of that fool’s errand to stir, like when he locked his car, and pulled down his cap, and walked past that house, and past that house, not exactly sure how far he was going to go, but with each step realizing he had gone farther in this direction than he had expected, farther than the times before, and was free to keep going, step after step without opposition, unexpectedly without opposition, wondering where all the opposition had gone. It was inconceivable to him that he would consummate this act, and yet here he was through the perimeter shrubbery, across the patch of open lawn, and under the protective cover of the thick rhododendrons around the porch. A patient remarked that when he did a crazy thing—a self-destructive thing—it didn’t feel like a crazy thing. It felt like a normal thing. Under the influence of crazy, crazy makes sense.
Where is the fucking opposition?
The front door swung open, and out popped Barb and Stan, holding hands, bidding adieu, smooching under the dim porch bulb. Not unlike an out-of-body experience for Leonardo, like he was watching himself watch them on the big screen. Barbara, I’m confused, did you misread the script? You’re kissing a stranger. Barbara, you should stop doing this because you’re not supposed to be doing this.
“Barbara,” he said, as he walked out of the rhododendrons, “what are you doing?”
Only after he paused at the base step of the porch, while the other two actors stood entwined above, their mouths open in freeze frame, amid deafening silence, did it dawn on Leonardo that the life he had grown accustomed to had just ended, and a whole new complicated thing was starting. Then he screamed, and gesticulated, and ranted like a madman.
“Barbara,” he said to the Barbara who walked next to him on this freezing night, looking for their missing son, “why did you leave me?”
“Because,” she said, “I didn’t love you.”
Chapter 26
The next breakthrough for Marge Blitz came because Susan H. Binh got greedy and impatient. Susan was smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee and having her nails painted by her mother when Mulverne called. “Eugene’s locked himself in his office,” Mulverne said. “He’s making threats…”
Susan hung up. She pulled a long poke of smok
e into the deepest part of her lungs, and slowly eased it out.
“What’re you thinking?” her mother asked.
They sat at the kitchen table, with Oprah to keep them company. They were working on a marketing list, and what to do about schools if Susan stayed, and whether Susan should lighten up, with frosting and blond streaks. The kids were quiet with a video upstairs. “I’m thinking,” Susan said, “that Eugene doesn’t have the balls to pull the trigger. He’ll start weeping and apologizing. He’s a total worm.”
“I always told you I didn’t like him.”
“I should have listened.”
“He reminded me of your father.”
“Mom…”
Mom lit herself a cigarette, which she rarely did after her lumpectomy. “So what will happen?” she asked.
“I assume they’ll fire him for being crazy, and he won’t make any money, and he’ll drive me crazy. If I’m really lucky he’ll kill himself. I better call the lawyer.”
Drunkmiller wasn’t available to take the call, but his round-faced associate, Bill Remington, was. He listened, then spoke. “Mrs. Binh,” he said, “I’ll have to review this with Mr. Drunkmiller.”
Which annoyed Susan. “I got a situation going here,” she said, “and I want to know if I’m supposed to do something. I’m not calling for a fancy twenty-page brief to frame on my wall. I need strategy.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Binh. I can’t think of anything else for you to do, or for us to do, this afternoon. We served the restraining order…”
“Yes.”
“You emptied the bank account…”
“Yes.”
“You changed the locks?”
“Yes.”
“Your children are with you and safe?”
“Yes.”
“I could tell you to sell your DeltaTek stock because it sounds like your husband is about to make it crash, but that would probably violate…”
“I don’t own any DeltaTek stock.”
Lucky Leonardo Page 10