Madeline Carter - 01 - Mad Money

by Linda L. Richards

  They promised to let me know if they heard anything and I saw myself out. The day, which had started in a strange hotel room at Marina Del Rey, was starting to take its toll.

  The maniacally flashing red light on the phone on my desk caught my attention as I walked in the door. I groaned inwardly: I hadn’t cleared them before I’d left in the morning, knowing that several of the messages were from Emily and, since she’d gotten me caught me up on the phone, there didn’t seem a big reason to listen to them. I was even less interested now, but knew I couldn’t just continue to let them pile up: it was possible there’d be something on at least one of the messages I’d want to know.

  I settled in to listen, out of habit taking up position in my desk chair, poised to jot down notes and numbers. There was a message from my mother, timestamped Monday evening about the time, I figured, Emily and I were crashing the LRG party. Mom sounded deliberately neutral, asking how everything was going, as though we hadn’t had several conversations earlier that day about the stock market. I made a note to call her later just to touch bases. There were the expected messages from Emily, telling me all about things I now knew but, wedged between the Emily messages, timestamped two-forty-five a.m. Tuesday, was a message from Jennifer. Her voice sounded thin and worried and she spoke quietly, as though she were keeping her voice intentionally low.

  “Hi Madeline. It’s me. Jennifer. I know it’s the middle of the night but please pick up the phone I really, really have to talk to you. I can’t… I can’t leave a number but I’m not at home,” and then, as if she’d made a decision, “I’ll try you again later.”

  I played the message back a couple of times, trying to squeeze information out of it, but there was nothing there. I could read things into it — perhaps fear, maybe apprehension — but I couldn’t be sure about anything. There just wasn’t enough information.

  Then more messages from Emily, another from my mom and then, timestamped just a few minutes before I’d gotten in the door, a message from Alex Montoya, asking if I’d care to join him for dinner some time.

  I played Jennifer’s message another couple of times before I called Tyler. He would, I felt certain, want to hear it. The phone rang six times before his voicemail picked up. I started to leave a message, then reasoned that I’d just seen him a few minutes ago: they had to be home.

  Tycho and I thundered up the stairs but I could see before I knocked on Tyler and Tasya’s door that no one was home. The house was in darkness and the kitchen door, when I turned the knob, was locked. I peered over the edge of the deck into the canyon. The rapidly falling darkness shrouded the details, but I could make out a car’s taillights, moving quickly, towards the beach. Tyler’s Lexus? Maybe. But I couldn’t worry about it now: I’d play Jennifer’s message for him when I got the chance.

  Back at the guesthouse, I thought about my day and about what I’d accomplished. At the same time, I tried to think about what I was trying to accomplish. Why was I even bothering? The stuff with Jennifer was obvious: the child had more or less adopted me on sight. If there was something I could do to help her, I knew I’d do it.

  But the mess with the Langton Regional Group was another matter. Part of me just wanted to back away from LRG entirely: sell my stocks, take my loss and pretend I’d never even heard of Langton and that Ernie had never come back into my life. Ernie’s own wife thought him capable of engineering a kidnapping in order to make a stock price fall. My whole involvement with Langton was a mess that showed every sign of getting messier.

  I had missed the day’s close gallivanting around West LA and I looked at my computer’s blank screen and thought about checking where the markets had ended up and having a look though my e-mail: there was likely to be a lot of it by now. But the events of a full day came rushing over me in a wave. I suddenly felt too tired to think about doing anything but pulling off my clothes and crawling into bed. Which is what I did. And when I slept, I didn’t dream at all.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The following morning it felt good to get up before the opening bell and take Tycho for a run through the hills. It’s quiet at that time of the morning. And fresh and cool. The smell of Eucalyptus followed us down the narrow roads and well defined trails. I’d discovered an old orange grove at the end of our road, abandoned now because the house that used to be on the grounds slid down the hill some years ago. Earthquake, mudslide or bad planning on the part of some long forgotten architect, I didn’t know. But I liked to go there and enjoy the overrun gardens and the shade and scent of the citrus trees and think about what it must have been like when there was a house here commanding this bit of earth. Tycho liked it, too. A chance to snuffle around and examine things of high interest to dogs. And, if I planned my run a certain way, it was about the right distance from home to wind down a bit and touch the earth before walking the final leg home. The run, the gardens and the walk relaxed me totally.

  Then home and coffee made by my own hand: strong and good. Then to my computer.

  As much trepidation as I felt about what sorts of silliness LRG might get up to on this day, it didn’t stem my excitement for the markets in the morning. This has been true throughout my career, no matter how badly I might have been doing the day before. I think it’s the pure possibility that excites me. Because, within limits (at least, most of the time) anything can happen. From one day to the next, up can become down and down can become what you were wishing for before you went to sleep the night before. It’s this merry-go-round of what-ifs that pushes me out of bed every morning. The promise of it all that draws me. All of those possibilities.

  Even though I’d only set up my newsfeeds a week before, I was already under a deluge. Since most of it comes to me in the form of e-mail, I get a lot. Two hundred or more pieces of electronic e-mail a day. It’s pretty easy to get through, though. Not at all like getting two hundred letters from friends. I sort them all by date and then just whiz through them, quite often scanning headlines and not bothering to read the whole item unless it’s about a stock I’m currently holding or one I’m thinking about buying.

  This morning there were more than a day’s worth because, with all of the running around I’d been doing, and my unexpected exhaustion the night before, I hadn’t been spending as much time as I usually did clearing my mail. So, this day, when I asked for my mail, over five hundred pieces came barreling down the pike at me. A little overwhelming, even for someone who is used to regular barrages. It was going to take me a while to get through them all, and I settled in.

  I hadn’t gotten far into my scanning, though, when a return e-mail address caught my eye: feewaybill@lookforthis.com. Fee Waybill. Lead singer of The Tubes. And Ernie’s college nickname. And since I don’t actually know the lead singer of The Tubes, personally — or even know if The Tubes still exist as an entity — that left exactly one person whom this could be from.

  The subject line also grabbed my eye: a salutation that included the pet name Ernie had called me during our time together. Pooky. I’d always hated it. I think he must have thought it sounded posh: something you’d call a girlfriend who summered at the Vineyard. Someone who pal’d around with girls called Bunny and CJ. Someone who wasn’t me. Seeing those names now, in the context of an e-mail, was oddly chilling. Like a hand reaching out of the grave from the past I thought I’d buried a long time ago. My hands weren’t steady as I read the message.

  From: feewaybill@lookforthis.com

  To: madln@aol.com

  Subject: Hello Pooky

  The reason for the nicknames should be obvious: easy identification. I trust you get it.

  I’ve gotten wind of some poking. You need to stop. Alternatives could be unhealthy. All is under control. I promise to explain soon and perhaps I can even make it worth your while.

  Your,

  Fee

  I sat and read and then reread the message. And then I didn’t read it: just sat there hoping that the words on the screen would somehow seep into my brain an
d make sense. There was little doubt in my mind that it was from Ernie. The madlin address was an old one — my first e-mail address. He must have taken the chance that I’d kept it active: which I had. It forwarded to the e-mail address I used most often, saving me from having to check the numerous e-mail accounts I’ve set up and moved on from over the years. For his part, anyone could set up a lookforthis.com account in about a minute. And it was free and completely untraceable. Lacking other possibilities, this really had to be Ernie.

  He’d said: I trust you get it. And I did. And I had. But it was phrased in such a way that, if I hadn’t kept the address and someone else had gotten the e-mail it would make absolutely no sense and would likely have been trashed as yet another piece of spam. But if I got it, I’d have no doubt who it was from. It was a warning. Alternatives could be unhealthy. A warning and a promise. And those things — especially served up together — probably had the opposite effect on me that he’d hoped: They made me mad.

  I’ve gotten wind of some poking. Which could mean a lot of things but, really, boiled down to only one: someone had told him I’d been at Langton the other day, which meant he had contact with at least one person inside the company. Or — and this seemed entirely likely — he’d seen the same news report that Emily and I had seen and recognized me and was now warning me off. He was right, though: poking pretty much summed up what I’d been doing.

  He’d written that he could possibly “even make it worth my while” to stay out of this. So he thought he could, what? Bribe me? I found myself seething and, even as I told myself to breathe and let it go, I knew what was fueling this fire: Here was Ernie, thirteen years later still being coldly controlling. Still thinking he could pull my strings and make me dance. And with the LRG dance he was currently involved in, he was completely raining on my parade.

  I hit reply and began a message.

  Dear Ernie,

  Then thought about that and settled on

  Ernie

  Then decided even that was too friendly and opted for no salutation at all. Which left me with a blank message because I couldn’t think how to respond. Though various expletives flitted through my brain there was little to be accomplished by any of that. And without expletives, there was nothing I could think to say. At least, not right this minute. I put it aside and moved on to other tasks that would divert my attention from Fee Waybill. Today, however, everything seemed related.

  Looking over my portfolio did nothing to help my mood. LRG opened slightly above what it had closed at the day before, it rallied briefly and then another large whack of LRG shares — a market sell, no doubt — started pushing the stock price down again. $4.25. $4.18. $4.27. $4.16. And so on. I stopped watching. It was too painful. I was too mad.

  “Sonofabitch.” I said it aloud, but quietly. Tycho thumped his tail at me. Cocked his head. It hadn’t sounded angry, but he couldn’t quite place the tone.

  Last night, in defeated exhaustion, I’d determined to sell my LRG shares at a loss and wash my hands of the whole thing. Now rested, refreshed and awash with rekindled old resentments I hadn’t even realized I’d hung onto, things didn’t look the same.

  Alternatives could be unhealthy. All is under control.

  “Jerk!”

  Jerk in so many ways, too. Never mind that his machinations had upset my personal applecart, if he really had kidnapped himself in order to make the stock of the company he had been newly employed by go down, he didn’t have even a quarter of the intelligence I’d always given him credit for. I’d always known he thought he was a force unto himself — above things like the laws and moral imperatives that other people feel compelled to function under — but there were lines. And this… this sincerely crossed all of them.

  I thought about the calculations on the paper Arianna had found. If she and I were interpreting it right, we were talking about over forty million dollars for a week or so of being “kidnapped.” There weren’t a lot of ways to make that kind of money.

  And then what? What could possibly be next? Would he be miraculously recovered somehow? In some splashy manner that made headlines and caused the stock to go up. Is that what he was planning? And at what point? What had the paper Arianna had shown me forecast as the low point? I thought about it. Three bucks? And if that happened, I’d be down fifty percent. Or about seventy thousand dollar if I converted all those figures into a dollar amount, which didn’t seem prudent for my mental health at this moment.

  And then something Alex Montoya had said at Tyler’s party popped into my head. I could see Alex sitting forward intently, wineglass in hand, talking to me with great passion about his work. Thinking about it now, I could almost feel gears clicking into place.

  What if Ernie was a psychopath? The quest for new highs, the lack of conscience and morals, all of it added up. I still had the concept of the eater of human flesh flitting around my brain and I figured Ernie was into Kobi beef and grilled chicken rather than anything more exotic. But kidnapping? That was too weird.

  And I knew that Ernie couldn’t be doing this by himself. He’d need someone unattached to him professionally to be doing the actual selling and buying of the stocks. Since stock transactions are entirely traceable, if that invisible someone had a leg up on the shady side of trading and maybe didn’t have a lot to lose, so much the better. All of this added up quite neatly to Ernie’s Harvard toady, Paul Westbrook. Someone I wouldn’t have thought of at all had his name not come up in my conversation with Arianna.

  I let my mind go for a minute; tried to free it of my own conceptions and just associate with facts. Alex had said that psychopaths used people up. But what if Paul had always proven useful? What if — and the more I thought about it, the more sense it made — what if Paul had always had a hand in Ernie’s success? The shadow. Knowing both of them well didn’t make me discount this idea.

  Knowing who was likely doing the actual paper moving didn’t make much difference to me. It was Ernie who was doing the manipulation and Ernie who was, in my professional estimation, culpable. What he was doing was so beyond insider trading, I hesitated to even call it that. He was deliberately manipulating the stock he was — by virtue of having been made Langton’s CEO — responsible for. And he was manipulating it in a way that might have a long-term negative effect on the company, its share price, its value and, if word got out, it could even effect the overall market, especially in the environment of corporate suspicion that had been growing since the demise of the bull.

  It was becoming clear to me that, while concerns over my own financial involvement in this were valid and growing larger with each drop of the share price, I had a moral obligation to do something. Just what that something might be was less clear.

  If Ernie had been a broker or a dealer, my course would have been clear. The National Association of Securities Dealers moves swiftly and mercilessly against infractors. It has to: there’s so much at stake. However Ernie wouldn’t be a member: he wasn’t a dealer. And, in this situation, he wasn’t a trader, either. The Securities Regulation Division functions on the state level, but LRG was a nationally traded security, even though the company was based in California. I might be able to go to the SEC, but with what? A report of a scrap of paper of unknown authorship with potentially meaningless numbers, an untraceable and slightly encoded e-mail and the suspicions of a wife who I was pretty sure would deny everything including our meeting if pressed. And then there was me on that security tape and the suspicions that had given birth to. No: with what I had to go on, the SEC was not a possibility. I needed something more.

  Even though I knew my motives were impure — I wanted information, not just the suave doctor’s company — I returned Alex’s call just after nine am: I figured he’d be in the office by now. I was right, though he surprised me by answering the phone himself: the number on the card he’d given me was his direct line.

  “Hi Doctor Montoya, this is Madeline Carter. We met at Tyler Beckett’s house the other night.”
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  “Call me Alex, Madeline. And, of course, I remember you. In fact, I left a message for you last night.”

  He sounded pleased to hear from me and we scheduled dinner for seven o’clock that night at a seafood place along the coast near Pacific Palisades, between Malibu and Santa Monica.

  By nine-thirty I figured Tyler and Tasya would be up and around. I wanted to hear if there had been any updates about Jennifer overnight, plus I wanted them to hear the message she’d left for me.

  Tyler looked cagey when I asked him where they’d gotten to the night before. This surprised me, because he’d seemed so forthright about everything before.

  “Uh, you know. Had some errands to run.”

  We were in the kitchen, Tyler sitting on a stool at the counter watching Tasya work. When he said this I noted that Tasya, madly chopping onions on a cutting board near the sink, looked up at him with one eyebrow raised, but didn’t say anything.

  “What are you making?” I asked Tasya, more to fill the void I felt in the room than because I actually wanted to know.

  “Soup, I think. Yes, soup. I feel like cutting something.” I thought it a good thing she was focusing on vegetables and not something softer. And when next I looked she seemed to be pulverizing large clumps of parsley and had a pile of carrots at her elbow ready for massacre. It was going to be a very finely cut soup.

  “One of the reasons I came up here was to tell you guys I got a message from Jennifer a couple of days ago. On my voicemail, but I didn’t clear it until last night,” Tyler had looked at me hopefully when I started speaking, then looked disappointed when he realized the message was a couple of days old. “Sorry, Tyler. I didn’t want it to sound more hopeful than it was, but there was no other way to say it. And she doesn’t say much on the message. But I thought you’d want to hear it anyway.”