Black Fridays

by Michael Sears

  The pause was long enough that I thought she might actually be considering it. No such luck.

  “I can’t,” she finally said.

  “You can’t . . . ?” I was tired and out of practice at making the conversational jumps, doglegs, and cutbacks that were what passed for normalcy with Angie.

  “I can’t come to New York,” she explained, with tight-lipped patience, “because I have a hairline fracture of the radius.” Implicit in her words was the evidence of my own hard-heartedness for not having already expressed my sympathy.

  She did not explain how a broken arm would keep her from traveling.

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Angie. Listen, it’s late—”

  “Mais. I got TeePaul all upset and confused. He was really sorry. He’s a sweet man, Jason, but he is not as good a driver as he thinks he is—especially when he’s been drinking and gets a bit fout-pas-mal.”

  She was drunker than I thought. Angie was perfectly capable of having a complete conversation without once slipping into Cajun patois. Usually it was an act, another from her portfolio of poses, one that she used when flirting, or being funny—or just before she fell off the barstool.

  “I get scared when he drives too fast and I know I can get bitchy when I’m frightened, mais, when he passed this old farm truck I let him know just what I thought about that, and that made him take his eyes off the road, just as we got to that really bad curve up by Patoutville. You know the one I mean?”

  If there was one thing in this world that I was dead positive on, it was that I had never been to Patoutville in my life.

  “The truck was fine, I don’t know why he was making such a fuss, and he gets all boudé, so I told him I was going to walk home if he was like that. And he got mad. Well, I know I shouldn’t have said that.” She burst out laughing. “Merde, cher! It was thirty miles back to Morgan City. I wasn’t about to walk. I just got down from the truck and climbed back up the bank. Mais, when he gets down on his side, he sinks right up to his coullions in that rice field and I could not help myself, cher.”

  I tried to establish some order in her patchwork story. “He drove off the road? Into a rice field?”

  “Ain? That’s what I said. Are you listening? I swear, you never listen to me.”

  She had often commented, when we were together, that one of my most endearing qualities was the way I listened to her.

  “Is that how you broke your arm?”

  “No, that is not how I broke my arm.” Thoroughly exasperated. “If you would stop interrupting, I would tell you.” She paused and waited for my apology. Not getting it, she continued, “I did something unforgivable. I laughed at him. And he is not like you, he is sensitive. You can’t laugh at a sensitive man.”

  Mamma had often described Angie’s father as a “sensitive man.” In my hometown, we would have just called him a mean drunk.

  “And when he’s mad, he just doesn’t know his own strength. You see, he was just trying to keep me from walking home, which he explained would have gotten me killed if someone had come along driving too fast and not seen me. And he took my arm, just to stop me, and you know I am delicate . . .”

  Like kudzu.

  “. . . and it broke.”

  I listened. And felt nothing. Was I over Angie that completely? That quickly? One night—a few hours—with Skeli and I had managed to put seven years behind me. I felt no anger at the cowboy—that’s what people like that did. I felt some disgust, revulsion at the images that came to mind, but no great outrage. I did feel some sympathy for Angie. Though she had placed herself in harm’s way, she didn’t deserve to be hurt. She had hurt me, robbed me, abandoned me, and was now intent on taking from me the person I loved most in the world—but I would not have laid an angry hand on her. And I also felt a buzz of irritation that I was being forced to hear it all and deal with it in the middle of the night. But mostly, I felt an undercurrent of dark fear. My son must not, under any circumstances, be allowed to be dragged down into that ugly swamp.

  “Angie, listen. I am very sorry for your troubles.” I tried to sound sympathetic. “I am sorry your young cowboy hurt you.”

  “Ain? I just told you! It was an accident.” Outrage.

  “Okay, I’m sorry you had an accident. And I’m sorry for so many things that have come between us.” I let my voice harden. “But I cannot change them now. And there is no way in hell that I am going to let that son of a bitch near my son. You come see him whenever you want. But leave that asshole home.”

  “I told you, Jason. I want my boy here with me. I will do what I need to do.” Her drunkenness had evaporated and the bayou front with it. I felt a sudden cold rush in my gut. “You think any Louisiana court is going to let some New York felon take a baby away from his mother? I’ve spoken to my lawyer down here, and he has promised to flay you to the bone. You will not get away with this.”

  I sat up, slammed a fist into the wall just hard enough to know I didn’t want to do it twice.

  “Angie, as long as our son resides in New York, it will be a New York court that hears his case, and they will hear about your drinking and how your mother kept the boy locked in a dark room, and they will hear about your abusive partner as well.”

  “Goddamnit, Jason! I want my son! Give me my baby.”

  “Over my dead body.” I lost my anger as quickly as it had come. I was left with disgust for the mess of our lives—and an ugly unease.

  “I will have my boy.” It was a threat. She was willing to take me up on it.

  “I’m saying good night, Angie. I am going to hang up now. Maybe we can talk about this again when you sober up. Good night.”

  She didn’t respond.

  I hung up.

  Fuck. I would have to get hold of my lawyer first thing in the morning. Despite my brave words, I did not trust the courts. Louisiana or New York. Anything could happen there. I would take the Kid and run before I let Angie take him back to Cajun country.

  MONDAY MORNING. Spud and I were back in the conference room—rumors were rampant, stocks were crashing, and everyone on the trading floor had the hollow-eyed look of earthquake survivors. Spud didn’t look much better. After a few, stress-filled hours of sleep, I fit right in. Zombie central.

  From the moment the Kid and I stepped out onto Seventy-fourth Street until I passed through the well-guarded front doors of Weld Securities, I was convinced that I was being tailed. The two guys from the night before seemed to materialize in my peripheral vision on street corners, in subway stations, ducking into doorways, only to transform into harmless-looking fellow New Yorkers when I looked directly at them.

  The Kid had sensed my upset—a situation that had threatened to escalate into a disaster when I couldn’t find him a matching pair of blue socks. I had been pleasantly surprised to find that he didn’t mind mismatched socks on Monday morning, as long as they were both blue.

  I needed a day off, a green tea, and a massage. I would have settled for eight hours of uninterrupted sleep.

  “How’d you get his laptop?” Spud asked, for what I realized was the second time.

  I kept the unedited version to myself. “The roommate let me take it.”

  After dropping the Kid at school, I had stopped at the post office and mailed a box filled with almost a quarter million dollars of chips to myself. It could stay in the Ansonia mailroom until I figured out how to cash them in—without going back to jail.

  “Let’s get started,” I said.

  Lowell Barrington hadn’t shown up. He looked like another runner. When I called over to his desk, the bright, bubbly voice of the Hello Kitty girl informed me that he wasn’t in yet. Maybe he had joined Sudhir in India. Maybe his father had grounded him.

  And my lawyer had yet to return my call. Calls. So far, my day sucked.

  Spud fired up the lap
top.

  Other than the breakup e-mails—and the music—the computer was oddly devoid of personal information. There were no drafts of letters to headhunters, no electronic checkbook, not even an address book outside of his Google account. Sanders had not been on Facebook or Myspace, he had no profile on LinkedIn, and he did not Twitter. Either he had been a unique twenty-first-century young man, or he was hiding something.

  “I’ve got his calendar,” Spud said.

  “How the hell did I miss that?”

  “It was sitting in his ‘recycle’ bin.”

  I burst out laughing. I had hid the chips in the garbage—the same place where Sanders kept his secrets.

  But Sanders kept his secrets in code. Letters and numbers filled the squares for each date. AH2x/EH. 10K/TP. It was a meaningless jumble. I scanned for patterns. Most simple codes give up their secrets because of patterns. Short words, like articles, are used repetitively. S appears at the end of words more often than any other letter. E is next. And so on.

  One pattern leaped out immediately. “Ten K? Two K? See this. They’ve all got to be numbers. Amounts. Are you with me?”

  Spud wasn’t listening. “Oh, shit,” he said. “This is fucked up.” He sat back, shaking his head.

  “What?” I barked.

  “Brian’s three-way? With the two hotties from Morgan? I told you the other day.”

  “Okay.”

  “There they are.” He pointed to an early-summer weekend date. !JF&!GK/Q.

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “Jill Felder and Grace Knudsen. In Quogue.”

  I saw it, but I didn’t like it.

  Brian Sanders had kept a diary of his sexual adventures. Less than a diary, merely a scorecard.

  “HM? See here?” There were half a dozen or more. HM!/VT. *HM/VT. And so on. “Heidi Miller. I met her. Her parents have a ski house near Killington. Nice girl.”

  “And DH/AC?” There were another half-dozen of those in the months before his accident.

  “No idea. Atlantic City?”

  “Sanders was very busy.”

  There were easily a hundred or more different sets of initials.

  “What do you think about the punctuation marks?” Spud said.

  I ignored the question. I didn’t want to know.

  “There’s two different patterns here,” I said. “Look.” I pointed to TNX5K/A. “Focus on the ones that look like this. Five K. Five grand. A. Arrowhead. Must be.”

  Spud and I stared at the screen in silence. TNX was a regular. ZNM and ZNH showed up in earlier months. We arrived at the same point by different paths.

  “Those are futures contracts,” I said. “M, H, U, Z. Those are the exchange codes for the delivery months. They’re the same in foreign exchange. March, June, September, December.”

  “And ZN is the ticker symbol for the Treasury ten-year-note contract. I should have caught it right away.”

  “And TNX?”

  “The options contract,” Spud said.

  We had it.

  Strewn amid the coded details of Brian Sanders’ sex life were the bits of evidence of his trading transgressions. Once or twice each week, there was an entry that concluded with A. Spud compared the dates and securities with the firm’s records. In each case there was a corresponding trade with the Arrowhead account.

  The payoff was almost as clear. I could see it, because I knew about the bagful of chips, but I might have caught the pattern anyway. The math was simple.

  “Look,” I said. “There are three A entries over this two-week period. Five K, seven K, twenty-two K. If we go back over his book, I know we will find the matching Arrowhead trades. All right, so that’s thirty-four thousand dollars. Four days after the last trade there’s this—17K/FX. That’s Sanders getting his cut. Fifty percent.”

  “How can you know what his cut was?”

  “Because it is the exact same pattern every time.”

  “Every time?”

  “Check it out.”

  He did. I was right. There would be a string of two to five smaller numbers, then one substantially larger, followed sometime in the next week by a figure exactly half of the total. Every time.

  “So what’s FX? Or TP? Or MS?” He pointed to other weekend coded figures.

  “The casinos? Foxwoods. Trump Plaza. Mohegan Sun?”

  Spud gazed at the screen in awe. “No shit. It’s all right there, isn’t it?”

  “Almost,” I said. “You’d need to see all the trades from Arrowhead to be sure. But the SEC can subpoena them and wrap it all up.”

  “But there would be no way of tracking the payoff, right? I mean, it was at a casino. Hochstadt could just slip Brian cash each time, and who would know?”

  Or chips. My brain was racing ahead—counting up the payoffs. Exactly $233,000. Whoever had the chips would know.

  —

  “THE WHOLE PURPOSE of your employment with Weld is the avoidance of scandal. Did you not understand that?”

  Stockman sounded as arch and overbearing as my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Goodier.

  “Allow me to educate you to one of the salient events in the history of this firm, Jason. Philip Barrington was one of the three founding partners of Weld Securities back in 1975. He is still on the board. His elder son runs our emerging markets debt trading desk in London. Lowell was his second son.”

  I had waited half the morning to get in to tell Stockman what Spud and I had turned up. He had listened with half an ear and then began removing the skin from my body in thin, delicately carved strips, one finely honed word at a time.

  “What could you possibly have said to the boy?”

  Lowell Barrington had left Weld on Friday night and taken the New Haven line as far as Stamford. There he had inexplicably exited the train, a full three stops before reaching Rowayton, where his father was waiting to meet him. According to a half-dozen conflicting witnesses, Lowell had waited on the platform until the arrival of the next fully loaded commuter train and then seemed to step out in front of it. Traffic on the New Haven line had been held up for almost an hour.

  “Jack Avery tells me that he spoke to Lowell late Friday afternoon—after you interrogated him—and that the boy was severely depressed. In shock!”

  Waiting patiently to get a word in for my own defense was not turning out to be a winning strategy. “Just a minute, Bill. I had a two-minute conversation with the guy. He was stressed. He was guilty about something. But I didn’t do anything or say anything to push him over the edge.” I was sure about that. Reasonably sure.

  “Guilty! Of what? Going to Atlantic City with a customer? Is that what you are claiming?”

  Standing up for myself didn’t seem to be a winning strategy either.

  “Those guys—the whole crew—were up to something illegal. If I found it, so will the SEC.”

  “Jason, there are much bigger issues involved. If what you say is true, it is all so penny-ante I will be surprised if anyone even cares! And even so, you say you have no proof other than these notes in a calendar. Notes written in some kind of code, which you claim to have broken. Where is your proof? Show me the money trail. Where were the payoffs?”

  In the mail. I wasn’t about to hand over two hundred thousand dollars just for the limited pleasure of having Stockman believe me.

  “I’m not done,” I said. “If the SEC goes after Arrowhead’s records, they’ll see both sides of all these trades. They’ll be able to put it all together.”

  “If this is the limit of what you have found, the firm is in no danger.”

  That was Stockman’s bottom line.

  “What do you want me to do about Barrington? Talk to the father?”

  He waved his hand as though chasing away a gnat. “No. Leave
it. As I said, there are bigger issues and I have already devoted too much valuable time to this today.”

  “I DON’T GET IT,” Roger said.

  Vinny looked over at me and rolled his eyes.

  “No, listen,” Roger continued. “You tell me he’s a crook, but I don’t see who’s the loser.”

  The three of us were huddled in Vinny’s corner of the bar, talking in half-whispers. I had been trying to explain what I’d been working on—without giving up the names of any of the players.

  Vinny took a turn at explaining it. “It’s not that tricky. It’s the same as any small-time putz stealing from the boss. Like the bartender who doesn’t ring up your drink and lets you overtip instead.”

  Roger gave a quick, furtive look in Rollie’s direction.

  “It ain’t like that.”

  I waded back in. “A trader owes his allegiance to the house. They set him up with all the tools, computers, information sources, and boatloads of cash. He gets to make bets all day long—buying and selling. He is supposed to buy low and sell high. That’s it. He works for the house and takes their check.”

  “But these guys wanted a little bit more,” Vinny added.

  “So they work out a little plan,” I said. “They give this hedge fund, who shall remain nameless, a guaranteed winner. Locked-in profit. And in return, the guy who runs the fund gives them a kickback.”

  “You still haven’t told me who the loser is.”

  Vinny threw his hands up. “The house, Roger!”

  “Every once in a while, the trader buys high and sells low,” I said. “This hedge fund books the profit from his intentional ‘mistake.’ The firm takes a small loss.”

  “And this is illegal? I thought it was all free market.”

  “It’s fraud,” I said.

  “It’s stealing,” Vinny added.

  “As long as the traders are making money for their firms, no one notices when they take a small loss on a trade—which is the beauty of the whole scam.”