The Stark Truth

by Peter Israel

  He asked me, in turn, if I was going to pay up to the Funds. He imagined Corky would make me pay up—Corky was something of a skinflint—before he handed over the combination to the safe.

  I told him the question was under discussion.

  Did I need him to do anything? Intercede in any way?

  No, I thought not.

  “Well,” he said, smiling his old charmer’s smile, “if it’s of any concern to you what your father thinks, I’d be most grateful if you did pay up. It’d be nice for me to go out with a clean slate.”

  I assumed he meant go out of life, or at least out of the Council. But the way he said it, it was with the same insouciance, as though he was asking me to pick up the check before we left the restaurant.

  That was the last time I saw him before Corky Stark’s funeral. Which, in fact, was the last time I saw him.

  19

  It would have been hard to realize, that glorious hot summer, when Kitty took to entertaining at home and the Dow reached an all-time high every day, but we had already entered a season of suspicion, of investigation and accusation, of things coming unstuck. Everyone you talked to, it seemed, was making money in the market. Even my blue-haired ladies, under my expert guidance, were making money—meaning simply that, by following the conventional wisdom, which was the only tool I had working for me, and concentrating on the blue chips, the 30 Industrials, the Fortune 500s, I was keeping pace for them … and myself.

  I needed to. My children were both in camp that summer and going to private schools in the fall. The bills on our new establishment (what else to call it?) were breathtaking, even though Kitty wrote off a good portion of her entertaining against Katherine Goldmark Enterprises. We had sold my apartment when we moved but had kept hers on Central Park South, which, even though empty most of the time, cost money. There were the cars, and the help, and the taxes, and a further beefing up of staff at Stark Thompson, P.C., for if, sooner or later, I was going to take on the Trusteeship and still hold the business at hand, it was time to gear up.

  Kitty’s business, meanwhile, was flying, to a point where she herself rarely attended the parties she gave and instead concentrated on new acquisitions and contacts. Having made a success of the failing Connecticut enterprise she’d taken over, she had branched further out and now—or so it seemed to me—pretty much owned the up-market party business from Princeton, New Jersey, all the way to Montauk in the east and, say, the Danbury–New Haven line in the north. This kept her on the road much of the time, or on the phone when she wasn’t on the road, but almost every weekend that summer was open house at our place. Our home was a showcase, Kitty maintained, for what she could do. If people—the right people—were impressed by how she entertained at home, where would they turn the next time they wanted to give a party?

  In this calculation she was undoubtedly right, and I even had my own role to play. Marrying me, Kitty said, had broken down the last barrier to her business, and to judge from the mixed crowd of guests who showed up for her “entertainments” that summer, from the Fourth of July fireworks and clambake on, I’d say she was right about that, too. One Sunday there was a tennis match on our court between two nationally ranked women pros, another a performance by a touring group of Chinese acrobats on our front lawn. And always music, always the booze flowing, always an exceptional cuisine, and she began to be written about in the society and gossip columns as well as the food pages. Not only did Kitty’s friends show up—the Buddy Spodes, say, from Scarsdale—but people I knew too, like the Thatchers from New Canaan, or the Buck Charleses (recently reunited on a trial basis) from Darien, people, Kitty guessed, who’d never had a Jew walk through their front doors. Jews exchanged small talk with Wasps, new money with old, Ellis Island with the Mayflower. The barriers broken, the old distinctions blurred—except, perhaps, to an increasingly rare observer such as myself, who still caught the telltale turn of phrase, the gesture, the giveaway remark.

  How then, in this near euphoric climate, could I talk of the sense of things coming unstuck? I could as well have been an astrologer, discovering a nefarious trining in the futures of certain signs, or a seismologist sensing the coming quakes in the too-quiet fault belts of the California coast. But no, with the benefit of hindsight, there were signs closer to home.

  I ran into old Mac Coombs that summer—in fact, at one of Kitty’s Sunday parties—who confirmed what my father mentioned, i.e., that the firm was coming apart at the seams. The way Mac explained it, they were top-heavy with partners, and in the rush to acquire and expand had made certain commitments to new partners, such as minimum guarantees, which now, it seemed, couldn’t be met without stripping the older partners’ incomes to the bone, if then. As a result, some of the older partners were in a state of near revolt and threatening lawsuits, and Mac predicted, with an air of gloomy resignation, that the only answer to the mess might be bankruptcy and dissolution.

  Then, too, there was the announced investigation of Braxton’s. If, by the time I’m talking about, Wall Street was well accustomed to scandal—in the wake, that is, of Ivan Boesky, Dennis Levine, and the resultant shake-ups in firms old and new—the fact that a Braxton’s should now come under suspicion, with rumors of diverted funds, insider trading, market-rigging, and the like, threatened the very firmament of high finance. Braxton’s under fire was like half the Harvard faculty suddenly being indicted for drug smuggling. It conjured forth images of, say, J. P. Morgan being led forth in manacles and thrust into a cell with Al Capone. It was, in other words, unthinkable, and I always felt that, in and of itself, was one of the reasons the investigation increasingly centered on Ted Goldmark—an anomaly in an institution of otherwise simon-pure pedigree—and how it was that he became both the target and the principal spokesman in the firm’s defense.

  Closer to home, as I said.

  Closer still, and indeed so close that it froze me to my chair, was a call I had at the office from a certain Suffolk County detective, Hammerson by name. He wanted to come interview me concerning the death of one Robert Thorne.

  But what could he possibly have on me? What could link me to Thorne? The only thing I could think of was Katherine Goldmark Enterprises, but Kitty had already been questioned about her affair with Thorne and the payments Thorne had made to her company. And if it was that, if they’d discovered some discrepancy, why would they want to talk to me and not her?

  There was no way, obviously, that I could push Detective Hammerson for answers over the phone. And Kitty, that night at home, was little help.

  “How should I know what they want to talk to you about?”

  “But there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to link me to Thorne. I only met him once. I hardly knew him.”

  “What do you think I’ve been trying to tell you, Tommy?”

  “Except maybe Katherine Goldmark Enterprises?”

  “Nonsense. You don’t know anything about Katherine Goldmark Enterprises. And they already talked to me about that.”

  “Then it has to be Safari.”

  “It can’t be. If it was Safari, you wouldn’t be seeing a detective from Suffolk County. You’d have the heavyweights on your doorstep. But there’s no way—how many times do I have to tell you?—that they can link you to him on Safari.”

  “Then what do they want to talk to me about?”

  It took only twice around the circle with this conversation for Kitty to become exasperated. She was doing her nails, I remember. Wrapped in a towel, she was perched on a white wicker stool in our master bathroom, bent over one hand with one of those miniature paintbrushes in the other. From time to time she dipped the little brush into a little vermilion bottle that sat on a companion wicker stool. Priorities, after all, are priorities. Yes, it might have been that we’d committed murder together and that an investigator was coming to talk to me about it the next day. But a woman’s nails are a woman’s nails.

  The next time I asked her the same question (“What do they want to talk to me ab
out?”), she simply glared at me over her shoulder, her pupils small and glittering, as though she wanted to clench her fists but couldn’t because the nails were wet, and said, teeth clenched instead:

  “For Christ’s sake, Tommy. Why don’t you just see him, and play dumb, and find out?”

  Which, no thanks to Kitty, was largely what I did.

  Detective Robert Hammerson, so identified by the credentials he passed over to me the next afternoon, was a small man, middle-aged and furtive, with a penchant for ducking his head, and I couldn’t escape the notion that somehow he had tunneled his way into the city, like some mole or field mouse, and that surfacing so high above the street, in my office, made him feel distinctly out of his element. He was also one of those people who prefer to get others to talk first, and I accommodated him by expressing my relative surprise that the police were still investigating Thorne’s death. I knew of it, of course, from the media coverage. But finally it had been an automobile accident, hadn’t it? And the body burned almost beyond recognition?

  Yes and no, Hammerson said. There was some evidence that suggested otherwise. For one thing, Thorne had been an experienced driver, and they could tell he hadn’t been under the influence. For another, their reconstruction of the event indicated that Thorne’s car had been moving forward at very low speed when it went off the cliff, and there was some question among the experts as to whether the fire had been accidentally set off. While they couldn’t rule out accidental death, therefore, they also hadn’t been able to rule out suicide either, or, finally, homicide.

  “So the file—that’s what you call it, isn’t it?—is still open?” I asked him.

  “Yes, it is. I’m not saying we’ll ever close it, either, Mr. Thompson,” he said a little sheepishly. “The case isn’t our A-one priority anymore. No one seems to much care why Thorne died. But we’re taking the investigation in a new direction. We’re taking another look at whoever stood to gain most from his death.”

  I said nothing.

  “The old greed factor,” he added with a ducking half smile.

  “And that brings you to met?” I said. “I’m afraid I don’t get it.”

  “Just legwork,” he answered. “Running down leads.” Then: “You knew Thome yourself, didn’t you?”

  “I’d say I knew of him more than I knew him. I think I only met him once.”

  “I guess that’s the time I’m here to talk to you about,” Hammerson said.

  “Really?”

  “That’s right.” He consulted the spiral notebook he’d taken out when he first sat down. “It was at a party, wasn’t it? Given by a Wanda Russell?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Mrs. Russell happens to be a client of mine.”

  “Well, I’d like to take you into our confidence, Mr. Thompson,” Hammerson said. “The person we’re looking at happens to be Thorne’s ex-wife, a certain Martine Brady. Do you know her?”

  “Yes, I do,” I said. In my sudden relief, I even started to say I’d seen her the weekend before, at my house, for Martine had shown up at one of Kitty’s parties. Instead I added, “Not very well, but I do.”

  “And they had a fight at this party, didn’t they? Thorne and the Brady woman? A pretty public fight, too?”

  “Yes, they did. And I was a witness. Come to think of it, is that why you’re here?”

  “You’ve got it,” he said. “Brady’s given us her version. In fact, she herself was the one who told us you’d been a witness. If you don’t mind, I’d like you to tell me what happened.”

  Thanks a bunch, Martine, I thought, for warning me ahead of time.

  Nevertheless, I gave Hammerson my recollection of it: that Martine had needled Thorne to the point where he’d slapped her, to which she’d reacted angrily. Also the names of others I remembered who’d seen it. Hammerson seemed generally satisfied with my account. Then, folding over his notebook:

  “A pretty unsavory character this Thorne, would you say?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t help you much there,” I answered.

  “They say he was involved in some pretty shady stock deals, but with him dead nobody’s been able to get to the bottom of them. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “No, I didn’t think you would. Anyway, thanks for your time, Mr. Thompson.”

  I stood up with him.

  “But this doesn’t make Martine Brady a serious suspect, does it?” I asked him.

  “No, it doesn’t. In fact you’ve pretty much corroborated what everybody else has told us, her included. But like I say, it’s the greed factor. She’s the one who gains the most. So we’re just trying to tie everything up.”

  Once he was gone, I confess that only the second call I made was to Kitty, who wasn’t available in any case. The first, by way of celebration, was to a number I had to look up in the phone book.

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me you were a suspected murderess?” I said when she picked up.

  To which Martine, once she’d done a double take and identified my voice, burst into delighted and raucous laughter.

  No matter how badly I wanted the Trusteeship, I thought I’d be crazy to commit myself to paying back my father’s debt without an equally firm commitment from Corky on his stepping down. Kitty agreed. As she put it, longevity ran in my family. Who was to say Corky wouldn’t fulfill his threat to live another decade and that the Council, barring an absolute catastrophe in his handling of the Funds, wouldn’t continue to back off from ousting him against his will?

  As to the other side of it, that is, that Corky really did make what he claimed he made (and more, as I discovered), that I could do better than he had from an investment standpoint, and that—incredible though this still seemed to me—he had virtually carte blanche in what he did with the Funds’ assets, all these things I verified in two subsequent meetings with him and numerous phone conversations. Very forthcoming with information and records, sure that when the time came the Council would give me whatever I wanted, he seemed, in every respect save the one, to have already accepted me as his heir apparent. And even in that respect, I suppose. For how many fathers, of their own free will, abdicate in favor of their sons until they are, as Corky would have said, damn good and ready?

  Meanwhile, at Kitty’s urging, I set out on a conscious campaign to woo my fellow Council members and to win them over before our next meeting, which was scheduled for late September. The summer found them scattered all over the eastern seaboard, from Bar Harbor to the Adirondacks, where the Flys, Sr. and Jr., owned adjoining properties (both adorned, if that is the word, by ultramodern, fortresslike homes designed by Cranny Jr.), to Bala Cynwyd, Pa., where I found Mildred Walker in a more classic, Georgian residence. Two were unavailable until September—one in Europe, one (an intrepid Thompson in his late seventies) on a fishing trip in western Canada—but well before the meeting I had completed my rounds.

  My visit to the Flys exemplified the reception I got: warm, cordial, but from the point of view of what I was after, absolutely maddening.

  When I told them what I was doing, and why I was there, they both voiced unqualified support—this on a stone terrace off Cranny Jr.’s second floor, under a warming sun and with a spectacular view of the Adirondack lake shimmering below. It was high time Corcoran Stark stepped down, they agreed, and clearly I was the best candidate to replace him.

  “In fact,” Cranny Jr. said enthusiastically, “I can’t wait for you to get started, Tommy. From what I know of it, the Funds is like a drifting iceberg—huge, yes, but melting away little by little. If we don’t take charge of it soon, the process can only accelerate.”

  “I agree with you,” I said, although I found his metaphor a little off. (How does one “take charge” of an iceberg?) “And as far as I know, everybody agrees with you … except Corky.”

  I then related to them what Corky had said to me, and the sense I had that he wasn’t about to resign unless he was pushed, in fact
pushed hard.

  “Oh, that’s just Corky,” Cranny Sr. put in. “He’s something of a curmudgeon, isn’t he? At least that’s what he wants us all to think.” Cranny Sr. laughed at this, with a phlegmy sound which stopped only when he cleared his throat. “But don’t worry about it, Tommy. He’ll come around.”

  “I’m not so sure of that. At least on the timetable everyone seems to want.”

  “Well, I am,” Cranny Sr. said testily, “and I’ve known him a lot longer than you two.”

  “When will that be, though?” I persisted. “When will he come around?”

  “Well, I’d say your next Council meeting would be the proper time. And that’s just a few weeks off, isn’t it?”

  “You mean, if Corky comes to the next meeting still unwilling to step down, the Council will act?”

  “I think that’s for you Young Turks to decide,” Cranny Sr. said, laughing again. “I’m no longer a member.”

  “Don’t worry,” his son concluded, “I’m with you all the way, Tommy. And I know I’m not alone.”

  And that was about as far as I could move them, any of them, which led me to conclude that if the Council was going to act on Corky, I was the one who would have to instigate it. For I found no volunteers in my travels.

  On the subject of the Senator’s indebtedness, I did better. Cranny Fly Sr., like most of the older members, knew about it vaguely. Cranny Jr. didn’t. Both were surprised by the actual number; both shook their heads over my father’s profligacy. Since I had now taken his place on the Council, Cranny Sr. felt that the debt ought certainly to be repaid, but he thought the Council should be flexible as to the schedule. He expected they would be. I told him Corky hadn’t been.