Hades

by Russell Andrews

  “That’s what he told me this morning.”

  Silverbush was definitely rattled, although he now did his best to hide it. A little late for the poker face, but at least he recovered for the betting round. “I assure you,” he said, “the senator never mentioned anything remotely like that.”

  “It’s funny. Everyone calls him that—the senator. But my esteemed father-in-law only ran for the Senate. He never actually won, so it’s not really the proper reference. Well, maybe it’s not really so funny. More pathetic.”

  This seemed to push the DA into a deeper state of confusion. The newly widowed Mrs. Harmon was being neither difficult nor cooperative. Those were the only two types of behavior that Silverbush knew exactly how to deal with. So, not on firm footing, he fell back on what he knew best: legal officiousness.

  “There was no discussion at all about your involvement.” Silverbush spoke as if he were talking about a parking ticket.

  “My father-in-law blames me for almost everything bad that has ever happened to the Harmon family,” Abby said. “And this morning, he made it very clear that this was no exception.”

  “I’m sure he was just upset.”

  “Have you ever met H. R. Harmon, Mr. Silverbush?”

  “I have, as a matter of fact. At several charity dinners and fund-raisers.”

  “Then you know that he spent almost his entire life learning what to say and when or when not to say it.”

  “I don’t really know him that well,” Silverbush said.

  “You will by the time this investigation is over. And if you want some advice, believe him whenever he makes a threat. Any other time, take things with a grain of salt.”

  Silverbush had exhausted his patience. He’d paid his respects to the powerful family as best he could; now it was time to move on. Justin was impressed by the man’s ability to stick to his agenda while still maintaining a high level of obsequiousness. “We’ll be investigating every possible angle,” he said. “I promise you we will have a satisfactory outcome for both you and your father-in-law.” Now he turned to Justin. “I assume you’ve prepared an initial report.”

  “Preliminary,” Justin said, looking down at the folder clasped in his right hand. “I’m waiting for the ME’s report and a summary from Southampton CSU.”

  “I can still start with that. Do you have anything at all to go on yet?”

  “I have a few thoughts after seeing the crime scene. And I spent the entire night preparing for the investigation. The first few steps are outlined in the report. Once we’re done here, I’ll be going to the city to talk to people who worked with Mrs. Harmon’s husband. And I’m hoping to see Evan’s father while I’m there.”

  “That won’t be necessary. Mr. Harmon will be coming here. This afternoon.”

  Abby spoke up now, surprised. “To East End Harbor?”

  Silverbush nodded. “He wants to see his son’s body. He’s already on his way.”

  Abby said, “Jesus,” and after that there was an uncomfortable silence in the room until Leona Krill spoke up for the first time.

  “Larry,” she said, “from what Justin has told me, that might not be a good idea.” Leona looked at the woman sitting next to her, said, “I’m sorry, Abigail,” then turned back to Silverbush and finished. “Apparently Evan was greatly disfigured.”

  “H. R. won’t be seeing his son,” Abby said quietly. “He won’t be seeing anything that even looks human.”

  “I understand,” the DA said. “I suggested that might be the case, but . . .”

  He didn’t finish the sentence, so Abby finished it for him. “But H. R. didn’t take the suggestion.”

  “I’m afraid not.” Silverbush inhaled deeply, said to Abby, “Are there any questions you have about what we’re going to be doing?”

  She shook her head.

  “Anything you need, I’m available twenty-four seven.” The DA then handed her his card, which she accepted with a nod. “I appreciate your coming to meet with me,” Silverbush went on. “I know how difficult this must be. But I want you to know that Chief Westwood has an excellent reputation. We’ve never worked together, but I have the highest confidence in his abilities. I hope you’ll be as cooperative with him as possible.”

  “I don’t think I could be any more cooperative with Chief Westwood,” Abby said and smiled for the first time in the meeting. Justin made a point of not smiling.

  “Excellent,” Silverbush finished. “I’ll have someone drive you home.”

  “I’m not staying at home,” she told him.

  “Of course. Understandable. Just tell my driver where you’re going and he’ll be glad to take you.”

  “I’d rather walk, if you don’t mind,” she said. “It’s not very far and I need the air.”

  “By all means,” Silverbush said. Then he turned to Justin and Leona and said, “I’d like to talk to you both before we disband.”

  When Abby was out of the station, Larry Silverbush spoke quietly to Justin, although he never glanced in his direction while his lips were moving. “You do know how fucking important this is?”

  “It’s a murder,” Justin said. “On a scale of one to ten, pretty high.”

  “I don’t need any smart-ass shit. This isn’t just a murder.”

  “Oh, that’s right. It’s a high-profile murder that’ll get you lots of headlines.”

  “I know about you, Westwood.”

  “My excellent reputation, you mean?”

  “Believe me, I fucking know all about you.”

  Leona reached over and put her hand on Silverbush’s arm. “Larry, I don’t know what you’ve heard, but Jay is a superb—”

  He didn’t let her hand rest on him for more than a moment, immediately shaking it away and cutting off her words. “I know how superb he is. I also know what an asshole he can be.”

  Justin shrugged, as if he’d been caught with his hand in a cookie jar. “Nobody’s perfect,” he said.

  “Look,” Silverbush said, “I really don’t want this to get nasty. But I want you to understand I know what you’re capable of, good and bad. I know the way you work. I know the trouble you’ve been in and the trouble you’ve caused in the past. This is an important case. It’s highly visible, the media’s going to be all over it in about five minutes, and it’s got political ramifications.”

  “For you, you mean.”

  “Fuck yes, for me.” He turned to face Leona. “And for you. It ain’t like you’re mayor of New York City, Ms. Krill, but I’m sure you like what you do. Running a cute, little town like East End has its perks. You’re already on thinning ice thanks to your choice of sexual partners.” She started to interrupt, but he barged ahead without letting her speak. “Hey, I couldn’t give a shit who or what you’re banging. But some voters do, so you better make it up to ’em by making sure we find out who killed Evan Harmon. You’re in charge of the police department. This drags on, nothing gets solved, you look foolish, incompetent. Out here you can get away with being a dyke, but a dyke who can’t get the job done, that doesn’t fly. Am I right?”

  Leona’s head drooped and her voice was barely above a whisper when she said, “Yes, you’re right. You’re astoundingly offensive, but you’re right.”

  Silverbush allowed a faint gloat of a smile to cross his lips, then pursed them and looked at Justin. “Same goes for you, too. Whether you want to acknowledge it or not, cowboy, we live in a political world. I know you think you make it up as you go along, but you live by the rules, same as the rest of us. Maybe you bend ’em more than most, but you’ve built up a life here. Got a nice little house; I haven’t been able to find too many friends but I’m sure you got one or two; got the occasional girlfriend. And you took this job, which I know you didn’t have to do, so it must mean something to you. You care about what you do; you care about the people in this town; you care about the results you get. In this instance, I care about the results you’re going to get, too. We got the same goal—make everything co
me out all right so our happy little lives just keep rollin’ along. So, you see, we’re not all that different, you and me.”

  Justin didn’t hang his head and his voice wasn’t close to a whisper when he said, “You’ll be good on the stump when you run for governor one of these days. But what is it you actually want from me?”

  “I want you to work with me. I want you to work with my men. I want full cooperation. I don’t want you going off half-cocked, and I don’t want you to talk to anyone in the media.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yeah. I don’t want you messing around in places you shouldn’t be messing around in.”

  “Any specific places you have in mind?”

  “H. R. Harmon.”

  “He’s kind of relevant to the investigation, don’t you think?”

  “Obviously, he might be helpful. It remains to be seen just how much.”

  “But you’ll be doing the seeing.”

  “That’s right. I think a slightly more delicate touch than yours is required here.”

  Justin didn’t answer immediately, not that Silverbush was looking for an answer. He was merely looking for acquiescence, which Justin gave him when all he said was “Okay.”

  “Good.” Silverbush smiled at them both now. He stood as if waiting for them to leave.

  “Can I just point out one thing?” Justin asked.

  “Of course.”

  “You’re in my office. You’re the one who’s actually got to make the graceful exit.”

  Silverbush laughed. It was almost an affectionate laugh—almost, but not quite. Justin handed him his preliminary report when the DA’s laughter stopped. “You might want to read this sooner rather than later.”

  “I’m not big on reading. I’m big on action.”

  “Well,” Justin said, “as you made clear, you’re the boss.” He nodded toward the report now in Silverbush’s hand. “All I can do is tell you what I know and make my recommendation.”

  “Would you like my recommendation?” Silverbush asked. “Don’t fuck up. Or I’ll have your balls for breakfast.”

  “If the whole governor thing doesn’t work out, try football coach,” Justin said. “You’ve got that inspirational touch.”

  Silverbush laughed once more, this time with genuine good feeling, and left the East End Harbor mayor and chief of police alone in the office.

  “Charmer, isn’t he?” Leona said.

  “You might want to read my report,” Justin said, handing her another copy, “before Mr. Charm does.”

  “Something you didn’t mention just now, Jay?”

  “Hey,” Justin said, “I’m not big on mentioning. I’m big on action.” And then he said, “But read it.”

  9

  The Rockworth and Williams offices were on the fifty-sixth floor of the World Financial Building. The expansive windows in the even more expansive lobby looked out, on this remarkably clear day, over what seemed to be the entire world. Directly east was Ground Zero, its presence still jarring. Looking north you could see almost all of Manhattan—Tribeca, midtown, Central Park, all the way up to Harlem, and even the distant specks of traffic inching along the Triborough Bridge. The view west took in the Hudson River and well into New Jersey. Looking south at the smooth expanse of the Upper Bay, you stared down at the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Justin had the feeling that if he had a better sense of geography and knew which way to look, and if his vision were substantially better, he’d have a decent shot at viewing the jutting shores of Cornwall all the way across the ocean.

  He was kept waiting for twenty-seven minutes, three minutes less than he’d expected. He could have barged in, flashing his badge, but he decided to keep this friendly. If the secretary had exceeded his thirty-minute waiting limit, however, his friendly demeanor would have gone out the fifty-sixth-floor window. Luckily for all concerned, she came in the nick of time to lead him back to Daniel French, the Rockworth executive who’d been picked to talk to him.

  “I’m not quite sure what I’m supposed to be able to tell you,” French told Justin. They were sitting in a conference room, which Justin figured was roughly the square footage of his house in East End Harbor. French offered water—cold or room temperature, which Justin declined; coffee, which Justin accepted, black. French had water. Cold.

  “I’m gathering any information that might be helpful in the investigation,” Justin explained. “I’m looking for help so I can find out who killed Evan Harmon.”

  “I still can’t believe this happened,” French said. “You never think . . . well . . . It’s just so shocking.”

  “Shocking because Evan didn’t have any enemies?”

  “Everybody in our business has enemies. I’m sure Evan had his share. No, I meant shocking because people go broke all the time in our business, or people wind up in prison because they embezzle funds. People don’t get murdered.”

  “Sometimes murder can even reach such rarefied air,” Justin said.

  “I’m not being some kind of prima donna asshole,” French said. “I know it happens. It’s just never happened to anyone I know. Or anyone quite so rarefied as Evan.”

  “How well did you know him?”

  “Fairly well. We were approximately the same age; we moved in somewhat the same circles, at least professionally.”

  “Not socially?”

  “No, not really. I mean, I’d see him around. At clubs or at a tennis match or something like that. But mostly we knew each other through business.”

  “I’d like a list of the people here who dealt with him regularly.”

  “Almost everybody on a certain level dealt with Evan. He was a player. I can get you the list, but it’ll be fairly long and I don’t know how helpful.”

  “You don’t have anyone who’s primarily assigned to Ascension?”

  “As I said, we have a few—”

  “How about Ellis St. John?”

  Dan French was good. He barely missed a beat. “Ellis certainly spends a lot of his time on the Ascension account. He probably could be—”

  “He was Evan’s primary broker, wasn’t he?”

  “He is Ascension’s primary broker, not Evan’s. He’s been one of our main connections to people there for the past three or four years.”

  “One of?”

  “Yes. Although I suppose he would be considered the main—”

  “If he was the main contact, why did so many other people here need to be in touch with Evan? Or with other people at Ascension?”

  “Because we have a lot of different departments, and sometimes it’s easier for people to simply talk directly to the person who can best address a specific need. If Ascension wants some research done on a particular type of investment, they deal with someone in that department. Ellis might coordinate it but not always.”

  “Is that Ellis’s main job, coordinating?”

  “No. It’s just a by-product of his link to Ascension. And to other companies, by the way. Ascension’s hardly his only account.”

  “What exactly is his link to Ascension? Can you define it?”

  “I suppose. It’s not as if it’s a unique job—it’s fairly standard for any company of our size. As I said, R and W is the primary broker for quite a few funds.”

  “So let’s go with the basics and explain to me what that really means.”

  French smiled broadly. Justin didn’t know if he was smiling because he liked teaching people what he did or whether he just liked talking about how much money his company made. “The prime brokerage business is a direct beneficiary of the growth of the hedge fund business. And the hedge fund business has become, by far, the most—how shall I put this—active segment of the asset management business.”

  “Active meaning lucrative?”

  “When it works,” French said. “When it doesn’t work, it results in the biggest losses.”

  “So it’s the most unstable.”

  “We don’t really use that word around here. Let’
s just say it’s the most volatile.”

  “Okay. Keep going.”

  “Twenty years ago, money that was managed by hedge funds was probably somewhere around thirty, thirty-five billion dollars. Now it’s substantially over a trillion. There’s no other segment of the financial world with anywhere near that kind of growth and profitability. But, as a result, there’s more and more competition. That’s normal and it’s probably healthy, but it also means you have to be more aggressive and you have to be good. You have to be better than your competitors, which means you need every edge you can get. So a lot of hedge funds hook up with companies like ours who can provide prime brokers, which helps give them the edge they need. We provide securities to cover short sales, make margin loans, clear trades, provide reporting services and custody assets, provide research. And we even help hedge funds raise money. As a prime broker, we probably execute twenty-five to thirty percent of a hedge fund client’s transactions. We also provide a daily NAV—”

  “Sorry,” Justin said. “I’m a little rusty with my financial acronyms.”

  “Net asset value.”

  “That it? No free tennis lessons and shiatsu massage?”

  “If need be. We provide whatever is necessary. We can set up a rudimentary risk management system for our clients; we’ll find office space as a hedge fund company expands; we’ll find someone an operations officer and traders; and, if necessary, we can even provide the accounting system.”

  “I assume you’re not doing this out of the goodness of your heart.”

  “That’s a phrase that no one even understands on the Street.”

  “So explain to me how you make enough to justify this extremely impressive office and your suits that cost more than most people’s rent.”

  “We get commissions from every single trade and order flow.”

  “At no risk.”

  “We handle the transactions; we’re not putting our own money in. And hedge funds probably account for a third of our trades now.”

  “You want to tell me how much that might come to a year?”

  “We don’t give out our financial figures,” French told him.