by Konstantin
We came to rest in a conference room that looked out on Broadway and Bowling Green and a piece of the darkening harbor. The walls that weren’t windows were covered in gray fabric and more nautical prints. The table was an ebony slab with a dozen chairs around it. There was an ebony console against the wall, with china cups and saucers on it. Vickers offered coffee and we declined. We sat at the table.
Vickers smoothed his tie and looked at me. “You never actually said why it is you’re interested in Cassandra Z,” he said.
I glanced at Mike, who moved his head minutely. “Missing persons,” I said.
Vickers nodded. “Cassandra being the person?” I nodded back. “Have you been to the police?”
“Not yet,” I said.
Vickers nodded. “Your client would rather not?” he asked. Mike saved me from answering.
“John told me you were going to talk to us about Cassandra, Tommy. Did he get that wrong?”
“No,” Vickers sighed, and smiled wearily. “He didn’t. You asked me about Cassandra; here’s what I can tell you: I was looking for her on behalf of a client; I spoke to the art dealer who represents her— a man named Orlando Krug— and eventually, I spoke to her. That was in December, over a month ago. Neither I nor my client has had any contact with her since.” He looked at both of us.
Mike stared out the window, and pursed his lips. I shook my head. “And…?” I said.
“And what?” Vickers asked.
“And that’s it? That’s what you called us in to say?”
“Actually, I just called you, not that I’m not glad to see Michael.”
“But that’s all you’ve got?” He nodded. “Why bother to say anything, then?”
He looked mildly puzzled. “You asked.”
“Is that all it takes?” My laugh was short and sharp. “Because if it is, I have plenty of other questions.”
Vickers sighed. “You have a reputation for being persistent. I thought I could save us all some time and undue effort, and let you move on to more productive things.” He looked at Mike. “I hope I haven’t miscalculated.”
“Of course not, Tommy,” Mike said. “And we appreciate you having us in. Nobody wants to waste time or cause unnecessary trouble, and if we could just follow up on a couple of things, then we’ll get out of your hair.” Vickers nodded vaguely and Mike smiled wider. “To start, what was it that you wanted to discuss with Cassandra?”
Vickers turned his palms up. “It’s a confidential matter, Michael; I’m sure you understand. I imagine your client feels much the same way.”
Mike nodded understandingly. “And your client is…?”
Vickers raised a white eyebrow. “A private person,” he said.
“Finding himself in one of Cassandra’s videos must’ve come as a surprise, then,” I said.
Vickers turned chilly eyes on me and tightened his mouth. “You’re missing the important point,” he said. “The important point is that I saw her once, over a month ago, and not again. Once. That’s the important point, son.”
My face tightened and I took a deep breath. “What about your client?” I asked.
“My client returned to New York a week ago, after three weeks in Latin America. And he can document his movements during that time.” He turned to Mike and smiled. “The itinerary makes it rock-solid, Michael.”
“Not really,” I said. “If he can afford you, then your client can afford all sorts of other help.”
Vickers looked at me as if I’d just crapped on his conference table. When he spoke, it was to Mike, and his voice was dry as kindling. “What the hell is with your friend? I invite him in to talk— as a favor, mind you— and I get this? I heard he was a hothead, but Christ…I mean, I could sit here asking you the same questions about your client— who he is, what he wants with this girl, and so forth— but am I doing that? No. Instead, I’m trying to help you out. And in return I get this?”
Mike gave him an apologetic shrug and looked at me. “Tommy’s right, John, there’s no call for us to speculate about things when he’s so willing to help,” he said. He turned back to Vickers. “January’s a nice time to get out of town, and go somewhere warm. Was Latin America a business trip?”
Vickers squinted. “How does that—”
“I’m sure you’re right— it probably doesn’t matter, and if the police think otherwise, I expect they’ll just ask.”
The hoods came down over Vickers’s blue eyes. “I have nothing to do with the police.”
Mike’s smile was guileless and his eyes were opened wide. “Of course you don’t,” he said. “And there’s no reason why you should.” And we were all quiet for a while.
It was Vickers who broke the silence. “Is that a threat, Michael?” he asked, though he didn’t seem much threatened.
“More of a proposal.”
“Proposing what, exactly?”
“That you tell us what your client wanted with Cassandra, and we go away and pursue the more productive things that you mentioned.”
Vickers smoothed his tie some more. “I don’t think so,” he said. “If the police have questions, so be it. We can’t help them, but if we have to waste time explaining that, then I guess that’s the way it is.”
Mike nodded. “Talking to the police, dealing with the press, questions about the business…all of that takes time.” His tone was sympathetic, even regretful.
“I don’t think the press—” Vickers began, but I cut him off.
“Your client is in a select group, Tommy: he’s the only guy in one of Cassandra’s videos to ever come looking for her, much less to find her. That alone makes for some elaborate explaining…especially given the timing.”
Vickers drummed his fingers on the tabletop for a while. Then he shook his head slowly. “You’re making things more complicated than they are, son— more complicated than they have to be— and you’re wasting your own time and your client’s money doing it. I spoke to this girl a month ago, and not again, and my client hasn’t seen or spoken to her in years.” He looked at Mike. “I’m asking you to trust me on this, Michael.”
Mike’s smile was small and bland. “That might be easier to do if we knew why you were looking for Holly in the first place.”
Vickers drank off whatever was in his cup, and sighed. “A girl like that— there must be a dozen other people you could talk to, more maybe. You really—”
“A girl like what?” I interrupted, and the anger in my voice surprised even me.
Vickers pursed his lips and looked at Mike. “He really can’t keep it in his pants, can he? That must cause you problems.”
Mike shrugged. “It’s the cross I bear,” he said coolly. Then he looked at me and twitched an eyebrow.
“I’ll meet you out front,” I said, and I left the room. Vickers didn’t say goodbye, and neither did I.
I paused by the corner office again, on my way back to the waiting room. The door was still shut and I thought about opening it and looking in on the dark-haired man, but I didn’t. Instead, I rode the elevator down and waited for Mike in a corner of the lobby. He was buttoning his coat as he approached.
“I’d forgotten what an arrogant bastard that guy is,” he said. “And those theatrics— either he’s lost his touch, or my standards are higher now than when I was twenty-five.” He smiled and ran a hand through his hair. “Your performance was far superior, by the way: no one does ‘volatile’ better.”
“It wasn’t entirely an act,” I said.
“The best performances never are.”
“Did Vickers say anything useful?”
Mike pulled out his BlackBerry and thumbed through messages while he spoke. “Not really. A vague offer to swap client names— a ‘You show me yours, I’ll show you mine’ sort of thing— but nothing sincere. He was never going to tell us shit.”
“Then what was the point of his invitation?”
“A calculated risk on Tommy’s part, I suppose— a chance to size you up, to dazzle
you and befuddle you and maybe find something out. Best case, a chance to sell you on his story and get you to leave his client alone. All of which would’ve been worth the risk of stirring the pot a little, especially given that you already knew he’d been looking for Cassandra. I suspect he gave up on most of it when you brought me along.”
Over Mike’s shoulder, I watched the elevators empty. Ranks of dark-coated figures flowed past, girding themselves for the cold. “You buy any of his story?”
“I don’t know,” Mike said. “Tommy wasn’t particularly circumspect when he went looking for Cassandra, which is not what you’d expect if he or his client had meant her harm.”
“Maybe they meant no harm when they were just looking; maybe that changed when they actually found her. Or maybe your pal doesn’t know everything his client was up to.”
Mike looked at me. “Has it occurred to you that maybe we’re in the same boat?”
I was about to say something— to concede the point, perhaps, or to ask just how worried he was about David— when an elevator door opened. A fat man emerged, followed by a small blond woman, followed by a stocky, dark-haired man. He swaggered off, and he rolled his shoulders as he went, and he was suddenly more than familiar. I stepped back, into the shadow of a column, and watched him cross the lobby, turning up the collar of his big camel coat as he went. Mike turned to look and I caught his arm.
“What?” he asked.
“That guy— in the tan coat— he was in Vickers’s office.”
“Yeah, I saw him when we came in. So what?”
“I think he’s Vickers’s client.” The stocky man pushed through the revolving doors and into the crowd on Broadway. He turned right, north.
“His Cassandra client?” Mike asked. “How do you know?”
But I was already past him when the questions came, headed for the doors. I glanced back and answered. “He’s Bluto,” I said.
25
It was nearly dark outside, and it took me a few minutes to pick out the swagger and the wide, brown shoulders from the hurrying crowd. I hung back while he waited for the light at Exchange Place, and my cell phone burred. It was Mike.
“You’re just following him, right?” he asked.
“What does that mean?”
“It means I know you were pissed at Tommy, and I know how you felt about those videos, and I don’t want you getting jammed up with something stupid like an assault charge when you’re in the middle of a case. It won’t do you or your brother any good.” The light changed and Bluto was moving.
“Nothing stupid,” I said, and I turned off my phone and followed him across Broadway. He headed west, through Exchange Alley, and north again on Trinity Place. Half a block later he went into an office building.
It was an older structure, circa 1950, built of brown brick and squatter than its neighbors. It was currently incarnated as Trinity Parc Tower, its aging, undistinguished bones only partially hidden beneath a recent veneer of marble and frosted glass. I was grateful that the lobby was shallow, so that I could see the elevators from the street. It also helped that the building directory was up to date, and that the security guards were dullards.
Through the lobby glass, I watched Bluto board an elevator by himself, and watched the floor display climb to 11 and stop. Then I scanned the directory and went inside. I scrawled the name of a twelfth-floor law firm in the sign-in book, and showed my driver’s license to the guards, who waved me through with barely a glance.
According to the building directory, three firms shared the eleventh floor: Fenn Partners LLC; MF Securities LLC; and Trading Pit LLC, and apparently they shared the same office too. I stepped off the elevator directly into a reception area, and the three names were spelled out in blue plastic letters on a sign above an unmanned receptionist’s desk. There was an arrangement of angular leather chairs and glass coffee tables to the right— the waiting area, also vacant. Behind that, beyond a waist-high partition, was a drab expanse of gray carpet, fluorescent lighting, and cubicles.
The cubicles were low-walled and tiny, and the ones I could see were equipped with narrow desks, swivel chairs, and banks of flat-screen monitors. The monitors glowed and flickered with charts and graphs and numbers, though just then they were playing to mostly empty seats. The few men left in the cubes— and there were only men in them— were stuffing briefcases and donning coats. They paid little attention to one another at the elevators, and none at all to me, and in a few moments I was alone in the waiting room.
There were glossy brochures on the coffee tables and I picked one up and read. After four pages of photos, diagrams, and acronym-laden babble about the latest trading technology, the most current market data, cutting-edge risk management, Nasdaq Level II quotes, extensive training, and low, low, low fees, I knew what I needed to about Trading Pit LLC. It was a day-trading firm— a motel of sorts— that for low, low, low fees, let an individual, a day trader, rent one of its cubes and the use of its trading systems, to earn or burn his money in a clean, well-lighted place. In theory, the firm’s systems were better than what one could typically access at home, the fees were lower than trading through a discount broker, at least for high-volume players, the executions were faster, and the environment was more disciplined and professional. Maybe, but I saw more than one screen that displayed the home page of a popular on-line poker site.
The most useful part of the literature was the back page, and the bios and photos of the firm’s management. There, at the top of the heap, was Bluto, the founder, chairman, and CEO of Trading Pit LLC: Mitchell Fenn.
According to the brochure, Fenn was a longtime veteran of the securities industry— a former SVP at a big broker-dealer, and director of that firm’s trading operations— and he’d left there two years ago to found Trading Pit, piecing it together from the scraps of several other day-trading outfits that hadn’t survived the last market downturn. His picture showed a broad, tanned face beneath a head of dark, curly hair. His teeth were large and bright, and his wide smile was hungry. I dropped the brochure on the table and stepped into the maze of cubicles.
I found Fenn at the northwest corner of the floor, in a large, chrome and leather den with views of Ground Zero. He was lounging behind a chrome and glass desk, and talking to a red-haired guy in a shirt and tie, who sat across from him, smiling and nodding. I saw a dusting of gray in Fenn’s shiny black curls, and a web of lines around his dark eyes, and closer up, he looked ten years older than he did in his photo— around fifty, maybe. He’d lost the overcoat and jacket, and his blue shirtsleeves were rolled over thick forearms. I stood in the door and he recognized me right away. He was still for a moment, and then the wide, greedy smile appeared.
“Fuck if Tommy wasn’t right about you,” he said. His voice was deep Brooklyn, and hearing it was a little shock. Some part of me had been expecting synthesized speech. “Fuck if he didn’t say I should keep away today. But I didn’t listen— I wanted to have a look.” He turned to the redhead. “Take a lesson from that, Chris: don’t argue with your lawyer.”
Chris looked from Fenn to me, and his doughy face was puzzled. He put his big hands on his knees, as if he was about to get up.
“He a friend of yours, Mitch?” he asked. His voice was surprisingly high-pitched, and full of adolescent tough. He ran a hand over his spiky hair, and his stupid blue eyes narrowed.
Fenn smiled wider. “We haven’t been introduced, but we’ve seen each other before— haven’t we?”
“I think I’ve seen a little more of you,” I said.
The big smile didn’t falter, but it turned colder, and a shade meaner. “Yeah? Hope you didn’t get some kind of inferiority complex from it.” His laugh was a throaty bark.
“It was something closer to indigestion.”
The grin held, but even Chris couldn’t miss the radiating anger. He had no idea what was going on, but he stood up anyway. “You want to watch your mouth, buddy,” he said. He was maybe an inch taller than I, and heavi
er by twenty sloppy pounds.
I looked more closely at his face— the freckles, snub nose, thin lips, and chipped front tooth— and I recognized him from the brochure: Christopher Fitz-something, the head sales guy. Which explained his eagerness to impress his boss. I shook my head.
“You don’t want an audience for this, Mitch,” I said.