by Stephen Frey
“But this time the young man has a stroke of good luck. He finds himself with a sharp lawyer doing pro bono work as a public defender, and all he gets is probation. Law enforcement wasn’t nationally coordinated in those days so the Richmond court doesn’t even know about the Ohio crime. Besides, once again the young woman admits that the sex was consensual, so it’s statutory rape, and she pleads with the judge to show leniency. Turns out she’s in love with the young man.”
“Keep going,” I urge.
“There’s no pregnancy as a result of the rape this time, but they end up getting married,” Reggie continues. “The young man gets a job at a local factory and the girl works as a maid for a family on the rich side of town. After a while they save enough for a down payment on a small house in a working-class section of the city. Then she does get pregnant and they have a baby boy. Everything’s going along fine. They’re in love and the young man seems to have gotten control of himself. But his past catches up to him. The girl from Ohio shows up on their doorstep with her child and suddenly the situation gets complicated again. Seems the young man had secretly been staying in touch with the Ohio girl the whole time.”
“The young man in the story is my father,” I whisper.
Reggie nods.
“But how did you find out all of that?” After so many years I’m finally learning who he is, and it isn’t pretty. I don’t see how this story could possibly have a happy ending. “Did you find old newspaper clippings from Ohio or something? Is that how you found my father?”
“No. He wasn’t William McKnight when he lived in Ohio. He was George Wayne Franklin. He didn’t change his name to William McKnight until he came to Richmond.”
“George Wayne Franklin,” I whisper to myself. “Then how did you find him?”
“Everything’s digital these days, and when we entered William McKnight’s fingerprints into the computer, Franklin’s record came up too. I pieced things together by talking to people in Richmond and Ohio who were around when this all happened.” Reggie puts a hand on my shoulder. “Are you all right, Augustus?”
“I don’t know,” I say, my voice raspy. Maybe it was good that I hadn’t been close to my father. If I had been, this news might be hitting me even harder. Though it’s hard to imagine how I could feel any worse right now.
“You sure? You want to talk?”
Down deep I think Reggie has a good heart. He can say all he wants to about staying cold and objective with regard to the people involved with cases he’s working on, but he knows he might as well have just dropped a bomb on me with what he’s said, and I can see that he’s concerned. “I just need a few minutes by myself.”
He nods. “Okay.”
He gets up and starts to walk out. “Just one more thing. Sorry to bring this up right now,” he says evenly, “but I still need a blood sample. Let’s get that detail out of the way.”
“Tell me again why you need a blood sample,” I say quietly, still stunned.
“I told you. It’s standard operating procedure. There’s nothing to be worried about.”
“If it was nothing to be worried about, Reggie, you wouldn’t be bugging me about it.” Augustus Franklin. It sounds strange. “Be honest with me, Reggie. What’s going on?”
“There was dried blood under Melanie’s fingernails when they brought her body into the morgue. I’m sure none of it was yours because you told me that you were never physically violent with her. Right?”
I nod slowly, as if in a trance.
“But our pathologists still need to check it out. It’s just part of the process. You understand, don’t you?”
I really don’t, but this afternoon I’ll give him what he wants, I decide, letting my face fall slowly into my hands.
“Good-bye, Augustus.”
So that’s why my father disappeared for a couple of days every few months. He was seeing his “other” family. And my mother was letting him. She had to have known what was going on if the other girl showed up in Richmond like Reggie said.
There’s a soft knock on the door.
“Yes?” I take my hands from my face but don’t look around. I assume it’s Reggie at the door, back with more questions.
“I’m sorry to bother you, Augustus,” Anna says quietly, moving to where I can see her.
“Oh, it’s you.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“That was a cop who just left, right?”
“Yes.”
“What did he want?” she asks reluctantly, as if she knows she has no right to ask but can’t stop herself.
I look into Anna’s eyes and I swear I see fear. “It’s a matter concerning an old family business. Money stuff. Nothing to worry about.”
I sweat profusely as I slam the red Everlast punching bag hanging from the basement ceiling. I haven’t even bothered to put on the eight-ounce gloves I usually wear when I work out. I just hit the bag harder and harder, faster and faster, making believe it’s Frank Taylor. Or my father.
I may be in good shape, but hitting the bag is exhausting work no matter how fit you are. After a few minutes my hands feel like anchors, and I start to become light-headed. But I keep going, groaning louder each time my fist smashes the bag, until my head is spinning and I’m gasping for breath.
Failure. Ironically, that’s my objective. Keeping my hands and arms going until I physically cannot do it anymore. That’s how you increase strength when you train. Go to failure.
Finally it happens and my knees buckle. I try desperately to maintain my balance, but it’s impossible and I stumble toward an old wooden wardrobe Melanie used when we were first married. My arms are so tired I can’t even raise them to protect myself, and I have to take the brunt of the impact with my shoulder. I crash into the shabby piece of furniture so hard it almost falls over as I collapse on the cement floor in front of it.
For five minutes I’m flat on my back, chest heaving, while my body recuperates. As I’m lying there, I think about how I finally made the trip downtown this afternoon and gave the D.C. police department my blood. The whole procedure was over quickly and it seemed routine—Reggie wasn’t even around. I haven’t heard anything yet, but I suppose it’s too soon to expect news. Not that I think there will be any news. Depending on how thoroughly Melanie washed her hands—or didn’t—the lab people may find my blood beneath her fingernails because of the scratches to my neck. But that wasn’t my fault, and if I have to explain the incident to Reggie, I think he’ll understand.
Finally I raise myself onto one elbow, still drained from the exercise. Maybe the blood test has weakened me. The lab people took more than I thought they would.
Both wardrobe doors have swung wide open as a result of the impact. As I rise to my knees, I see it’s full of Melanie’s old clothes dangling from wire hangers. Blouses and dresses she used to wear but that went out of style a few years after we were married. I reach out and touch one of the dresses, thinking about how happy we were during our first years together. It was a time when simply having each other was enough. When the lack of money wasn’t an issue. When eating hot dogs three nights a week didn’t bother us.
As my fingers stroke the material, I feel something in one of the dress’s pockets. It’s a solid mass about the size of a baseball. I dig inside curiously and fall slowly back on the floor as I pull it out of the pocket and hold it up in front of my face. It’s a thick roll of cash, held tightly together by a rubber band.
When I’m finished going through the rest of the clothes in the wardrobe I’ve found several more rolls. In total there’s more than six thousand dollars hidden here.
CHAPTER 12
I’m not a gambling man. I’m not part of a neighborhood crew that meets regularly for Friday night poker marathons, I don’t bet on sporting events, and I’ve been inside a casino only once in my life.
That was last February when Melanie and I drove to Atlantic City and stayed at the Taj Mahal on the board
walk. I won the trip as a door prize at my company Christmas party in early December—the first time I had ever won anything like that. It was so cold when we got to New Jersey we stayed inside the casino the entire time. We never even made it to the boardwalk, let alone the beach.
The afternoon of our first day we bought two very expensive cocktails and wandered aimlessly through the cavernous, neon-lit rooms. I didn’t have extra cash for the tables—the door prize included only the room and dinners—so we people-watched. Most of them appeared to be enjoying themselves. The whole gambling thing was simply an experience and the cash they were throwing away was funny money.
But a few people in the casino didn’t take losing quite so easily. They slammed their fists on the green felt of the tables every time the house hit twenty-one. They yelled and cursed and shouted for a new dealer whenever they lost, unable to accept the simple fact that Lady Luck was laughing at them. One guy was even ejected by two huge uniformed guards after he banged the table so hard following a bad deal that other players’ chips fell to the floor. There was a mad scramble as the crowd tried to grab a few.
I actually saw a woman try to snatch her chips off a craps table and make a run for it after a bad roll of the dice—she was nabbed quickly. And Melanie watched a man dissolve into tears standing in front of a slot machine, clasping an empty plastic change bucket with both hands. As soon as the man used his last quarter and stood up, another guy slipped onto the stool in front of the same one-armed bandit and on his fourth pull won a huge pot, filling his plastic bucket with the exact same quarters the first guy had lost. It was sad. For no apparent reason, one guy was a huge winner and the other guy was a total loser, but I suppose that’s just the way life is.
Most Atlantic City blackjack tables have ten-or twenty-dollar per-deal minimums, so the few five-dollar tables are usually pretty crowded. Melanie and I camped out near one of the cheaper tables to watch, and when a player at the end closest to us left in disgust after the dealer scooped up his last chip, Melanie shocked me by stuffing two hundred dollars in my palm and pushing me toward the vacated seat. I slipped in front of a pudgy woman wearing a loud orange jumpsuit who was scrambling to get to it too. I gave the woman a quick wink as I claimed the seat just ahead of her, then got my two hundred dollars exchanged for chips.
Like I said, I’m not a regular gambler so I don’t know the ins and outs of a complex game like craps, but blackjack is pretty straightforward. Get as close to twenty-one as you can, but don’t go over. Go over, you lose. Beat the dealer without going over, you win. Aces count one or eleven—it’s the player’s choice—all face cards like kings and queens count ten, and every other card’s value is its face amount. The key to blackjack is knowing the odds cold. Knowing when to hold and when to take a hit, and never deviating from the probabilities no matter how good or bad the cards are treating you.
I’m fairly disciplined, I’ve always been good with numbers, but I was still surprised when I walked away thirty minutes later with five hundred dollars in chips. As soon as I started to feel the cards going against me, I picked up and left. Which is almost as important as knowing the odds. Knowing when to walk away, and having the discipline to do it. Otherwise the casino will end up with everything.
As soon as I had exchanged my five hundred dollars’ worth of chips for cash at the window, Melanie slipped both hands around my neck and kissed me deeply. Then she whispered in my ear that she was going upstairs to our room, and that I should follow in a few minutes. That if I did, she’d give me the fuck of my life. Then she tapped the money in my hand and told me that such a good time would cost me exactly five hundred dollars.
As I watched Melanie walk toward the elevators, turning heads as she always did, I remember trying to figure out where in the world she could have gotten the two hundred bucks. I kept the checkbook and I would have known if she was taking money from the account. There were never any ATM withdrawals or cash checks on the monthly statements other than mine. But sometimes there were crumpled tens or twenties lying on her bureau in the morning after one of her late nights. I figured Taylor had given it to her in case she had car trouble on the way home and needed to call a cab.
There were some winners at the casino, a few people with piles of chips that seemed to constantly grow. But they were few and far between, and they weren’t at the center of a wild crowd and with a gorgeous woman on each arm like you see in the movies. They kept to themselves, most of them wore sunglasses so you couldn’t see their eyes, and their expressions didn’t change whether they won or lost.
I’ve been thinking about that weekend ever since it occurred to me that Bedford & Associates is exactly like that Atlantic City casino. It’s government sanctioned, enables the general public to recklessly thrill-seek, and chews up and spits out inexperienced players in a heartbeat. Since I go there every day, maybe I’m a gambling man after all.
Of the hundred day traders who were at Bedford the day I started nearly two weeks ago, eleven are already gone because they couldn’t pay off their debts to Michael Seaver. But they’ve been replaced quickly because there are always more people who believe they can beat the odds, who want in on this action that they think will make them rich.
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that so many people in our society want to play the day trading game. Day trading defines us perfectly. We’re a nation obsessed with risk in the pursuit of huge reward, and we have absolutely no patience. Things have to happen for us at light speed or we’re bored to tears. Nowadays people day trade their careers, for crying out loud. Monday your neighbor is working for ABC-dot-com, Wednesday he’s at MNO-dot-com, and by the end of the week it’s XYZ-dot-com. No more forty years to a gold watch and a pension like it was for our fathers. We want it now, and if you can’t give it to us, we’ll find someone who can. If people are willing to day trade their careers, they’ll sure as hell day trade stocks.
Once in a while a newspaper runs a story about somebody losing everything after investing their life savings in a dot-bomb like SweatersForRats.com or in plans for a south Texas ski resort, but you’re more likely to hear about the original eBay investors who turned four million into four billion. The eleven day traders who left Bedford over the last two weeks without a dime aren’t good PR for the machine, so we assume they screwed up, not the system.
I don’t know for certain, but I think Daniel is about to become the twelfth person to disappear from the Bedford trading floor. He looked terrible this morning when he arrived—his eyes were bloodshot and his purple hair was a mess. I mean, even more of a mess than usual. He told me yesterday that he was having a bad run with his portfolio, and I caught him popping pills in the men’s room a few minutes before noon today. I feel bad for him, but it’s none of my business and I don’t want to meddle where I’m not wanted. Sometimes people who need help the most will devote more energy to covering up their problems than to saving themselves. It’s strange how that works, but I’ve seen it before. Mom tried to help my father so much, but every day he receded a little farther into his shell until at the end he barely even spoke to her. He was a broken man. Now I know why.
Up to now I haven’t technically been day trading. Aside from Teletekk, I’ve been buying and holding my securities for at least a couple of days, whereas classic day traders are in and out of their positions in minutes, sometimes seconds. They use strategies with names like “hi-mom” as they search for identifiable high momentum—hence the name—in a particular stock or index like the S&P 500 or the Nasdaq 100. Day traders closely track trading ranges of a specific security or index over short time periods, and when they see an aberration or identify high momentum in either direction—up or down—they take advantage of it. Say XYZ Co.’s share price has traded in the range of $20 to $25 during the last month. A day trader may snap up XYZ Co. when the price nears $20 and sell as it approaches $25. In fact, he may buy at $20, sell at $20.25, buy at $20.50, sell at $20.75 and so on all the way up the range. He’ll do the
same thing as the price declines by shorting the stock. He’ll do it on the way up and on the way down, over and over all day long. That’s day trading. There are lots of unique strategies within that framework, but that’s the basic idea.
A few years ago this kind of rapid-fire trading wouldn’t have been possible. The creaky mainframes the stock exchanges used back then would have melted under the weight of today’s volume. But now the supercomputers the American exchanges have installed can handle almost everything we throw at them. Which, ironically, isn’t necessarily good because most of the individuals out there who are trading shouldn’t be. But that’s the double-edged sword of capitalism. We cheer those who take risks and make millions and mock the idiots who take risks and lose it all.
Day trading sounds simple, which is the problem. The average Joe figures he can easily identify a historical trading range in a security by himself and be an instant success. He figures he doesn’t have to be able to understand a complex set of financial statements or be completely up to speed on all of XYZ Co.’s latest products. In fact, he figures it might hurt him if he were. Then he might think too much. All he’s trying to do is stay on the alert for major announcements about the companies he’s invested in that could propel his stocks violently in either direction. The challenge for the average Joe is that securities don’t remain in the same trading range forever, even when there are no major announcements—which might seem obvious. But in the minute-by-minute chaos of the market, day traders can lose sight of the bigger picture. Then they lose their shirts.
The trader who buys XYZ Co. as the share price approaches $20—the bottom of the identified range—may be shocked when the shares suddenly plunge past $20 to $17 or $16. What he doesn’t know is that some huge portfolio manager in Omaha, Nebraska, arbitrarily decided to dump a ton of shares, causing a sell-side imbalance—and there’s no way the trader could have ever anticipated this. As a result there are many more shares trying to find a home than there are homes—more sellers than buyers—so the price drops below the $20 resistance point until enough buyers surface to stabilize the price. And the day trader may not see the cause of the imbalance on Trader One because the portfolio manager’s dealer may be able to hide the transaction—if it’s a Nasdaq-traded issue—until it’s too late for the day trader to react.