The Big Fear

by Andrew Case

  If he pushed a little, he could get somewhere. If someone at the firm had a grudge against Davenport, you never know what he might do. Afraid he’d get exposed, or fired, or sent to jail, he could snap. Maybe her husband didn’t have a jealous girlfriend and an insurance policy. Maybe there were some bad actors on Wall Street that Leonard could tell detective Harrison about. Every cop needs a lead. And every lead starts with a motive.

  The woman’s fingernails curled cautiously around the lip of her cocktail glass. “I’d wanted so badly to end up there. On the top floors, looking out important windows. At one point I would have done anything to keep that kind of power.”

  Leonard leaned back a little. You can get more out of people if they think you are comfortable. Leaning forward shows fear, anxiety, tension. Veronica’s perfect posture was shuttered around her drink, but if Leonard could show her that he wasn’t afraid, maybe she would open up.

  “So what would you have to do?”

  “You can’t make money being nice to everyone. You know another firm is oversold in a piece of land, you take advantage. The brokers in the building across the street might take the hit and have to send their kids to public school. You can’t get hung up over it.”

  “That sounds like competition. That doesn’t sound like danger.”

  She took a sip of her fructose. “One time, I had been at the firm two years. I was the most junior person there. I was in minerals. You fly around the world, to the most godforsaken places where maniacs are digging for gold. There was an outfit in Indonesia that had sparked whispers of a serious find. The price of the company tripled in a week. I was sent to the field so we could know what was going on first. A spring day in Aceh is hotter than the worst summer in New York. I spoke to the local techs, re-examined the core samples. The dig was a bust; it had looked good at first, but the samples proved that the find was worthless. A couple of grams of ore; you’d never recover your costs. I met with the head of the company before I called home. He was like a character out of a fairy tale—a tangled beard and knotted ankles and deep sallow cheeks. He begged me not to make the call, to give him one more week. Eliot made a fortune shorting the stock before it crashed, and that man jumped out of a corporate helicopter floating over a five-hundred foot waterfall. I understand hurting people. So long as it’s fair. So long as it’s according to the rules.”

  “And that doesn’t sound like danger either.”

  “Because pretty soon they ask you to break the rules.”

  “Who?”

  She shut down. He waited her out. Usually someone will try to fill the silence. But sometimes you need to push a little. She was ready to tell him, but she needed to be asked.

  “Davenport found out who, didn’t she?”

  “It was Eliot.”

  Leonard reached out and touched her hand. People talk when they think there is someone there to listen. In ten years of investigating complaints, Leonard had learned how to seem like a good enough listener. He spoke slowly, with all the warmth he could. “The rules changed on you.”

  “Each time it was a little bit worse. But each step was so small. You undercut the enemy. You get the information more quickly. Someone isn’t watching the market closely and they make a mistake; you capitalize on it. And the life is good, Leonard. It can seem hard, but it’s worth it. For a girl from Howard Beach whose family thinks someone with a pension from the MTA is a success story, Twenty-Six Wall Street feels like the top of the world.”

  Howard Beach. It would explain the fingernails. The accent and the posture were a way of overcompensating. In a room full of Groton and Deerfield, it’s better to seem as though you’re overdoing it than to come off like you grew up in Queens. People might not place you and guess you’re maybe a Canadian aristocrat, or someone who did his boarding school in Switzerland; they won’t ask questions, anyway. But if you open up with outer-borough vowels when the canapés are being passed, your secret will be out. We all have something we are running away from. His head was still tilted to listen to her. His hand was still on her wrist. He wasn’t going to interrupt her.

  “First we’d milk people for information. Instead of waiting for our lab reports, just find the guy in the field who needs the money most. The FDA is a sieve; there is always someone willing to spill the results of a study before it’s public. Technically illegal, technically insider trading, but everyone does it. Like doping in the Tour de France. You wouldn’t be in the game if you didn’t push the rules a little bit.”

  “And then?”

  “And then it gets worse.”

  Her drink was almost empty. She was running out of steam, and while she was giving Leonard a very heartfelt confessional, she hadn’t mentioned why they were there. He had to dig further. “Veronica. Someone killed my boss. Either I’m in the process of getting framed for it or the person who did it is coming after me next. I don’t even know who to be afraid of. But you do.”

  A long sigh. A drink from the cocktail. Those fingernails getting perilously close to her lips, and the residue of her lipstick on the glass as she set it down. “That’s where you’re wrong. I don’t know who either. But I know why.”

  “Why, then.”

  “Your boss brought some kind of list. There was a binder of e-mails. Records of trades. Eliot was—I never had anything to do with it. Eliot had people at the firm who had taken the next step. They weren’t just investigating what was going to happen. Who was doing a bad job. They were sabotaging companies. They would place a short, then set off a bomb. It looks like an industrial accident. You don’t just predict that something bad is going to happen. You make it happen. People sell the stock and he collects a profit.”

  “And where were these industrial accidents taking place?” Maybe Eliot was blowing up wastewater plants in New Guinea. People do all sorts of horrible things for money. He was on to something. For a moment, his ambition ran ahead of him. Catching a cop for a dirty shooting was nothing compared to this. For a moment, he forgot that the last person who had learned this had ended up dead.

  “Right here, Leonard. Right in New York.”

  Nothing would have surprised him except that. This was no far-flung conspiracy. The headlines of the past two years were fodder for EHA Investments’ flush portfolio. The crane collapse would just be a short on a construction company. You sell a restaurant and then release rats in its basement. That sickening smell from the chemical plant hadn’t been an accident. Someone had made money off of it. And the water taxi sinking had meant actual drownings, actual deaths. Not a game to anyone. “You mean the little disasters.”

  It wasn’t quite a nod. “The crane collapse. The water taxi sinking. The rats in the restaurant.”

  Leonard tested his own drink again. Still too sweet. Now it wasn’t even cold any more. “The city has been under attack.”

  She just stared into her drink. Some things you can’t bear to confirm.

  “What was on the list?”

  Veronica shrugged. “I don’t know. I just saw Eliot afterward and I know what happens if you cross him.”

  “So why target me?”

  “If you get arrested for killing your boss, then no one will look any deeper. No one will start talking to Eliot.”

  So Davenport had put enough of the story together to get murdered, probably by someone who now thought Leonard would look good for it. In the next day or two, something linking him to Davenport’s death would be found in his desk or his home. If they could kill Davenport, if they could see that the cops were looking at Leonard, it wouldn’t take much to manufacture a little evidence.

  “Where is the list now?”

  “Eliot has a copy. That’s all I know.”

  “But that’s not all you know.”

  A small hint of fear in the eyes, quickly banished. Ignorance now, a wide open who-me gaze of wonder. Leonard picked up the envelope and slid out a pa
ge of phone records, neatly ticked.

  “You know that I’m investigating the cop shooting. The detective that was killed on the boat. It’s what Davenport did until three days ago.”

  “I read the papers.”

  “These are Brian Rowson’s phone records. The detective who was shot. Five, six, sometimes seven times a day, the last month, he was calling the same number. Do you see that?”

  The thin fingers paging through the paper. “He called our firm.”

  “Any idea why a cop assigned to the Harbor Patrol was calling your investment firm seven times a day? Probably wasn’t managing his portfolio.”

  “I don’t know who he spoke to. It could be anyone at the firm.”

  “But Davenport could have found out.”

  “Someone was telling Eliot. If the detective was calling the firm, he was speaking to Eliot. Or one of his henchmen. Eliot knew when the little disasters were going to happen. I think he was hiring people to do it. Not just here in New York. He would hint at something that was going to happen. In Yemen. In Indonesia. He would send these coded messages, and then tell the traders what to do. To short a certain natural gas distributor. Or airline. Eliot would only hint at it in the hallways. He’d ask, ‘Don’t you have concerns about United Drug?’ And two days later a poison outbreak. Or a mine, and it would collapse. Something horrible would always happen when he gave the word. Here.”

  She took out the flash drive she’d been using all afternoon to copy files. Her fingers shook as she handed it over. “When your boss died, I figured she had learned something. So I did some digging. I found what messages had come through to the firm. Some of them are in code. So I looked at the days of the trades too. The trades were always just after the messages. And they are just before something horrible happened. Look at that. You will see for yourself. What Eliot has been up to.”

  Leonard took the drive. Veronica went on.

  “You have to finish what she started. Her law firm won’t do it. They were hired by Eliot. Eventually they will just give him what he wants. Someone else will take the fall. She will have more information somewhere. Her home, her office. You have to find it so we can turn Eliot in.”

  She was right. Davenport was cautious. She would have built redundancy into the investigation. Somewhere she would have kept her evidence. How had Eliot put it together? How much had he profited? Who were the companies on the list of sabotage targets? And if there were any that hadn’t been hit yet, how could he warn them, and save himself in the process.

  Veronica’s second drink arrived. She reached for it a little too eagerly. Leonard took a chance to reason with her.

  “Veronica, turn yourself in. Turn on Eliot. There are good cops out there. You’ll get credit for turning them in. Whatever you did, you didn’t murder anyone. It won’t be so bad for you.”

  She shook her head and reached into her purse. “You’re wrong. I can’t prove a thing. If I turn myself in, I will never see the outside of a prison. Eliot and the rest of them will make sure of that. They will make it look as though I did much worse things than I did. The only way to stop them would be to catch them in the act, and I don’t have the nerve for that.”

  “And you think I do.”

  “Your boss found out what they were up to. You could find out what she knew. If you know who is next on the list, then you can be ready for them. Apprehend them. That is the only way you are going to get to Eliot.”

  Leonard watched her put back the next drink. Veronica was taking a risk just by talking to him. Leonard had grown accustomed to leaks. He couldn’t even mention some of his favorite cases, because the only way anyone heard about them was that he had slipped confidential files that were about to be quietly closed to tabloid reporters. The kindergarten teacher with four open investigations for child molestation who couldn’t be fired. The EMT who’d been busted twice for doing heroin on the job; the bus driver who slammed the doors on anyone wearing a Mets cap. He had built his favors with Tony Licata that way, right up until Licata was writing Leonard up as a murderer. Leonard understood, appreciated that Veronica was taking a risk. Maybe it was all she could do. He would take her up on it. But he needed to know the terms.

  “So I try to find out who they are going to hit next. I learn what Davenport learned. What then?”

  “Call me at work. Don’t tell me what you found. I’ll know you found something out just by the fact that you called. Once you have some kind of evidence, we can take action. Then I’m going to have to disappear.”

  “Disappear?”

  “They will find me out. Eliot has ways of hurting you. I played as long as I could. I’m going to try to get out alive. I was too caught up in it, and I know I have to get out.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I have ways of making money. Enough for the rest of my life. When this is through, I have ways of escaping. I don’t mind running away. But I’m not going to try to hunt him down and get myself killed.”

  “That’s my job, apparently.”

  “I think you want to. And I think you can. And I think that you know that if you don’t, you could end up in prison. Or maybe worse. It’s more than I’m willing to do. I need to look after myself. Call me when you find out what she knew.”

  Of course Davenport could have been working on anything. The bank could have just been one piece of it: There was no reason for her to limit her search. No reason except getting murdered. Leonard looked down at Veronica. She wasn’t quite smiling. She had shipped off her burden and handed it over to Leonard. Now he was supposed to find out who had killed Davenport so that she could run off to Canada or Belize or Portugal and never look back. He would have smiled in her shoes too.

  “Thanks for your warning. And your help.”

  The eyes were sweet then, sad. “It’s something, Leonard. It’s all I can do.”

  “I know.” With that Leonard stood and turned. He left her drinking by herself and walked back into the sticky summer night. The sweat that had crystallized cold in the air-conditioned bar blossomed back to life on his neck, back, and arms.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  RESISTING ARREST

  A half an hour later, he was off the subway and stumbling toward his apartment. He felt queasy, a little from the booze and a little from the manic swerves from the chilly bar to the hot night into a cold subway and back into the swampy street. He was careful putting one foot in front of the other. Not that you can get pulled over in this town for walking while intoxicated, but still. When he came out of the subway, his phone told him that he had missed a call. From Tony Licata of the Daily News. He could wait until morning to return it.

  The train let him off at the corner of Empire and Flatbush, the park above him, the quickly gentrifying Lefferts Gardens behind. He had two blocks to walk down Empire before turning up toward Ebbets Field. From the subway, the towers twinkled more like projects than ever. The dull cement balconies, barely big enough to stand on, mainly used for drying laundry. The yellow brick, fading to the color of a smoker’s teeth. It wouldn’t be long before some developer came in and blew the whole thing for condos. Empire itself was a wreck. A couple of fast-food outlets, a hulking self-storage warehouse, and storefront after storefront shuttered and padlocked. The buildings had all been sold, but the new owners weren’t quite sure what to do with them yet. The zoning was commercial, the city was trying to designate it as affordable housing, and a small group of angry locals had decided to storm community board meetings and chain themselves to the fences to keep any development from going forward. So Leonard walked past two blocks of forlorn storefronts on a four-lane street, traffic whipping off the expressway behind him. He crossed at Bedford, off the commercial block and on to the empty residential hill leading to the prison-block apartment.

  As he closed in on the corner, there was something quietly out of place. He didn’t notice at first, and he kept his stri
de. Then it stood out at him—a little wrinkle in his ordinary view of the world. At the end of the curb, at the spot where the fire hydrant normally guards the last fifteen feet of empty street, there was a parked car. Almost into the crosswalk. It should have been ticketed or even towed for being left in the hydrant space overnight: it was nearly three in the morning. Leonard walked toward the car, cautiously, from behind. As he closed in, he could tell it was a city vehicle from the broad rear bumper and the two or three extra antennae springing from the back. Not a cop car necessarily. Just something official. Something you would use to show that the guy was important. The kind of thing a city official would be driven around in.

  Leonard approached more carefully now, straining in the dark to see if there was anyone in the back seat. He circled wide, hoping to look like just another straggler coming home late from one of the many bars people raved about in this neighborhood. He was almost even with the rear seat, far to the side, when he felt safe to duck his head toward it.

  A figure in the back jostled, gestured to the driver’s seat, and the car started. There had been someone in it after all. Two someones. The lights sprung to life and the car jolted up the hill and Leonard couldn’t make out exactly who was sitting in the back, but he thought he could make out a head of smoothly strained silver hair. Hair that looked like it had been ironed and pressed. Hair he almost recognized.

  But before Leonard could think about why Deputy Mayor Victor Ells was staking out his block, there was a fresh brusque voice booming from someone crossing the street in front of him.

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  Leonard looked up. A uniform cop. Alone. Leonard kept his mouth shut. His hands out. He didn’t move and he didn’t turn away. The guy could ask him questions if he wanted to, but Leonard wasn’t about to volunteer anything now.

  “Can I talk to you for a second?” A foot patrol on midnight tour was unusual. Even more unusual was the fact that the guy was alone. The only place the NYPD used foot patrols now was in impact zones—collections of four or five blocks that the department’s databases promised were hot spots for drug dealing and everything that came with it. The local commands would flood the zones with officers fresh out of the academy—guys who didn’t know how to make an arrest and were uncertain with their weapons. The idea was that just by having uniforms on the streets, you would keep people from committing crimes in plain sight. And it worked to a certain extent—the drug dealers moved their operations three or four blocks in any direction whenever the impact zone changed, knowing the rookie cops were afraid to step outside their sector.