Death's little helpers jm-2

by Peter Spiegelman

  Frye held up a finger and listened intently for a moment, then shook his head. “That we spoke only when necessary and otherwise had as little to do with each other as possible.”

  “Not exactly chummy after five years. What was the problem?”

  Frye sighed and pocketed his phone. He looked at the East River, bouncing by the cab window. “Greg doesn’t deal well with dissent, Mr. March, and he requires a rather large quotient of deference from his colleagues. As it happens, I’m chronically long the former and short the latter.”

  “Is that why you quit?”

  “That, and the fact that staying there was doing nothing for my career. Who wants to be the last rat off the ship, after all?”

  “I didn’t realize Pace-Loyette was sinking.”

  “The firm will survive, I expect, but the research department won’t- not in its current form, at any rate. It’s much diminished already, and it hasn’t hit bottom yet. I am by no means the first person to realize that, and I won’t be the last.”

  “Has Danes figured it out?”

  “Of course he has, but being Greg, he puts himself at the center of the phenomenon. He sees it as another example of management’s desire to tar his reputation and fix him with blame for all the excesses of the past.”

  “Is there any truth to that?”

  Frye looked at me and nodded slowly. “Some, perhaps, but mainly the seniors at Pace just want to get on with things; they want to settle their claims and move along. Greg can’t see that; he sees settlement as an admission of guilt- his guilt.”

  “So you don’t think he’ll up and leave any time soon?”

  “No, not Greg. And until those claims are settled, I don’t know that there’d be many bidders for him. No one wants the baggage.”

  “So I gather you two didn’t discuss his vacation plans that last day you were in the office?”

  Frye snorted. “Lord, no. Not on that day or any other. As I said, we didn’t have that kind of relationship.”

  “Who does he have that kind of relationship with?”

  “Friendship? Pleasant acquaintanceship? No one I can think of, though maybe Irene Pratt comes closest. Do you know Pratt?” I made a vaguely affirmative sound. “She’s a diligent soul, and much better at deference than I.” Frye’s phone trilled. He made more excuses to Maureen and entreated her to do the same to whoever was waiting for him uptown, which gave me time to think.

  “Forget friends, then,” I said, when he got off the phone. “How about anyone that Danes has pissed off?”

  Frye laughed. “That’s quite a list. Greg is a plague on everyone, from the summer interns to half the occupants of the executive suite.”

  “He leave any of them particularly mad? Anyone holding a grudge?”

  “I couldn’t say, really. People learn to keep their distance when at all possible, and most of those fortunate enough to work directly for Greg develop rather tough hides.”

  “What about the ones who don’t?”

  Frye gave me a speculative squint. “Greg has a certain radar for them, Mr. March. They seem to attract more than their share of torment, and they don’t stay around long.”

  “Which is a polite way of calling Danes a bully.”

  “I suppose it is.” Frye smiled innocently.

  “Bullies collect enemies, as a rule. Did Danes manage not to, somehow? Did none of these people stay angry with him?”

  He shrugged. “None of them stays angry with the weather either, I imagine. And once you know Greg, you realize that’s what he’s like. He’s like a force of nature: a natural bastard. But there’s nothing personal in it- or, rather, it’s personal but indiscriminate. Sooner or later, the rain falls on everyone.” Frye raised an eyebrow. “Why the interest? Do you think Greg’s run afoul of someone? Is that why he hasn’t returned?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know enough to think much of anything yet,” I said. “All I have now are questions. Most of them will come to nothing, but I have to ask.”

  “Hell of a job,” he said. I nodded. We were coming up on the UN, and traffic had come nearly to a halt. Frye swore softly and called Maureen again. I thought about some things Irene Pratt had told me. Frye rang off and I had another question for him.

  “Winning personality aside, how is Danes as an analyst?”

  “Greg is undeniably a very bright guy: keen insights into companies and industries, a very quick study, and a phenomenal memory. I’m the first to admit I learned a lot from him.”

  “Though not from his work on Piedmont, I’d guess.”

  “That again.” Frye sighed. “People never tire of it. But in truth, it’s unreasonable to expect that Greg- or any other analyst- would have known what Denton Ainsley was up to. Greg may have smiled in a few too many photo ops with Ainsley, and gone on a few too many Piedmont junkets, but that doesn’t make him an accomplice. Foolish, perhaps, or vain, but not complicit.”

  “Piedmont was just one bad call; what about the rest? If Danes is so smart, how did he end up so wrong?”

  “There are lots of smart people in this business, March, but smart isn’t the whole story. Smart isn’t always enough. You need insight into how the market moves and a feel for the people who move it.”

  “Danes doesn’t have that?”

  “Everyone has blind spots,” Frye said. “Greg’s, I suppose, are a reluctance to revisit his calls- even in the face of a changing market- and perhaps a certain susceptibility to manipulation by fund managers.”

  “I understand the first part more or less, but what does that last bit mean?”

  Frye smiled. “One of the things an analyst does is talk to people who hold big positions in the shares of companies they cover. In part they do it to solicit investor views on where the companies are going, and in part it’s to pitch their own ideas. But those conversations can be very tricky things.

  “Say, for example, you cover Company X, and Mr. Smith, a hedge fund manager, holds a big stake in X. If you were getting ready to rate X as a strong buy, it would be nice to know that Mr. Smith was going to hold on to his shares of X- or perhaps even increase his position. So before issuing your report, you might go have a chat with Mr. Smith. With me so far?”

  I nodded.

  “Good. Now, Mr. Smith is no fool. He knows that if Company X gets a buy rating from so eminent an analyst as yourself, its shares are likely to rise. And he knows that if he sells off his position into that run-up, he can make a pretty penny for his fund. So given all that, and being a devilish and manipulative bastard like all his ilk, Mr. Smith might seek to mislead poor gullible you. He might try to convince you that he thinks your ideas about X are brilliant and subtle and altogether sublime and he agrees with them entirely. And if you were so deceived, you might trot back to your office and issue your strong buy report- and find yourself in for a nasty surprise when Smith unloads his position into your nascent rally, momentum swings south, and shares of X tank in a big way.”

  “Is that the sort of thing that happened to Danes?”

  Frye nodded. “My example’s simplistic, but it captures the flavor. In Greg’s defense, it’s a subtle game, with lots of permutations. And it’s played against some very clever people whose cards are almost always better than yours. Even the best find themselves wrong-footed now and again.”

  “But with Danes it was more often than now and again?”

  “He has a hungry ego. It makes him vulnerable to stroking from smart, powerful people.”

  I thought about that for a while. “Insightful, for a stock analyst,” I said, and meant it.

  Frye laughed. “I’m a strictly amateur psychologist, I assure you. But Greg’s quite a specimen; it’s impossible not to speculate. And that’s ex- stock analyst, by the way.”

  Our cabbie had fought his way off the FDR and onto the midtown streets, but we were not moving fast enough for Frye. He cursed vigorously at each red light, and at 47th Street and Third Avenue, he tossed a bunch of bills through the Plexiglas d
ivider and got out. He headed up Third at close to a trot.

  “What are you doing now that you’ve left Pace?” I asked, following.

  “What every analyst dreams of, of course.” Frye grinned. “I’m starting a hedge fund.” And he disappeared into Smith amp; Wollensky.

  Peter Spiegelman

  JM02 – Death's Little Helpers aka No Way Home

  11

  Fort Lee is perched high above the Hudson River, atop the wooded cliffs of the Palisades, and an easy drive from Manhattan: straight up the West Side Highway and across the George Washington Bridge. It’s an old town, with a past that stretches back to the first English settlers and to the Dutch before them. The welcome sign at the town line boasted of it: Rich in history, it read, in flowery white script. Maybe so, but they kept it well hidden. Mostly the town seemed rich in on-ramps and off-ramps and parking lots, in shopping centers and drive-through banks, in video stores and copy shops and nail salons and pizzerias. What poverty it suffered seemed mainly in the areas of architecture and zoning.

  It was midafternoon and raining when I crossed the GW, and traffic was heavy near the tolls. So I had plenty of time to gaze upon the tangle of highways where the toll plaza morphed into the New Jersey Turnpike and several other routes, and to study the thicket of indecipherable road signs posted there. Despite this contemplation, I had only the vaguest notion of where I was supposed to go. New Jersey does that to me.

  I steered my rented Toyota to an off-ramp. The local streets were pitted and gray, and the local drivers had little patience with uncertainty, but I paid them no heed and eventually found my way to Lincoln Avenue.

  It hadn’t been difficult to come up with an address for Richard Gilpin’s firm, Morgan amp; Lynch, though the one I’d found was not the one listed on the company’s Web site- that address belonged to a commercial mail drop in one of Fort Lee’s many strip malls. I’d plugged the Morgan amp; Lynch telephone number into a reverse directory, and out had popped a listing for something called Ekaterinberg Holdings, with an address on Lincoln.

  It was a small office building, with a faA§ade of white brick that was going brown and narrow metal-framed windows. The windows were dirty and most of them were dark. The building had only four stories, but it loomed above its neighbors on the block, which included a Korean restaurant, decked out in mirrored glass and white stucco, a travel agency with a torn red awning, a two-level municipal parking lot, and a surgical supply company with barred windows and a sign proclaiming the area’s largest selection of latex gloves. Office space must’ve been tight down in the Caymans.

  I drove past the building and pulled the Toyota into a space a block and a half down, in front of a bar called Roxy’s. Rain was falling harder now, and slanting in the wind. A wet shoe box flip-flopped across the street, following a plastic grocery bag that drifted like a ghost. I turned up the collar of my field jacket and opened my umbrella.

  The lobby was a little larger than a broom closet, and done in algae-green tiles and fluorescent lights. There was a dusty plastic plant to the right as I came in, and a building directory on the wall to my left, behind a cracked pane of glass. I consulted it but learned little, as the only plastic letters left there had been arranged to spell the word SHAT. The elevator was to the rear, and taped on the wall next to it, in red ink on cardboard, was a handwritten note to the mailman. From this I learned that anything for Ekaterinberg Holdings or EK Industries or Gromyko Construction was to go to the fourth floor. I figured that included me, and I wedged myself into the tiny car.

  The elevator smelled like a taxi, only not as fresh, and the short hallway it opened onto smelled even worse: cigarettes, beer, old pizza, mildew, and piss, not necessarily in that order. The strawberry air freshener that someone had sprayed recently was hopelessly overmatched. The walls were paneled in fake wood, like a basement playroom, and murky light came from a glass fixture overhead. The carpet was brown and squishy, like moss, and I was glad it was a short walk to the only door there was. It was blank but for a mail slot, and it had no bell. I went in without knocking.

  I was in a room not much bigger than the elevator. It was windowless and pictureless, paneled and carpeted like the hallway. The only other door was on the opposite wall, and it was closed. The only furnishings were a dented metal desk to the left, a plastic swivel chair behind it, and a black canvas director’s chair in front. The desk was small, and the telephone and TV on top occupied nearly its entire surface. The director’s chair was empty. The swivel chair was not.

  She was sprawled in it, her legs stretched out before her and crossed at the ankles. She looked fourteen, going on forty. Her hair was white-blond on top and black at the roots. It was short in back and long on the sides, and an uneven fringe ran across her forehead. Her features were fine and childlike: a tiny red mouth, a small rounded nose, thin brows, narrow slightly tilted gray eyes, ears barely large enough for their half-dozen piercings and the hardware that hung from them. Her face was round and downy, the bones still hiding beneath a layer of baby fat, and her skin was a flawless white, but for the tattoos.

  There was one at the corner of her right eye that looked like a little red teardrop, and another along the side of her neck that spelled the word pain in elaborate black print. The same fancy lettering appeared on her knuckles, spelling the word white on her left hand, and bitch on her right. A green snake wound around the length of her skinny right arm and flicked its red ink tongue at her wrist.

  She wore jeans and a tight gray T-shirt, and the hard-looking store-bought breasts underneath seemed to belong to a much larger woman. They jutted from her body like a stone mantel, and made a convenient shelf for her ashtray. She took a cigarette from it, puffed, and raised her head to look at me. Her little eyes were vacant and flat. She stared at me for a moment and then went back to her TV show, something about women whose husbands loved sheep. When the advertisements came, she took the ashtray off her breasts and put it on the desk and sat up. Her gray eyes got smaller.

  “You want something?” She had a heavy accent, and pronounced her w as a v. Eastern European. There was no hostility in her voice, or even suspicion, just a mild curiosity that someone had turned up at her door. I thought for a moment. I wasn’t sure what name Gilpin went by here- assuming he was here at all.

  “Richards around?” I asked. One of her brows went up, and something like a smirk crossed her young face.

  “Dick?” She said it so it rhymed with seek. I nodded. Her gaze flicked back to the TV as the commercials ended. “In there,” she said. She flicked a thumb at the door, perched the ashtray on her bosom again, and went back into her slouch. I opened the door and went in.

  It was a rectangular room with windows along one side that looked out on Lincoln Avenue and the rain. And it was full of cigarette smoke and testosterone.

  The men sat at tables arranged end-on-end, in three rows that ran the length of the room, and they peered into their monitors and spoke into telephone headsets. It was a mostly young bunchtwenty-somethings- and mostly unappealing, like a group of spring-break drunks spoiling for a fight. There were a lot of neck chains in the room, and wrist chains, and expensive watches too. There was a lot of hair gel, and a storm front of clashing colognes. The dress code ranged from jeans to leather to silk tracksuits and rumpled Armani. Besides ashtrays, coffee cups, and beer bottles, skin magazines were the most common desk accessories. A lot of heads turned as I walked in, but they soon turned back to their monitors and telephones. They had work to do.

  They were dialing for dollars. Some of them read from scripts and some were winging it; some of them whispered into their headsets and some were shouting; some pleaded, others cajoled, and a few all but threatened- but ultimately it was the same pitch, over and over again: the opportunity of a lifetime, don’t miss out, guaranteed returns, fully hedged, risk free, a sure thing. Send money now. The Morgan amp; Lynch sales force at work.

  The guy closest to the door had a thick neck, shiny blond hair,
and a red polo shirt that threatened to rip around his biceps. I stepped behind his chair.

  “Where’s Richards?” I asked. He clamped his hand over his headset mike and twisted in his seat to give me an ugly look. Then he turned back around and started whispering.

  “I’m telling you, Mr. Strelski- can I call you Gerald?- it’s all set to go. And when it does, it’ll go like a rocket.”

  The guy next to him tapped my arm and pointed to the other end of the room, to a doorway partly blocked by one of the tables. I nodded and went over. The door was ajar and someone was talking on the other side of it. I recognized the deep, deeply sincere voice of Richard Gilpin.

  He was on the phone and only glanced up when I came in. He was caught up in the rhythm of his pitch.

  “… We’re pursuing some very exciting opportunities in the Latin American markets, Mrs. Trillo- some deeply undervalued companies…”

  I tuned him out and looked around. The office was no bigger than the reception area and it was furnished along the same lines, though Gilpin had a fancier phone and, instead of a TV and fake breasts, he had a computer and a big Styrofoam cup of coffee. There was a metal filing cabinet in the corner, next to a trash can and a swivel chair. I wheeled the chair over and sat and watched Gilpin.

  He was a broad guy in his late thirties, with big arms and shoulders and a block-shaped head atop a heavy neck. He had wavy well-barbered brown hair that he wore in a modified Prince Valiant. It hung low over his forehead and nearly brushed his pale brows. His dark eyes were narrow and set deep in his beefy face, and they were gathered too closely around his wedge-shaped nose. His mouth was small and thin, and his cleft chin had begun to dissolve into a blurring jawline. His tan was very dark and looked machine-made.

  Gilpin wore khaki pants and a blue button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his hairless arms. He looked more like the football coach at a Sun Belt high school than a fund manager. In fact, he was neither. He stared off into infinity as he worked his mark, and his big hands carved the air as he spoke. He was wrapping up now.