Now, not only did I have to solve the case before the fraud squad hauled Ernest away, but I was going to have to insist on cash-and-carry. Ernest’s credit rating had just fallen into the basement.
“RECOGNIZE him?” Jake’s voice rose. “His face was blown off!”
“I noticed that.” We were in Jake’s office, mid-morning. I’d hung around the street entrance-also Midtown, only a few blocks from Ernest, but with more casual security-and buttonholed Jake when the armored limo dropped him off out front. Jake brought me upstairs mostly to avoid a scene in public.
“Thing is, you didn’t seem surprised,” I continued. “Which got me wondering.”
He put up some resistance, but when I mentioned Gatling’s interest, we both knew it was only a matter of time. The police would be far more tenacious than me.
“The ghost is Randall, of course,” he said finally. “My former partner.”
“Aha.” I’d suspected-people rarely disappear and keep living-but it was nice to hear Jake agree. On the other hand, the ghost’s face really was nothing but gore. “How can you be sure?”
“Because he visited me, too.”
Okay, that was a surprise. “When?”
“Two days ago. Middle of the night.” He made a peevish frown. “Don’t they ever show up during business hours?”
“Not usually. So… he didn’t hare off with the petty cash after all.”
Jake snorted. The ghost-might as well call him Randall, now-explained that he’d been kidnapped and tortured into revealing the bank password, then shot and dumped into a Hudson River garbage scow.
“Randall’s really angry,” said Jake. “But the kidnappers wore masks the whole time, so he has no idea who they are.”
“Which means he can’t go haunting them. I get it.”
“He can’t stand the idea that everyone thinks he’s a thief, living the high life in Fiji or whatever. So he’s making it up to me, with this guaranteed-return trading scheme.”
“Randall directed you to Ernest?”
“Yes. Of course, I did a thorough check on the Eppleworth funds. The returns are honest-the forex streak is real, just like Randall said.”
“Hmm. How did Randall tell you all that?”
“Writing on his shirt, like you saw last night. It took forever.”
“I bet.” I considered. “There are a couple of really obvious questions-”
“Yeah, I know.” Jake leaned back in his ergonomic, sleek-leather, post-Aeron chair. “Like, why not give me the tips, instead of going through Ernest?”
“That’s one.”
“He doesn’t want to bring too much suspicion on the firm here. You said the cops are already sniffing around-he figured, let Ernest take the heat. I can still keep the earnings.”
“Okay.” That sort of made sense. “But how does he know? How can he read tomorrow’s box scores today?”
“It’s an afterlife thing. Short-term time dilation, quantum tunneling effects.” Jake shrugged. “I didn’t understand his explanation, but so what? The point is, it works.”
“Uh-huh.” I looked out Jake’s window, where a pigeon was waddling around on the ledge. “So did you double your money on those forints?”
“No.” Jake looked annoyed again. “I wasn’t quite convinced. Stupid, huh? But Ernest expects Randall back tonight, and I’m going all in then.”
I hit the Rolodex again.
Jake got the two questions, all right, but there was one more he seemed not to have thought of: If it was so easy, why hadn’t it happened already?
Like I said, with the economy hitting lows in the Mariana Trench, plenty of Wall Streeters were moving to the Great Beyond. Between stress-related cardiacs, Provigil overdoses, and wiped-out investors bursting in with semiautomatic weapons, it was a wonder the big firms still had to resort to redundancies. Anyhow, that meant a steady flow of financially savvy type A’s into the afterlife. If they really could game the day traders, you’d think some of them would have tried it before now.
Many more phone calls, and I discovered that, in fact, they had. But no one wanted to talk about it.
“It’s like this,” said one of my ex-colleagues from Lehman. “I have some friends, they’ll tell me stories over drinks, but they’ll never admit anything publicly.”
“Why not? Even if it’s a ghost doing the legwork, positive returns are positive returns. The Street’ll take its alpha from anywhere-shades, vampires, flesh-eating zombies, who cares?”
“Because it never lasts long,” my former desk mate said. “Three people told me they had, uh, visitations, I guess, but every one flamed out after just a few tips. And then what-you’re going to send a share-holder letter explaining you lost a bundle by taking advice from the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come? No way. So they keep quiet.”
“Ah. So nobody actually made money on the advice.”
“Nope. It was all currency trades, too, in the last few months. But the shade always screwed up after a while.”
“One last question. Was it the same ghost each time?”
“I didn’t ask. But everyone said he’d been murdered, so messily they couldn’t possibly identify who he’d been in real life.”
I was too late.
I waited until the morning to talk to Ernest. Hey, the Knicks were in the playoffs-talk about an unexplainable phenomenon-and I didn’t want to miss the game.
Ernest, I’m sorry. Really.
When I got to his office, there were police cars, two TV trucks, and a herd of pedestrians clicking cell phone photos as a covered gurney was lifted into the coroner’s van. I couldn’t talk my way through the uniforms standing guard behind the yellow tape, so I waited until Detective Gatling came out. When I waved, he frowned and hustled me out of the crowd.
We stood inside the lobby, out of the way as a pair of forensic technicians in Tyvek bunny suits lugged their kits to the elevator.
“Security cameras caught the whole thing,” said Gatling. “Video’ll probably be on the Internet by lunchtime… Jake Tims walked into Ernest’s office, started screaming, and pulled out a Glock. Eleven rounds, eight through the torso.”
“What were they doing?” I pointed to the armored security guards across the lobby, apparently under interrogation by another detective.
Gatling shrugged. “There’s no metal detector here. They caught him quick enough after the shooting stopped.”
I shook my head. “Jake lost some money this morning, I take it.”
“Just about every penny. He went the wrong way on, uh… just a minute.” Gatling flipped through his notebook. ”Ringgit. Some kind of Asian money? I don’t know the details, but he blew his entire packet on the trade.”
“Randall.” I muttered some profanities. “The ghost.” And I explained how Jake had thought his former partner was steering him to riches.
Gatling started to catch on. “Don’t tell me.”
“Yup. Randall seems to have been recommending up/down currency positions to traders all over the city. But none of them were talking to each other.”
“A tip-sheet scam!”
“I think so.”
Gatling’s grin spread wide. “I haven’t seen one of those in decades.”
In ancient times, long before the Internet, a grifter would mail out a newsletter to, say, a hundred sports bettors, predicting who’d win the big game on Sunday. The trick was, half the tip sheets would say one team-and half, the other. Next week, the newsletter would go out again, but only to the fifty recipients who’d gotten the correct prediction the first time-and so on down the line, half the marks falling away each week. See how it works? At the end, three gamblers would have gotten seven examples of a tip sheet with a perfect record.
And then the grifter would send one more mailing, asking if the marks would like to subscribe. Sure, it was costly, but now that he’d proven himself…
The beauty was, it was even halfway legal. Oh, the good old days.