"But sir," she'd nearly pleaded. "This house is only two hundred and twenty thousand. With your income and assets, you qualify for well over nine hundred thousand. Why would you want to…"
"Ma'am?" I'd interrupted, "this is the house we want. Are you going to sell it to us or not? If not, I'll be happy to find another agent who will."
She sold it to us of course. She certainly did not want to lose her commission. We moved into our first house on September 18, 1991. We made love in the bedroom that first night before we even began to unpack.
Nina Stevens became Doctor Stevens on June 3, 1992. My parents, her parents, Tracy, even Mike and Maggie flew up for the ceremony. After they all returned home Nina was left with four weeks before her residency in emergency medicine began. I took a vacation from work, it's easy to do when you're the boss, and I rented us a condo on the leeward side of Maui. Except for our honeymoon it was our first real vacation. We spent three and half weeks relaxing on the beach, eating in restaurants, sightseeing, and making love at least twice a day; sometimes in our condo, sometimes on a deserted stretch of beach as the sun went down, and once in the bathroom of a sightseeing dinner cruise boat. That last one was not exactly making love, it was pure lustful fucking, through and through. Not that there is anything wrong with that.
When we returned to Seattle the hell of residency began for Nina. She would work thirty-six hours at a stretch at least three times a week, learning the finer points of treating medical and traumatic injuries in the busiest emergency room in Washington. If she was allowed to get any sleep there at all it was typically less than an hour at a time. When she was home she was exhausted. Many was the time that she drug herself into the house at some forbidding hour and tried to tell me about her shift but fell asleep in mid-sentence. I would carry her to bed like a child on these occasions, undress her, and tuck her in.
I concentrated on my own work during this period, spending hours at my computer terminal in the office or in the den of my house, researching companies, finding out what they made, how they made it, what kind of raw materials they used to make it with. I spent even more hours on the phone with my clients, advising them to buy this, to sell that. My reputation continued to grow to the point where I had to turn down clients because I simply didn't have the time to consult with them. And of course, under the rules of capitalism, my price went up along with the demand for me. I received so many offers of employment at outrageous salaries from large firms that I lost count of them. I had so many rich pricks offer to partner with me that I had to develop a standard speech for turning them down.
I suppose it was inevitable that one day two gentlemen in suits entered my office and approached Darla, my young secretary. They spoke a few words to her, showed her some identification, and a second later my phone was ringing on my desk. She told me about my visitors and I instructed her to let them in.
"Mr. Stevens," said the taller of the two, his eyes flitting around my office, looking for something incriminating. "I'm Special Agent Talon, FBI."
He flipped open a little leather case, displaying his credentials. "This is Agent Sparks from the Federal Trade Commission." Sparks displayed his own credentials. "Would you mind if we had a few words with you?"
"Not at all gentlemen," I said, suppressing my nervousness at the appearance of a couple of feds, "please sit down." I waved them to the chairs before my desk. "Can I have Darla bring you some coffee or tea? Maybe some bottled water?"
"No thank you," Talon answered for both of them. They took their seats and spent a moment just looking at me.
"What is it I can help you with?" I asked.
"Word among the investment community," Sparks said, speaking for the first time, "is that if you want to make some guaranteed money in the market, you go see Bill Stevens at Stevens Consulting."
I gave a small smile, "glad to know that my reputation proceeds me."
"Uh huh," Sparks continued. "We did a little checking on you Mr. Stevens. When we hear something like that it makes us a little curious. Guaranteed money? In the stock market? There is really no such thing. The stock market, as you surely know, is little more than a respectable form of gambling. Some have a flair for it, some do not. But nobody has the reputation that you have. Nobody."
He leaned forward, his gray eyes burning into mine. He was trying to intimidate me. "You charge nearly three times what other investment consultants do," he said. "There is no reason or justification for such an outrageous fee in a business such as this. None at all. But somehow you not only get away with it, you have more clients than you can handle. We sent one of our agents to try and sign up with you just to check you out and he was turned away, not because he's a fed but because you have no time to take on new clients, you're that booked."
"Is there something illegal about that?" I asked, starting to get a little angry.
Sparks ignored my question. "We've talked to many of your clients. It seems that you have quite the ability to spot and exploit trends in the market. An almost spooky ability. Time after time we were told how you advised them to put their money in this stock or that stock, usually something obscure that they'd never even heard of, and then low and behold, that stock begins to go up and up. Not one person we talked to complained about their stocks going down. Not a single one. Not one of them bitched about the fee you charged. Not a single one. Do you find that a little strange Mr. Stevens? Because I surely do."
"My clients TALKED to you?" I asked, appalled. I don't know why that surprised me but it did.
"Oh yes," Sparks smiled, perhaps sensing a little uplifted corner of my persona that he could pry at. "They were quite willing to talk to us once we implied to them that something illegal might be going on and that they might be implicated. Most of them happily showed us the records of their buys and sells. They sold you out in an instant at the mere suggestion that they themselves might be in danger."
"Figures," I muttered, seething at this knowledge. I recovered myself quickly. "But I'll ask you again gentlemen, have I done anything illegal?"
"I don't know Mr. Stevens," Sparks asked me, "have you? From everything we've learned it certainly looks like a fair amount of insider trading is going on here. Somebody is feeding you information, probably several somebodies inside of these corporations."
"Are you serious?" I asked, feeling myself on a little firmer ground. "You're suggesting that I have contacts inside of more than a hundred corporations that are feeding me inside info? Do you really believe that? It would have to be that many because that's how many companies I routinely advise my clients to invest in. I'm sure you know that if you've checked on me like you said. That's an awful lot of inside information, isn't it?"
"So you say you're doing nothing wrong?" Sparks asked, "that you're just very adept at picking the right stocks time and time again. So adept that you never guess wrong?"
"Basically, yes." I nodded.
"Would you mind if we took a look through your files?" Sparks asked next.
I laughed out loud, not able to help myself. "Let you look through my files?
Are you mad?"
He gave me a reasonable look. "If you have nothing to hide Mr. Stevens," he said, "then why should you mind letting us take a look?"
I shook my head at them. I'd had about enough of this. "Gentlemen," I asked, "this is the United States of America, is it not?"
"Yes Mr. Stevens," Sparks nodded.
"Good. Then I'm protected by a little document called the constitution am I not? A little addition to that document known as the fourth amendment? If you want to look through my files than you go get a judge to give you a warrant allowing you to do so. But you can't do that, can you? Because you don't have any probable cause that I've committed any crime. You're just here on a fishing expedition, hoping that I'll break down in front of you and bust open some international inside trading conspiracy. Well sorry to disappoint you gentlemen, but that's not going to happen. There is no conspiracy and you will not be looking at any of my files."