“It’s a little off the wall-really just a guess on my part-but I’d say they were giving license to a moral difference of opinion with the law.”
I shook my head, not even bothering for an explanation. He was now in his role of alchemist, turning the lead weight of Wall Street number crunching into the gold of human nature, unfortunately in one of its least appealing aspects. I got up from the table and crossed over to the window that looked down onto Main Street and the drive-in bank opposite. The people on the sidewalk strolled back and forth like Bedouin wanderers: slow, dehydrated, flattened by the post-sunset heat.
Justin Willette continued with his treatise. “The laws against insider trading are seen by many investment types as an unrealistic, knee-jerk political reaction catering to a bunch of socialist bleeding hearts. They were designed to give everyone a fair shot at grabbing the gold ring, from the little guy with enough change for a stock or two, to the corporate giants investing the assets of entire countries. Problem is that nowadays most everybody uses the same outfits to buy and sell; both the little guys and the giants give their money to say, Merrill Lynch, or Shearson, or Kidder Peabody to invest. So who’s getting screwed by the insider-trading laws, these people ask? Everybody, big and small.”
“And you’re saying Wentworth and/or Clyde followed that line of reasoning?”
“I have my suspicions. But I think they were very subtle about it. Too subtle for me to nail down their exact technique with the little I’ve seen, and maybe not even then. After all, neither one of them needs to land in the slammer at this point in their lives, nor do they appear to need any more money. The trick was to play the game just enough to get ABC on its feet. After that, it would be Jardine’s baby, with the two older guys in the background giving him perfectly legitimate advice now and then.”
The frustration was making my head pound, even with the air-conditioning. “But why, Justin? That’s what bugs me. Why the hell take the risk at all? You steal a hundred bucks or you steal a million; it’s still stealing, and if you get caught, you still get the book thrown at you. I understand why it all made sense for Charlie Jardine, but Clyde and Wentworth are a total mystery to me. Could Clyde have been ignorant of the whole thing?”
Willette shook his head. “Not a chance. Wentworth might have been. I didn’t find any documentation linking him financially to ABC. There were a lot of letters from and to him in the files, but they were all legit. Morris, McGill, after all, drew up the papers that created ABC. As for motivation, I can only take a shot at Clyde; the other two are too murky for me.”
I left the window and faced him, still standing. “So what’s your shot?”
“Revenge. I think he got back into the game to stick it to ’em. He felt he’d been nailed for some paperwork screw-up after a lifetime of minding his p’s and q’s, and that this was the perfect payback.”
I couldn’t keep the skepticism from my face, not that it fazed him in the slightest. “Hey, it’s just a guess-an educated one, I might add. Old-timers like Clyde have a tough time retiring, and from what I heard from my sources, he was pissed something royal by the treatment he got. Guys like that can be competitive as hell; it’s what keeps ’em on top. Revenge is as natural to them as Velveeta is to you.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“Joe, I know it’s not much, certainly nothing you can bring to court, but it’s all I could glean. Maybe if you could get another warrant and get a whole team to really give ABC a microscopic look, you might find your smoking gun, but I kind of doubt it. It was too small an operation, run by some canny old farts. They wouldn’t have left too much lying around.”
“Then why the court order to return the papers to Clyde?”
“Instinct. We like to see ourselves as riverboat gamblers, secretly, of course. It’s bad form to let someone see your cards, even if you’re about to fold.”
I thanked him for all his time, energy, and insight and left. The image of a circle of card players stuck with me, though. It brought to mind again the notions of calculation and manipulation. The further I progressed into this case, the more I felt the pressure of vested interests at work-of egos bruised, ambitions run amok, and of minds working overtime toward specific, malevolent ends.
23
The phone startled me, shattering the late-night stillness of the empty office. It was Sammie Martens.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Someone I’d like you to talk with, on Elliot Street.” Sammie gave the address in an obviously strained voice. “He’s a little reluctant to leave home right now.”
“Be right there.”
The address she’d given belonged to one of the most notorious of our city’s flophouses. The entrance was a narrow doorway wedged into the far-left side of the building. The rest of the first floor was occupied by a series of ever-changing storefront businesses. I climbed the dimly lit wooden staircase, keeping my hands away from the stained and rotting smashed plaster walls, acutely aware that I was ascending into a closed and poisonous atmosphere of urine, sweat, and years’ worth of unwashed bodies. The stench, sharpened by the sauna-like conditions, made my head swim. It also made me think that Sammie Martens had been crawling these halls, and others like them, for days now in search of her elusive bridge-dweller. For her sake, if for no one else’s, I hoped she’d hit paydirt.
I reached the top floor, walked down the corridor, stepping around a pile of something that looked vaguely organic, and stopped before the open door of number 33. Sammie Martens, pale, exhausted, but obviously exultant, was standing in the middle of the room. Sitting on what passed for a bed was our odorous friend Milo.
I nodded to them both, although Milo, either depressed or half comatose, was staring at the floor.
“Thanks for coming, Lieutenant. Milo here has something he wants to get off his chest.”
There was dead silence in the room, apart from Milo’s breathing, which sounded a little like air escaping from a water pipe.
Sammie kicked him in the shin, hard. “Don’t you, Milo?”
He grabbed for his leg and slipped off the bed, howling in protest. Normally, I would never have tolerated such a move by a cop, but I also knew Sammie Martens well and realized that what I was witnessing must have been the culmination of a lot of back-and-forth between these two, in which Sammie had probably been receiving the short shrift. It was an angry outburst I would let pass, but just once.
She was down on her knees in front of him now, her face inches from his. “Come on, you son of a bitch. I’ve looked like a jerk once because of you, and it’s not going to happen again.”
Her face was shining with sweat, which matted her hair at the temples and streaked the back of her shirt. Whatever Milo had told her could have been put in a report, or she could have brought him to me, as she had done before. But that would have been under normal circumstances, and right now, I realized, not much was normal about Sammie’s behavior. I’d let her overextend herself and hadn’t reassured her enough about her earlier mistake with Milo.
I knelt down next to them. “Milo, what’ve you got?”
“I got a fuckin’ broken leg is what I got.”
Reluctantly, I reached out and lifted his chin until we were looking straight at one another, from so close I thought my eyes might water. “Concentrate, Milo. Talk to us now and we’ll get out of your hair.”
His one good eye blinked at me a couple of times. “Toby paid me off to lie to you people.”
I looked sharply at Sammie. “Toby? Wasn’t that the same guy who was offered five hundred bucks to identify the bridge bum?”
Her expression was bitter. “The one and only. Talk about coincidences.”
Milo shook his head free of my hand and snorted. “Coincidence, bullshit.”