“What the hell for?” Mulloy asks.
“You know what curiosity did to the cat, don’t you?”
“I don’t know from cats,” he says. “All I know is pussy.”
She gives him the finger and stalks away, followed by their whistles.
On Thursday night, she complains to her father and Judy Bering about having to work late on a couple of workmen’s compensation cases. It’s almost seven o’clock before they leave, and she sees Ed Fogleman drag himself home. Then the dump is almost deserted; only the night watchman is in his hut at the locked gate, flipping through his dog-eared copies of Penthouse.
She goes out to the storeroom, puts on the light, starts digging through the barrels of scrap paper from Bechtold. It’s almost all six-color coated stock. Someone is running a slick annual report, and the discarded sheets are preliminary press proofs with colors out of register and black type too heavy or too faint.
That’s not what she’s looking for. She spends more time with black-on-white proof sheets: documents, proxy statements, prospectuses. Nothing of any interest. She gives up and drives home. The next morning she tells Fogleman to empty the barrels and bale everything.
She goes through the same routine on the following Tuesday evening with similar results. She’s beginning to think her wild idea, her Big Chance, is a dud. But on the next Thursday night she finds some interesting proof sheets on Pistol amp; Burns letterheads. She scans them hastily. They look like a plan for a leveraged buyout of Wee Tot Fashions, Inc. She gathers up all the pages she can find that mention Wee Tot, crams them in her leather portfolio, and drives home to Smithtown, singing along with Linda Ronstadt on her stereo deck.
She stops up to visit with her mother for a while. Then when Becky and Martha settle down for an evening of TV, Sally rushes downstairs to the den. She’s too excited to eat, but pours herself a Perrier before she goes over the Pistol amp; Burns documents scavenged from Bechtold’s scrap. She reads them three times because some of the type is blurred, and she has to use a magnifying glass to make out certain words and phrases.
Then she does swift computations on her pocket calculator. The next morning she calls her stockbroker and sells some of the dogs in the Steiner portfolio, taking a tax loss. But she accumulates enough funds to buy 10,000 shares of Wee Tot Fashions at a total cost of about $48,000, including commission. Have a hunch, bet a bunch.
A week later, after following the market anxiously, she sells out her Wee Tot stake for about $112,000, and is so elated and unbelieving that she doesn’t know whether to weep or laugh.
And a week after that, she’s having a coffee with Judy Bering in the outer office when a tall, thin guy, nicely dressed, walks in and smiles at the two women.
“I’m looking for Sally Steiner,” he says.
“That’s me,” Sally says. “Who are you?”
He hands her a card. “Jeremy Bigelow,” he says. “Securities and Exchange Commission.”
She’s sitting naked on a three-legged kitchen stool, hunching forward.
“I think I’m getting splinters in my ass,” she says.
“Shut up,” Eddie says, “and try to hold that pose. Don’t relax. Make yourself tight and hard.”
She is tight and hard. Her body has a rude grace, heavy through shoulders and hips. Not much waist. The thighs are pillars tapering to unexpectedly slender ankles. A muscled woman. Her skin is satin.
“When’s Paul coming back?” she asks.
Her brother sighs. “I told you. He’ll ring before he comes up. Don’t get so antsy.”
He continues sketching, using a soft carpenter’s pencil on a pad of grainy paper. He works swiftly, limning her body with quick slashes, flipping pages, trying to catch her solidity, the aggressiveness of her flesh. He was right: She does loom.
After a while she forgets that she’s exhibiting herself in front of her brother and thinks about why she’s there. Because she wants something from him-or rather from his consenting adult, Paul Ramsey.
That visit from the SEC investigator spooked her. The guy wanted to know how come she had sprung for 10,000 shares of Wee Tot Fashions, Inc. Had she heard something? Did someone tell her something? Did she know anyone at Wee Tot? At Pistol amp; Burns? Why, suddenly, did she buy such a big block of that particular equity?
Without pause, she scammed the guy silly. She was proud of that. She wanted to get out of garbage hauling, she told him, and open a store that sold kids’ clothes. She bought Wee Tot to get their annual reports so she could learn more about the business. Besides, she owned a dozen other stocks. She was in the market for kicks.
He departed, apparently satisfied, and Sally went back to her own office. She was sweating. What if Jeremy Bigelow subpoenas Steiner’s customer list and discovers they’re collecting trash from Bechtold, who does confidential printing for Pistol amp; Burns? What if he comes poking around, asking questions of Ed Fogleman, Terry Mulloy, Leroy Hamilton, and learns she’s been putting aside barrels of Bechtold waste? Curtains!
She decides she handled her Big Chance stupidly. Too many people involved, too many potential witnesses. And she purchased the stock in her own name. Idiotic! And she bought 10K shares. That would be a trip wire to alert anyone investigating the possibility of insider trading.
Eddie’s phone rings. Three times. Then stops.
“That’s Paul,” he says. “He’ll be up in about ten minutes. You can get dressed now. I got some good stuff. But I’ll need a couple more sessions.”
“Sure,” she says. “Anytime.”
To her surprise, she finds she’s no longer self-conscious, and when Eddie helps her hook up her bra in back, she thinks it’s a nice, brotherly thing for him to do. By the time Paul Ramsey shows up, Sally is dressed and sipping a glass of their lousy chianti.
Paul is a tall blond with a sweet smile and more teeth than he really needs. He’s got a laid-back manner, and Eddie says that when the world blows up, Paul is going to be the one who murmurs, “Oh, yeah? Cool.”
Sally has already decided what she wants to do. She’s going to continue picking through Bechtold Printing trash. But if she finds another lead on a takeover, merger, or buyout, she can’t invest in her own name, or in the name of anyone else connected with Steiner Waste Control. Too risky. And the stock purchase has got to be less than 10,000 shares.
“Paul,” she says, “I got a proposition for you.”
“Sorry,” he says with his seraphic grin, “my evenings are occupied.”
She tells him what she wants. She’ll give him the name of a stockbroker. He’s to open an account by purchasing shares of AT amp;T. She’ll give him the money. After that, he’ll buy and sell on her instructions.
“I’ll pay all the losses,” she says. “You get five percent of the profits. How about it?”
The two men look at each other.
“Go for it, Paul,” Eddie Steiner advises. “My little sister is a financial genius.”
“Okay,” Paul Ramsey says, shrugging. “Why not?”
Sally has come prepared. She hands over a manila envelope with $2,500 in cash and the name and phone number of her stockbroker.
“Stick with me, kid,” she tells Paul, kissing his cheek, “and you’ll be wearing diamonds.”
“I prefer emeralds,” he says.
She goes back to the office, pondering her next move. She’s walking from her parking slot when she meets Anthony Ricci. The kid is wearing tight jeans and a Stanley Kowalski T-shirt, and he looks beautiful.
“Hey, Tony,” Sally says. “How’s it going? You like the job?”
“No,” he says with his 100-watt smile, “but the money is good.”
“All money is good,” she tells him. “The loading-you can handle it?”
“Sure,” he says. “I’ve done worse. Maybe someday I’ll be a driver-no?”
“Why not? We have a lot of turnover. Hang in there, kiddo.”
She goes into her office, parks her feet on her desk, and tries to figure how to paw through the Bechtold garbage without endangering Steiner Waste Control. She decides she can’t do it by herself. She’s got to use fronts, some bubbleheads who won’t have a glimmer of what she’s doing. She looks out the window and sees Terry Mulloy and Leroy Hamilton wheeling onto the tarmac to dump their load. “Oh, yeah,” Sally breathes.