Clawback (8 page)

“I’ve seen that before,” I said.

He nodded. “Uh-huh.”

“‘Firepower,’ right?”

“Yeah.”

“A sniper I knew once, he had the same tat.”

“Marine?”

“No.” I shrugged. “Was that you? A jarhead?”

“Eight years. Yourself?”

“Truck mechanic.”

He studied me, then laughed. “Right.”

“Really.”

“You don’t have that fobbit look, somehow.”

“Mostly I dug holes,” I said. “Then when the shooting started, I jumped in.”

“I wish I’d had that kind of sense.”

Clara got her own cup of water and leaned against the bench, next to me. “Silas is in finance, too. CPA and everything.”

“Yeah?” Lockerby looked interested. “Investments?”

“Mostly auditing,” I said. “Statement oversight. Compliance verification. Like that.”

“But you understand all that money stuff.”

“Well—”

“Because I’ve been wondering.” He leaned in. “You know, I follow the news and all, but—let me ask you something.”

“Sure.” I suppressed a sigh.

See, I knew what to expect. Tell someone you’re a doctor, they’ll ask about
this funny rash I have on my stomach; can I show it to you
? If your job is to deliver soda to movie theaters, they’ll tell you
it’s total robbery Adam Sandler wasn’t nominated for an Oscar; what’s up with that
? And if you work anywhere near Wall Street, it’s always
what do you like? Got a tip
?

“What I don’t understand is why would anyone ever put their money anywhere except a lowest-fee index fund?”

I blinked. “That’s a good question.”

“Everything else just seems like you’re letting some asshole skim.”

“Well…yeah, that’s about right.”

“Lockerby wants to understand Wall Street,” said Clara. She
patted him affectionately on the head. “Unfortunately, he’s taken his understanding to the logical extreme: the market is completely rigged, so it’s pointless to participate.”

“You’re all in what, then,” I asked. “Gold?”

“In?” He laughed. “Rent, mostly. And food. And bicycle parts.”

Kimmie wandered back in. “It’s still raining,” she said.

“Slow day,” said Clara. She glanced at Kimmie, then at an old-fashioned clock on the wall above Lockerby’s bench. “It’s after noon.”

“Yeah?”

“You got anything left?”

It looked like chasing down Ganderson’s avenger was going to wait a while.

“I
can’t believe you’re out here in the rain.” I still didn’t have a hat, and water seeped steadily through the collar and down my back.

“The fish bite better.”

“What do they care?”

Walter shrugged. “It’s true.”

We stood at an iron fence behind a shuttered warehouse, where a seawall from the nineteenth century crumbled slowly into the East River. A few blocks north the shoreline park started, with mowed lawns and a stone river walk. The Parks Department encouraged fisherman there and on any number of the city’s other, well-policed piers. But Walter insisted the fishing was better farther down, under the remnants of the Lower East Side’s industrial past.

And he wasn’t the only one. A handful of other guys leaned on the rail, stolid in the drizzle, next to their poles and bait buckets and tackle kits.

“The runoff has all kinds of garbage the bluefish like to eat,” said Walter. “And the raindrops aerate the surface of the water, which makes them friskier.”

“Then why haven’t any of you caught anything?”

“We throw them back.”

“What a great hobby.”

Walter was at least fifty but tall and wide, with a thick mustache gone gray. No glasses. He looked like a North Sea trawlerman, not a counterfeiter. “So what’s up?”

Meaning, why had I tracked him down, on his day off, in the one place he deserved to be free of life’s usual crap.

“That guy Hayden,” I said.

“Ah.”

“I’m going to send the copies to the DA.” And the key question: “If it’s okay with you.”

“Hayden didn’t give you what you wanted?”

“He did, actually.”

“So?”

“He’s an asshole.”

Walter considered that. “Most of them are.”

“Who?”

“Your clients.”

“What?—Hayden’s yours, not mine.”

He shrugged. “Wall Street. Listen, photocopy the sheets twice over, and send the final copies.”

I’d met Walter years ago, when I was starting out, so I was forever and always an amateur to him.

“At the library,” he added. “Or Mailboxes USA.”

“I was going to scan it, convert the file to a low-res JPEG and email it.”

“Uh-huh. That might work, too.”

Twenty feet away one of the other fisherman picked up his pole and twitched it, experimentally. The line tautened and jerked. Everyone turned to watch.

“Hayden’s not wrapped up with those dead bankers, is he?” Walter’s voice was quiet, but his eyes focused on me.

“Dead bankers?”

“Three at least. That’s what I hear.”

No use asking where that bit of gossip had drifted up. Clara and her fellow newshounds might not have published the link between Akelman, Sills and Marlett yet, but it wouldn’t be long. Ganderson’s news blackout didn’t have a chance.

“So far as I know, Hayden’s clear,” I said.

True enough—but I wasn’t. A little bad luck could drag me into the official Marlett investigation. The police would be keenly interested in placing someone like me at the scene around the time of his death. Painful though the prospect was, I needed Hayden around as a prospective alibi. “Though, it would be good if he stayed in town for a few more weeks.”

“Might be a lot longer than that.” Walter still didn’t look satisfied. “You
sure
he wasn’t involved? Maybe just the last one?”

“Marlett?”

“The sniping.”

“He has a rock-solid alibi,” I said. “At the time Marlett got shot, Hayden was three feet in front of me, chatting away.”

“Chatting?”

“You know these guys—can’t stop talking about how smart they are.”

But a small nagging suspicion wouldn’t die, not completely.
Hayden one day, Marlett an hour later—too damn close. James Jesus Angleton had it right. Sometimes those odd little synchronicities
mean
something.

The guy working his line had reeled it almost all the way in. A moment later he flipped the pole up and landed a squirming, silver-gray fish with a dirty back, close to a foot long.

“Striped bass,” said Walter. “Pretty good for the river here.”

“Seems a shame not to eat it.”

“Some of those restaurants in SoHo, you probably are.”

The conversation drifted to business, which, like anywhere, mostly meant sharing invidious and poorly sourced gossip about people we worked with. White-collar enforcement is a small field, like I’ve said. It’s not the rackets, where mobsters are constantly gunning one another down and going to jail and disappearing into WitSec. Hell, even the rackets aren’t the rackets anymore, not unless you speak Fujianese or Lao.

“I’m thinking of getting out,” Walter said.

“You tell me that every three months.”

He shrugged. “I might actually do it this time. I bought a nice condo down in the Keys, did I mention? A foreclosure. And the boat’s almost paid off. Who needs this shit?” He lifted a shoulder toward the river, the rain, and the oil-slick trash edging the shore.

“Spend your days bonefishing? Sounds nice—for about a week. You’d go bananas.”

“Business is a pain in the ass. And there’s new competition, too. Any punk with an iMac and a digital SLR thinks he can undersell me.”

“If it’s that easy, maybe I should try it. A quiet life, for a change.”

“Is that what you think?”

“Nobody pulls an automatic rifle on the forger.”

Walter laughed. “You’d be surprised.”

“Maybe.” I realized my jacket sleeves had gone a wet, rusty brown where I’d been leaning on the iron rail. “I’ve got competition too, though—if the vigilantes have really started hunting down rogue financiers.”

“Is that what you do?”

“Not exactly. But they’re diminishing the client base.”

The drizzle eased, but the sky was darker than ever.

“Saw Zeke the other day,” said Walter. “He asked about you.”

“Asked about me.” I thought about that for a moment. “In a good way? Or do I need to start carrying an M16 around?”

“Just social.” Walter raised one hand, like, don’t worry about it. “You know. Wondering how you were.”

“Wet.” I tried to rub the rust off one sleeve, and gave up. “But now that you mention it, maybe I should talk to him. Possible subcontracting. Where’s he been?”

“The same as always. Volchak’s, behind about three empty pitchers.”

“I’ll try early in the day, then.”

Down the row one of the fisherman had managed to light up, under his Mets cap. Smoke drifted in the mist.

“Got to go,” I said. “Nice catching up, Walter.”

“Throw Hayden off the sled if you want,” he said. “Okay by me.”

I guess he’d been paid already, too.

C
lara was in the phone book. Too easy.

Not her cellphone, of course. But the
Event Risk
website had a fax number on its Contact page. Even modern, all-electronic journalism is still chained to its Pleistocene era. I looked up the number in a reverse directory online and
voilà
: an address for “C Dawson” on 90th, west of Second Avenue.

No wonder Clara had bothered to find me in person that first day—she apparently lived right around the corner.

It was early evening. Her home was five blocks away. Why not?

Dusk, cool and damp. I wandered along 90th Street at little more than a meander, examining the buildings and cars and faces.

Old brownstones, with a few tearouts mixed in: ugly aluminum and concrete flatfronts from the sixties, before the Planning Commission stepped up. A pizza deliveryman went by on a bicycle, passing a Chinese takeout guy just stepping from his double-parked hatchback. A light breeze drifted up from the river, three blocks east.

Fifty yards away, just as I’d recognized Clara’s building from the
Street View image I’d checked earlier, the ace blogger herself emerged. She was dressed in a close-fitting T-shirt over running shorts, her hair pulled into a ponytail.

“Yo, Clara!” I called out, but a truck was passing and she hopped off the steps and took off down the street without looking in my direction.

I didn’t try to catch up. She was headed toward the river. I walked briskly after her, and when she came to the dead end, where the walkway was built above the FDR viaduct, I could see her turn right. South. Good enough. All I had to do was keep moving in the same direction, and eventually, after she turned around to come back, we’d meet.

A steady roar came from the viaduct beneath my feet, the cars clogged in rush hour. Exhaust drifted up. Trees in Carl Schurz Park, which extended several blocks downriver, were at a fall foliage peak, orange and red and yellow.

I went into the park and found an unoccupied bench. Not so many people out. More than the crummy weather, it was the end of the workday, when everyone wanted to get home. Children no longer seemed to have unsupervised time outside. And the nighttime crowd hadn’t emerged yet.

If the mayor still lived at Gracie Mansion, which was in the park, I’d have had plenty of company. But laws preventing the use of taxpayer funds on private citizens meant that unmarried partners could not be accommodated at Gracie, and the current mayor prefers to bunk with his girlfriend. The mansion was available for city functions, but mostly unused. I sat and waited.

By the time Clara returned it was well into dark. The river was shadowed, and lights glowed in the low Queens skyline on the other side. A few streetlights had come on, along the pathways in the park behind me. She must have run for an hour.

When she was thirty feet away, I raised a hand in a wave, but kept to my seat.

“Clara!”

She slowed but didn’t stop, instead swinging her head left, right, checking the entire area before focusing on me. Good reaction.

“Just me,” I said.

After a moment she halted, putting her hands on her hips, breathing a little hard from the run. “Silas? What on earth are you doing here?”

“I
live
here, as you well know. Have a nice jog?”

“A little wet.”

I’d noticed that. Her shirt was soaked, from drizzle or sweat, clearly showing the dark outline of a sports bra underneath. The nylon shorts, equally wet, were plastered to the long, clean muscles in her legs.

“Want my jacket?”

“Don’t be silly.”

We were at the edge of the park, alone. Somewhere a siren rose and fell.

“You’re almost home,” I said. “Long run? Why don’t I walk you. We can catch up.”

“Since six hours ago?” But she was smiling. “You’ve been working, if you’ve got more to report already.”

I got up from the bench, feeling stiff. I have to say, my ass hurt
from sitting so long—people were smaller or tougher or something in Olmstead’s day.

“Marlett’s death is more and more suspicious,” I said, as we started down the path.

“You mean apart from the fact he was assassinated by a sniper, on his doorstep, in the most expensive county in Connecticut?”

I looked sideways at her. “Foul play does seem to be involved, yes.”

“Good to know.”

“There’ve been two others,” I said. “So far.”

“Others?”

“Betsy Sills and Jeremy Akelman.”

She was slower than Johnny, but only by a second or two. “
Three
suspicious deaths. All money managers of some sort. Oh my God.”

“Yes.”

“I can’t believe this isn’t news yet.”

“Nothing connects them directly.” Not exactly true, but I didn’t see any reason to bring Ganderson into it. “It seems…odd.”

“Shit, I wish I had my phone. I sort of remember Akelman—got hit by a car or something. And Sills drowned. Do you have any proof they were murdered?”

“No.”

“That’s okay, I can still use it. What an awesome lead! It’s perfect—just what I need to follow up my stories on Marlett.”