JM03 - Red Cat (22 page)

Over Mike’s shoulder, I watched the elevators empty. Ranks of dark-coated figures flowed past, girding themselves for the cold. “You buy any of his story?”

“I don’t know,” Mike said. “Tommy wasn’t particularly circumspect when he went looking for Cassandra, which is not what you’d expect if he or his client had meant her harm.”

“Maybe they meant no harm when they were just looking; maybe that changed when they actually found her. Or maybe your pal doesn’t know everything his client was up to.”

Mike looked at me. “Has it occurred to you that maybe we’re in the same boat?”

I was about to say something— to concede the point, perhaps, or to ask just how worried he was about David— when an elevator door opened. A fat man emerged, followed by a small blond woman, followed by a stocky, dark-haired man. He swaggered off, and he rolled his shoulders as he went, and he was suddenly more than familiar. I stepped back, into the shadow of a column, and watched him cross the lobby, turning up the collar of his big camel coat as he went. Mike turned to look and I caught his arm.

“What?” he asked.

“That guy— in the tan coat— he was in Vickers’s office.”

“Yeah, I saw him when we came in. So what?”

“I think he’s Vickers’s client.” The stocky man pushed through the revolving doors and into the crowd on Broadway. He turned right, north.

“His Cassandra client?” Mike asked. “How do you know?”

But I was already past him when the questions came, headed for the doors. I glanced back and answered. “He’s Bluto,” I said.

25

It was nearly dark outside, and it took me a few minutes to pick out the swagger and the wide, brown shoulders from the hurrying crowd. I hung back while he waited for the light at Exchange Place, and my cell phone burred. It was Mike.

“You’re just following him, right?” he asked.

“What does that mean?”

“It means I know you were pissed at Tommy, and I know how you felt about those videos, and I don’t want you getting jammed up with something stupid like an assault charge when you’re in the middle of a case. It won’t do you or your brother any good.” The light changed and Bluto was moving.

“Nothing stupid,” I said, and I turned off my phone and followed him across Broadway. He headed west, through Exchange Alley, and north again on Trinity Place. Half a block later he went into an office building.

It was an older structure, circa 1950, built of brown brick and squatter than its neighbors. It was currently incarnated as Trinity Parc Tower, its aging, undistinguished bones only partially hidden beneath a recent veneer of marble and frosted glass. I was grateful that the lobby was shallow, so that I could see the elevators from the street. It also helped that the building directory was up to date, and that the security guards were dullards.

Through the lobby glass, I watched Bluto board an elevator by himself, and watched the floor display climb to 11 and stop. Then I scanned the directory and went inside. I scrawled the name of a twelfth-floor law firm in the sign-in book, and showed my driver’s license to the guards, who waved me through with barely a glance.

According to the building directory, three firms shared the eleventh floor: Fenn Partners LLC; MF Securities LLC; and Trading Pit LLC, and apparently they shared the same office too. I stepped off the elevator directly into a reception area, and the three names were spelled out in blue plastic letters on a sign above an unmanned receptionist’s desk. There was an arrangement of angular leather chairs and glass coffee tables to the right— the waiting area, also vacant. Behind that, beyond a waist-high partition, was a drab expanse of gray carpet, fluorescent lighting, and cubicles.

The cubicles were low-walled and tiny, and the ones I could see were equipped with narrow desks, swivel chairs, and banks of flat-screen monitors. The monitors glowed and flickered with charts and graphs and numbers, though just then they were playing to mostly empty seats. The few men left in the cubes— and there were only men in them— were stuffing briefcases and donning coats. They paid little attention to one another at the elevators, and none at all to me, and in a few moments I was alone in the waiting room.

There were glossy brochures on the coffee tables and I picked one up and read. After four pages of photos, diagrams, and acronym-laden babble about the latest trading technology, the most current market data, cutting-edge risk management, Nasdaq Level II quotes, extensive training, and low, low, low fees, I knew what I needed to about Trading Pit LLC. It was a day-trading firm— a motel of sorts— that for low, low, low fees, let an individual, a day trader, rent one of its cubes and the use of its trading systems, to earn or burn his money in a clean, well-lighted place. In theory, the firm’s systems were better than what one could typically access at home, the fees were lower than trading through a discount broker, at least for high-volume players, the executions were faster, and the environment was more disciplined and professional. Maybe, but I saw more than one screen that displayed the home page of a popular on-line poker site.

The most useful part of the literature was the back page, and the bios and photos of the firm’s management. There, at the top of the heap, was Bluto, the founder, chairman, and CEO of Trading Pit LLC: Mitchell Fenn.

According to the brochure, Fenn was a longtime veteran of the securities industry— a former SVP at a big broker-dealer, and director of that firm’s trading operations— and he’d left there two years ago to found Trading Pit, piecing it together from the scraps of several other day-trading outfits that hadn’t survived the last market downturn. His picture showed a broad, tanned face beneath a head of dark, curly hair. His teeth were large and bright, and his wide smile was hungry. I dropped the brochure on the table and stepped into the maze of cubicles.

I found Fenn at the northwest corner of the floor, in a large, chrome and leather den with views of Ground Zero. He was lounging behind a chrome and glass desk, and talking to a red-haired guy in a shirt and tie, who sat across from him, smiling and nodding. I saw a dusting of gray in Fenn’s shiny black curls, and a web of lines around his dark eyes, and closer up, he looked ten years older than he did in his photo— around fifty, maybe. He’d lost the overcoat and jacket, and his blue shirtsleeves were rolled over thick forearms. I stood in the door and he recognized me right away. He was still for a moment, and then the wide, greedy smile appeared.

“Fuck if Tommy wasn’t right about you,” he said. His voice was deep Brooklyn, and hearing it was a little shock. Some part of me had been expecting synthesized speech. “Fuck if he didn’t say I should keep away today. But I didn’t listen— I wanted to have a look.” He turned to the redhead. “Take a lesson from that, Chris: don’t argue with your lawyer.”

Chris looked from Fenn to me, and his doughy face was puzzled. He put his big hands on his knees, as if he was about to get up.

“He a friend of yours, Mitch?” he asked. His voice was surprisingly high-pitched, and full of adolescent tough. He ran a hand over his spiky hair, and his stupid blue eyes narrowed.

Fenn smiled wider. “We haven’t been introduced, but we’ve seen each other before— haven’t we?”

“I think I’ve seen a little more of you,” I said.

The big smile didn’t falter, but it turned colder, and a shade meaner. “Yeah? Hope you didn’t get some kind of inferiority complex from it.” His laugh was a throaty bark.

“It was something closer to indigestion.”

The grin held, but even Chris couldn’t miss the radiating anger. He had no idea what was going on, but he stood up anyway. “You want to watch your mouth, buddy,” he said. He was maybe an inch taller than I, and heavier by twenty sloppy pounds.

I looked more closely at his face— the freckles, snub nose, thin lips, and chipped front tooth— and I recognized him from the brochure: Christopher Fitz-something, the head sales guy. Which explained his eagerness to impress his boss. I shook my head.

“You don’t want an audience for this, Mitch,” I said.

Fenn barked out another laugh. “An audience for what? You doing tricks or something?”

Chris took a step toward me and poked a finger in my direction and then at the door. “You, out— now.” His face was red, and his fists were clenched. Fenn’s dark eyes were shining with expectation.

“You’re going to get him hurt,” I said to Fenn. Behind Chris’s back, he shrugged. Chris took another step.

“There’s only one guy gonna get hurt, asshole,” he said. Then he put his hands up, to shove me in the chest. I stepped aside and he fell past me, and I hurried him along with a push between the shoulders. I stuck out my foot as he went by, and he stumbled into the hallway, down on one knee and flapping like an ungainly red bird. I shut the door and turned the lock and looked at Fenn. He laughed out loud.

“Tommy said you were a piece of work,” he said, and his wide frame shook. Behind me, Chris cursed and worked the doorknob. Then he started pounding.

“You okay, Mitch?” he shouted. “You want security for that asshole, or the cops?”

“No,” Fenn called. “No cops. Everything’s fine, Chris— I’ll catch you tomorrow.”

“You sure? I can—”

“Tomorrow, Chris,” he repeated, and Chris got the message and went away. Fenn picked up a red rubber ball from his desk and started squeezing it. He shook his head.

“Or was I wrong, and you’re going to try and push me around, too? ’Cause I’m telling you, it won’t be so easy with me.”

“As appealing an idea as that is, I came to talk.”

Fenn leaned back in his chair and smiled. If there was relief there, it was hard to tell. “You want to talk, talk to Tommy.”

I walked to the desk and slung my coat on one guest seat and sat in the other. “I heard what he had to say. I didn’t find it convincing.”

“That sounds like something between you and Tommy.”

I sighed heavily. “You’re going to make me go through the motions?”

Fenn squeezed the rubber ball, and watched his knuckles go white. “Which motions are those?” he asked.

“The ones I make while I’m calling the cops.”

“Calling them about what?”

“About you and the Williamsburg Mermaid, for starters.”

Fenn was quiet for a while, and studied his fingers on the red ball. “Is that supposed to make me go weak in the knees?” he asked eventually.

“Worry more about the effect it has on the cops, and especially when they see Cassandra’s video.”

He smirked. “You know, I’ve never watched the final product. I hope she made me look good.”

A little rushing noise started in my ears. “Yeah, you look great choking her, Mitch— almost as good as when you’re slapping her around, or burning her breasts with candle wax.”

Fenn let go of the ball. It took a small bounce on his desk and came to rest against his phone. He pointed at me, and finally the grin went away. “Fuck you, March— that bitch was a freak, but she was a grownup freak. She knew what she was getting into, and she liked it, so don’t lecture me.”

I felt my hands grip the armrests of the chair, and I felt something shift in my face. Fenn pushed his chair back from his desk by half a foot.

“What— she was a friend of yours or something?”

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Don’t call her ‘bitch’ anymore,” I said softly.

“Whatever,” he said. “My point is, she was no schoolgirl, and the cops will figure that out. And, anyway, I can account for my time.”

“Sure, and while they’re figuring, and you’re accounting, who knows what other agencies will start asking questions— about your business, maybe, and Tommy’s, about your clients…”

Fenn’s eyes narrowed. “What agencies?”

“I don’t know,” I said, shrugging. “The IRS, maybe, or the SEC— there are all sorts of initials out there, and all just a phone call away.”

Fenn’s mouth was an angry line, and I could almost see the steam rising from his dark curls as he stared at me. He shook his head. “Tommy wasn’t bullshitting you; it’s been years since I had any contact with her, and I had nothing to do with what happened.”

“Why did you send him looking for her, then?”

He ran a hand across the back of his neck and let out a long breath. “I got a letter a while ago— about three months back— pictures of me and her, from when we were together. A few days later a note came, from somebody squeezing me, or trying to.”

“Somebody who?”

Fenn snorted. “Do blackmailers usually sign their letters?”

“You assumed it was Wren?”

“From the photos and the bullshit threats, that’s what I thought, but I never knew who the fuck Wren was. That’s why I called Tommy.”

“What were the threats?”

“The same crap as two years ago,” Fenn said. “Sending pictures to the boss, the wife, the in-laws— all that shit.” Fenn paused and surprised me with a satisfied smile. “She didn’t know that it was all old news, though. That ship sailed a long time ago.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means in the last couple years I’ve become pretty much squeeze-proof.”

“Squeeze-proof how?”

Fenn laughed. “Two years ago, I was still married, I was working for somebody else, and I was just putting together the money for this.” He gestured around him. “Now I’m single, I’m in charge around here, and I bought out the last of my investors six months back. So if somebody wants to put pictures of me fucking a beautiful girl on the Internet, they can go right ahead. The way we went at it, it’d probably get me more dates.”

“Why not ignore the letter, then? Why send Vickers to look for her?”

“That’s just what Tommy said— leave it alone— but I said no way. Immune to it or not, I fucking hate the idea of someone trying to shake me down. I hate being harassed; I hate people messing with my privacy. And the fact that there’s somebody out there who thinks they can get away with it— who thinks I’m a soft touch— that’s a fucking insult.”

“So what was Vickers supposed to do once he found her?”

“Send her a fucking message, that’s what. Let her know that I know who she is, and that she’s going to get herself in trouble— serious legal trouble— if she keeps screwing around with me.” I shook my head. The words were familiar, and so was the reasoning.