Scent of Evil (31 page)

Justin Willette had never lit the world on fire as a financial high roller. He had not come to Brattleboro after a career on Wall Street or from advising the yacht-owning set on how to screw up American business through LBOs. He had stuck to doing his homework, had worked long hours with firms in Boston getting the basics down, and was now a registered rep of one of the big national stockbrokers. He had the reputation of guiding the little guys through the investment maze with integrity and a minimum of smoke and mirrors.

He also liked a puzzle and had helped us in the past to unscramble a few. Although there was no evidence of it now, I knew he and Dennis had spent the entire day poring over buy-and-sell tickets, market-trend charts, financial newsletters, business correspondence, and God knows what else, all with frequent referrals to the computer glowing on the counter behind him, and all, I had no doubt, at no cost to us.

“So do you smell something fishy?” I asked him.

He pursed his lips. “Yeah. That’s a pretty good way of putting it. Nothing definite, but something wrong. Not court-of-law material, though; keep that straight.”

“Okay.”

He nodded, reassured. “Okay. Small lecture on trading, then. The National Association of Security Dealers, called NASD for short, and the New York Stock Exchange, monitor all trading, as does the SEC, which oversees both of them. Also, with national firms like Merrill Lynch or Prudential-Bache or whoever, senior partners of regional offices tend to keep an eye peeled. What all of them are looking for are patterns, since there’re way too many transactions conducted every day to analyze every one.

“What is a pattern, you ask?” Willette continued, although I had done no such thing. “It’s something like buying AT&T stock one week before a merger is announced, and then doing the same kind of thing with another company a few days or weeks later, cashing in both times. That catches people’s attention, especially if it keeps happening and involves a fair amount of cash.”

“Insider trading?”

“Possibly. That’s the tricky part. There’s a lot of analysis that goes on in this business, and there’re a lot of smart people doing it. Look at ‘Wall Street Week’ on TV sometime and you’ll see them in action. They study the trends, look at the figures, sometimes even interview the principal players, and then they make a buy. If the stock then suddenly goes through the roof, is that insider trading? Nope. So the watchdogs have got to tell the difference between a sharp guy with an honest track record, and a crook.”

“So what makes you suspicious of Jardine? That he was too new in the business to be any good?” I paused. “How good was he, by the way?” Willette chuckled. “I don’t know about him, but ABC Investments was off to a healthy start. If they’d been wooing me as a customer with their track record, I would have listened. What do you know about Arthur Clyde, by the way?”

It was an embarrassing question, considering the effort this man had expended on our behalf. “Not much, I’m afraid. We would have had more if it hadn’t been for this double homicide; our manpower’s been stretched to the limit. Basically, you’ve been our only Clyde investigator up to now.”

Willette smiled and shook his head. “Didn’t mean to put you on the spot. I know you’re ass-deep in alligators. I did a check on Arthur Clyde. He was cited and suspended by the NASD two years ago for what I’d call irregular paper shuffling. It’s not that rare; people get caught in the rules all the time, and usually it’s no big deal, at least as far as the public is concerned. Unfortunately, the broker can really get pinched, depending on how tough the bureaucrats want to get.”

“How tough did they get with Clyde?”

“Well, that’s the interesting part. It was just a little thing—I called a friend of mine who did some digging. Clyde apparently goofed on some form having to do with a client’s discretionary account. From what I understand, he put things right within a single work day, but the milk had been spilled and NASD was called in to supervise the cleaning up. Normally, that means a hearing, a certain amount of bowing and scraping, a slap on the wrist, a small mountain of paperwork, and that’s it. Only this time, it didn’t work that way. Clyde, with a squeaky-clean record going back God knows how many years, got pissed. He told the NASD boys to screw themselves and refused to attend the hearing. So they found him in contempt, slapped a fine on him, and gave him a six-month suspension; not that it mattered, since he’d already quit his job.”

“Wasn’t that a problem when he went in with Jardine?”

“No. The fine had been paid off, and the six months had long since elapsed. As far as NASD was concerned, it was ancient history.”

“Until now.”

Willette wobbled his head from side to side. “Maybe, just maybe.” This was what he got in return for his labors: the joy of being the oracle, if only briefly, in the midst of a major case. The man knew enough of the world to realize I wouldn’t be in his office if I wasn’t in need of his knowledge. Finally, he laughed. “Okay, I’ll concede. But keep in mind it’s all pretty subtle and will need lots of supporting evidence, none of which I have.”

“Gotcha.”

He propped his elbows on the arms of his chair and built a steeple of his fingers. “I do suspect some insider trading, but not on the order to which we’ve become aware in the news.”

I could feel the crease growing between my eyes.

“The trick to this game, as a retail business, is to show people you’re a consistent winner. It’s nice to hit the jackpot, of course, but unless you do it frequently, you’re quickly seen as a flash in the pan. And if you do hit it frequently, pretty soon your place of business is crawling with investigators all wondering how you did it. Word of that gets out fast, too, and can be as bad for the bankbook as unemployment. So you work for a middle ground, enjoying the peaks as they come, but going for solid, respectable returns.”

I kept my mouth shut at the end of this primer, knowing the punch line would come in good time.

“The first thing that caught my eye with ABC was that they hit this steady, predictable stride right off the bat.” He paused.

“And that’s pretty rare?”

“As a snowball in hell. It’s like any other business; it takes you a while to find your sea legs.”

“But what about Clyde? Didn’t he have years of experience and contacts he could bring to bear? And there was Wentworth in the background, too.”

Willette wagged his finger at me, delighted. “All true, but Clyde’s contacts would be on the investment side, not the investor. You can have a great product, but you need clients to buy it; that’s why an operation like this usually takes time to show a profit. As for Wentworth, he’d have the same problem in reverse. He might have the local appeal, but any clients he could round up would want to see a solid track record before they signed on. It’s like a catch-22; you can beat it but not easily, especially with a partner like Jardine, whose résumé would look good only on an application to Taco Bell.”

“But they did it nevertheless.”

“That they did, largely on one account.”

He paused again, and again I played along. “Okay. I give up. Which account?”

“They landed the Putney Road Bank pension fund almost as soon as they’d hung out their shingle.”

Mention of the Putney Road Bank made the short hairs on my neck tingle. Two of the names on Milly’s list were employed there.

“In your digging through ABC’s files, did you run across either Kenny Thomas or Paula Atwater, in connection to the bank?”

For once, Willette looked blank. “Nope, doesn’t ring a bell.”

I tried a more general approach. “Why would a bank put that much money into a new outfit like ABC? I mean, what would the pitch be to the board of directors or whoever?”

Willette thought about that for a moment before answering. “It would have to hinge entirely on connections—the credibility of the person making the pitch. ABC wouldn’t have anything else.”

“And that would’ve been Wentworth, since Clyde’s a newcomer and Jardine’s a nobody, at least in the bank’s eyes.”

Willette shrugged. “Sure, Wentworth. But not him alone. The real enthusiasm would have to come from within the bank, from officers carrying Wentworth’s torch, and that’s something I don’t think they’d do without some real incentive.”

“Like a kickback?”

“Kickback, payment up front, drugs, sex, or rock ’n’ roll; who knows? You know what they say: ‘Money talks and bullshit walks.’ A lot of bankers I know are either stupid, greedy, or both. If Wentworth paid off a fat sum to the right people, then that, mixed with his own reputation, might do the trick, especially with an outfit like Putney Road Bank. It’s hardly Chase Manhattan, after all; it’s more like a one-horse barn, but perfect to get ABC off to a nice start.”

“You implied ABC got a few other lucky breaks.”

“Yeah, equally intriguing, and again only because of the suspicions it raises. Traditionally, in this business, the slow hard road to success is attained through old-fashioned hustle. You get a tip, you offer it around; people turn you down but watch to see what happens to the stock in question. If it goes up, you don’t make any money, but you gain a little credibility. So you do it again, and again. Eventually, if you keep hitting base runs, and especially if you hit the occasional homer, people start paying you for your advice. It’s pretty elementary.

“The trick, of course, is to come up with enough winner suggestions to get enough clients to keep you from going bankrupt. The hassle, in other words, isn’t just in trying to locate customers, but also in locating juicy investments. Here again, I found ABC to be remarkably well blessed.”

“Reflecting Clyde’s abilities to choose stocks, Wentworth’s influence and number of contacts, and Jardine’s salesmanship in putting the two together.”

Willette chuckled. “Very good—just what they’d want you to think. Old-fashioned American know-how at work.”

“Well, couldn’t it be?”

“Sure, it could be, but not probably. See, Joe, I live in this part of the jungle. On the face of it, you’d be right, maybe. A lot of guys, mostly in the old days, did get to the top à la Horatio Alger. But it took a lot of work, and I mean real ball-busting, year-after-year stuff—not very appealing to either the young modern male or the old guy in his twilight years who still has a greedy twinkle in his eye.”

I sighed, a little depressed at how cannily accurate it all sounded. “So how do you think they did it?”

“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.”