The Big Killing (18 page)

Wetzon was waiting for Howie Minton in the lobby bar of the Hotel Vista, thinking what a big waste of time it was to meet him again. Howie Minton had a brainstorm every year, during which he thought he wanted to leave L. L. Rosenkind. Last year it had been because of a new manager. How strange men were about change. If something was displaced in their environment, they felt threatened instead of challenged to make it right again. It happened all the time. The new manager had a different approach, or perhaps the chemistry between him and Howie was wrong.

She had come across only one broker who moved every few years because he felt it was good for him to have a change. Saul Mossberger claimed it made him work harder and kept him interested and on his toes. She could see his point. It was an easy business to plateau in. Many brokers reached a certain point of growth and then stayed there. Saul had been in the business twenty-five years and had moved four or five times and now was getting ready for another move. But he was decidedly different from anyone she’d met in the brokerage business. He’d spent his developing years in a Nazi concentration camp. Now over sixty, he didn’t take Wall Street machinations very seriously. He had a big trading business, mostly immigrant refugee clients who had come here with nothing and made good. They were gamblers at heart, loved to play the market.... “Do you want to order something while you’re waiting?” the waiter asked.

“Yes, Perrier with lime.” She wondered how the Mildred Gleason-Jake Donahue confrontation had been resolved. If they’d been let loose on each other, there surely would have been a double murder. She was sick of the whole business. And then there was the beauteous Amanda Guilford. It never ceased to amaze Wetzon what a small world the brokerage community was. Everyone seemed to know everyone else.

She looked at her watch. Ten after five. Brokers were rarely on time for appointments. Most of them were drowning in details—paper, information. There was so much to do before they shut down at the end of the day. So much they were responsible for. She took a sip of her Perrier and thought about Mildred Gleason again. If Mildred
had
been Barry’s partner, and if Barry
had
been taping Jake’s phone conversations, it was to use in some way against Donahue. But not officially. Wetzon didn’t think unauthorized tapes of phone calls could be used in court. Even more curious was the fact that Barry had not told Mildred about any tapes until almost his last words. For some reason, he wasn’t feeding her the tapes all along.

Well, eliminate Mildred as Barry’s murderer. Mildred hadn’t killed Barry because she had been on the phone with him when he died, so maybe Roberta was right—Jake Donahue had done it. Donahue certainly had the best motive. The last thing he would have wanted was to let his embittered ex-wife get her hands on something she could use against him. And hadn’t Silvestri asked her if she had seen Jake that night at the Four Seasons?

Until today, Wetzon had only seen photographs of Donahue in newspapers and magazines. He was always good copy. But it was nothing like meeting him in person, especially when he was in a rage. He had a tough, jowly face with the jaw of a street fighter. Not someone you’d ever want to be angry with you. He had been incredibly successful, all the while leaving bodies behind him. What a thought—leaving bodies behind him. Astonishing what the subconscious could come up with.

And what about Roberta what’s-her-name, Mildred’s assistant? Her bizarre behavior must have had to do with their personal relationship, not business. Still, why did Wetzon feel they had met before?

“So, Wetzon, it’s really been nice seeing you again. Bye-bye. Keep well.”

She looked up to see Howie Minton standing over her, laughing at her.

“My God, Howie, how long have you been standing there?” Feeling like an idiot, she slid over on the banquette. “Here, sit down. I’m really sorry. I was thinking about something and lost track of where I was.”

“It’s all right. I’m easy. So tell me,” Howie said, sitting down, adjusting his white French cuffs, flashing gold cuff links, “why did you murder Barry Stark?”

“Oh, Jesus, Howie, that’s awful.”

“Oh, come on now, I’m joking … see ... it’s a joke. Ha, ha. You know it’s a joke,” Howie said sincerely. “Besides, everyone who ever knew Barry Stark wanted to murder him at one time or another.”

“What are you saying, Howie? I didn’t even know you knew him.” There it was again. The Street was a family, for better and for worse.

“Sure I knew him. He was a slug, a real lowlife. He turned a lot of nice people into veggies. Listen, this is my philosophy, there’s so much money to be made legally, who needs to—”

“You should talk to the police, Howie. You could give them some leads, maybe,” she responded, equally serious.

“Yeah, I could tell them about Mildred Gleason.” Howie flicked some lint from his sleeve.

“Mildred Gleason?” Wetzon sat up. “What about Mildred Gleason?”

“Promise you won’t say anything, Wetzon, and I’ll tell you.”

“Oh, Howie, you know I don’t talk. If I told what people tell me, I’d be out of business.” She slipped her hands under the table and crossed her fingers on both hands. “Okay, I promise.” God, what had she come to?

“Vodka tonic,” Howie told the waiter. “All right. Remember at the end of September last year, right around the Jewish Holidays, we had this record-breaking heat wave? Every day for a week the temperature was around a hundred?”

Wetzon nodded. The waiter returned with Howie’s drink and a bowl of popcorn.

“So I have a good client—a Greek—and he has a chain of coffeeshops. He likes to trade, big, but it’s all—let’s put it this way—I have to go pick up the money.”

“Oh, Howie,” Wetzon said, knowing he meant it was cash money. “That’s so damned dangerous.”

“Don’t worry, Wetzon. It’s under control. My manager and I have it all worked out.” He stirred his drink with the yellow plastic stirrer. “Anyway, at this point the market is laying there like a beached whale, so dead that I’d go all the way to Greece for the money, if I had to.” He laughed a little too heartily.

A group of bronze-skinned men in expensive suits came into the bar and sat at a table across from Wetzon and Howie Minton. They were talking passionately, rapidly, in Spanish.

Howie lowered his voice; Wetzon bent toward him to hear. “I come in the back way, as always, through a private entrance, and Kostos’s brother has it all ready for me. So I sit down in the back office and start counting. Nickie—that’s the brother—brings me a Turkish coffee, and when I go to put the money in my briefcase, I knock the damn cup over and get a spot on my tie.” He looked at his tie as if it had just happened. “I’m telling you I’m really bugged—it’s a new Paul Stuart tie. I take my case and come out of the office to look for the men’s room. You know these coffeeshops—they have two rows of booths with a common partition. Well, on the upper half of Kostos’s booths, there’s a mirror, so I lean into a booth to check out my tie, and damned if I don’t hear—” He licked the popcorn salt on his fingers. “Do you want to hear the rest?” He was teasing her.

“Howie, come on,” Wetzon protested. “Give.”

“Okay, okay, I’m as nosy as you are. The first thing I hear is that foghorn voice of Mildred Gleason, and she’s doing a number on someone about what a bad move he made. And I’m dying to know who it is and pretty soon she calls him Stark so I know damn well who she’s crapping on.”

“What do you mean ‘a number’?”

“Oh, you know, about the new-issues market being dead and Jake going back on his deal. Then she tells Stark how good her business is, and he gets more depressed by the minute. Says his life is falling apart and his air-conditioner conked out, and you can tell she’s loving every minute of it. She says to him he can work for her and he lightens up right away and then she gives him the old one-two. Not as a broker, she says, you have no book—like he’s not good enough to shine her shoes. You’ve got all your clients in Jake’s crummy stock, she says, and I don’t give freebies to brokers to rebuild their books. Jesus, what a bitch. I’m almost feeling sorry for the poor bugger. By this time, Wetzon, old buddy, I gotta tell you, I have my nose to the goddam partition.”

Wetzon was so engrossed in Howie’s story that she did not see the waiter until he said a rather loud, “Ahem.”

“I’ll have another vodka,” Howie said, checking his solid gold Rolex.

“Perrier,” Wetzon said. “What happened next?”

“Well, she says she’ll pay him big bucks for information about Jake that she can use to get back her father’s firm. You know, of course, that Donahue’s was her father’s company and Jake took it over and changed the name?”

“I know.”

“Anyway, she gets him interested. Papers, tapes, wiretaps, whatever, she says, but she wants enough inside dirt to bury Jake. Ha! Knowing Jake, he’s probably doing the same thing with her.”

The waiter brought their drinks and took away the empty glasses.

“So,” Howie continued, “Stark picks up on it right away and gets her up to a hundred and fifty thou and a limited partnership before he’s finished. She agrees to give him ten thou on account and then she tells him it’s all going to be handled by her assistant. Boy oh boy, Stark made some deal,” Howie said enviously.

“Yes, he did, didn’t he?” Wetzon was unable to keep the sarcasm out of her voice.

“Oh, well, so it goes,” Howie said nonchalantly. “When you play with fire, you gotta know you’re going to get burned.”

“Did you hear anything more?”

“No, because she called for the check. I took off before they stood up.”

“What a story. Didn’t you tell anyone about it?”

“Who was I gonna tell? Jake? I’m an observer on this one, Wetzon. My motto is, don’t start something you can’t finish. I saw Stark about a week later, and he was on top of the world, prancing around Harry’s in his Vuarnets with that tall blonde broker from Donahue’s.”

“Don’t tell me you don’t know her name, Howie?” Wetzon joked.

“I don’t, Wetzon,” he said, taking her seriously, looking chagrined. “Do you?”

“No.” She was trying to keep a straight face. “About Barry, though, I think you should tell that story to the police.”

“Not on your life. I don’t want to get involved. It wouldn’t look good. And it wouldn’t be healthy. Who knows why he was aced? It could have been a lot of different things. Believe me.”

“Okay, let’s talk about you. How’s Ellen feeling?”

“Great, great. The baby’s due in six weeks.”

“Wonderful.”

“And we bought a house. In Manhasset.”

“So you’ve become a commuter.”

“Yeah, and it’s not so bad. I read the papers on the train in the morning, read the financial reports and the ten-Ks on the way home.”

“And how are things in the office?” Wetzon asked, steering him to the crux of what had brought him out to meet her once again.

“Well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. You know I think of you as my friend.”

Whoever said that dishonest people can’t look you in the eye?
she thought instantly, meeting Howie’s sincere ones.

“Okay, I’m listening,” she said.

“Another one of my good clients, I put him into one of our high-tech stocks, you know, an R.R.R., a Rosenkind research recommendation, and he went in heavy, because it looked really good—” Howie paused and reached for his drink.

“And?”

“And the stock took a nosedive—a big one—and he was in the hole fifteen thou—” Little beads of sweat had formed on Howie’s upper lip.

“So? That wasn’t your fault. The company recommended it, and he bought it.”

“Right. My client said he didn’t blame me, but he was writing a letter to the company to complain about the stock and the way it acted after they recommended it, and he wanted me to know that’s what he was going to do.”

“Okay, very nice of him.”

“Right. So he writes the letter, and Compliance calls me in and the head of retail is there, and my manager, and the head of research, and they tell me they’re going to give this guy his fifteen thou back. They don’t want lawsuits and publicity, and then they drop it on me. They’re going to take the fifteen thou they give him back out of my future commissions.”

“That’s terrible. Unfair. What did you say?”

“I said that’s terrible and unfair and you’re making me very unhappy.”

“And what did they say?”

“They said, that’s too bad for you.”

“So you want to look around again?”

“Yes. And this time I’m serious, Wetzon. I’m ready to make the move. I want to show them they can’t do it to me. I’m not in this business forever, you know. I want to lay away some equity and get out by the time I’m forty. You know what I mean. One big killing and I’m out of this rat race.”

There it was again. The big killing. They were all looking for it.

“So what do you say, Wetzon, my friend?”

She smiled at him. “Let’s go for it. How much do you have in so far this year?”

He pulled a folder out of his briefcase and showed her his runs. “This is a very important step for me, Wetzon. So I feel good that we’re going to work on it together.”

It was after six when Wetzon and Howie Minton shook hands.

“I’ll call you Monday and let you know what I’m doing,” she said.

“Start with Shearson,” he said.

“Okay.”

“Thank you, my friend,” Howie said. “I’m going to run for my train.” He got up, ignoring the check, which the waiter had left on the table. “Wetzon,” he said, taking her hand again, “keep well. And take my advice, as a friend, don’t get involved with this Barry Stark business. And stay away from Jake Donahue. There’s something bad coming down there.”

“Wait, Howie,” she called after him. “Tell me—”

“Gotta run, Wetzon. Stay well.” Howie strode away, straightening his French cuffs: a well-dressed man of twenty-eight whose yearly income was well over $150,000. It was amazing. Yes, Howie was right. In what other industry could such young men make so much money so quickly and so legally?

She paid the bill, left the waiter five dollars, and went down into the belly of the World Trade Center to take the IRT back uptown. Rush hour was almost over and the platforms and trains were much less crowded than they would have been an hour earlier. She got a seat on the #2 train, the express, which she could take up to Seventy-second Street and switch to the local.