Black Fridays (25 page)

“RIGHT TURN.
Fifty feet.” The voice of the GPS jolted me awake again. She sounded like a BBC announcer crossed with a third-grade teacher.

I had slept through the drive up to Darien and I felt almost human—Maloney had made me eat something before we started out. Then he had tried to prep me for confronting Hochstadt, but I kept nodding out while he was talking. Then I nodded out while I was talking. Maloney left me alone after that.

We were deep down a meandering boulevard, drifting through an arboretum of huge spreading oaks and impenetrable ten-foot-tall rhododendron forests. Every so often we passed an entryway, sometimes marked with a pair of stone gateposts. Far back from the road, lights twinkled through the leaves, giving the only evidence that the area was currently inhabited.

“Pull over,” Maloney said.

He checked the cell phone/transmitter—again. “Just stick to the script and you’ll do fine. No tricks. No improv. Let him take the bait. Don’t push it.”

I tried to remember the script.

“I still say we should have called him first. I just show up at his door? He’s going to be totally panicked.”

“Panicked is good. He’ll start making mistakes. Just don’t make any yourself.”

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

A second car pulled up beside us—two more FBI agents.

“We’ll be out here. Seconds away. If anything starts to go wrong, sing out. We’ll be all over it.”

I didn’t want to think about what he meant by things going wrong.

“Let’s get this over with,” I said.

Maloney got out and walked to the other car. Brady pulled forward.

A miniature lighthouse doubled as a mailbox. We pulled around it and entered a long straightaway, bordered on one side by a long line of those pine trees you always see bordering fields in pictures of Tuscany. A wide lawn on the other side sloped up a long hill to a grove of three spreading oaks that blocked the front of the house. Brady drove up slowly and stopped the car just past the trees.

“Not the castle I expected,” I said.

The house was a two-story colonial with a built-in two-car garage. It wasn’t small, but neither was it one of the vast mansions we had passed after pulling off the highway.

“It’s got to be the smallest house on the block,” he said.

“Or the county.”

Brady’s phone buzzed. He answered and listened.

“That was my boss, asking why you haven’t gone in yet.”

“Tell him I’m gone.” I got out and followed a wide brick walkway to the front door. I rang the bell. If it was working, I couldn’t hear it. I waited a minute longer and used the heavy brass knocker shaped like a ship’s anchor. The door boomed. Still nothing. I turned back to look at Brady and shrugged my shoulders. He shrugged back.

“There’s no one home.” I spoke loud enough for the transmitter to relay my disgust to Maloney. “Can you take me home, now?”

Just as I started back toward the car, the door swung open. “You must be in a big hurry,” a smoky female voice warned.

The woman must have come straight from the shower. Her hair was turbaned in a mauve towel and the rest of her was wrapped in an ankle-length matching robe. She had the frame of a large woman, but the proportions to carry it off.

“Mrs. Hochstadt?”

“Sorry about all this.” She let her hand flutter over the V in the robe. If she was trying to be demure, it wasn’t working. “I didn’t expect you until eight. I just got in. Come in.” She turned and walked inside, leaving the door ajar behind her. I followed.

“I’ll be back in just a minute. Please go ahead and look around down here.” She disappeared behind a wall and I heard her climbing the stairs.

“Mrs. Hochstadt? Is your husband here?” I called after her.

“No.” She turned it into a laugh. “We don’t need him, do we? You go ahead and get started.”

Whoever I was supposed to be, it wasn’t getting me any closer to interviewing her husband. I decided to wait for her return and then make a quick exit.

The living room had the pristine, unlived-in look of having been prepped for sale. There were no stacks of magazines, no clutter along the top of the waist-high bookshelves, not even a hint of ash in the fireplace. A thick book of Jill Krementz portraits lay on the coffee table as though it had been placed there by a real estate agent. A few low-numbered washed-out prints by artists I had never heard of hung on the wall over the bookcase. Otherwise, the walls were neutral and featureless, save for a big, empty rectangular space over the fireplace, outlined in a faint, grayish smoke residue. It didn’t look like the palace of a hedge fund king; it looked like the pleasant but characterless abode of a moderately successful CPA.

The furnishings were all good quality, but straight out of the showroom. There was not one favorite chair, or funny lamp, or antique end table that said anything about the people who lived there. The space felt as cold as an oncologist’s waiting room.

The lady came clacking down the stairs in a pair of backless, low-heeled shoes, black toreador pants, and a scoop-necked fuchsia sweater. Suddenly, the décor made sense. Whenever she was in the room, all eyes would be on her.

“Please, sit. Make yourself comfortable.” She directed me to a surprisingly comfortable swivel chair facing the couch. “I just need to find my glasses.” Her hip brushed my shoulder as she swept past to a closet by the front door. She rummaged through a large handbag. “I am blind without them and hopeless with contacts,” she said as she eased down onto the couch. For a woman with such obvious assets, she was touchingly shy as she turned her head away to put on the glasses. Then she turned to me and her face registered sudden shock.

“Jesus Christ! Jason Stafford? What the hell are you doing here? You are Jason Stafford, aren’t you?”

“I am. I’m sorry to frighten you. I’m here hoping to talk with your husband.”

“The Worm? What would you want with that son of a bitch?”

Did I know this woman? How would I have forgotten her? “Uh,” I stammered. “It’s about work.”

“Of course.” She tossed her hair back and looked down her nose at me. “He’s always looking for people with your talents.”

Whatever those talents were, she clearly didn’t like them.

“Look, I’m sorry to trouble you.” I started to rise. “If your husband isn’t here, I should just leave.”

“Oh, shit,” she said. “Sit down.”

I sat and waited for her to make the next move.

She looked flustered. “I thought you were the appraiser,” she said, with an embarrassed laugh. “I’m selling the house.”

“Ah.” I nodded as though I now understood.

“You don’t remember me,” she said. It was less an accusation than a statement.

“No,” I admitted. “Though I can’t imagine how I would have forgotten.”

She acknowledged my awkward compliment with the kind of look that hinted more than promised, but was still guaranteed to make most men sit up and bark, or roll over and beg for their belly to be rubbed. But it wasn’t a friendly look.

“About ten years ago. You were visiting Case’s London office. I was assigned to be your factotum.”

“I must have been seriously jet-lagged,” I said. And then a face came to mind. A much different face—and body. Lank hair, roseate complexion, a much bigger, wider woman, but with the same green eyes behind oversized glasses. She had efficiently organized two weeks of client meetings, prepping me, guiding me, and even chauffeuring me when necessary. “Wait. I’m sorry. Diane . . . ?”

She nodded. “Havell. I still used my maiden name then.”

“It was good to have a fellow Yank to translate for me.” More memories came back. “And keep me from getting run over every time I stepped off a curb.”

“And find you someplace that served cold beer.”

“But you were . . .” I paused, fumbling for words that would not offend.

“Pregnant,” she said. “Six months.”

“Ah,” I said. I hadn’t suspected.

“I didn’t use the name Hochstadt until our daughter started school. It was just much easier.”

“Ah,” I said again, trying to arrange all the clues into a coherent picture. “I’m flattered you remember me.”

“You were famous.”

Not yet infamous.

“And your daughter? Where is she now?” There was no sign that a child had ever walked into that barren living room.

“She is in school. In Switzerland. I plan to join her as soon as all this”—she waggled her fingers expressively—“is done with.”

“And your husband?”

“Soon to be ex-husband,” she corrected. “The Worm is living in Greenwich. I asked him to move out this spring. He was surprisingly gracious about it. What is it you want with him?”

“I have to ask him some questions.”

“I’m sure,” she said, drawing out the word dismissively. “About Arrowhead, no doubt. All your old crowd.”

I was losing her. We were past pleasant memories and easy rapport.

“I never heard the name until last week,” I said. “You may think you know all about me, but you’re wrong.” Maloney would be champing at the bit, but I thought there was a chance to get some information, if I could keep her talking.

She looked away. “Talk to my husband.” She rattled off his address.

I didn’t bother to write it down—Brady would already be plotting it on the GPS. “Diane, you helped me once. Please, you can help me again. It’s important. Who’s the ‘old crowd’ you’re talking about?”

“Are you asking me to trust you, Jason?”

It was time for cards on the table. Maloney was going to have a conniption. “I’ve been hired by Weld Securities to look into Arrowhead. And what I’ve found so far is going to take a lot of people down. But I need help. Give me names, Diane, please.”

She looked up and glared at me. “I lost my marriage to them. That ex–Case crowd. I was married to a nice guy. A little nebbishy, but he treated me like a queen. He ran back-office operations for a small hedge fund—moving money around the world to avoid the tax collectors. He was good at it. Then he got hired by Arrowhead. They convinced him he was a trader and turned him into the nastiest little bundle of raw nerves you ever saw.”

“The business chews people up,” I said. “Trading’s not for everyone.”

She snorted. “He was no trader. He came home with these stories of crossing big trades between major players, as though he knew the markets better than Rothkamp or Dresden Bank. It was absurd.”

“Names?”

She shook her head. “And he was still moving funds around. All over. Hundreds of accounts. Then they relocated us here. Three years ago. I never knew why. But they bought the house for us. Paid for Alana’s school.”

“Sweet deal.”

Her nostrils flared slightly as though she smelled something rank. “They treat the help well.”

I kept digging. “I imagine there’s a lot of money to go around.”

“I don’t know how the money works. Geoffrey had a big expense account—they never questioned it. They paid for the boat to be brought over from England. The summer rental on Nantucket and the vacations at the Bitter End on Virgin Gorda. And he got paid more than he ever would have made as an ops guy. But nothing like what a trader gets who was supposedly clearing a couple of hundred mil a year.”

Two hundred a year. I must have looked stunned.

“That’s what he said.” She sighed. “Of course, that was before he started lying to me. About everything.”

“You never met any of the Arrowhead directors?”

“No. I went along on some of the client outings, but Geoffrey never bothered to introduce me to his bosses.”

“The client outings? The casino trips?”

She looked away before she answered. “Once or twice.”

There it was. She was holding something back, but she wasn’t going to give it up easily.

“Well, if that’s it, I will be going. Thanks for your time. And I sympathize. I’m divorced myself.”

She visibly relaxed.

“My, you are in a hurry. No time for a drink?” She shifted one leg a fraction of an inch and instantly changed from someone’s angry ex to a hungry predator. The glasses came off. My body was having a very primitive response.

“Can I get a rain check?” I stood up, reluctantly.

She made a moue of disappointment. “Rain or shine. But you better hurry. I plan on spending Christmas with my daughter. In Gstaad.”

As she rose off the couch, she managed to lean forward just enough for me to see she must have made a habit of sunbathing topless.

We were face-to-face across the coffee table. The room felt very warm. I fought my way through the fog of pheromones. Pieces shifted and suddenly fit. Sanders’ diary. His scorecard. DH/AC. Diane Hochstadt—Atlantic City.

“Just one more thing.” I looked directly into her eyes. “How well did you know Brian Sanders?”

For a split second, her guard came down and she looked as though she’d been slapped. She wrapped her arms around her elbows and glared back at me.

“I can’t see how this is any of your business.”

“People tell me he wasn’t a gambler. So what was he doing while his buddies were hitting the tables? What were you doing? You were there, weren’t you?”

“You should leave now.”

“You know you’re in his diary. You and a lot of other women.”