The Big Killing (11 page)
Authors: Annette Meyers
Tags: #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Mystery, #Women Sleuths, #Thrillers & Suspense, #Crime, #Financial, #Crime Fiction
The cab dropped them off in front of a low, modern building, a construction of pale tan bricks and lots of glass.
“This can’t be it,” Wetzon said. She had expected the station house from
Hill Street Blues
, an old, battle-worn, gray stone fortress, worse for the wear, high stone steps, NYPD carved in the stone above massive doors. What a disappointment. That style of precinct house had much more verisimilitude.
“It looks like Mark’s first school in Virginia,” Smith said. “Spoils the magic.”
When they opened the door, the inside, too, looked like a school. Stone floors, tiled walls, fluorescent lights, a pay phone on the right amid a forest of plants.
Definitely disappointing. Hard to believe that real crimes were solved in this atmosphere.
There was noise, a lot of it, but it was more like men’s-locker-room noise. In fact, Wetzon thought, the whole place looked and smelled like a gym. There was a battered old metal desk in institutional gray at the door, but no one sat there, and uniformed cops came in and out, brushing by Smith and Wetzon without paying the slightest attention to them.
They walked straight a few paces until they came to a large opening on their left, and turning, they entered an immense room, definitely like a gym. On their left, running the full length of the room, was a low railing, behind which were desks, computers, a switchboard, and men, some in uniform, some not. Everything was painted the same ugly green.
“Help you, ladies?” a uniform asked. He stopped typing.
“Yes,” Wetzon began, “I—”
“We’re here to see Detective Silvestri,” Smith interrupted, smiling that smile again.
“Sure,” the uniform said. He was a nice-looking young man, with a bushy mustache and hair that touched the back collar of his shirt. His name tag said
Gallo
. “Wait a minute and I’ll tell him ...” He paused.
“Smith and Wetzon,” Smith drawled, for effect.
The nice young man smiled politely, not sure if he was being made fun of.
He picked up the phone, holding the receiver with his shoulder as he resumed typing, and said, “Tell Silvestri there are a couple of ladies here to see him.”
“He’s expecting me,” Wetzon said. “At four.”
“You’re a little early. He’s in a meeting. Take a seat.” He motioned toward the long row of plastic and metal chairs, green again, lined up on the opposite wall. They were unoccupied except for an elderly woman sitting forlornly in the middle of the row, who seemed to be carrying on a running conversation in heavily German-accented English with someone who wasn’t there. She had a large shopping bag at her feet and she kept rummaging around in it.
“Charming,” Smith said. “Let’s not sit. We can look around.”
“I’m too achy not to sit when I have a chance.” Wetzon made a beeline for one of the plastic chairs. “You look around, if you want to.” She took a mirror out of her handbag and looked at herself. Awful. Dark circles under her eyes, drooping lids, raw scabby bruise on her forehead. She put the mirror away and leaned back, closing her eyes.
Restless, she opened them again in time to see Smith disappear in the direction from which they had come. Uniforms came and went, dropping off papers, picking up radios. Steady action with no sense of urgency. She counted three policewomen.
Smith came back and sat down next to Wetzon. “You look rotten, sweetie. After you finish here, go home and get to bed—”
“Gee, Ma, do I have to?” Wetzon said with a faint grin. She saw that Smith had combed her hair and put on lipstick. She looked very attractive in her black suit and burgundy silk blouse. There was a vivid spot of color on each cheek. She had obviously found a bathroom on her tour.
“Ladies, you can take the stairs on the right or the elevator out in the hall on your left.”
Wetzon turned right when they left the big room.
“Where are you going, Wetzon?” Smith demanded. “You’re so tired you can’t stand, but you’re going to take the stairs?”
“Never ride when you can walk,” Wetzon replied. “It’s good for the calves.”
“Thanks, but I’ll take the elevator.”
More space with more green desks; telephones ringing. The desks were piled with papers. Men in street clothes lounged around, standing, sitting, talking to one another and talking on the telephones. The staccato clatter of typewriters took the place of the tickertape, but it seemed familiar territory to Wetzon.
“It looks like the boardroom of a brokerage house,” she whispered to Smith when she got off the elevator and joined her. “A lot like Jake Donahue’s, as a matter of fact.”
Smith was positively luminous. Was it Silvestri, the environment, or just the excitement? The more Smith glowed, the drabber Wetzon felt.
Silvestri came out of an office in the back of the room and waved them toward him. He was wearing the same rumpled brown suit, and he didn’t look as if he had a dinner date planned for that evening.
“Ms. Wetzon,” he said formally, shaking Wetzon’s hand. “How are you doing today?”
“All I need is a full night’s sleep,” she answered. “How is your arm?”
“All I ever need is a full night’s sleep,” Silvestri said, but he was looking at Smith.
“It’s a little crowded in here,” Smith remarked, looking over Silvestri’s shoulder. Two desks and several well-worn metal chairs were squeezed into a tiny room. One desk was occupied. Wetzon recognized Metzger from last night at the Four Seasons. His eye pouches looked even worse in the light of day. Metzger was on the phone, making notes in a dog-eared notebook. “I’d better wait downstairs, or out here,” Smith said, pointing to the “boardroom.”
“Are you sure?” Silvestri seemed a little disappointed. “We can bring in another chair.”
“No, I’m fine. I want to call the office anyway.”
“Well, you can use one of the desks out here.”
“I’ll go downstairs to the pay phone,” Smith said cheerily. “Don’t you two bother your heads about me.”
Wetzon looked at Smith suspiciously. Smith was up to something. It was when she was most innocent-looking and -sounding that she was up to the most mischief.
“Here, Ms. Wetzon, sit down, and I’ll get a stenographer.” Silvestri went into the main room and spoke to a neatly dressed man in a plaid sports jacket and gray pants. The man picked up a metal carrying case and followed Silvestri back to the office. He set up his stenotype unit on its stand and waited. Silvestri slid into the chair behind the desk and motioned to Metzger, who ended his phone conversation.
Wetzon saw Smith wait until they were settled, then turn quickly and disappear toward the staircase. She was wearing slingbacks, and the noise of her clicking heels on the steps carried all the way back to Silvestri’s office. Why had she insisted on using the elevator to come up and had now taken the stairs down? Sometimes Smith was such an enigma.
Wetzon turned her attention to Silvestri and felt a wave of warmth rise from her fingertips to her cheeks. She was so attracted to him that she was afraid it showed. She looked down at her hands. She wanted so much to make a good impression. He cleared his throat politely, and she looked up. Silvestri was waiting expectantly, as if he’d just asked her a question.
“I’m sorry.” She was flustered. “Did you say something?”
“Yes. I asked if you were ready to begin.”
Wetzon nodded, swallowing with difficulty.
“Try to relax,” he said sympathetically. “Just answer the questions as carefully as possible. I’m not going to give you the third degree. Would you like some coffee or a Coke?”
She shook her head, feeling very much alone. “Just water, please, and I’m ready.”
Silvestri took off his jacket with exaggerated care, one arm at a time, and put it on the back of his chair. He was wearing a blue-and-white-striped shirt and a tan lambswool sleeveless sweater, and Wetzon could see the bulge of the bandage beneath his shirtsleeve near his left shoulder. There was no gun in view.
Why isn‘t his arm in a sling
, she thought.
He has to be having some pain.
When he went out into the squad room to get her the water and himself some coffee, she noticed another bulge under his sweater near his waist in the middle of his back. His gun.
Nervous, Wetzon looked around. The room she was sitting in was smaller than the office she and Smith shared, but it gave the illusion of more space because it was glass from midway up. There were blinds all around on the half-windows, so privacy was obviously available if needed. A large map of the City was on the wall behind Silvestri’s desk and a calendar hung from a nail on the side wall. The calendar was still on February.
Everything needed a coat of paint. There was an ugly brown spot on the ceiling from what looked like a leak, where the plaster had puckered and dried, and there were scuff marks and chipped places on the walls. Someone had written a phone number on the wall with a magic marker.
Hanging from the low ledge around the office, where window met wall, were clipboards. Cases, probably. She saw that out in the squad room Silvestri had stopped to talk to another detective, who had his pants leg up, his foot on a chair. He was adjusting his sock—no, it wasn’t his sock, it was an ankle holster. She was so fascinated that she got up out of her chair and came close to the window to get a better look.
Metzger eased himself up as if to see what she was looking at so intently, and muttered, “Goddam cowboy.”
The other detective rolled down his pants leg, picked up a black leather jacket, and left the squad room.
Metzger’s phone rang once. “Yeah?” He listened, made a note in his book, opened his desk drawer, and closed it hard. “I’m on my way.” He hung up the phone and nodded at Wetzon. Then he went out to meet Silvestri, who was precariously carrying two cardboard cups by their lips in his right hand. Metzger relieved him of one of the cups. They put their heads together and looked around at her once. Metzger returned to the office with the cup he had taken from Silvestri and set it on Silvestri’s desk. Steam rose in a delicate cone from the cup. Metzger went back to the squad room and beckoned to one of the other detectives, who scooped up some material from his desk and left the squad room with him.
The clock on the opposite wall of the squad room said four-thirty. Silvestri stood in his doorway, glanced at it, and sighed. He handed Wetzon the cup of water and sat down at his desk.
“Thanks,” she said, taking the water. She was anxious to tell him about the key and get rid of it. She felt it was literally burning a hole in her pocket.
The stenotypist, who had been reading a battered copy of
New York
magazine, totally disinterested in the activity in the small office, put it down on the floor under his chair and readied himself.
Silvestri leaned back and studied her. She shifted uneasily in her chair. She hated being looked at like that, as if she were a specimen.
The stenotypist cleared his throat. Silvestri nodded. “Are you ready?” he asked her again.
“Before we start about last night, I want to show you ...” She took the key out of her pocket and held it out to him. Her hand shook. “I found this in the pocket of my suit jacket after I got home last night.”
He leaned forward with an almost unobtrusive wince and took the key, his hand brushing hers, completely unaware of her attraction to him. She wondered what kind of vibes she gave off that were so different from Smith’s. Or did she just give off no vibes at all?
“Well, well, well,” Silvestri was saying, concentrating on the small key. “You say this was in your pocket?”
Didn’t he believe her? “Yes, Barry must have put it there when he took my arm at the Four Seasons. I don’t know how else it could have gotten there.”
“Did you take your jacket off at any time before you got home?”
That was a thought. Of course she had. “Yes ... at Smith’s, which is ridiculous because why would Smith—” She stopped.
“Yes?” Silvestri was watching her thoughtfully. His eyes were flat, revealing nothing. His manner was totally professional.
Why would Smith want a copy of the key if it was her key? Of course she would want a copy of the key if it was hers. No, it didn’t make sense. “There’s no reason for Smith to have put a key in my pocket and not tell me,” Wetzon said firmly.
“Okay.” He spoke slowly, running his fingers around the edge of the key. “What about York Hospital?”
“Yes, my jacket was taken off when we got there, but what reason would anybody have to put a key in my pocket?”
“I don’t know, but I’ll check it out. Meantime, let’s assume that Barry Stark put it in your pocket.”
“Okay.”
“Why?”
“You mean, why would he? I don’t know, maybe because he was afraid of someone.”
“Good. Did he react to anyone at the restaurant or at the bar when he came in?”
She strained to remember. He had looked over at the bar several times. “I don’t know. He looked over at the bar ... it was very crowded. But Barry was the kind of guy who was always looking around in a room, looking for the next possibility, the next sale. He had this nervous energy, like a motor that was always racing. A lot of brokers have it.”
“And after you were seated?”
“He kept talking to me, but looking around. I think he either saw someone or thought of something, because all at once he looked as if he’d seen a ghost. He turned a ghastly white and jumped up, saying he had to make a phone call.”
“Did you notice anyone looking at him?”
“No. It was very crowded. Unusually crowded.” And noisy. The bar had been jammed with people—
“Did you see Jacob Donahue there?”
“Jacob Donahue? Was he there? I didn’t know that.” She was puzzled. Surely Barry would have said something if he’d spotted his employer in the crowd? “I’ve never seen him in person, only in newspaper photographs, so I’m not sure I would have recognized him.
Was
he there?” she asked again.
Silvestri ignored her question. “What did Stark say to you? Start at the beginning, when he phoned you yesterday.”
She concentrated, wanting to be accurate. “He said he had a problem, that he wanted to see me. I thought it was a problem in his office. Barry always had problems. He made a lot of money, but he was always complaining about not making enough. And the new-issues market is dead.” And so was Barry.
“Explain, please.”
“New issues are companies that are brought public. They’re known as I.P.O.s—Initial Public Offerings. All of the major brokerage houses are involved in this, more or less. To put it simply, a private company pays a brokerage firm big money to bring them public, sell their stock to the public. The salesmen—the brokers—of the firm then sell these shares for the company that’s going public. The big houses like Shearson and Merrill usually syndicate the best of these, offering chunks of shares to other, smaller brokerage firms. Firms like Donahue’s take on the smaller, more marginal companies that want to go public, those with more risk to the future shareholders, the ones the more established firms are wary of.” Wetzon leaned forward as she spoke, engrossed, relaxing visibly.
“Donahue’s normally does not syndicate shares in what they bring public. They keep everything in-house and that’s what their brokers sell almost exclusively. When these new issues come to market, the firm puts a price on the stock, and if the market is down, the price is low. Therefore, a company often waits to go public to get a better price on its stock. When the market is bear and sinking rather than rising, the new-issues market goes dead, and brokers at firms like Donahue’s, who have built their books with just new-issue clients, don’t make any money. This is all very simplistic, I’m afraid,” she said apologetically.
“But they can sell other stock besides these new issues, can’t they?” Silvestri asked, frowning. “They could be doing that at the same time, couldn’t they?”
“Yes, but most of them don’t. I know, it doesn’t make sense to specialize, but a lot of brokers do it. They shift into whatever product they perceive they can make big money in. Barry was like that. Many brokers look on this as a long-term career. They want to build a client base and do well for their clients and keep adding to that base over the years, through referrals, building up a decent, steady business. But others, like Barry, say they’re in it for the short haul. They want to make the big killing—make their million and get out before they’re thirty-five.”
Silvestri’s eyes widened. She continued, a little guilty about enjoying herself. “And some of them do. Others make their million and live up to it. Cars, houses, alcohol, drugs, gambling, women, divorces. A million dollars doesn’t go very far with the government and the mob as your partners. A lot of these brokers are burnout cases by the time they’re thirty-five. I’ve interviewed guys of twenty-four or twenty-five who sat with me, literally shaking—high on stuff—I don’t know what.” She was gesturing, showing him. “These kids are taking home three-quarters of a million dollars, more or less. What does a twenty-five-year-old kid do with all this money? ‘How much do you need?’ I always ask, because I’m curious. I never get a straight answer, but I know the answer is, ‘More, more, more, as much as I can get.’” She paused. “‘ If it kills me.’”
The stenotypist looked up.
Silvestri was staring at her. “Gosh,” she said, “I’m sorry. I get a little carried away, I guess. See what you started.” She smiled at him ruefully.
“I don’t know much about the stock market,” Silvestri said. “It always struck me as being a crapshoot.”
She smiled at him again. “This is a business where most people—even those at the top—are looking for the quick buck, the big killing. I’m repeating myself, but it’s about money. It’s about greed.”
“Didn’t the SEC institute all kinds of checks and balances after the Crash in ’87?”
“Sure, but you can’t legislate away greed. I’m sure you see it all the time.”
“You must be good at your business,” Silvestri said, showing dark-rimmed turquoise eyes.
She considered that. “I am. Funny about the language of making money. All death words. Dead market. Big killing. Barry Stark was always looking for the big killing.”
“Tell me about when you met him last night.”
“He was a little late, and he seemed nervous, almost frantic. He kept talking about repos.”
Silvestri looked at her quizzically.
“Repos are repurchase agreements,” she said patiently. “I didn’t know either. He explained it to me. It’s a financial transaction—in this case, with government securities. It’s pretty tricky, and it sounded as if he’d stumbled into a compliance problem.”
“Compliance?”
“Compliance to the SEC and federal law. Every brokerage firm has a compliance department to protect it from doing anything wrong. It’s like internal affairs in the police department.”
Silvestri nodded.
“It sounded as if Barry had come on something that for once he couldn’t handle.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, I’m tired,” she said wearily, “so I’m telling you that this is a whore’s business. People will do anything for money, including breaking the law, if they think they can get away with it, or leaking or selling information, selling speculative stocks to their own grandmothers. Anything. And Barry was not one who would let a little illegal action bother him.”
“So?”
“So this problem that he had stumbled onto had to be life-threatening. He was scared.”
“Okay, what happened when he left?”
“He jumped up, said he had to make a phone call, that he’d forgotten something and would be right back. And he left, practically on the run. That was it.” She was getting tired of repeating it.
“And what did you do?”
“I waited. Oh, yes, and when I stretched my legs under the table I bumped his attaché case. Otherwise I would have forgotten about it. I waited about twenty minutes or so. I was getting edgy. I couldn’t imagine what was taking him so long, and I wanted to go home. So I paid the bill and took the case with me downstairs to the phone booths. I was going to tell him I couldn’t wait, that I had another appointment.”
“Did you see anyone follow him down the stairs?”
“No one specific. People were going up and down constantly.”
“Did you see anyone around the phone area when you got there?”
“No.”
“Then what did you do?”
“I went straight to where Barry seemed to be talking on the phone. He was all hunched up over the receiver.”
“You couldn’t tell something was wrong with him?”
“No.”
“Didn’t you think he was in a strange position?” Silvestri’s voice was skeptical. Maybe she
had
been too wrapped up in herself. She should have noticed, now that she thought about it, how odd Barry had looked, all scrunched up like that. She shrugged.
“I can’t explain why I didn’t get suspicious except to say that I’ve never seen someone dead before, let alone violently dead.”
“Okay, then what?”
“The rest you know.”
“Tell me.”
She shuddered, reliving it. “I knocked on the glass to get his attention, but he didn’t move. I was getting really annoyed. I pushed the door open slightly, and he ... his body ... slipped toward me, out, almost falling on me ... I had to get out of the way. It was horrible.” She choked. She pushed back her chair as if to get away from the thing that Barry had become.
“Take a deep breath,” Silvestri said loudly. “Keep breathing deeply. Come on now. Slowly.”
She broke out in a cold sweat, but kept breathing deeply. She was afraid not to. Tears came awkwardly. “Oh, God,” she gasped, “I’m sorry. This is so tacky.”
Silvestri stood up and sat on the front corner of his desk, near her, his right hand resting lightly on her shoulder. “Keep breathing,” he said.
There was an agitated knocking on the glass, and Wetzon and Silvestri looked up to see Smith, furious, eyes flashing. “What are you doing to her?” she mouthed to Silvestri, pointing to Wetzon.
