“Our put option?”
I stopped pedaling. “You’d better start at the beginning. I have no idea what you mean.”
“Charlie asked our family to invest in his fund of funds.”
“Okay?”
“He said we couldn’t lose.”
“Lila, I know your father invested eight million and you invested two.”
“Only because Charlie agreed to guarantee the investment.”
“Guarantee?”
“If the value ever fell below the initial investment, Charlie agreed to make up the difference.”
“I know what ‘guarantee’ means. I just can’t believe he agreed to that.”
“It was Charlie’s idea,” Lila said. “He said everybody on Wall Street uses put options.”
“We do. But you pay for them.”
“My dad’s was one million, mine two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”
“How’s this relate to me? The ‘just business’ part?”
“We weren’t certain if Charlie had the wherewithal to guarantee ten million bucks.”
“Okay?”
“That’s why Charlie offered to get that letter from you.”
“What letter, Lila?”
“You’re starting to annoy me, Grove.” Her accent no longer sounded sweet.
“What letter?” I repeated, my choleric tone turning the heads of others in the spin class who were trying to listen to the Marine.
“The letter that said ‘I have known Charlie for I-forget-how-many years. He maintains an eight-figure account with SKC. We value our long-standing relationship with Mr. Kelemen.’ Blah, blah, blah.”
“I never sent that letter.”
“A signature says you did.”
“Can I get a copy?”
“Of course,” Lila said. Her face had turned to stone, expressionless and unmoving.
I felt sick. It had nothing to do with exercise. It had everything to do with Charlie Kelemen. I never sent Lila a reference letter. Charlie was not a client. What had he done? I wanted to head over to Woodlawn, dig Charlie out of his damn box, and kick his fat dead ass. Instead of pleading my case, though, I asked questions. Interrogation was the fail-safe mechanism employed
by top producers confronting uncertainty. “What would you say if I told you Charlie never banked with us?”
“I’d say SKC has a big problem. What are you telling me, Grove?”
I avoided her question and posed my own. “How come you never mentioned the letter to me?”
“What was the point? Charlie and you were good friends. And we have a letter of confidence on SKC’s letterhead.”
“I see.” My stomach belly flopped onto the small intestines.
“There’s the other thing, too.”
“Which is what?”
“Charlie paid a two percent finder’s fee for new investors.”
“You’ve known him as long as I have, Lila. Why would he pay me anything?”
“You’re a broker, Grove. You guys work on commission, and I just assumed—”
“Lila,” I butted in, “Charlie never paid me a dime.”
Sensing my anger, she repeated, “It’s just business.”
The Body Nazis were staring now. The ex-Marine bellowed:
“He stole whiskey.
I stole wine.
Now we’re doing double time.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
My bed has two pillows, soft and mushy, delicious and ductile. They are forgiving lovers, generous and buxom, always willing to nestle in tight no matter how foul my mood or execrable my morning-after breath. They are tender, a faithful blend of cotton and goose down. At night they comfort me with insouciant dreams. On the weekends they beckon me to join them for ménage à trois power naps. The pillows overcome all my objections, and I succumb, the willing guest of gracious hosts.
One pillow cradles my head. The other doubles as a want ad for a new lover, the kind of announcement that appears in the classified wilderness of
The Village Voice.
WORKAHOLIC STOCKBROKER DESPERATELY SEEKS SINGLE FEMALE WITH SASSY GOOD LOOKS AND DROLL INTELLECT TO MATCH. MUST BE WILLING TO DEAL WITH EMOTIONAL BAGGAGE AND NURSE FRAGILE MALE PSYCHE BACK TO HEALTH.
There has been no guest traffic through my bedroom. No “flow,” as Wall Street describes trading activity.
Sometimes the second pillow props my head just a little higher, the better
to read. Sometimes it becomes an adult teddy bear, the willing recipient of fetal death grips. It works well with the first. The two pillows are veteran dance partners. They complement each other’s moves with grace and fluidity. Together, they whisk me off to a better place.
After seeing Lila I slept for shit. The pillows lost their magic that night. They exposed my flank, left me vulnerable to an incoming salvo of worries. That night my bed was no five-star retreat.
The tortuous turning started at once, tossing, tossing, and more tossing. All I saw was Charlie. His fat head. His goofy smile. His chins waddling and banging against the folds of his neck. His gut hanging over his belt like a silk sack loaded with three-dozen doughnuts. His pudgy man breasts straining against a pink oxford shirt, once crisp from starch but now wilted with messenger bags of sweat riding beneath plump armpits.
What the fuck have you done, Charlie?
From eleven P.M. until 1:07 A.M. I thrashed. I looked at my alarm clock every five minutes or so. I urinated a hundred times. I lowered the toilet seat after every agitated piss. Evelyn would have approved. I raised it every time my peevish bladder beckoned. Raise, lower, raise, lower. I congratulated myself for toilet seat etiquette above and beyond the call of duty, like it deserved the Nobel Peace Prize among married couples. But Evelyn was gone. Raise, lower, raise, lower. I lay on my side. I flopped on my back. I pulled the covers over my head like a cocoon. I kicked the sheets down around my ankles. I plucked goose nibs projecting from the corners of my second pillow. I took my shirt off. I put it back on. I played Billie Holiday music. I turned her off. I opened the window to get some fresh air. I closed it when the fresh air smelled less fresh and more like stockyards, ripe from the July humidity. Raise, lower, raise, lower.
Why’d you forge my name, bastard?
I was pissed. That letter was a sham. I never signed it. Charlie never opened an eight-figure account with my firm. That letter would drag SKC through a fen of litigation if not refuted beyond all doubt.
“Your Honor,” Cash Priouleau’s lawyers would say, “our clients invested ten million with Mr. Kelemen. They paid one-point-two-five million dollars for put options, securities designed to protect their principal. That’s a total
of eleven-point-two-five million. Mr. O’Rourke’s testimonial swayed their investment decision, Your Honor. His company has a market value of thirty-five billion. It professes expertise in money management. It’s only fair this big, powerful, influential firm with deep pockets reimburse our client for their losses.”
Where’d you get SKC’s letterhead, bastard?
Those arguments could cost SKC $11.25 million. In fact, the Priouleaus might win damages totaling millions more. Pain and suffering and all that crap. Cash and Lila had not lost any money yet. But who knew what would happen when we unwound the Kelemen Group? Hedge funds lost money just like everybody else. The Priouleaus would raise hell if they received anything less than $11.25 million. A messy court battle would cost me my career.
No wonder you got whacked, bastard.
Evelyn knew how to handle these situations. She thought methodically, chewed on facts for days. She developed intricate solutions. She reviewed each step, played out what-if scenarios, and discarded the actions with bad outcomes. I needed Evelyn now. What would she do? I encouraged her to take matters into her own hands.
If you see Charlie, kick his fat ass for me.
At 1:08 A.M. insomnia took the gold. I kicked my pillows to the side and padded to the kitchen. Pinot Grigio and extra-butter popcorn—I punched the comfort food button and channel-surfed through ESPN,
Leave It to Beaver,
and sixteen different versions of
Law & Order
.
Try as I might, there was no escaping Charlie Kelemen’s big adventure. Nothing could make me forget the trio of well-fed sharks at the New England Aquarium. Or Sam Kelemen’s raccoon tears. Or Lila Priouleau’s letter.
Not even Mariska Hargitay.
I needed to inspect that letter and read it for myself. I planned to scrutinize every comma, every colon, every damn syllable. Maybe it would offer some clue, some shred of information that revealed Charlie’s game. Or maybe it contained a mistake that proved I was not the author.
Around 1:46 A.M. Ron Popeil distracted me with his pitch for rotisserie ovens. The gung-ho audience chanted over and over, “Just set it and forget it.”
Wish I could do that with Charlie’s mess.
There were so many people I needed to call—Lila, Frank Kurtz, and especially Cliff Halek. He would know what to do. I considered whether to call Lila’s father and drop the bomb on him directly: “That reference letter is a fake, Cash. I don’t know what to tell you.”
He’ll shit. Better to deliver tough news in person.
As Ron Popeil threw in free steak knives for acting now, I toyed with the notion of flying to Atlanta first thing. That way I could look Cash in the eye and convince him the letter was phony. “No way,” I finally told Ron after much deliberation. “I need to square up things with SKC first.”
Ron didn’t offer any advice. He was too busy promoting six easy payments of $16.95 each. Around 2:59 A.M. I crawled back into bed, long one rotisserie oven and a set of razor-sharp steak knives, short one answer to the question troubling me most.
Why did Charlie forge that letter?
Three hours later my alarm clock buzzed,
Get your lazy ass out of bed
. Someday I would flush the damn thing.
This morning I turned it off and stormed into the bathroom, where the mirror flinched and said,
You look like crap
.
Eighty minutes later I paid no attention to our morning research call. None of the money babble registered. I kept thinking about that damned letter, mentally debated whether 8:30 A.M. was too early to ring Lila. The deliberation proved unnecessary. At 8:23 A.M. the fax machine bleated like a stuck goat. I jumped.
It was Lila. Two pages arrived. She had scrawled “Grove, call me” on the cover sheet. “We need to talk.”
Did she speak to Cash yet?
The letter began: “Dear Lila, I have known Charlie Kelemen for ten years.” True. “He maintains an eight-figure relationship with Sachs, Kidder and Carnegie.” False. “Our firm values the relationship with Mr. Kelemen, who has been a wonderful client for four years, and we hope to assist him in all ways possible.” Bullshit. It was signed: “Sincerely yours, Grove O’Rourke, Principal.”
What the fuck, Charlie.
Throughout eight years at SKC I had never referred to anyone as a “wonderful client” in writing or otherwise. The phrase was hackneyed and
sycophantic. The punctuation in the letter sucked. They could get away with lousy punctuation at Yale or Princeton, but not at Harvard. We separated our coordinate clauses with commas.
The signature was mine. Someone could have scanned “O’Rourke.” It would have been easy to trace my name. I was forever sending handwritten thank-you letters to Charlie and Sam. E-mails struck me as a tacky way to say thanks. They were far too convenient to express true appreciation. I always penned thank-you letters on Crane’s stationery.
Thank you for dinner, Charlie. Thank you for the theater tickets, Charlie. Thank you for forging my name, bastard?
There was only one thing to do. I dialed Halek, my go-to guy. He always had a view. I almost shouted his name before he had the chance to answer. “Cliff.”
“Yeah?” he asked, unaware what was coming.
It took thirty seconds to describe the reference letter on my desk. When financial disagreements boiled over, lawyers inevitably frisked for the deepest pockets to sue. I could just hear some mouthpiece claim, “Had it not been for the confidence Mr. O’Rourke expressed in Mr. Kelemen, my client never would have invested in the Kelemen Group.” Those deep pockets belonged to SKC.
“Go see Kurtz,” Cliff ordered.
“I didn’t write the letter.”
“Doesn’t matter. Every bomb makes a mess when it explodes. Do yourself a favor and get out in front of the issue.”
Cliff was right. He took a page right out of the Catholic playbook. You go to confession. You spill your guts. You cop to everything, including the time you mooned Sister Mary Loretta in ninth grade. You say you are sorry. You say it a hundred times, each time more penitent than the last. You pray for forgiveness. You hope like hell that Saint Peter remembers when you stand outside the pearly gates one day.
“Cliff,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“We’ll make a Catholic out of you yet.”
“Listen, pal,” he scolded, “don’t fuck around.” Dial tone. His rebuke left me cold and, frankly, uncertain about our alliance.
Nobody wants this.
At 9:03 A.M. I walked to Frank Kurtz’s office and peered through the glass. His door was closed, unusual with just twenty-seven minutes to the opening bell. Issues always surfaced. Frank generally left his door open to either address questions or approve complicated trades.
