“Boston Police,” Mummert explained.
“The
New York Post
,” Maris proclaimed, trying to upstage the two officers.
“Holy shit,” Scully bleated from several cubicles back.
“Do you have an appointment?” Kurtz asked her.
“With O’Rourke,” she replied, pointing to me.
“He’s busy,” Fitzsimmons corrected.
Baby Face, who had seemed so naive before, calculated the odds and took command. “What’s your name, ma’am?”
“Mandy Maris.”
Mandy Fucking Maris to be precise.
“We’ll get you an interview, Ms. Maris.” Baby Face eyed Gus, and they graciously ushered her in the direction of SKC’s PR department. The pudgy lawyer worked her like an ambassador.
I underestimated him.
Maris called over her shoulder, “The Kelemen story runs Wednesday.”
What story runs tomorrow?
“Do you need a conference room, Officers?” Kurtz offered.
“That won’t be necessary,” Fitzsimmons replied. “We’re heading over to a station.”
I never asked, “Do you have a warrant?” The question would have been too embarrassing inside a room full of stockbrokers drooling over my clients.
The two officers and I headed for the elevators. The last thing I saw was Patty Gershon sidling up to Kurtz. Scully and Casper slithered after her, a department full of hooded cobras right behind. I think one of them hissed at me.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
All things considered, the day sucked. SKC had just evicted me. Two officers were escorting me away from a building that had been my corporate home for eight years. And Patty Gershon, arch nemesis and primordial cutthroat, was upstairs stealing clients.
That’s only half of it.
Scully, Casper, and others were scavenging for Gershon’s spit-backs. Mandy Maris, the brunette in plainclothes, was somewhere inside our offices chronicling the rise and fall of a top producer. What was Baby Face saying to her?
Bad-hair day.
Kurtz could never control Gershon, no matter what he agreed. She was probably on the phone with JJ now: “Congratulations on your deal.”
Brown-nosing in Polish.
“Did you hear about Grove?” she would ask. “He left the firm. Gee, it’s awful how he gouged you on all those trades. You mean you didn’t know? Oh my.”
There was also the matter of reputation, of innuendo and the thousand cuts of hearsay. Rumors would tarnish my name. I could already hear the whispers and see Mandy Maris’s words in print. I still wasn’t sure why the
unexpected visit from Fitzsimmons and Mummert. But I had a good idea, and it wasn’t pretty.
Losing clients is the least of my problems
.
It felt strange outside, the Midtown chaos surreal. During trading hours there was never enough time to venture along the sidewalks, to lose myself in the daily portmanteau of tourists and employees. I barely had enough time to break for meals, and here I was perp walking over to the precinct on Fifty-fourth and Eighth.
What do Fitzsimmons and Mummert want anyway?
The two officers reminded me of those other myocardial migraines, Key Lime and Hummer Guy. I had not reported anything to the police. Perhaps the twins reported me, and the dynamic duds from Beantown already knew. They were guests of NYPD after all. My omission suddenly felt dirty.
“Listen,” I burst out, not thinking. “That guy was swinging a chain at my head. That’s why I threw the bottle.”
“What bottle?” Fitzsimmons asked.
“What guy?” Mummert followed.
They don’t know.
The two officers stopped walking and waited for an answer. Fitzsimmons stretched his neck in a big, round orbit. Mummert cleaved to the side of our building, his ferret eyes locked onto mine. The tag-team intimidation worked. I confessed to the fight. Had they asked, I probably would have copped to the Lindbergh kidnapping on the spot.
Fitzsimmons challenged me first: “How come you didn’t file a complaint?” It was more accusation than question.
“Yeah, how come?” Mummert pressed.
“I was upset. Okay? I didn’t get their license plates. Okay? I have issues at work. Okay?” The staccato excuses rained like hail.
“Do your issues have anything to do with Lila Priouleau?”
“A letter?” echoed Mummert.
“You know about that?” Their knowledge caught me off guard.
Then I remembered Baby Face’s attempt to be helpful: “We gave your reference letter to the police. They can check if the signatures match.”
“Word travels fast in a police station,” Fitzsimmons replied, confirming my hunch.
“It’s not my letter.”
“Our people say it’s your signature,” the big officer leered, all doubt and hang-the-jury suspicion.
“Photoshop works magic.”
“Maybe so,” Fitzsimmons agreed. “You can tell us about it at the station.”
My cell phone rang and saved me from saying something stupid. The ring tone, set to the highest volume, trumpeted the
Pink Panther
theme. A few tourists laughed as they walked past. I was glad Fitzsimmons and Mummert were wearing plainclothes. Otherwise, the three of us would have attracted attention.
“Will you hold this?” I asked Mummert, handing him my briefcase.
Cliff Halek was on the phone. “Annie told me what happened.”
The interruption annoyed Fitzsimmons. He scowled and tilted his head, first to the left, then to the right.
“I can’t talk, Cliff. I’m with the police.”
“Did you hit somebody on the way out?” he asked, surprised by the mention of police.
“No time to explain. Call Kurtz. Tell him you’ll help Zola Mancini run my business. Don’t take any shit. If he objects, go over his head. Crush him. I need to go.”
“Call me later,” he replied, and clicked off.
Fitzsimmons prompted, “As you were saying.”
My cell phone interrupted, yet again. The
Pink Panther
theme had never sounded so annoying. It was Annie. “Did Cliff call you? What should we tell clients?”
“He called. I can’t talk.”
“What’s going on, Grove?” Annie never backed off when she wanted something.
“I’ll explain later.” I hung up cold-call style.
Wish I hadn’t done that to Annie.
“Maybe you should turn that damn thing off,” Fitzsimmons ordered, grinding and cracking as he rolled his head round and round.
“Maybe you should fix your neck.”
Wrong thing to say.
“Don’t be a wiseass.” Fitzsimmons touched me on the elbow with his left hand and gestured west with his right. “Let’s go,” he ordered. “You were telling us about the letter.”
“Lila faxed it last Friday.”
“Why is it important?” he asked as we walked.
“Cash Priouleau insisted Charlie demonstrate his financial strength.”
“What for?”
“Her family invested ten million with Charlie, and they paid on additional one-point-two-five million for his guarantee.”
“And your letter proved the victim had the cha-ching to make that guarantee,” Fitzsimmons observed.
“It’s not my letter. How many times do I need to tell you?”
“Whatever.”
“It’s not whatever,” I flared up angrily. “Charlie’s fund of funds disguised a Ponzi scheme.” There it was. I had just exposed Sam’s flank to cover my own.
“What makes you say that?” the big officer asked. Before I could answer, he scolded, “And why didn’t you tell us sooner?” His questions sounded like the reprimands from my high school nuns.
“I wasn’t sure until Saturday.”
“That left you all day Sunday,” Fitzsimmons objected. “Our work is never done,” he added sarcastically.
“If you recall,” I protested, “some failed steroid experiment tried to whip my head with a chain on Sunday.”
“We’ll get back to that,” he countered. “Now, what’s the problem at your office?”
My head was swimming. Fitzsimmons kept changing the subject. “SKC asked me to take a leave of absence.”
“Were you fired?” he asked.
“Given the heave-ho?” Mummert clarified needlessly.
“No,” I stated with more outward confidence than internal conviction.
“They didn’t waste any time running you off the premises,” Fitzsimmons observed dryly. “What do you mean by leave of absence?”
“It means, Detective, that financial scams make for bad public relations. My shop, the venerable Sachs, Kidder, and Fucking Carnegie, is distancing itself from me.”
“Nice mouth,” Fitzsimmons observed. Then, he threw another curve. “What’s your relationship with Sam Kelemen?”
I stopped short on the sidewalk. The questions had just turned dangerous. “Do I need a lawyer?”
Neither of the officers answered my question. Instead, Fitzsimmons volunteered, “We know you wired her seventy-five thousand dollars.”
“How do you know that?”
“Your firm told us,” Mummert said. “A guy from Legal.”
SKC’s lawyers watched everything, including wire transfers. “What difference does my wire make?”
“Let me spell it out for you,” Fitzsimmons snapped, “Tina Turner style.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Nice and easy.”
“Like the song,” Mummert explained.
“Maybe you guys should write for Leno.”
“You won’t see
The Tonight Show
where you’re going,” Fitzsimmons scoffed. “The television is off long before eleven-thirty.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“We have a dead husband,” he explained, “who happened to be your best friend. We have a letter that says Charlie Kelemen walked on water. And that letter has your signature on it. We have a widow. She’s hot as balls, and you wired her seventy-five thousand dollars. And now come to find out, we have millions of dollars missing, a Ponzi scheme. All this makes you an interesting person, and I’m trying to understand the links between the victim, his widowed bride, the seventy-five thousand dollars you wired her, and of course . . . your letter. Understand?”
“It’s not my letter.”
“Your fingerprints are all over this case. So far you haven’t volunteered much information to Yours Truly. Get the picture?”
“Am I a suspect?”
“Either that or a material witness.”
“More suspect than witness,” Mummert clarified.
At the east corner of Fifty-fourth and Eighth, I turned north in the direction of my condominium. But the two officers blocked my path. “Let’s go down to our clubhouse, pour some coffee, and talk,” Fitzsimmons instructed.
“I don’t care for doughnuts.”
“Do you hear that, Mums?” Fitzsimmons looked at the other officer. “We have a comedian.”
“Yeah, a comedian,” he chorused.
“I’m through talking.”
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Fitzsimmons threatened. “Mandy Maris might need a few quotes for her story.”
“That’s the way it is?” I asked.
Fitzsimmons held his hands out from his sides, palms open and facing me. He smiled and cracked his neck again.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Inside the station house Fitzsimmons and Mummert grilled me. They played every trick of interrogation, used every technique authorized by the Geneva Conventions to prod confessions and wring out information. They cursed. They screamed. They pouted. They banged their angry fists on the table. They gassed up on Coke, coffee, and chocolate, any kind of caffeine. Around 12:30 P.M. they ate chips and sandwiches, even though there was no food for me. They threatened. They scoffed. They huffed, and they puffed, and they scowled and rolled their suspicious eyes every time I answered a question. They jeered. They sneered. They labored like bulldogs to intimidate me. And for the better part of three hours, they met their match.
I work for a large NYC brokerage firm. I deal with this shit every day.
At times Fitzsimmons and Mummert treated me like a witness. Other times like an accomplice. Each man alternated between good cop and bad. It was an uneasy rotation, for they both preferred the darker, nastier role. In the end only one thing rattled me.
“Are you going belly to belly with Sam Kelemen?” It was hardly a question. Fitzsimmons accused more than he asked.
“Am I sleeping with her? Is that what you mean?”
“Locking crotches and swapping gravy,” Mummert explained. “Crotches and gravy.”
My face reddened. “That’s it. I’m calling my lawyer.” The officers waited while I stirred a venom cocktail: two parts outrage, one part shock, and a big splash of kiss my ass.
No one moved at first. No one said anything. We just sat there. The officers looked at me. I looked at them. The sweep hand on my watch ticked off fifteen seconds. Fitzsimmons cracked the knuckles of his meaty hands.
Glad it’s not the neck.
The clock on the wall ticked off another thirty seconds. Mummert’s chin jutted at an imposing angle, more ferret-like than ever, as he chewed a hangnail. Forty-five seconds equaled an eternity inside a silent room full of nervous tics.
