Black Fridays (16 page)

“Thank you.” The window behind his eyes had shut again.

“I’ll be in at eight. Don’t make me come find you, all right?”

His head jerked in what I took to be a nod of agreement.

I felt like a bully.

—

THE FRIDAY-AFTERNOON
torpor had settled over the markets and the ranks began to thin. The commissioned salesmen were first to leave. The junior traders would be last. I went to check to see if Sudhir had returned.

“I’m looking for Sudhir,” I announced.

The head mortgage trader looked up from his monitor. He had a little, graying mustache that made him look a decade older than his forty-or-so years. Or maybe it had just been a tough week.

“You and me both,” he said.

“We were supposed to be meeting earlier today, but I saw him cutting out of the building around lunchtime.”

“That makes you the last person to see him, pal.”

I seemed to be having some strange effects on junior traders that day.

“Check this out,” he said. “Hey, Carol. Where’s the fax from the Rabbit?”

The woman I had spoken with that morning handed me a single sheet of paper. I scanned it quickly. It was a letter of resignation. No explanation. Effective immediately.

“The guy went home, typed this up, and faxed it in. Weirdest fucking move anybody’s pulled on me. We’re sitting here sorting through his positions. Who the hell resigns by fax?”

“He never said a word?”

“Wait. It gets better. I had Carol call him at home. She gets his roommate just as the guy is headed out for the weekend. He’s pissed. The Rabbit packed a couple of suitcases and split. For the airport. He’s flying home. Probably already in the air, by now.”

“Home?” I was having a hard time keeping up.

“Yeah, home. As in India. North Dum Dum or whatever.”

“Kolkata,” Carol said.

“Same difference.”

“And nobody saw this coming?” I said.

“I should be grateful,” he said. “He did save me the trouble of firing his ass.”

“He wasn’t making it?”

He gestured for me to follow him. We walked only a few steps, then he turned and spoke quietly.

“Sudhir had a great first year. I thought he was going to be a star. Smart, cool, always focused. Then about a year ago, he started hanging out with that arrogant asshole Sanders. Excuse me speaking ill of the dead, but the guy was nasty. Sudhir turns into party guy and starts hitting the casinos every week. Then he starts getting slack. Next he’s making mistakes.”

“Trading mistakes.”

“Nothing serious. He misprices something by a quarter point or so. I ream him out. He says it’ll never happen again, and a week later it does.”

“What did you do?”

“Cut him slack at first—too much, I guess. Anyway, whatever mojo he ever had went away and never came back. He practically jumped every time somebody said his name. That’s when we started calling him the Rabbit. Finally, I reined in his risk limits and told him to cut back on his positions. He would have been gone by year-end.”

“Did you ever think he might have been up to anything?”

“Dirty?”

I nodded.

“I had compliance go over his trades,” he said. “Avery gave him a clean bill of health. It all came to nothing.”

“But you weren’t convinced.”

“Something smelled wrong, but I’ve got ten other things begging for my attention every minute of my day. I let it go.”

—

A FULL DAY
of checking trade reports had done nothing to make Spud look any brighter or happier.

“You all right?”

“I’m never going to drink again.”

“And a good time was had by all,” I said. “Having any luck here?”

He shook his head.

“Nor me.” I filled him in quickly on the scene with Carmine, Lowell’s pleading for more time, and Sudhir’s self-banishment.

“No kidding?” He found the Sudhir story the funniest. “He’s a weird dude.”

“Really? I think your buddy Lowell may have him beat. He’s like a WASP zombie. Walking dead.”

“Did Jack Avery find you?”

“No. I didn’t know he was looking.”

“He stopped by. I told him you were interviewing Brian’s friends all afternoon.”

It had been a long week—I didn’t want another face-off with Jack Avery late on a Friday.

“I think it’s safe to say these guys were up to something—but who knows what? None of them are talking. The only thing to do is wait for Monday and see if Barrington opens up after he talks with his father. Unless you have any other ideas.”

“Just one.” He wrote a number on a slip of paper and pushed it across the table. “Call Brian’s roommate. He lives out in Brooklyn. Maybe he knows something.”

It sounded like a long shot, but I was down to long shots.

I WAITED UNTIL
the Kid was down for the night before calling the roommate. Eight o’clock on a Friday night and it sounded like I had woken him up.

“Jason Stafford,” I repeated. “I’ve been hired by Weld. Brian’s old firm.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“So, I’d like to come over and chat about Brian for a bit.”

“Okay.” His voice was thin and detached and it hit me. He wasn’t sleepy, he was high. “Why?”

“Like I said. I’ve been hired by Weld to tie up some loose ends for them.”

He laughed. “That’s funny.”

I wondered what pharmaceutical cocktail he had ingested.

“How’s that?”

“’Cause that’s what the other guy said. Last week. Loose ends. That’s funny.”

The reason that I failed to see the humor had to be chemical in nature.

“Did this guy leave a name?”

“I don’t know.”

I thought about asking him to describe the man, but decided against it. For all I knew, the whole experience had been a hallucination.

“So when’s good for you?” My father had arranged to take the Kid all day Sunday. “Sunday? Noon all right?”

Noon was not all right. The roomie worked nights all weekend. Late afternoon would be okay. Late.

—

SUNDAY MORNING.

I made pancakes while the Kid read one of his car books. I knew he couldn’t read—though he could identify all his letters as long as they were in capitals—but his memory was so strong that he could look at a page that had once been read to him and repeat all the words verbatim. If he missed a word, he always missed that word—it was simply a white noise gap in his memory. And though the voice was definitely that of a five-year-old boy, the cadence and inflection were always those of whoever had first read the page to him. I could identify the ghosts of the living as the Kid turned the pages: Angie’s vocal sweeps and dips, and sometimes halting pronunciation as she sounded out longer words; my father’s dramatic pauses and emphasis, a skill I’d never known he possessed; Mamma’s syrupy sweetness, making dual carburetors and fuel injection systems sound like magnolia blossoms and maypop berries. And there was another voice, one that I did not at first recognize. A bit flat, but confident. Both strong and unassuming. It was a nice voice. I liked it.

“Time for breakfast, Kid.” Pancakes with corn syrup, a taste he had inherited from his mother, who claimed that “maple tastes weird.”

“Not hungry.” If I ever figured out whose voice he was imitating when he went into his “NO!” mode, I planned on waterboarding the son of a bitch.

“It doesn’t matter, little one. This is when we eat.”

“Not hungry.” He flipped a page and began to recite the brief history of the DeLorean. The book failed to mention the CEO’s arrest for trafficking in cocaine.

I let him finish. “Okay, Kid. Put it away and get up here.”

His body tensed and for a moment I was sure I was about to witness a major meltdown. Then, with a tuneless whistle, like a French teapot, he came to the table and began to eat. Another minor victory for both of us.

My father arrived minutes later and I fed him, too.

“What the . . . ? What is this?”

“Corn syrup,” I said.

“Tastes weird.”

He ate the pancakes anyway.

After a lengthy discussion of the proper placement and use of children’s car seats, and an even lengthier discussion of various possible routes, Pop bundled up the Kid and a half-dozen of his toy cars, and took him for a day trip out to a petting zoo in New Jersey.

I cleaned the apartment, shopped for essentials, read another chapter of
The Science and Fiction of Autism
, belatedly arranged for a dozen roses to be sent to Wanda with a note that avoided use of the word “love,” yet did not actually preclude it, and mapped out my route to Brooklyn.

—

LATE THAT AFTERNOON,
I rode the J train for the first time in my life—out past the projects, nearly to the border of East New York. Brian Sanders’ roommate lived in one of the dozen or so brownstone buildings on the block that was not yet undergoing renovation.

It was a testimony to the insanity of the New York real estate market that a young person making $150,000 a year or more could still be forced to share a third-floor walk-up around the corner from the Lucky Seven Bar and Grill, a steadfastly ungentrified watering hole, its single window painted black and the exterior walls tagged with the red three-jeweled crown of the local Bloods chapter.

The front windows of Sanders’ building were all covered in steel mesh. It would stop a brick, but not a bullet. That was probably a good sign in that neighborhood. The intercom must have worked, despite emitting a series of deafening and disheartening squawks—the door buzzed and gave way as I pushed through.

The door to the apartment was ajar, and I let myself in. The roommate was draped over a sagging armchair, which had been covered with an orange-and-blue silk batik. He was wrapped in an ankle-length Chinese silk robe with a migraine-inducing pattern in purple and silver stripes. Maybe he was color-blind.

“I’m Mitch,” he said. “What’s your name again?”

“Jason.”

Elaborate formalities out of the way, he went back to staring, dull-eyed, at a giant, wide-screen television where a bald man with a pussy patch beard was haranguing an attractive, but somewhat matronly blond woman at a Lucite lectern. The woman was squealing and clapping her hands with all the forced enthusiasm she could muster. I waited for a commercial before speaking again—I hated to interrupt.

“I’ve come to talk about Brian. Can you spare a few minutes?”

He picked up the remote and hit the mute button.

“Sorry to disturb your day off.” I tried to sound sincere.

“I work nights during the week. Friday and Saturday I get to play my music.”

A musician. I looked around the room. No piano. No guitars. No sign of a horn or even a music stand.

“Oh? What do you play?”

“I compose.” He sounded insulted, as though actually playing an instrument was beneath him.

“Modern? Classical?”

He did not sneer, but I felt it anyway. “Techno. I record street sounds and work it into a dance, pop framework. Want to hear some?”

Not a chance. “I’d like to ask you about Brian.”

He let out a long sigh. “Oh, man. Can’t you just take his stuff?”

“His stuff?”

“It’s been forever. I want to rent the room, but I’ve got to get his stuff out. His parents said they’d come get it, but I don’t think they meant it. I mean, why would they come all the way from Missouri for a bunch of stuff?”

I thought he made a good point.

“Do you mind if I go through it?”

“That big guy from your office already did that. He took a couple of things.”

“Did the big guy have a name?” I asked. Like Jack Avery? Or Gene Barilla?

Mitch shrugged. I had the feeling that Mitch shrugged a lot.

“If you just put it out at the curb, it’ll all be gone by morning.”

“I’ll have someone take care of it,” I lied.

Mitch laughed. “See? That’s just what
he
said!”

I wanted to kick myself—or him. I had given up a Yankees game and a couple of beers at P&G’s to come out to Brooklyn to entertain young Mitch.

“What can you tell me about Brian? What kind of a guy was he?”

Shrug. “He was a good roommate. He worked days, I worked nights. We got along.”

The definition of a good roommate in the world of youth today. At Ray Brook, a good roommate was someone who didn’t insist on soaping your back in the showers.

“Did you think he was under any stress before he died? Anything at work that might have been bothering him?”

Shrug.

“Did he ever open up about anything? Did you two ever talk?”

“We talked about whose turn it was to clean the bathroom. He was my roommate, not my sister.”

The commercials ended. The bald man returned. Mitch turned the sound back on. Interview over.

“Sorry. I’ll just take a look around his room,” I said.

Mitch didn’t answer, but then, I hadn’t expected that he would.

Brian’s room had been searched—by someone who didn’t care whether anyone knew about it or not. Drawers had been dumped and overturned. The floor of the closet was three feet deep in clothes, still attached to their hangers. It was a good-sized room, with that rarity of New York amenities, a window that looked out on something other than an airshaft—in this case, the street and a smog-throttled ginkgo tree.

I went through the mess, but if there had been anything there that would have given me a better feel for Brian Sanders, I couldn’t find it. He read Neal Stephenson and Robert Heinlein and Cormac McCarthy. He bought his suits—quite sensibly, I thought—at Saint Laurie. The shirts were all Lands’ End. Boxers, not briefs. He preferred ribbed condoms. But there were no letters, no bank or brokerage statements, no appointment book, address book, or diary. Like most of his peers, he had kept all that on his computer—and that was gone.

It was a wasted trip.

“I’m taking off,” I said to the back of Mitch’s head. “Don’t get up.”

He hit the mute button again. “Wait. You’re not taking his stuff?”

I had his attention, even if briefly and misguided. “I don’t see a laptop around. Did I miss it, or did the other guy take it?”

“It’s in his gym bag.”

“I didn’t see a gym bag.”

“Check the bottom of the front hall closet. By the door.”

The closet held three seasons of windbreakers, leather jackets, overcoats, and down bubble coats. There was also a small pile of old boots, discarded running shoes, and worn-out sandals. And three cases of empty Corona bottles. And a single ski pole, a chipped clay flowerpot holding a long-dead poinsettia, and, at the bottom, a black nylon bag, scuffed and battered.

I pulled the bag out. It was heavier than it looked.

“Hey. How come the other guy didn’t take this?” I called out.

Mitch waited until the commercial, touting some kind of chicken-coating mix, reached its denouement before answering.

“Nobody asked.”

Maybe the roommate was smarter than he looked.

I opened the bag. Wrapped carefully in a foul-smelling towel, and buried beneath a pile of assorted, once white anklet socks, sweatshirts, T-shirts, and nylon shorts, was a red Dell laptop. But what lay spread across the bottom of the bag was even more interesting.

I looked up at Mitch. He was again transfixed by the negotiations between the blond and the bald guy.

The bag sloshed as I moved it. Hundreds—possibly a thousand or more—of casino chips slithered across the bottom of the bag. Black, green, blue, and purple. The logos on the chips were for at least half a dozen casinos all over the tristate area. My mind was racing, trying to estimate a total value, but it was impossible. There was at the very least well over $100,000. I was looking at financial security for myself and the Kid for some time to come.

There would be complicating factors—such as what my parole officer would say if I were caught in a casino, in another state. He had the power to send me back to jail for spitting in the subway. That set one parameter—he must never know.

“I’m going to take the whole bag with me, if that’s okay,” I said.

“When are you coming back for the rest?” He barely turned his head.

“I’ll be in touch.”

The blond lady was hugging the bald guy. He didn’t look happy about it.

I let myself out.

—

A SMALL GROUP
of teenagers were huddled on the subway platform, just beyond the aura of the sputtering neon lights. They were all dressed in similar uniforms of dark hoodies, baggy jeans, and expensive-looking basketball shoes. They could have been on their way to gospel choir practice for all I knew, and if that were the case, I was sure they would forgive me for hugging the gym bag to my chest as I stood directly in front of the token booth attendant. The line between racial profiling and basic street survival skills is thinner in some neighborhoods than others.

When the two beefy men dressed in blue windbreakers and baseball caps and looking exactly like plainclothes cops came through the turnstile, I breathed a little easier. Until I noticed that they seemed to be paying much more attention to me than to the young men in the shadows. Or rather, working a bit too hard not to pay attention to me.

Policemen had never made me uncomfortable—before my troubles. Now they always did. But I was willing to endure a bit of discomfort for the security of an escort, as I carried my newfound treasure home through the wilds of Brooklyn.

I changed to the Number 2 train at Fulton Street. So did they. The odds of this being mere coincidence were all the way down at the far left side of the bell curve. They sat at the opposite end of the car, looking everywhere but at me. I started to sweat.

The older, grayer, and leaner of the two wore Nikes and slim-cut jeans. He seemed more reserved, contained. The younger man’s head never stopped moving, his eyes darting, catching everything. I waited until the train began to roll out of the station, got up, and moved to the next car. If they followed me, I wasn’t neurotic or paranoid, I was justifiably concerned. They stayed in the first car, leaving me convinced that I was neurotic, paranoid, and justifiably concerned.