ER - A Murder Too Personal (11 page)

The fax said the place was on Forty-second
between Sixth and Seventh, in what you would not call the fanciest
precinct in town. It was four blocks from my office. I grabbed my
jacket and got down there as fast as I could. It was one of those
public fax-sending storefronts with Xerox machines and post office
boxes, squeezed between a smoke shop and a porno hangout. The fat
slob behind the counter took a spit-soaked cigar out of his mouth
long enough to tell me, “I don’t remember nothing about nobody. We
get hundreds of people in here every day.” When I put a twenty on
the counter, he just shrugged and looked out the door at a
sleazebag who was trying to come in. “Get the fuck out of here,” he
yelled, “or I’ll bust your fucking skull.”

I picked up the twenty. That was the way I
felt too.

I was in one of the foulest moods I’d ever
been in. Black as pitch. For the next couple of hours I wandered
around the city trying to sort it out.

Every block was so familiar. I walked around
the East side until it became too sterile. Then I took the
Seventy-ninth street transverse through the park and walked around
the West side, sensing rather than seeing the menace. This was a
third-world city next to the opulence of the East side, separated
by the green wilderness. A jumbled whorehouse of all nations next
to the ordered world on the other side of the park.

All the walking and musing did nothing to
ease my disposition. I walked through the night. Tomorrow, I’d
start looking for Wheelock. I hoped it would be him. That would be
a nice symmetry. I wouldn’t treat him too kindly.

You could call them boiler rooms or bucket
shops, but they were usually located in storefronts or first-floor
offices in rundown buildings in old industrial neighborhoods. They
had names like Second Jersey or First Interstate or First
International or various combinations and permutations of names
like Morgan, Whitney, Rothschild, Fiske. The only thing they had in
common was that their names ended in Securities.

This one was located in Hoboken, but it could
just have well been in Miami or Denver. They never stayed put in
one location too long. Just long enough for the complaints to pile
up in the state attorney general’s office or the SEC or the NASD.
Then, just before the investigators swooped down, they moved
operations to a less inhospitable site and took a new name.

All they needed was a switchboard for the
phones and some desks. Sometimes they didn’t even need the desks.
The young turks who worked these shops were college dropouts. One
or two years of college and a burning desire for quick and easy
bucks were all that was required. That and a slick phone manner.
They’d call across the country, say they were calling from Wall
Street, and play to the greed that drives the blue collar and pink
collar and the retired and the widowed. The story was invariably
the same. There was a gold mine, or a Russian default, or platinum
options, or a new Internet company, as long as it had .com as a
suffix. There was a new process, or a crisis impending. There was
always a scheme—and if you waited too long you would miss out. The
company would go public, the process would become common knowledge,
the crisis would erupt. Now was the time to get in—before the
masses, while you had early knowledge.

It had taken me more than an hour to get
there because the upper level of the George Washington bridge had
been closed and I had to go five miles an hour in a vehicle
designed to burn rubber at a hundred and fifty.

The Palisades were partly shrouded by the
early morning haze. The view of the Hudson was still magnificent,
but not enough to compensate for the slow crawl. As I sat stalled
on the bridge, I watched the drivers around me picking their noses
or smoothing their hair, tapping on the steering wheel to the
rhythm of an unheard backbeat.

I finally made it across to Jersey and drove
along the local commercial streets, looking out for the building
number. It was a storefront and there appeared to be a lot of
activity inside the front window. A bunch of old men in working
class clothing stood outside the door in a conspiratorial huddle,
surveying the operation. There were signs hanging in the window
promising 8% to 10% returns tax-free with no risk, guaranteed
without fail.

I parked on a side street in front of a row
of neat two-family houses that spoke of solid values. No problem
leaving the car there. There was always an Italian grandma watching
out of the upper floor window and wired right into the local
precinct.

The girl at the desk looked surprised to see
me, as if anyone half-alive ever wandered into the place. She was a
luscious specimen of eighteen or nineteen with teased big blond
hair and black nail polish, probably local, looking to get a job
across the river on Wall Street. She must have assumed I was an
investigator from the NASD, because she got up from behind her desk
and came around to meet me.

I told her I wanted to see the boss and she
returned with a fat, sweaty guy in tow. By now all the young studs
had lowered their voices or cupped their hands over the
mouthpieces, and were staring at me surreptitiously. One flash of
my badge was all I gave him. That was enough. I caught his sigh of
relief as he pulled a dirty handkerchief out of his back
pocket.

“I’m looking for one Steve Wheelock,” I said
to him.

“Oh, yeah. Wheelock…Steve…” He passed the
handkerchief over his brow. He was a tall, greasy guy, balding,
with a bad shave and a protruding lower lip. He wore a poly shirt
that still had yesterday’s dinner on it and a six-pack tie with
those stripes that shaded from dark to light. The shirt was open at
the neck and the knot of his tie was a third of the way down from
his throat to his beer belly.

“Wheelock worked here for a couple of years.
He was a good broker. Put in his hours, made his calls, met his
quotas, one of the best. Left here, let’s see,” he said as he
rubbed his stubbly chin, “last April or May. Booze trouble, broad
trouble, you know.” He winked at me with a jaundiced eye.

“Yeah,” I said. “Which broad?”

He wiped the back of his neck with the
handkerchief. “He was a real cunt man, you know. Banged everything
in sight. Some broad came into the office, not this one, the old
office, when we were upstairs and she was waving a gun and said she
was going to blow his balls off and everything.”

He seemed to think this was very funny
because he started to guffaw and then it turned into a half
laughing- half coughing spasm that I thought was going to end up in
a heart attack, but he finally caught himself and wadded the
handkerchief over his mouth and hawked into it.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Anyway, this broad
must’ve scared the shit out of him because he didn’t come back no
more. I heard he started drinking even more than before. He had us
send his commission checks to …let me see…some place in
Connecticut.”

I had a good idea why this turkey was being
so helpful. He had no beef with me. He thought I was a cop and he
wanted to keep me happy and get me the hell out of there. As long
as I wasn’t investigating securities fraud, he would have told me
which way his wife liked to take it. Hell, he would’ve offered me
his wife.

“Who was the woman with the gun?”

He hesitated and rolled his eyes up.

“No idea. His girlfriend, maybe. A
good-looking broad, though. Tall and thin, with long blond hair.
Think her name was Barbara…something. I can find out for you.”

“Sure,” I said. “Do that for me.”

He yelled out across the room. “Elliot, come
over here, willya.” A guy in his mid-twenties hung up his phone and
threaded his way between the desks. He was wearing a neatly-pressed
blue shirt with a white collar and red suspenders. The shirt was
buttoned at the neck and he wasn’t wearing a tie. He looked like
one of those Iranian diplomats on TV. He had closely cropped curly
hair and no sideburns.

When Elliot got to us, Greasy threw an arm
around his shoulder. “Elliot, my man. This gentleman is official.”
He winked at Elliot. “He’s looking for Wheelock. You remember that
broad that came in waving a piece around the old office? What was
her name?”

“Oh yeah.” Elliot’s head bobbed up and down
in recognition. “Oh yeah. What a chick. Name was …Alice…I
think.”

My mouth went dry. I coughed, but not too
loud.

“Boy, she was all pissed because he was
screwing the secretary at the old place. That one with the big tits
and the fat lips. You remember Mary Lou? She was a champion head
job. Best in the office. She could suck your eyeballs out of your
dick. Wheelock was so played out he couldn’t fuck his girlfriend so
she came around looking for him and Mary Lou, remember? They were
in the conference room screwing and this wacko comes in and says
she’s going to shoot his dick off and…”

Greasy jabbed Elliot in the ribs.

“Nice operation you run here,” I said.

“We try to keep things under control but you
know how it is when you get a lot of young buckos together. They
got an expression here. “Only two things count—writing tickets and
getting laid.”

“What about this broad?” I asked. “What
happened to her?”

Elliot shrugged. “Nice looking broad, though,
but high strung, if you get my meaning. I seen her a couple times
before she came round with the gun. That was some fucking day—bombs
going off all over the place. Wheelock in the conference room
banging Mary Lou and this wacko broad running all around the place,
screaming and waving a gun. And that was the day the Jefferson
County bonds went belly up and all the customers were panicked and
were calling in trying to unload the shit and the switchboard was
all lit up and…”

“Yeah,” I cut in. “I can see it now. Like A
Night at the Opera, right?”

Elliot stared at me. Greasy nodded
enthusiastically. “Yeah, yeah.”

“Where did you send Wheelock’s checks?” I
said.

“Someplace in Connecticut.” Greasy
replied.

“Get me the address.”

He kept nodding as he trotted off to a filing
cabinet. In his hurry, he kept tossing files onto the floor. Then
he found what he was looking for, sighed, and brought it back to
me. The address was in Greenwich. I could still make it before dark
if I left now.

I put my hand on Greasy’s arm. “You’ll see my
ugly face again if I don’t find what I’m looking for.”

“Yes, sir,” Greasy said. “I’m always glad to
help you any way I can.”

“I like the way you handle yourself,” I told
him. “Just keep those young men on the phone and off the
girls.”

I felt like a regular commuter on I-95.
First, Chisolm’s company, then his house, now Wheelock’s address.
It was 5:45 PM and smack in the middle of the evening rush. At
least the car wasn’t overheating, not yet anyway. There was plenty
of time to ponder our fragile dependence on mechanical objects and
the unchanging physical laws of the universe.

As I drove along and tried to stay out of the
trajectory of those angry sixteen-wheelers, I weighed the
likelihood of Alicia running around waving a gun and threatening
her boyfriend’s privates. She wasn’t a violent person, but she was
tough and she was capable of defending herself. She wasn’t a
fragile blossom, like those old-fashioned women. Come to think of
it, she could be a vixen when pushed too far. I remembered a day
long ago, when we were first married. I said something, damned if I
recall what it was, but it went deep into her soul and riled her
beyond belief. She grabbed one of those carving knives from the
kitchen stand and chased me around the apartment, her eyes
flashing, half-laughing at her audacity as she threatened to raise
my voice two octaves. When I finally got the knife away from her,
she crumpled on the floor and we did it then, Alicia laughing
hysterically as if she couldn’t believe she could have ever acted
so irrationally.

The woman they described sure sounded like
her. And I guess she was capable of that kind of rage. What the
hell had happened to my girl since she left me to put her in such a
state? What sort of pressure could make a well-brought-up woman
turn into a banshee in a public place?

I pulled off 95 at exit 4 and made a wide
swing beneath an underpass. Spray painted on the concrete wall were
the words I WANT MY MTV! No incitement to violence, no cry for
identity, no lovesick plaint. Just a teenager’s simple wish.

The sun had just scudded behind some clouds
when I located the address. It was a shabby-looking house on a
quiet cul-de-sac. The other houses on the street looked like
Buckingham Palace by comparison. The smell of freshly-cut grass
hung in the air, but the smell wasn’t coming from this house. The
yard was overgrown with weeds. There was a sculpture of a Cupid
that had once been painted pink, but the paint was flaking and
patches of rust were showing through, like large scabs. The house
was a Cape Cod with brown cedar shakes that had been worn away by a
quarter century of rainstorms so you could see the insulation under
the ragged edges of the shakes.

The front door was half-open, but the outer
screen door was locked. I knocked a couple of times and called out
and waited maybe three minutes before I heard a heavy tread coming
down the stairs. She was a slow-moving hulk of a woman in her
sixties and she peered at me through heavy-lidded eyes.

I held my badge up for her to see through the
screen. She squinted at it for a long minute, but her vision was
obviously less than perfect.

“I’m looking for Steven Wheelock,” I
said.

Reluctantly she unlatched the screen door and
shoved it outward. “He ain’t here,” she said with a look of sour
displeasure. “He ain’t been here since last winter. Skipped out
without paying the last two months rent. His room’s still empty.
Ain’t been able to rent it since.” Her voice was gravelly and
seemed to issue forth from her nose. Her features were puffy and
her skin was too pink, almost flushed. “Lowlife son of a bitch, he
was,” she muttered, more as a confirmation to herself.