Singer 02 - Long Time No See (26 page)

Instead of more eyebrow theater, Cecile gave me an encouraging nod. “That makes sense,” she said. “I vaguely remember a saying about ‘Study the past ...’”

‘“Study the past, if you would divine the future,’” I quoted. “Confucius said it.”

“When was Confucius again?”

“Somewhere around the fifth century
B.C.
”

Either I sounded authoritative or I was right, because whatever the test was, I passed. Cecile asked: “What do you want to know about Courtney?”

“How well did you know her?”

“We weren’t friends, if that’s what you mean,” Cecile said, leaning back in her high-backed starship
Enterprise
black suede chair. “Look, investment banking can be a cutthroat field. Who’d want to have a close friend who knows your innermost thoughts, your vulnerabilities, when you might get into a competitive situation with her? On the other hand, neither of us felt any hostility toward the other—at least I’m sure I didn’t. We were business-friendly, but not friends.”

“How would you assess her capabilities?” I asked.

“Hard to say,” she said cautiously. “We graduated college and came to Patton around the same time. If you come in without an MBA, the way we did, you’re put in a two-year analyst program. It’s really a kind of boot camp. You spend a hellish amount of time crunching numbers, doing computer models of businesses, and so forth. But you work alone, or with associates and partners, twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours a day, all-nighters—whatever it takes.” Cecile was clearly not the sort who would try to be engaging, yet her manner was so forthright and low-key that the word “agreeable” came to mind and stood alongside “formidable.” “So I never got to know her all that well,” she went on. “I’d have known her even less if she hadn’t been a woman. Thirteen years ago, when we started here at Patton, women were already more than a novelty. But we weren’t an established fact yet. Every once in a while a small group of us would meet for dinner or drinks for mutual morale raising.”

“What was Courtney like?”

“Like all of us. Focused on career. Ambitious. At the beginning, though, we were all pretty useless. I believe Courtney was a psych major and I majored in math, but—I can only speak for myself—I came here knowing next to nothing about investment banking.”

“Did Courtney seem to know more than you did? Less?”

“I have no idea. The game in this business is to act as if you know what’s going on as you try to grab onto the next rung of the ladder. Or at least not to look as panicked as you feel. Naturally, you have to scramble up the ladder pretty fast, or someone will throw it over.”

“If you’d been in different fields, if say, she’d been a lawyer, could you have been close to Courtney Logan?”

Cecile Rabiea had obviously been conceived without nervous mannerisms. She simply sat motionless in her grand suede chair. Finally she said: “I don’t think so. She was a bit too rah-rah for my taste. Happy, happy, Patton, Patton, go team go. I mean, she was perfectly fine. It’s simply a matter of personal style.”

“I understand.” I peered around her spare but expensive office. “You seem to have done pretty well.” She wasn’t a person given to modest shrugs or self-effacing You’ve-got-to-be-kiddings. “Was

Courtney as successful as you before she retired to become a full-time mother?”

“No.” I counted one-banana, two-banana to give her whatever time she wanted. Cecile would say only what she wished to say. I sensed my pressing her or prattling to cover the silence would be counterproductive. Anyhow, by the time I got to the fourth banana, she went on: “The first two years she did as well as I did. Most of the others got a thank-you for having been with us, Godspeed, and have a nice life, but the two of us were asked to stay on. But then ...”

She swiveled back and forth, which I sensed was a prelude to standing and saying Nice meeting you. So I leaned forward and said: “Listen, you have my word that anything you tell me won’t have your name attached. You’re one of five names and I’m only going to report what was said, not who said it.”

When her nod finally came, it said, Okay, I believe you. “What a lot of people don’t understand is that everyone on Wall Street is really smart,” she began. “I didn’t get where I did by having the highest IQ, because I don’t. I’m only as smart as the next guy. You get ahead in this business by being persistent. I think that’s the point Courtney couldn’t comprehend. There’s no magic. You do first-rate work. Courtney did, from what I heard. But after that, you’ve got to be tenacious. When they finally let you get near a client or potential client, you offer him your information and your insights.
Then
you call to wish him happy birthday. You ask him all about his fly-fishing trip. You help him get more office space. You give him hot news on one of his competitor’s earnings-per-dollar sales. You take him out to dinner with his wife and your husband. Pretty soon, you’re an established fact in his life. When he needs an investment banker, who does he turn to? To you. Except Courtney apparently felt her work alone could speak for itself.”

“Didn’t anyone tell her it wasn’t enough?”

“I’m sure something was said. But if you don’t have a good sense of people, if you can’t read the subtext beneath their words, then you’re not going to get it. And you definitely won’t be able to fulfill a client’s needs, needs maybe even he hasn’t identified yet.”

“So she had something of a tin ear for”—I paused—“the human stuff?”

“I wouldn’t put it that strongly. She just lacked a little something, it always seemed to me. Maybe depth. Maybe sensitivity. Not that she wasn’t nice.”

“But she didn’t have the right stuff?” I asked.

“If you’re a professional cheerleader, or a wife and mother, nice and pretty and bright is more than enough. But not if you’re an investment banker. Clients expect commitment. Solidity. Now subtract from that the fact that once the research and the spreadsheets were done, the reports written and the meetings held, Courtney believed she’d done enough. To win the client. To earn the big money.” Cecile got up from her big chair. I rose from mine. “She never comprehended that at that point her work was only half finished.” She walked me to the door. “Courtney wasn’t capable of going the full mile. She could only make it halfway. I’m sure at some level she understood she didn’t have it. I remember feeling sad for her, but I knew her leaving was inevitable. And sure enough, once she had the baby, she didn’t even try to get back into this world.”

So I checked off the first name on Fancy Phil’s list. Then I spent the next day and the one after that traveling into Manhattan, speaking with Courtney’s former colleagues—an investment banker here, a real-estate mini-mogul there, as well as the chief operating officer of some mammoth conglomerate that apparently couldn’t stop itself from buying anything that had the word “broadband” attached to it. Actually, I was surprised all these hotshots were willing to see me without due diligence, or at least a few probing questions. My guess was they all considered themselves, to one degree or other, traffickers in information—gossip as well as the financial stuff—and they wanted to be inside the Courtney Logan learning curve.

So I wound up sitting in some nifty leather chairs and drinking Diet Cokes in crystal tumblers proffered by private secretaries, all of whom had soothing mommy voices. But in the end all these custom-tailored VIPs could offer were similar recollections, that Courtney had been bright, ambitious, and friendly, although not quite top drawer professionally. That is, until I visited Joshua Kincaid.

“Hey, call me Josh!” he’d insisted before I could get to the second syllable of “mister.” A smiley man, he wore a dark blue loose-weave shirt that looked like a screen door at dusk, tucked into black silk slacks. He was the least investment bankerish of the people on Fancy Phil’s list. No wonder: He’d gotten an invitation to go elsewhere after one year at Patton Giddings and had wound up in his family’s business. Now he was president of Kincaid, Kincaid & Kincaid, Mortgages.

We sat on a couch in his midtown office and worked on a plate of zucchini and celery sticks his secretary brought in. “Keeps my mouth busy when you’re talking,” he explained, “otherwise I’d never shut up. Bad habit, talking. This works, except by late afternoon ... Do I have to tell you?” Apparently he thought he did. “Gas. Detroit could use me as an alternative energy source.”

“Right,” I managed to get in.

“That’s why I walk home every night.” Josh was sandy-haired and fair, with pipe-cleaner arms and legs that looked even longer and thinner because he was so lanky. The more he chattered the more it seemed as if he’d had a successful personality transplant from some short, Falstaffian donor. “So—let me think a second—I guess the last time I heard from Courtney was like about a year ago. May, June, I forget.”

“What did she—”

“She wanted financing. For her company. Whatever it was called.” I didn’t even try to slide the word “StarBaby” in edgewise. “So I said to her, ‘Courtney, if you want a jumbo mortgage, I’m the man. But we’re not in the banking business.’ Naturally, that took around fifteen, twenty minutes for all the back-and-forth I-think-the-world-of-you-but-I’m-giving-you-the-bottom-line. To tell the truth, if the baby-video thingie had sounded good, I might have put some of my own dinero into it, but it sounded like she was no way near getting it off the ground, much less fly, much less stay up. Because we aren’t talking seed money. Uh-uh. Courtney wanted heavy bucks and she was nowhere near ready for such a big step and anyone with an IQ higher than cheesecake would have known it. You know what was really pathetic?”

“Wh—” I think I managed to say.

“That the Courtney I knew at Patton Giddings would have turned her own proposition down in two seconds flat. Maybe one. And I think she knew that. It’s soooo weird. Everyone always said what a bubbly personality she had, and she did. But this time when we talked, her bubbles had bubbles. She went so over-the-top on the baby idea that I knew at some level—Christ, I
hate
myself when I say ‘at some level’—Courtney had to know she wasn’t going to make it. But she was desperately trying anyhow, and I give her credit for that. Except she really wasn’t all that skillful at hiding her desperation, and someone who’s really good, someone I’d want to back, would be. Good at hiding desperation, I mean. And you know what’s even weirder?”

“What?” I asked, realizing that by the time his next sentence was finished I would have missed my chance of catching the 4:43 to Shorehaven.

“Right after Courtney was missing, guess what?
Another
woman—a banker in New Jersey. She disappeared without a trace, too!”

Talk about weird: my reaction. Not one shiver of Dear God! passed through me. Not one gasp. I can only guess it was because I have neither the temperament nor the cheekbones for high drama. I was tempted to say, Yeah, Josh, right, weird. Or maybe I was suppressing my excitement because I didn’t want false hopes. In any case, if the notion of some connection did zip through either my conscious or subconscious mind, even for a second, I didn’t seriously consider the possibility of danger. Like, Egad, a serial killer targeting smart women in greater New York. Or, some heinous plot by evil masterminds is afoot that I must steer clear of. If I had been the least bit fearful, unlike all those plucky protagonists in movies, I would have walked away from the Courtney Logan case, hopped the 5:03 back to Long Island, and taken guitar lessons. Or Chinese cooking lessons. Or had a face-lift and spent the rest of my years looking like Cindy Crawford’s Semitic aunt.

But at that moment all I was aware of was that I’d spent two days of interviewing people in custom-made haberdashery and all I’d gotten was that Courtney was cheerful, smart, but not quite top-drawer professionally. Thus, when Josh’s secretary followed up the zucchini and celery sticks with iced tea with an actual sprig of mint along with a plate of Oreos, I decided this might be a lead worth pursuing.

“Wow,” was how I responded.
“Another
missing woman. Did you know her?”

“I met her once. We did the home mortgage for some major client of Red Oak—the Red Oak National Bank, little dippy three-branch operation—and Emily was there for Red Oak to make sure his feathers didn’t get ruffled, not that we were out to do that.”

“What was her name?”

“Emily something. Hispanic. Or Latino. I’m not sure: Is there a difference? I’m always afraid I’ll use the wrong one and insult them. Or it could have been Italian. Anyhow, she was okay. Not a major deal at the bank, I don’t think. But she seemed to have done a lot of work for this client and he seemed very comfortable with her.”

“Do you remember who the client was?”

“A guy with English teeth. You know, two hundred teeth in one small mouth, like they have. Except he wasn’t English. Probably New England. Or super preppy. I remember he kept saying ‘cahn’t’ instead of ‘can’t.’ Except they never say ‘cahn’ for ‘can,’ do they? So you know they’re full of it.”

“Do you remember his name?”

Josh sucked on an ice cube while he ruminated. Then he crunched it and offered: “Richard Gray? Gray Richards? He inherited like fifty-one percent of the shares of a company that manufactures containers for the pharmaceutical industry. His sister has the other forty-nine. Heavy, heavy money. Dumb, dumb guy.”

“And this Emily was his personal banker, his contact at this Red Oak place?” Josh nodded, but before he could start talking again I asked: “Why didn’t the bank give him his mortgage if he was such an important client?”

“The government won’t let you lend more than fifteen percent of capital to any one borrowing entity, so with a small operation like Red Oak ... probably has two hundred million in assets, well”—he chuckled—“you can do the math.” If I had a day and a half and a calculator.

“Tell me what happened with her disappearance,” I went on.

“I don’t know. Like one day she was there and she went on vacation and she never came back and no one knew where she was.”

“How old a woman was she?”

“Early thirties. At least that’s the impression I got. I could be wrong, ha-ha. Come to think of it, I vaguely remember her introducing herself as an assistant branch manager and she was hand-holding an important client like Pharmaceutical Container Man and I thought, like,
‘Assistant
branch manager?’ and guess what I thought next? ‘Glass ceiling.’ Just so you know I’m a sensitive guy.”