The Last Hand (21 page)

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Authors: Eric Wight

BOOK: The Last Hand
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“Keep me in touch, won't you, sir. I have another twenty-five years to go before my pension kicks in.”
“W
e've come across the name of a Harry Cane linked to your brother. Cane is in prison for fraud …”
They were in Flora Lucas's office. She cut him off. “I can guess what you found. What can I do for you?” Brisk, let's-deal-with-this attitude, consistent with treating her brother's foolishness as no big deal, although she would prefer to see it remain quiet.
“How did your brother meet Cane?”
“What is this, Inspector? Are we having a chat over coffee? I don't know. What does it matter when those two met? It's me we are talking about, isn't it?”
“Could you explain that, ma'am?”
“It's me that Harry Cane swindled, not Jerry. Didn't you know that?”
“I see,” Salter said, one pleasant area of speculation withering on the vine, as he scrambled for composure. “I was coming to that. Let's forget about your brother for the moment. How did
you
meet Cane?”
“He appeared at a couple of functions, I think. And some private receptions. He helped out with a bit of fund-raising. When you go into politics, friends organize events, partly to raise funds, partly to get you known. It is an old principle that if you shake enough hands, kiss enough babies, you will get elected. Somehow in all this I found myself knowing Cane. First I had his card, then he was in my office, selling shares in a company that planned to replace Microsoft?” She smiled, like saying “cheese.” “I lost twenty thousand.”
“It was a straight scam?”
“
He
didn't think so. Have you met him? My memory is that he is a remarkable a man who ought to be in politics. No, he put my money into a trust fund specifically designated to buying this particular stock. But a better opportunity cropped up, and Cane spent the money on something else—a Malaysian gold mine, I think.” She laughed. “Something like that. We lost the lot.”
“And the company that was supposed to replace Microsoft?”
“It is now worth three times what it was worth then. I'm telling you this to show you how persuasive Harry was. He was a dreamer and a liar, but he really thought he would make a lot of money. He believed, and he made his clients believe.”
“But one of his clients could stand the loss much less than you could.”
“So I heard.”
“Did your brother know Cane, apart from you?”
“God, no. Jerry would have nothing to do with a character like Cane. Jerry was one of the people who
didn't
buy into “Trivial Pursuit” when he could have. It sounded risky, and he hadn't gone to law school with the people involved. Two big strikes against it. Oh no, he was appalled when I told him I was one of Harry Cane's victims.”
“Then why did he visit Cane in prison?”
She blinked. “When?”
“A few days before he died.”
She continued to stare at him, but only out of surprise. There was no hesitation when she spoke. “At this moment I have no idea. I would imagine it had something to do with me. Perhaps he wanted to make sure that Harry Cane would continue to observe a vow of silence where I was concerned.”
“But your brother never discussed this visit he made?”
“No. I was in Costa Rica, remember? He was probably just being protective, even there, sort of what-I-don't-know-can't-hurt-me. Now I remember who introduced me to Cane. It was one of Jerry's poker pals. Robinson, I think. Several of that gang were sucked in. But not Jerry. Never Jerry.”
 
 
This time Robinson kept him waiting for fifteen minutes, without apology. To be fair, Salter had not arranged an appointment, but simply called his office to say he was on his way and hung up before Robinson's secretary could put him off. So Robinson might well have managed, with great effort, to create a space in his schedule in which to fit Salter. But Salter had the impression that he was supposed to understand that he had been kept waiting deliberately. That was all right with him.
Salter believed that he was bearing news of Robinson's humiliation, and that this was one occasion when the messenger's knowledge of the message was more important than the message itself, and that therefore every attempt would be made to kill the messenger. He decided, after a look at Robinson's tight face, to try a fake-jolly approach as the one most likely to make the lawyer lose his temper and drop his guard.
“Many thanks for finding the time to see me at such short notice, Bonar,” he said. And then, “What's the trouble? You're not still pissed off about that poker game, surely?”
“What's the problem now, Inspector?” Robinson looked over his glasses and managed a small, mechanical smile, as if Salter were an clumsy oaf jostling him on a subway car.
“Same as before. Jerry Lucas. The name of Harry Cane has cropped up, and I was talking to Flora Lucas about him. She says she met him through you. She was one of the people he conned, you remember?”
“What was the name again? Harry what? Cane? I'm not with you.”
Salter laughed in a friendly, knowing way. “I think you are, Bonar. Harry Cane. Swindler. Probably took you for a few thousand, right? But it's embarrassing to be known as one of his dupes, so you didn't join the prosecution. Right? Like with me and the poker game.” He watched Robinson's body signal each hesitation as he considered his response, the hands lifting and dropping, the fake relaxation and then, at last, the throat-clearing before the resolve.
“You seem to have it, Inspector. I did join in Cane's little scheme. It seemed to me on a par with buying a lottery ticket. I was skeptical, of course, but it seemed worth a try.”
“Did the others feel the same way?”
No hesitation now. “Absolutely. We all enjoy a gamble, as you know, so we made a sort of pool among ourselves, a little syndicate.”
“For how much? Each?”
The hesitation returned as Robinson wondered whether to lie, then dropped the idea. “Twenty thousand.”
“How many of you?”
“Four.”
“Jesus Christ. He got eighty grand off you. And another twenty off Flora Lucas. Who were the others?”
“Scott Mercer, Brian Davis, Andrew Cutler, Craig Lister, and me.”
“The gang. Who was missing?”
“Lucas.”
“Why?”
“Because Jerry smelled a rat and we didn't. Give him credit. He did his usual thing. When I suggested we invite Cane on a Thursday night to explain his scheme–he'd already pitched me—Jerry did a little research and decided not to join us.”
“Why? He found Cane had a record? Cane didn't have any convictions.”
“A police record is only one kind of record, and not always the most important one. No, Jerry tried to find Cane's track record, if you like, his reputation in the marketplace.”
“And heard some rumors?”
“He heard nothing.
That
is what made him suspicious. He couldn't find anyone who knew anything about Cane.”
“But he worked for a company of stockbrokers, didn't he? Bonded, I would imagine? They would have checked up on him.”
“Inspector, if you want to have a chat about how crooks get themselves trusted, into positions of trust, or how people in positions of trust turn into crooks, we'll be here all day. There are crooked lawyers, crooked bankers, crooked you-name-it, all of them totally trustworthy until they are caught. I understand from television that
even the odd policeman is bent, so let us not be amazed that Harry Cane was employable.”
“I guess all of us have a crooked streak,
and
a gullible streak, eh, Bonar. Now, how did he work it? First of all, there's one other name missing—Holt.”
“Larry was there that night, but he stayed out of the syndicate. Though as I remember, he had no reservations about the particular scheme.”
“So how did the scheme work?”
Now Robinson looked uncomfortable. “I'm not sure. I'd have to get the others to help me out on the details.”
“Twenty thousand dollars bet blind?”
“No, no, no. Of course we were careless, but Harry Cane was a very persuasive man.”
“Give me an idea.”
“I'll try. Let me come at it from another angle. You know how currency traders work?”
“Not the faintest.”
“You've heard of them, surely?”
“Oh, sure. They sit up all night sending money back and forth to Hong Kong, and in the morning they've made a quarter of a cent which translates into half a million dollars. Something like that.”
“That'll do. Money is constantly changing in value, and a good trader knows when to buy or sell.”
“And once in a while he loses the lot.”
“Okay. Now you can trade fundamentals or you can trade momentum.”
“Let me try. Fundamentals. You can sit tight, certain that dollars are actually worth so many pounds or yen, so if you wait, the fundamental value will come back, right?”
“Very good. And momentum?”
“No, Bonar. You hear a lot about fundamentals, but momentum I associate with politics, as in when to call an election.”
“It's the same principle. If you trade the momentum, you are betting that a currency that has started to rise will continue to rise, so you should jump on the bandwagon.”
“The same if it starts to fall?”
“Absolutely.”
“But if everyone's doing it, who's on the other side?”
“That's the trick, of course, to get in and out at exactly the right moment, before the momentum expires. And to know when there is momentum in any change in price.”
“You're losing me.”
“Hang on to what you said. It's all about knowing when to jump on and off the bandwagon. Now Cane was very knowledgeable about the history of momentum trading in the securities market.”
“Stocks and shares?”
“Yes. And he had devised a new factor. He called it the Inertia/ Disaster Index. He had done a lot of research to show that you could bet on the inertia of the general public to take a particular price change a certain distance, even in the face of very weak fundamentals. The Inertia/Disaster Index involved a lot of factors; the chief one was a very sophisticated psychological analysis of how the average man responds emotionally to a sharp shift in the price of his stock, even in the face of concrete information that should tell him exactly what to do.
“Let me give you a crude example. Margaret Thatcher privatized a lot of state industries while she was in power, and they invited the ‘little man' to subscribe to a public offering of shares before the shares actually hit the market, all acording to the Thatcher social philosophy that everyone is a little capitalist at heart, or should be. In some cases, the shares went up when they went public and the little man made a profit, but in one case, at least, the advance shares were offered at a price that the market felt was too high, so when the day of offering came the price had gone down and you could buy the shares for less than people had agreed to pay.
“Now there was no legal obligation for the little subscriber to take up his shares, and it was nonsense to do so, because he could actually buy the shares, if he wanted them, for less in the market. But what happened? Many of the people who had signed up took their shares, paying the higher price, sometimes in installments. When they were asked why, the replies were astonishing ‘Oh, well,' said one man. ‘I still think it's a good company so I'm sticking with it.
I've made up my mind, and I don't like shilly-shallying around.'
“That's where Cane's Index comes in, knowing that such a reaction is possible. He undertook to apply it to any shift in price of a major stock to predict how much the inertia of the small investor would affect momentum. Cane claimed to have charted seventy-five years of the history of emotional response to share changes. But it gets more sophisticated than that so as to take into account the increasing sophistication of the small investor, who is himself instinctively slotting in his own Inertia Index, based on his knowledge of other people like himself.”
“So, using this index, Cane got in or got out a day before everyone else, that it?”
“More or less.”
“So you gave your money to Cane?”
“We bought shares in the partnership he set up among us.”
“What did he need you for? If he knew what was going to happen, why couldn't he just make money for himself?”
Now Robinson smiled. “That, Inspector, is the great unaskable question in this whole arena. Roughly speaking, it asks, if the experts-analysts, tipsters, gurus-know anything, why are they telling us? Why don't they just make money? You'll have to answer that one yourself, but all of us forget from time to time that the answer is that there must be more money in selling advice on how to make your fortune than there is in risking your own money, and it is entirely risk-free.

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