Timothy's Game

by Lawrence Sanders

  They eat as they stroll, as everyone else is doing. Meanwhile, between sips and bites, they talk shop.

  “What’s your take on that Twiggs?” Cone asks.

  “I think he’s straight,” Bigelow says. “A gentleman of the old school. But not too swift when it comes to street smarts. He wanted to hook up everyone at Pistol and Burns to a lie detector. I had to explain to him how easy it is to beat the machine.”

  “Yeah,” Cone says. “Like urinalysis for drugs. There’s a couple of ways you can beat that even with an observer there watching you pee in a plastic cup.”

  “Please,” the SEC man says, “not while I’m eating.”

  “So how do you figure the Wee Tot Fashions leak? The arbitrageurs?”

  “I think so, and that’s what I’m going to put in my report. I don’t believe anyone at Pistol and Burns was on the take. It was just rumor and good detective work by the arbs. Those guys can put two and two together and come up with twenty-two. We checked all the trading in Wee Tot in the last few weeks. Not the odd lots, of course. Just the big trades, like ten thousand shares and up. Most were handled by brokerage houses the arbs use. I looked for personal connections with Pistol and Burns staff, and came up with zip. There was one big trade, ten thousand shares, by an amateur. A woman named Sally Steiner. But she works for a garbage collection outfit on Eleventh Avenue. She couldn’t have any access to inside information. She plays the market for fun and games, and just made a lucky pick. Other than that, there’s nothing to justify our pushing this thing any farther. What’s your interest in this, Tim? What does Twiggs expect Haldering and Company to do?”

  “He just wants me to double-check his security precautions.”

  “That sounds easy enough,” Jeremy Bigelow says. “Most of these investment banking houses are as holey as Swiss cheese. You could stroll in and walk out with their checkbooks, and no one would notice, especially if you were dressed like a Harvard MBA.”

  The SEC investigator is a self-assured guy with such strength of character that he can eat one salted peanut. When Cone first met him, Bigelow came on strong, like working for the Securities and Exchange Commission was akin to holding high office in the Papacy. The Wall Street dick had to swat him down a few times, but then Jerry relaxed, and they were able to work together without too much hassle.

  He’s a beanpole of a gink who equates height with superiority—but that’s okay; superior shrimps cause more trouble. Cone admires him because he can drink gin martinis. Cone loves gin martinis but can’t handle them, and leaves them strictly alone—especially since an incident several years ago when he ended up in Hoboken, N.J., in bed with a lady midget.

  “I got to get back to the treadmill,” Bigelow says. “Thanks for the lunch. I’ll probably be popping Tums all afternoon, but it tasted good. Let’s eat street again—my treat next time.”

  “Sure,” Cone says. “Listen, that woman you mentioned who made the big trade in Wee Tot Fashions. … What was her name?”

  “Sally Steiner. Why the interest?”

  “Did you talk to her?”

  “Of course,” Bigelow says, offended. “That’s what they’re paying me coolie wages for. She’s a tough bimbo who practically runs that waste disposal business I told you about. Her father owns it. She claims she bought Wee Tot stock because she wants to get out of garbage and open a store that sells kids’ clothes. She figured the annual reports of Wee Tot would help her learn the business. It makes sense.”

  “Sure it does,” Timothy Cone says. “Nice seeing you again, Jerry. Give my best to the wife.”

  Bigelow looks at him. “How do you know I’m married?” he asks. “I never told you that.”

  “Beats me,” Cone says, shrugging. “I just assumed. You’ve got that married look. Also, you’ve got a pinched band of skin around your third finger, left hand, where I figure you wear a ring but maybe take it off during the day in case you meet something interesting.”

  Bigelow laughs. “You goddamn sherlock,” he says. “You’ve got me dead to rights. I better watch myself with you; you’re dangerous.”

  “Nah,” Cone says, “not me. I’m just a snoop. Thanks, Jerry.”

  “For what?”

  “All the info you gave me—like Sally Steiner and so forth. I owe you one.”

  “Look,” the SEC man says, “if you find out anything more about the Wee Tot Fashions leak, you’ll let me know?”

  “Absolutely,” the Wall Street dick vows. “I’m no glory hound.”

  They shake hands, and Cone watches the other man move away, towering over everyone else on the street. Then he trudges back to Haldering & Co. He stops on the way to buy a knish. He’s still hungry.

  Three

  MAY IS A RACKETY month for Sally Steiner. She is living in a jungle and giving as good or better than the blows and bites she endures.

  “Listen, Jake,” she says to her father, “I’m going to take a few hours off this afternoon to go see some customers.”

  “Yeah?” he says, looking up from his tipsheet. “Who?”

  “The new people we got from Pitzak.”

  “I already seen them.”

  She sighs. “You saw them, pa. But so what? I’m the one they call with their kvetches. I want to know who I’m dealing with.”

  “So do what you want to do,” he says. He puts aside his chewed cigar and picks up his whiskey and water. “You’re going to do it anyway, no matter what I say. So why ask?”

  “I didn’t ask,” she says, as prickly as he. “I’m telling you.”

  But there is only one customer she wants to visit: Bechtold Printing, downtown on Tenth Avenue. She’s planned this interview and dressed for it. Black gabardine suit. High-necked blouse. No jewelry. Opaque pantyhose. Clunky shoes. With a leather portfolio under her arm. The earnest executive.

  “Mr. Frederick Bechtold, please,” she says to the lumpy blond receptionist, handing over her business card. “From Steiner Waste Control.”

  The klutz takes a look at the card. “He’s in the pressroom,” she says. “I’ll see.”

  It’s almost five minutes before the owner comes out, a chunky slob of a man. He’s wearing a cap of folded newsprint and an ink-smeared apron that doesn’t hide a belly so round that it looks like he’s swallowed a spittoon.

  “Zo,” he says, peering at her card. “Sally Steiner. You are related to Steiner Waste Control?”

  “Daughter,” she says brightly. “I just stopped by to see if you’re satisfied with our service, Mr. Bechtold. Any complaints? Any way we can improve?”

  He looks at her in amazement. “Eight years with Pitzak,” he says, “and he never came around. No, lady, no complaints. You pick up twice a week, right on schedule. My contract with Pitzak is still good?”

  “Absolutely,” Sally says. “We’ll honor the prices. Nice place you got here, Mr. Bechtold. I’ve heard about your reputation for top-quality financial printing.”

  “Zo?” he says, with a smile that isn’t much. “I do the best. The best! You’d like to see my pressroom?”

  “Very much.”

  It’s a cavern, with noise and clatter bouncing off cinderblock walls. There’s one enormous rotary, quiet now, and four smaller presses clanking along and piling up printed sheets. Sally is surprised at the small work-force—no more than a half-dozen men, all wearing ink-smeared aprons and newsprint caps. Two guys are typing away at word processors. One man is operating a cutter, another a binder. A young black is stacking and packing completed work in cardboard cartons.

  “This is my pride,” Frederick Bechtold says, placing his hand gently on the big rotary. “West German. High-speed. The very best. Six colors in one run. And I use high-gloss inks from Sweden. Expensive, but the people I deal with want only the best.”

  “You have some big Wall Street accounts, Mr. Bechtold?”

  “Absolutely,” he affirms. “For them, everything must be just zo.”

  “Annual reports?” Sally suggests.

 
; “For the color, yes. And in black-and-white, we do brochures, documents, instruction booklets, proxy statements—everything. They know they can depend on Bechtold Printing. They give me a deadline, and I meet it. I have never been late. Never!”

  Sally shakes her head in wonderment. “A marvelous operation,” she says. “Nice to have met you, Mr. Bechtold. You ever have any complaints about our service, you just give me a call and I’ll take care of it.”

  She goes back to the office and gets to work. First, she finds gimpy Ed Fogleman, who runs the dump.

  “Ed,” Sally says, “we got a new customer: Bechtold Printing, on Tenth Avenue. It’s a clean job; practically all their shit is paper. We’ll pick up twice a week. Is there any place we can store the barrels for a day or so before we bale?”

  He peers at her, puzzled. “Why do you want to do that, Sal?”

  She’s prepared for questions. “Because I got a look at their operation, and they use everything from coated stock to blotting paper. Up to now we’ve been baling everything from good rag to newsprint in the same bundle. I figure maybe we could make an extra buck if we separate the good from the lousy and sell different qualities of scrap paper at different prices.”

  “Yeah,” the old man says slowly, “that makes sense. But who’s going to spend the time separating all the stuff? Sounds to me like a full-time job—and there goes your profit.”

  “That’s why I want to hold out the Bechtold barrels,” Sally says patiently. “To see if it would be worth our while. Where can I put them temporarily?”

  Fogleman chews his scraggly mustache. “Maybe in the storeroom,” he says finally. “I can make space. It’s against fire regulations ’cause we got inflammables in there, but if it’s only for a day or so, who’s to know?”

  “Thanks, Ed,” Sally says gratefully. “I’ll get the barrels out as soon as I can.”

  She goes back to her office and looks out the window every time a truck rolls into the dump. She goes running when she spots Terry Mulloy and Leroy Hamilton in their big Loadmaster compactor.

  “Hey, you paskudniks,” she yells, and they stop. Terry leans out the window.

  “Sally baby,” he says, grinning. “You’ve finally decided you can’t resist my green Irish joint.”

  “Up yours, moron,” she says. “Listen, I’m revising schedules and pulling you two bums off that chemical plant on Twenty-fourth Street and giving you Bechtold Printing on Tenth Avenue.”

  “God bless the woman who birthed you,” Leroy Hamilton says. “That chemical place smells something fierce. Gets in your hair, your clothes; you can almost taste that stink.”

  “Yeah,” Sally says, “well, now you’ve got Bechtold. A nice clean job. Practically all paper. Pickups on Tuesday and Thursday. When you get the stuff, keep it in separate barrels and leave them in the storeroom. Ed Fogleman will show you where.”

  “What the hell for?” Mulloy asks.

  “You know what curiosity did to the cat, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know from cats,” he says. “All I know is pussy.”

  She gives him the finger and stalks away, followed by their whistles.

  On Thursday night, she complains to her father and Judy Bering about having to work late on a couple of workmen’s compensation cases. It’s almost seven o’clock before they leave, and she sees Ed Fogleman drag himself home. Then the dump is almost deserted; only the night watchman is in his hut at the locked gate, flipping through his dog-eared copies of Penthouse.

  She goes out to the storeroom, puts on the light, starts digging through the barrels of scrap paper from Bechtold. It’s almost all six-color coated stock. Someone is running a slick annual report, and the discarded sheets are preliminary press proofs with colors out of register and black type too heavy or too faint.

  That’s not what she’s looking for. She spends more time with black-on-white proof sheets: documents, proxy statements, prospectuses. Nothing of any interest. She gives up and drives home. The next morning she tells Fogleman to empty the barrels and bale everything.

  She goes through the same routine on the following Tuesday evening with similar results. She’s beginning to think her wild idea, her Big Chance, is a dud. But on the next Thursday night she finds some interesting proof sheets on Pistol & Burns letterheads. She scans them hastily. They look like a plan for a leveraged buyout of Wee Tot Fashions, Inc. She gathers up all the pages she can find that mention Wee Tot, crams them in her leather portfolio, and drives home to Smithtown, singing along with Linda Ronstadt on her stereo deck.

  She stops up to visit with her mother for a while. Then when Becky and Martha settle down for an evening of TV, Sally rushes downstairs to the den. She’s too excited to eat, but pours herself a Perrier before she goes over the Pistol & Burns documents scavenged from Bechtold’s scrap. She reads them three times because some of the type is blurred, and she has to use a magnifying glass to make out certain words and phrases.

  Then she does swift computations on her pocket calculator. The next morning she calls her stockbroker and sells some of the dogs in the Steiner portfolio, taking a tax loss. But she accumulates enough funds to buy 10,000 shares of Wee Tot Fashions at a total cost of about $48,000, including commission. Have a hunch, bet a bunch.

  A week later, after following the market anxiously, she sells out her Wee Tot stake for about $112,000, and is so elated and unbelieving that she doesn’t know whether to weep or laugh.

  And a week after that, she’s having a coffee with Judy Bering in the outer office when a tall, thin guy, nicely dressed, walks in and smiles at the two women.

  “I’m looking for Sally Steiner,” he says.

  “That’s me,” Sally says. “Who are you?”

  He hands her a card. “Jeremy Bigelow,” he says. “Securities and Exchange Commission.”

  She’s sitting naked on a three-legged kitchen stool, hunching forward.

  “I think I’m getting splinters in my ass,” she says.

  “Shut up,” Eddie says, “and try to hold that pose. Don’t relax. Make yourself tight and hard.”

  She is tight and hard. Her body has a rude grace, heavy through shoulders and hips. Not much waist. The thighs are pillars tapering to unexpectedly slender ankles. A muscled woman. Her skin is satin.

  “When’s Paul coming back?” she asks.

  Her brother sighs. “I told you. He’ll ring before he comes up. Don’t get so antsy.”

  He continues sketching, using a soft carpenter’s pencil on a pad of grainy paper. He works swiftly, limning her body with quick slashes, flipping pages, trying to catch her solidity, the aggressiveness of her flesh. He was right: She does loom.

  After a while she forgets that she’s exhibiting herself in front of her brother and thinks about why she’s there. Because she wants something from him—or rather from his consenting adult, Paul Ramsey.

  That visit from the SEC investigator spooked her. The guy wanted to know how come she had sprung for 10,000 shares of Wee Tot Fashions, Inc. Had she heard something? Did someone tell her something? Did she know anyone at Wee Tot? At Pistol & Burns? Why, suddenly, did she buy such a big block of that particular equity?

  Without pause, she scammed the guy silly. She was proud of that. She wanted to get out of garbage hauling, she told him, and open a store that sold kids’ clothes. She bought Wee Tot to get their annual reports so she could learn more about the business. Besides, she owned a dozen other stocks. She was in the market for kicks.

  He departed, apparently satisfied, and Sally went back to her own office. She was sweating. What if Jeremy Bigelow subpoenas Steiner’s customer list and discovers they’re collecting trash from Bechtold, who does confidential printing for Pistol & Burns? What if he comes poking around, asking questions of Ed Fogleman, Terry Mulloy, Leroy Hamilton, and learns she’s been putting aside barrels of Bechtold waste? Curtains!

  She decides she handled her Big Chance stupidly. Too many people involved, too many potential witnesses. And she
purchased the stock in her own name. Idiotic! And she bought 10K shares. That would be a trip wire to alert anyone investigating the possibility of insider trading.

  Eddie’s phone rings. Three times. Then stops.

  “That’s Paul,” he says. “He’ll be up in about ten minutes. You can get dressed now. I got some good stuff. But I’ll need a couple more sessions.”

  “Sure,” she says. “Anytime.”

  To her surprise, she finds she’s no longer self-conscious, and when Eddie helps her hook up her bra in back, she thinks it’s a nice, brotherly thing for him to do. By the time Paul Ramsey shows up, Sally is dressed and sipping a glass of their lousy chianti.

  Paul is a tall blond with a sweet smile and more teeth than he really needs. He’s got a laid-back manner, and Eddie says that when the world blows up, Paul is going to be the one who murmurs, “Oh, yeah? Cool.”

  Sally has already decided what she wants to do. She’s going to continue picking through Bechtold Printing trash. But if she finds another lead on a takeover, merger, or buyout, she can’t invest in her own name, or in the name of anyone else connected with Steiner Waste Control. Too risky. And the stock purchase has got to be less than 10,000 shares.

  “Paul,” she says, “I got a proposition for you.”

  “Sorry,” he says with his seraphic grin, “my evenings are occupied.”

  She tells him what she wants. She’ll give him the name of a stockbroker. He’s to open an account by purchasing shares of AT&T. She’ll give him the money. After that, he’ll buy and sell on her instructions.

  “I’ll pay all the losses,” she says. “You get five percent of the profits. How about it?”

  The two men look at each other.

  “Go for it, Paul,” Eddie Steiner advises. “My little sister is a financial genius.”

  “Okay,” Paul Ramsey says, shrugging. “Why not?”