Nothing Personal: A Novel of Wall Street

by Offit, Mike

  With the morning sun slanting in from across the park, the white room took on a buttery glow. He had agonized over the cabinets when he’d renovated and wound up having them made from sycamore wood and a greenish bottle glass. The countertops were a heavily veined white marble, and the floors antique limestone. It was his favorite room, and he’d taken out the second bedroom to make it larger. The owner of the building had decided to take it co-op, and Warren had immediately agreed to buy the unit at the “insider” price, which was so cheap it seemed like robbery. New York City’s rent laws were incredible.

  The Wilson steel racquet still lay on the breakfast table, catching the sun with a blinding flash. He realized he’d forgotten to fill and set the timer on the coffeemaker the night before, so he stepped to the sink and filled the Krups machine with water and grounds, flipping it on, then closing the canister of coffee. The back door to the apartment opened into the kitchen, and Warren had asked the doorman to be certain always to leave the newspaper there for him. It was lying on the mat when he opened the door, a picture of George Bush staring out from the first page. The vice president’s picture held his eye for a moment, but as he stood, something else occurred to him. The door had been single-locked, and he always double-locked it.

  “Angelo?” Warren spoke normally into the phone, but held the receiver about a foot from his ear.

  “Yes? Right here!” Warren had anticipated Angelo’s habit of screaming into the phone like Bell calling for Watson.

  “Hey, Angelo, it’s Warren Hament. Could you ask Gabriel to come upstairs for a second?” The doorman had shouted his assent, and after a few sips of coffee, Warren heard the service-elevator door open and greeted the superintendent by the back door.

  “Gee, I don’t know, Mr. Hament.” The unctuous, condescending tones of the Polish émigré never failed to annoy Warren. “I’ll check the log, but I would be surprised if any of the staff would have come into the apartment without telling me.” The building had a copy of Warren’s keys for emergency access.

  Warren smiled unconsciously. The super never actually did anything himself. He’d have one of the doormen or a handyman do it. He just wanted the tip himself. Warren knew that every other staff member in the building hated Gabriel. Nonetheless, Warren didn’t have time to worry about it, so he fished a twenty out of his pocket. Another $20 tip, he thought, just the cost of living in New York, like the parking tickets, the taxes, and every other maddening expense made necessary by the endless inability of the city government to clean up its own corruption and convince the poor that any work was better than welfare or crime. “God,” he said out loud to himself, coming up short, “I’m starting to think like a fucking Republican.”

  Warren poured and drank the rest of his coffee while reading a heartening summary of the Rangers’ hockey game the night before. The team was improving, but Warren knew better than to hope for a Stanley Cup anytime soon. Still, it could happen. He put down the paper, his neck stiff and painful. He got up and poked around in a drawer, finding some aspirin, and downing them with juice. He stopped for a moment. Coffee. Aspirin. Orange juice. Jesus, he might as well pour some battery acid down there, too. So, he searched around some more and came up with a pack of Rolaids. He popped a few in his mouth, and the rest in his pocket. He crept into the bedroom and gently kissed Sam on the forehead. She opened her eyes, the indirect light making the green irises almost translucent.

  “Gee, you look nice,” she said, sitting up. “You know, you’re better looking than you think.”

  “God, a compliment at this hour? What did I do to deserve that?”

  “Hey, I know I might have told you that looks don’t matter to a woman, but I’m starting to realize that you’re the cutest guy I’ve ever gone out with.”

  “Gone out with?” Warren spread his hands wide. “I think we’re a little past that.”

  “Hmmmm. Yeah, maybe. Well, we’ll have to talk about that later.” Sam stretched back out and pulled the covers up to her chin. “I need at least three more hours here.”

  After the taxi ride to the office, and a few minutes getting organized, Warren began the ritual of another day. He was amazed how quickly everything had become a mundane repetition, even though it involved moving billions of dollars around in increasingly arcane ways, and at how having at best a modest talent made young professionals into arrogant, free-spending millionaires. The work was deadening and largely filled with limited and shallow people. Increasingly, the engineers and quant jocks were the stars of the Street, and their peculiar patois could kill the conversation at any cocktail party.

  Warren couldn’t keep himself from pondering Liechtenstein, and the events that had led to the treasure so carefully buried there. Frankly, he wasn’t even certain how illegal Anson’s activities had been. The money technically was only brokerage fees and trading profits earned by a middleman on some fantastically lucrative transactions. Unless the bankers had been completely fraudulent in writing down the loans, there was no crime there. Combes’s taking a big cut of the profits was obviously against the firm’s rules but … Warren stopped himself. This was all a stupid rationalization. He knew that Combes and his cohorts had stolen the money from the banks, just as surely as if they had done it with a gun. If money had been passed back to Beker, that was probably a felony. If the shareholders and regulators were too sloppy or stupid to notice it, that didn’t change anything. The right thing for Warren to do would be to march right off and tell the FBI or the CIA, or somebody. Hell, he thought, if I told the guys at Weldon, they’d probably just try to figure out a way to take the money themselves. Besides, Warren hadn’t engaged in any of the criminal activity. He’d just stumbled upon the pirates’ buried treasure. He wasn’t sure what that made him.

  He’d seen lots of instances where management had approved trades with insurance companies or banks to help them avoid accounting problems. They were illegal, but they were profitable for Weldon and hard to define. Malcolm had always had some plausible-sounding explanation. Once, Kerry had asked about paying one of her banks two points more for a package of adjustable-rate mortgages than they were worth, in order to sell them a different bond at a four-point markup. To sell them and buy the CMOs made a lot of sense, but if they sold the mortgages for their true market value, they would take a loss, which would result in lower earnings for the year, and that would result in lower pay for the men who ran the bank. So, if Weldon paid a price that would allow them to break even or show a profit, then made up the difference by also selling the bank the CMOs at an inflated price, Weldon would make lots of money, the bank would look falsely profitable, and if a regulator figured out what was done and actually did something about it, they would all wind up out of the business or in jail. Malcolm okayed the trade.

  “Well,” he had said to Kerry, “you know those are some pretty weird ARMs they’re selling. They could be worth a couple points more. Who knows? I’ve seen it happen before.” While many unusual securities, particularly in mortgages, were hard to price accurately, that trade had been an obvious and egregious violation. Nothing ever came of it, except for Weldon’s $2 million profit, because the regulators were generally people with little or no knowledge of what they were regulating and rarely checked transactions anyway. Profits from that trade helped fatten Malcolm’s year-end bonus, in addition to allowing Kerry to earn a big commission. The firm’s compliance department rarely raised a stink if a supervisor signed off on a trade—after all, those same supervisors set the compliance department’s bonuses. This system ensured that problems or bad deeds would generally be ignored or covered up. There was no reward for a compliance officer to uncover misdeeds. In fact, Warren had heard more than once that the officers got pushed aside or even fired.

  Warren’s mind returned to the larger question. If the money wasn’t really “missing”—since no one seemed to notice or care about the markdowns at the banks—that meant no one would be looking for it. There had been absolutely no sign of any invest
igations or inquiries, and most of Anson’s records and files had been distributed to the groups working on each transaction or archived. Warren and Sam had broken down the computer into tiny pieces, roasted them in his fireplace, then scattered them in trash cans all over the city. There was no sign that anyone thought Anson’s death was anything more than a tragic example of the growing crime rate. It just didn’t make any sense. There was no such thing as the perfect crime. If Anson Combes had died, Warren reasoned, it was because someone wanted that money. Otherwise, some dumb burglar had killed one of the wealthiest men in New York and left with only a few bucks and some jewelry.

  Thinking about the whole situation made Warren anxious, and he buried himself in his work. The corporate trading desk had been at the morning sales meeting, hawking a big new deal for an airplane leasing company, so he hunkered down and started studying the financial summaries to see if he wanted to sell it to his clients. He’d gone about halfway through the pack of Rolaids in his pocket already, the chalky, mint flavor somehow soothing to the spirit as well as the belly.

  Unlike many Weldon salesmen, he tried to screen out the garbage before attempting to sell anything to his accounts. All Street firms needed the revenue from new deals to keep the machine greased, so some stinkers would inevitably sneak in, even at a relatively conservative place such as Weldon. Larisa’s Temenosa deal had been a prime example. One day, the firm is raising money selling bonds for Temenosa, supposedly a hot, growing diversified oil services company with fabulous cash flow. Seven months later, all the money raised in the bond offering is gone, spent on a lousy acquisition, investment-banking fees, and a lot of executive compensation, and the firm files for bankruptcy. It seems the bankers on the deal had been a little too optimistic about that cash flow. Oh, well, there went a billion dollars or so. The amazing part was that Weldon got assigned the plum reorganization advisory job by the bankruptcy court. Since they already knew so much about the company, the receiver would save the expense of a new firm’s starting from scratch. The fees were generous, even though the company itself was virtually busted. It was all a funny joke, as long as you were on the magic gravy train.

  It took Warren about an hour to decide that the leasing company was a house of cards that would collapse almost immediately if the airline business softened even slightly. With all the new debt, it would actually fail if business just stayed the same and didn’t improve. Meanwhile the CEO and majority owner lived like a king and would no doubt use a chunk of the bond proceeds to fund his lifestyle. He stuck a prospectus in an envelope with a printed “For Your Information” card and scratched out Information, substituting Amusement, sending it off to David Schiff. He loved this kind of deal. They could laugh together as it crashed in flames.

  Thinking of Larisa again made Warren a little uneasy. She had seemed genuinely sad when he’d run into her. She was a tough cookie who had gotten where she wanted to be, but paid a price personally. She had been made one of the youngest vice presidents in Finance at the firm and was on the path to be an MD within a few years. It may not have worked out with him, or even with Anson, but she’d find someone new. Besides, having kids or a family was something that would wait. At the pace she was going, she’d be able to retire and have a brood at thirty-five. He could see her point and couldn’t fault her logic, although her sleeping with the guy he was most scared of hadn’t exactly warmed his heart. For a minute he wondered if she might have known about Anson’s accounts. He dismissed it—she had always warned him never, never to do anything even in the gray area between legal and questionable. He felt that she was not yet resolved as a part of his life somehow, and that thought did not make him comfortable. He had a great girlfriend, a good career in a tough business, and a great big bag of salty pistachio nuts that the shoe-shine man had sold him that morning. All was right, or at least allright, with the world. For now.

  forty-nine

  A cold hand ran down his spine, grabbing at his stomach and squeezing hard enough to make him gasp. A yawning pit opened inside him, and hot flames shot up from his groin to his cheeks, setting his skin afire, and his heart ablaze. He felt himself shrinking suddenly and violently, until he felt like a pin dot, white-hot, searing down through his seat, the floor, and into the earth and bedrock below.

  “Warren, there’s someone from the police here to see you” was all the receptionist had said to him, and he struggled for his breath as he answered, “I’ll be right out.” In the three months since they’d returned from Europe, there hadn’t been so much as a peep. It had lulled him into a sense of calm. It only took an instant to shatter into a billion shards, and his composure returned only slowly as he walked to the elevator foyer as if to the gallows.

  The familiar and intelligent face of Detective Wittlin peered up from a copy of Forbes magazine, which he was flipping through. The round, smiling face of Donald Trump stared out from the open page.

  Wittlin closed and dropped the magazine back on the small coffee table and greeted Warren with a handshake. “Hey, sorry to drop in on you unannounced. I needed to talk to you right away.” Wittlin swiveled around. “Is there someplace we can go?”

  Warren held up a finger. “Mary, are any of the conference rooms open? The detective and I need some privacy.”

  The receptionist consulted a logbook briefly. “Only the War Room, and only until two.”

  Warren looked at Wittlin, who nodded approval. “Fine, pencil us in.” He showed Wittlin the way, through a set of double glass doors, and down a short hall. The War Room was actually a big conference room, with the most advanced teleconferencing technology available. Every branch office of Weldon had a room just like it. From this room priority sales calls were made, and senior executives could address every employee in the firm simultaneously. It was ridiculously large for just two men, but they sat at the corner of the immense conference table.

  “Okay. What is it?” Warren crossed his legs and tried, quite successfully, to look relaxed. His heart was pounding.

  “I have something I want you to take a look at.” Wittlin reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a manila envelope. He slid out of it a small stack of photographs and handed them to Warren.

  They were obviously from a security camera in a building foyer or lobby. A distorted overhead view showed two people, quite clearly Anson Combes and Bonnie, entering the foyer. A second showed a lone figure, head covered by a hat and some kind of face covering, leaving. Warren started to flip through the others, but Wittlin stopped him.

  “That’s the one I wanted you to see.” Wittlin reached for the rest.

  “Can I see the others?”

  “You don’t really want to. They’re shots of the body. Pretty rough stuff.”

  Warren pursed his lips. He was beginning to feel relief—Wittlin was asking about the murder, not about European bank accounts or sham mortgage sales.

  “I guess not.” Warren studied the shot. The shadowy figure was completely covered by a big parka and the hat. On closer inspection the mask appeared to be a scarf, and Warren could make out some kind of pattern on it. “What can I tell you?”

  “We think that’s the killer. The timing seems right. No one else in that building remembered going out or having a visitor. It has to be. I wondered if you could tell anything from it?” Wittlin looked Warren square in the eye inquisitively.

  “Why’d it take so long to get this? It’s been, what, about five months?”

  “Yeah. Well, we were checking it out, computer enhancing it, and following up leads. We got nowhere. I figured I’d take a shot and see if anyone else could get something from it.” Wittlin shrugged. “We’re just about out of gas on this case.”

  Warren nodded and studied the picture again. Something about it unsettled him. The posture of the man? The scarf? He spent a long minute scanning it before he handed it back. “I’m sorry, Detective. I’d like to help. But I can’t see anything there that you can’t. It’s somebody walking out of a building. Could be anybody,
any building.”

  “I know. Listen, I appreciate you taking the time. I’m afraid I’m going to let you down on this one. Some of the jewelry from the girl’s place turned up—the watch anyway, on a kid we arrested uptown. Not a killer, just a pusher. He bought it from a fence we know, who couldn’t even remember his own name. Twenty bucks, for a three-thousand-dollar Rolex. A woman’s watch, too, on some punk crackhead. Anyway, that makes the B and E look real, and we’ll probably scale it down.” Wittlin looked sheepish.

  “Look, Detective, if it makes you feel any better, Anson Combes was a world-class shit. Nobody liked him, probably not even his wife, who he was cheating on with more women than just Bonnie. Hopefully, she’ll get remarried, and her kid will have a decent father. He is not missed around here, I can tell you that.” Warren risked the candor because he felt bad for Wittlin.

  “I know. It’s amazing, everybody says the same thing about that guy. If you had to look at everyone that hated him as a suspect, you’d bring in anyone who ever met the guy. Still, some perp is laughing his ass off at me and may do it again. This fucking job can get on your nerves. Do you know the lab guys identified the hair and skin samples to a black male, probably twenty-five, type O positive blood. There’s about a million suspects in that category, just like about sixty percent of the murders in this city. Same basic profile for the guy who killed Dougherty. Similar samples, different blood type, different DNA. We can test for that now.

  “So it wasn’t the same guy. Just the same act, ending a man’s life.” Wittlin had gotten up and was slouched over as he talked, disheartened.

  “Well, if anything else comes up, I hope I can be of more use next time.” Warren held the door for the detective and escorted him back to the elevator landing.