by David Lender
As the last to leave the office for the evening, Chuck turned his key in the elevator lock when he got to the basement garage. His Lexus LS460 was the only car remaining—the garage only held ten, the upper basement having been converted to the garage by Milner when he leased the penthouse. As he got ready to start the big Lexus, he saw a man in a dark suit approach. It surprised him, because at this hour he would only have expected to see one of the security guards. He felt a tickle of anxiety. The man motioned for Chuck to roll down the window; Chuck felt better when he saw the man smiling at him. Chuck hit the button and when the window was halfway down, saw the man reach into his suit jacket and emerge with something odd looking. Terror exploded in his brain, then the panicked urge to reach out to start the car as he realized it was a gun with a silencer pointed directly at his head. The word No! formed in his mind, and then everything was darkness.
Milner sighed and looked out the window of Wilson, Sharts & Devane, his law firm’s conference room in the MetLife Building. He looked down at his office in the Helmsley Building across 45th Street. He’d rather be over there. Hell, he’d rather be anyplace than here right now.
“Shot in the temple through the open car window,” Sandy Sharts said.
“The police say it was clearly a professional job. Assassination style,” Milner said.
Sandy continued, “I have to ask. Do you think this had anything to do with your business?”
Milner didn’t want to let his mind go there. But with Jack and Mickey leaning on him about the Tentron deal…He hadn’t told Sandy about that meeting yet. “It’s hard to believe,” Milner said.
“Can’t be a coincidence. If we found out the Feds are making noises, somebody else may have. And then your CFO, the numbers guy who keeps all your tallies, knows where all the bodies are buried, shows up dead.”
The most Milner could do was nod. He couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge it aloud. But even nodding caused a stinging spasm of guilt to wrench his chest.
Sandy said, “Or maybe your friends aren’t about to let you waltz out of their lives so easily.”
How could Sandy piece that together so fast? It forced Milner to think two steps ahead. Or maybe they’re worried about taking a fall and they’re covering their tracks. Maybe I’m next. He couldn’t just sit around waiting to find out.
Milner bent down to pass underneath the yellow crime scene tape the cops had stuck to the front of Chuck’s office. He decided he couldn’t wait until they were done and out of there completely. The forensic team was basically finished anyhow; after two full days at it since Chuck’s murder, they’d only been here for about an hour today. Not much chance they’d be back this afternoon. Still, Milner felt his pulse throbbing and an airy sensation in his chest.
He looked around the office. Man. It looked like they’d stripsearched the place. They left desk drawers open, showing all the files missing, cables and power cords strewn on the floor, scraps of paper around. Chuck’s desktop computer had been removed, showing a dusty rectangle on the glass desktop.
Milner sat in Chuck’s chair and spun it around to face the credenza. He pulled out the bottom credenza drawer all the way, lifted it out onto the floor. He got down on his knees, reached in, and pressed on the side in the back of the credenza where the drawer had been. The false back opened, and Milner pulled out Chuck’s hidden files. He poked around with his hand for the laptop computer Chuck always kept in there. It was missing. He got back up, sat at Chuck’s desk and put the files down. He thought about it. Chuck’s laptop contained all his private spreadsheets and records.
He opened the top file. As Milner expected, it was a raw accounting of all Milner’s cut of profits from Walker’s trading ring. Chuck always received the data hand-passed from the Walker guys, cryptic stuff buried in deal pitches and memos. Chuck’s calculations and confirmations of the accounting were in spreadsheets compiled on Chuck’s laptop. Had they taken it from his car?
Now he remembered. The day before he was killed, Chuck had said he’d forgotten to bring the laptop into the office after the weekend. So where is it?
Back in his office, Milner clenched his jaw with resolve, then, he realized, anger, as he thought about Chuck and laid out a half dozen of the papers from Chuck’s files on his own desk.
He worked into the evening, pulling out his old HP 12c calculator and adding by hand the rows and columns he’d written on a spreadsheet from the raw numbers in Chuck’s files. He confirmed they summed to within $15,000 of his cut from Walker’s trading ring. Close enough. So all the records are here. Could it be that’s what the guy who killed Chuck was looking for? He decided he needed to find Chuck’s laptop to see if that held any answers. Then he thought of Chuck’s wife, Lisa. He hadn’t visited her since Chuck’s murder, but if his phone call to her was any indication, it wasn’t gonna be fun. Man, I’m not looking forward to this.
Chappaqua, NY. For some reason the GPS system in Milner’s Mercedes CL600 didn’t pick up all the side streets in the wooded section of Chappaqua off Whippoorwill Road. He turned the high beams on and crept along until he saw a mailbox. Number 577. He was close. A minute later he saw the bluestone columns marking the entryway to the White’s property, and then the driveway winding up the hill. He drove past the rolling lawn that cascaded down from the house; the lawn Chuck cut himself with his riding lawn mower, not because he had to, but because he enjoyed it.
Three other cars were parked in the gravel circular drive in front of the colonial farmhouse that had been expanded to ramble off in all directions. Renovations he’d heard Chuck talk about over a decade. When Milner got out of the car, he felt a cool breeze and a dampness in the air, probably from the stream he could hear on the far side of the house. Milner wanted to turn his suit jacket collar up against the chill, then realized the chill he felt didn’t come from the air.
A sharp-featured woman with probing eyes showed Milner into the room off the entry hall. She referred to it as the sitting room; Chuck had called it his den. A minute later the crumpled shell of Lisa White entered and shut the door behind her. “Oh, Harold,” she said. Her eyes were reddened puffs of raw meat. Her athletic frame was cowed, like someone had scrunched her down two inches shorter in the last days. She was shockingly diminished from the vibrant woman he’d known for over a dozen years. The sight of her made his stomach feel queasy and his legs weak.
“I’m so sorry, Lisa.” Milner crossed the room to her and took both her hands in his, then put an arm around her and showed her to the sofa. He sat down next to her.
“How could this happen?” she said.
“I don’t know. I’m trying to figure it out.”
“The police have been and gone.” She turned away from Milner. He could see she was fighting back tears. She exhaled, turned back to him, said, “Have they told you anything?”
“Nothing. They’re asking me for answers, and I can’t give them any.”
She looked into his eyes, said, “Who would do this?”
Now he started to get angry again. Who would do this? Murder his friend and ruin this woman’s life? He said again, “I don’t know.”
She turned away and looked across the room, at nothing.
After a full minute of silence, Milner said, “I can think of one thing that might give me some answers.”
She turned her head like a shot, her lips parted and her eyes pleading.
“You know Chuck’s laptop?”
She nodded.
“I can’t find it, and I don’t think the cops have it. Did they mention it to you?”
“No. He had it with him on the boat last weekend.”
“Do you think it’s still there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you mind if I check?”
“I’ll get you the key.”
As she walked across the room, he wondered if the cops had Chuck’s boat staked out. Only one way to find out.
New York City. Richard was itching to analyze the spreadsh
eet he created on all the mole’s emails. That night at his apartment he shut off his cell phone, opened his laptop and started sorting. The tally was 17 deals over four years. So the mole had started just after the foreign partners invested in Walker. Interesting.
He sorted all the deals chronologically, thinking that might make it easier to break the code names. He was right. LeClaire had told him code names were assigned using the first letter of the actual company as the first letter of the code name. Based on that, it wasn’t hard to figure out that three of deals the mole and his friends traded on were Milner’s—Tungsten Steel Service Centers, Ernest-United, and Val-Tech Industries. He surfed the Internet for an hour based on code names and dates and confirmed his suspicions: all but one of the mole’s deals in the first three years were Walker-advised M&A transactions. He couldn’t crack the code names for the last year.
Regardless, it looked like it might not be just a few dirty guys at Walker. Based on this, somebody was trading on almost all Walker-advised billion-dollar-plus public M&A transactions, where the size of the deals allowed for significant trading volume and meaningful trading profits.
So now he was faced with the reality of blowing the whistle. But what did he really have? And he was still on probation. The last thing he needed was to make a fool of himself if he was wrong, and get fired over it. He decided he wasn’t going to say anything to anybody for now. Particularly Kathy, because he knew what her reaction would be.
Shelter Island, NY. An hour after Milner left Lisa White, he touched down in a helicopter at East Hampton airport. His car service driver was waiting for him and they made the 9:12 p.m. ferry to Shelter Island with two minutes to spare. They crept down Chequit Avenue into the Shelter Island Yacht Club, where Milner told the driver to turn the lights off but keep the engine running. He walked with his head held erect, trying to look like he knew exactly where he was going. The description his secretary, Stephanie, had given him on the phone from searching the club’s layout on its website was all he had to go on. He didn’t want to be walking around looking like some guy who didn’t belong there, some guy who was looking for some other guy’s boat.
He turned left at the first T in the dock and started counting slips. He started wondering about the cops again, if they were staking out Chuck’s boat. As he approached what he counted to be slip 13, he recognized Chuck’s boat, an Etchells 22, converted from racing to high-performance daysailing.
Okay so far. He still hadn’t seen a soul since getting to the Club. He turned down the gangplank, stepped onto the deck the way he thought a sailor might, stuck the key in the lock on top of the cabin and slid the roof open. He slid it shut behind him as he went down the steps. He used his flashlight until he found the switch for the cabin lights. His hands were sweaty when he clicked on the lights.
The laptop was in the second place Lisa suggested he look—on the left forward bunk. He picked it up and turned around. He was back in the car within three minutes from leaving it. He was burning to open the computer on the chopper back to Manhattan, but waited until he sat down at his desk in the office in his apartment.
He plugged into the Internet and opened Outlook, then watched the emails download. He saw a series of emails from [email protected] on the day Chuck died. His pulse quickened as he opened one, then another. It rammed in his temples as he kept opening emails. They were detailed records of Milner’s profits from the Walker ring. That paper trail never existed; somebody created it after the fact for a reason. A frame.
His hands were trembling with anger as he searched Chuck’s computer to find his spreadsheet files. It took him 15 minutes to find Chuck’s master spreadsheet accounting for Milner’s profits from Walker’s trading ring. He clenched his teeth as he looked back and forth from the spreadsheet to the emails. The new emails from [email protected] were an exact match of Chuck’s spreadsheet files. I’m hosed. If the Feds didn’t have him before, they sure as hell would once they saw the emails, and eventually they would. The same emails would be in Chuck’s desktop as well, which the cops had.
Who was framing him? Jack and Mickey were still pushing him to do Tentron. Maybe Tentron was a trap. Would their foreign partners be doing it without Jack and Mickey knowing?
One thing seemed certain: whoever killed Chuck was responsible for sending those emails.
New York City. Sandy looked across Milner’s desk at him. He obviously still thought the phones might be tapped, asking for a face-to-face meeting again. “We need to talk.”
Milner said, “That’s usually why you come over here and get in my face.”
Sandy just looked at him for a moment. Milner looking back at him. Their usual dance. Then Sandy leaned in toward Milner. “I gather you’re still moving forward on this Tentron deal. I don’t understand. If you’re worried about the Walker guys, why still deal with them? And if you really think they killed Chuck, we need to go to the police.”
Milner squirmed in his chair, then said, “I think they may be trying to frame me for the trading ring. Maybe even for Chuck’s murder. I’m going through the motions on Tentron to buy time, figure out what to do.”
Sandy gave Milner one of his sternest looks, one Milner would have thought amusing under other circumstances.
Milner went on, “I didn’t tell you, but Jack and Mickey came up here and pressured me to do the Tentron deal.”
“When?” Sandy locked his gaze on Milner’s eyes. There was no getting away from him on this one.
“Just before Chuck was murdered.”
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph.”
“And I’ve done some investigating since then. The cops didn’t find Chuck’s files on the trading ring; they were still buried in his office. And his laptop was missing, but Lisa helped me find it. Chuck’s files match exactly with my totals from the ring as calculated on the spreadsheets in Chuck’s computer. Only someone inside the ring could have that information. Except now. I found a bunch of emails to Chuck on the day he died that lay it all out so a second grader could follow it. Only reason for those emails to exist is a frame.”
Sandy said, “Sounds like the Walker guys are setting you up for the ring. But why do you say they might be setting you up for Chuck’s murder?”
“Just a feeling.”
Sandy tilted his head skyward and thought. He looked back down at Milner after a moment and said, “Do you think they murdered Chuck?”
“Who the hell else?”
“To pressure you to keep playing ball with them, or because Chuck knew something?”
“To pressure me. A warning shot.”
Sandy shook his head. “Bastards. If I’d never seen anything like this before I wouldn’t believe it.”
Milner didn’t answer.
Sandy said, “You need to go to the police.”
“I don’t have any proof, just my own speculation. And I’d have to blow the whistle on myself for Walker’s ring in order to give my suspicions any credibility.”
“If you have material information regarding Chuck’s murder, you have to go to the police. If you have to expose yourself, so be it. You’re in a helluva pickle anyhow. What’s wrong with this: cop a plea and turn everybody else in? Pay a fine and go back to your life when you’re out of jail.”
“Are you kidding? Jail is what’s wrong with it.”
“Boesky only went away for a few years. I think Milken served two or three.”
“Bernie Madoff got 150 years; maybe they’d only give me 100, but I’ll never get out. And I don’t have any proof to bring down the top guys in the ring, so I’ve got no negotiating leverage to cut a deal for myself for reduced time in jail. It’d be my word against theirs, and they’d serve up some poor underling schmucks to the Feds to protect themselves.”
“And Chuck’s murder? You’re going to sit back and let them get away with that?”
“I don’t have anything that would help the cops make it stick. I’d be sacrificing myself for nothing.”
Sandy shook his
head, looking disgusted.
Milner said, “I’d rather run.”
“Then you better do it quick. If the Walker guys are framing you, you may not have much time. Remember, the Feds are already onto you. If they come, the Feds and the U.S. Attorney will freeze all your assets. And if the Walker guys have worse in mind than framing you, you might wake up dead one day.”
After Sandy left, Milner turned and looked through the window up Park Avenue. When Sandy first talked to him about the Feds, Sandy said they would bust a small fry in the trading ring, then squeeze him to give up the higher-ups. And I’m the top of the food chain. But there’s always a bigger fish.
Milner waited until everybody else in the office went home, then walked downstairs to the wall where the Macintosh amps had been warming up for two hours. He pulled out a good Deutsche Gramophon LP of his favorite symphony, Beethoven’s Sixth, the Pastoral, and placed it on his Basis 2800 Signature turntable. By the time he walked back to his chair in the sweet spot, 12.5 feet from the big Wilson Maxx speakers, the opening strains were playing. He sat down, pointed the remote and turned it up. He had some thinking to do, and in about an hour this would clear his head.
Milner got to the office at 8:00 a.m., before anyone else would arrive. He turned to one of the foot-high Rolodexes on his desk, cranked it to the card. He checked his watch, dialed the phone.
The secretary put him through.
“I’m surprised to hear from you directly, old boy.”
You mean concerned, don’t you? Milner didn’t respond.
After a moment, old man Schoenfeld said, “Anything wrong?”
“No. I just wanted to speak with you personally to tell you I’ve decided to do the Tentron deal, and that it’s my last with you guys.”
