Wall Street Noir

by Peter Spiegelman

  Normally Maureen would make it to the door before he had both locks open—the sound of the Medeco was enough to bring her running, especially when there was food and he was late. But not this time. Kurnit dropped the bag of Chinese food on the small table next to the door, hung up his coat in the closet, and locked the door.

  “Darling?” he called.

  He carried the food into the kitchen, popped the staples holding the bag shut, and took two large plates down from the china cabinet. Two forks, two serving spoons. He tore off two paper towels to use as napkins.

  “Honey?”

  He carried the plates to the table in the dining area, a corner of their L-shaped living room. He flipped on the ceiling light. “I’m sorry I’m late. But the food’s not cold. Yet.”

  He returned to the kitchen to get the two aluminum trays containing their main dishes, the two cartons of rice, the paper-sheathed pairs of chopsticks, the cellophane-wrapped fortune cookies. He dropped it all on the table.

  “Maureen? You okay?”

  Finally, he went into the bedroom.

  It was a week before Simon Kurnit returned to his apartment, and when he did he had to strip off the yellow police tape on the way in. The apartment was silent and dark, and he sat at the table in the dining area without turning on the light. Someone had thrown out the Chinese food and Windexed the tabletop. He could smell it.

  His back ached. He had a headache, too, and he hadn’t shaved that morning or washed his hair when he showered. He’d just stood under the water, barely feeling it though it was turned as hot as it would go.

  The company had put him up in a hotel room—a top-of-the-line suite at the Edison with windows facing out over Central Park—while the lawyer Perlow dug up (Find him the best in the city, Steinbach had said when he and Perlow had shown up at the holding cell. Not the second best, the very best) got him straightened out with the police. He’d had Maureen’s blood on him, all over his hands and shirt, and it was natural to take him into custody even though he’d been the one to phone 911, even though he was obviously distraught, even though the knife was nowhere to be found. Many husbands who kill their wives are distraught, and many of them find a way to dispose of their knives before 911 arrives.

  But the lawyer, a man named Neville, Stephen J. Neville, was able to get him out, and they tucked him away in the Edison under a false name so the reporters from the Post and the Daily News couldn’t find him. They found him anyway, but since he didn’t come out of the building, didn’t answer the phone or the door, they eventually gave up and left him alone. There were other murders to write about, after all.

  Perlow testified that he’d seen Kurnit in the office around the time the murder was estimated to have taken place, and the e-mail logs supported this. Picking up the takeout food added another few minutes; a cop who spoke Chinese got confirmation from the woman at the restaurant. Then, too, there was the fact that the bedroom had been thoroughly ransacked and some large items—a DVD recorder, Maureen’s laptop, her jewelry box—were missing. Kurnit told them about the man he’d passed in the vestibule, the stranger with the bulging black garbage bag, large enough to hold a DVD recorder and a laptop and a jewelry case. They either believed him or they didn’t, but they let him go. He hadn’t formally been charged, and Neville told him he wouldn’t be.

  But what did it matter? He didn’t need the police to charge him or a jury to judge him guilty. He knew he was.

  Twenty-five minutes.

  So it’s a real ten minutes

  Yep.

  I can count on it

  Yep.

  He had touched the man, they had passed belly-to-belly; he’d been polite, said goodnight to him. While upstairs Maureen was bleeding to death. Or had she already been dead by then? If so, for how long? Ten minutes? Fifteen?

  He’d thought he couldn’t cry anymore, he’d thought this repeatedly over the past week, but he’d been wrong every time and he was wrong now. The tears ran down his face like water. His chest heaved. He made no sound. Just sat in the dark sobbing and asking himself what had been so goddamn important that it couldn’t wait till tomorrow, what e-mail was worth Maureen’s life.

  They’d sent him flowers, the company had, and the card that came with them was signed by everyone in the office. Steinbach had written, Take as much time as you need. You’ve always got a home here, and he remembered their conversation the day he told Steinbach he was leaving. A home. A home was the one thing he didn’t have, that he’d never have again.

  Would ten minutes have made the difference? Would five? If he’d walked in on the man while he was filling his bag, could he have stopped him? Or would he be dead now, too, lying side by side with Maureen in that chilly basement morgue? It didn’t sound so terrible to him. Not nearly as terrible as sitting here in their dark apartment, alone, afraid to open the bedroom door.

  He slid the closet door open instead, ran his hand along the coats, lifted the sleeve of one of hers, inhaled deeply. There was no smell of her, but it was her coat, it had held her once, and he pressed it to his cheek as though some residue of her might still be there. Outside, on the street five stories down, cars honked, some drunk shouted at them, life went on. In here, the radiator thumped and clanked as the heat came on, hissing. But it all sounded to him like whispers from a thousand miles away.

  He counted the money in his pocket, thought about where, this time of night, he could get a quiet drink, some private spot where no one came and you could sit by yourself and if you cried a little no one would say anything. There was a bar two blocks away—he’d brought Maureen there once but she hadn’t liked it, hadn’t liked climbing two flights of stairs to get there and another flight if you had to use the bathroom; she said it felt like some old, decrepit, falling-apart relic from the ’40s, and she was right, that’s exactly what it was, it’s what he liked about the place, but he’d never made her go there again. Yet she’d been there once, on the stool next to his, and if that stool held no more of her ghost than this coat did, so what? So what?

  Then, when he got back, he’d brave the bedroom.

  When he got back.

  He locked the door behind him and headed to Frankie and Johnnie’s.

  It had been a speakeasy once, or anyway that’s the story they told. Perlow liked it because except at theater time it was generally pretty empty. Middle of the day, you just had a few lonely retirees keeping the bartender company, and coming up on midnight you’d have the place to yourself.

  At the top of the stairs, the little coat check room was open but no one was manning the counter and the metal rod in the back had nothing on it but hangers. Perlow walked past and pushed the main door open. To the left was the bar, to the right a handful of tables where your more upscale customers could order some food with their drinks. When he’d given Mesh the assignment, they’d sat at a table so they could talk without the bartender hearing, but this time there was nothing to say, and Mesh was waiting for him at the bar.

  Mesh was an older guy, well into his fifties. He still had the wooly sideburns he’d grown out when they were the hot new look around the time of the Bicentennial, only now they were white, like the rest of his hair. He had a paunch and his face was deeply grooved, and sitting at the bar in his wind-breaker and turtleneck, he could’ve been any guy in any bar, taking home $375 a week from some union job. But he was taking home lot more than that, and they hadn’t found a way yet to unionize what he did for a living.

  Perlow dropped the Duane Reade bag he was carrying at the foot of the empty stool next to Mesh’s, stripped off his coat, draped it over a chair back. He wasn’t going to stay long, but one drink, maybe two, would give Mesh time to finish the one in front of him, settle his bill, quietly pick up the bag, and exit. They hadn’t arrived together and wouldn’t leave together.

  The bag contained an envelope and the envelope contained the full 10k he’d promised, even though Mesh had been sloppy this time, had been seen. Perlow had wanted to dock him for th
at, give him maybe a ten percent haircut just to make a point, but when he suggested this to Steinbach, Steinbach had said no, that’s not the way you do business. A handshake is as good as a contract, that’s the way Wall Street works—billions of dollars change hands on a handshake, and if you say you’re going to pay someone ten thousand dollars you don’t show up with nine. You try that and pretty soon everyone knows and no one will do business with you.

  Probably just as well. Guy like Mesh got unhappy with you, he might do worse than just stop doing business with you

  “What’ll you have?” The bartender wiped down the spot in front of Perlow, though it was plenty clean. Just a way to keep his arm occupied, something to do while waiting for an

  A beer, Perlow was about to say, make it a Heineken, but the door swung open then and Simon Kurnit walked through it

  It didn’t register at first. Perlow, from the office—all right, everyone at Quilibrium worked late some nights, though this late was pretty extreme. And the guy next to him who glanced up and quickly turned away—just a guy, though there was something about him. Kurnit stood in the doorway, holding onto the door, thinking, I can’t just walk out, it would be rude, but also thinking that the last thing he wanted right now was company, was Perlow from the office, was—

  Then it did register. The turtleneck. The sideburns. The face. Perlow, glancing over now at the other man, a look of panic flashing across his face. It was a moment of complete clarity. It felt to Kurnit as if he’d been walking on the surface of a frozen lake and, without warning, plunged through into the icy water beneath.

  “You—You—” he said, but Perlow was facing the other way, raising his hands, saying something to the other man, who was reaching into his windbreaker with one hand, pulling out a black handgun, leveling it at Kurnit. Perlow was saying, No, you can’t shoot him, we need him, and wrestling for the gun, one hand on the man’s wrist, the other on the barrel itself, and the words “we need him” went echoing around in Kurnit’s head.

  He didn’t move. He was rooted to the spot, watching the men fight over the gun, and it was only when the gun-shot exploded in the confined space, smashing a bottle and sending Perlow backward over his stool in a spray of blood, that Kurnit found his legs again. He stumbled back against the door and fell into the hall outside as a second bullet splintered the doorframe. Getting to his feet, he scrambled for the stairs, grabbed the narrow banister, and flew down, two steps at a time, slipping, almost falling, ducking his head as he heard the clatter of footsteps behind him. He reached the landing, used the banister to pull himself through a tight 180-degree turn, and started down the steep second flight to the street.

  Halfway down he missed a step. He felt his heart catch, his breath stop. He swayed for a moment in midair, tipping forward, headlong. It was suddenly silent, it seemed to him—there were no more footfalls, no shouted voices behind him, just the world tilted precariously and swinging up at him. He put out a hand to catch himself, and his fingertips raked a row of framed black-and-white photos of forgotten Irish tenors off the wall as he fell.

  He felt his leg snap under him, but when he came to rest against the street door at the foot of the stairs, he was only conscious of the pain in a distant way. He was facing up, and he watched as a pair of sneakers came into view on the highest step he could see, then the legs of a pair of brown corduroy pants, then a hand holding onto the banister, a plastic Duane Reade bag hanging from its wrist. The man kept coming, picking his steps now with care. The zipped-up bottom of the windbreaker descended into view, then the other hand with its gun, the barrel pointed down at him, and finally the man’s chest and face. Kurnit’s heart was racing, fluttering; maybe he was going into shock. He watched the gun barrel come up and the finger tighten on the trigger and then the second pair of feet at the top of the stairs, and the second pair of legs, and the second gun, this one a long-barreled shot-gun. And the man before him, the one who had murdered Maureen, the one his own company—my God—had paid to murder Maureen (No, you can’t shoot him, we need him), the man who was going to kill him, too, this man spun to face the threat behind him and lost his balance and may well have died from the fall, but the blast from the bartender’s shotgun didn’t give him the chance.

  In the hospital, Kurnit refused visitors, refused newspapers. He only turned the television on to watch Jeopardy!, and even regretted doing that the one time a teaser for the evening news showed footage of Michael Steinbach leaving a courthouse, Stephen Neville at his elbow.

  He hesitated at the door to Steinbach’s office. The cast had come off and he’d switched from crutches to a cane, but he still felt it each time he put weight on the leg, and he took a moment to arrange himself before he lifted the handle of the cane and used it to rap sharply against the wood.

  “What?” Steinbach shouted.

  Kurnit turned the knob and went in. He knew Steinbach was alone; his assistant had left at 5:30 and no one else had gone in during the half hour he’d been watching.

  He limped across the office to Steinbach’s desk, where the man waited, his face showing no expression except perhaps a trace of impatience. There was a chair off to one side of the desk, and Kurnit lowered himself into it, extended his left leg so the knee wasn’t bent. It stiffened up less that way.

  Steinbach stared at him, dissecting him. Kurnit stared back. He’d thought he wouldn’t have the patience for this, but suddenly he found himself extremely calm.

  “We’re glad you’re back, Simon,” Steinbach finally said.

  “I just want to know one thing,” Kurnit said, and his voice didn’t shake at all. “How could you do it? How could you possibly …?”

  “I don’t know what got into Perlow’s head,” Steinbach said. “He must have—”

  “No,” Kurnit shot back. “No. Not Perlow. You. Perlow did what you told him to do. That’s all he ever did.”

  “I never told Perlow to hire anyone to kill Maureen. I would never—”

  “Stop it. Stop it. I’m not an idiot. You always say you hire people because of how smart they are, so how about treating me like it? I’m not wearing a wire, we’re the only people here, and I want an answer. I think you owe me that.”

  Steinbach’s eyes flicked back and forth across his. He was hunting for something. Trying to decide whether Kurnit was lying or not? He wasn’t, and Steinbach apparently satisfied himself that this was the case.

  Steinbach turned back to his desk, hunted briefly through one of the stacks of papers, found a recent P&L report, and tossed it at him. “Strategies you developed or worked on generated $84 million over the first eleven months of this year. You’re a valuable employee.”

  “So … you kill my wife?”

  “I didn’t kill anyone,” Steinbach said. “But speaking hypothetically? For $84 million? Let’s analyze this rationally. Put some numbers to it.” He leaned back in his chair. “With her alive, we have a zero percent chance of keeping you. Remove her and your main incentive to leave has been eliminated. Now, there is some chance, call it twenty-five percent, that you decide to leave anyway, maybe quit working entirely, and there’s maybe another twenty percent chance that the whole thing blows up and you find out what happened, but that leaves a fifty-five percent chance of keeping you, and those are better odds than we’ve had on trades that ended up making us a lot money. You tell me, what would the fair price be of an option that improved the odds from zero to fifty-five percent of keeping a man capable of generating $84 million a year? Actually—” he tapped on the screen of his PDA a few times, dividing and multiplying, “$91.6 million if you annualize. I haven’t run Black-Scholes, but I can tell you it’s worth a hell of a lot more than the sum of what Randall Mesh, Stephen Neville, and the Edison Hotel charged. Now, you’ve got to factor in the risk-adjusted cost of fighting the charges if things do blow up—as they did—and that’s not cheap. And then you’ve got to assign some amount to the catastrophic risk, however small, of going to jail. But it still comes out an expected-v
alue winner.”

  Kurnit sat in silence.

  “I don’t imagine you can look at it objectively right now,” Steinbach continued, “but if you do look at it objectively, you’ll see what I’m talking about. It’s like the distressed securities business—a company’s going bankrupt, the owners are behaving emotionally, you go in and price the trade accurately, and if the numbers come out positive you pull the trigger. Now, in this case it didn’t work—it failed to work pretty spectacularly, in fact. But that doesn’t mean it was a bad trade. It just means it was a trade that moved against us. So you count your losses and move on. I’m telling you this, Simon, for two reasons.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “The first is that you asked, and you’re right, you deserve a straight answer—whether you can handle it or not is up to you. The second is that I think you handle it. You’re angry, I understand that, but you’re a rational man and extremely intelligent and I think you can put that aside and come back and be just as strong a businessperson as before.”

  “What odds would you give it?” Kurnit asked, and this time his voice did shake, but he didn’t care. “What odds that I can come back and be a strong businessman for you?”

  Steinbach considered the question seriously. “Thirty per-cent. Which may not be great, but it’s not a trivial percentage.”

  “No,” Kurnit said, “that’s not trivial.”

  He got slowly to his feet. Leaning on his cane with one hand, he reached into his jacket pocket with the other. After getting out of the hospital, the first place he’d made his way on his crutches was back to Frankie and Johnnie’s. He couldn’t navigate the stairs, of course, but he’d called ahead and the bartender had come down to meet him. Kurnit wanted to thank him, he’d explained, and maybe the bartender would’ve come down for that reason alone, but he’d also told the man he was looking for someone who could hook him up; he didn’t need anything like the shotgun the bartender kept under the bar, just something he could keep in the night table at home, something to give him a little peace of mind. Not a problem, the bartender had said, I know a guy.