This last job was something else. This one was a young guy, from Bala Cynwyd, who was a stockbroker. Chason thought there was something fishy about a stockbroker wanting to be a used-car salesman right from the start. Usually, it would be a used-car salesman trying to get into something more classy, like being a stockbroker, not the other way around.
Once he started nosing around, Chason thought he understood why. This guy was a real sleaze, too sleazy even to work for a sleazy greaseball like Joey Fiorello.
One of Joey’s salesmen, a young guy wearing an open-collared yellow sport shirt with a gold chain around his neck and a phony Rolex on his wrist, came out of the office with a toothy ‘Hello, sucker!’ smile on his face.
“Can I be of some assistance, sir?”
“Mr. Fiorello around?”
“Yes, sir,” the salesman said. “But I believe he may be tied up at the moment. Is there something I can do for you?”
“No, thanks,” Chason said, and walked around the guy and into the office.
Joey’s secretary, a peroxide blonde with great breasts who Chason had learned wasn’t as dumb as she looked, smiled at him, then picked up her telephone.
“Mr. Chason is here, Mr. Fiorello,” she announced, listened a minute, and then hung up.
“Mr. Fiorello said he’ll be right with you, Mr. Chason,” she said. “How have you been?”
“Can’t complain,” Chason said. “How about yourself?”
“Well, you know,” the blonde said. “A little of this, a little of that.”
A moment later, the door to Joey’s office opened and a guy who looked like another salesman came out. Then Joey appeared in the door.
“Hey, Phil, how’s the boy? Come on in. You want a cup of coffee, or a Coke or something?”
“I could take some coffee,” Chason said.
“Helene, how about getting Mr. Chason and me some coffee. How do you take yours, Phil?”
“Black would be fine,” Chason said as he shook Joey’s extended hand and walked into the office.
He had to admit it, Joey had a classy office. Nice furniture, all red leather, and a great big desk that must have cost a fortune. The walls were just about covered with pictures of classy cars and of Joey and his family on his sailboat. There was a model of the sailboat, sails and everything, in a glass case.
The blonde delivered two mugs of coffee. The mugs said, “Fiorello Fine Cars. We sell to sell again!”
Joey waited until the blonde had closed the door behind her, then asked, “You got something for me, Phil?”
“I don’t think you’re going to like it, Joey.”
“I pay you to find things out. Who said anything about me having to like it?”
“Mr. Ronald R. Ketcham is a sleazeball, Joey,” Chason said.
“How is he a sleazeball?”
“You understand I can’t prove anything, Joey. I mean, if I was still a cop, I don’t have anything I could take to the district attorney.”
“Tell me what you found out,” Joey Fiorello said. “That’s good enough for me.”
“Okay. The truth is, he is a stockbroker. For Wendell, Wilson and Company, in Bala Cynwyd. Before that, he was a stockbroker with Merrill Lynch, here in the city. He told Wendell, Wilson he wanted to leave Merrill Lynch so he wouldn’t have to come into the city every day. The truth is, he resigned from Merrill Lynch about five minutes before they were going to fire him.”
“Fire him for what?”
“For one thing, he didn’t go to work very often, and for another, there was talk that when he did show up for work, he did a lot of business his customers didn’t know about. You know what I mean?”
Joey shook his head, “no.”
“Stockbrokers work on commission. The more stocks and bonds and stuff they buy and sell, the more money they make. So, if they aren’t too ethical, they call their customers up and suggest they sell something he hears is going to go down, and buy something else he hears is going to go up, and maybe his information isn’t so kosher. He did a lot of that at Merrill Lynch, but that isn’t all. If they have customers that are buying and selling a lot, so their monthly statements are pretty complicated, what some of those guys do—what Ketcham got caught doing—is making trades their customers didn’t order.”
“Explain that to me,” Joey said.
“Like you own five thousand shares of, say, General Motors. Ketcham would sell, say, a thousand shares one day, and buy it back the next. And get a commission selling it, and another commission buying it back.”
“The customers don’t notice?”
“A lot of the customers don’t keep good records,” Chason explained. “They get their statement, it says they sold a thousand shares at fifty bucks, and then, a day later, they bought a thousand shares at forty-seven-fifty, which means they picked up twenty-five hundred bucks less the commissions, why ask questions?”
“What if they sold the stock at forty-seven-fifty, and then bought it back at fifty, and they lost twenty-five hundred? Don’t that ring bells that something ain’t kosher?”
“From what I hear, believe it or not, most people don’t catch on right away. The company itself catches more salesmen doing stuff like that than the customers do. And that’s what happened to Mr. Ketcham at Merrill Lynch. The company—they call the people who do it ‘internal auditors’—caught him.”
“But they didn’t fire him?” Joey asked. “You said he resigned, right?”
“Like I said, I can’t prove this happened to him at Merrill Lynch, but this is the way something like this works, all right? The internal auditors catch a guy doing something like this, what can they do? If they fire the guy because he’s been making unauthorized trades for his customer, and they tell the customer, the customer is going to be pissed, right? And take his business some other place, and tell all his friends what Merrill Lynch, or whoever, has done to him. ”
“Yeah,” Joey said, considering that. “So what do they do?”
“They call the guy in, tell him that they have enough on him to get him kicked out of the stockbroker business for life, and that the smart thing for him to do is have his desk cleaned out by five o’clock, keep his mouth shut, and if he gets another job, to straighten up and fly right. You get the picture.”
“Jesus, you just can’t trust anybody these days, can you?” Joey said.
“There’s more crooks out of jail than in,” Chason said.
“So he went to this company in Bala Cynwyd, you’re telling me, and started this shit all over?”
“No. Not exactly. He’s about to get canned from Wendell, Wilson for not producing. That means not selling or buying enough for his customers. The reason he’s not producing enough is that he comes to work late, leaves early, or doesn’t come to work at all. You can only get away with telling the boss you were ‘developing business’ on the golf course, which is why you weren’t at work, if you actually produce the business.”
“If he’s not ‘producing business,’ what’s he living on, if he’s working on commission?”
“That’s what I wondered,” Chason said. “He lives good. He pays a lot of money for his apartment, drives a fancy car, dresses good, and he’s got a girlfriend who probably costs him a lot of money.”
“You mean a hooker?”
“No, I mean one of those Main Line beauties, who expect to be taken to expensive restaurants, and weekends at the shore. Like that.”
“How do you know about the girlfriend?” Tony asked.
Chason took a small notebook from his pocket.
“Her name is Cynthia Longwood,” he said. “Her father is Randolph Longwood, the builder.”
“I heard the name,” Joey said.
“Anyway, they have been running around for some time. So I wondered how he was paying for all this, and started asking some questions around. I got to tell you again, Joey, that I can’t prove any of this, it’s just . . .”
Joey Fiorello indicated with his hands that he understo
od the caveat.
“If I was a betting man, Joey, which I don’t happen to be, I’d give odds that this sleazeball is into drugs. Maybe not big time, but not small time, either.”
“No shit?”
“It all fits, if you think about it.”
“You tell me.”
“If somebody has an armful of that shit, everything is rosy. You don’t give a shit about anything. You don’t feel like going to work, you don’t go to work. Everything will be all right. And if you do go to work, you put some shit up your nose, it turns you into a fucking genius. You’re too smart to get caught buying and selling stocks and bonds nobody told you to. You understand?”
“I’m getting the picture.”
“You get your hands on, say, twenty thousand dollars’ worth of heroin, or cocaine, any of the high-class stuff, if you know where to get it and where to sell it, you keep out what you need to shove in your own arm, or up your own, and your girlfriend’s, nose—”
“You think his girlfriend is a junkie?”
“I didn’t hear anything like that. But I would be surprised if she didn’t do some ‘recreational drugs.’ That’s pretty common among people like that. You heard what happened to the Detweiler girl, her father owns half of Nesfoods?”
Joey Fiorello shook his head, “no.”
“I know who they are,” Joey said. “What about the girl?”
“She stuck a needle in her arm in Chestnut Hill and was dead before she could take it out.”
“No shit?”
“Killed her like that,” Chason said, snapping his fingers. “Anyway, after you put aside whatever shit you need for yourself and your girlfriend, you sell the rest. You put away enough money to buy another twenty thousand worth later on, and you live good on what’s left over.”
“And you think Ketcham is doing this?”
“Like I said, I can’t prove it, but yeah, Joey, I’d bet on it.”
“Can I ask you a personal question, Phil?”
“You can ask,” Chason said. “But I won’t promise to answer.”
“You’re a retired police officer,” Joey said. “You get this feeling about somebody like this, dealing drugs, doing what you think he’s doing with the stockbroker business, you feel you got to tell the cops?”
“No,” Chason said. “For one thing, like I said, I can’t prove any of this. And for another, if I did, they’d probably tell me to mind my own business.”
“What do you think his chances are of getting caught dealing drugs?”
“He’ll get caught eventually,” Chason said. “If he don’t get killed first, in some drug deal gone bad, or kill himself, the way that Detweiler girl did.”
“Well, one thing for sure,” Joey said. “We don’t want this son of a bitch walking around the lot, do we?”
“I wouldn’t if I was you, Joey,” Chason said.
“Phil, I don’t want anybody to know I was even thinking of giving this son of a bitch a job. It would be embarrassing, if you know what I mean.”
“What I do, Joey, like it says in the phone book, is confidential investigations. What I told you, you paid for. It’s yours. I just forgot everything I told you.”
“I appreciate that, Phil,” Joey said.
Chason nodded his head.
“How long did it take you to come up with all this, Phil?”
“No longer than usual. I’m going to bill you for ten hours, plus, I think, about sixty bucks in expenses.”
“Two things, Phil. First of all, I think it took you like twenty hours,” Joey said. “And I figure you had maybe two hundred in expenses.”
“You don’t have to do that, Joey.”
“Don’t tell me what I have to do, Phil, please, as a favor to me. Second thing, how would you feel about being paid in cash, instead of with a check? Are you in love with the IRS?”
“I don’t have a thing in the world against cash, Joey.”
“That’s good, because I just happen to have some cash the IRS don’t know about, either,” Joey said.
He got up from his desk and went into what looked to Phil Chason like a closet. He returned in a minute with an envelope.
“You want to check it, to make sure it’s all right?” Joey asked.
“I’m sure it is, Joey,” Chason said, and put the envelope in his suit jacket pocket.
Joey offered him his hand.
“We’ll be in touch,” Joey said.
Chason started out of the office.
“Phil, you want to get out of that piece of shit you’re driving, I’ll make you a deal on something better.”
“Not right now, Joey, but I’ll consider that an open offer.”
“It’s an open offer,” Joey said.
Chason left the office. Joey went to the venetian blinds and watched through them until Chason had left the lot.
Then he left his office.
“I’ve got to see a man about a dog, Helene,” he said.
He went out and got into a red Cadillac Eldorado convertible and drove off the lot. Six blocks away, he pulled into an Amoco station and stopped the car by an outside pay phone.
He dropped a coin in the slot and dialed a number from memory.
“This is Joey. I need to talk to him,” he said.
“Yes?” a new voice responded a minute later.
“This is Joey, Mr. S.,” Joey said. “I just left the retired cop. I think we had better talk, if you have time.”
“Come right now, Joey,” Vincenzo Savarese said.
TWELVE
Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin looked up from the mountain of paper on his desk and saw Michael J. O’Hara sitting on his secretary’s desk.
“How long have you been out there, Mickey?” Coughlin called.
“You looked like you were busy,” O’Hara said.
“I told him I’d let you know he was out here,” Veronica Casey, Coughlin’s secretary, said.
“Never too busy for you, Mickey,” Coughlin said, motioning for O’Hara to come into his office.
“Oh, you silver-tongued Irishman, you,” O’Hara said, and slumped into one of the two armchairs in the room. “What’s going around here you don’t want me to know about?”
“There’s a long list of things like that,” Coughlin said. “You have something specific in mind?”
“Actually, what I had in mind was that you and I should go somewhere and have a little sip of something. Maybe two sips. Maybe even, if you don’t have something on, dinner. You got plans?”
“No,” Coughlin said. He looked at his watch. “I didn’t realize it was so late.” He raised his voice. “Go home, Veronica!”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure. Put this stuff away, and we’ll start again in the morning.”
“Okay,” she said, coming into the office and gathering up the papers on Coughlin’s desk. “He skipped lunch,” she said to O’Hara, “so eat first before you do a lot of sipping.”
“Okay,” O’Hara said. He waited until she had left the office, and then said, “She’s in love with you. Why don’t you marry her?”
“She has a husband, as you damned well know.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Go to hell, Mickey,” Coughlin said, laughing. “But she’s right. I didn’t have any lunch. I need to put something in my stomach.”
“Fish, fowl, or good red meat?”
“Clams and a lobster comes to mind,” Coughlin said.
“Bookbinder’s?”
“That’s close,” Mickey said.
“Too far to walk,” Coughlin said. “Where’s your car?”
“In the No Parking zone by the door,” Mickey said. “I’ll bring you back here, if you like.”
Michael J. O’Hara’s Buick was indeed parked in the area immediately outside the rear door of the police administration building, in an area bounded by signs reading “No Parking At Any Time.”
The joke went that there were only two people in th
e City of Philadelphia who would not get a parking ticket no matter where they left their cars, one being the Hon. Jerome H. Carlucci, the mayor, and the other being Mickey O’Hara.
That wasn’t exactly true, Coughlin thought as he got into O’Hara’s car. But on the other hand, it was close. He himself didn’t dare leave his car parked where Mickey had parked the Buick, confident he would not find a parking ticket stuck under his wiper blade when he returned for it.
Mickey enjoyed a special relationship with the Police Department of the City of Philadelphia shared by no other member of the press. Coughlin had often wondered why this was so, and had decided, finally, that while some of it was because he was a familiar sight at funerals, weddings, promotion parties, and meetings of the Emerald Society (and, for that matter, at gatherings of the German, black, and Jewish police social organizations as well), it was basically because he was trusted by everybody from the guy walking a beat to Jerry Carlucci.
He never broke a confidence, and he never published anything bad about a cop until he gave the cop a chance to tell his side of the story.
And while he did not fill his columns with puff pieces about the Philadelphia Police Department, he very often found space to make sure the public learned of some unusual act of kindness, or heroism, or dedication to duty of ordinary cops walking beats.
And that was probably, Denny Coughlin thought, because Mickey O’Hara, in his heart, thought of himself as a cop.
Not that Mickey ever forgot he was a journalist. Denny Coughlin had thought of Mickey as a personal friend for years, and he was sure the reverse was true. But he also understood that the reason Mickey had appeared at his office to offer to take him to dinner was less that they were friends than that Mickey had questions he hoped he could get Coughlin to answer.
The door chimes sounded, playing “Be It Ever So Humble, There’s No Place Like Home.”
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