At End of Day

by George V. Higgins

  “Look at the bright side. If what you say is true, money’s what’s on her mind, when she comes back she’ll be happy. A happy woman’s the best kind to have. The reason she’s happy don’t matter.” He drank.

  Stoat was glum. “Well, I hope you’re right. She really needs money about now, more’n I can spare without damage.”

  “You two got financial problems?” Farrier said. “How can that be? You said it yourself, you don’t exactly throw it around. You never did anything costly, I know about. This place’s nicer’n what Cheri and I’ve got, but like you say, we’re comin’ from lot different circumstances. You haven’t been married before and divorced; got no kids, don’t drive flashy cars, you don’t wear flashy clothes, you don’t blow a wad on vacations, and the stock market she plays ’s been up, never higher. Where the hell’ve you spent all the dough?”

  “This past year or so, she’s been branching out,” Stoat said. He emptied his bottle into his glass and sat back in the leather chair. “She started playing the commodities markets, Chicago Board of Trade. You know, like Hillary Clinton says she did, buying some kind of commodities futures. Big money fast. Says she invested ten grand and made a big profit. She’s not really sure how she did it, or where, or what in—just that some guy named Red who her husband Bill knew. Red said she did, so she must’ve. I dunno whether she bought cattle futures or maybe it was pork bellies—which I guess means bacon. She most likely doesn’t know either, but a few months after that, Red gives her another call, and now she finds out she sold all her contracts. Hillary still isn’t sure what she sold or to who—all she knows is she nets ninety grand on the deal, and this makes her think very highly of Red. Much more highly now’n she does of her husband, gettin’ blow jobs from a pudgy White House intern.

  “But—and this’s how you can tell, if you didn’t think so before, how much smarter Mrs. Clinton is’n we are—where I suspect you—and I know damned well I—would at that point’ve said, ‘Way to go, Red. Now what you do for me is do that again. Buy some more stuff for me, anything looks good to you. Only this time buy ten times as much—,’ Mrs. Clinton didn’t. Mrs. Clinton says, ‘Thanks, Red, cash me out.’

  “Lily’s pretty smart, but she’s nowhere near as smart as Mrs. Clinton, and she doesn’t know Red. She also doesn’t know as much about commodities as Red does, or as she herself does about stocks and bonds. She went into metals, big time. And what’s worse, she did it on double leverage. Borrowed money on stocks that she owned, what they’re worth at the time—much more’n she’d paid for them. So she was betting those stocks wouldn’t go down.

  “Then with that borrowed money, she bet again. She didn’t exactly buy metals futures; she bought calls, which’re options to buy metals futures. Her theory is that if she borrows a dollar she can buy a dollar call, which will be worth at least ten dollars three months from now—the price of the metal will’ve gone up at least eleven, so the person with the option saves a buck buying it. She then sells those calls and buys her pledged stock back, leaving a bundle for profit.

  “The trouble is that for her to win, at least two things have to happen her way. But to lose, and lose big, only one has to go against her.

  “The metals market has to keep going up, so the options to buy it three months from now will be worth something. If metals go down, she will lose. And the stock that she pledged has to stay at least even. If it goes down before she pays off the loan, she’ll have to come up with more stock. But what’ll she use to buy some more stock? All her cash’s in metals futures. She’ll either have to start selling her other stocks, or borrow against something else. Like this place.” He drank some beer.

  “Oh, no,” Farrier said, interrupting. “I wouldn’t care if she’s swimming in shit, I wouldn’t let her do that. I’ve been strapped for cash a good many times, had to borrow so much it scared me. But two things I know—no matter how broke you may get, you never touch where you live, and the only time you touch your pension is to finance the place where you live.”

  “I agree with you,” Stoat said. “And she can’t get at my retirement. But the reason there’s so much in it is because unlike you and most people, I didn’t tap my retirement account for the down payment on this place. I was willing to, but I didn’t want to, and she didn’t want me to either. So I agreed to make the monthly payments and furnish the joint. Furniture—the stuff I had in Washington was cheap, and old, and worn out. Wouldn’t’ve been worth the cost of moving it up here—gave it to a battered-women’s shelter in Bethesda, took the tax deduction. And she made the down payment, twenty-seven grand, twenty percent of the purchase price—on the condition the place would be in her name. I had no objection; we hadn’t known each other that long. If it didn’t work out, she’d be where she didn’t really want to be, but at least she’d still have her money—and like I said, I needed new furniture anyway.

  “So, even though I’m the one who’s made all the payments, these past thirteen months, my name is not on the deed.”

  “So,” Farrier said. He finished his first beer.

  “So I can’t stop her from hocking it,” Stoat said, getting up.

  “End of last year she opened up a line of credit, sliding limit.” He picked up the empty beer bottles and headed for the kitchen. “Lets her borrow up to the amount of market equity we’ve got in this property—which the bank’s appraiser told us, this surprised me, is lots more’n we paid for it. Boston real estate market’s gone nuts.

  “Up to now we haven’t drawn on it, the equity. Had no plans to at the time we took it out. Her argument was that the banks were competing to offer very good deals, one point over prime rate, and if the day ever did come when we needed it for something, maybe fix up the bathrooms, put in a hot tub, when we put the place up for sale—as we surely will someday—to make it sell faster, or to put a down payment on a new place someplace else while we’re waiting for the sale on this one to go through. All we’ll have to do’s make a check out and we’ll have it. No hassle, and a very good rate.” He paused one beat. “And the clincher was,” he said, “the interest that you pay on it’s just like the regular mortgage—tax deductible.”

  The Hitachi showed a young man in a yellow slicker standing on a wharf around midday, holding a microphone, his dark hair ruffled by the wind. There was a battered dark green fishing trawler tied up on his right and a white one tied up on his left. “What New England fishermen are saying is that unless foreign pressures on the cod fisheries can somehow be reduced, this important species will fairly soon become extinct.”

  Stoat took two more Harpoons from the refrigerator and put them on the counter. “Sounded reasonable to me, then,” he said. “It sure doesn’t now. She made it very clear to me, ’fore she went to Memphis, that if dear old Wallace didn’t make thoughtful provisions for each of his dear former wives, what she’s going to do is write one of those checks. If it comes to it—which it will, once she starts—right up to the limit of our current equity.”

  “Which’d be?’ Farrier said.

  “In the current boom market,” Stoat said, opening the beers, “with low mortgage rates, she guesses it’d come to at least eighty grand, and since that sort of thing is her stock in trade, my guess’d be her guess is right.”

  “So if one of those two things you mentioned goes wrong, and she loses her bet on the options, she can put you in the hole for eighty grand,” Farrier said.

  “Already did,” Stoat said, coming back into the living room. “Go wrong, I mean. The wheels started coming off the Russian wagon a year or so ago. The country was broke, had to raise cash. They’ve got some of the world’s richest mineral deposits, so they did the obvious thing and started digging faster, flooding world markets with metals. Now all of a sudden Lily’s call-prices on metals futures’re higher’n the price of actual metals. The calls aren’t worth anything, and there doesn’t seem to be any real prospect they will be, two, three months from now.” He put the beers on the coffee table and sat down
again in the chair, crossing his legs.

  “But you’ve at least got those sixty days to think of something else,” Farrier said, leaning forward and refilling his glass.

  “No, we haven’t,” Stoat said. He uncrossed his legs and leaned forward, taking the other beer and refilling his glass. “The stock she hocked was a five-thousand share lot of Advanced Extrusions, at the time worth eleven bucks a share. They invented, and patented, a new and much cheaper way to make the heavy-duty molded fittings that secure the electrical wiring harnesses in motor vehicles. So they don’t flop around and chafe, short out. Revolutionary—enabled General Motors to cut the average cost of manufacturing passenger vehicles by about three bucks and quarter. Times hundreds of millions of cars and trucks every year? Pretty easy to see why that stock took off. And AdEx was just one of Lily’s many brilliant investments—she bought at the initial offering price of four and three-quarters.

  “Of course it’s also pretty easy to see why AdEx’s now down almost half last year’s peak value. This year GM’s been on strike and so AdEx earnings’re down. GM’ll go back to work, so AdEx’s still one to hang onto—closed yesterday six-and-a-half. But five thousand times six dollars and a half is thirty-two thousand five; the loan she hocked it for is for fifty grand. She’s got until Monday to cover.”

  “So she needs seventeen-five,” Farrier said.

  “Not exactly,” Stoat said. He put the bottle back on the table and drank some beer.

  “Well, twenty grand then, whatever,” Farrier said. “They want extra margin, have her sell some other stock. But whatever you do, don’t hock your house.”

  “Ah, she won’t do it that way,” Stoat said, his face a map of misery. “She says even though real estate’s looking very strong now, the stocks in her portfolio will appreciate at least twice as fast in a year as this condo will. More likely, she thinks, they’ll triple.” He paused one beat. “She includes AdEx in that calculation.”

  “So borrow more on the stocks then,” Farrier said. “Makes more sense’n risking your house.”

  “I agree,” Stoat said, “but she won’t do that either. And maybe I didn’t make it clear enough—when she says the contents of her portfolio will triple in the coming year, she’s including AdEx in her expectations. ‘GM strike won’t last forever,’ she says. ‘Six months after it ends, AdEx earnings’ll be back at least to where they were, probably higher—answering pent-up demand, and the price’ll go up again.’ ”

  “So?” Farrier said.

  “So she’s not planning to sell AdEx to offset the loan,” Stoat said. “It’s the whole fifty grand she plans to pay back with the equity line.” He took a long drink.

  “Jesus,” Farrier said. “So that means unless you find some other way to come up with fifty grand, you’re going way back from where you started when you bought the house, far’s paying off your mortgage is concerned.”

  “Damn betchah,” Stoat said. “We shopped around and got a twenty-year eight-point-five mortgage. I’ve paid in roughly thirteen thousand on it. I figure about half of that’s been interest. So if she does what she says she plans to do, by the end of next week we’ll be about a hundred-and-fifty-one thousand in debt—instead of the hundred-and-one we are this week, or the hundred-and-eight we owed when I started making payments.” He drank some beer. “You can see why I don’t want to do that.”

  “It’d amount to …” Farrier said, drinking some beer; he coughed. “What it’d amount to’d be that after making payments for the past year, you haven’t gotten closer to payin’ off the mortgage. You haven’t even treaded water, stayed in the same place—she’s puttin’ lead boots on your feet, sinking you further, a lot further. Transferrin’ the money you’ve been puttin’ into, and’ll have to keep puttin’ into, the house, out of the house and into her stock account.”

  “Precisely,” Stoat said.

  “Which is, of course, in her name,” Farrier said.

  “That’s right,” Stoat said, “her name sole.”

  They sat drinking beer and considering the matter, oblivious to the Hitachi and the young woman with short dark hair in the navy blue suit with a white blouse and flowered scarf standing with a microphone brightly lighted for TV against the blue surrounding evening next to a small white wooden sign outside a three-story brick building. In the center of the sign there was a blue and gold Commonwealth of Massachusetts seal above black block letters reading “STATE POLICE BLUE HILLS DIVISION.”

  She said, “State Police still aren’t commenting on what sources say was a series of arrests made late this afternoon and earlier this evening at a number of locations, at least one of them in nearby Randolph and throughout Norfolk and Bristol counties. Reports that what’s involved is a truly bizarre story—an elaborate scheme involving as many as a dozen people, some of them terminally ill, many of them cancer patients, to obtain painkilling prescription drugs using counterfeit prescriptions. Norfolk County District Attorney …”

  “So,” Farrier said at last, “the metals options she bought are worthless and they’re going to stay that way. It happens. Lily’s a smart investor, made a lot of good deals, but every smart investor makes a bad deal now and then, and this’s one of hers. Too bad, but it’s a bad deal she made, not you.

  “So, let her cry in her beer. You forget about it. What you need to do is stop her from fobbing her bad deal off onto you. To do that you need someone who will lend you twenty thousand dollars—not fifty—to cover her margin account. For as long as it takes for this AdEx stock to bounce back, which she says will not be long. After which she’s going to withdraw the twenty grand from her account and give it back to you, and you in turn are going to pay it back to the guy who loaned it to you.”

  “She won’t agree to that,” Stoat said, grieving, shaking his head. “She’ll say, ‘No, I won’t do that. I’m writing the check.’ ” He drank some beer.

  “And at which point you will say,” Farrier said, grinning at him, “ ‘If you do that, sweetheart, darling, then I hope you’ve either got some income stream that you’ve been keeping secret from me, or else come fall you won’t mind moving. Because I’ve made my last payment on this house that I don’t own, and I ain’t gonna make no payments whatsoever on that new loan for fifty grand. So, unless you start making those payments I’ve been making every month that you’re now gonna piss away, you’ll be in arrears in thirty days, and in default before foreclosure—Veterans Day’d be my guess.’ ” Farrier grinned. “Think she’ll write that big check then?”

  Stoat’s eyes showed some life and he managed a small smile, but he shook his head again. “You’re brilliant, Jack, you’re brilliant—and you’ve got an evil mind. No wonder you get along so well with the crooks and the hoods and the gangsters. But you’re overlooking something. I don’t have a banker who’ll give me a twenty-thousand-dollar unsecured loan until the stock market improves. Federal employees credit union won’t give me that kind of money. They’d tell me either to withdraw it from my retirement account or use it for collateral—both of which would amount to withdrawal and neither of which I will do.

  “And I’m not from around here; I don’t have the kind of long-established personal reputation, family ties, that if I’d stayed in Tennessee where I grew up and my family’s always been, I could maybe call upon to get a private personal loan. I’ve been sort of a nomad. I don’t have anybody here who’s got that kind of money, and either knows me well enough, or owes me big enough to do me that big a favor.”

  “Sure you do,” Farrier said. “They’re on their way here for dinner.”

  Stoat’s eyes opened wide and his mouth hung open. He closed it, licked his lips and swallowed. “Jesus H. Christ, Jack,” he said. “I can’t take money from those guys—the only reason I don’t say which felony it’d be is because I don’t know which crime to call it. Extortion? Soliciting bribes? Corrupt practices? Any one of them, for damned sure—probably at least a dozen more. Hell, the two of us here—we’ve probably al
ready committed a crime, and a serious one, conspiracy, minimum, you by suggesting I do such a thing and I by even considering it. One overt act now and that’s all it would take—guilty as Lucifer, the pair of us.”

  He shook his head vehemently. “No, no, no and no, Jack—I couldn’t possibly do that.”

  “Darren,” Farrier said, “you’re forgetting something. We haven’t committed a crime at all, and we won’t have if you take my advice. It isn’t a crime if nobody knows about it. It never becomes one until someone finds out. The only way anyone ever finds out is if someone involved in it tells them. Who in this scenario of yours——”

  Stoat shook his head again vigorously, saying “No” again.

  “On the contrary, yes,” Farrier said. “The idea of floating a loan from the lads has been on your mind for some time. It isn’t new to you, and it did not come from me. All I had to do was hint at it, and you knew exactly where I was going. Couldn’t wait to denounce it, because the temptation’s so strong. It may scare you some—I don’t doubt that—but it doesn’t surprise you at all. The idea of floating a loan from the lads didn’t come into this room tonight out of my mind, my friend. It came out of yours.

  “But, since you had the idea, and you are tempted by it, enough to invite my opinion, let me put on the finishing touches. If there’s no crime unless somebody tells, who in your scenario’s gonna do that? Certainly we’re not gonna tell—not unless we lose our minds. And what would make Nick or Arthur tell? It’d be against their interest too, to make such a claim. In the first place, no one’d believe them. And if anyone ever did, all we’d have to do’d be let it be known that we’re about to get them indicted for all kinds of bad acts. Then say, ‘What do you expect? They’re criminals, for Pete’s sake, pulling the usual criminal dodge—telling lies about us to stay out of jail.’ And that would be the end of them.”

  Stoat licked his lips. The Hitachi showed various views of a BMW 328 sedan being driven at high speed along a mountain road while a male voice-over assured listeners the car cost less to buy than the road to build. It was 7:41. The doorbell played “Dixie.” “Annnnd … showtime,” Farrier said.