The Dead Cat Bounce

by Sarah Graves

  Ellie’s calm fled. “Oh, the hell with the damn tie pin. Can’t anyone just do what I want, for once?”

  It was the most refreshing thing I’d heard from her since the whole unpleasant business began. “Why, Ellie,” I said, “I believe you may be growing a spinal cord.”

  She made a face at me—there had never been any doubt about the existence of Ellie’s spinal cord, only its activity in Hedda’s presence—and went to have her chat with Arnold out in the dining room, while Hedda sat trembling furiously but so far obediently.

  “Hedda,” I said, “I think I’d better tell you—”

  “I know what I need to know,” she spat, her eyelids lowered balefully, but I noticed that from beneath them her gaze kept returning to the door of the dining room.

  There was something repulsively stagy about her distress—her frightened outrage, expertly mingled with a touch of frailty; heartrending, if you didn’t know her—as if the whole point of a man with an ice pick in his head was to illustrate something about her.

  “And it’s all your fault,” she complained, “you’re a very bad influence, and I don’t mind saying I think you should pack up your things and go back to wherever it was you—”

  With any luck, I thought, she would just drop dead.

  “You know Threnody Mcllwaine has been murdered,” I told her flatly, “but what you don’t know is that Ellie has confessed to the crime. She’ll be charged with it soon, and you need to be prepared for considerable uproar. The house will be examined, of course. There’ll be an investigation.”

  Hedda’s face smoothed as if it were made of wet plaster and someone had gone over it with a skimming trowel. I’d seen the same shocked reaction before, in other contexts; informing people that their financial lives have fallen into ruin, for example, that they have come to me too late and must now sell the racehorses, the jewels, the paintings, and the speedboats has a similar effect.

  “Ellie,” Hedda repeated slowly, “charged with his murder.”

  She got up, seeming to look past me into the distance, but when I turned, it was one of the old photographs she was staring at: Hedda, all made up like a movie star, and a famous gangster, now deceased.

  “The snow has given us time,” I said, still waiting for the explosion; I have seen Hedda apoplectic at the discovery of a dry-cleaning error. “If it weren’t for that, they’d have been all over the place by now. But they will come, and soon.”

  “Ellie,” Hedda murmured. She tottered, and nearly fell.

  Fortunately I caught her—she timed her collapse to put me conveniently within reach; she shall have drama wherever she goes, I thought—and it didn’t take long to revive her. We propped her on the sofa with a pillow under her feet, and her eyelids began fluttering almost immediately. Tucking the gold brocade dressing gown in around her legs, I noticed the old scars marring her ankles. But I didn’t stop to think much about them, too worried about what might happen next to give thought to what must, after all, be ancient history now.

  Alvin hovered on the periphery, frowning and clasping his pale hands together, shooting anxious, communicative glances at me. Clearly he was torn between his concern for Hedda and a desire to get me away from her as quickly as possible, and into the privacy of his office; we ex-hotshot financial disaster-management specialists can just sense these things.

  Meanwhile I remained readied for the blast: it was a favorite trick of Hedda’s, collapsing in distress to draw people near, then erupting when everyone was conveniently within killing range.

  But the explosion never came. Hedda’s first words when she could speak again were so out of character that I thought she must have suffered a stroke.

  ““Ellie,” she said, in mild tones that I had never heard out of Hedda before, and I was willing to bet Ellie hadn’t, either. “My dear, I support you completely.”

  She did, too, only not in the way I thought, until the end.

  Or almost the end.

  10

  Once we got Hedda settled and the terrible wig had been straightened once more over her hair, I followed Alvin into his office and closed the pocket doors behind me. He had a story to tell, I could see by the way he had set out his financial records on a long oaken table, the ledgers and folders with covers laid open in the soul-bearing, confessional way desperate people arrange when they have decided to fling themselves on the mercy of somebody like me.

  Alvin was older than Hedda, well into his seventies: a stoop-shouldered man with bushy grey eyebrows, pink cheeks, and a bald, freckled head. Wearing a white shirt, bow tie, and blue knitted cardigan, he resembled a retired attorney or college professor, neither of which he was. Instead he had run the town lumberyard for half a century, inheriting it from his father and operating it until it closed, a victim of superstores and a dwindling regional economy.

  I found his frankness touching, and after a moment’s thought, frightening. Alvin’s reserve was ordinarily implacable, a wall of quiet dignity and privacy behind his courtly manners.

  But not today. I thought about the previous evening’s sequence of events: first we found Mcllwaine; then Ellie went home and told Hedda and Alvin that Mcllwaine was dead. But she’d told only Alvin about confessing to the crime herself, perhaps for fear of Hedda’s reaction.

  “Thren and I were arguing yesterday,” Alvin said. “About this, and I’m afraid Ellie must have overheard us.”

  Then he sat in silence while I turned the pages of his books. The records spanned decades, but absorbing them didn’t take long; they were impeccably kept and he had opened them to all the right sections, so the important parts jumped out at me. When I was finished, I had two clear thoughts:

  First, the charming little fishing village of Eastport was nowhere near as isolated from the world and its sordid workings as I had imagined. The tale Alvin’s books told was connected to one I knew well from The Wall Street Journal, and from ex-colleagues with whom I still kept in touch. And second, Ellie was in more trouble than I’d thought, because the story went like this:

  Once upon a time, in a country far away—but not so far that it didn’t have extradition treaties—an enterprising fellow named Charlie Finnegan discovered some platinum.

  Well, actually, it wasn’t just Charlie; it was his American mining company, and it wasn’t just some platinum. It was a huge deposit, and rich as Croesus according to the core samples analyzed by the geologist Charlie had hired.

  Somewhat later, the geologist jumped off a tall building, or fell, or was pushed; details of the event remain murky. At which point, people began asking why a geologist hired by Charlie, paid by Charlie, and in essence held captive in the middle of a jungle by Charlie (that was where the platinum was, in a jungle in Surinam) would report anything but what Charlie wanted him to.

  Which was that the platinum in the core samples had been drilled from the exploration site. But that, as I say, was later.

  At the time, when the core sample results came in, Charlie’s company immediately went public: people could buy shares in it, for money that Charlie would then use to go back and dig up the platinum. (The geologist, at that point, had not yet fallen, or jumped, or been pushed, off the building.)

  Which was where I entered the tale, peripherally but decisively enough to keep its plot points fresh in my mind: one morning soon after I arrived in Maine, I’d gotten a call from one of my old clients, talking about a new offering of platinum stock he’d heard of and wanting my opinion of the issue.

  I’d never paid much attention to initial public offerings, other than the ones I privately called BFGs: buy, fly, and goodbye. These I chose by asking myself one question: how cool?

  The common stocks of Reebok, Snapple, and Netscape, for example, passed the test; people liked those products in a big, special way: they were popular, yet they felt somehow exclusive. You had to have a certain tuned-in awareness of the culture, an awareness you believed not available to everyone—although of course it was; the culture was saturated i
n these products—to know you were supposed to like them: that they were cool.

  Until they weren’t anymore. One day Sam came home wearing Nikes, drinking Fruitopia, and talking about logging onto AOL (not all on the same day, naturally, but you get the idea). I sold each of my BFGs a quarter before it plunged, and since that era in my financial life there hasn’t been another BFG worth talking about, although I will admit I’ve got my eye peeled for the next Amazon.com.

  But back to Charlie and the platinum stock: Platinum was not cool. Furthermore, I’d known Charlie in the old days when he was finding other platinum, along with silver and gold and the gemstones set into them, inside the jewelry boxes of ladies whose houses he entered by crashing parties to which he had not been invited. Charlie was always a persuasive, dashing-looking fellow, a fact that helped him get into the houses in the first place, and one that assisted him also at his sentencing hearing—no mention of which appeared in the prospectus of his new company.

  I advised my ex-client to avoid the stock; if what he wanted was to lose his money, I said, he could do it by visiting the racetrack. But this was a decidedly contrarian opinion at the time; Charlie had enlisted one of the best underwriters in New York to assist him in his capital-amassing project. Pretty soon everybody who was anybody was on board: investment companies, pension funds, all the big opinion writers in the financial newspapers, here and abroad.

  Nobody seemed to care that there was no independent assay of the core samples, or that a mysterious gang of thugs had destroyed Charlie’s office trailers, or that the government of the country where the site was located had jacked up its permit fees. The point was, the platinum was there and they were going to get rich.

  Until the geologist took his fall, and they weren’t getting anything. It was a debacle of massive proportions, one all the big names on Wall Street claimed they had gotten safely out of before the crash came.

  They hadn’t. Charlie had hoodwinked them all. Many individual investors got badly burned, too. One was my ex-client, who ignored me. Another, according to his books, turned out to be Alvin. But that wasn’t the most remarkable thing in Alvin’s financial records.

  “These are all your brokerage statements?”

  He nodded, and I paged back through them: listings of stocks he’d bought and sold over the years, the prices he’d paid and what he’d gotten. Twice, he’d taken enormous fliers on small companies, selling everything to acquire huge holdings in unpromising-looking little businesses no one had ever heard of.

  It was most emphatically not what I would have advised. Sailing out onto the perilous sea of a single holding—instead of a well-managed, well-diversified set of investments—may be fine for young men with whole lifetimes ahead in which to recover from their errors. But it is not recommended for fellows like Alvin, who by their forties should be constructing deep, tranquil ponds of financial security upon which to float their golden years.

  Contrary to this wisdom, Alvin had sold everything in his portfolio—mutual funds, T-bills, municipal bonds with coupons so generous they were to die for—to amass his risky positions.

  And he had done it twice. What happened after that had me squinting at the statements in disbelief:

  Each time, the shares had begun their plunge soon after Alvin bought them. He had ridden them stubbornly into the cellar. His losses had been huge, and not all on paper, either. He’d sold big blocks, probably to keep his cash flow going; some of the things he’d held earlier were income producers, utility companies with interest-bearing nuclear exposures, and pharmaceutical blue chips.

  But then, just when his buys started edging into free-fall, the stocks began rising. And the reason it was all so amazing to me was this:

  Stocks do not generally crash without warning, all at once. Instead the collapse comes in stages: first the insiders sell, then guys who are watching the insiders, then people who are primed to get out at certain levels or who have entered stop-losses, and finally the general public. This results in predictable waves of selling: not a single plunge but a series of definitive drops.

  Now, if you look at the chart of a stock that has suffered a collapse, you will see that at the bottom of each drop there is a small uptick, a rise in the price. This uptick, representing the smart money getting out because it knows what is coming, and fools getting in because they don’t, is known as the dead cat bounce, so-called because if you drop a dead cat off a skyscraper the cat will bounce, too, but the movement doesn’t mean the cat is alive.

  Alvin had done the impossible: he had bought dead cats and survived them, not once but twice. In each case the market for the stock had revived with a vengeance, and Alvin had made a killing.

  But then came the third time: Finnegan’s platinum company.

  On that one, Alvin had gotten killed, and it was Mcllwaine’s fault.

  I turned back to the beginning of the books. There were small mysteries in them and I wanted Alvin to explain them to me. But Alvin had come to the end of his patience, waiting for me to decode his financial doings—and, as it turned out, Threnody Mcllwaine’s deep involvement in them. Now Alvin wanted to talk about Ellie and the events on the morning of Mcllwaine’s murder.

  I sat and listened to Alvin for a long time.

  “So, can you help me hide this?” he wanted to know when he was done, meaning the information in his ledgers. “Because,” he finished, “it’s all going to look so bad for her.”

  Alvin was a sweetheart, but nobody was going to mistake him for Mr. Wizard. Gently, I explained to him that mocking up a whole new financial history was beyond even my considerable ability, and advised him to keep quiet unless someone asked a direct question. It was the best I could do for him under the circumstances, but I could tell he didn’t think it was good enough. I didn’t, either.

  As I was leaving, I met Bob Arnold in the hall, looking like a mile of bad road. From his red-rimmed eyes and unshaven face, it was obvious he’d been up all night. He was leaving, too.

  “Alvin say anything pertinent?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I lied. “He’s pretty shaken up.”

  Arnold nodded, undeceived. I was sure he could tell from my face that Alvin had said plenty. But Arnold was patient.

  “Well, it’ll all come out in the wash, I guess. Anyway it’s out of my hands now. State people are on the way.” He glanced at the window. “Storm’s layin’ off a tad.”

  “Did she tell you anything,” I asked, meaning Ellie, “about how she did it, or where?”

  In other words, could she substantiate her story?

  I already had a why. It had been in the tale Alvin had told me, and it was a beauty: that Threnody Mcllwaine had ruined Alvin White as surely as if he’d taken a hatchet to him, because Alvin’s disastrous investing had been on Mcllwaine’s advice. But I wasn’t going to volunteer it, which Arnold understood; let someone who questioned Alvin on an official basis get the why out of him.

  He shook his head. “Won’t. She did say it happened here, which if I’d known, I’d have had to seal the place off. I guess she didn’t want that. Wanted a last night, here, what I figure.’

  Sighing, he added, “Too late now. Scene’s all contaminated. Plenty of people’re gonna be mad about that, but hell, it’s water under the bridge. I know Janet Fox was here with Hedda, they were upstairs together, and Mcllwaine was down here in the office with Alvin. As for the rest, Ellie says she’ll tell it all at one time, not string it out in dribs and drabs.”

  Arnold looked miserable. “What a mess. And on top of the Lubec thing, too.”

  “They find them?” The drowned men from the dragger, I meant.

  “Yeah. One of ’em.” He added a few details. “I saw Wade coming off the boat. Said it was bad. Tide and waves, knocked the body around some, before they spotted it.”

  “But why did those guys go out last night in the first place? They must have known the weather had gotten too bad.”

  “Well, a boat’s a big investment.
Fellow wanted to save it. Other fellows, I supposed they’d promised to help. That’s the way of it, sometimes, on the water. You do what you say you’ll do. Plenty of times, you squeak through. Skin of your teeth.”

  And other times not. Arnold shrugged his parka on, pulled his earflaps down over his ears. “Bad day all around,” he said, going out the front door.

  When he was gone I stood in the hall, thinking it over. Alvin was still in his office, and Ellie and Hedda were upstairs in Hedda’s room; I could hear their footsteps over my head.

  Outside the snow had stopped falling in honest, steady bucketsful; instead, it sneaked down. One minute a few sly flakes floated from the sky, and in the next another inch had accumulated, everything coated in white again.

  Until I talked with Arnold I hadn’t been sure what to do next, but now I was. Helping Ellie was going to require some thought before I could take action. And that tie pin, I decided, could wait.

  Instead I went home and got my own gun from the lockbox Wade had built in the corner of my cellar, zipped it along with some other things into my backpack, and walked downtown through the shrouding, deceitful snow to the Federated Marine building.

  11

  Federated Marine was a no-frills, white-painted frame structure on the north end of the waterfront, overlooking Deer Island. Outside, it seemed to blend into the snow falling in bursts from a squall that had whipped up over the water. Inside, its walls were plastered with navigation charts.

  “Want to go shooting?”

  Wade looked up from his battered, grey metal desk. His face, ordinarily so good-humored, was drawn and disconsolate.

  “Yeah.” He pulled on his heavy parka and strode out of the building ahead of me without another word.

  We got into his pickup, a rusting Toyota with a cherry beacon on the dash and a marine-band radio mounted on the console. The squall of a moment earlier had dissolved as suddenly as it came, and now the background snow had begun slacking off as well, the wind gusting up only to settle again into a damp, steady blow that was moving the storm’s first blast out to sea.