01 the dead cat bounce, p.8
01 - The Dead Cat Bounce, page 8
they might be better off in some other setting. A more
controlled," I emphasized, "setting."
Her lip curled. "Ellie wouldn't let them." It was
her mantra whenever unpleasantness threatened, and it
always made me want to throttle her.
But now was my chance to put her on notice that
her reign of terror might be ending, and if it was, she
had better watch out for me. "Ellie might not be able to
stop it."
A flicker of alarm showed in Hedda's malevolent
eye. Just then the pocket door slid open again and Ellie
reappeared.
"You took long enough," Hedda snarled, then glanced
warily at me. "And I hope," she modulated, "it was a
fine conversation."
Mission accomplished, I thought.
"Not exactly," Ellie said. "Jake, that was Mrs. McIlwaine,
and she says ..."
The tie pin; I'd forgotten it completely.
"Bob Arnold told her you might be here," Ellie went
on, "and she's worried about where her husband's pin
has gone. I guess," she added uncomfortably, "she
thought I'd be gone by now, too."
Of course the news about Ellie's confession was
already all over town. Arnold wouldn't have talked
about it, but the deputy and the state cop would, and in
Eastport news travels fast. And although the weather had
given us a brief reprieve, very soon now the story would
be all over the country.
"Gone where?" Hedda demanded. She was going to
go ballistic when she found out. I felt torn between
hoping not to be around when it happened, and wanting
to be, for Ellie's sake.
"Who's that?" Hedda's look of anxiety ratcheted up
to alarm as footsteps sounded on the porch, a man's
shape moved across the frosted glass of the panes at
either side of the front door, and the brass knocker rattled
as Bob Arnold let himself in.
"Hello? Anybody home?"
"Oh, the police!" Hedda struggled up theatrically.
"Why is he here?"
Ellie took three swift steps, put her hands on her
mother's shoulders, and replaced her in her chair.
"Now, you sit there," she said, in a low, fierce tone I
had never heard from Ellie before.
Hedda's eyes filled with tears; her lip began trembling.
It was a wonderful act, but this time Ellie was having
none of it.
"No shouting," she instructed. "No getting up. And if
you hit anything with that cane, I'll take it away from
you and burn it."
She turned to me, visibly composing herself. "Jake,
will you please stay here with my mother for a little
while? I need to talk to Arnold before the rest of them get
here."
"The rest of who?" Hedda asked tensely, cranking up
the drama--but without, I noticed, budging from her
chair.
"But. . . the tie pin." All at once I badly wanted it out
of my possession; it seemed such an evil little icon of
everything that was happening.
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 McIlwaine 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 super stores 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 McIlwaine; then Ellie
went home and told Hedda and Alvin that McIlwaine
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 in 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
