Timothy's game

“I don’t understand.”

“Not important. You interested or aren’t you?”

“You really think something is going down with those short sales?”

“Oh, yeah. There’s frigging in the rigging.”

“All right,” the ADA says, “I’ll get someone to fill in for me over here, and I’ll be at your place in an hour. Now are you happy?”

“Creaming,” Cone says.

He’s there in a little more than an hour, his rubberized raincoat streaming and his red hair plastered to his skull. “Aw,” Cone says, “did you get caught in the rain?” McDonnell stares at him. “You’re a real comedian, aren’t you?”

He’s a young guy, broad and beefy. He looks as if he might have been a hotshot in college football but didn’t have the moves or speed to make pro. But he’s still in good shape: flat belly, hard shoulders, a jaw like a knee, and hands just slightly smaller than picnic hams.

“Where can I hang my raincoat?” he asks.

“Throw it on the floor,” Cone says. “That’s what I do.”

But the ADA sits down in the armchair in his wet coat. He pulls out a clean white handkerchief and swabs his dripping hair. “All right,” he says, “let’s stop playing games. What’ve you got?”

Cone takes him through the whole thing: How Haldering was hired to investigate sabotage at Dempster- Torrey factories; how he, Cone, decided the motive was to bring down the price of the common stock so short- sellers could profit; how he suspects that David Dempster might be the knave behind the manipulation.

“David Dempster?” McDonnell says sharply. “The brother of the guy who got scragged?”

“That’s right.”

“You think he had anything to do with John Dempster’s death?”

“How the hell would I know?” Cone says. “I’m just a lousy private eye interested in industrial sabotage.”

“What have you got on David Dempster?”

“He runs a two-bit PR operation from a small office on Cedar Street, but his net worth is like four mil. That’s got to tell you something-right?”

“Unless he inherited it.”

“That I doubt. But you can check it out.”

McDonnell looks at him a long time, eyes like wet coal. “It stinks,” he says finally.

“Sure it does,” Cone agrees. “A dirty way of making a buck.”

“That’s not what I mean,” the ADA says. “I mean your story stinks.”

The Wall Street dick jerks a thumb toward the door. “Then take a walk,” he says. “Sorry to have wasted your time.”

“Jesus, what a hard-on you are! Can you blame me for doubting you? What the hell have you given me? A lot of numbers on a computer tape. Those short sales could have been lucky guesses and you know it. All you’ve said is that you ‘suspect’ David Dempster might be finagling it. Where’s your hard evidence?”

Cone shrugs. “Take it for what you think it’s worth. It’s your decision.”

McDonnell leans forward to slam a meaty palm down on the desk. “Goddamn it!” he cries. “You’re holding out on me and I know it. You want to be charged with obstruction of justice?”

“Be my guest,” Cone says. “I’ll be delighted to see you make a fucking idiot out of yourself-if you’re not one already.”

They lock eyeballs, both infuriated. It’s Hamish McDonnell who blinks first. “Can’t you give me anything to go on?” he says hotly. “Anything at all that will make me think you’re just not blowing smoke.”

“Yeah,” Cone says, “I can give you something. Three names. Two guys and a company. They’re all hotshot financial advisers, with pension and trust funds to diddle. They’re the weasels who are financing this scam. There may be others, but these three are in it up to their pipiks.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t. You want the names or not?”

The ADA groans. “Give me the goddamned names,” he says.

It turns out that Cone’s ballpoint pen has run dry and he can’t find a clean piece of paper to write on. So his triumph is somewhat diminished by having to borrow McDonnell’s pen and a sheet torn from his pocket notebook.

“You’re a winner, you are,” the ADA says. “How do you get across the street-with a Boy Scout?”

Cone jots down the three names provided by Neal Davenport. “You won’t have any trouble getting addresses,” he tells McDonnell. “They’re all well-known operators on Wall Street. And listen, do me a favor and do yourself a favor, get moving on this fast. These bums are planning another trick. It’s going down right now.”

“Yeah? And how do you know that?”

“You’ll have to take my word for it.”

“Seems to me I’m taking your word for a helluva lot.”

“What do you want-a list of personal references?”

“This is going to take a lot of work, and if-”

“Bullshit,” Cone says. “You pick up these chiselers, sweat them a little, tell them you’ve got all the facts and figures on their smelly deals with David Dempster, and I guarantee at least one of them is going to crack. He’ll spill his guts to wangle a lesser charge. Wall Street villains are not stand-up guys; you know that.”

“If you’re scamming me on all this, Cone, I’m going to come back to this shithouse and personally take you apart. And believe me, I can do it.”

“Maybe,” Timothy says.

Hamish McDonnell rises and buttons his raincoat. He makes no effort to shake hands, and neither does Cone.

“And don’t call me,” the ADA says. “I’ll call you when and if I’ve got something.”

Cone leans back and lights a cigarette. He figures McDonnell for a tough nut who’s not afraid to use the muscle of his office to get the job done. That’s okay; the pinstriped types will find themselves confronted by a heavyweight with none of the deference of their golf club pros or private nutritionists.

He pulls on his leather cap and leaves the office. He discovers the rain has stopped. But the sky is still leaden with drizzle. He curses his stupidity for not having driven to work that morning. He tries to find an empty cab and fails. Damning the weepy day, he starts the long hike back to his loft, convinced there’s no productive work to be done in the office.

It’s true that he persuades other people to do his job for him. Neal Davenport, Jeremy Bigelow, and now Hamish McDonnell-all cooperate, but only because they believe it’s to their own profit. Everyone acts out of self- interest-right? Because self-interest is the First Law of Nature. You could even make out a case that a guy who devotes his whole life to unselfish service-like spooning mulligatawny into hopeless derelicts or converting the heathen-is doing it for the virtuous high it gives him.

But even assuming that no one acts without an ego boost, there’s a very practical problem Cone has in farming out his investigative chores. Once he’s done it, all that’s left for him is twiddling his thumbs-or anything else within reach. No use leaning on his helpers; that would just make them sore and earn him static. So there’s nothing for him to do but be quietly patient-which is akin to asking a cannibal to become a vegetarian.

These rank musings occupy his mind during his sodden toddle back to his cave. There he finds that Cleo, apparently surfeited with garlic salami, has upchucked all over the linoleum.

He spends the remainder of that day futzing around the loft, smoking too many cigarettes and drinking too much vodka. He goes over the caper a dozen times in his mind, looking for holes in the solution. No holes. Then he wonders if another meet with Dorothy Blenke or Eve Bookerman would yield anything of value. He decides not.

In the evening, warned by what happened to Cleo, he shuns the salami and opens a can of pork and beans.

“Beans, beans, the musical fruit,” he sings to the cat. “The more you eat, the more you toot.”

He finishes the can (eaten cold), leaving just a smidgen for the neutered tom, figuring to give the poor creature’s stomach a rest. Then he gets caught up on his financial newspapers and magazines, devouring them with the avidity of a baseball maven reading box scores. Wall Street is his world, and he’s long since given up trying to