Sally shakes her head in wonderment. “A marvelous operation,” she says. “Nice to have met you, Mr. Bechtold. You ever have any complaints about our service, you just give me a call and I’ll take care of it.”
She goes back to the office and gets to work. First, she finds gimpy Ed Fogleman, who runs the dump.
“Ed,” Sally says, “we got a new customer: Bechtold Printing, on Tenth Avenue. It’s a clean job; practically all their shit is paper. We’ll pick up twice a week. Is there any place we can store the barrels for a day or so before we bale?”
He peers at her, puzzled. “Why do you want to do that, Sal?”
She’s prepared for questions. “Because I got a look at their operation, and they use everything from coated stock to blotting paper. Up to now we’ve been baling everything from good rag to newsprint in the same bundle. I figure maybe we could make an extra buck if we separate the good from the lousy and sell different qualities of scrap paper at different prices.”
“Yeah,” the old man says slowly, “that makes sense. But who’s going to spend the time separating all the stuff? Sounds to me like a full-time job-and there goes your profit.”
“That’s why I want to hold out the Bechtold barrels,” Sally says patiently. “To see if it would be worth our while. Where can I put them temporarily?”
Fogleman chews his scraggly mustache. “Maybe in the storeroom,” he says finally. “I can make space. It’s against fire regulations ’cause we got inflammables in there, but if it’s only for a day or so, who’s to know?”
“Thanks, Ed,” Sally says gratefully. “I’ll get the barrels out as soon as I can.”
She goes back to her office and looks out the window every time a truck rolls into the dump. She goes running when she spots Terry Mulloy and Leroy Hamilton in their big Loadmaster compactor.
“Hey, you paskudniks,” she yells, and they stop. Terry leans out the window.
“Sally baby,” he says, grinning. “You’ve finally decided you can’t resist my green Irish joint.”
“Up yours, moron,” she says. “Listen, I’m revising schedules and pulling you two bums off that chemical plant on Twenty-fourth Street and giving you Bechtold Printing on Tenth Avenue.”
“God bless the woman who birthed you,” Leroy Hamilton says. “That chemical place smells something fierce. Gets in your hair, your clothes; you can almost taste that stink.”
“Yeah,” Sally says, “well, now you’ve got Bechtold. A nice clean job. Practically all paper. Pickups on Tuesday and Thursday. When you get the stuff, keep it in separate barrels and leave them in the storeroom. Ed Fogleman will show you where.”
“What the hell for?” Mulloy asks.
“You know what curiosity did to the cat, don’t you?”
“I don’t know from cats,” he says. “All I know is pussy.”
She gives him the finger and stalks away, followed by their whistles.
On Thursday night, she complains to her father and Judy Bering about having to work late on a couple of workmen’s compensation cases. It’s almost seven o’clock before they leave, and she sees Ed Fogleman drag himself home. Then the dump is almost deserted; only the night watchman is in his hut at the locked gate, flipping through his dog-eared copies of
She goes out to the storeroom, puts on the light, starts digging through the barrels of scrap paper from Bechtold. It’s almost all six-color coated stock. Someone is running a slick annual report, and the discarded sheets are preliminary press proofs with colors out of register and black type too heavy or too faint.
That’s not what she’s looking for. She spends more time with black-on-white proof sheets: documents, proxy statements, prospectuses. Nothing of any interest. She gives up and drives home. The next morning she tells Fogleman to empty the barrels and bale everything.
She goes through the same routine on the following Tuesday evening with similar results. She’s beginning to think her wild idea, her Big Chance, is a dud. But on the next Thursday night she finds some interesting proof sheets on Pistol amp; Burns letterheads. She scans them hastily. They look like a plan for a leveraged buyout of Wee Tot Fashions, Inc. She gathers up all the pages she can find that mention Wee Tot, crams them in her leather portfolio, and drives home to Smithtown, singing along with Linda Ronstadt on her stereo deck.
She stops up to visit with her mother for a while. Then when Becky and Martha settle down for an evening of TV, Sally rushes downstairs to the den. She’s too excited to eat, but pours herself a Perrier before she goes over the Pistol amp; Burns documents scavenged from Bechtold’s scrap. She reads them three times because some of the type is blurred, and she has to use a magnifying glass to make out certain words and phrases.
Then she does swift computations on her pocket calculator. The next morning she calls her stockbroker and sells some of the dogs in the Steiner portfolio, taking a tax loss. But she accumulates enough funds to buy 10,000 shares of Wee Tot Fashions at a total cost of about $48,000, including commission. Have a hunch, bet a bunch.
A week later, after following the market anxiously, she sells out her Wee Tot stake for about $112,000, and is so elated and unbelieving that she doesn’t know whether to weep or laugh.
And a week after that, she’s having a coffee with Judy Bering in the outer office when a tall, thin guy, nicely dressed, walks in and smiles at the two women.
“I’m looking for Sally Steiner,” he says.
“That’s me,” Sally says. “Who are you?”
He hands her a card. “Jeremy Bigelow,” he says. “Securities and Exchange Commission.”
She’s sitting naked on a three-legged kitchen stool, hunching forward.
“I think I’m getting splinters in my ass,” she says.
“Shut up,” Eddie says, “and try to hold that pose. Don’t relax. Make yourself tight and hard.”
She
“When’s Paul coming back?” she asks.
Her brother sighs. “I told you. He’ll ring before he comes up. Don’t get so antsy.”
He continues sketching, using a soft carpenter’s pencil on a pad of grainy paper. He works swiftly, limning her body with quick slashes, flipping pages, trying to catch her solidity, the aggressiveness of her flesh. He was right: She does loom.
After a while she forgets that she’s exhibiting herself in front of her brother and thinks about why she’s there. Because she wants something from him-or rather from his consenting adult, Paul Ramsey.
That visit from the SEC investigator spooked her. The guy wanted to know how come she had sprung for 10,000 shares of Wee Tot Fashions, Inc. Had she heard something? Did someone tell her something? Did she know anyone at Wee Tot? At Pistol amp; Burns? Why, suddenly, did she buy such a big block of that particular equity?
Without pause, she scammed the guy silly. She was proud of that. She wanted to get out of garbage hauling, she told him, and open a store that sold kids’ clothes. She bought Wee Tot to get their annual reports so she could learn more about the business. Besides, she owned a dozen other stocks. She was in the market for kicks.
He departed, apparently satisfied, and Sally went back to her own office. She was sweating. What if Jeremy Bigelow subpoenas Steiner’s customer list and discovers they’re collecting trash from Bechtold, who does confidential printing for Pistol amp; Burns? What if he comes poking around, asking questions of Ed Fogleman, Terry Mulloy, Leroy Hamilton, and learns she’s been putting aside barrels of Bechtold waste? Curtains!
She decides she handled her Big Chance stupidly. Too many people involved, too many potential witnesses. And she purchased the stock in her own name. Idiotic! And she bought 10K shares. That would be a trip wire to alert anyone investigating the possibility of insider trading.
Eddie’s phone rings. Three times. Then stops.
“That’s Paul,” he says. “He’ll be up in about ten minutes. You can get dressed now. I got some good stuff. But I’ll need a couple more sessions.”
“Sure,” she says. “Anytime.”
To her surprise, she finds she’s no longer self-conscious, and when Eddie helps her hook up her bra in back, she thinks it’s a nice, brotherly thing for him to do. By the time Paul Ramsey shows up, Sally is dressed and sipping a glass of their lousy chianti.
Paul is a tall blond with a sweet smile and more teeth than he really needs. He’s got a laid-back manner, and Eddie says that when the world blows up, Paul is going to be the one who murmurs, “Oh, yeah? Cool.”
