Black Fridays Page 6

  “Perfect. You are now assigned to me. Sit down. Do you know who I am?”

  “No. I guess you work for Mr. Stockman.”

  “Jason Stafford,” I said. The name meant nothing to him. When I had last been famous, he was probably too busy beer-ponging to have seen my name in the press. “He’s hired me to look into Sanders’ trades. I report only to him.”

  “Okay.” He seemed neither pleased nor displeased. Nor suspicious.

  “What do you think about that?” I found that if I kept focused on him and the task, the walls tended to behave better and keep their distance.

  He hesitated. “About what?”

  “About somebody looking into Sanders’ trades.”

  He shrugged. “He could be pretty secretive. I don’t know. I guess we’ll see.”

  “We will,” I said. “What kind of secrets?”

  He thought for a moment. There was an answer on the tip of his tongue, but he held on to it. When he finally spoke, I felt like I was getting the story he thought I wanted.

  “Well, a lot of the traders like talking about what they’re doing in the market. Like bragging, but not really. Brian never explained. Even if I asked him something straight out, he would give me half an answer at best.”

  “Anything else?” He was holding something back. “It’s all going to come out. Sooner is a lot better than later.”

  “I guess it wasn’t that much of a secret.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Brian was a serious hound. Always in pursuit mode. It got weird sometimes when he was trying to keep all the different girls straight.”

  Ah. That kind of hound. “A player.”

  “Exactly.”

  I had been a virgin when I graduated from high school—having been skipped ahead two years in elementary school and never quite recovered socially. My introduction into the mysteries of the flesh by Meagan Albright occurred during my second year at Cornell. She and I had several brief entanglements, the main purpose of which, as far as I could tell from her monologues on the subject, was to evoke jealousy in the heart of a fellow math major who had spurned her advances. And though I was far from celibate in the intervening years, before I was swept up into a state of slavering, perpetual concupiscence by Angie, I had never been a player.

  The active pursuit of not just one woman at a time but many, with all the schedule and emotional juggling required, seemed more stressful than the job. I had the necessary calculating, predatory reserve, but I channeled it into my work, rather than sexual conquest. There was no jealousy on my part toward those who chose to live that way, no moral outrage, no need to defend the honor of womankind; it was more a sense of disbelief that anyone would devote themselves so single-mindedly to the pursuit of something so ephemeral.

  Angie opened my eyes.

  I looked at the young trading assistant. He seemed more than a bit in awe of Sanders and the games he played. I didn’t hold it against him, but I wanted information.

  “What kind of women? Co-workers? Clients?”

  He shook his head. “Well, not co-workers anyway. But he would get maybe a dozen calls a day from girls. Girls he met at clubs or out at the beach or wherever.” He must have interpreted my interest as shared esteem because he continued. “There were these two Hilton-wannabes at Morgan who kept calling him and he managed to talk them into a three-way one weekend out at his share in Quogue.”

  This was getting me no closer to understanding Sanders’ business or what he may have been up to, and the underlying air of hero worship was pissing me off.

  “Save it. Let’s get back to his trading. What’s in the boxes?”

  “Trade reports. P&L. Notebooks.”

  I nodded. “By tomorrow morning, I need to understand it all, capisce? I’m not a bond guy, so you are going to have to interpret for me.”

  “No problem,” he said.

  I wasn’t sure. The SEC would bring a dozen accountants to wade through that much paper, and a time budget of “as long as it takes.” I had an inexperienced trading assistant and two weeks.

  “I want a list of all the clients Sanders did business with—and the salesmen assigned to them. Then go through every trade and flag anything that looks unusual—for any reason. Really big trades, different products, new accounts, you follow?”

  “No problem. I can get most of it off the computer. I can match it up with the paper trail.” He looked up at the blasting AC vent and tried shifting his chair a bit. It didn’t help.

  “Great. I can use a computer, but there’s a lot I don’t know or don’t have time for. I’m going to be leaning on you a lot. Next, see if you can find any trades that look off the market. Let me see those as well.”

  “That’s going to be trickier. I know what you want—trades where the price doesn’t really line up with where the market was trading at the time, right? I just don’t think I really know his product well enough.”

  “I thought you knew about bonds.” Did I need somebody else?

  “I do. But matching up prices that way could be a problem.”

  “Then leave it for now. We’ll deal with it down the road.” The walls were playing tricks on me, inching in on my peripheral vision, but moving back when I looked right at them. It was time for me to go. I was beginning to shiver—from the cold or my claustrophobia or both. I stood up. “I’ve got someone waiting for me. You and I will get started in the morning around eight-thirty. By tomorrow night I need to know everything you know—and more.”

  “No problem.”

  “And see what you can do about that goddamn vent.”

  “Will do, Mr. Stafford.”

  That made me realize. “By the way, what’s your name?”

  “Frederick Krebs. But everybody pretty much calls me Spud.”

  “As in potato?”

  “It was a fraternity thing . . .” he began.

  “Please,” I stopped him. “Say no more.”

  I WENT HOME to meet my son. It was his first day of school and the nine hours I had spent at Weld was the longest time we had been apart all week. He was why I had kept Stockman waiting—getting him settled in New York had been a bigger priority for me than saving Weld Securities from zealous regulators.

  Not that it had been easy.

  A week before, I was dripping sweat outside the Louis Armstrong Airport in New Orleans, waiting for Enterprise to bring me my Dodge Charger—I had splurged the extra two dollars for the full-sized car. It was high hurricane season, with both temperature and humidity hovering around one hundred, yet the Saturday-morning flight had been almost sold out. Laissez les bons temps rouler.

  Three hours later, I made the turn onto Hoptree Lane and pulled up into the white oyster-shell driveway of Mamma Oubre. The house sat back from the road with a single, ancient live oak dominating the front yard. Spanish moss hung motionless in the still, humid air. I had stopped for a quick lunch and the shrimp and Tabasco were grinding away in my gut—or maybe it was just my system telling me I was afraid of what I was going to find.

  When I opened the car door, the humidity swept in, coating the windows with fog and nearly suffocating me. It was like trying to breathe soup. I wiped off my sunglasses and got out of the car. Mamma came out the front door and stood on the porch. I felt like she had been watching and waiting for me. She looked like she was having a hard time deciding whether to welcome me or warn me off.

  The welcome won. In her part of the world, it almost always wins.

  “Well, isn’t this a nice surprise? Young Jason, all the way from New York City.” Mamma was only five years older than I, but she had become a grandmother at forty-seven. I guessed I would be “Young Jason” for another twenty or thirty years.

  “Is Angie here?”

  Mamma made a slight frown—directness in approa
ch was one step away from rudeness. But she must have forgiven me, either because she was still fond of me or because she recognized that most northerners suffered from the same affliction and it was sinful to think badly of the disabled.

  “Come up here and give me a decent hello. I want a hug and a chaste kiss on the cheek before I let you interrogate me.”

  I did as I was told. We sat under a gently turning overhead fan, on a pair of very tired white wicker chairs, and drank sweet tea—a concoction that seems to lose all of its flavor north of the Mason-Dixon line. On Mamma’s porch that day, it became an elixir. She asked after my father’s health and made me promise to give him her best regards. She renewed her vow to visit New York one day—a vow I had long since learned to ignore. She reminded me that despite her minister’s admonitions about the theater being sinful, she had a much more modern view and would one day dearly love to see a Broadway play.

  “Maybe Hairspray. I did so love the movie.”

  I did my best to be charming—it was really all she wanted of me, as though a bit of pleasant conversation could keep reality at bay. I liked her, despite myself, and I was content to let the antediluvian moment play out. She had married in high school—to a bum whose sole contribution to family harmony was his departure. A year later, as his daughter began kindergarten, he had died in an oil-rig accident. Insurance refused to pay because of the flask in his back pocket, and a blood alcohol level well over the state maximum for operating heavy machinery. Mamma raised two children—Angie and her brother, Tino—on a school cafeteria cook’s salary. Her church, her children, and her spirit kept her going.

  “I know you haven’t come all this way just to keep me company. You may ask me about Angie now, but I really don’t know how much I can tell you. She comes by on most weekends, and takes Jason for an hour or so, but she doesn’t really stay to visit. She has some friends down to Morgan City, I know.”

  Amid this whirl of hints, misdirection, and polite stonewalling, one fact leaped out at me. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t realized it earlier.

  “The Kid is here? Where? I want to see him.”

  The Kid. My son had resisted almost every other name we had called him. “Jason” was my name, it seemed, and it confused and angered him when we tried to call him that. “Junior” was worse. Angie had called him “Boo,” but she called almost everyone that at one time or another. “Kid” stuck.

  Mamma made a show of looking at her watch. “He’s napping now, but I expect him to be up sometime soon. It’s no good waking him. What they say about sleeping dogs? You know. The boy can be a terror when he gets woked.”

  “I want to see him. I won’t wake him up, but I really need to see my boy.” I had tried to keep the desperation out of my voice, but I was begging.

  Mamma gave a sigh. “All right. But if you wake that boy, let it be on your head. You don’t know what you are asking, young man.”

  The last room on the front of the house had a hook and eye holding the door shut. Mamma quietly flicked it open. I felt a flash of sudden fury. I wanted to know why my son was being locked in like some nasty pet, but Mamma raised a finger to her lips and shook her head. She pushed the door open slowly and I looked into the darkened room.

  Despite the dark curtains and the lack of air-conditioning, the temperature in the room was almost pleasant. A fan hummed in one corner. The furniture was a bevy of hulking shapes in the dark, but the faint light from the hallway fell on the single bed against the far wall. On a wrinkled Star Wars sheet, the top sheet kicked off and bunched around his ankles, lay my son. Angie’s son, because there was no denying her genetic influence. The Kid looked like a miniature replica of his mother. He was beautiful. The round baby face and wispy few strands of platinum hair that I remembered had been transmuted into a delicate, elfin-featured oval, framed by waves of strawberry blond. I wanted to rush in and wrap him in my arms and beg him to forgive me for ever being away from him. Mamma felt my urgency and laid a hand on my arm. She shook her head and pulled the door closed. I swallowed hard and nodded. I could wait.

  I followed her back to the porch.

  “Sit. Sit.”

  “Mamma, why in hell do you keep the boy locked in? What is that about?”

  She winced at my profanity, but not the question. She took my hand. “Oh, Young Jason. Your boy hurts himself. He leaps, he jumps. He thinks he’s flying. If I don’t watch him every minute, he will break an arm, a leg, or his back.”

  Which all sounded to me like things every five-year-old boy tried. I gritted my teeth.

  “And right now,” she continued, “you’re thinking it’s normal. It’s normal for little boys to do things like that, and I won’t say you’re wrong. Only you don’t know your boy. What he does is not normal, and if I don’t keep one hand on him all day, he will find some way to put himself in the hospital.”

  She sat holding my hand and staring into my eyes. The years between us shrank. She wasn’t just my mother-in-law, ex or not. She wanted me to know she was my friend and she understood. I took a breath and a sob escaped, surprising us both.

  “All right, I’m okay. Thank you. You’re right, I don’t know. I’ve read some things—books and articles when I could get them, while I was away. But you’re right. I don’t know.” I had read enough, knew enough, to know that I really didn’t know anything. But I was sure I knew better than some. I would have to bide my time, watch, and decide what to do later.

  “I say prayers for that boy every day,” she said.

  While I don’t believe in the same deity, I recognize that prayers can perform miracles. Sometimes the only miracle is the comfort it gives to the one doing the praying—but that can be enough.

  “I know. Thank you for that, Mamma.”

  “I pray for you and my daughter, too. I thought you could be so good for her. She can be wild, I know. She has some of her father in her that way. But I thought she could find some peace with you. You were so solid.”

  “It was a good front.”

  “I don’t believe that. I don’t know anything about money and all what you do, but I know you are not a bad man, Jason. And I still pray for you.”

  “Thank you.” I didn’t think I was a bad man either, but it was nice to hear someone else say so.

  “But I don’t hold with divorce. It is a sin. I never divorced my husband. What God has joined? Hmmhmm? I don’t believe it was right. And it hurt Angie. She wouldn’t let you see, but it hurt her bad. I could tell.”

  Angie and I had talked it over too many times for her not to have heard what I was saying. Maybe I hadn’t heard what she had to say.

  “I never meant to leave her—or have her leave me. The divorce was just a way of hanging on to some of our money. The Feds took almost everything that wasn’t in her name. The plan was for her to wait and we could start again fresh. If she hadn’t bolted, we would be up in New York waiting on a new marriage license right now.”

  “And so this divorce was just about the money?”

  She understood. “Exactly. The court left me enough to pay my lawyers and I was lucky to get that.”

  She was shaking her head. “Young man, I don’t know why you don’t see. Money only makes it worse. The sin of greed does not excuse the sin of divorce.”

  I felt another sudden rush of anger. It was like trying to talk politics with a Libertarian. Practicality always falls to ideology.

  “Mamma, can we agree on this? I am here and I want to make things right. I want me and Angie to be one again. I want us to have a life together and to try and raise our son—whatever his problems—together.”

  For the first time, she would not meet my eyes.

  “I know how my little girl made money. She posed for those underwear ads wearing nothing but a spot of lace. I can tell you I was most pleased when she found you and stopped all that. And I know she
loved living in the big city and playing at being a sophisticate. But that is not all she is. She is still just an upland Cajun girl who had the looks and got lucky. And when her man divorced her—over money, mind you—she took it very hard. My girl is hurting, Jason.”

  There was something else she wasn’t saying, but at that point I still believed there was some way of rescuing the situation.

  “I need to see her. I need to talk to her. I can’t change what’s past, but I can try to arrange things a bit better for the future.”

  Mamma looked off over the front yard with its sparse, burnt-brown grass and the line of white-painted rocks along the road. She was looking for something that left a long time ago.

  “All right. I will call her. Tell her you’re here. I will even, for all it’s worth, tell her I think she should come here and talk with you.”

  “Thank you.” There wasn’t anything else to say.

  “I’ll fix up a room for you.” She stood up heavily, looking twenty years older than her years. “The boy’ll be up soon.”

  I decided to go for a short run to work out the kinks from traveling all day. I changed in the spare bedroom and briefly stuck my head in the door of the Kid’s room. He had flipped to his other side, facing the wall. His skin was so fair that in that dark room he looked unreal—a ghost of a boy. I closed the door and stood there debating whether to replace the latch. Screw it, I decided. He was my kid and I wouldn’t have him locked up in the dark, like in some nineteenth-century gothic novel. I left it undone and tiptoed down the stairs.

  The late-afternoon heat and humidity were still deadly. I did one eight-minute mile and one twenty-minute stroll back toward the house, staying in the shadows of the live oaks and cedar elms.

  Coming in the front door, I could hear Mamma in the kitchen, softly singing along with some preacher’s choir on the radio. I started up the stairs.

  There was a sudden scurry of footsteps from the landing above and I looked up in time to see the Kid at the top of the stairs. He was humming loudly, a single note, and hopping from one foot to the other, his arms outstretched.