JM02 - Death's Little Helpers aka No Way Home Read online

  “You’re really going back in?”

  “I have to. They’re reviewing our contracts tomorrow, and I’ve got people getting ready. They’ll need help.”

  “So it’s going to happen?”

  Jane picked a crab roll from my container. “It’ll happen. It may age me by ten years— but it’ll happen. It’s a great fit for the buyers, a great price for us, and the best thing for the company. It’s a win all the way around. Slide those veggies down here.”

  I did, and helped myself to a skewer of chicken satay. “Are they still asking you to stay on?”

  Jane winced and shook her head. “It’s just a crush,” she said. “They’ll get over it.” She got up and gathered her papers and stacked them on the kitchen counter. She saw the tulips there. “These are pretty.”

  “They’re for you,” I said.

  Jane smiled. She opened a cabinet beneath the counter and came up with shears and a blue glass vase. She slit the wrapping on the tulips and snipped an inch from the bottom of the stems. Her movements were quick and sure. She ran water in the vase and put the tulips in.

  “Nothing they can do to make it worth your while?” I asked.

  “Nope. The buyers are okay, but it’s still a big company and way too much of a boys’ club. There’s no way I’d sign up for that again.”

  After B-school, Jane had done time at a prestigious investment bank and at a big management consulting firm, and both experiences had filled her with a fierce resolve to be always self-employed.

  “Besides,” she said, “it’s been a long year. I’ve got another few weeks on this deal, and all I want afterward is to ride into the sunset.” Jane looked up at me. “Have you thought any more about riding along?” she asked, and the air seemed to thicken between us.

  In the brief reprieves she granted herself from the office and the culmination of her deal, Jane had been planning a very long vacation, and she’d invited me to join her. Guidebooks and travel magazines had been turning up in my apartment for weeks now, and we’d been tiptoeing at the edges of this conversation for almost as long. Each time we did, it was a cautious tug-of-war, a wary testing of resistance and balance over suddenly unstable terrain. And each time left us both a little edgy.

  “Sure,” I said.

  She cocked an eyebrow. “Sure, you’ve thought about it, or sure, you’re coming?”

  “I’ve thought about it. I’m still thinking about it.”

  “Thinking that it’s a good idea?”

  “That it’s a good idea, but …”

  Jane looked down at the flowers. “But what?”

  “But I took a job today, and I don’t know if it’ll be a long one. I have to see how it plays out.”

  Jane pursed her lips and nodded minutely. She stared at the tulips and spent a while rearranging them in the vase. “I guess your trip to Brooklyn went well,” she said eventually.

  “Well enough,” I said, and I told her about my meeting with Nina Sachs and my lunch with Tom Neary. She listened carefully and shook her head when I was through.

  “If it was anyone else, I’d say maybe he’d run off to hide his face in shame. But as it’s Danes, my bet is that some investors bought him a room at the Jimmy Hoffa Hilton.” There was a wry twist to her mouth and I was relieved to see it.

  I laughed. “Do you know the guy?”

  “Just from the stuff in the papers— about Piedmont— and from when he was on Market Minds all the time. I remember the bratty know-it-all attitude. I was actually referring to the whole analyst species.” She opened the fridge and took out a bottle of seltzer. She brought it and two glasses back to the table.

  “You have it in for them on general principle, or do you have a more specific grudge?”

  Jane filled the glasses. She drank from hers and stretched her legs out. “Both, I guess.” I raised my eyebrows, and Jane continued. “I never had illusions about analyst independence. I knew who paid their bonuses and who they were beholden to— and it certainly wasn’t the investing public. I mean, the notion of getting an objective opinion about a company, or an unbiased recommendation about its stock, from somebody who’s essentially a paid pitchman for that company— it’s ridiculous. And even if they weren’t thoroughly compromised, what are their opinions worth anyway? They’re like weathermen. Being right has never been a big part of the job description.” Jane took another drink. She put her right heel on the edge of her seat and rested her arm on her knee. She flexed her toes, and the tendons were taut along the top of her foot.

  “I thought the reforms changed things,” I said.

  Jane shook her head and gave me a sympathetic, silly-boy look. “That’s the party line, I suppose— that the reforms got rid of a layer of conflict by separating the analysts from the investment bankers and separating analyst pay from banking fees. But so what? It’s still the same guys at the top of these firms, deciding who gets paid and how much. If investment banking is important to them, and if they think a certain analyst has helped win business, they’re going to make sure he gets paid for it. Senior management knows it, the investment bankers know it, and so do the analysts— they just try to be a little less brazen these days.”

  She drank some seltzer and shook her head some more.

  “And sure, firms are very careful now about saying so if they do business with a company that their analysts are touting. But telling people about conflicts of interest doesn’t make the conflicts go away. A cynical person might even argue that all this disclosure just gives the firms more cover for the next time around.”

  Jane was relaxed, and her compact body was at ease in the chair, but she nonetheless projected a latent, supple energy— like a coiled spring or a watchful cat. It was in her every fluid motion, and it was even in her voice, in the chords of certainty and confidence of her pleasant contralto. She flexed her fingers, and I watched the muscles shift smoothly in her wrists and forearms.

  “And what’s your personal gripe?” I asked.

  She puckered her lips, as if she’d tasted something sour. “I guess I don’t like being bullied,” she said.

  I thought about that for a while. “It’s hard to imagine anyone trying.”

  Jane gave a humorless laugh. “You’d be surprised,” she said. She drained her seltzer, and I poured another glass. “It was a few years ago, when I was running that little biotech in Cambridge. They’d had some problems— with low production yields and a couple of nasty lawsuits— but we’d sorted those out and the worst was behind us, and we were shopping for a new credit facility. We were talking seriously to three big lenders when, one day, I got a call from an analyst— one of the few who covered the company.

  “I knew him, of course. He was from a big regional firm, and I’d talk to him a couple of times a quarter at least. He was one of those frat-boy-gone-fat types, but he’d always been friendly and reasonably straightforward. That day, it took him a while to get to the point.

  “He started asking about our hunt for new credit, which I had just talked about to a bunch of investors and analysts— including him— two weeks before. I thought he was looking for some inside dope, and I started to explain that I wasn’t going to tell him anything I hadn’t told the group, but he cut me off. That wasn’t what he wanted to talk about, he said, and he started telling me how there were other motivated lenders out there besides the ones we had on our short list. By that point, I was feeling like we were in some very weird territory, but I still had no idea what the guy wanted. Finally, he got to it.

  “He asked if I was aware that his firm was in the lending business too. I said that I was, but that I thought we were getting into an inappropriate area. I tried to end the conversation, but he pretty much ignored me. He said he wasn’t sure I’d considered the big picture, and maybe it was because I was a short-timer— just an interim CEO— that I was ignoring a firm that had always been very supportive of my company. He said that if I kept on ignoring his firm, that support could evaporate. I asked him if b
y support he meant his coverage of the company— his research reports— and he said he’d always known I was a bright girl.”

  “Bright girl?” I said.

  Jane laughed. “I was stunned— as much by his heavy-handedness as anything else.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I thanked him for his advice and hung up, and then I called the vice chairman of his firm. I told him what had happened and pointed out that— just for appearances’ sake— he might want his boy to ease off a little. A few days later the firm announced that our analyst had been promoted and transferred, and they assigned a new paunchy frat boy to cover us. He was dumber than the first guy but quieter. End of story.”

  “Except that you carry a grudge.”

  “I have a long memory.”

  “Duly noted.”

  “I always knew you were a bright boy.” She smiled and glanced down at her watch.

  “You’ve got to get back to the office,” I said. “I’ll put on some clothes and walk you over.” I went into the bedroom and Jane was behind me. She tossed her T-shirt on the bed and stood, backlit, in the doorway. Shadows fell across her small round breasts. Her nipples were dark and hard.

  “Not just yet,” she said softly, and she came across the room and pulled away my towel. Her hands were soft and warm on my body, and so was her mouth. She pushed me down on the bed and wriggled out of the rest of her clothes and lay next to me. Heat came off her in waves. It carried the milky scent of her soap and the faint spice of her perfume, and beneath them both, the tang of her. I breathed deeply, and my heart hammered against my ribs.

  I kissed her and her tongue played slowly in my mouth. I caught the flavors of mint and curry and cilantro. I slid my hands down her back and sides and along her thighs. She shuddered and rolled against me. I kissed her breasts and her belly, and spread her legs and tasted her.

  She said something unintelligible and buried her fingers in my hair and moved her smooth legs against my shoulders. She pressed herself against me, quivering, again and again, and suddenly she twisted out from under me.

  “Not yet,” she whispered. She pushed me over on my back and hooked her leg across my hips and slid on top of me. She took me in her hands and slowly fit herself around me and we lay there, barely breathing. And then she began to move.

  I came out of the oblivion that had taken me, lying sideways across the bed. Jane was beside me, her dark head on my chest, an arm and a leg flung across me. The room was full of her scent and the heat of her body. In the dim light, I watched the slow rise and fall of her back, the faint flutter of her eyelids, and the tiny random movements of her bow-shaped mouth. I ran my finger lightly along her hairline, just above her right temple, and felt the small ripples there, invisible to the eye— the wake of the bullet that had grazed her last year. Jane opened her eyes and looked at me for a long while before she spoke.

  “No harm done,” she said softly. I wanted to believe it.

  3

  Find the real estate. Find the cars. Look for criminal records and civil suits. Get the phone bills. Check the hospitals. Check the morgues. Every missing persons case is different, but every one begins the same way. It’s like the opening gambit in a game of chess, and if your missing person isn’t actually in hiding— or isn’t any good at it— play can often stop soon after. I spent much of the morning making these moves, and thanks to the marvels of technology and the wonders of outsourcing, I could do it all without leaving home.

  I put a Charlie Haden disc on the stereo, filled a mug with coffee, powered up my laptop, and fed Gregory Danes’s name and Social Security number to several of my favorite online search services. For a price, they would make mincemeat of his privacy.

  Nina Sachs had already given me the address of Danes’s Upper East Side apartment and his home, office, and cell phone numbers, and she’d told me about the big black BMW he sometimes drove on weekend jaunts, and all of that was helpful. But what I was really interested in were the things she couldn’t tell me about— like any other phone numbers listed in Danes’s name, for example, or any other cars or houses he might own. The search services could find those for me, and a whole lot more. Plane registries, boat registries, criminal convictions, voter registrations, bankruptcies— the vast universe of public records was at their disposal. One service would even find any court cases that Danes had been involved in, and another would scan the SEC’s databases for any complaints or arbitration claims made against him. They weren’t infallible, but they were a good place to start, and a lot faster than doing the legwork myself. And they were legal. Buying his phone bills was another, murkier story.

  Telephone bills are not public records, and the online services that deal in them sometimes vanish from the Web without warning, often to reopen— under new names and at new sites— a few days later. Their legality is questionable but not their usefulness, not to someone like me, and I submitted Danes’s home phone and cell numbers to one of them.

  Not all the preliminary work could be done online; for certain things, I had to pick up the phone. Simone Gautier is an elegant Haitian woman who runs a small detective agency in Forest Hills. She does mostly personal injury and divorce work, but for a reasonable fee Simone will send one of her many day players out to cruise the hospitals and morgues. We agreed to start in the five boroughs and we agreed on a price. I e-mailed Danes’s description to her and faxed her a photograph.

  Results would take some time— hours for the search services, days for Simone, and more days for the phone bills— but Danes’s trail on the public search engines was enough to keep me busy in the meanwhile.

  Danes had been more or less invisible lately, at least as far as the media was concerned, but before the bubble burst— and immediately afterward— he had been a very public guy indeed. In the perpetual now of the Internet, his fame lived on. I started clicking on links.

  Danes’s biography on the Pace-Loyette corporate Web site was terse to the point of mean. It gave his date and place of birth (July 23, 1962, Maplewood, New Jersey), and told of his undergraduate (BS, Cornell) and graduate (MBA, University of Chicago) education, and stated that he’d joined Pace as an analyst in the late eighties. And that was it; there wasn’t even a picture. I kept clicking.

  A long derelict investment advice site, iLoveYourMoney.com, carried a head shot and a more expansive version of his biography, probably copied in happier times from the Pace-Loyette site. This edition included a laundry list of Danes’s professional affiliations and the accolades he’d received over the years from the industry and the business press: Tech Analyst of the Year, Top Tech Stock Picker, Most Influential Tech Analyst, New Economy Avatar of the Year … it went on and on.

  A more current site, RobberBaronsRedux.com, carried the same bio on a page entitled “Top Pimps.” This account, however, was ironically and brutally annotated, and adorned with a large photo of Danes, digitally enhanced with mustache, goatee, glasses, and devil’s horns. Childish, yes, but I laughed.

  I clicked away, and the arc of Danes’s career emerged from a fog of data. He’d started as a computer hardware analyst, initially at a big broker-dealer and then at Pace-Loyette, and never distinguished himself from the legion of other analysts tilling the same soil.

  That all changed when he was reassigned to cover what was then a relatively new market sector: computer-networking equipment. The first company he analyzed was a little-known manufacturer of network routers called Biscayne Bay Technologies. When he called Biscayne management’s projection of earnings “cautious to the point of wimpy” and predicted that the company’s share price would triple in six months, reaction ranged from incredulity to ridicule. In fact, it took five months and Biscayne’s shares quadrupled. It was the first in a string of home-run calls.

  Danes was the right guy in the right place and time. He saw the coming commercialization of the Internet and understood its implications, both for the tech companies that were making it possible and for companies that could
sell their goods and services there. And he had the courage of his convictions. He followed Biscayne Bay with similarly astonishing— and accurate— predictions on Ambient Reasoning, Surfside Search, ColdKarma.com, and a half-dozen other companies. By the late nineties, Danes had made his bones many times over. He was The Man in the tech sector, and his word was enough to move share prices. More importantly, it was enough to ensure a successful IPO.

  Danes logged a lot of miles in the late nineties on road trip after road trip with Pace-Loyette investment bankers, pitching the prospects of one tech company after another that Pace was about to take public. A few of those firms would grow into real businesses, with actual products and profits, but most would not, and many were no more than cocktail-napkin doodles, tarted up with PowerPoint. But the Danes imprimatur pulled a lot of weight with investors who, if they didn’t always buy his hype, at least understood the buoyant effect it could have on a newly issued stock.

  When the new millennium came, the market, like so much else, turned to lead. And though he had predicted the boom, Danes hadn’t foreseen the bust— or maybe he’d believed that his say-so alone would be enough to prevent it. While share prices plummeted, Danes and a handful of other analysts maintained their crazed enthusiasms, until many of their favorites became penny stocks or vanished altogether.

  If the collapse of the market was a surprise to Danes, its aftermath was a whack in the head with a two-by-four. The hopeless tangle of quid pro quos and conflicting interests that bound together investment banks, their corporate clients, and the people who ran those corporations were open secrets on Wall Street. But when the particulars of these arrangements— the bartering of favorable stock ratings, personal loans, and shares of hot IPOs for lucrative investment banking engagements— were dragged out for the public-at-large to see, the public-at-large got sorely pissed off. While analysts hadn’t built the trough or gorged themselves at it as deeply as some, they were wide and obvious targets— and so often painted with convenient bull’s-eyes. The brightest one on Danes’s backside was Piedmont Science and its affable chairman, Denton Ainsley.