Lucky Leonardo (8 page)

To back and fill for a moment, shortly after Janet Casey returned from her spa retreat where she tried to recuperate from the day Eugene Binh cracked up, and while she was still up to her elbows in carpet samples and Eugene's lawsuit was just a twinkle in his attorney's eye, Janet placed a difficult call to Bill Brockleman, with her boss Mulverne joining her on the call as a silent partner. You remember Brockleman, the big attorney who died on page one, and after that advised Leonardo not to think of him as a friend, and more recently warned Abigail Stern, the girl attorney, to watch her back if and when she turned against DeltaTek.

“Bill?” Janet said.

“Hi, Janet.”

“We have a problem.”

“What?”

“Securities and Exchange Commission.”

As put by Janet, an SEC investigator was looking for “an informal discussion” about “suspicious and/or unusual trading activity” in DeltaTek's common stock occurring on the afternoon and evening of Friday, October 4. Janet asked Brockleman to help her prepare.

So two nights later Brockleman duly sat at Janet's kitchen table eating pizza and working through a stack of print-outs and papers while Janet drank scotch and watched a
Seinfeld
rerun in the next room.

The stock price had risen all week on heavy volume, opening at $14.55 on Monday, September 30, and reaching $18.20 at 3:05 pm on Friday, October 4, its 52-week high, up $1.60 for the day and $3.65 for the week, reflecting a string of favorable analyst forecasts and, Brockleman surmised, market excitement over prospects for Code B.

Then, like a rogue wave rising without warning from a placid sea, a sudden and powerful surge of sell orders overwhelmed the price, sinking it to $12.35 at the 4:00 pm close of regular NASDAQ trading, down a monstrous 32 percent of market capitalization in less than an hour. Brockleman didn't need an advance degree in finance to deduce the time when news of Eugene's threat to self-destruct reached the street. How it reached the street, that was another matter.

The price continued to drop like a rock in heavy after-hours trading, hitting a low of $11.52 at 4:17 pm. But then, in defiance of the laws of gravity, down turned up. The price shot to the surface and into the sky with the ejaculatory thrust of a sea-to-air missile, reaching $19.10 at the 6:30 pm close of after-hours NASDAQ trading, the high for the day, for the year, and for the adjusted life of the stock.

An amazing comeback. An astute investor who bought a mere ten thousand shares at the 4:17 pm low and sold out two hours later would have earned a very short term gross capital gain of about $75,800, which, as they say, beats working. One million two hundred thousand DeltaTek shares traded that day, making it a NASDAQ volume leader, right behind Microsoft, and permitting many winners. And losers, like the guy who bought 6,000 shares at 3:10 pm on Friday near the top, which were sold from him on a margin call at 3:54 pm near the bottom, giving him a loss of $37,200, or $845.45 per minute of ownership, who cried foul to the SEC at 9:05 am on Monday morning. He was one of several complainers, according to Janet.

Brockleman played with the chronology. Eugene was disarmed at 4:02 pm. The first ambulance arrived at 4:16 pm. The first up-tick of the comeback came at 4:17 pm. The press release which announced that a difficult employment situation had been favorably resolved was not issued until 7:15 pm. One possibility was that the ambulance driver was a day trader who analyzed the situation on his drive over. Can we blame the ambulance driver?

“Janet,” Brockleman said in a voice loud enough to be heard over the laugh track, “where did you put the telephone records?”

“I don't remember.”

“Come in here and help me.”

“I can't.”

“Janet, when the going gets tough the lawyers have to get creative…”

“Eat me.”

Janet was crankier than usual. Brockleman assumed it was her time of the month. He got up and nosed around her kitchen on his own, which, aside from the crusts of his pizza, had no trace of food or food preparation. Janet didn't cook. Her kitchen featured an industrial size paper shredder on top of her stove, and racks of files including the pile marked
Privileged and Confidential
which she dropped in her sink earlier in the evening when she passed through on her way to the bar in her television room. Janet drank. And watched
Seinfeld
reruns.

Brockleman thumbed through the sink files wondering whether a jury would believe mere clumsiness could cause an elbow to strike the faucet while a forefinger hit the disposal button, making bad files disappear, which was how his mind worked, always evaluating the viability of misconduct and alibis associated with his assignments, honing his professional skills as it were, like a firefighter imagining what he would do if a fire broke out behind the deli counter, or an actress rehearsing her acceptance speech in the tub.

Brockleman's thumbing led him to find a print-out of all outgoing calls from DeltaTek's executive-floor phone lines on October 4, showing time of day, number called, duration of call, and extension called from. He identified the 911 call to the police, made at 4:06 pm, lasting one minute. Two calls were made in the prior six minutes and eight in the following ten minutes. “Janet,” he called out, “I'm going to order more pizza.”

“You do that,” she called back.

“Hey,” he added, “do you remember who called the police?”

“No.”

“Did you?”

“Not me. It was probably Cathy Leigh, or maybe Johnny Angelo, or maybe it was your friend Dr. Cook.” Janet appeared in the kitchen doorway, drink in hand, wearing a wraparound robe. “Why do you ask?”

“I'm sleuthing.”

“Why did you ask if I called the police?”

“I don't know.”

“Did you call the police?”

“No. I remember hearing the crash of the glass, and Ben Grevere screaming out of the squawk box, and I just ran down the hall to Eugene's office. I didn't think to call. Or let me rephrase that, I don't remember calling.”

“I don't remember calling either,” Janet said. She sat down at the kitchen table, holding her robe closed. “What do you think is going to happen?”

“I think they'll conclude, on a preliminary basis, that the radical down and up of the stock looks like insider trading. Someone who knew about Eugene called someone on the outside with the information. First with the bad news, then with the good news. What else could it be?”

“Wouldn't you think that somebody who was doing it would be discreet, and settle for a small profit that wouldn't get picked up on anybody's radar screen? A few hundred shares, what's the big deal? Who's to know?”

“I would think.”

“But here you've got thousands of shares, and the price jumping up and down like a roller coaster. How do you get away with that?”

Janet was wearing a wire.

The bright lights of Foxwoods dimmed in the background as Leonardo and Chrissie streaked northward through the post-midnight darkness.
Like eloping lovers
, thought Leonardo. Disabled vehicles, center-strip plantings, and bridge abutments flew past, like the spooks and gray beasts of a fairy tale, although some of the abutments seemed to challenge the life force of the car with their dull magnetism, obliging Leonardo to grip his wheel tightly and concentrate on keeping the streaming white dots of the middle lane beneath him lest he be lulled into a veering, squealing, bloody collision with an immovable pile of concrete.
This is not a question of staying awake, but of staying in touch.

Chrissie stayed quiet, except for her intermittent snores and the word bubbles which popped from her dreams: “Is that blood?” “No, no, I'm not…” “What kind of beans?”

Dinner at the steak house was so apart from the real lives of Chrissie, Leonardo, Tom, and Mom that it was great. Nobody dug deeper than the skin of a potato, or remembered any indignity prior to the shrimp cocktail, or looked farther ahead than dessert. Although at one point Mom asked Leonardo to interpret her recurring dream. “I am swimming,” she said. “And a big dog is swimming with me...”

“Do you recognize the dog?”

“A black lab, I think. A good swimmer.”

“Do you know any black labs?”

“Only from a distance.”

“Do you know anyone who looks or acts like a black lab?”

While Mom ran down the people of her life looking for a match, Tom, sitting next to her, said, “I once had a real life experience like your dream. I was on the beach the morning after Labor Day, a few minutes before sunrise…”

“By yourself?” Chrissie asked.

“Yes,” Tom said. “Alone, feeling alone, all alone…”

“A long time ago?” Chrissie asked.

“I was seventeen or eighteen. A kid. A young man. I couldn't sleep. I had things on my mind. I walked down to the beach. There was visibility, but no color. Everything was gray. The sand, the water and the sky were flat slabs of gray. And everything was still. The air was still. The ocean was still, as still as a photograph. I was the only thing moving. I felt I was walking through the land of the dead…”

“Were you smoking dope?” Leonardo inquired.

“A toke or two early that night, Lenny, but this was more like I was straight and the world around me was doped. Stupefied, you know? Petrified.”

“Like scared shitless?” Chrissie asked.

“No,” Tom said. “Like turned into stone. Like I wasn't supposed to see this part of the world until I'm dead, and I was getting a preview. And then out of nowhere, out of all the eerie grayness and deadness there's a girl and a dog walking up the beach toward me. Like someone was reading my mind. From my mind to the big screen.”

“You were thinking about meeting a girl and a dog?”

“I was thinking how alone I was, sweetheart. And presto, there's a girl and her dog. Although I'm not sure it was her dog. The dog is the key here. The dog was a messenger dog. He arranged the meeting.”

Chrissie, Leonardo and Mom raised concurrent eyebrows and dropped concurrent jaws. “The girl was all white,” Tom said, gazing into the middle distance, in the direction of the poker room, “white T-shirt, white shorts, white skin. Blond hair close to white. I remember her as being pretty, but not pretty like a Swedish starlet, you know? More like Finlandic. Icelandic? Squinty about her eyes. A sharp nose. Nice body…”

“How old was she?” Chrissie asked.

“She could have been sixteen, she could have been twenty-three.”

“Umm,” Leonardo interjected, “how did the dog arrange the meeting? I have this image of the dog telling his secretary to give you a call…”

“Lenny, you want to avoid getting too narrow on this. I'm not transmogrifying.”

“Oh.”

“I observed that the dog had spiritual qualities. I
felt
the dog had spiritual qualities. He had
knowingness.
He led her to me, and when she reached me, on this empty nowhere beach outside of time we didn't have to say, ‘hello,' ‘nice morning,' ‘what's your name.' We didn't say a single word. We just embraced right there. We hugged like we were each the most important person in the world to each other. We were blessing each other's journey…”

“Umm, are you sure she was a real person?” Chrissie asked.

“Like, was she a visitor?”

Chrissie nodded.

“I don't know for sure. How does one ever know?”

Chrissie nodded, like in agreement.

“And then the dog who looked like a black lab led me into the water for a purifying swim, as the sun peaked over the horizon…”

“Did the girl swim too?” Chrissie asked.

“No, just the dog and me. The dog directed me with his nose and his eyes when to turn and where to go. He was a very good swimmer, which is why Mom's dream reminded me.”

Leonardo reflected on Tom's story as he pierced the night with the prow of his Corvette, keeping a safe distance from the sidelines, sad to leave behind the controlled and risk-averse environment of the casino where all he could lose was money, and some dignity and rectitude, but mostly just money, and return to the bad air and sticky surfaces and ambiguous outcomes of his regular life, where he had to choose between the illusion of controlling the odds and the reality of jumping headfirst into the disintegration machine.

As Leonardo pondered his choice, Chrissie popped another word bubble: “Tom,” she said.

The danger for Brockleman started—took its first breath following lengthy gestation—with a buy order for five thousand shares of DeltaTek common stock executed at 4:20 pm on Friday, October 4, four minutes after the ambulances arrived at the scene, three minutes after the first up-tick in DeltaTek stock, while Eugene Binh's blood still flowed freely into Janet Casey's plush carpet.

For a while it looked to the SEC like a case of brilliant luck and savvy investment, because even after they subpoenaed his telephone records they couldn't find a connection between the buyer, a day trader in Dallas, and any of the DeltaTek insiders who were under investigation. To his credit, and as part of his alibi, the trader often played with this size dollar volume, and he had traded in and out of DeltaTek a few times before, suggesting that he watched the stock and waited for market opportunities, like a legitimate investor.

But he goofed when he sent two dozen long-stemmed red roses to Selma Floyd, Brockleman's long-time and devoted secretary, as a little thank you after he cashed out his position. The anonymous card said, “Selma, you're the best.”

This gentlemanly sentiment didn't set off any beeps on any regulator's radar screen, but it did push Avril (nee Amanda) Fenton's nose out of joint. Avril and Selma were office rivals. They perennially vied for the title of most attractive unmarried secretary, twenty-five and older division. Avril steamed each time she passed Selma's work station and had to smell the roses.

“Who sent the roses?” Avril asked.

“Oh, just a friend,” Selma answered. She showed Avril the card, blushing slightly.

“Sweet card,” Avril commented.

“Thank you,” Selma answered.

What bothered Avril was the possibility that her nearly full-time boyfriend Bruce might have sent the flowers to Selma. Not that Bruce ever sent flowers to anyone, or knew the difference between a rose and a dandelion, but he danced a slow dance with Selma at last summer's firm outing, a party cruise around Boston Harbor, causing Avril to drink heavily on board and refuse sex that night until Bruce swore he would never, ever, ever do that again.

Avril lacked evidence that Bruce was behind the roses,
but what if he were?
After a day and a half of excruciation, with Selma still beaming like she was queen for the day, and the roses still looking fresh as a daisy, and Bruce still talking like he didn't know anything about anything, Avril cracked.

Lying only when she had to, and using the sophisticated telephone skills that made her a top-notch legal secretary, she backtracked the roses from Selma's desk, to the firm's delivery log-in book, to the Boston florist who delivered them, to the Dallas florist who called the order to the Boston florist, where the trail cooled because the Dallas customer paid cash to the Dallas florist, and the Dallas salesgirl who took the order was too short-term to remember the customer or the transaction even after Avril suggested the possibility of a cash reward and/or the alternative of a jail sentence.

But that was close to good enough for Avril, since Bruce wasn't in Dallas on the day of the cash transaction, unless he did a round trip between his breakfast and dinner with Avril, which was doubtful since thunderstorms shut Dallas down for most of the afternoon according to independent analysis of the airport logbook and the meteorological charts, and his time sheets, which were not easy to obtain and did not show obvious signs of tampering, indicated he worked the whole day in Boston, and it was almost silly to think he would call a friend in Dallas to pay cash for flowers to be sent to Boston since he had no known friends in Dallas or anywhere else within a thousand miles of Dallas or five thousand miles of Dallas for that matter, and in any event, Avril reminded herself whenever doubts trickled back in, he was a lazy slug who didn't have the capacity to make a romantic gesture, or at least never had with her, which was sort of the problem.

So Avril used alternative routes around the office for the life of the roses, and did her best to keep Bruce happy at home, and didn't think much more about Dallas until later in the month when she was straightening up her lawyer's desk and happened to turn over a confidential memo, from Attorney Brockleman, about an on-going SEC investigation into unexplained stock transactions, including one with a Dallas connection. Avril put two and two together, re-checked the math, and decided to drop a dime.