All the walking and musing did nothing to ease my disposition. I walked through the night. Tomorrow, I’d start looking for Wheelock. I hoped it would be him. That would be a nice symmetry. I wouldn’t treat him too kindly.
CHAPTER XIX
You could call them boiler rooms or bucket shops, but they were usually located in storefronts or first-floor offices in rundown buildings in old industrial neighborhoods. They had names like Second Jersey or First Interstate or First International or various combinations and permutations of names like Morgan, Whitney, Rothschild, Fiske. The only thing they had in common was that their names ended in Securities.
This one was located in Hoboken, but it could just have well been in Miami or Denver. They never stayed put in one location too long. Just long enough for the complaints to pile up in the state attorney general’s office or the SEC or the NASD. Then, just before the investigators swooped down, they moved operations to a less inhospitable site and took a new name.
All they needed was a switchboard for the phones and some desks. Sometimes they didn’t even need the desks. The young turks who worked these shops were college dropouts. One or two years of college and a burning desire for quick and easy bucks were all that was required. That and a slick phone manner. They’d call across the country, say they were calling from Wall Street, and play to the greed that drives the blue collar and pink collar and the retired and the widowed. The story was invariably the same. There was a gold mine, or a Russian default, or platinum options, or a new Internet company, as long as it had. com as a suffix. There was a new process, or a crisis impending. There was always a scheme-and if you waited too long you would miss out. The company would go public, the process would become common knowledge, the crisis would erupt. Now was the time to get in-before the masses, while you had early knowledge.
It had taken me more than an hour to get there because the upper level of the George Washington bridge had been closed and I had to go five miles an hour in a vehicle designed to burn rubber at a hundred and fifty.
The Palisades were partly shrouded by the early morning haze. The view of the Hudson was still magnificent, but not enough to compensate for the slow crawl. As I sat stalled on the bridge, I watched the drivers around me picking their noses or smoothing their hair, tapping on the steering wheel to the rhythm of an unheard backbeat.
I finally made it across to Jersey and drove along the local commercial streets, looking out for the building number. It was a storefront and there appeared to be a lot of activity inside the front window. A bunch of old men in working class clothing stood outside the door in a conspiratorial huddle, surveying the operation. There were signs hanging in the window promising 8 % to 10 % returns tax-free with no risk, guaranteed without fail.
I parked on a side street in front of a row of neat two-family houses that spoke of solid values. No problem leaving the car there. There was always an Italian grandma watching out of the upper floor window and wired right into the local precinct.
The girl at the desk looked surprised to see me, as if anyone half-alive ever wandered into the place. She was a luscious specimen of eighteen or nineteen with teased big blond hair and black nail polish, probably local, looking to get a job across the river on Wall Street. She must have assumed I was an investigator from the NASD, because she got up from behind her desk and came around to meet me.
I told her I wanted to see the boss and she returned with a fat, sweaty guy in tow. By now all the young studs had lowered their voices or cupped their hands over the mouthpieces, and were staring at me surreptitiously. One flash of my badge was all I gave him. That was enough. I caught his sigh of relief as he pulled a dirty handkerchief out of his back pocket.
“I’m looking for one Steve Wheelock,” I said to him.
“Oh, yeah. Wheelock…Steve…” He passed the handkerchief over his brow. He was a tall, greasy guy, balding, with a bad shave and a protruding lower lip. He wore a poly shirt that still had yesterday’s dinner on it and a six-pack tie with those stripes that shaded from dark to light. The shirt was open at the neck and the knot of his tie was a third of the way down from his throat to his beer belly.
“Wheelock worked here for a couple of years. He was a good broker. Put in his hours, made his calls, met his quotas, one of the best. Left here, let’s see,” he said as he rubbed his stubbly chin, “last April or May. Booze trouble, broad trouble, you know.” He winked at me with a jaundiced eye.
“Yeah,” I said. “Which broad?”
He wiped the back of his neck with the handkerchief. “He was a real cunt man, you know. Banged everything in sight. Some broad came into the office, not this one, the old office, when we were upstairs and she was waving a gun and said she was going to blow his balls off and everything.”
He seemed to think this was very funny because he started to guffaw and then it turned into a half laughing- half coughing spasm that I thought was going to end up in a heart attack, but he finally caught himself and wadded the handkerchief over his mouth and hawked into it.
“Excuse me,” he said. “Anyway, this broad must’ve scared the shit out of him because he didn’t come back no more. I heard he started drinking even more than before. He had us send his commission checks to…let me see…some place in Connecticut.”
I had a good idea why this turkey was being so helpful. He had no beef with me. He thought I was a cop and he wanted to keep me happy and get me the hell out of there. As long as I wasn’t investigating securities fraud, he would have told me which way his wife liked to take it. Hell, he would’ve offered me his wife.
“Who was the woman with the gun?”
He hesitated and rolled his eyes up.
“No idea. His girlfriend, maybe. A good-looking broad, though. Tall and thin, with long blond hair. Think her name was Barbara…something. I can find out for you.”
“Sure,” I said. “Do that for me.”
He yelled out across the room. “Elliot, come over here, willya.” A guy in his mid-twenties hung up his phone and threaded his way between the desks. He was wearing a neatly-pressed blue shirt with a white collar and red suspenders. The shirt was buttoned at the neck and he wasn’t wearing a tie. He looked like one of those Iranian diplomats on TV. He had closely cropped curly hair and no sideburns.
When Elliot got to us, Greasy threw an arm around his shoulder. “Elliot, my man. This gentleman is official.” He winked at Elliot. “He’s looking for Wheelock. You remember that broad that came in waving a piece around the old office? What was her name?”
“Oh yeah.” Elliot’s head bobbed up and down in recognition. “Oh yeah. What a chick. Name was…Alice…I think.”
My mouth went dry. I coughed, but not too loud.
“Boy, she was all pissed because he was screwing the secretary at the old place. That one with the big tits and the fat lips. You remember Mary Lou? She was a champion head job. Best in the office. She could suck your eyeballs out of your dick. Wheelock was so played out he couldn’t fuck his girlfriend so she came around looking for him and Mary Lou, remember? They were in the conference room screwing and this wacko comes in and says she’s going to shoot his dick off and…”
Greasy jabbed Elliot in the ribs.
“Nice operation you run here,” I said.
“We try to keep things under control but you know how it is when you get a lot of young buckos together. They got an expression here. “Only two things count-writing tickets and getting laid.”
“What about this broad?” I asked. “What happened to her?”