Страница 59 из 84
And sure enough.
The ghost materialized over by the bookcase, three or four seconds to become mostly opaque. Bloody wounds over shirt and tie, as Ernest had said. It looked like he’d taken a bullet in his chest and another right in the nose. His face was unrecognizable carnage, one good eye peering out above a mess of bone and bloody tissue.
He looked around, saw us, and startled. For a moment he shimmered and began to fade.
“It’s okay!” said Ernest, jumping up. “They’re investors. More money for the fund. That’s good, right?”
The shade hesitated, then resolidified. It seemed to stare at me, then Jake, and then kind of shrugged.
“No problem.” Ernest gestured behind his back, at us-stay quiet. “Okay?”
Pause, then another slight shrug.
“Good. So, ah, what do you have to recommend today?”
After one more hard look at us, the ghost pulled up his shirt. One side had been shredded by the gunshot, but the other was more or less whole. With a pen or pencil in one hand, he scribbled on the fabric, then held it out.
Ernest walked up and bent down to squint at the shirttail.
“Forints?” he said. “Appreciating?”
The ghost nodded.
“Excellent.”
And that was that.
THE next morning, I couldn’t help myself-I turned on the computer as soon as I woke up and checked the foreign exchange ticker. The European markets had been open for two hours.
So there. Hungarian forints were up more than 5 percent. Good call, ghost.
And I have to admit I felt a chill. Even after everything Ernest had told me, I still hadn’t quite believed.
After a shower I had a choice to make. I could chase down the shade’s identity-basically a database search, checking morgue records and police reports and so forth. The problem was, a lot of people die every day, and even the gruesomely violent means of death wouldn’t narrow it down that much. We live in a murderous age.
Or I could follow up on Jake Tims.
He’d been remarkably cool last night. I don’t care how many thousands of zombies you’ve killed in shoot-’em-up video games, real corpses freak most people out. Plus, Ernest said Jake had approached him out of the blue. Sure, the hedge fund’s remarkable returns were generating all kinds of industry buzz, but it seemed remarkably keen timing on Jake’s part.
No contest.
And next to no effort, either. A single phone call reminded me of why Jake’s name was familiar.
“You don’t remember?” Detective Gatling yawned at the other end of the line. I heard bullpen noises behind him-a cell phone ringing, muffled complaints, the clatter of chairs. “Jake Tims used to have a partner, Randall. They ran a boutique investment firm, but last year Randall disappeared, along with the entire sweep account.”
“Oh, yeah.” Active traders keep their operating cash in a separate account, carrying a slightly better interest rate. “How much did he abscond with?”
“Three million, plus or minus.”
“Now I remember.” Once Randall’s pilfering would have been big news, but after Madoff and Stanford and Lewis, a mere seven figures was chump change, hardly worth a B-section headline. “You never found him?”
“Naw.” Gatling didn’t have to say, And we didn’t look that hard, either. In the nihilist landscape of post-collapse Wall Street, there were plenty of bigger fish to fry.
“Jake’s about to move most of his assets over to Ernest Eppleworth,” I said.
“Really.” His tone was flat, but I could hear Gatling’s interest perk up.
“What do you know about Eppleworth?”
“Nothing,” Gatling said, but he was a lousy liar, especially for a cop.
“Uh-oh.” I closed my eyes. “There’s an investigation open, isn’t there?”
“Not for me to say. What’s your interest?”
I hesitated, then explained the ghost. Concealing evidence is not my style.
“Huh.” Gatling was silent for a moment. “The returns are too good to be true. We were thinking Eppleworth had a mole in one of the black pools.” Where large transactions could be conducted directly, between large entities, free of the oversight from regulated exchanges-in other words, an ideal spot to front-run the big dogs. Totally illegal, but that never stops the sharpies. “A ghost-I’m not sure that’s even against the law.”
“Exactly.”
By the time I hung up, I knew the clock was ticking. Gatling was a
Now, not only did I have to solve the case before the fraud squad hauled Ernest away, but I was going to have to insist on cash-and-carry. Ernest’s credit rating had just fallen into the basement.
“RECOGNIZE him?” Jake’s voice rose. “His face was blown off!”
“I noticed that.” We were in Jake’s office, mid-morning. I’d hung around the street entrance-also Midtown, only a few blocks from Ernest, but with more casual security-and buttonholed Jake when the armored limo dropped him off out front. Jake brought me upstairs mostly to avoid a scene in public.
“Thing is, you didn’t seem surprised,” I continued. “Which got me wondering.”
He put up some resistance, but when I mentioned Gatling’s interest, we both knew it was only a matter of time. The police would be far more tenacious than me.
“The ghost is Randall, of course,” he said finally. “My former partner.”
“Aha.” I’d suspected-people rarely disappear and keep living-but it was nice to hear Jake agree. On the other hand, the ghost’s face really was nothing but gore. “How can you be sure?”
“Because he visited me, too.”
Okay, that was a surprise. “When?”
“Two days ago. Middle of the night.” He made a peevish frown. “Don’t they ever show up during business hours?”
“Not usually. So… he didn’t hare off with the petty cash after all.”
Jake snorted. The ghost-might as well call him Randall, now-explained that he’d been kidnapped and tortured into revealing the bank password, then shot and dumped into a Hudson River garbage scow.
“Randall’s really angry,” said Jake. “But the kidnappers wore masks the whole time, so he has no idea who they are.”
“Which means he can’t go haunting them. I get it.”
“He can’t stand the idea that everyone thinks he’s a thief, living the high life in Fiji or whatever. So he’s making it up to me, with this guaranteed-return trading scheme.”
“Randall directed you to Ernest?”
“Yes. Of course, I did a thorough check on the Eppleworth funds. The returns are honest-the forex streak is real, just like Randall said.”
“Hmm. How did Randall tell you all that?”
“Writing on his shirt, like you saw last night. It took forever.”
“I bet.” I considered. “There are a couple of really obvious questions-”
“Yeah, I know.” Jake leaned back in his ergonomic, sleek-leather, post-Aeron chair. “Like, why not give me the tips, instead of going through Ernest?”
“That’s one.”
“He doesn’t want to bring too much suspicion on the firm here. You said the cops are already sniffing around-he figured, let Ernest take the heat. I can still keep the earnings.”
“Okay.” That sort of made sense. “But how does he know? How can he read tomorrow’s box scores today?”
“It’s an afterlife thing. Short-term time dilation, quantum tu
“Uh-huh.” I looked out Jake’s window, where a pigeon was waddling around on the ledge. “So did you double your money on those forints?”
“No.” Jake looked a