There was a message on my machine when I got back to the office. It was from McCormack.
“Mr. Rogan, it’s Friday afternoon about two forty-five,” said the neat clipped voice. “I’d like to meet with you as soon as possible. I just came across something in a filing cabinet I shared with Alicia that I think you’ll find interesting.”
I called him faster than a hooker could drop her panties.
“It’ll take me a half-hour to get uptown from Wall Street,” he said.
“OK, fine. Meet me by the information booth in Grand Central at four-thirty.”
He showed up on time, wearing his Armani suit and Gucci tie with the little stirrups and suspenders with little bulls and bears. His face was pale underneath his salon tan. He was carrying a brown manila envelope.
The huge waiting room was starting to fill up with homeward-bound commuters threading their way between the bums and the tourists. You could tell the commuters. They strode purposefully, always looking straight ahead, heading for the 4:35, the 4:41 or the 4:45…
I took the envelope. “What is it?”
His tone was tentative. “It’s a disk. I thought Alicia had cleaned out all her files and taken them with her. I was going through a file cabinet we shared. She had the top two drawers and I had the bottom two drawers. I needed some more space for my files and I found this disk in the back behind some empty folders. It must have been a back-up copy.”
“Did you run it?”
He bit his lip. “Just enough to know what was in it. I didn’t want to see any more than that.”
“And what was it?” I prodded to get his reaction.
He took half a step backwards. “I’d rather you answered that for yourself.” He took another half-step back.
I put my hand square on his shoulder. “Come upstairs to my office while I run it. You can explain it to me.”
He pulled his shoulder away from my grip. “You’ll understand it when you see it.” He widened the distance between us. “Besides it’s late and I have to run.” He glanced at his tank watch without noting the time.
Then I guess he had a sudden change of heart because he leaned in toward me and whispered, “I’m in this too deeply already. I don’t want to be part of it anymore. I’m scared. You’ll see why when you run the disk.”
He did a brisk half-turn and blended into the crowd of well-dressed yuppies on their way to their health clubs and juice bars.
I stopped off at the Roy Rogers to pick up a bacon cheeseburger and a cup of coffee with skim milk and took the elevator back up to my office.
I pulled off my jacket and tie and threw them over the back of a chair. Then I slipped the disk into the computer and started my dinner as the computer went through its opening routines.
What I saw was halfway to finding the Rosetta Stone. Page after goddam page of Jergen’s financials corrected for cash flow deficiencies and reconstituted statements showing fraudulent or non-existent cash flows. All of the financials combined indicated that Jergens had a negative net worth.
Alicia had done a masterful job. What a competent gal she was. She’d taken all of his financials and recast them using the figures she’d generated from her own investigations. This was the weapon that would bring Jergens down. Here was one of the biggest real estate operators in the country skewered like a shish kebab. No wonder he wanted to get her fired…or worse.
I didn’t waste any time. Jergens was probably still in his office. Maybe I should have waited and planned a strategy. But there was one thing I learned in the Corps and it was the only strategy they had-find the bastards and pile on.
I called Jergens’ office, got his fax number and faxed five of the most damaging pages together with a note asking him to give me a call at his earliest convenience, if it wasn’t too much of a bother.
The clock said 5:36. I finished my bacon cheeseburger and waited for his call.
It came in exactly seventeen minutes.
A female voice, free of regional inflections and well-modulated, said, “Mr. Jergens would like to speak to you, Mr. Rogan. Please hold the line.” She sounded like one of those computer ladies on the voice mail.
Ten seconds later Jergens got on. “Rogan, you fucking asshole scumbag.”
“Good evening, Mr. Jergens,” I said. “It’s always a pleasure to hear your voice.”
“Don’t fuck with me, Rogan.” His voice blasted out of the speakerphone and reverberated through my office. “Get your ass over here right away.”
“Is that an invitation?”
“Don’t mess with me. I’m warning you. Get over here or I’ll send my boys over with an engraved invitation. And it won’t say RSVP.”
“First I’ll have to consult Miss Manners on the etiquette of all this.”
“You watch your step, Rogan or…”
I had him. “Or I’ll end up like Alicia and Laura?”
His voice level dropped a couple of thousand decibels. “Listen, I’m asking you to come and see me. I’m asking you in a nice way, you fucking scumbag.”
“I accept your invitation. Where will I find you?”
He gave off a grunt that was a half-laugh. “I’ll be in the usual place. You know where it is. I think you were here before and tied up one of my men.”
“Oh, you mean the hotel. I’ll be there in fifteen.”
I grabbed a cab just off the ramp downstairs and told the cabby to drive up Park. He was an Indian or a Pakistani and the car smelled of chana batura with a hint of curry. When we hit Forty-ninth we got stuck in some kind of motorcade and slowed to a crawl. The cabby turned his head and motioned in the direction of Third.
“We go up Third, Boss? Faster that way. Less traffic.”
I waved toward Madison. “Naw, go up Madison. It’s closer.”
He nodded vigorously three or four times. “Your city, Boss. You know better. Not my city, you know.”
It took a half hour to get to Jergens’ hotel. This time I walked straight through the lobby like I owned the first mortgage on the place and headed for his private elevator. The guy on duty saw me coming and his eyes widened in recognition. It was the sumo wrestler, only this time he was wearing a wrinkled light blue suit that was two sizes too small for him and looked like it came from the bargain basement at Wal-Mart.
“Back for some more golf?” he grinned.
“Not till you improve your stroke. You’re supposed to hit the ball, remember?”
“I kinda forgot. Your head looked so tempting.”
I smiled at him. “Enough of this pleasant repartee. Take me to see your master.”
“I want to see you again, fuckface. I enjoyed beating up on you.” He opened the elevator door and motioned me inside. He followed me into the car and stood facing me as the door slid shut behind him. It wasn’t a big elevator and he took up ninety-five percent of the available space. His BO expanded to fill about ninety-nine percent of the available air.
“Ever think about going on a quick-weight-loss diet?” I asked him.
He glared at me. “Listen, wiseguy…” he started.
“Well at least suck up your gut and hold your breath until we get to the penthouse. There’s no air left in here for me to breathe.”
His blood pressure looked like it was ready to go off the chart. His cheeks, which were ruddy to begin with, were starting to turn the color of overripe plums. It was a good thing we got to the top floor before his blood vessels ruptured.
Two guys stood there blocking the view as the door slid open. One was the second golfing buddy. I didn’t recognize the other. He was a big guy too, but more muscular than Mr. Sumo. His shoulders looked like the flight deck of an aircraft carrier.
“Shakedown time, Rogan,” he said unpleasantly.
“Pleased to meet you, Tiny. This is my Filipino houseboy, Kato,” I said as I jerked my thumb back at Mr. Sumo.
“Never mind the fucking jokes, Rogan,” he said. “Assume the position.”
I sighed, stepped out of the elevator and raised my arms over my head. My bad arm hurt when I held it up. They patted me down and then grunted as a sign of satisfaction. Tiny motioned to me to follow him and started down the corridor. The golf player walked behind me. Mr. Sumo got into the elevator and went back down.
The corridor was furnished more expensively than most mansions. The furniture pieces were antiques in Louis XIV style. The floor was inlaid hardwood patterns covered by Persian carpets that were worth approximately the budget of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. It was incongruous to see these low-life thugs in such an opulent setting. The place could have been an exhibition gallery in the Morgan museum.
Two heavy wooden doors stood at the end of the corridor. Above the doors were two security cameras. Tiny pressed a buzzer. The right door opened. Tiny grabbed my arm and pulled me into a large anteroom. It was furnished as expensively as the corridor, but there was no daylight. The windows were covered with thick damask drapes and behind the drapes were heavy gauge opaque sheets of plastic blocking any outside light from filtering in.
Three men sat in the room. Two were playing gin and the third was the turkey I’d left tied up the last time I was here. He was still reading the same X-Men comic book, or maybe I’d give him the benefit of the doubt and say he was re-reading it.
The men looked like figures in a wax museum. They didn’t move, didn’t look up, except for my friend, who shot a dirty look in my direction and went back to scrutinizing his literature.
Across the room was another set of heavy wooden doors with another set of security cameras. The golf player came around from behind me and pressed the buzzer next to the doors.
There was a loud click and Tiny shoved both doors open, then pointed his finger for me to go in.
It was a big room and it looked like a combination office and living room. It was decorated even more elegantly than the other room. There were four medieval unicorn tapestries covering the walls and I didn’t have to look long to know that they were originals. The drapes, tapestries and carpets combined to give the room a real somber air. The lighting was dim and came mostly from a huge chandelier.
In the center of the room was a massive darkwood antique desk. Jergens sat at the desk, leaning back, his hands locked behind his head.
“Rogan,” he said. “Anybody ever tell you that you have an extraordinarily large set of brass balls?”
“Standard issue in my line of work,” I told him.
He nodded. “Come over here and sit down.”
I made myself comfortable in a wing back chair.
He opened an intricately carved cigar box and shoved it across the desk in my direction.
“Care for one?”
I picked up a cigar and examined it. It was an H. Upmann.
“Only if you promise it won’t explode.”
He tossed me a well-worn Zippo. On it was the anchor, globe and eagle. I raised my eyebrows and looked at him.
“Fifth marines,” he said.
“The hell you say.”
“Fuckin’ A.”
I lit up, took a deep puff, and digested that one.
Then I took another puff and said, “Why did you kill Alicia?”
“I didn’t kill anybody.”
“She was blackmailing you.”
“Big fucking deal,” he said. “So what?”
“That’s a good reason to kill somebody.”
“Not in my book.” He stuck his jaw out, like he was daring me to contradict him.
“You were paying her off.”
He smiled for the first time. “Yeah, her and ten thousand other freeloaders.” He stopped and squinted at me. “I pay people for what they can do for me.”
“Yeah. And what was that?”
His grin took on the look of one of those evil clown masks. “She was a sexy bitch. I wanted to ream her out.”
I took another puff and let the smoke out slowly. The cigar was starting to taste foul. “And what happened?”
Jergens laughed. “Exactly fucking nothing. The bitch had principles in her own way, you know. She would fuck me, but she wouldn’t fuck me.”
I stared back at him. “She had the goods on you-falsified financials, fraudulent 10K’s. She was going to knock your whole operation down like a stack of toy blocks. That’s why you killed her-to shut her up before she could. Only you didn’t count on one thing. She sent a duplicate set of documents to her sister, so you had to whack her sister too.”
He looked at me for a long time, then he said, “Rogan, you’re not as smart as you think you are.”
“What do you mean?”
He leaned across the desk, picked up the Zippo and started toying with it. “You didn’t do your fucking homework,” he said.
I let him continue. He fiddled with the Zippo until it gave off a light as big as a flame thrower. Then he stopped playing with the lighter and put it down on the dark polished desktop.
“She didn’t have to shoot me down,” he said finally. “I was finished before she came along.” He looked me square in the face. “Didn’t you check the short interest in my stock?”
“No,” I said. I was starting to get an uneasy feeling in my liver.
“Go and scope it out. It’s been getting bigger every month for the last few months. The word is out on the street. Every cocksucker and his brother knows about the scam. The only thing that kept the stock from collapsing was that there was a small float and I kept buying back shares to squeeze the shit out of the shorts. Only now I’m tapped out, so the stock’s gonna drop like a rock. Then the fucking SEC’s gonna come poking around and I’m going up the fucking river.”
He reached over and lit up a cigar. The lighter shook as he tried to steady the flame.
“They’ll send me to Club Fed for two to three. Then I’ll be back, bigger and badder than before.” He sucked on the cigar and blew out a large cloud of smoke that hung in the air over his head.
“Why did you send those two clowns to nail me in my garage?” I said.
He shook his head. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. I didn’t send anybody after anybody. You were the one who came after me, remember? I didn’t even know who you were until you started showing up in my face.”
I got up. “If you drop the soap, don’t bend over to pick it up,” I told him.
“Thanks for the advice.”
“Always glad to help out a fellow jarhead.”
“Semper fi,” he said as I walked out.
“Yeah,” I said. “Whatever.”