JM02 - Death's Little Helpers aka No Way Home by Peter Spiegelman Page B
Authors: Peter Spiegelman
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violations that seemed to stop just short of outright fraud. Gilpin, the article noted, was the younger brother of “prominent Wall Street analyst Gregory Danes.” The reporter was almost right; according to Nina Sachs, Richard Gilpin was Danes’s creepy half brother. Gilpin was on my list of people to talk to, assuming I could find him, and I took down the details.
I went to the kitchen and warmed my coffee in the microwave and looked out the window as I drank it. The sky was a soft, even gray, and the gulls, wheeling slowly over the building across the street, were nearly lost against it. I had a lot of windows opened, and a small breeze wandered in with the street noise.
I thought about Danes and the traces he had left behind on the Web— his footprints across the big stage of Wall Street— and I thought about the other actors recently brought to heel. I recalled the televised hearings and the faces, pale under their golf-course tans. Some had been annoyed at being called to testify and others had been downright angry, and a few, perhaps, had been something close to scared, but regardless of demeanor they seemed to share a common sense of astonishment that questions had been asked at all.
Thoughts of arrogance and money and Wall Street led me, inevitably, to my family. Money is the family business— on my mother’s side, at least— and it has been ever since my great-grandfather founded the merchant bank of Klein & Sons. One of my uncles runs the bank these days, with help from my eldest brother, Ned. My other brother, David, and my older sister, Liz, work there too, along with the rest of my uncles and countless cousins. Not every Klein offspring has gone into banking, though. My baby sister hasn’t, and through the years there’d been heretics who’d wandered off into medicine, law, and academia. But there’d never been a cop or a PI before— not until me.
This was not a source of particular family pride, but I was used to that. By the time I’d found a career— or it had found me— I’d already amassed twenty-two years’ worth of underachievement and unfulfilled expectations. Even now I could hear my mother’s chilly tones: You surprise me, John, only in the particulars of your choices, not in the degree of their foolishness. She’s gone now— both my parents are— but her sentiment lingers like a ghost around my family.
Not that I’d never toed the family line. I had, albeit sporadically. In college, I was a business major for about ten minutes, and for several summers I’d interned on the trading floor of a big broker-dealer. I’d gotten coffee, answered phones, run pricing models, reconfirmed trades, and tended my hangovers there, and I’d listened quietly, over long expensive lunches, while people barely older than I tried to sell me on a future with the firm. It didn’t take. The avarice, egotism, and self-delusion I’d seen there approached caricature, and when the dismay wore off, Wall Street had bored me to tears.
Several times in recent years clients and cases had led me back there and afforded me a darker but more interesting view of the place. In seven years as a cop I’d seen what greed and arrogance could do when they were mixed with desperation and opportunity; that was old news. What was different on Wall Street was the stakes that people played for, the variety of their games, and the particular mix of brains and vanity they brought with them to the table. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
I topped off my coffee, found the Pace-Loyette phone directory that Neary had given me, and turned to the listings for Gregory Danes’s department, Equity Research.
Research wasn’t a big group at Pace-Loyette— fewer than thirty analysts in all— but it didn’t need to be. Pace-Loyette wasn’t a big firm, and they didn’t cover every sector of the market; technology was the specialty of the house. Danes’s name appeared at the top of the page, with the title
I went to the kitchen and warmed my coffee in the microwave and looked out the window as I drank it. The sky was a soft, even gray, and the gulls, wheeling slowly over the building across the street, were nearly lost against it. I had a lot of windows opened, and a small breeze wandered in with the street noise.
I thought about Danes and the traces he had left behind on the Web— his footprints across the big stage of Wall Street— and I thought about the other actors recently brought to heel. I recalled the televised hearings and the faces, pale under their golf-course tans. Some had been annoyed at being called to testify and others had been downright angry, and a few, perhaps, had been something close to scared, but regardless of demeanor they seemed to share a common sense of astonishment that questions had been asked at all.
Thoughts of arrogance and money and Wall Street led me, inevitably, to my family. Money is the family business— on my mother’s side, at least— and it has been ever since my great-grandfather founded the merchant bank of Klein & Sons. One of my uncles runs the bank these days, with help from my eldest brother, Ned. My other brother, David, and my older sister, Liz, work there too, along with the rest of my uncles and countless cousins. Not every Klein offspring has gone into banking, though. My baby sister hasn’t, and through the years there’d been heretics who’d wandered off into medicine, law, and academia. But there’d never been a cop or a PI before— not until me.
This was not a source of particular family pride, but I was used to that. By the time I’d found a career— or it had found me— I’d already amassed twenty-two years’ worth of underachievement and unfulfilled expectations. Even now I could hear my mother’s chilly tones: You surprise me, John, only in the particulars of your choices, not in the degree of their foolishness. She’s gone now— both my parents are— but her sentiment lingers like a ghost around my family.
Not that I’d never toed the family line. I had, albeit sporadically. In college, I was a business major for about ten minutes, and for several summers I’d interned on the trading floor of a big broker-dealer. I’d gotten coffee, answered phones, run pricing models, reconfirmed trades, and tended my hangovers there, and I’d listened quietly, over long expensive lunches, while people barely older than I tried to sell me on a future with the firm. It didn’t take. The avarice, egotism, and self-delusion I’d seen there approached caricature, and when the dismay wore off, Wall Street had bored me to tears.
Several times in recent years clients and cases had led me back there and afforded me a darker but more interesting view of the place. In seven years as a cop I’d seen what greed and arrogance could do when they were mixed with desperation and opportunity; that was old news. What was different on Wall Street was the stakes that people played for, the variety of their games, and the particular mix of brains and vanity they brought with them to the table. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
I topped off my coffee, found the Pace-Loyette phone directory that Neary had given me, and turned to the listings for Gregory Danes’s department, Equity Research.
Research wasn’t a big group at Pace-Loyette— fewer than thirty analysts in all— but it didn’t need to be. Pace-Loyette wasn’t a big firm, and they didn’t cover every sector of the market; technology was the specialty of the house. Danes’s name appeared at the top of the page, with the title
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