Mortal Bonds by Michael Sears Page B

afternoon, though. I’ll tell her later. I don’t see it as a problem. She won’t have to meet Angie.”
    “You don’t see a problem?”
    “No.”
    “God, forgive me. I raised an idiot.”
    “Pop, you don’t know Skeli.”
    “Yeah, I do.”
    He rang off, leaving me with a slight buzz of anxiety. I shook it off and went back to work. This time I focused on the lists Everett had included.
    I recognized scores of names of clients, many of the friends, and a few of the employees. But one name leaped off the page.
    Michael Moskowitz. Individual Client. Total investment $1.2 million.
    “Mickey the Mouse” had been in the markets for years when I was starting out, having traded foreign exchange for the old Franklin National Bank until they went under. He managed not to be indicted and resurfaced a few months later as a foreign exchange broker working for one of the shops that acted as intermediary between the big players. For a few months he had been my broker, while I was learning the ropes. We would chat every day, do some business when it suited, and he would buy me dinner every couple of weeks. Then he went away to rehab and we lost touch. I knew he drank—too often—it was practically part of his job description. I hadn’t known about the cocaine. When he came back to work, they assigned him to a different desk to keep him from slipping back into old habits. It hadn’t worked—the old habits had become new again. We hadn’t spoken in almost twenty years.
    But the thing that had made the Mouse special was his love of market gossip. Mickey had the skinny on everything. You could not scoop the man. If Goldman Sachs was hiring away Solomon’s sterling trader, Mickey knew which wine they were drinking with dinner the night they agreed on the contract. If anyone had a handle on where Von Becker had stashed three billion dollars, my money was on Mickey.
    I checked the online directory. He still lived out on Long Island. Rockville Centre.
    “Hello?” he answered, sounding both sadder and frailer than I remembered.
    “Mickey?”
    “Who’s this?”
    “It’s Jason Stafford, Mick.”
    There was a short pause. “Out of the past. You ever see that movie? Robert Mitchum. The best. You should rent it sometime.”
    “How ya been?”
    “Truth? Not so good. Not where I thought I’d be, at any rate. How you making out?”
    “I’m good, actually,” I said. “As you say, not where I thought I’d be, but good.”
    “I thought I’d be hearing from you.”
    “How’s that?”
    “You’re working for them.” He said the word “them” like it was something toxic. “I figured you’d find my name.”
    He still had his ear. It was what I needed.
    “What have you been up to?” I asked.
    “The last year? The last ten years? I’ve been out of the market for at least that long.”
    “I guess I knew that.”
    “Yeah. Third time back from rehab; I guess they got the message. They made me take a disability. Funny thing. It was the right thing to do. I’ve been clean ever since.”
    “How did you get wrapped up in this Von Becker mess?”
    “That prick. It was Binks. The son. He introduced me. Binks partied a lot when he first started out. He and I had some times together. He’s into other stuff these days, what I hear. Anyway, when I got laid up on the beach I talked to him about some ideas I had of trying to work from home. Desperate stuff. It was never going to work. Binks put me together with the old man.”
    “Helping you out?”
    “I was fifty-six and getting four grand a month from disability. The wife was still teaching, but she had her thirty in and wanted to retire. The old man said we could make twelve percent and still have some upside of principal. I jumped at it. We emptied all our accounts. Seven hundred and fifty thou. He said we would earn ninety grand a year—minimum. It wasn’t Wall Street money, but we were okay.”
    “You didn’t think it was too good?”
    “No. Remember, this was ten