By the Time You Read This

23

ROGER FELT. CARDINAL HAD not thought about Roger Felt for at least five or six years. Roger Felt had been a stockbroker/financial adviser/investment analyst for the Algonquin Bay office of Fraser, Grant. He had enjoyed a reputation for being a local Midas with growth stocks.

Like just about every other financial adviser in town, Felt’s bread and butter lay in mutual funds. He took people’s nest eggs and savings accounts and rainy day funds and put them into more or less conservative allocations of five-star funds. But he had not been satisfied with that sort of program for his own retirement planning. Too many years of reading the financial press had filled his head with profiles of financial wizards who made killings and retired with sailboats and ski mansions and houses in the south of France. You weren’t supposed to end up with a ranch-style split level in Algonquin Bay and a cottage on Mud Lake.

And so Roger Felt had embarked on an ambitious scheme to make the big leagues. He moved his own portfolio into the riskier stocks, the testosterone market, and he started betting on margin. And when the first margin calls had come in, he rapidly paid them off with his own cash.

Of course, this cash was also supposed to pay for his wife’s retirement, not just his own. It was meant to cover assisted living for his mother-in-law and the educations of their three kids, who were all heading off, seriatim, to university. No problem. When the market turned around, as his economic savvy told him it must, he would be so rich he could pay for all of those things with pocket money.

Many losses and many margin calls later, Roger Felt found himself in the uncomfortable position of having drained not just his own accounts but those of his wealthiest clients. In Algonquin Bay, these “wealthiest” were not millionaires, but retirees with plump pensions and paid-off houses who had a little extra cash. Roger Felt “borrowed” liberally from their accounts to pay off his margin calls and to place bigger investments, with the intention, he later told the court, of paying everybody back—with interest, of course.

Dreams of luxury on the Côte d’Azur began to fade, and dwindled into dreams of paying back the funds he had pilfered, dreams of restoring his own family to financial health, dreams of staying out of jail.

It was not to be.

One of his clients, a Mrs. Gertrude M. Lowry, wished to consolidate all her funds with another firm. When she tired of Felt’s evasions, she called the police. Cardinal got the case and, since he was no financial wizard, Delorme was soon put on it too. She had been just a few months short of an MBA when she joined the police and had spent half a dozen years chasing white-collar criminals.

They arrested Felt on charges of fraud, misappropriation of funds and breach of fiduciary duty. He was found guilty on all three. His lawyer, Leonard Scofield, made an eloquent request for a minimum sentence that the judge received coolly. He could do little else after hearing from the parade of witnesses: men long past their prime who had been forced to go back to work, young people whose dreams of owning a house had come to nothing, angry couples who had lost their homes, and tremulous old women now working at menial jobs to keep their heads above water. Roger Felt was banished to a medium-security prison for eight years, from which he had been paroled after serving five.

Cardinal rolled up in front of the address Desmond had given him. It turned out to be an apartment above a fabric store on Sumner. To get to the downstairs door, Cardinal had to squeeze his way through a passageway so narrow that he was forced to turn sideways.

The door had been decorated by consecutive generations of graffiti artists, the least imaginative of whom had written I Love You in raspberry-coloured letters a foot tall. Cardinal buzzed the intercom and waited, looking around the alley with its crushed soda cans, its fly-away sandwich wrappers, even a laceless, soggy tennis shoe. All in all, a long way down from the lakeside property Roger Felt had owned when Cardinal and Delorme had arrested him. He had been swinging in a hammock with a rum and Coke in his hand at the time.

A voice caused the intercom’s torn speaker to flap and buzz. “Who is it?”

“Courier.”

“Hold on, I’ll be right down.”

Heavy footsteps on the stairs within, and then the door opened.

Prison had done nothing good for Roger Felt’s appearance. He had always been a squarish man, not graceful, but expensive suits and a regular squash game had combined to make him look like a person you might call sir. But now he was squat and trollish. His shirt looked as if it had not been ironed for decades, and there were rings of sweat under his arms. He reeked of cigarettes, and was wheezing from the stairs.

“Are you from Alma’s?” he said, naming a Main Street restaurant. “I’m not really expecting anything.”

Cardinal held up his shield. “Surprise.”

Felt peered up at him through thick lenses. “Oh, no.”

Cardinal pushed the door open. “Mr. Felt, we have reason to believe you are in breach of your parole. I need to come in and take a look around.”

“Let’s see a warrant first.”

“You’re a convicted felon on parole, Mr. Felt, and I have reasonable grounds to suspect you are in breach. No warrant required.”

Cardinal pushed his way past him and went up the dark stairwell. The door at the top opened onto a cramped, lopsided kitchen lit with one of those fluorescent rings beloved of penny-pinching landlords. A cigarette sent up coils of smoke from an ashtray. Beside it there was an adding machine, a stack of files, a battered-looking laptop and a small printer.

Cardinal pulled a sheet of paper from its out tray.

It was an invoice from Beckwith and Beaulne addressed to Nautilus Marine Storage and Repair. The capital Ns and Rs had lines running through them. Cardinal usually stayed pretty cool when it came to arresting criminals. But now, as Roger Felt came huffing into the kitchen, he felt a surge of rage. Immediately, some other part of his character locked this rage away. He pointed to the adding machine, the files, the columns of figures on the laptop screen.

“The terms of your parole are that you not be employed in the financial sector. Clearly, you are performing accountancy services. May I speak to Mr. Beckwith?”

“He isn’t here.”

“And Mr. Beaulne?”

“He’s not available either.”

“Beaulne and Beckwith are fictitious entities, aren’t they?”

“It’s just a name. It sounded good.”

“You’re running a fictitious company, Mr. Felt. For purposes once again of duping the public.”

“I need clients. The name sounded good. You can’t expect me to live on the income from a job in a sandwich shop.”

“With your record of fraud and breach of fiduciary duty, I think a judge is going to be very interested in the fictitious Mr. Beaulne and Mr. Beckwith.”

“Please don’t do that. I can’t go back to jail.”

“Get your shoes on, Mr. Felt. That’s exactly where we’re going.”