Death Benefit

20.

ONE CENTRAL PARK WEST NEW YORK CITY MARCH 4, 2011, 8:05 A.M.

When his home office phone rang just after eight in the morning, a very anxious Jerry Trotter snapped it up. He’d been hoping it would ring, and he was hoping it would be Harry Hooper.

“I just had breakfast with that Morgan guy I was telling you about last night,” Hooper said, launching right in after Trotter picked up.

“You met with the guy? Sat down in front of him and ate breakfast?” Trotter was surprised. Brubaker and Hooper were usually more indirect, avoiding face-to-face meetings.

“He wouldn’t say anything more over the phone. He wanted a meeting, insisted on it. At six-thirty in the morning. He thinks I’m a headhunter for real, and he wants a new job, like yesterday. I couldn’t see the harm in it. It’s not like I’m going to see the guy again.”

“But what do you know about being a headhunter?”

“What’s to know? I just asked the guy to tell me about himself, about his strengths, where he sees himself in five years, all that BS. I said I didn’t know of anyone who needed someone exactly like him, but I’d keep an ear to the ground, keep him in mind.”

“Didn’t he ask you for your business card?”

“Said I was all out,” Hooper said. “Said I’d been meeting with a lot of bankers the last couple of weeks and underestimated demand. Almost convinced myself I was that busy. Anyway, we finally got around to talking about your woman friend. She and the thick guy who she was working for at the time definitely slept together. More than once. Not just some drunken hookup at a convention but an actual affair-hotel rooms in the afternoon, that kind of thing.”

“And he knows this how?”

“He was going out with this woman who was good friends with your girl. Real good friends, like girlfriends who told each other everything. So your friend tells this woman she’s seeing this guy who’s married. Then she says it’s her boss. She swore the friend to secrecy, made her swear she’d never tell anyone, all that. But the woman told my guy. Information’s valuable, as you know, and it all depends on the circumstances. This woman thought it would help in her relationship with my guy, bring them closer, having a shared secret. It didn’t work. They broke up after a while.”

“So why’d he tell you?”

“Like I said, information can be valuable. I was asking about your girl, he knew something. Maybe he wanted the supposed job I was checking out your friend for. I don’t really know. I guess I may have led him to believe I’m better connected on Wall Street than I am.”

“He’s going to be pissed when you disappear all of a sudden.”

“What’s he gonna do, tell his boss? Anyway, I plan to call him next week, start letting him down slow. It looks like I’m going to be downsized myself. Sure is a cruel world.”

“Okay,” Jerry said. “Give me a second to think.”

Jerry held the phone in both hands. This was good-Gloria Croft and Edmund Mathews had slept together ten, twelve years ago. And clearly it hadn’t ended well because Gloria was apparently enjoying trying to ruin Edmund. But for what Jerry had in mind, there had to be more. This was good, but it wasn’t enough.

“Okay, I like this, but I need more. Keep digging. Try and figure out why it ended between them, and why it ended so badly.”

“All right, got it.”

Jerry sat back in his chair. He was a man with a lot of secrets, which is why he assumed everyone else had them. Some of Jerry’s secrets concerned the fact that he was unfaithful to Charlotte, his wife of twenty-two years. He had had affairs with some of his patients, one of which continued after Trotter ended his medical practice and went into finance. It was still going on, with trysts at an apartment Trotter maintained in the Village for that express purpose. Trotter didn’t feel any guilt about Charlotte. He thought of it as a kind of deal even though Charlotte had never been approached about it. He played around, and she lived the high life. Shopping was her sport.

From Jerry’s perspective risk was a big part of life. Everybody handled risk differently. He thought he handled risk well, which was what made him a good hedge fund guy. Others handled risk poorly. The real question that dogged Jerry’s mind at that moment was how much would have to be on the line for someone to do something truly desperate. He was just beginning to think there might be a way to solve the problem that Edmund had tossed into his lap.

Jerry Trotter had another secret, one that weighed on his mind more heavily than any other. It had nothing to do with women. Not only had Jerry taken a very sizable personal stake in LifeDeals, in addition to the position his fund had acquired publicly, but he had made a third and completely clandestine investment that was larger than the other two stakes combined. Jerry had studied what Edmund and Russell had set up with LifeDeals, read the business plans, and pored over the sales reports. He had commissioned his own secret research and paid lawyers hefty fees to set up financial instruments ready to be sold at a few days’ notice. And then, masked by a series of offshore shell companies, he had set up the bare bones of a parallel company that would mimic LifeDeals, right down to the type of policies it went after. As Edmund never tired of saying, life insurance was a $26 trillion business in the USA alone. There was plenty of money to go around.

Edmund and Russell’s bad news about regenerative medicine had hit Jerry Trotter like a hammer blow, much more than Edmund could have guessed. His due diligence had completely missed it, as had Edmund’s. To his partner and his firm, LifeDeals’ predicament was unfortunate but it hardly threatened the hedge fund’s success, even in the short term. But Jerry stood to lose much more. His personal stake was very large but also survivable. But if the shadow company that he was rolling out went down, he was probably ruined. The various subsidiaries were already buying policies. Individually, each was tiny compared with LifeDeals’. Together, Jerry had once been proud to think, they were larger.

Over the course of approximately eighteen-plus hours, from the moment he’d left the Terrasini restaurant, Jerry Trotter had become an extremely desperate man. He hadn’t slept all night, instead using his old calculator and various files and portfolios to try to figure out ways in which he could emerge from this intact. He knew he was clutching at straws with Harry Hooper, but he was hoping against hope that Edmund Mathews had something more than just money at stake, something that would mean Jerry didn’t have to try to fix this mess all on his own. Jerry had few qualms, but he much preferred to delegate the truly dirty stuff, the stuff that could get you thrown in jail or worse.