Two Time

NINETEEN

EDDIE AND I waded in the last few feet so Hodges could spin the dinghy around without grounding the propeller and head back to his boat, affording Jackie the special joy of being greeted by a wet, sandy dog.

“Love you, too, Eddie, get the hell off of me. That heap of yours was in the drive, so I thought you were jogging.”

She looked a lot better than the last time I’d seen her. Someone had evolved my bandage redesign into something even more elegantly discreet. And her color was back. Kind of a fleshy spotted pink.

“You were half right. Want some coffee?”

She held up the envelope, which turned out to be a manila file folder.

“Yes. And a conversation.”

I really didn’t need any more coffee, I just wanted to get the taste of Hodges’s hand-picked beans out of my mouth. When I got back she had the folder open on her lap, with a binder clip securing the short stack of papers against the breeze coming off the water. She had a pen stuck in her mouth and a pencil behind her ear, probably forgotten there.

“The first thing to decide,” she said, “is whether to burn these right away or wait until tonight when we might need the heat.”

“Okay I’m listening.”

“Most of the stuff is blacked out. Understandably, given the risk he was already taking.”

“Who?”

“Web.”

“You did it.”

“Kind of. Took a protracted game of twenty questions. More like twenty thousand. And things like, if I’m getting warm, hum a few bars of La Marseillaise.’”

“Takes persistence.”

“And a little tit, per your suggestion. Though I’d have done that anyway.”

“And?”

She pulled a piece of yellow legal paper out of the middle of the stack and clipped it on the top. It was covered with her handwriting. She put it up to her chest and cleared her throat.

“Where do you think Jonathan ranked in his class at the Harvard Business School?”

“Is this another twenty questions?”

“Come on. You’d do it to me.”

“I don’t know. First.”

“Sure should’ve, given his performance. Though it’s hard to graduate at the top of your class when you never graduate.”

“Really.”

“Or even matriculate. Not according to Harvard. And they’re sticklers on things like admission and tuition.”

“He didn’t go?”

“Not officially. He somehow managed to sneak into some courses and even submitted papers that impressed his professors, until they discovered he wasn’t actually enrolled in the school.”

“Gosh.”

“All I have is the copy of a memo from one of his professors to the Dean of Admissions. Alternately apologetic, or defensive, about getting snookered, and full of admiration for the quality of Jonathan’s work. It ends with something like, if Mr. Eldridge ever decides to engage with the university in an appropriate fashion, assuming the absence of legal encumbrances, I fully recommend we consider his candidacy very seriously, yadda, yadda.’ I think Web let me see this as a good summary of the situation. Took me about three stanzas into the French national anthem, but I got the gist.”

I struggled to remember the drab little office in Riverhead. One of the few adornments was a wall partially covered with framed documents, the kind with Old English script inked in with the name Jonathan Eldridge. I thought I could visualize a diploma from Harvard, but it might have been a manufactured memory, born of another file I got from Joe Sullivan that held Jonathan’s resume.

Jackie had the look of canary-fed cat.

“Okay I bet there’s more,” I said to her.

“Nobody said you had to be a graduate of Harvard to be a stockbroker, or even a financial adviser. So what’s the big deal, you might ask.”

“Rhetorically, like they do at Harvard.”

“I mean, even Alena has an NASD Series 7 broker’s license, which is the basic, national thing. Jonathan would have to have at least that, and probably a Series 63, which you get from New York State. And in order to legally perform the duties of a licensed financial consultant, he’d naturally have a Series 65. Beyond that, he’d need to be registered in all the states his clients live in, not just New York, and registered with the New York Stock Exchange, since he put through trades.”

The framed documents came back into my mind’s eye. I tried to remember if there were any other wall decorations, but I didn’t think so. They were behind his desk, which faced Alenas, so she probably had the specifics branded into her consciousness. Clients and prospects would call, she’d always be first to pick up the phone. Answer any questions, provide an overview of the firm’s capabilities and credentials. Confident and reassuring, convincingly supportive of her boss’s attainments and proficiency, because she was convinced herself.

“You’re kidding.”

“None of em. And I looked, trust me. Checked with the NASD, the stock exchange, state agencies, nothing. Never took the tests, much less secured the licenses.”

For the first time since seeing him throw the tennis ball for his French poodle, I wanted to have a conversation with Jonathan Eldridge. Suddenly I desperately wanted to get a close look at his face, listen to his speech, test his body language. He’d always just been the guy some other guy blew up, interesting more for the lack of interest he inspired. More than a caricature, but easily categorized—the tight-assed financial wonk, the circumspect researcher, settled comfortably within his narrow forte, calibrating his own serenity as carefully as his investment recommendations. A man engaged in one of the most stressful occupations you could choose in a way that precisely established the optimum level of stress. Jonathan Eldridge, once almost two-dimensional, was now fractured into an infinity of possibilities, like the splinters of a broken window. Or rather, everything I’d thought about him up to then simply winked out of existence, and in its place a blank unknown appeared, all questions and no answers.

Like a cheap theatrical device, my brain replayed the whole thing in reverse, searching for another start point. As I once did in the face of unexpected and catastrophic systems failure, I needed a way to reset the operating assumptions.

I stood up.

“I need another cup of coffee.”

Jackie held up her manila folder.

“You don’t want to hear the rest?”

“Okay,” I said, sitting back down.

“Alena was dead right on her hostiles list, at least for two of them, and yes I’m sorry I was mean to Alena, just don’t make me apologize every time I mention her name.”

“Which two?”

“Back up. Once you get past the fact that Jonathan had zero academic or regulatory sanction, he was very good at picking stocks and managing portfolios. The logistics were actually quite easy. Jonathan Eldridge Consultants had an account with Eagle Exchange, the brokerage firm. This account was divided into a string of discrete sub-accounts, all legally the same, but stand-alone in terms of what went in and out and how statements were issued. This, on the face of it, is not an uncommon practice with small securities shops, boutiques, one-man bands who don’t have the infrastructure to handle all the administrative detail involved in trading, which is quite onerous and potentially devastating for the broker if he happens to mess up a transaction. Perfectly legal. They make their money, as Jonathan did, by taking a percentage of the assets under management; the brokerage house still gets its commission as it would if it was all Jonathan’s personal money.

“Alena kept track of it all with her own accounting system, tied directly to the sub-accounts at the brokerage house, which were identified only by number. So, Alena had an account called Joyce Whithers that corresponded to a numbered sub-account at Eagle. Alena handled all the transactions at Jonathan’s direction, and managed the working relationship with a guy at the other end of the phone. She got the statements each month from Eagle, and issued statements of her own to the individual clients. This system was already set up by Jonathan when she started working for him, though she improved on it considerably. I could start in on how it’s another example of an underappreciated female assistant doing all the work and the boss getting all the credit, but he credited her just fine when you hear what she was making.”

“Ig told you that?”

“I start throwing out numbers to you, and you either point up or down.”

“Got it.”

“The clients don’t have to know all their money is getting pooled in a single account at the buy-sell end as long as their statements from Jonathan and Alena accurately reflect what they bought and sold, and the consequent proceeds. Which is what everybody got, lots of nice proceeds. All but Ivor Fleming and Joyce Whithers. No evidence, according to Mr. Doll Face, that Jonathan was skimming or misrepresenting the performance of individual portfolios. He might have made some bad calls for Joyce and Ivor, but it’s all accurately accounted for, fair and square.”

“He took better care of Butch.”

“Splendid care. I should have such care from my broker. If I had a broker.”

“But Alena called him hostile.”

“Strictly personal reasons. Tense phone calls overheard in the office, nasty little notes he gave her to pass to Jonathan, family crap. She really despises him, and I can see why.”

It must have been irresistible for Butch to have such an obvious target for his flavor of social rebellion so close to home, such an easy mark, yet apparently free of consequences, at least financial. But when I brought up Jonathan at the fundraiser, his regret was palpable. I didn’t have a brother, but I had an understanding with my sister that neither of us ever articulated. It was the bond of a common enemy, and a shared defensive strategy. We never contended with each other, conserving our resources for the real battle. There wasn’t a lot of warmth, but certainly an abiding respect for the private nature of the other. Not that any of that was obvious. What family opera is ever understandable by people watching from the outside? There’s no decoding an underlying communication that even the participants aren’t fully aware of.

“Unless you’re packing a few more revelations, I’m going for that cup of coffee,” I told Jackie.

“You drink a lot of coffee.”

“Keeps me calm.”

“That’s all Web would let me have. And I’m serious about burning this, and you have to promise me not to give him up.”

“I don’t know what we’re doing here, Jackie. So sure. He’s safe with me.”

“I don’t know what we’re doing, either, but I’m going to corroborate this so it looks like I dug it all up on my own. Then look brilliant. For whom, I don’t know. For what reason, I don’t know either.”

“Okay.”

She walked me back to the cottage, but I let her walk on her own to her Toyota pickup. I knew she’d seen Amanda sunning herself next door, but held back the wisecracks, either being overly distracted or suddenly afflicted with a case of good manners.

But when I heard the little truck start up something occurred to me. I ran outside and caught her at the end of the driveway.

“Say Jackie, what about undergrad? Where did Jonathan go to college, or did he fake that, too?”

“I don’t know. Though I haven’t looked everywhere. I did pin down Butch’s transcript. Went to BU, graduated with honors.”

“Really. What’d he major in?”

“You’re gonna love it.”

She reached out the truck window and patted my shoulder, an uncharacteristically familiar gesture that caused an unwanted recollection of Joyce Whithers’s scaly hands.

“Economics.”