Crimes by Moonlight

The Insider by Mike Wiecek

It was nice to have my office back.

Not strictly an office, mind you, and not strictly mine. In our profession, nobody would dream of paying for a hundred square feet behind pebbled glass. But the Tasty-Time Coffeehouse had not long ago been completely overrun by the New Unemployed. You know who I mean-laid-off bankers, mostly-hogging the chairs, frowning at their laptops, stretching a single caramel mint latte straight through lunch. The Tasty-Time’s manager tried switching off the Wi-Fi, but it wasn’t until he bolted plates over every power outlet that the freeloaders finally got the idea.

Today even the best table in the house was open, up front by a plate glass window. I steered my client over-we’d arrived at the same time-and got two stale donuts and coffee.

“Ernest Eppleworth,” he said. He didn’t look much like an Ernest, with his movie-star jaw and short, fashionably graying hair. “Thanks for seeing me, Mr. Clark.”

Ernest ran a little hedge fund, and he knew a guy whose sister had a friend I’d helped out last year. It wasn’t much of a case-the ghost had already been fading away, and the friend held on to his marriage-but everyone seemed happy at the end. A recommendation apparently traveled along, as they do.

Anyway, I was glad for the business.

“So how can I help you?” I asked.

“Well.” Ernest hesitated. “The thing is… I’m making too much money.”

“Ah.” An obvious solution presented itself, but-“Why don’t you tell me about that?”

“Since November, we’ve earned a 13,000 percent return.”

“Holy-” I choked on my donut. “A little over half a year-you’ve been doubling your money every month?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Short-term forex trading.”

“No way.” And I meant it.

See, I used to be a banker myself. Lehman Brothers, maybe you heard of them. After my own layoff, I drifted into private security. Crime is just about the only growth industry going nowadays. The ghost specialization thing-all that came later.

But anyway, that’s how I knew my way around the markets. Day-trading foreign exchange?-most folks would do better piling up their money and putting a match to it. Ernest wasn’t telling the whole story.

“Well,” I said. “What currencies?”

“A range. Nairas, lately, and good action in hryvnias, kyats, and Qatari riyals.”

“There’s a market in this stuff?” Nairas were Nigerian, and I was pretty sure hryvnias were Belorussian or Ukrainian or something, but I’d never heard of kyats.

“We get better leverage in the unregulated venues.” He noticed my skepticism and added, “It’s fully documented. We use a London-based clearinghouse, report every trade, pay our taxes. Entirely above-board.”

I started to get a glimmer of the problem. “So you’re just very good traders, is that it? Never wrong-footed by the market, ice-cool under pressure, all that?”

Ernest had the grace to look embarrassed. “More or less.”

“Someone’s feeding you trades.” I didn’t make it a question.

“No.”

“No?”

“Not someone,” he said. “Something.”

CONSIDERING how much sheer energy and intellect has gone into analyzing the markets, it’s surprising that no one saw the correlation decades before. Hemlines, sunspots, AFC vs. NFC in the Super Bowl-every other conceivable, spurious relationship has been studied to death. But only recently did someone notice that market volatility marched neatly in step with parapsychological phenomena.

In other words, the more ghosts showing up, the wackier the Dow.

Ouija boards and seances? Had their peak in the late 1920s and early ’30s, and you know what was happening then. The Age of Aquarius? Maybe it was all the dope those kids were smoking, but paranormal visitations skyrocketed right when the economy tanked in the early 1970s. Which led directly to all that New Age out-of-body crap and the first Reagan recession-and by the time the bubble economy crashed, everyone and their dog seemed to have a personal angel.

Potted history, to be sure, but now that we’re in the Great Depression Two, the ectoplasm’s been flying like mud. Basically, economic distress translates into a lot of unhappy deaths, with hauntings following right behind.

“I don’t know who he is,” said Ernest. “I’ve never seen… one before.”

“What’s he look like?”

“You know-like a ghost.” Ernest frowned impatiently. “His shirt’s all torn up, blood everywhere on his head and chest, and he kind of shimmers, and you can see outlines of the furniture behind him.”

“So he didn’t die in his sleep.”

Here’s how it works-or the best current understanding, maybe not worth much. Most people, they die, and they go somewhere else straightaway. Nobody knows what’s beyond that long tunnel with the warm light at the end of it. But sometimes, if someone is really upset, if they feel they have vital, unfinished business-basically, if they’re incredibly resentful about being dead-they can hang around for a while, pestering the living.

It’s almost always revenge, of course. Once in a blue moon some star-crossed Romeo can’t believe he died before his beloved, and he comes back, blubbering and fading in and out, until Juliet gets fed up and tells him to just get going, already. But usually shades are angry, vindictive losers who are happy to take a rain check on heaven if they can get just one more chance to screw with their enemies still on earth.

I’d never heard of a ghost who stayed behind simply to help out.

“Why you?” I asked.

“I have no idea.” Ernest hesitated. “And, well, I haven’t tried to press, you know? I mean, the guy’s making me a fortune, no reason to rock the applecart.”

Nice. The hedge fund mentality in a nutshell, if anyone still doesn’t understand why Wall Street cratered the world economy recently. But we could let that go for now.

“He appears in my office,” said Ernest. “Always late at night, when I’m the only one there.”

“How often?”

“Every week or two at first. Then more frequently. This week on Monday and Thursday.”

“And he-”

“Gives me a recommendation. This or that currency, up or down, for the first thing the next morning.”

Forex, especially in the bizarro currencies Ernest had mentioned, was more than volatile. It would be like putting your entire stack on red or black, every time. And with leverage-he could probably multiply his bets by ten or twenty, on margin, with a cooperative broker-he was gambling the car, the mortgage, and the girlfriend, too.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “How does he communicate the details?”

“He must have died with a pen in his hand.” Ernest shrugged. “He writes on his shirttail and shows it to me.”

That’s another of the rules: the ghost shows up with whatever he happened to be wearing or holding at the instant of death. For most people, of course, that means a hospital johnny and the nurse-call button. Or if you have a massive heart attack shoveling snow, you get to keep your parka and the shovel.

Ernest’s ghost was apparently killed in the office.

“How long does he stay?”

“The first time, maybe half an hour. It took me a while to get the idea, you can imagine. After that, hardly more than a minute, just long enough to show me the tip.”

“He sounds efficient, this shade.”

“The last few times it’s been longer, like five or ten minutes. I don’t know why.”

“And every tip is good?”

“Every single one. He’s never missed, even once.”

I chewed some donut. “Is your fund still taking investors?”

“What?”

“Never mind.” I probably couldn’t make the minimum. “You know, most of my clients in situations like this, they want help getting rid of a shade. The golden-goose thing, I’m not sure what the problem is.”

“I saw a lawyer.” Ernest frowned. “He says the situation might be construed as insider trading, depending on who the… who he is. Was.”

“Really?” I couldn’t see how, exactly-had the SEC started going after psychics and palm readers? But paranormal litigation was a brand-new specialty, and case law was scant. “I think I see why you’re talking to me, though.”

“That’s right-everyone says you’re the best.” Ernest looked at me, well… earnestly. “I need to know who this ghost is.”

IT’S always scams or revenge.

Maybe not words to live by, but true for most of my cases.

Except now. I just couldn’t see the angle. Any angle. Some dead guy-murdered, from the description-takes an indefinite stopover from the Paradise Express, simply to help make Ernest very, very rich.

At least I didn’t feel guilty tripling my usual rates.

It was Monday, and Ernest expected the ghost that evening, so I went over to his office after dinner. Twentieth floor, Midtown, a block off Fifth Avenue. The ground-floor security desk had three guards, all of whom seemed to be moonlighting from their day jobs as counter-terrorist paramilitaries-boots, machine guns, armored vests. Good thing Ernest had told them I was coming.

Out of the elevator it was all teak and marble and handwoven Kashmiri rugs. Ernest had the corner office, a single desk lamp lit, so we could see the skyline glitter and twinkle all the way downtown.

Oh, and a surprise.

“This is Jake Tims,” said Ernest, as a man stepped from the shadows.

Mid-thirties, a little younger than Ernest, dressed in hedge fund casual: gray pants, open-collar shirt, John Lobb loafers, and a Breguet wristwatch.

“Nice to meet you.”

“Jake is making an investment,” said Ernest. “A major investment in the fund.”

“Six hundred million,” said Jake.

I nodded like this was the sort of pocket change I could lose at the dry cleaners, too. “Let me guess-you’re here for the due diligence?”

“Damn right.” Jake smiled tightly at Ernest. “If I’m shifting 90 percent of current assets, I need to see the genie at work.”

“Of course.” Ernest turned to me. “You don’t mind?”

“Not at all.”

We settled into some incredibly soft leather armchairs near the windows. I tried to figure Ernest’s game-was he using me for protection? To evaluate Jake? To bolster the ghost’s legitimacy somehow?

No obvious answers, so I just sat quiet, listening to them talk about real estate. You’d think, a couple of guys this wealthy, they’d be living on a whole different plane, but no, it was just the usual complaints about parking and brokers and the other co-op owners.

More square feet, of course.

After a half hour Ernest looked at his watch-a Patek Philippe maybe, I couldn’t be sure in the dim light, but definitely more gauche than Jake’s-and said, “Should be just a few minutes now.”

And sure enough.

The ghost materialized over by the bookcase, three or four seconds to become mostly opaque. Bloody wounds over shirt and tie, as Ernest had said. It looked like he’d taken a bullet in his chest and another right in the nose. His face was unrecognizable carnage, one good eye peering out above a mess of bone and bloody tissue.

He looked around, saw us, and startled. For a moment he shimmered and began to fade.

“It’s okay!” said Ernest, jumping up. “They’re investors. More money for the fund. That’s good, right?”

The shade hesitated, then resolidified. It seemed to stare at me, then Jake, and then kind of shrugged.

“No problem.” Ernest gestured behind his back, at us-stay quiet. “Okay?”

Pause, then another slight shrug.

“Good. So, ah, what do you have to recommend today?”

After one more hard look at us, the ghost pulled up his shirt. One side had been shredded by the gunshot, but the other was more or less whole. With a pen or pencil in one hand, he scribbled on the fabric, then held it out.

Ernest walked up and bent down to squint at the shirttail.

“Forints?” he said. “Appreciating?”

The ghost nodded.

“Excellent.”

And that was that.

THE next morning, I couldn’t help myself-I turned on the computer as soon as I woke up and checked the foreign exchange ticker. The European markets had been open for two hours.

So there. Hungarian forints were up more than 5 percent. Good call, ghost.

And I have to admit I felt a chill. Even after everything Ernest had told me, I still hadn’t quite believed.

After a shower I had a choice to make. I could chase down the shade’s identity-basically a database search, checking morgue records and police reports and so forth. The problem was, a lot of people die every day, and even the gruesomely violent means of death wouldn’t narrow it down that much. We live in a murderous age.

Or I could follow up on Jake Tims.

He’d been remarkably cool last night. I don’t care how many thousands of zombies you’ve killed in shoot-’em-up video games, real corpses freak most people out. Plus, Ernest said Jake had approached him out of the blue. Sure, the hedge fund’s remarkable returns were generating all kinds of industry buzz, but it seemed remarkably keen timing on Jake’s part.

No contest.

And next to no effort, either. A single phone call reminded me of why Jake’s name was familiar.

“You don’t remember?” Detective Gatling yawned at the other end of the line. I heard bullpen noises behind him-a cell phone ringing, muffled complaints, the clatter of chairs. “Jake Tims used to have a partner, Randall. They ran a boutique investment firm, but last year Randall disappeared, along with the entire sweep account.”

“Oh, yeah.” Active traders keep their operating cash in a separate account, carrying a slightly better interest rate. “How much did he abscond with?”

“Three million, plus or minus.”

“Now I remember.” Once Randall’s pilfering would have been big news, but after Madoff and Stanford and Lewis, a mere seven figures was chump change, hardly worth a B-section headline. “You never found him?”

“Naw.” Gatling didn’t have to say, And we didn’t look that hard, either. In the nihilist landscape of post-collapse Wall Street, there were plenty of bigger fish to fry.

“Jake’s about to move most of his assets over to Ernest Eppleworth,” I said.

“Really.” His tone was flat, but I could hear Gatling’s interest perk up.

“What do you know about Eppleworth?”

“Nothing,” Gatling said, but he was a lousy liar, especially for a cop.

“Uh-oh.” I closed my eyes. “There’s an investigation open, isn’t there?”

“Not for me to say. What’s your interest?”

I hesitated, then explained the ghost. Concealing evidence is not my style.

“Huh.” Gatling was silent for a moment. “The returns are too good to be true. We were thinking Eppleworth had a mole in one of the black pools.” Where large transactions could be conducted directly, between large entities, free of the oversight from regulated exchanges-in other words, an ideal spot to front-run the big dogs. Totally illegal, but that never stops the sharpies. “A ghost-I’m not sure that’s even against the law.”

“Exactly.”

By the time I hung up, I knew the clock was ticking. Gatling was annoyed about losing the mole idea, and I was certain he’d be talking to the DA in about five seconds, to see what they might do with Ernest’s unorthodox tipster.

Now, not only did I have to solve the case before the fraud squad hauled Ernest away, but I was going to have to insist on cash-and-carry. Ernest’s credit rating had just fallen into the basement.

“RECOGNIZE him?” Jake’s voice rose. “His face was blown off!”

“I noticed that.” We were in Jake’s office, mid-morning. I’d hung around the street entrance-also Midtown, only a few blocks from Ernest, but with more casual security-and buttonholed Jake when the armored limo dropped him off out front. Jake brought me upstairs mostly to avoid a scene in public.

“Thing is, you didn’t seem surprised,” I continued. “Which got me wondering.”

He put up some resistance, but when I mentioned Gatling’s interest, we both knew it was only a matter of time. The police would be far more tenacious than me.

“The ghost is Randall, of course,” he said finally. “My former partner.”

“Aha.” I’d suspected-people rarely disappear and keep living-but it was nice to hear Jake agree. On the other hand, the ghost’s face really was nothing but gore. “How can you be sure?”

“Because he visited me, too.”

Okay, that was a surprise. “When?”

“Two days ago. Middle of the night.” He made a peevish frown. “Don’t they ever show up during business hours?”

“Not usually. So… he didn’t hare off with the petty cash after all.”

Jake snorted. The ghost-might as well call him Randall, now-explained that he’d been kidnapped and tortured into revealing the bank password, then shot and dumped into a Hudson River garbage scow.

“Randall’s really angry,” said Jake. “But the kidnappers wore masks the whole time, so he has no idea who they are.”

“Which means he can’t go haunting them. I get it.”

“He can’t stand the idea that everyone thinks he’s a thief, living the high life in Fiji or whatever. So he’s making it up to me, with this guaranteed-return trading scheme.”

“Randall directed you to Ernest?”

“Yes. Of course, I did a thorough check on the Eppleworth funds. The returns are honest-the forex streak is real, just like Randall said.”

“Hmm. How did Randall tell you all that?”

“Writing on his shirt, like you saw last night. It took forever.”

“I bet.” I considered. “There are a couple of really obvious questions-”

“Yeah, I know.” Jake leaned back in his ergonomic, sleek-leather, post-Aeron chair. “Like, why not give me the tips, instead of going through Ernest?”

“That’s one.”

“He doesn’t want to bring too much suspicion on the firm here. You said the cops are already sniffing around-he figured, let Ernest take the heat. I can still keep the earnings.”

“Okay.” That sort of made sense. “But how does he know? How can he read tomorrow’s box scores today?”

“It’s an afterlife thing. Short-term time dilation, quantum tunneling effects.” Jake shrugged. “I didn’t understand his explanation, but so what? The point is, it works.”

“Uh-huh.” I looked out Jake’s window, where a pigeon was waddling around on the ledge. “So did you double your money on those forints?”

“No.” Jake looked annoyed again. “I wasn’t quite convinced. Stupid, huh? But Ernest expects Randall back tonight, and I’m going all in then.”

I hit the Rolodex again.

Jake got the two questions, all right, but there was one more he seemed not to have thought of: If it was so easy, why hadn’t it happened already?

Like I said, with the economy hitting lows in the Mariana Trench, plenty of Wall Streeters were moving to the Great Beyond. Between stress-related cardiacs, Provigil overdoses, and wiped-out investors bursting in with semiautomatic weapons, it was a wonder the big firms still had to resort to redundancies. Anyhow, that meant a steady flow of financially savvy type A’s into the afterlife. If they really could game the day traders, you’d think some of them would have tried it before now.

Many more phone calls, and I discovered that, in fact, they had. But no one wanted to talk about it.

“It’s like this,” said one of my ex-colleagues from Lehman. “I have some friends, they’ll tell me stories over drinks, but they’ll never admit anything publicly.”

“Why not? Even if it’s a ghost doing the legwork, positive returns are positive returns. The Street’ll take its alpha from anywhere-shades, vampires, flesh-eating zombies, who cares?”

“Because it never lasts long,” my former desk mate said. “Three people told me they had, uh, visitations, I guess, but every one flamed out after just a few tips. And then what-you’re going to send a share-holder letter explaining you lost a bundle by taking advice from the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come? No way. So they keep quiet.”

“Ah. So nobody actually made money on the advice.”

“Nope. It was all currency trades, too, in the last few months. But the shade always screwed up after a while.”

“One last question. Was it the same ghost each time?”

“I didn’t ask. But everyone said he’d been murdered, so messily they couldn’t possibly identify who he’d been in real life.”

I was too late.

I waited until the morning to talk to Ernest. Hey, the Knicks were in the playoffs-talk about an unexplainable phenomenon-and I didn’t want to miss the game.

Ernest, I’m sorry. Really.

When I got to his office, there were police cars, two TV trucks, and a herd of pedestrians clicking cell phone photos as a covered gurney was lifted into the coroner’s van. I couldn’t talk my way through the uniforms standing guard behind the yellow tape, so I waited until Detective Gatling came out. When I waved, he frowned and hustled me out of the crowd.

We stood inside the lobby, out of the way as a pair of forensic technicians in Tyvek bunny suits lugged their kits to the elevator.

“Security cameras caught the whole thing,” said Gatling. “Video’ll probably be on the Internet by lunchtime… Jake Tims walked into Ernest’s office, started screaming, and pulled out a Glock. Eleven rounds, eight through the torso.”

“What were they doing?” I pointed to the armored security guards across the lobby, apparently under interrogation by another detective.

Gatling shrugged. “There’s no metal detector here. They caught him quick enough after the shooting stopped.”

I shook my head. “Jake lost some money this morning, I take it.”

“Just about every penny. He went the wrong way on, uh… just a minute.” Gatling flipped through his notebook. ”Ringgit. Some kind of Asian money? I don’t know the details, but he blew his entire packet on the trade.”

“Randall.” I muttered some profanities. “The ghost.” And I explained how Jake had thought his former partner was steering him to riches.

Gatling started to catch on. “Don’t tell me.”

“Yup. Randall seems to have been recommending up/down currency positions to traders all over the city. But none of them were talking to each other.”

“A tip-sheet scam!”

“I think so.”

Gatling’s grin spread wide. “I haven’t seen one of those in decades.”

In ancient times, long before the Internet, a grifter would mail out a newsletter to, say, a hundred sports bettors, predicting who’d win the big game on Sunday. The trick was, half the tip sheets would say one team-and half, the other. Next week, the newsletter would go out again, but only to the fifty recipients who’d gotten the correct prediction the first time-and so on down the line, half the marks falling away each week. See how it works? At the end, three gamblers would have gotten seven examples of a tip sheet with a perfect record.

And then the grifter would send one more mailing, asking if the marks would like to subscribe. Sure, it was costly, but now that he’d proven himself…

The beauty was, it was even halfway legal. Oh, the good old days.

Gatling shook his head. “Randall set Eppleworth up to fail, spectacularly. But why?”

“Not Eppleworth. He just happened to be the last mark still making money. The target was Jake.”

“Why?”

“Because Jake killed Randall.”

A pause while Gatling thought it over. “Gunshots, yeah, same as Eppleworth upstairs this morning, I could see that. But if that was true, why would Randall come back to Jake-and why in the world would Jake believe anything from the guy he’d just murdered?”

“Because Jake must have hired the thugs who kidnapped Randall. It really happened the way he said-fingernail pulling, the bank password, the garbage scow. Only when he was on the other side did Randall have time to figure it out. He set this whole elaborate scheme up simply to ruin Jake-and Jake went along with it, because he assumed Randall didn’t know what actually happened.”

We stood in silence for a moment. Outside, the coroner’s van finally drove away.

“You’ll find the motive if you look,” I said. “My guess is Jake wanted the whole pie for himself-and the three mil from the sweep account was just a lagniappe.”

“You’re probably right.” Gatling put his notebook away. “Let’s do the formal interview later, after I check into it.”

“Sure.”

We walked toward the door. Sunshine spilled across the lobby’s polished floor.

“Good thing New York doesn’t have the death penalty,” Gatling said. “I’m sure your new pal Jake wants a word with you, but he’ll have to wait, oh, about forty years.”

“Yeah.” I sighed.

“What?”

“Ernest,” I said. “He’ll probably be visiting me tonight.”