CHAPTER sixty
The phone was ringing persistently and I struggled to pull myself out of a deep sleep. The clock radio told me it was seven thirty-five. I had been asleep for less than two hours and the painkillers they had given me at the hospital had worn off and the gentle throbbing I’d felt the night before in my ear now felt like a pounding jackhammer. Ah, the healing process, I thought. Jay slept soundly beside me and he didn’t move when I ungracefully fell out of bed. My blood-soaked clothes were in a disgusting pile on the floor and I gingerly stepped over them and grabbed Jay’s oversize T-shirt, taking my time, hoping the phone would stop ringing.
The ribbing on the neck of the T-shirt caught on the large bandage on the side of my head when I was pulling it on, jarring my wound and the first curse of the day escaped my lips.
I yanked the ringing receiver off the hook and automatically put it up to my right, bandaged ear.
"Yes," I yelled into the receiver as I passed it to the left side of my head. The handset felt uncomfortable against the lump over my left ear, so I held it away from my head. A hands-free set would have come in handy.
"Kathleen, is that you?"
It was my mother. Oh god. Please don’t let it be some disaster, I thought in a panic. She never calls this early in the morning, and only ever calls on Sunday, when the rates are cheapest. It never occurred to me that she might be calling about me.
"Yes, mom. What’s wrong?"
"What’s wrong?" she asked indignantly. "What’s wrong? You’re all over the morning news and you ask me, what’s wrong?"
"Calmly mother. I’m fine. Really." My interest was piqued now. "All over the news?"
"Yes, there were pictures of you getting into an ambulance. They said you’d been shot. Are you all right?"
"I’m fine. Just a small wound. On my right ear. Where are you calling from?" She was normally at work at this time of day.
"Don’t end your sentences with a preposition," she lectured me and I laughed. Nothing ever changes.
"I’m at home, with your father. He came racing out of the house to get me. He’d seen you on the news."
"Well, tell him I’m fine." I briefly filled her in on the events of the previous night and promised to call later.
"And mom?"
"Yes?"
"Thanks for always telling me to wear clean underwear."
I heard her laugh as I hung up the phone and it felt good to take one thing off my list of mental notes.
My heart broke at the sight of Sadie Weinstein, sitting in the lobby of the police station. It seemed she had aged overnight, and the forlorn, lost look on her face made me wonder if she would be able to cope with what she and Philip were about to face. She didn’t recognize either Jay or myself as we passed her with our escort to the second floor for our meeting with Detective Leech.
Leech’s sorry excuse for an office consisted of a desk, a chair and a telephone. I was sure there wasn’t room for a cockroach, let alone two guests, so we met in one of the small rooms where we were told they questioned suspects.
"Not that you’re suspects," he quickly said. I gave him a smile because I believe in encouraging humour and I also believed that we were never too old to develop the skill. Besides, I was starting to like Leech. When this was all over I might speak to him about possibly changing the pronunciation of his name to Lesh or Latch or something that didn’t make him sound like a Bay Street lawyer.
After we had passed the pleasantries and he had served us some coffee that tasted just the way the television cops described it, he told us that Philip was being arraigned that afternoon on attempted murder charges and that the Crown Attorney was calling on the RCMP Fraud Division for their assistance in investigating a myriad of other possible charges. Leech told us that after they had explained to Philip what ‘hard-time’ in a prison was all about, he had agreed to a plea bargain. Lesser charges for squealing on Chris Oakes and Larry Everly.
Chris Oakes was in a hospital lock-up under a psychiatrist’s care. He had been totally incoherent when the police attempted to question him the night before.
"The only thing he said, over and over, was Baby," Leech said.
"Well, I certainly hope they have voice mail in the loony bin. He can have his sessions with his shrink over the phone." I silently chastised myself for what had just come out of my mouth and hoped that in a couple of days, or weeks, I would have more charitable feelings towards these bastards. But, Leech didn’t get the joke and Jay just shot me one of those looks. The kind of look your mother used to give you when you were little. You might be at your great-aunt’s house for dinner and during a pause in the conversation you make a comment about her moustache. Unable to kick you under the table, your mother shoots you that look.
"What about Larry Everly?" I asked.
"The NYPD are co-operating with us and have picked him up and they’re holding him there until we can nail down all the charges. Philip Winston told us some pretty unbelievable things last night and I have no doubt that Mr. Everly will be going away for a long, long time."
"Care to share any of that with us?" I urged him.
"Winston tells us that he allegedly witnessed Everly and Oakes murder his father. Why he never came forward with that information is a question that will probably not get answered. So, he blackmailed them. He got himself well educated and worked his way around the country in various high technology companies. About a year ago he saw his opportunity. He told us he had been following Oakes’ career so he was watching TechniGroup very closely. TechniGroup was acquiring a lot of companies and that was when Philip approached Oakes. He was going to make Oakes pay, and pay big time. He wanted money, and lots of it, so he came up with the plan to have Oakes buy the company he was working for and get him into a senior position at TechniGroup. He also knew that your company had been ripe for a take-over for some time and as part of his master plan, he figured Larry Everly, with his connections on Wall Street, would be more than eager to go out and find a buyer. Turns out he was right."
"Finding a buyer for a company our size, isn’t that easy," Jay said.
"Easy enough when you’re motivated," Leech told us. "The other side of this nasty deal was that Philip insisted on stock options. And lots of them. I’m not much of a brain when it comes to all of this high level corporation stuff, but I had a quick lesson this morning from my brother-in-law. He’s an actuary," he said proudly.
Jay and I barely suppressed our laughter when the old joke came to mind. Question: Why did you become an accountant? Answer: Because I didn’t have the charisma to be an actuary. Every profession has its cross to bear and because actuaries do such incredibly boring work, they are perceived to the outside world as lifeless people with no personality. I was sure this was the only joke in history that had been told about an actuary.
"He explained to me about how the price gets set and how you make money on them," he continued. "Everly and Oakes were to get the stock price down so Winston’s options would be given to him at a low price. So the two of them started passing rumours around. Winston said they talked off the record to some people on the floor at the stock exchange and to industry analysts. Those are the folks that follow your specific industry and make predictions about the business," he told us needlessly. "I’m getting to like using these buzzwords. I guess the rumours were nasty enough to have the stock price go down and that’s exactly what Winston wanted."
"It worked," I interjected. "He got a shit-load of options and the exercise price was pretty low. Along with the rumours that we didn’t know about, there were the other things happening that the public knew about and those events themselves drove the price down even more."
"Right," he agreed. "The news that your chief accountant was resigning made the price drop." I smiled at his use of the term chief accountant. Rick would have liked that. "Oakes and Larry Everly told their sources that Rick Cox had been fired. And that made the price drop
some more. But when Mr. Cox committed suicide, it got worse."
"Was it a suicide?" I asked him.
He shook his head and I watched Jay’s face for a reaction but there was none. He had been sitting quietly, stone-faced through much of Leech’s recital.
"We’ll get to that part in a minute. The news that an employee of the company had died mysteriously and that we were investigating it as a homicide, just added fuel to the fire. So all of these events got the desired result. A low stock price, Philip Winston got his big job at TechniGroup with stock options, and there was another company, ripe to take-over TechniGroup. The plan had worked. But then you," he nodded at me, "and your partner here, got involved. The both of you were too smart for your own good."
"Not smart enough," I said ruefully, pointing to the bandage on the side of my head.
"No," he agreed. "But Mr. Winston didn’t know how much you knew. When he found out that you had visited his mother, he saw all of his plans going up in smoke. He obviously got desperate."
"Obviously. It was him, you know, who broke into my apartment the other night."
"He needed to scare you off. I guess it almost worked."
"Almost," I agreed. "But then he had to double his threat and bash me over the head."
"Desperate men do desperate things," he said unnecessarily.
"I had made up my mind to let you do your job but he pushed the issue. I want to know what happened to my friend Evelyn."
"That’s where it all started didn’t it? So sad, that such an innocent person had to get involved. This could all have gone off without a hitch, if she hadn’t died," he said sadly. "No one would have ever known."
I didn’t need to hear that and once again I was overwhelmed by feelings of sadness and helplessness because I hadn’t been there to help my friend. Tears welled up inside me and poured silently down my cheeks into my mouth.