Клэр Донелли - Catch As Cat Can

“Dad couldn’t pay my freight through school, so I tried a little entrepreneurship—pharmaceutical sales.” He smiled at the reminiscence, but then his expression went sour. “Until somebody got caught with a bag of pot. Then those fine legacy students got a stern talking-to, while the blue-collar kid got a couple of years as a guest of the California penal system.”

Neil carefully rearranged the trays of fish on display. “By the time I got out, my old school buddies were starting careers as brokers and wouldn’t have anything to do with me. But I made a couple of connections in the joint.”

“Jimmy DiCioppa?” Sunny asked.

“Nah, someone way down on the totem pole. But he got me in the door. When I met Jimmy, he was still in the dark ages. He thought robbing banks was a big deal. But he saw where the other crews were going, and he didn’t want to be left behind. I came along at just the right time.”

“To do what?”

Neil actually laughed. “That’s the funny thing. What I did for Jimmy was what a lot of my honest, upstanding classmates were doing. Pump and dump—singing the praises of a particular stock to investors so they’d buy and push the price up, then selling out at the top of the market and making a killing. They had B-list small customers they could play that with, while we had to do boiler rooms, selling over the phone, like that Leonardo DiCaprio movie. Nowadays, I suppose they do it over the Internet. Cold calls. It got easier when we had our own stock-trading firm. We could get the ball rolling on a hot IPO then get out fast when the price inflated enough. Or a few guys could control the market for a stock by trading it among themselves—”

“I thought the stock market was a little more sophisticated than that,” Sunny said.

“Back in the day, small-capital shares moved around more like a flea market than the stuff you see in the movies. Guys would offer a price that they’d hope to get for a stock—the ask. Guys representing buyers come in with a bid, the price they want to pay. A broker is supposed to go around to every stall in the flea market and find the best ask they can. But here’s the thing. The difference between the ask and the bid in big financial represents the brokers’ profit. So if you run the sales between you and your friends, you can keep the spread wide and make some nice change.”

“That’s what you did?” Sunny asked.

“That’s what a lot of guys in the market did,” Neil said. “But when I brought Jimmy into the market, we didn’t threaten to blackball people at the country club like the so-called legit brokers did. We smacked heads.”

Sunny stared. “As simple as that?”

Neil smiled. “You ever hear the saying, ‘The market is driven by fear and greed?’ Well, we used fear. After getting roughed up, a lot of those big, bold masters of the universe peed themselves and fell in line. As for greed, a lot of them wanted to know what their cut would be.”

“That’s all you needed to make a lot of money.”

“Oh, there are more wrinkles. We could use offshore accounts to buy stocks at special low prices for foreign investors. Then we’d sell it to make big profits.” Neil went silent for a moment. “At least Jimmy the Chopper made big profits. The rest of us got crumbs. At first I figured he brought the money into the deals.”

And the leg-breakers, Sunny silently added.

“But as time went on, I realized I was never going to see much out of this. Maybe you’ve heard another saying about the market, how there are bulls, bears, and pigs. Jimmy really turned into a pig. He wanted tribute, he wanted kickbacks, and he thought the market was like his turf. We had a situation where another crew was trying to sell short on a stock we were playing with, driving down the price when we wanted it to go up. They leaned on one of the brokers we had, um, persuaded to help us, and Jimmy went crazy. I saw him lose it completely and order a hit on the guy.”

“That’s how you wound up in witness protection?” Sunny asked.

“That, and the fact that I knew where a lot of Jimmy’s money was parked,” Neil said. “Jimmy should have had a sit-down with the other crew rather than start shooting. But instead he had to be a pig about it.”

And some broker got killed, Sunny thought . A crooked broker, but he got killed.

“Still, I’d have probably kept my mouth shut, but he took the one legitimate thing I had and ruined it,” Neil went on. “I used my little cut from all these various deals to open a restaurant. It was a nice little place. I know a lot about fish, I had some recipes, got a good chef, and we were doing pretty well. But Jimmy wouldn’t leave us alone. He started hanging out there, with all his friends. They drove off the other customers. And Jimmy, well, you just couldn’t hand him a bill.”

Neil’s expression went dark. “Then Jimmy got interested in one of the hostesses, a nice kid trying to make it in Hollywood. That got really dangerous. You don’t say no to Jimmy the Chopper. I managed to get her out of town, out to the Valley, but Jimmy wasn’t happy. After that, he screwed me on some deals I set up for him.”

“Sounds as though you kind of liked this girl,” Sunny said.

Neil’s face softened. “She was a good kid—bright, talented. But she wasn’t getting anywhere. I managed to find her a job in a different field. At the time, I was going through a nasty divorce. Then some federal prosecutor thought it was time to do something about the various crews getting involved in the market and decided to make an example out of me.”

His shoulders rose and fell. “I could see the handwriting on the wall, so I let my ex-wife Terry have everything, the house, the restaurant. Then the feds floated the idea of testifying against Jimmy. Hell, what did I have to lose?”

“Everything you were,” Sunny said. “Your name, your family . . .”

Neil shook his head. “My father wanted nothing to do with me after I threw in with Jimmy. My wife just wanted my blood after she got everything else. The only one who might miss me was Abby—the girl I helped. But let’s face it, she was better off without me, and in her new line of work, being involved with a mobbed-up guy wouldn’t help her career. I did my best to keep my other business away from the restaurant, and a lot came out in the trial that, well, it wouldn’t impress a girl.”

“And you came from sunny California to here.” Sunny glanced through the store’s plate glass window to the leaden skies outside. Nothing more had fallen after the ice storm, but the clouds remained.

“Yeah, it’s a shock for a guy with thin blood, but I managed. The feds helped out with some money, and I opened the shop here. They keep an eye on me.”

Sunny smiled. “You mean, Val Overton does.”

Neil laughed. “Yeah, she’s a real pistol. Makes me wonder what she’d be like if she ever let her hair down. But she’s all business with me. They’ve got her stretched pretty thin, managing a bunch of us witnesses. Got to hand it to her, she works hard—and you wouldn’t believe how little money she makes. And what are the guys in Washington doing? Cutting the budget.”

Sunny watched Neil’s face. He seems a lot fonder of Abby than he does of Val, she thought. Unless this is all a line of BS.

“Still, you got in trouble,” Sunny prodded.

“Hey, I tried to push the market a little after I got settled in. It should have been good for the local fishermen and for me. I knew the restaurant business. If I could supply some of the big buyers around here, everybody would have benefited.”

“Except Deke Sweeney,” Sunny said. “Will had a talk with him.”

“That guy’s a piece of work, from what I hear.” Neil shook his head. “If he had a problem he should have sat down and talked with me. Instead, he tries to kill me—businesswise, I mean,” he quickly clarified.