ELMORE LEONARD - Unknown Man #89

“Yeah. What do you want?”

“You mind I ask you when you were born?”

There was a silence as the man waited, still on the line.

“I want to be sure I’m talking to the right party,” Ryan said. “If you are, all I need to know is where I can get in touch with you, or where you live.”

The second Robert Leary, Jr., hung up.

Shit.

Ryan waited around until eight-fifteen. There were no more calls.

Dick Speed returned his call at eleven-thirty that evening.

“I’ve been trying to get you for a couple of hours.”

“I had to go down to the bus station.”

“The bus station?”

“It’s a long, boring story.”

“Well, this Robert Leary, Jr., I hope to shit you don’t have to serve him papers.”

“Why?”

“The guy’s a fucking beauty.”

Ryan listened then for several uninterrupted minutes while Dick Speed read the sheets on Leary. Ryan listened and said, reverently, when he finished, “Jesus Christ.”

Ryan didn’t get hold of Jay Walt until the next morning. He said over the phone, “I don’t think twenty bucks an hour is going to make it. The three hundred for openers, okay, you’ve spent that. But now, what I’ve found out so far, I think it’s possible I could get killed if I keep at it. But not for any twenty bucks an hour. We make another deal and you tell me what’s going on before I tell you anything.”

Jay Walt got back to Ryan within fifteen minutes. He said he had to do a little talking, but finally arranged a meeting. Ryan was to go to the Pontchartrain Hotel and ask for a Mr. Perez.

“Aren’t you going to be there?”

“Well, not right away. He said he wanted to see you alone.”

Jay Walt didn’t sound too happy about it.

“THERE’S NOTHING MYSTERIOUSabout it,” Mr. Perez said with his soft accent. “My business is finding lost stockholders. People who own stock in a company but don’t know it.”

“Why don’t they know it?” Ryan asked him.

“We’ll get to that if you’re interested.” Mr. Perez uncrossed his legs and pulled himself out of the deep chair. “I’m sorry, I didn’t ask you what you drink.” He picked up a glass from the coffee table and moved away.

“Nothing, thanks,” Ryan said.

“Too early, huh? I have my dinner at noon. So I start anytime a half hour before.” The way he said “my dinner” with the soft drawl sounded good, something he enjoyed, though he didn’t look like a big eater. He was bony, in fact, with a long, bony nose that was discolored with broken blood vessels. He looked more like a drinker than an eater.

“Where’s your home?” Ryan asked him.

“Baton Rouge, when I’m not somewhere else. I also have a home at Pass Christian, on the Gulf. But I haven’t seen much of it lately, been spending most of my time up this way.”

Ryan sat in a straight chair with arms, his damp raincoat across his lap. He was having a hard time typing Mr. Perez. Light-skinned Cuban or old Louisiana Spanish maybe, with a halo of hair that had receded to the top of his head and an air of relaxed self-confidence. The man knew who he was. It didn’t bother him that his white shirt was rumpled or his necktie had slipped and was off-center. Ryan watched him go over to a low bookcase that was set up with several bottles of liquor and glasses and a silver ice bucket. Next to the bar, an alcove window of tinted glass reached to the floor, framing a view of the Detroit River and the Ambassador Bridge to Canada. It was still raining, coming down out of a washed-out gray sky that had been hanging over the city for days.

Ryan wondered how much the hotel suite cost. There was a desk piled with folders and papers and a thick briefcase on the chair next to it. Beyond the desk, through an open doorway, he saw twin beds with gold spreads and gold headboards. He bet it was costing the guy a hundred a day, at least. He wondered if the guy was a lawyer. He looked like one: not the corporate lawyer, but the downtown city-hall lawyer.

“What do you call what you do?”

Mr. Perez was coming back with his whiskey over ice, taking his time.

“My title? Well, my card says I’m an investment consultant. How’s that sound?” Mr. Perez smiled easily.

“I suppose you’re a lawyer, too.”

“Why do you suppose that?” He lowered himself carefully, holding the lowball glass in front of him, and sank down in the chair.

“I guess I just assumed you were.”

“You hire lawyers,” Mr. Perez said. “You don’t have to be one. Thank God.”

“Can I ask you, how do you happen to know Jay Walt?”

“I don’t know him. Least I didn’t,” Mr. Perez said. “I used him once before, he was all right. You see, locating people, a very good way to find out about them is through their credit rating. So I generally use somebody in the business. I believe he was the first or second one in the Yellow Pages, Allied Credit something or other. Let me ask you, are you a friend of his?”

“No,” Ryan said.

“You don’t care too much for him either.”

Ryan didn’t say anything.

“I have kind of a negative feeling myself,” Mr. Perez said. “Man talks out loud in elevators. I was thinking, there’s not much reason to keep him around. That’s if you’ve got something to tell me.”

“A few things,” Ryan said. “But I don’t know what I’m into yet. I don’t know what’s going on.”

“You’re trying to locate a lost stockholder who, I hope, doesn’t know he’s lost,” Mr. Perez said. “See, the way I go about it, I pick out a company that was around during the depression, when the value of their stock was quite low or maybe worthless. I go to the company and I say, ‘If you give me the names of any stockholders you’ve lost track of, I’ll see if I can locate them for you, at my own expense. Get the dead wood out of your stockholder list and bring it up to date.’ See, what happens from time to time, the company will get back a dividend check they sent out. Or their annual report comes back. Maybe the person died and the company wasn’t notified. Or moved and didn’t leave a forwarding address. The company usually doesn’t make much of an effort to find the person. They go through the motions, then after a while, if they still haven’t located the party, they put the name on their list of lost stockholders.”

“What I was wondering before,” Ryan said, “the stockholder, I mean if he’s alive, he knows he owns the stock, doesn’t he?”

“You’d be surprised,” Mr. Perez said. “He might’ve put it away thirty years ago and forgot about it. Or he thought the company went broke during the depression. Or, what happens, he inherits the stock but never looks at it to see what it is. Now it’s buried under some old papers in the bottom of a desk. So, I get the list from the company and go to work.”

“They just give it to you?”

“Why wouldn’t they?” Mr. Perez stared, interested in Ryan’s answer.

“Well, I’d think it would be privileged information. I can’t see the company taking the chance, exposing their stockholders to, well, they don’t know what, do they?”

Mr. Perez smiled. “You were going to say exposing them to some kind of con. Believe me, Mr. Ryan, there’s nothing questionable or suspicious about what I do. You’re right, though. Some companies are hesitant. They feel they have to consider my proposition very carefully, discuss it, get approval from the board, all that. Well, in those cases, what I do, I get on friendly terms with one of the third- or fourth-level executives of the company and ask him to let me have the list-he knows I’m not going to do anything illegal-and avoid a lot of red tape and confusion.”