Andrew Gross - Reckless

Foley placed the photo back on the pile. “Doesn’t prove anything, you know?”

“No.” Hauck nodded. “Not in itself. But there’s still an un-solved homicide in France. And I think maybe all those folks whose money he’s representing might want to know who he is.”

Foley gulped down the rest of his vodka and motioned to the waiter for another. Hauck shook his head. “I’m fine.”

“Have one,” Foley said, raising two fingers. He rested his forearms on the table, gold cufflinks showing through his sleeves. “Listen, Ty, I’d rather, if you can see it our way on this, that none of this had to come out.”

Hauck fixed his eyes on him, surprised.

Foley shrugged. “I mean, it’s clear Merrill should know her boyfriend’s a piece of refuse. But the rest…” He tapped the photo. “This other thing…”

“This other thing what, Tom? Marc Glassman brought down a Wall Street bank. His family’s murder is still an open homicide. Thibault’s got a murky past, is deep in certain financial circles, and is seen together with the victim. To me it’s a bit more than ‘this other thing.’”

Foley took in a breath and nodded. He rubbed his palms together in front of his face. “I want you to listen to me, Ty. We didn’t put you on here, give you all this money, so you could continue thinking like a cop. You’re not representing the town of Greenwich anymore. You’re representing us. Wertheimer’s gone. The Treasury’s carving up whatever meat is left on the bone and selling it off. Other than that fancy building, their only real asset is their retail brokerage operation. It’s still second only to Merrill Lynch. You have any idea who’s in line for that?”

Hauck stared at Foley. Now he did.

“Reynolds Reid. That’s who. Who also happens to be, other than the United States government, our largest account! See how it’s all fitting in, Ty? And our job is to protect the interests of our accounts now, not the people. Not investigate wrongdoing. That’s the government’s job.” His boss stared at him directly. “Now I know I asked you to check out this guy-for a friend-and you did. You did it well. But that’s it now. That’s as far as it goes. You’ve got no proof he’s done anything wrong. So he’s caught talking to a guy at a public venue whose luck happened to go the other way. You going to look into everyone Marc Glassman might have talked to? I bet if you checked out where these pictures are from, they’ve got him yapping to twenty people like Thibault that same day.”

“Tom, this is a guy who’s gone to great lengths to camouflage his past. Only people who do that are people with something to hide. At the very least, we have to look into who he is.”

“No.” Foley shook his head with a frozen stare. “No. At the very least, we do what we can to make sure our client sees through a very important deal. If rumors start to fly that this trader dude was dirty or compromised in some way, if people start looking into this Wertheimer thing and then it gets mixed back up with Merrill, the CEO’s ex-wife, or us…” The second round of drinks came and Foley winked at the pretty bartender who brought them over, then looked back to Hauck, his gaze tight. “You’re a partner here now. Not a cop, so I don’t expect you to act like one. So your priorities are ours. After the sale goes through, maybe then, in a couple of weeks…a month. Then you can rattle the cage a little harder. We’ll look at it again. How’s that?”

“And what about Merrill?’

Foley inhaled a deep, conflicted sort of breath, then shrugged. “This isn’t something she has to know about right now. Trust me. A month. String it along. We’ll see then. You see what I mean?”

Hauck wet his lips, a bitter taste in his mouth. It felt uncomfortable, soiled, even rolling over what Foley had proposed. In his past life…

But maybe things had changed. Accepting the job and the money. Maybe he had to get used to that. New priorities. After all, nothing had been proven. Hauck felt himself nodding, fighting the urge that he was going against everything he was made of inside.

“Good.” Foley smiled and gave a pat to Hauck’s shoulder. “A couple of weeks, a month.” He lifted his new glass, the color coming back to his complexion. “Now if that’s all done maybe we can shift the subject to you, Ty…and how we see you fitting into this organization.”

The idea that Talon might use him as a kind of spokesperson appealed to Hauck, against his better nature, on the drive home.

Maybe it was helped along by a couple of beers.

His boss had talked about taking advantage of Hauck’s reputation for independence, uncovering money launderers and even a corrupt senior state senator, and thought that would go well with some of the government contracts they were after. While Hauck had shied away from any publicity after his last big case-the killing of a federal prosecutor from up in Hartford-the story had become front-page news and had brought an end to the career of one of the state’s most powerful politicians as well as put a stain on the legacy of one of its wealthiest tycoons.

He drove onto the Major Deegan Expressway, past Yankee Stadium, trying to push the questions about Dani Thibault and Marc Glassman out of his head.

He punched in Annie’s cell. She was at work, and he’d promised to let her know how the meeting went. But as soon as it began to ring, something made him think twice and, not sure why, he clicked the line off.

The truth was that nowhere in Hauck’s soul was there a single, isolated place where Foley’s response on how to handle Thibault sat peacefully in him, nowhere in the back-and-forth of his con-science that the option of just doing nothing, letting it sit-what’s right for our accounts, that’s your priority now-made sense.

Instead, as he swung the Beemer onto the parkway heading to Connecticut, twenty minutes from home, there was Merrill. The doubts he saw deep in her eyes. She didn’t want to put it aside. I want to know who the man I’m supposed to be falling in love with really is.

You’re not representing the town of Greenwich anymore…

Instead, there was Thibault. A cipher. A con man. Or much, much worse. Deals that didn’t happen. Relationships that didn’t exist. What kind of man did all that? What was it he had to hide?

You know who’s bidding on Wertheimer’s retail business, Ty? Foley had patted him on the shoulder.

He was feeling played.

Instead, there were headlines about the once-mighty Wall Street firm in ruins. Jobs lost. The Dow in freefall. Fortunes decimated. Marc Glassman and April and their beautiful daughter dead.

Now if that’s all done maybe we can shift the subject to you, Ty…

What is it, he thought as he lost himself in the rhythm of the drive, that’s really being protected here? Just because he had made this shift in his life, just because his company ID now said Talon, not the Greenwich police, he couldn’t just put it behind him. The unrest in his blood was the same, the same he’d always felt.

How do you put away something that is as true to you as the beating of your own heart?

How do you put the truth behind you?

“Well, the first thing you should know”-April smiled, taking a sip of coffee-“is you’re not going crazy. Insanity is inherited, you know.” She bit her lower lip. “You get it from your kids.”

He laughed, taking a sip of his latte too. “I always thought it was the other way around.”

“Popular misconception,” she said. “Forgiven. Everyone makes that mistake at first.”

“Thanks for initiating me.”

After his third time there, their eyes bumping into each other a few times, they had happened to leave the building together and talked for a second on the sidewalk. There was a Starbucks on the corner and she asked him if he liked mocha lattes.