|
Excerpt
From:
Mad
Money: A Madeline Carter Novel
by Linda L. Richards
Published by MIRA Books
ISBN: 0-7783-2103-7
One
No
one accused me of killing Jackson Shoenberger. The hand on
the weapon wasn't mine. I didn't pull the trigger or point
the gun. After Jack was dead, no one looked at me and said,
"She did it. Madeline Carter widowed that woman, orphaned
those kids."
Yet I felt responsible. Responsible and, at the same time, I
felt how easily it could have been me. Those things might
sound mutually exclusive, but they're not.
I wasn't a junior broker. Neither was Jack. We'd both been
with the company ten years when Sal came to us and offered
to pull us out of the bullpen -- give us offices of our own.
Jack looked as if he thought it was a good idea, but I
wouldn't bite. I loved the electric crackle in the pen on
bullish mornings when the room hummed with possibilities --
the phones, the yells, the excited high fives. It was all a
part of it for me. I loved being a broker. Becoming an
investment manager didn't feel like a step up.
I wouldn't have blamed Jack for accepting Sal's
offer. Jack had a wife, kids and a house in Jersey. I
didn't even have a cat. But when I declined, Jack looked at
me with those heavy-lidded eyes of his and grinned. "What
she can hack, I can hack." It could have meant a lot of
things, but I took it at face value.
We never got a clear answer on how the shooter made it past
security and into the bullpen. He looked normal enough.
Fortyish, short dark hair, well-pressed chinos and a good
wool coat, not out of keeping with the season. In retrospect
I think that when he said, "Jackson Shoenberger?" to confirm
Jack's identity, there was a quaver in his voice. A
hesitation. But maybe that's just my mind filling things in
after the fact.
The rest isn't filled in.
Initial surprise. Then a smile. An extended hand. "Yeah, I'm
Jack. What can I do you for?" A coat flung aside, a flash of
chrome, a crack of sound, then Jack on the floor in a
cascade of blood. I can't forget the smell: metallic and
burnt all at once. The smell of the firearm discharging.
Cordite. But something else. Not the smell of death, but of
dying.
Before any of us had time to react, another crack sounded
and the shooter was down. So little space separated the two
men that the shooter's ruined face came to rest on Jack's
left foot. More blood. Then a cone of silence you could hold
in your hand. The world stopped. No one said anything. No
one screamed. No one even seemed to breathe. Ten seconds.
Maybe thirty. It was the blood on my hand that woke me from
my daze. Moved me. Blood cooled by its flight through the
air.
Then chaos: we all moved at once. It didn't matter; we could
have stayed there for an hour. Forever. Jack was dead.
Jackson Shoenberger -- thirty-five-year-old husband of
Sarah, father of Nigel and Rose, the man who never missed
the first-Thursday-night-of-themonth meetings of his gourmet
club -- was dead before he hit the floor.
And it was stupid. Pointless. Without sense. The shooter had
been a client. Not an important one. He'd made a bit of
money when the bull was raging and had started investing
heavily just as the bear pulled up. The worse the market
got, the more money he plugged in. I know Jack wouldn't have
asked his client where the cash was coming from. That wasn't
part of our job.
Once the blood was mopped up, we followed the paper trail.
Jack had been trying to steer the guy right, but he hadn't
listened, hadn't trusted and had said, "Buy," when Jack had
told him, "Sell."
It had only been a couple of hundred grand but, as it turned
out, it belonged to the shooter's mom. According to the
pieces the police and the old woman's boyfriend put
together, the lady asked for her cash back to buy a condo in
Florida and her son just snapped. Killed her pretty much the
way he'd killed Jack -- at close range with the same small
gun -- then hauled his ass to Manhattan from Long Island and
did the double deed, Jack and then himself, all in the space
of a couple of hours.
The funeral was in New Jersey -- in Lawrenceville, where the
Shoenbergers lived. I was pleased to see Sarah's delicate
face light up when she saw me, and surprised to see Nigel
and Rose standing somberly on either side of their
mother.
"They're little, I know," Sarah said when she saw me
notice. "But I wanted them to be part of this. Funerals are
about completion for those that are left behind." She said
it like a mantra, smoothing Nigel's pale hair absently as
she spoke. "They deserved the chance to say goodbye,
too."
Sarah was, in all ways, the opposite of her husband. Late
husband, I corrected myself. Sarah was a tiny bundle of
energy, where Jack had been big and rangy and, for a broker,
laid-back. Sarah was dark where Jack had been fair. Each had
been given a child: at nine, Nigel, with fine wheat-colored
hair and pale eyes, was the image of his father. Today it
hurt to look at him. Rose, just six, was dark and composed,
a jade-green ribbon bringing out the red highlights in her
hair.
"I was afraid you wouldn't come," Sarah said, grasping my
hand tightly when she saw me after the funeral.
"Of course I'd come, Sarah. How could I not?"
"I was worried when you didn't return my calls."
"Sarah, I'm so sorry. I ... I didn't know what to say." I
glanced down at the kids, lowered my voice. "I was ... I was
there."
"Oh, honey, I know you were." She reached out and squeezed
my hand. "That must have been so hard."
The touch undid me. On the surface of things, I'd been
managing fine. Not thinking too much about anything, just
moving. But the touch, from someone so close to Jack,
someone with whom I shared a link to my old friend, was like
a flame to wax on the place I'd been protecting. I could
feel my face cloud, tears threatening, something I couldn't
bear the thought of Sarah seeing. Her pain, I
thought, was enough. She didn't need the added weight of
mine. She didn't see it that way.
"After all of this -- " she indicated the crowds of people
filing through, both Jack and her families, co-workers and
friends " -- just a few people are coming by the house. I'd
like you to be one of them."
I nodded, quickly kissed her on the cheek and went to move
on, to let other mourners pay their respects, but Sarah
didn't let me slip away. She grasped my hand firmly and
pulled me back. "Don't even think about bailing, Carter,"
she said firmly. "I need you there. Jack would have
wanted you there."
"Yes'm," I said, smiling for what felt like the first time
in days. "That does not sound like an invitation that can be
turned down."
"It's not."
"I get that, already. When?"
"Anytime, really. My parents headed back to the house to
make coffee and prepare food."
I didn't head straight for the house. I drove around
Lawrenceville in my rental, mentally placing Jackson
everywhere I looked. In a ball cap and jeans, on the
weekend, scooting into the hardware store for whatever gunk
he needed to fix a leaky faucet in the kids' bathroom.
Taking Sarah out for Italian food on their anniversary.
Running the kids to day care and, later, to school. When I
cruised past the high school and thought about how he
wouldn't get to see his kids go there, let alone graduate, I
made myself stop. None of this, clearly, was going to bring
Jackson back. And none of it was making me feel any better,
either.
Sarah and the kids were already back at the house when I
pulled up, a strudel purchased from a local bakery in my
arms.
"I was afraid you weren't going to come," Sarah said. She
was outwardly composed, but I knew her well enough to see
the strain around the edges: the reddened eyes, the line
above her brow that didn't seem to go away even when her
expression was relaxed. That hadn't been there a month
ago.
"Naw." I showed her the strudel. "Couldn't come
empty-handed."
"Right," she said sarcastically, taking it and indicating I
should follow her to the kitchen. "I know what a stickler
you are for tradition."
I stuck my tongue out at her tone, a childish gesture, and
we both started to laugh, the laughter turning to tears in a
heartbeat.
Jack and Sarah's kitchen was bright and modern. The
hand-painted milk jugs from the 1940s and 50s that Sarah had
collected over the course of her marriage brought happy
splashes of color to the room. I had watched the collection
grow over the years, exclaimed at new acquisitions when I'd
joined them for family dinners. It felt odd being here now,
knowing that Jack wouldn't be joining us. Wrong.
Sarah was crying like someone for whom tears are no longer
an effort, the way oil moves through a well made machine:
smoothly and with grace. "Everything is just the same.
Nothing will ever be the same." She shrugged, leaning on the
counter. "I'm a widow now, Madeline. A widow. I can't
get my mind around that. And I keep expecting him to
come back. To walk through that door." She looked out to the
backyard as though she was, indeed, expecting him to walk
in, bags of groceries in his arms, yelling, "Sarah, did you
forget to pay the goddamn Visa bill?"
It was me, I wanted to say. It's all because of me
and what I wanted, what I said. I didn't, though. "Is
everything going to be okay, Sarah? Financially, I mean? You
wouldn't need that on top of ... "
"No, no. Everything is great that way. And the company has
been terrific. More than terrific. They've sent out a grief
counselor and therapists for the kids and you name it.
You're lucky to work for such a great company."
"I'm thinking of quitting," I said quietly, surprising
myself. It was the first time the thought had entered my
head, but it suddenly seemed my obvious next move.
Sarah just looked at me.
"I'm thinking of leaving Merriwether Bailey," I said with
more confidence.
"You are not."
I just nodded.
"Oh, Madeline. Why?"
"I can't go back there. I mean, not to work, like, every
day."
"What'll you do?"
It felt terrible, taking sympathy from the newly bereaved
widow, but it also felt good, allowing my pain to ease away
a little bit. As if the blending of our pain would somehow
open it to the light for sharing. Or maybe it was just good
to air some of the stuff that had been rocking around in my
head since Jack died.
"I'm not sure. I feel so ... bad, Sarah. I feel ...
"
"Responsible?"
I looked at her sharply. How had she known?
"There was nothing Jack didn't tell me, Madeline. Nothing.
That's one of the reasons I could love you as much as I did
-- do -- because no matter what some people thought, I knew
that the love you shared with Jack was different than the
love I needed from him. Part of the reason I could
love him so deeply was because he was a man who could
have a woman as his best friend. Other women might not have
understood that. I did." She smiled at me through a thin
cloud of tears. "And you got to be my friend, too.
"Jack told me he was up for a promotion. And then it came
and he told me what happened. Told me what both of you had
said."
I crumpled then. I felt diminished, reduced. I had wanted to
tell Sarah. Yet at the same time I hadn't wanted her to
know.
"But, Madeline, you said what you said and Jack did what he
wanted. That was his way. Once you've thought about it,
you'll know what I'm saying is true. He loved the market. He
lived for the market. And he made a good living as a
broker. A very good living. He didn't need the extra salary
moving into an office would have given him. He told me, 'I'd
miss the sweat and the Maalox.' Those were his exact words.
And I know he would have missed you."
And that was just it. What if -- more what-ifs -- what if
there hadn't been a me? Or if I'd never joined
Merriwether Bailey? It was clear to me that Jack would still
be alive.
I didn't say this to Sarah. I figured she'd been through
enough. "Thank you, sweetie," I said, hugging her quickly.
"It's been so hard for me. And you're his wife. I
feel like such a loser feeling as bad as I do and knowing
how much harder it must be for you."
"That's the thing about grief, hon. It's not a contest. No
one gets to win." She smiled bitterly and I knew that
bitterness wasn't directed at me. "I have felt ... " She
searched for a word. "Flatlined. I've felt flatlined since
it happened. I go through the motions, but none of it
matters." She shrugged. "So that's my big plan, for now. For
the kids. Just keep the motions going and maybe sometime
it'll surprise me. Maybe someday it won't be pretend."
The idea of the flatline got into my head. It covered
precisely how I felt. Entirely flat, not quite alive. I was
someone who had always thought of herself as buoyant.
Vibrant. And suddenly I was anything but. For the
first time in my life it was possible for me to spend a
whole day in bed, doing nothing. I'd drag myself up to go to
the bathroom, maybe make some toast with peanut butter or a
soft-boiled egg, and then try to throw myself back into
sleep.
I didn't quit my job right away. Unlike Jack, who got taken
out with a bullet, I went with a whimper. I took a leave of
absence -- a week that stretched into two then four -- and
contemplated basic things. The meaning of life, for me. How
I fit into the pattern that I'd created. On good days I was
able to leave my apartment and I didn't cry. On bad ones,
I'd encounter Jack's face at every turn: in the antique
mirror over my armoire, in the dull gloss of the
tiles behind the stove, through the window when I tried to
imagine what was in the world beyond my door.
Jack and I had never been lovers, though I'm sure people in
the office had their doubts. In the time we worked together,
both of us got married, one (me) got divorced, one (him) had
children, and in between were all the challenges of lives
being lived, both in the markets and out of them. I loved
Jack. Not as a wife loves a husband, yet not quite as a
sister loves a brother, either. I'd always felt that what we
shared transcended all those things. That we'd be together
always, each forever the emergency other in our lives. And
now ...
My world was full of what-ifs. What if Jack had taken Sal's
offer and had been safely working with corporate clients
behind a closed office door?What if I had said yes to Sal
and Jack had followed my lead? But the world can be too full
of questions. Stack them all together and you end up a
dollar store cashier in Bend, Oregon, or a gas station
attendant in New Hampshire. You end up spending your life
looking for low risk gigs. What did low risk look like,
anyway? No one had ever warned me about the physical dangers
involved with being a stockbroker.
Before Jack died, I'd already been having thoughts about
changing my life. I'd spent the last few years coasting on
high tech, just like everybody else. It's hard to think now
about, what it was like being a broker during the boom, but
it was ... delicious. Touch anything and it goes gold. Pick
some crappy little Web-based company with a happy idea and a
slick annual report trading at six and a half dollars, trade
it, promote it, and within two weeks it's trading at twenty
bucks. By the end of the boom I was working with scores of
securities just like that, trading at twenty, forty, sixty
dollars a share. For some of them, two hundred wasn't even a
reach.
I saw and felt it coming. I was crunching Advil like candy.
Do I even have a stomach lining anymore? And Maalox.
I never drank it right out of the bottle like some of the
guys did, but that's what was in the coffee mug on my desk
anytime after lunch.
I had a nice little co-op apartment -- stand on a chair and
look out the bathroom window and see Central Park -- that
I'd paid mostly cash for. My own trading had never been on
the margin. I lost the bazillion or so dollars I'd been
worth on paper. But I was a broker; I'd never been convinced
it was real money, anyway. I had my apartment. I had a
Chagall etching I'd bought with some pretend money I'd
converted into real money. I thought, I'm gonna be okay. I'm
gonna coast through this. I still had a job. Not everyone
did.
Then Jack.
I thought briefly about not doing something with stocks. I
wanted to make a new life. I could do anything. I
could wait tables. Become a real estate agent. Be a film
director. Open a dress shop. Or a café. But the
reality was that the stock market was the only thing I knew.
Except I also knew I didn't want to be a broker anymore. I
didn't want to invest other people's money. And I realized I
was tired of having to stand on a chair to see a slice of
green. My apartment was worth enough to buy a whole house in
most cities that weren't New York. It was certainly enough
for a stake.
I had a lot of questions, was shy on answers, but there was
one thing I knew: my days at Merriwether Bailey -- or any
other brokerage -- were over. And it wasn't just that the
new economy was looking like it was going to suck so badly
there'd be too many of us. I was good. I could have kept my
job. I just didn't want it anymore.
"What are you gonna do?" Sal asked when I went into the
office to clean out my desk.
As I loaded the cardboard box that was proving to be too
large for my few personal possessions, I had been trying to
impress details on my mind so I wouldn't forget: the
wood-grain laminate that seemed to coat every hard surface
in the office (active traders can be messy), the dumb, dippy
bird on Jamal Henderson's desk (bright red with a real
feather on his head and always dipping toward water but
never making it), the viral hum of the air conditioner
(noiseless noise, white noise). My eyes stopped on Jack's
desk, catty-corner from mine. Empty now, his family pictures
gone. Had Sarah come in for everything? Or was there a box
somewhere in one of the back offices with "Shoenberger"
scrawled across it in big, black letters? I figured I didn't
really want to know.
It was 4:30 p.m. on a trading day. The markets were closed,
the bullpen in the post-coital lull that follows the closing
bell: brokers cleaning up their desks, doing paperwork,
chatting softly, amicably; traders horsing around like the
self-satisfied adolescents they seem to pride themselves on
being. All of this activity, all in anticipation of
tomorrow's opening bell, while still riding the
ebbing high of the day's trading. I knew this was one of the
things I'd miss.
"Carter?"
"Sorry, Sal. I was just thinking."
"I asked what you're going to do." I noticed that the corner
of Sal's mouth was twitching, as it does when he's worried
about something. I wondered if I might be the cause.
Sal was my boss, but he was more, as well. My father died
when I'd only been at Merriwether Bailey a couple of years.
Sal hadn't tried to be a father to me after my Dad was gone,
but he'd slid into the senior-male figure in my life
position comfortably. Watching me closely through
heartbreaks and workaholic periods. Prodding me when I
seemed to spend too much time at the office or forgot to
eat. He worried about me. I could see it on him now.
"I don't know," I told him honestly.
"Just not this, huh?"
I nodded.
"Jack," he said. It wasn't a question.
"I guess." I looked again at the empty desk, allowing my
eyes to scan the place where Jack had fallen.
Self-indulgent, self-punishing. I made myself stop. "And it
just doesn't make sense to me anymore. Not so much."
He hugged me then. I hadn't expected a hug, not from Sal.
But we both needed it -- the touch of another human. The
world was changing. Jack's death was the grand finale for
me, but Sal and I had both seen the changes coming for a
long time. You don't get to be an old racehorse without
learning to recognize the sound of the starting gate. Or,
for that matter, the feel of the finish wire.
Sal pulled a strand of hair away from my eyes, tucked it
behind my ear. "We're gonna miss your smiling mug, kiddo. I
always said you were too pretty to be a broker."
I made a shooing motion with my hands, though I couldn't
stop the grin that slid over my face. It was an old line
with us. Lady brokers were seldom slender, five-foot-eleven
blondes with lots of unruly hair. I've never thought of
myself as gorgeous -- attractive, sure -- but in the early
days, the guys gave me a fairly hard time. After a while,
once I'd earned my stripes, it turned into good-natured
ribbing. These days it was all about Barbie. If I made the
company a lot of money, they'd call me Vacation Barbie, as
in I'd earned a vacation. Or if word leaked out that I was
in a relationship, the guys would ask, "How's Ken?"
The Barbie stuff didn't irritate me perhaps as much as it
should have. The trading floor is always tense. As a result
brokers get their laughs as cheaply and easily as possible,
there's no time or energy for sophisticated humor, not
during working hours.
Now Sal said, "Good luck, Barbie," and, despite the teeny
inside joke, I could see the sentiment was sincere. "You
always know where I am."
And I did.
I was disappointed when, a couple of weeks after I'd quit my
job, I still didn't feel any better. I started getting
seriously worried about myself. Was this what had happened
to those crazy ladies you saw pushing shopping carts filled
with all their possessions? Did it start with some sharp,
personal tragedy they never recovered from? The moment that
possibility seemed like an achingly clear forecast of my
future, I pulled myself out of bed and made a conscious
effort to do something. Anything. And in those first
few days of stumbling recovery, a walk around a couple of
blocks chased my breath away. But it helped. It was like
there was a light ahead somewhere, if only I squinted
diligently enough.
My timing on choosing to return to what was left of my life
was flawless. Around the time I could manage a whole meal,
cared enough to shower every day, and felt strong enough to
catch up on my laundry, my co-op sold and I knew that the
time for introspection was over. In thirty days new people
would be moving into my apartment and would expect me not to
be living there. I had to do something. I just wasn't
quite sure what.
|
Bio
Calculated
Loss
The
Next Ex
Mad
Money
Linda's
Blog
|
