I hit the Rolodex again.

Jake got the two questions, all right, but there was one more he seemed not to have thought of: If it was so easy, why hadn’t it happened already?

Like I said, with the economy hitting lows in the Mariana Trench, plenty of Wall Streeters were moving to the Great Beyond. Between stress-related cardiacs, Provigil overdoses, and wiped-out investors bursting in with semiautomatic weapons, it was a wonder the big firms still had to resort to redundancies. Anyhow, that meant a steady flow of financially savvy type A’s into the afterlife. If they really could game the day traders, you’d think some of them would have tried it before now.

Many more phone calls, and I discovered that, in fact, they had. But no one wanted to talk about it.

“It’s like this,” said one of my ex-colleagues from Lehman. “I have some friends, they’ll tell me stories over drinks, but they’ll never admit anything publicly.”

“Why not? Even if it’s a ghost doing the legwork, positive returns are positive returns. The Street’ll take its alpha from anywhere-shades, vampires, flesh-eating zombies, who cares?”

“Because it never lasts long,” my former desk mate said. “Three people told me they had, uh, visitations, I guess, but every one flamed out after just a few tips. And then what-you’re going to send a share-holder letter explaining you lost a bundle by taking advice from the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come? No way. So they keep quiet.”

“Ah. So nobody actually made money on the advice.”

“Nope. It was all currency trades, too, in the last few months. But the shade always screwed up after a while.”

“One last question. Was it the same ghost each time?”

“I didn’t ask. But everyone said he’d been murdered, so messily they couldn’t possibly identify who he’d been in real life.”

I was too late.

I waited until the morning to talk to Ernest. Hey, the Knicks were in the playoffs-talk about an unexplainable phenomenon-and I didn’t want to miss the game.

Ernest, I’m sorry. Really.

When I got to his office, there were police cars, two TV trucks, and a herd of pedestrians clicking cell phone photos as a covered gurney was lifted into the coroner’s van. I couldn’t talk my way through the uniforms standing guard behind the yellow tape, so I waited until Detective Gatling came out. When I waved, he frowned and hustled me out of the crowd.

We stood inside the lobby, out of the way as a pair of forensic technicians in Tyvek bunny suits lugged their kits to the elevator.

“Security cameras caught the whole thing,” said Gatling. “Video’ll probably be on the Internet by lunchtime… Jake Tims walked into Ernest’s office, started screaming, and pulled out a Glock. Eleven rounds, eight through the torso.”

“What were they doing?” I pointed to the armored security guards across the lobby, apparently under interrogation by another detective.

Gatling shrugged. “There’s no metal detector here. They caught him quick enough after the shooting stopped.”

I shook my head. “Jake lost some money this morning, I take it.”

“Just about every penny. He went the wrong way on, uh… just a minute.” Gatling flipped through his notebook. ”Ringgit. Some kind of Asian money? I don’t know the details, but he blew his entire packet on the trade.”

“Randall.” I muttered some profanities. “The ghost.” And I explained how Jake had thought his former partner was steering him to riches.

Gatling started to catch on. “Don’t tell me.”

“Yup. Randall seems to have been recommending up/down currency positions to traders all over the city. But none of them were talking to each other.”

“A tip-sheet scam!”

“I think so.”

Gatling’s grin spread wide. “I haven’t seen one of those in decades.”

In ancient times, long before the Internet, a grifter would mail out a newsletter to, say, a hundred sports bettors, predicting who’d win the big game on Sunday. The trick was, half the tip sheets would say one team-and half, the other. Next week, the newsletter would go out again, but only to the fifty recipients who’d gotten the correct prediction the first time-and so on down the line, half the marks falling away each week. See how it works? At the end, three gamblers would have gotten seven examples of a tip sheet with a perfect record.

And then the grifter would send one more mailing, asking if the marks would like to subscribe. Sure, it was costly, but now that he’d proven himself…

The beauty was, it was even halfway legal. Oh, the good old days.

Gatling shook his head. “Randall set Eppleworth up to fail, spectacularly. But why?”

“Not Eppleworth. He just happened to be the last mark still making money. The target was Jake.”

“Why?”

“Because Jake killed Randall.”

A pause while Gatling thought it over. “Gunshots, yeah, same as Eppleworth upstairs this morning, I could see that. But if that was true, why would Randall come back to Jake-and why in the world would Jake believe anything from the guy he’d just murdered?”

“Because Jake must have hired the thugs who kidnapped Randall. It really happened the way he said-fingernail pulling, the bank password, the garbage scow. Only when he was on the other side did Randall have time to figure it out. He set this whole elaborate scheme up simply to ruin Jake-and Jake went along with it, because he assumed Randall didn’t know what actually happened.”

We stood in silence for a moment. Outside, the coroner’s van finally drove away.

“You’ll find the motive if you look,” I said. “My guess is Jake wanted the whole pie for himself-and the three mil from the sweep account was just a lagniappe.”

“You’re probably right.” Gatling put his notebook away. “Let’s do the formal interview later, after I check into it.”

“Sure.”

We walked toward the door. Sunshine spilled across the lobby’s polished floor.

“Good thing New York doesn’t have the death penalty,” Gatling said. “I’m sure your new pal Jake wants a word with you, but he’ll have to wait, oh, about forty years.”

“Yeah.” I sighed.

“What?”

“Ernest,” I said. “He’ll probably be visiting me tonight.”

Swing Shift by Dana Cameron

Jake Steuben knew it would be easy to find Harry amid the crowd at North Station. All he had to do was find the highest density of pretty girls; his friend would be within fifteen feet.

Sure enough, there he was, ten feet away from a group of secretaries by the newsstand, watching as they chattered about the stars on the cover of Life. Jake picked up his valise and edged his way through the crowd. He leaned over and whispered into Harry’s ear.

“If you get into trouble and you can’t get out, it’ll be because of a girl.”

“There are worse reasons.” Harry startled, his morose stare gone, and stood up to shake Jake’s hand. “Train was on time. Any trouble?”

“What trouble would there be? It was crowded but quiet; I stood in the vestibule most of the way.”

Harry looked askance. “No doubt the conductor made you stand out there-that’s the ugliest hat I’ve seen in quite some time, my friend.”

Jake took off his hat to look at it fondly. It was a little shiny, stretched, and the brim needed reblocking. “It’s just getting broken in.”

They walked out of the train station, past drunken sailors staggering to Scollay Square, then a few blocks to the Boston Common.

Harry said, “How’s the wife?”

“Sophia is fine, thanks. How’s the war effort in Washingt-?”

“And the baby’s doing well?”

Jake couldn’t help smiling. “Cutting his first tooth, so he’s a handful. Say, Harry, what is it you-?”

“Good, glad to hear it. And everyone in Salem?”

Jake looked around. There was no one to overhear their conversation, so why did Harry keep interrupting? Politeness was all well and good, but he had come to Boston on the double. “Real good,” he said slowly. “Thanks for asking.”