Monday morning, I stuck my gun in a shoulder holster under a loose tweed jacket and drove the Omega into the Loop to begin a day at the brokerage houses. At the offices of Bearden & Lyman, Members of the New York Stock Exchange, I told the receptionist I had six hundred thousand dollars to invest and wanted to see a broker. Stuart Bearden came out to meet me personally. He was a dapper man in his middle forties, wearing a charcoal pinstripe suit and a David Niven mustache.
He led me through a maze of cubicles where earnest young people sat with phones in one hand, typing on their computer terminals with the other, to his own office in the far corner of the floor. He brought me coffee and treated me with the deference half a million dollars commands. I liked it. I’d have to tell more people I was rich.
Calling myself Carla Baines, I explained to Stuart that Agnes Paciorek had been my broker. I was getting ready to place an order for several thousand shares of Ajax when she’d warned me away from the stock. Now that she was dead I was looking for a new broker. What did Bearden & Lyman know about Ajax? Would they agree with Ms. Paciorek’s advice?
Bearden didn’t blink or blench on hearing Agnes’s name. Instead, he told me what a tragedy her death was; what a tragedy, too, that you couldn’t feel safe working in your own office at night. He then punched away at his computer and told me the stock was trading at 543 3/8. “It’s been going up the last few weeks. Maybe Agnes had some inside news that the stock is cresting. Are you still interested?”
“I’m not in any hurry to invest. I guess I should make up my mind about Ajax in the next day or so, though. Do you think you could scout around and let me know if you hear anything?”
He looked at me closely. “If you’ve been thinking about this move for some time, you must know there’s a lot of talk about a covert takeover bid. If that’s the situation, the price will probably continue to go up until the rumor is confirmed one way or another. If you’re going to buy, you should do it now.”
I spread my hands. “That’s why I don’t understand Ms. Paciorek’s advice. That’s why I came here-to see if you knew why she’d warn me not to buy.”
Bearden called his research director. The two had a short conversation. “Our staff hasn’t heard anything to counter-indicate a buy order. I’d be very happy to take it for you this morning.”
I thanked him but said I needed to do some more research before I made a decision. He gave me his card and asked me to let him know in a day or two.
Bearden & Lyman was on the fourteenth floor of the Stock Exchange. I rode the elevator down eleven floors to my next quarry: Gill, Turner & Rotenfeld.
By noon, having talked myself dry in three different brokerage offices, I beat a discouraged retreat to the Berghoff for lunch. Ordinarily I don’t like beer, but their homemade dark draft is an exception. A stein and a plate of sauerbraten helped recoup my strength for the afternoon. Everyone had given me essentially the same information I’d gotten from Stuart Bearden. They knew the rumors about Ajax and they urged me to buy. None of them showed any dismay on hearing either Agnes’s name or my interest in Ajax. I wondered if I’d taken the wrong approach. Maybe I should have used my own name.
Maybe I was barking up an empty tree. Perhaps a late-night burglar, intent on computer terminals, had found Agnes and shot her.
I continued to prove that a woman with six hundred thousand dollars to invest gets red-carpet treatment. I’d talked to no one but senior partners all morning and Tilford & Sutton was no exception: Preston Tilford would see me personally.
Like the firms I’d visited that morning, this one was medium-sized. The names of twenty or so partners were on the outer door. A receptionist directed me down a short hallway and through the trading room where a score of frantic young brokers manned phones and terminals. I picked my way through the familiar stacks of debris to Tilford’s office in the far corner.
His secretary, a pleasant, curly-haired woman in her late forties, told me to go in. Tilford was nervous, his finger-nails bitten down to the quick. This was not necessarily a sign of guilty knowledge, at least not guilty knowledge about Agnes- most of the brokers I’d seen today were high-strung. It must be nerve-racking following all that money up and down.
He doodled incessantly as I pitched my tale to him. “Ajax, hmm?” he said when I’d finished. “I don’t know. I have-had a lot of respect for Agnes’s judgment. It so happens we’re not recommending anyone to buy now, either, Ms., uh, Baines. Our feeling is that these takeover rumors have been carefully placed by someone trying to manipulate the stock. The bottom could crash out at any time. Now, if you’re looking for a growth stock, I have several here that I could recommend for you.”
He pulled a stack of prospectuses from a desk drawer and shuffled through them with the speed of a professional card dealer. I left with two hot prospects tucked into my bag and a promise to call again soon. On my way to number seven, I called my answering service and told them to take messages if anyone phoned asking for Carla Baines.
At four-thirty, I’d finished with Barrett’s list. Except for Preston Tilford, everyone had recommended buying Ajax. He was also the only one who discounted the takeover rumors. That didn’t prove anything one way or another about him. It might mean only that he was a shrewder broker than the rest-after all, only one man in one brokerage firm had recommended against buying Baldwin when its stock was soaring, and he was the only one out of the entire universe of security analysts who had been correct. Still, Tilford’s recommendation against Ajax was the sole unusual incident of the day. So that was where I had to start.
Back home I changed out of my business clothes into jeans and a sweater. Pulled on my low-heeled boots. Before charging into action, I called the University of Chicago and undertook the laborious process of tracking down Phil Paciorek. Someone finally referred me to a lab where he was working late.
“Phil, it’s V.I. There was someone at your house yesterday whose name I’d like to know. Trouble is, I don’t know what he looks like, only how his voice sounds.” I described the voice as best I could.
“That could be a lot of different people,” he said dubiously.
“No accent at all,” I repeated. “Probably a tenor. You know, most people have some kind of regional accent. He doesn’t. No midwestern nasal, no drawl, no extra Boston r’s.”
“Sorry, V.I. Doesn’t ring a bell. If something occurs to me, I’ll call you, but that’s too vague.”
I gave him my phone number and hung up. Gloves, pea jacket, picklocks and I was set. Cramming a peanut butter sandwich into my coat pocket, I clattered down the stairs into the cold January night. Back at the Stock Exchange, a security guard in the hall asked me to sign in. He didn’t want any identification so I put down the first name that came to me:
Derek Hatfield. I rode to the fifteenth floor, got off, checked the stairwell doors to see that they weren’t the kind that lock behind you, and settled down there to wait.
At nine o’clock a security guard came up the stairs from the floor below. I slid back into the hallway and found a ladies’ room before he got to the floor. At eleven, the floor lights went out. The cleaning women, calling to each other in Spanish, were packing up for the night.
After they left, I waited another half hour in case anyone had forgotten anything. Finally leaving the stairwell, I walked down the hall to the offices of Tilford & Sutton, my boots clopping softly on the marble floor. I’d brought a flashlight, but fire-exit lights gave enough illumination.
At the outer door I shone my flashlight around the edges to make sure there was no alarm. Offices in a building with internal security guards usually don’t have separate alarms, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. Pulling my detective’s vade mecum from my pocket, I tried a series of picklocks until I found one that worked.