Free Timothy's Game by Lawrence Sanders Page B

and humps his way to the nearest subway station. He tries to figure the best way to get to 47th Street and Tenth Avenue, and finally realizes there is no “best” way. No matter what his route, he’s going to get soaked.
    But almost a half-hour later, when he exits at 50th Street and Eighth Avenue, the downpour has ended. The city remains a sauna, and Cone reflects morosely that all he needs is someone to beat him with birch branches. He carries his raincoat and splashes through puddles and running gutters down to 47th Street and westward to Tenth Avenue.
    Ramsey’s building looks the way Cone imagined it: peeling paint, torn shades, cracked windows. It is dreary and dying, and no way would you figure it as the residence of a Wall Street plunger.
    There’s a spindly-legged little girl on the sidewalk. She’s about nine, and she’s skipping rope to the repeated chant:
    “Hubba, hubba, hubba,
    You better use a rubbeh.
    Or your ma will be a bubbeh.”
    A freckled, red-haired boy is sitting on the sagging stoop, watching her. He looks to Cone to be about eleven, going on forty-six.
    “You live here?” Cone asks him.
    The kid stares at him coldly. “What’s it to you?”
    “I’m looking for Paul Ramsey. You know him?”
    “I don’t know nothing, I don’t.”
    “He’s supposed to live in this building.”
    “I’m not saying, I’m not.”
    “But you heard the name?”
    “I told you I don’t know, I told you.”
    Cone sighs. “Who are you—Joey Echo? All right, I’ll see for myself.”
    He starts up the stoop. The kid stands up.
    “Hey,” he says, “you want to know about this guy, you want to know? Cost you a buck.”
    Cone digs out his wallet, fishes out a dollar, hands it over.
    “I don’t know nothing, I don’t,” the kid yells and darts away.
    Outraged, Timothy watches the juvenile con man race down the street. Then he laughs at how easily he’s been scammed. He figures that kid will end up President or doing ten-to-twenty in Attica.
    He goes into the cramped vestibule that smells of urine and boiled cabbage. There’s a bellplate but no names are listed in the slots. But there are names on the mailboxes. Two are listed for Apartment 5-A.
    One is Paul Ramsey.
    The other is Edward Steiner.
    He gets a cab going downtown on Ninth Avenue. The hackie wants to talk baseball, but Cone isn’t having any; he’s got too much to brood about.
    There’s this woman, Sally Steiner, who goes for 10,000 shares in Wee Tot Fashions, Inc., in an insider trading scheme at Pistol & Burns. And there’s this man, Paul Ramsey, who buys 27,000 shares of Trimbley & Diggs, Inc., in what is apparently another insider scam at Snellig Firsten Holbrook. And this Ramsey lives in an apartment with a guy named Edward Steiner.
    Maybe the two Steiners aren’t related, don’t even know each other. Coincidences do happen—but don’t bet on it. The Wall Street dick wonders how far he should push what he’s already calling the “Steiner Connection.”
    He’s back in the loft, pacing back and forth, when a light bulb flashes over his head, just like a character in a cartoon strip. And suddenly he remembers what he’s been trying to recall these past few days, something he heard that struck a tinny note. It comes to him now.
    Jeremy Bigelow said that when he interviewed Sally Steiner in the course of his investigation of the Wee Tot Fashions deal, she claimed she bought her 10,000 shares because she wanted to get Wee Tot’s reports. She was planning to quit the garbage business. She hoped to learn more about the manufacture, distribution, and sale of children’s clothing.
    Now, as Cone well knows, people sometimes do buy stock to get a company’s reports and possibly learn about the business. And sometimes they buy stock just so they can attend the annual meeting of stockholders and may get a free box lunch. But those objectives can be achieved by purchasing one share, ten, or maybe a hundred. But buying 10,000 shares