Free JM02 - Death's Little Helpers aka No Way Home by Peter Spiegelman Page B

There was a phone message from Jane, telling me she had a dinner with the buyers that night, and another, from my brother Ned, reminding me of my nephew’s birthday party that weekend and telling me to expect some e-mail: three résumés and a schedule of interviews.
    Klein & Sons was in the market for a security director. Ned had tried to sell me on the job and wasn’t happy when I’d run in the opposite direction. In a momentary spasm of familial conciliation, I’d offered to interview the candidates on his short list. It was one of those good deeds that had certain punishment written all over it.
    I checked my e-mail and found the résumés there. I also found reports from the search services. I poured myself a cranberry juice and sat down to read them, wondering if they’d shed any light on where Gregory Danes had driven to when he’d driven off the map.

5
    Richard Gilpin was calling himself Gilford Richards these days, at
    least at the esteemed investment firm of Morgan & Lynch of Fort Lee, New Jersey. His voice was deep and ripe with sincerity, but he went quiet when I used the name Gilpin and hung up when I said I was calling about his half brother, Gregory Danes.
    Finding Gilpin hadn’t been hard; he was in the book, at an address somewhere in Englewood. I’d called that number and an answering machine there told me I’d reached the residence of Gilford Richards. I’d plugged Gilford Richards into a search engine and come up with Morgan & Lynch’s cheesy Web site. According to the site, Morgan & Lynch was a Cayman Islands company that operated half a dozen hedge funds— microcap stock and foreign equity funds mainly. They claimed steady growth in assets under management, and remarkable returns, and they made elaborate and incoherent statements about the mathematical models used to manage their investments. The whole thing reeked of Ponzi.
    No one named Morgan or Lynch seemed to be associated with the firm, but Gilford Richards was listed as one of its principals. Richards’s CV was impressive but curiously failed to mention his earlier incarnation as Gilpin or his run-ins with the SEC. An oversight, no doubt. After five attempts, I gave up trying to reach him again, and resigned myself to a trip to Fort Lee. But not today.
    Today, Dennis Turpin was on my calendar. I’d called Nina Sachs last night, to get approval to disclose her name to Turpin. It was a surprisingly painless experience. And from what I’d heard on the phone, the whole gestalt at Sachs’s place had taken a definite uptick.
    Nina had answered. Her voice was light and her mood was expansive. There was music in the background, and Billy was laughing and calling to Ines.
    “Come on, Nes, I put on that Miami shit you like.” He sang “Turn the Beat Around,” badly.
    I told Nina about my talk with Turpin and about his offer to trade information, and she didn’t think long before agreeing.
    “Hey, what the hell— they already know I’m looking for Greg.” She thought longer about my conversations with Christopher, the doorman, and Rafe, the garage attendant.
    “It wasn’t the cops?” she asked after a while. She was quieter and worried.
    “It doesn’t sound like them.”
    “So, who then?”
    “I was hoping you might have an idea.”
    “Fuck, no. People from work, maybe?”
    “Could be,” I had said. “Maybe I’ll find out tomorrow.”
    I had some time until my afternoon meeting with Turpin— time enough for lunch and more phone calls. I punched Simone Gautier’s number.
    She had no word for me yet on the hospitals and morgues, but that’s not why I was calling. I gave her Danes’s plate numbers and a description of his BMW and agreed on a fee to have her check out the longterm parking lots at Newark and LaGuardia and JFK. I’d already searched for Danes’s car in the NYPD’s online database of impounded vehicles and come up empty, and I didn’t hold out great hope for the longterm lots— Danes struck me