The first phone call came just a few hours after learning of the Linder's fate. Aside from
my lunch meeting with Steven Angle two hours earlier, I had gotten nothing done that day, and
there was no problem with that mainly because there hadn't been much done at all with my
clients' investments since my horrible mistake with Julio's money over that heart drug study.
Nobody thought Drexel Pharmaceuticals would stop development of the heart drug over the
study, but that's what they did and their stock got creamed for it.
I didn't know how Julio would respond upon learning the news, and, when I didn't hear
from him or Martin for five days, I got really spooked. If they were going to whack me over my
mistake, it surely would have happened within those five days. Two days into this torment, I
started making plans to disappear, but the hurdle of leaving my family was far too large. Julio
could just as easily kill them in retribution, so if I were to disappear, it would have to involve my whole family. Then there was the planning time problem. Such a plan would need at least a few
weeks to pull off and we only had a few days.
At the end of the fifth day, I was sitting in my office sipping on my sixth diet coke of the
day when I decided to give Martin a call. Nobody knew about the heart drug bet except me, yet
Martin had to have seen the $45 million drop in funds - that's what Julio paid him to do.
“Peter, how have you been?” Martin asked me. “We figured it would be good for our
relationship if we let you stew for a few days.”
“I don't understand, so you knew about it the whole time?”
Martin laughed weirdly. “Well, if you're asking me if I noticed $45 million less on
Monday than at the end of the prior Friday, then, yes, I did know all about it.”
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I leaned forward in my chair and didn't say anything to Martin for a few seconds. I had to
come clean with them.
“You know, no one on Wall Street thought that Drexel would stop development of its
heart drug after the study results were released last Thursday evening.”
“Well, we knew you wouldn't be so stupid as to steal the money from us,” Martin said
coldly.
“No, I suppose not,” I replied.
Martin didn't really specify how our relationship would change - he didn't have to. Not
that I had any leverage in my deal with Julio before the Drexel fiasco, but his grip felt much
tighter afterwards and spawned the dastardly plan to shake down doctors for drug study inside
information.
The Linders would still be alive if I hadn't showboated with Julio's money, and that
thought had me frozen in a bad karma twister all morning following Martin's news about the
Linders.
My firm had two employees, Judy Host, my receptionist, and Darryl Ludsten, who ran
the administration side of things. Darryl was on vacation for the next two weeks.
Judy rang me at 1pm to tell me to pick up line one.
“Peter, you gotta hear this…this guy is totally whacked!” she screamed into my intercom.
I picked up the handset and hit the button for line one.
“Liar, Liar, pants on fire, and your profits keep going higher, ha, ha, ha,” the voice sang
eerily, only to repeat the song over and over again. It was a real low and underwater-like voice,
disturbing in its delivery, meaning and just about every other kind of way.
It sure sounded like a recording - Judy couldn't reset the line because the other end
wouldn't hang up. That's when she called me.
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“They'll hang up eventually,” I told Judy firmly. “Is this the first time something like this
has happened?”
“Well, yeah, Peter,” Judy responded. “Should we be scared?”
After I heard her put the receiver down, she started running down the hallway, making a
clickity clack with her flip flops. It seemed she wore those things nine month months out of the
year, though she always told me it was six.
Judy had been with me for over thirteen years and was a former bartender at a Newark
strip club, something that she never discussed. I didn't know if she thought I had some kind of
judgment against that sort of thing, but whatever. For as long as I had known her, Judy wore an
Annie Lennox red crew cut and a large gap between her front teeth. Judy and her husband Hank
recently adopted a foster child that was living with them after being abandoned at a local
shopping mall at the age of two.
When Judy took the job way back when, my firm was in Manhattan, in an office building
just off of Times Square, and I thought she would leave me when I decided to relocate my firm to
the New Jersey suburb of Morristown, but she stayed and moved herself and Hank to Morristown
as well. We had had been in Morristown for six years, all in the same building that I shared with
the law firm, Dewey, Stange and Lewis. Stange is dead, and, since the day Judy and I moved in,
both Lewis and Dewey had been trying to win some entertainment business from me, sometimes
a little too aggressively. Our office had two offices off of a long hallway, a conference room and
a lobby where Judy sat. Darryl came aboard five years ago.
At this point of my career, I didn't need to visit clients in person, with only had a few
appointments a month from celebrities bored with their life and looking to me as sort of a
reminder of just how much dough they had gathered over the years.
Timothy Gilbert
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31
Judy sprinted into my office and started to blurt something out, but stopped and put her
index finger to her lips.
“Judy, it's okay,” I told her, squeezing out a chuckle. “I think it's a college buddy of
mine.”
This was definitely another swing trying to whack at my nerves and I simply wanted this
day to end. Talking with Judy, amazing calmness had to reign inside me to laugh it off as a prank
call from a college buddy.
“Well, let's plan on using Line two for the rest of the day, and if you find out who it was,
please kill them for me!” Judy exclaimed.
“Done.”
She left my office and I let out a deep breath. Somebody was clearly trying to scare me,
but, somehow, being in bed with a Mexican drug lord made me a little harder to scare – or so I
liked to think.
Steven Angle didn't say anything strange during lunch other than to show a little too
much enthusiasm for my investment performance in recent years. Steven came to visit me a few
times a year, probably the most of my clients, and I wasn't sure why that was. His lunch invite
was spur of the moment as he didn't mention it to Judy when he called to change the time that
morning, not long after I got off the phone with Martin. Judy was such a huge Steven Angle fan
that it had taken her a few years to able to hold a normal conversation with the man.
Judy had thought Stephen would be in for a quick 20-30 minute meeting, but that went
out the window with the lunch plans. How in the world could I stay focused for an entire lunch?
For Pete's sake, the Linders' blood was on my hands, and I was supposed to eat, drink and be
merry?
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Damage Control
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And we weren't expecting his whole family to be with him, so, when the Angle clan
walked into the front lobby, Judy and I were taken aback. The man had four children, all of them
present at our lunch meeting along with Steven's wife, Cherise, who spent the entire lunch trying
in vain to control her two year old boy. Spilling three glasses of water during the hour long
meeting, this kid thought it hysterical to run around the table and smack each person in the back.
Surreal as it was to see a rock star juggle four kids at a restaurant, Steven handled everything
well. I was surprised, though, that nobody came up to him for his autograph.
Steven asked me question after question about the companies my firm had invested in for
his portfolio, something he did last year when he took me to dinner. That dinner was the first
dinner that I had with a client in five years, and I'd like to say I thought of him as a friend – but who was I kidding? A friend doesn't rope his other friends into bed with a Mexican drug lord and
tie their fortunes to a global money laundering scheme.
Looking at Steven's kids during lunch, part of me wanted to scream “I'm sorry” right
there in the restaurant. The Angle family didn't deserve my lies, nor did any of my clients, but
Julio had us all under his bind. I just needed to keep my smile on and wait for a miracle – risking
losing all my clients money by recklessly disturbing my relationship with the cartel was foolish -
or for somebody to put a bullet through Julio Viola's head.
I had gotten Angle-esq enthusiasm over my investment performance from a few clients
recently. Yet, after listening to that recorded phone message, maybe one of my clients or maybe
even a competitor didn't believe the numbers? I hadn't received any client liquidation requests in
over two years, although that meant nothing after a phone call like that. Granted, this person had
no proof without access to my bank records and even those would be difficult to transcribe. Still,
if the authorities were made suspicious enough, it would be game over for me.
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Whoever I was hiding from Judy, this certainly was no college friend of mine. Someone
out there knew my secret. How much time before the whole world knew? They had to be
guessing, albeit correctly, that my investment performance was fictional, because it was highly
doubtful that Julio or Martin would blab about my situation to others. I had hidden my tracks
rather well and offered in-depth explanations for my „stellar' performance in the annual reports
that my firm sent to my clients the past few years. In the end, however, I was a liar and nothing
more and now someone wanted me to pay.
The agent for Bruce Gilbert, a Broadway director that Judy never had heard of, was on
Line Two.
“Peter Hansen.”
“Did you get my message?”
The voice sounded deeper in person, and a lot clearer.
“Who is this?” I demanded, shooting up from my chair.
The dial tone rang and he was gone. I thought for a second about running out to Judy to
see if this joker rang up on caller ID, but it was not worth alarming her any further and it wasn't
likely this guy would make such a rookie mistake anyway.
I got back on the phone – it was time to call for some help.
“Martin, we got a problem here,” I said firmly. “Someone has called here twice this
afternoon, accusing me of lying to my clients about my investment performance.”
“Who do you think it is?” Martin asked.
“I don't have a clue, but Judy is really scared.”
“I can assign a guy to watch over you if you want, but he may get a little too close for
comfort…your family might get suspicious…”
“Let me deal with them,” I responded. “I really appreciate this Martin.”
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I cracked a smile, because this creepy caller guy didn't know who was playing on my
team, and he might learn the hard way about messing with „ole Peter Hansen.
“Hey, we look out for each other, Peter,” Martin affirmed. “I can have a guy in your
parking lot in one hour.”
“Martin, thanks a lot.”
“Don't mention it…just stay safe,” Martin stated. “We need you alive and well.”
I couldn't argue with the general statement about being alive and well. Maybe someday,
Julio would cut me loose.
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Damage Control
35
Monday, September 1
5pm