My elation returned to tension by the time I got back to the department. Gershwin’s office was a former storage room for my office, which he had to traverse to get to his space. I’d been at my desk for several minutes when he entered with a stack of files in his hand.
“I’m gonna shuffle through reports from Ruiz just to see if there’s anything there.”
Ruiz, Tyler and Bell were the investigative-pool dicks assigned to follow up on sightings based on the retouched photos of Gary Ocampo, potential ways Donnie might look. The photos had been sent to all law-enforcement entities in the region.
“They’re overwhelmed, right?”
“Swamped. Were you the one authorized the general release of Gary’s retouched photos to gay bars and organizations?”
“What? No.”
“If not you, Big Ryde, who?”
“No idea.”
“The hits are coming in, but the guys are barely able to check a dozen a day.”
I sighed. The FCLE had dozens of active cases – murders, drug dealers, counterfeiters, bank robbers – all handled from two floors in Miami’s Clark Center building. I’d been lucky Roy’d allowed me three pool investigators.
“It’s a pure crapshoot,” I said. “But it’s gotta be done.”
“Ruiz says next time you want them to check a suspect make sure he’s ten feet tall with purple hair and one eye in the center of his forehead. I told Ruiz that wouldn’t solve anything … it’s Miami.”
He continued for his office. I cleared my throat. “Uh, hang on a sec, Zigs. Morningstar wants me to take her to a supper club. Any recommendations?”
He jumped into his office, threw the files on his desk and was sitting across from me in a flash, leaning forward. “Oy caramba, Big Ryde. Give me the juicy details.”
“There are no juicy details. She’s resigning to re-train for standard physician-type work and I offered to take her to dinner to celebrate. The supper club was her addition.”
“Does la señorita want Latin dancing?” I saw his grin widening. “That’s pretty sensuous stuff, sahib.”
“Don’t start,” I said. “Just give me some suggestions.”
He snapped his fingers. “The Calypso Club, an institution. Full Latin orchestra. Low lighting, too, jefé. Candles on every table.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
He put a hand above his head, one below, snapping his fingers like a flamenco dancer. “Es muy r-r-r-r-r-romantico.”
I muttered and waved for him to beat it, but as soon as the Cheshire-grinning Gershwin trotted to his office I made reservations at the Calypso.
Auguste Charpentier, né Jeremy Ridgecliff, leaned back in his Herman Miller Aeron chair and looked between the computer monitors and Bloomberg terminal on his desk. The US trading day had just ended and he approximated his winnings: over eleven thousand bucks, on the low side of average.
“Eleven thousand bucks and change, Brother,” Ridgecliff chuckled. He often included his brother in his talks with himself, as if the brother were there in person. “How’d you do today, Carson?”
He rolled back from the desk and took a final look at the equipment. He shut the computers down, and began removing the connecting cables, reflecting on his life since beating it from Manhattan with the police on his heels.
After moving to the backwoods of Kentucky, he’d been so fiercely bored he cataloged all flora on his ten-acre property, simultaneous teaching himself French to fit with his new guise (and to read Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Valéry without a translator’s intervention). He’d also taken to watching business news in the afternoon while preparing dinner. He’d had no prior knowledge of business, a quotidian endeavor practiced by a financio-merchant class that seemed devoid of scruples, though tended to dress rather well.
While he watched the pot simmer with a rabbit ragout or whisked his sauce hollandaise, he flicked between Bloomberg and CNBC. At first it was gibberish, numbers and symbols and icons and a never-ending procession of men and women with second-tier minds (though conducting themselves as though they were first-tier) spouting conclusions about the markets that were immediately contravened by the next series of talking heads. Bond merchants said one thing, stockbrokers another, sellers of precious metals had their own spin.
But as he watched and whisked, listened and ladled, Ridgecliff discerned one vital trait: though comprised of thousands of interwoven parts too complex and ever-shifting to create an over-arching analysis, the market – as a whole; as an entity – had a personality. And because it was comprised of humans, it was a human personality, subject not to logic, but trends and phobias and false confidence and insecurities and idiot worship and self-aggrandizement and the need to see itself as the exact center of the universe.
Ridgecliff had arrived at his moment of enlightenment just as the roux in a chicken-okra gumbo had come to the boil, meaning absolutely nothing, but something many people would take as a sign that gumbo was his lucky food. Which was the whole point: the market did not make mathematical sense, but humanized sense.
The market had a personality and it was neurotic.
Even better, this neurotic personality was moronically simple, with only two true states: blustering drunkard and scared child. Anything else was just transition. When the drunkard was ramping into a screaming, self-centered bender, Jeremy Ridgecliff played the bull. When conditions changed and the scared child began mewling and simpering, he played the bear. When the market was in transition, he put his winnings elsewhere, like real estate, hedges, or venture-capital funds.
It was so simple he wondered why no one had figured it out before. But then realized that a decade in an institution for the criminally insane was excellent backgrounding in analyzing the patterns of greed, dysfunction and insecurity.
Ridgecliff was setting a small monitor into a packing crate when his desk phone rang. He leaned over the screen on the console, saw CARSON listed as the caller. He sighed and shook his head as the words spread from the speaker into the room.
“JEREMY! CALL ME, GODDAMMIT! I’M WORRIED ABOUT YOU!”
The caller paused as if to add more, but clicked off. Ridgecliff rolled the chair to the phone’s connection to the wall and pulled it out. “If you’re worried now, Brother,” he chuckled, “I’m afraid things are going to get even tougher.”
He padded the phone with bubble wrap and set it in one of the large boxes provided by the moving company, then went to the door and turned to see the entirety of his office in three packing crates sitting beside his chair, desk, and lamp. The moving company had taken the rest of the contents of his home, his office all that was left.
He started to turn off the light, but paused to take a final look at the room where his fortunes had begun and were daily changing for the better. He felt an odd quiver somewhere near his heart: a sense without analog or precedent.
My God, he thought. Is that wistfulness? He flicked off the light.
She was right. It could happen.