Fifteen minutes passed and a large, overweight, uniformed man came through a door at the side of the lobby. Marjorie knew it was the entrance to the cells, the old, pre-World War I part of the jail. “You the one wanted to see Sam Black?” His voice was hoarse and growly, like the product of too much cigarette smoke.
“Yes, please,” she responded.
“Come with me.” He gestured her toward him. Then he turned and stepped back into the corridor. When she reached his side he pointed at a plastic box on a counter. “Leave your purse there.” He picked up an electronic wand and ran it briskly over her back and front and under her arms. “Okay,” he muttered and unlocked the other door in the small room. Marjorie walked down a short gray corridor to a glass-enclosed meeting room. The walls looked as though they had been added may years after the original construction of the jail.
There was a small steel table bolted to the floor and two plastic lawn chairs, one on each side of the table. “You can have an hour. A deputy warden will be over there, keeping an eye on you. He can’t hear your conversation.” Marjorie wondered about that. “When you want to leave, or need help, just rap on the door.” He left her alone. It was eerily quiet although she had an impression of faint voices, some calm, some anguished, one on the verge of sobbing. She couldn’t make out the words. When the door unlatched the voices faded out.
A female warden unlocked Sam’s cuffs but not the chain around his waist nor the leg hobbles.
“Hello, Aunt Marjorie,” he said, shuffling to the chair. “Sorry you have to see me like this.”
“I understand they have you on suicide watch? What’s that about?”
Sam shrugged. “I yelled. I got into it briefly with another inmate and a guard. It was just a momentary thing, but they have their rules and procedures.” He shrugged again.
“Physical? You and the other two?”
“Nope, why?”
She wondered if the suicide watch was an excuse to put Sam under closer surveillance. “I can’t touch you, Sam, but I’d give you a big hug if I could.”
He smiled briefly. “I know. I’d hug you back.”
“I need you to explain to me what you told Alan about day trader thefts and that conversation.” She had decided not to tell him that Alan was missing. “I have his notes and we talked after he met with you but I think it’s a good idea if you tell me again so I can…” she gulped…“I can compare notes with Alan.” She could tell her smile was weak, but she hoped he wouldn’t notice. He didn’t need any other worries, although she assumed word of Lockem’s absence would reach the jail before long.
“Okay, look. Most of what day traders do is based on timing. We are always trying to beat the market. The biggies, the traders who sometimes move millions, work in seconds, trying to buy or sell stocks just ahead of a rise or fall. It depends on a lot of factors. I can’t compete or get clients like that because of my location. The distances mean my trades are slightly behind East Coasters. Even a few nanoseconds when you are closer by a thousand miles is an advantage.
We have verbal and written contracts. We get paid a percentage of the deal, up or down. Clients come and go depending on how successful I am. Most of my clients are fairly conservative. A lot of my clients are using funds from some kind of retirement funds. Keoghs, or IRAs and bonds. They’re usually looking for a temporary bump. A vacation trip, a gift for a grandkid. But a lot of them get bitten by the bug and they decide to play with some of their excess funds. Actually, most of them don’t have excess funds, because they might need the money for unexpected medical procedures. Or they just live longer than expected. They’re like land speculators in the old days. It’s almost like flipping real estate today. And every trade I make, I get a tiny piece of the action. So let’s say I decide I can churn a client account by trading up or down more than necessary to increase my “take.” If I’m good and lucky, it won’t harm the client, who might not even notice unless he reads the reports closely, or asks.”
“But you don’t do that, because if your mother found out, she’d kill you.” Marjorie grinned. “Metaphorically.”
“Right. Trading is exciting enough. I don’t need the extra tension from doing illegal stuff.”
“Do you get pressure, in that regard?” Marjorie was trying to avoid being too blatant.
Sam stared at her. “If you mean, do I get asked to fudge or make illegal trades, sure. All the time, actually.” He looked down at his chained waist. A couple of times I had inside information and could have made a real killing.” He sighed.
“What can you tell me about the dead man?”
“Well, he was a sharp trader. Ketchum did his own trading after he learned the ropes. He had a rep for being a sharp in a lot of things. He had a lot of enemies around town. Not raging angry people, you know. Mostly people came to not trust the guy. Like with the mountain property. He wouldn’t cooperate or talk to anyone and then ran the ‘dozer down the hill. That’s nuts.”
“Why do you think he was killed?”
Sam shook his head. “I really don’t know.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah. But I don’t think it was ‘cause of the bulldozer event.”
“You don’t?”
“No. None of the people—you’ve met ‘em—would do that kind of thing. Slug him maybe. Sue him. Sure. Unless there was something else, something nobody knows about, none of the mountain group would do that.”
“So, what’s your guess, then,” she pressed. “Who did this and what’s the motive?”
Sam leaned back, away from the pressure of her words. To Marjorie, he had some ideas, but he was holding back. Did he think his mother, her cousin Edie, had been involved? She couldn’t even begin to entertain such a thought. Which led to the inevitable. What else was everybody hiding?
Half persuaded when she’d entered the jail, Marjorie agreed with him and with Alan’s earlier assessment that Sam was being wrongfully held and there was something else going on. Something still well-hidden. Something they’d have to ferret out in order to save Sam from prison or worse, the hangman’s noose.