“No, thanks,” Chason said, and walked around the guy and into the office.
Joey’s secretary, a peroxide blonde with great breasts who Chason had learned wasn’t as dumb as she looked, smiled at him, then picked up her telephone.
“Mr. Chason is here, Mr. Fiorello,” she announced, listened a minute, and then hung up.
“Mr. Fiorello said he’ll be right with you, Mr. Chason,” she said. “How have you been?”
“Can’t complain,” Chason said. “How about yourself?”
“Well, you know,” the blonde said. “A little of this, a little of that.”
A moment later, the door to Joey’s office opened and a guy who looked like another salesman came out. Then Joey appeared in the door.
“Hey, Phil, how’s the boy? Come on in. You want a cup of coffee, or a Coke or something?”
“I could take some coffee,” Chason said.
“Helene, how about getting Mr. Chason and me some coffee. How do you take yours, Phil?”
“Black would be fine,” Chason said as he shook Joey’s extended hand and walked into the office.
He had to admit it, Joey had a classy office. Nice furniture, all red leather, and a great big desk that must have cost a fortune. The walls were just about covered with pictures of classy cars and of Joey and his family on his sailboat. There was a model of the sailboat, sails and everything, in a glass case.
The blonde delivered two mugs of coffee. The mugs said, “Fiorello Fine Cars. We sell to sell again!”
Joey waited until the blonde had closed the door behind her, then asked, “You got something for me, Phil?”
“I don’t think you’re going to like it, Joey.”
“I pay you to find things out. Who said anything about me having to like it?”
“Mr. Ronald R. Ketcham is a sleazeball, Joey,” Chason said.
“How is he a sleazeball?”
“You understand I can’t prove anything, Joey. I mean, if I was still a cop, I don’t have anything I could take to the district attorney.”
“Tell me what you found out,” Joey Fiorello said. “That’s good enough for me.”
“Okay. The truth is, he is a stockbroker. For Wendell, Wilson and Company, in Bala Cynwyd. Before that, he was a stockbroker with Merrill Lynch, here in the city. He told Wendell, Wilson he wanted to leave Merrill Lynch so he wouldn’t have to come into the city every day. The truth is, he resigned from Merrill Lynch about five minutes before they were going to fire him.”
“Fire him for what?”
“For one thing, he didn’t go to work very often, and for another, there was talk that when he did show up for work, he did a lot of business his customers didn’t know about. You know what I mean?”
Joey shook his head, “no.”
“Stockbrokers work on commission. The more stocks and bonds and stuff they buy and sell, the more money they make. So, if they aren’t too ethical, they call their customers up and suggest they sell something he hears is going to go down, and buy something else he hears is going to go up, and maybe his information isn’t so kosher. He did a lot of that at Merrill Lynch, but that isn’t all. If they have customers that are buying and selling a lot, so their monthly statements are pretty complicated, what some of those guys do—what Ketcham got caught doing—is making trades their customers didn’t order.”
“Explain that to me,” Joey said.
“Like you own five thousand shares of, say, General Motors. Ketcham would sell, say, a thousand shares one day, and buy it back the next. And get a commission selling it, and another commission buying it back.”
“The customers don’t notice?”
“A lot of the customers don’t keep good records,” Chason explained. “They get their statement, it says they sold a thousand shares at fifty bucks, and then, a day later, they bought a thousand shares at forty-seven-fifty, which means they picked up twenty-five hundred bucks less the commissions, why ask questions?”
“What if they sold the stock at forty-seven-fifty, and then bought it back at fifty, and they lost twenty-five hundred? Don’t that ring bells that something ain’t kosher?”