Bloodless (Aloysius Pendergast #20)(41)
Four hours later, Masolino, bathed in sweat, a pile of damp paper towels on the floor behind him, hands trembling, finally shut down his system. It was only two o’clock in the afternoon, but he was going home early to have a stiff martini.
Ellerby’s trading went back years and years, via every imaginable financial instrument, all over the map: those same quick little trades making modest profits. Every trade was legal, or so it seemed. Masolino could think of only one answer: Ellerby was a stock-trading genius the likes of which the world had never seen. Given the short time frames on so many of the trades, he must have developed some incredibly powerful mathematical quantitative trading algorithms that monitored markets and traded accordingly. An algorithm like that—that never made a mistake and always made a profit—would be the holy grail of Wall Street. But such programs, no matter how powerful or ingenious, could never be 100 percent accurate. It was impossible, given the random fluctuations of the market, to ever be perfectly accurate. But the hard drive held only records of transactions—no indication of how the trades were identified and executed and no algorithmic trading program.
And by the end of it all, Ellerby had amassed a paper fortune of close to $300 million. A hotel manager. Three hundred million. And $200 million of that had been made in just the last three weeks.
Christ, Masolino needed that martini.
27
FRANCIS WELLSTONE JR., HAVING donned a new suit and tie, sat in the same parlor, in the same venerable wing chair, with the same view of West Oglethorpe Avenue, that he recalled from his first visit. There were, however, a few differences of note. It was not morning, but past six in the evening; he’d been served sweet tea instead of lemonade; and his hostess, Mrs. Daisy Fayette, was in a less agreeable mood than the first time they’d met.
“Do you mean to say that he actually interrupted your segment?” Wellstone asked, injecting surprise and sympathy into his voice.
Daisy nodded, her lavender-tinged hair shaking in displeasure. A tiny cloud of powder rose from it before settling again. “I was just beginning to explain why the Montgomerie House was haunted—an eddy in the spiritual ether, caused by the murder-suicide—when he cut me off. In midsentence…and in front of everybody, with the cameras still filming!”
“I’ve heard that Betts has a reputation of being an unpleasant person to work with. But to needlessly humiliate someone who’s helping him…!” Wellstone shook his head, at the same time finding a secret pleasure in the fact that he wasn’t the only one to be recently humiliated by that bloviating dotard producer.
By now, Wellstone had taken the measure of Savannah—its history, legends, and secrets. In Daisy’s circle of southern gentility and decorum, Betts’s oafish behavior would have been dealt with in a different way, and old Mr. Fayette, if he hadn’t been moldering in the grave, might have called Betts out, fought a duel with him, over the insult. Perhaps the old ways weren’t so barbaric after all.
On the other hand, Daisy’s outrage was exactly what he’d been hoping for. After his fury over his treatment at Lafitte’s had cooled, his mind had begun working strategically again. Daisy was almost certainly ready to become a useful informant on Betts, his inside source, so to speak.
“I visited the Montgomerie House myself just yesterday,” Wellstone said, taking a sip of iced tea. “I thought it to be one of the most fascinating spots I’ve ever visited. And spiritually disturbing,” he hastily added. “Especially after reading your most informative, ah, book about it.”
“Thank you,” Daisy said.
Pamphlet, Wellstone had almost said; fortunately he had corrected himself in time. He’d tut-tut a little more, then get down to business. “I’m surprised, actually, to hear that Betts had so little interest in the Montgomerie ghosts. I would have thought it precisely the kind of thing he could work into his documentary.”
“Oh, he was interested,” Daisy said. “It was that other man who said there were no ghosts.”
“That other man?” Wellstone repeated, although he knew exactly which man that was.
Daisy nodded. “Moller. The one with all the equipment.”
“Moller wasn’t interested?” he asked.
Daisy hesitated. “No…not exactly that. He said his instruments weren’t picking up any traces of ghostly activity.”
Wellstone shook his head. “That doesn’t make any sense. As we both know, the house is profoundly haunted. My guess is…”
He hesitated for drama.
“What?”
“That this Moller is a quack. You must have run into them, Daisy. Someone who claims to know about the science of the paranormal but is nothing more than a showman, a fake.”
“I certainly have! You run into them all the time while doing supernatural research.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if this whole documentary is a ridiculous charade.”
Daisy took a demure sip of her tea. “I wouldn’t be surprised at all.”
“But…what happened when Moller couldn’t find any ghosts?”
“Betts actually told Moller to make his instruments ‘work better.’” She smiled slightly—the prickly smile Wellstone recalled from his first visit. “Moller told him that finding nothing there would make it all the more believable when they did find something.”