a-soft-place-to-fall - Rakhibul hasan (story books to read .TXT) 📗

an aging yellow Labrador retriever, a stack of banker's boxes, and the remnants of a Big Mac with fries, he would have settled back on the deck of his shorefront rental and laughed.

Twelve months ago he was still the top guy in the Personal Investment division at Mason, Marx, and Daniels on Wall Street. He had the fat salary, the fancy car, and the great apartment that went with it. He was the one they called "the natural", the kid who had started in a boiler room making cold calls, then worked his way up to a corner office with a window and a list of accounts that was almost legendary. "If we could bottle what Butler's got, we'd rule the universe," Franklin Bennett Mason had said to the assembled troops at the last Christmas party. Nobody had Sam Butler's drive, his determination, his ability to convince strangers to hand over their life savings to a man they'd met only fifteen minutes ago.

He was the best of the best, Sam Butler was, and everyone in that tightly-knit world in which he operated knew it. He was the one you wanted on your team. He kept his emotions out of the work place. He was everybody's pal, but nobody's friend and that touch of mystery only served to burnish his glow. The truth was, he hadn't had time for friends. He'd been too busy raising five brothers and sisters.

Sam never lied to his clients. He never encouraged them to take risks he wouldn't take himself but if a client was looking for a walk on the wild side of investing, Sam would clear a path and serve as bodyguard. He understood responsibility in a way few people his age could and he took his clients' plans for the future as seriously as he took his own. People responded to Sam. They always had. And in the narrow universe called finance, he was a rising star. One of the cable money channels had given him a ninety second spot one Tuesday night a few years ago and that minute and a half had turned into a daily three-minute closing bell gig that polished his reputation to the same high gloss as the one on his leased BMW.

When he first began to suspect something was wrong, he told nobody. He was pulling in the same amount of business, but his cumulative numbers were going down. The market was bullish, bonds were soaring, neither recession nor inflation were anywhere on the horizon. His closing bell reports were sunny and bright, visibility unlimited. The economy was about as good as it could get and the fact that his clients weren't raking in the bucks disturbed him but he did nothing about it. At least they weren't losing money. Not yet. One more year, he told himself. That was all he needed. One more year and the last of his siblings would be finished with college and ready to tackle the world on her own. Maybe then he'd have time for niceties like ethics.

He spent a few long weekends at the office going through his files and an unsettling trend began to appear through the endless streams of data. His clients were actually beginning to lose money. Nothing significant -- at least not yet -- and nothing that couldn't be explained away with terms like profit taking and seasonal adjustments but Sam could easily see the pattern being established. Someone was quietly shifting small quantities of blue chips into high risk ventures that, in Sam's eyes, had FRAUD written all over them in capital letters and signed with his name.

He told himself that it didn't matter. His clients were only names and social security numbers attached to a dollar figure. Hell, he wouldn't know most of them if he bumped into them on the street. He had learned a long time ago that personal attachments had no place in his business. He didn't want to know about hospital bills or new grandchildren. He didn't want to see family photos or share any of his own. He had made that mistake early on in his career and it was a dangerous one. They were accounts, not friends, but sometimes it was hard to remember that.

Ten more months, that was all he needed. Forty weeks longer and he'd be able to walk into Mason's office and say goodbye.

And he almost made it. Nine weeks before the day he planned to hand in his resignation, he came home to find two guys in black suits waiting for him inside his apartment. He didn't ask how they got in and they didn't volunteer. He didn't need to ask why.

It seemed he wasn't the only one who had caught onto what was happening at Mason, Marx and Daniels and, thanks to some clever planning, so far all roads led straight to Sam. The scope of what they were telling him almost made his knees buckle. While he had been busy looking the other way, someone had managed to erase one set of fingerprints from the scheme and replace them with another set: Sam's. The men in the black suits had a proposition for him, one he could refuse if he didn't mind going directly to jail without passing go. They needed information culled from the inside and they pointed out to Sam that it was in his best interests to become their number one source.

He began to keep a detailed log of names, dates, and percentages and when that log became too hot to store on his computer, he started snapping photos of the data on screen with a tiny camera he kept hidden in his shirt pocket. He filled notebook after notebook with contemporaneous data, suspicions, and thoughts, then locked them away in a safe deposit box back in his old Queens neighborhood, along with the files and the photos and everything else he'd been able to lay his hands on. A second key to the box had been mailed to an address in Arlington, Virginia.

He probably would have been able to pull it off if it hadn't been for Mrs. Ruggiero. Mrs. R was his first client, a widow from the old neighborhood where he'd grown up. Mrs. R was the one who'd made sure the Butler kids were fed and watched out for during those first few weeks after their mother's death and then again after their father died. Years later, she had come to him with the insurance monies from her late husband's policy and asked him to invest it for her "so I should be comfortable one day." Something came over him when he saw what was happening to her bottom line. It hit him in a way nothing else had. He thought of the box of homemade cookies that arrived at the office every Christmas, the invitations to Easter Sunday dinner that he always refused because the old neighborhood sometimes seemed light years away. He thought about his mother and how she and Mrs. R used to head out to All Souls Church on Francis Lewis Boulevard for the Friday night bingo games.

Mrs. R deserved a hell of a lot better. And that was how he came up with the bright idea to move her monies back into the safer holdings they both preferred, a painstakingly laborious process made more so by the fact that he wanted to stay off the radar screen. So it began with Mrs. R and when that seemed to work he remembered the old guy in Brooklyn, Ben Ashkenazy, who had fought in World War II with their next-door neighbor, then worked his butt off at AT&T for thirty years. He deserved better than a

year of diminishing returns, didn't he? And it worked for Ashkenazy too which got Sam thinking about Lila Connelly who took a buyout from IBM and now her entire retirement fund was in Sam's hands and disappearing. These clients were small fish in a big sea, the forgettable ones, the ones you practiced on before you moved up to the whales. Why in hell were they the ones who reminded him he had a heart?

Lila used to get her hair done at the place where his mother worked and when his mother died, Lila was there at the funeral with a fifty dollar bill for the Butler kids and a promise of more. And now he was letting them screw her to the wall, take all of her dreams and run them through a giant shredder called business.

The hell he was.

So he began moving Lila's funds too – slowly so slowly -- and that was when the clock finally ran out.

On a sunny Friday morning in early August, Franklin Bennett Mason, senior partner and occasional racquetball opponent, called Sam into his office and told him he was through. Mason gave him the company line about new directions and how much they appreciated everything Sam had done for them over the years but they both knew what was really happening. The stone cold look in Mason's eyes gave it away. They'd noticed that Sam was quietly shifting monies away from the questionable ventures and back into the blue chips and they were smart enough to know exactly what that meant.

Lucky for Sam they didn't know everything.

They cut him a nice goodbye check and he was out the door thirty minutes later. Sam knew the talk would start as soon as he stepped out onto the Street. Another head case, they would say. A burnout. You can't keep the heat turned up that high for so long and not pay a price. They would wonder over lunch where he would turn up next. Maybe Morgan Stanley. Maybe Salomon. Maybe he'd even pull a Jimmy Buffett and live on a sailboat moored down in the Keys. But nobody would call to see how he was doing. The pace was too fast, the competition too intense. His desk would be claimed by the next morning and his television spot would be given to someone else before the closing bell rang that afternoon. He would be forgotten before the end of the quarter.

Within the hour his friends in the expensive black suits showed up at his door to relieve him of his key to the safety deposit box and to warn him that things were going to get a lot worse before they got better.

If they got better at all.

They advised him to make himself scarce for a while. Pick a spot, they'd vet it, then disappear. They gave him a cell phone equipped with all sorts of fancy blocking devices and a number to call every day to check in. He was to stay in the country, keep the phone with him at all times, and be ready to be brought back on a moment's notice to testify against his former employer. They made no promises. With luck, the information he'd gathered would clear his name. Without it, he was looking at serious jail time.

He thought about renting a room in the Hamptons but that was still too close to ground zero. The Jersey shore was a possibility but it would be too easy to bump into someone he knew. He hated Florida and California and couldn't afford Hawaii. He had, however, always liked Maine with its three thousand miles of coastline. Warren owned at least a half dozen houses in Shelter Rock Cove. Maybe he would rent one of them to Sam on a monthly basis until he found out if his next address came with number embroidered on the back of his shirt.

Warren said yes before Sam had time to finish his question.

Shelter Rock Cove was vetted and okayed. He told his brothers and sisters that he was taking off into the wilds of Maine on a sabbatical. He told them that he wanted to get in touch with nature, clear