Final Option

  “TERRIFIC... AN AMAZINGLY ENTHRALLING MYSTERY...

  The author takes you on a roller-coaster ride that doesn’t end.... Millholland is one of the true original series characters, an unspoiled woman from a wealthy background who prefers to make her own mark in the world.”

  —Tempe News-Tribune (AZ)

  “Gini Hartzmark brings into play a fascinating behind-the-scenes look.... She seems to know the real Chicago, with its myriad of cultures and diverse neighborhoods.”

  —Mostly Murder

  “Gini Hartzmark has established herself as a quality writer.... Kate’s personal life is part of Final Option’s charm.... It’s an above average murder mystery and an excellent travelogue in the arcane world of commodities trading.... Hartzmark is a winner.”

  —Mystery News

  By Gini Hartzmark

  Published by Ivy Books:

  PRINCIPAL DEFENSE

  FINAL OPTION

  BITTER BUSINESS

  FATAL REACTION

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  An Ivy Book

  Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group Copyright

  © 1994 by Gini Hartzmark

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  http://www.randomhouse.com

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 93-91730

  ISBN 0-8041-1227-4

  Printed in Canada

  First Edition: March 1994

  10 9 8 7 6

  To Sam, Jonathan, and JoAnna

  Acknowledgments

  I am tremendously grateful to the busy people who generously made time to help me with the research for this novel. Mark Kollar of Knight-Ridder Financial News shared his experiences and gave me an overview of the futures industry, as did Roger Rutz and Thom Thompson at the Chicago Board of Trade. Jim Porter of Chicago Research & Trading Group, Ltd., was kind enough to discuss the special alchemy of his firm.

  Thanks also go to friends Dr. Mike Rocco, Rick Cooper, Chuck Zellmer, Ruth Berggren, Larry Barker, Michael Bader, Emmeline Diller, and Scott and Jodi Schumann for sharing their technical expertise over the kitchen table or the garden fence. And heartfelt thanks to Nancy Love; Leon Danco; Jan Harayda; my editor, Susan Randol; my friend, Ann Rocco; and especially my husband, Michael, for their unflagging support.

  And while I thank all these special people for their input and advice, I must be quick to absolve them from errors of fact and any other misdemeanors I may have committed.

  CHAPTER 1

  From the very first time I met him, Bart Hexter had been playing games with me. This morning was no exception, just another aggravation added to an already long list. Hexter was my client, a powerful futures trader who was a legend in Chicago—the sort of hardhitting businessman that this city of big shoulders seems to specialize in. Flamboyant, mercurial, with a huge appetite for risk, he’d earned his nickname, Black Bart, as much for his dark temper as his trademark jet black hair.

  But there was a statesmanlike side of the man as well. He was a persuasive spokesman for the futures industry and a lobbyist of no little skill. He and his wife, Pamela, were prominent for their many philanthropic works and held up their dedication to family, community, and each other, as a proud example to those who sought to emulate their success.

  Still, there were those who counseled against being taken in by the man’s patrician patina. Futures, they insisted, is an industry where greed, guile, and naked aggression are considered assets to be cultivated. For the better part of thirty years, they pointed out, Bart Hexter had been the biggest—and some would contend—the baddest in the game.

  Recently, Hexter and his company, Hexter Commodities, found themselves the focus of a government investigation. Most big traders did from time to time, and as his attorney I was not overly concerned. For his part, Hexter was worse than nonchalant. For weeks I’d been begging him for copies of the documents relevant to the government’s case, the trading records and account statements that I would need in order to answer the government’s charges. But with Hexter Commodities’ response due in less than five days, Bart Hexter had yet to produce one scrap of paper.

  I was not pleased.

  We had scheduled a number of meetings to discuss the matter, but so far Hexter had canceled them all— usually at the last minute. His excuses to date included: an overcrowded schedule, secretarial error, bad markets, and last but not least, a pressing poker game. Our most recently scheduled meeting, set for four o’clock the previous Friday, had been called off with no explanation at all. Furious, I’d phoned Hexter and demanded a weekend meeting. He’d retaliated by insisting that the only time he had available was Sunday morning at eight.

  And so I found myself, not comfortably in bed with the reassuring bulk of The New York Times, but behind the wheel of my car, dodging construction barrels on the Edens Expressway. This, at least, I reassured myself, was one meeting Bart Hexter was not going to get out of.

  Bart Hexter lived on an estate in Lake Forest that had been in his wife’s family for four generations. He lived lavishly, with the unabashed enjoyment of material things that springs from early years of want. Hexter had grown up poor even by the working-class standard in the Irish neighborhood of Bridgeport on Chicago’s south side. His father was a deckhand on a grain freighter that plied the Great Lakes trade, a faithless husband, and an unrepentant gambler, who only returned to his family when his money or his luck ran out. Bart’s mother was a pale and pious woman who bore her husband’s perfidy like a cross and raised her sons, Bart and his younger brother, Billy, with equal doses of discipline and religion.

  Having survived St. Bernadette’s School and three years military service in Korea, Hexter landed a job as a runner at the Board of Trade. He didn’t think much of the work at first, but he got off early, with plenty of time to play poker—a game he’d found he had a taste and a talent for in the army. On weekends, Bart occasionally filled in playing trumpet in a friend’s dance band, which was how his path crossed that of Miss Pamela Worley Manderson of Lake Forest.

  The awkward, sheltered, only child of Letitia and Sterling Manderson, heir to the Manderson meatpacking fortune, Pamela was easily captivated by the Byronic profile and hot brown eyes of the young Irishman. Their marriage, six months later, was the scandal of the year. One could only guess at what tears and entreaties, what threats of elopement and estrangement, had been necessary to extort the grim approval of Pamela’s parents to the match.

  Despite the scandal, or perhaps because of it, the Mandersons invited the young couple to make their home on their property, building a house for them behind the high hedges of the Manderson estate. Six months after it was completed, Bart Hexter mortgaged the house and used the proceeds to buy a seat on the Chicago Board of Trade.

  In less than two years’ time, with a one-year-old son and a daughter on the way, Hexter repaid the mortgage and leveled the house that had been his wedding present. In its place he erected another house, this one in the same Tudor style of his in-law’s, only four times as large. When construction was complete, Pamela’s ample girlhood home stood dwarfed behind it, literally in its shadow.

  The drive to Lake Forest from
my apartment in the city is a depressing trek up the chain of expressways— the Dan Ryan, the Kennedy, and the Edens—that, feeding into each other, form the suburbanite’s daily escape route from the city. Once you’re free of the jumble of construction near Wrigley Field, past the tidy bungalows of Skokie, there’s a strange stretch, as barren as the moon. Farmland has been asphalted into parking lots, and sleek office buildings sprout like poisonous mushrooms from the flat, empty plain.

  But once you leave the expressway and turn onto Route 41, you get to the country as abruptly as turning on a light—at least the expensive and manicured version of the country that passes as Chicago’s lush northern suburbs. The ancient elms are huge, meeting above the road in a dark, leafy canopy. There is a muted murmur of vast lawns being mowed in the distance, and if you listen hard enough you can imagine the faint ping of golf balls being hit deep behind the trees.

  It was especially warm for April. When I rolled down the window of my car, the air smelled damp and rich with the progressing spring. I turned onto Deerpath Road and made my shady progress into the bastion of quiet privilege that is Lake Forest. On my right, I passed the city offices, set back from the road like a small college, then past the three blocks of cloyingly cute and shockingly expensive shops that comprise the business district. I crossed the train tracks—the station is so quaint it always makes me think of gingerbread— and turned right onto Parkland Avenue. After a mile or two, I slowed to watch for the twin pillars of red brick that mark the entrance to the Manderson estate.

  Hexter’s secretary had faxed me detailed directions to the great man’s home, including a carefully drawn map, but I’d left them at the office. I didn’t need them. I’d grown up less than a mile from his home.

  I found the gateposts easily enough and turned onto the drive that was newly paved and deliberately winding. The house, as I recalled, was set quite a distance from the street in what was considered, even by Lake Forest standards, to be a rather grand park.

  As I rounded the first turn I was startled to see a car nose down in a gully a little distance from the drive. A whisper of exhaust trailed from the tail pipe. I slowed to a stop.

  Everyone knew Hexter’s car, a custom-made Rolls Royce Phantom—black with a white top. The license plate read, simply, BART. But what was it doing in the underbrush, with its back wheels cocked absurdly on the bank of a gully and its front butted up against a young birch tree? I got out of the car and squelched my way down the gently sloping bank.

  * * *

  We may have had a meeting that morning, but Bart Hexter certainly wasn’t dressed for business. He waited for me behind the wheel of his Rolls clad only in a pair of red silk pajamas. The window was rolled all the way down on the driver’s side and I called his name through it softly. I didn’t expect any answer. I was close enough to see clearly the cruel damage of two bullets in his head.

  The impact of the shots had knocked him toward the passenger side of the front seat where he sprawled, his head tilted absurdly so that one eye stared up at me with a disquieting mixture of entreaty and astonishment. Below his left temple there was a neat red hole with another larger and more ragged wound beneath it. His arms were limp, with one flung straight back behind his head and the other hanging down from the seat of the car, twisting his neck at an angle that would have been uncomfortable to maintain in life.

  Beyond the body the passenger side window was a crimson mess. The white leather of the car’s interior was splattered with blood and flecked with what I took to be bits of brain and bone. In a few places, black hairs clung to the goo. Black Irish, I remembered with a shudder, my breath suddenly coming in shallow, little gasps. That’s how my mother had always described Hexter, her tone of voice somehow implying that that was the very worst kind. The morning paper, soaked right through, lay near his head.

  I do not know for how long I stood looking at the body, transfixed by the tableau before me. I know that I felt a great, mixed-up, paralyzing surge of emotions. Fear, revulsion, and the pure adrenaline rush of shock. But underneath it all there was a vast well of detached curiosity. Some drama had been played out here to a bloody conclusion. One part of me wanted to know how it was that Bart Hexter had come to be here, shot dead at the end of his own driveway.

  By the time I heard the whine of the police sirens they were practically upon me, with lights flashing and tires squealing—two squad cars, an ambulance, and a plain white sedan. I stood there, frozen, like a deer caught in the headlights. Since I had not been able to see Bart Hexter’s car from the street, I wondered who had called them.

  “Stand away from the car,” barked an amplified voice as the doors of the various vehicles were flung open. Policemen swarmed out, guns drawn. “Get your hands in the air.’" Startled, I looked behind me. It took me a second to register that it was me who was being addressed. One of the officers came up to me at a sprint. It wasn’t until I was made to “assume the position” against the hood of my car and roughly patted down for a weapon that they got around to asking questions.

  “Who are you?” demanded a beefy sergeant, his voice high and loud from tension.

  “Kate Millholland.”

  “What are you doing here?'’

  “I had a meeting with Mr. Hexter,” I stammered.

  “What kind of meeting?”

  “Business. When I got here I saw his car had gone off the road. I went to see if anything was wrong. He’s, he’s, he’s been shot.”

  “Shot dead?”

  “I think so, yes.” My voice, my power of speech was failing me. I was down to words of one syllable and little more than a whisper.

  “What time did you get here?” he barked.

  “I’m not sure, my meeting was at eight. I think I was a few minutes early.” I looked at my watch. It read close to 8:15.

  “I’m going to have to ask you to come with me.”

  I nodded mutely and allowed myself to be escorted to one of the squad cars for questioning. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a red-haired man climb slowly out of the unmarked car and amble toward the Rolls Royce, his casual bearing in marked contrast to the taut energy of the police officer at my side. The patrolman opened the door of the squad, and I slid into the backseat. It was a Caprice that looked too clean and new to be a real police car, not like the battered Chicago blue and whites that bounce on shot shocks through the streets in my neighborhood. Metal mesh separated the front seat from the back, and before I knew it, I was left alone with the squawk of the police radio. I checked the door. It was locked.

  Shock, I decided after a few minutes of quiet contemplation, had turned me into a moron. It was, to say the least, disconcerting to arrive for a meeting at your client’s home only to find him shot. But I hadn’t even mustered the presence of mind to wonder who, if anybody, had killed him. I thought about it for a while, letting the implications sink in. Why did I automatically assume that someone else had pulled the trigger when suicide was much more likely? In futures markets the payoffs can be profanely high, but the downside is equally steep. If he’d killed himself, I reasoned grimly, Bart Hexter wouldn’t have been the first trader who’d found himself sitting on a time bomb of bad trades and eaten a bullet rather than wait for it to go off.

  I waited for close to an hour, growing impatient, angry, and finally bored, locked in the back of the Lake Forest police car. Finally the door was opened by a red-haired man in his late forties wearing a shiny blue suit and a tie that was about an inch too wide. He had a thick build, running to fat, and he tapped his blunt fingers impatiently on the roof of the car while I climbed out.

  “I’m Detective Ruskowski,” he said, not extending his hand to be shaken. He was, I figured, maybe an inch under six feet. We looked at each other eye to eye. There were deep lines in his freckled face, and his ginger hair was liberally sprinkled with gray. On second thought, I decided he must be older than my original estimate; either that, or he’d just lived hard.

  “You Kate Millholland?” r />
  “Yes.”

  “Any relation to the Millhollands that live on Jessup Road?”

  “My parents.”

  I waited for another question, but none came. Neither of us spoke. The quiet lasted long enough to get on my nerves.

  “Are you going to tell me what’s happened?” I asked, trying hard not to sound testy.

  “Why don’t you tell me?” answered the detective evenly.

  “I had a meeting this morning with Bart Hexter. When I pulled in the drive I saw his car down there in the gully. I stopped to see if there was something wrong. I found him behind the wheel of his car. He was wearing his pajamas. It looked like he’d been shot. I’m pretty sure that he was dead.”

  “He was the last time I checked.” replied Ruskowski. He produced a small notebook from his breast pocket and began flipping through it. We just stood there for a while, the silence growing larger and more awkward with every passing second. I felt puzzled and annoyed. I thought policemen were supposed to ask questions. Maybe Ruskowski thought that if he just let things hang long enough I’d be tempted to blurt something out—a confession perhaps.

  “Was it suicide?” I asked, finally ending the game. “Is that what you’d expect it to be?”

  “I expected him to be here, alive, for this meeting,” I shot back.

  “What was your meeting about?”

  “Business.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “Mr. Hexter was a futures trader,” I replied, appalled at the speed with which I had slipped into the past tense when it came to Bart Hexter. “The CFTC—that’s the Commodity Futures Trading Commission—is considering bringing charges against him and his company for exceeding position limits in soybean contracts in March and April of last year.”