Last Chance for Glory by Stephen Solomita Read Free Book Online Page B

field work, so I got my license. I’m a full-fledged private eye. Or, I will be in about six hours. Right now, I’m on suspension. What happened was I set up an illegal surveillance and almost got caught. The case against me was pretty weak, but I didn’t have the heart to take a chance at trial, so what I did was plead nolo contendere before the board and accept a year’s unpaid vacation. Today’s my last day off.”

TWO
    I T WAS WAY TOO early, just a little before six, but Marty Blake was already in the bathroom, soaping his dark, heavy beard. Though he’d been hoping against hope for another hour and a half’s sleep, he hadn’t even bothered to set the clock. What was the point? On an ordinary day, he’d already be cruising Manhattan, timing the lights as he methodically worked the avenues, from Ninety-sixth Street down to Houston Street. Looking for the last of the night people, the first of the office workers.
    That nightmare was now officially over (though the memory lingered on). He’d done his time, served his sentence; he was going home. Maybe.
    When he’d called Joanna Bardo, he’d expected a lot more enthusiasm. In fact, he’d expected a hero’s welcome, because he was a hero. Even during the worst of it, when the prosecutors were talking fifteen years, when his own lawyer wouldn’t meet his eyes, when the prosecutors were offering to let him walk away with his license if he gave up Joanna Bardo, he’d stood fast. He’d taken the heat like a good soldier.
    The case had been simple enough. A small brokerage firm, Hattmann Brothers, suspected one of their executives, an accountant named Porcek, of insider trading. Namely, Porcek was feeding information on new issues to his brother-in-law who was passing it on to a cousin who was buying shares in his wife’s name. The firm wanted to dump the accountant before the feds caught on, but they needed more than a paper trail. They needed enough hard evidence to convince Porcek to leave without a fuss. Or a scandal.
    Hattmann Brothers had given the job to Joanna Bardo who’d given it to Marty Blake, her number-one investigator. Especially when it came to black-bag operations.
    “They don’t want to know what we’re going to do, Marty,” she’d said matter-of-factly. “They just want it done.”
    He’d taken the hint, entered Porcek’s apartment while he was at work, bugged the rooms, and tapped the phones. It wasn’t supposed to be a big deal. Despite the high-tech image cultivated by modern private investigators, the business was still as corrupt as it had been when private investigation meant catching errant spouses with their pants down. Clients expected results, but they weren’t prepared to pay for six months of by-the-book investigation. If you wouldn’t cut through the red tape, your competition would. It was that simple.
    By the time Blake had realized that Porcek’s extra-legal pursuits involved more than insider trading, the IRS had busted into Porcek’s apartment, seized two million dollars in counterfeit currency, and discovered the various taps and bugs. The feds had kept the bogus fifties, but passed on the hardware to the New York State Attorney General. The AG had gone to Hattmann Brother’s who’d implicated Manhattan Executive and Joanna Bardo. Joanna (with no real choice in the matter) had named Marty Blake.
    In the end, it was the AG who’d blinked. Despite their blustering, the prosecutors hadn’t had enough to go to trial. They’d offered Blake a dismissal of the criminal charges in exchange for a year’s unpaid vacation. He’d taken it because he didn’t have the courage to put a decade of his life in the hands of a jury.
    Marty Blake rinsed off the last of the shaving cream, toweled dry, then took a moment to appraise the face in the mirror. He would have preferred something a little more dignified. Something just a bit aristocratic. The clients with the big bucks were mostly corporations, now, and they expected