Timothy's Game by Lawrence Sanders Read Free Book Online

Terry leans out the window.
    “Sally baby,” he says, grinning. “You’ve finally decided you can’t resist my green Irish joint.”
    “Up yours, moron,” she says. “Listen, I’m revising schedules and pulling you two bums off that chemical plant on Twenty-fourth Street and giving you Bechtold Printing on Tenth Avenue.”
    “God bless the woman who birthed you,” Leroy Hamilton says. “That chemical place smells something fierce. Gets in your hair, your clothes; you can almost taste that stink.”
    “Yeah,” Sally says, “well, now you’ve got Bechtold. A nice clean job. Practically all paper. Pickups on Tuesday and Thursday. When you get the stuff, keep it in separate barrels and leave them in the storeroom. Ed Fogleman will show you where.”
    “What the hell for?” Mulloy asks.
    “You know what curiosity did to the cat, don’t you?”
    “I don’t know from cats,” he says. “All I know is pussy.”
    She gives him the finger and stalks away, followed by their whistles.
    On Thursday night, she complains to her father and Judy Bering about having to work late on a couple of workmen’s compensation cases. It’s almost seven o’clock before they leave, and she sees Ed Fogleman drag himself home. Then the dump is almost deserted; only the night watchman is in his hut at the locked gate, flipping through his dog-eared copies of Penthouse.
    She goes out to the storeroom, puts on the light, starts digging through the barrels of scrap paper from Bechtold. It’s almost all six-color coated stock. Someone is running a slick annual report, and the discarded sheets are preliminary press proofs with colors out of register and black type too heavy or too faint.
    That’s not what she’s looking for. She spends more time with black-on-white proof sheets: documents, proxy statements, prospectuses. Nothing of any interest. She gives up and drives home. The next morning she tells Fogleman to empty the barrels and bale everything.
    She goes through the same routine on the following Tuesday evening with similar results. She’s beginning to think her wild idea, her Big Chance, is a dud. But on the next Thursday night she finds some interesting proof sheets on Pistol & Burns letterheads. She scans them hastily. They look like a plan for a leveraged buyout of Wee Tot Fashions, Inc. She gathers up all the pages she can find that mention Wee Tot, crams them in her leather portfolio, and drives home to Smithtown, singing along with Linda Ronstadt on her stereo deck.
    She stops up to visit with her mother for a while. Then when Becky and Martha settle down for an evening of TV, Sally rushes downstairs to the den. She’s too excited to eat, but pours herself a Perrier before she goes over the Pistol & Burns documents scavenged from Bechtold’s scrap. She reads them three times because some of the type is blurred, and she has to use a magnifying glass to make out certain words and phrases.
    Then she does swift computations on her pocket calculator. The next morning she calls her stockbroker and sells some of the dogs in the Steiner portfolio, taking a tax loss. But she accumulates enough funds to buy 10,000 shares of Wee Tot Fashions at a total cost of about $48,000, including commission. Have a hunch, bet a bunch.
    A week later, after following the market anxiously, she sells out her Wee Tot stake for about $112,000, and is so elated and unbelieving that she doesn’t know whether to weep or laugh.
    And a week after that, she’s having a coffee with Judy Bering in the outer office when a tall, thin guy, nicely dressed, walks in and smiles at the two women.
    “I’m looking for Sally Steiner,” he says.
    “That’s me,” Sally says. “Who are you?”
    He hands her a card. “Jeremy Bigelow,” he says. “Securities and Exchange Commission.”
    She’s sitting naked on a three-legged kitchen stool, hunching forward.
    “I think I’m getting splinters in my ass,” she says.
    “Shut up,” Eddie says, “and try to