Timothy's Game by Lawrence Sanders Read Free Book Online Page A

hold that pose. Don’t relax. Make yourself tight and hard.”
    She is tight and hard. Her body has a rude grace, heavy through shoulders and hips. Not much waist. The thighs are pillars tapering to unexpectedly slender ankles. A muscled woman. Her skin is satin.
    “When’s Paul coming back?” she asks.
    Her brother sighs. “I told you. He’ll ring before he comes up. Don’t get so antsy.”
    He continues sketching, using a soft carpenter’s pencil on a pad of grainy paper. He works swiftly, limning her body with quick slashes, flipping pages, trying to catch her solidity, the aggressiveness of her flesh. He was right: She does loom.
    After a while she forgets that she’s exhibiting herself in front of her brother and thinks about why she’s there. Because she wants something from him—or rather from his consenting adult, Paul Ramsey.
    That visit from the SEC investigator spooked her. The guy wanted to know how come she had sprung for 10,000 shares of Wee Tot Fashions, Inc. Had she heard something? Did someone tell her something? Did she know anyone at Wee Tot? At Pistol & Burns? Why, suddenly, did she buy such a big block of that particular equity?
    Without pause, she scammed the guy silly. She was proud of that. She wanted to get out of garbage hauling, she told him, and open a store that sold kids’ clothes. She bought Wee Tot to get their annual reports so she could learn more about the business. Besides, she owned a dozen other stocks. She was in the market for kicks.
    He departed, apparently satisfied, and Sally went back to her own office. She was sweating. What if Jeremy Bigelow subpoenas Steiner’s customer list and discovers they’re collecting trash from Bechtold, who does confidential printing for Pistol & Burns? What if he comes poking around, asking questions of Ed Fogleman, Terry Mulloy, Leroy Hamilton, and learns she’s been putting aside barrels of Bechtold waste? Curtains!
    She decides she handled her Big Chance stupidly. Too many people involved, too many potential witnesses. And she purchased the stock in her own name. Idiotic! And she bought 10K shares. That would be a trip wire to alert anyone investigating the possibility of insider trading.
    Eddie’s phone rings. Three times. Then stops.
    “That’s Paul,” he says. “He’ll be up in about ten minutes. You can get dressed now. I got some good stuff. But I’ll need a couple more sessions.”
    “Sure,” she says. “Anytime.”
    To her surprise, she finds she’s no longer self-conscious, and when Eddie helps her hook up her bra in back, she thinks it’s a nice, brotherly thing for him to do. By the time Paul Ramsey shows up, Sally is dressed and sipping a glass of their lousy chianti.
    Paul is a tall blond with a sweet smile and more teeth than he really needs. He’s got a laid-back manner, and Eddie says that when the world blows up, Paul is going to be the one who murmurs, “Oh, yeah? Cool.”
    Sally has already decided what she wants to do. She’s going to continue picking through Bechtold Printing trash. But if she finds another lead on a takeover, merger, or buyout, she can’t invest in her own name, or in the name of anyone else connected with Steiner Waste Control. Too risky. And the stock purchase has got to be less than 10,000 shares.
    “Paul,” she says, “I got a proposition for you.”
    “Sorry,” he says with his seraphic grin, “my evenings are occupied.”
    She tells him what she wants. She’ll give him the name of a stockbroker. He’s to open an account by purchasing shares of AT&T. She’ll give him the money. After that, he’ll buy and sell on her instructions.
    “I’ll pay all the losses,” she says. “You get five percent of the profits. How about it?”
    The two men look at each other.
    “Go for it, Paul,” Eddie Steiner advises. “My little sister is a financial genius.”
    “Okay,” Paul Ramsey says, shrugging. “Why not?”
    Sally has come prepared. She hands over a manila envelope