Final Option

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