Final Option

successful.”
    “Maybe someone was jealous? Maybe someone was angry that Bart had made money at his expense?“
    “Lots of traders get jealous. Lots more get angry. There’s a fistfight a day down there, probably more. But the beauty of this business is that there’s always another day’s trading. All you have to do is hang in there and you’ll have a chance to do to the other guy what he just did to you. I just can’t see this being a trading thing. This has to be something personal.”
    “The police asked me whether Bart was happily married. Do you think he was?”
    “Marriage doesn’t make you happy,” replied Loretta, turning away from the screen for an instant as she spoke. “I should know that better than anybody. But I do know that there were three things that Bart loved: risk, money, and Pamela. I think of the three, Pamela was the thing he was most afraid of losing. I know that sounds strange, coming from me,” she turned back to her computer. “It’s no secret that Bart and I had a thing once. It didn’t last very long. Mostly because there was no chance that he’d leave his wife. Bart was too used to her; she was like a habit to him. He didn’t have to pretend- with Pamela. He could be his petty, evil-tempered self. I know for a fact that Bart was terrified of losing her. It took me awhile to figure it all out, but once I did I broke it off.”
    “Why was he afraid of losing Pamela?” I inquired, genuinely perplexed.
    “Because she had more money than he did.”
    “But he had plenty of his own money. He didn’t need his wife’s.”
    “But his money was different, wasn’t it? With his kind of money he could buy a Rolls Royce and build a big house. But it takes Pamela’s kind of money to get into all those snotty clubs and get invited to all those parties he loved to hate. He used to say that Pamela’s friends’ horses were better-looking and twice as smart as their owners. He used to say that if you put any one of the pantywaists he played golf with into the trading pits with a wad of their own money they’d wet their pants. He loved feeling superior to them, but he also knew that if it wasn’t for Pamela, they’d never even let him in the front door. That’s not to say he was afraid to have Pamela mad at him, but he was always careful that she didn’t get too mad, if you get what I’m saying.”
    “You said he loved risk. Do you think he could be in any kind of big-time gambling trouble?”
    “Bart wasn’t like his brother Billy. They both loved to gamble, but unlike Billy, Bart never bet more than he could stand to lose. He was too calculating to get into trouble.”
    “Everyone I talk to says the same thing. Hexter made his share of enemies, but nothing out of the ordinary, nobody who’d be angry enough to kill him.”
    “Except that we’re all wrong,” said Loretta, frowning at the screen.
    “Wrong how?”
    “Well obviously because someone did kill him,” she answered distractedly. I sat and watched her while she punched in more numbers and stared at the computer display with a troubled look. Finally she turned to me.
    “I can’t understand it,” she said. “Rita’s right. All the files have been erased and the backups too. It’s all just gone.”
    “Do you think Bart might have erased the files himself?” I asked, dismayed.
    “No. Bart didn’t know enough to even switch on his computer. Besides, according to this, the files were erased Monday morning at 8:46. Bart was already dead.”
     
    It had taken some bullying—both on my part and Barton Jr’s.—to convince Tim to extract the original trading tickets I needed from the bowels of basement storage. I still couldn’t decide whether Tim was dumb, lazy, or just paralyzed into immobility by his uncle’s death, but after a while I didn’t care. He had wasted a lot of time making lame excuses for why it would be hard to find the records that I’d asked for, and said that they wouldn’t be any use to me anyway. I suspected that he just didn’t want to be bothered with digging them up. It wasn’t until I’d made it very clear that I wouldn’t leave without getting what I’d come for that he finally dragged himself into storage for them, but not until after I’d concluded that if Tim Hexter were my assistant, I’d spend a fair amount of time yelling at him, too. But then, unlike Bart, I’d never have someone as dim as Tim working for me.
    Before I finished at the Board I also made a