I had started working at Prentice, Walters, & Reis in early July, but I still stopped for at least a moment in front of the door to my office on the 43rd floor of the new, gleaming 50-story skyscraper on Lexington near 54th. There was my name: Joel Gordon, Associate Counsel.
Joel Gordon, Associate CounselIn mid-June, I had married Aliya, two weeks after graduating from law school and two more weeks before starting at PWR in their Securities Division. I had the princely annual salary of $24,100. We lived 40 blocks south in Stuyvesant Town and could easily afford the $190/monthly rent and the tuition for Aliya’s graduate clinical psychology program at NYU.
“Mr. Gordon?” I heard a voice behind me.
I turned and saw a short woman with perfectly coiffed silver hair and nodded. She wore a quarter-sleeve collarless red dress with vertical stitching that came down below her knee. I took note of low heeled, shiny black shoes with a buckle that matched the color of the dress.
She moved toward me. “My name is Mrs. Ann Kimberly, and I am Mr. Reis’ executive secretary.”
She glanced at her delicate watch on her left wrist. “It is now 8:55, and he would like to see you in his office right away. Mayor Beame is coming at 9:30.”
“Mr. Reis,” I stammered. You mean Mr. Reis of …”
“Yes, of Prentice, Walters, & Reis, your boss. Please follow me to his office on the 49th floor.”
She was already a step ahead of me heading to the elevators. I caught up and asked: “Would you know why he wants to see me?”
Only after pressing the up button, did she turn and face me. “Why, I couldn’t possibly know that, now could I?”
Exiting on the 49th floor, I followed Mrs. Kimberly down a softly lit mahogany-paneled corridor. Portraits of the firm’s founders and senior partners, as well as multiple paintings of ships in New York harbors and rustic scenes including one of hounds and horses on a fox chase, lined the walls.
We stopped before the open double-doors of an anteroom. A young woman who did not look up sat at a small corner desk typing on an IBM Selectric.
“Please wait here,” Mrs. Kimberly said as she made her way to her desk. She pressed a button on the telephone and, after a moment, announced: “Mr. Gordon is with me.” And then, “Yes I will.”
She motioned me toward a mahogany door with JOHN REIS, MANAGING PARTNER etched into a brass plaque in its center. She opened it for me to enter and then closed it behind me.
JOHN REIS, MANAGING PARTNERReis’ office was easily four times larger than mine, with the same dark wood that paneled the corridor. There were no fluorescent lights overhead, as in my office, but rather a half dozen desk lamps that gave adequate lighting graced Reis’ expansive desk and a conference table that could seat eight. One wall was all glass with a view of the East River. Another wall featured personal photos, scenes of weddings, christenings, graduations, ski trips, and one large picture of what I took to be a much younger Reis in an army uniform. Bookcases filled with law tomes covered other wall areas. A closed door to the right had to be a private bathroom.
Reis rose to greet me. He was well over six feet with a slight stoop and a broad, Nordic face. I pegged him to be in his late sixties. He loomed over me as he reached out a large hand and shook mine vigorously.
“Nice to meet you, Gordon. You’re working securities, and I hear good things about you from your mentor.” That would be Larry Seidman. He’d been teaching me the ropes at PWR. “Let me get to the point, since our good mayor is about to arrive.”
Reis motioned me to sit down opposite him at the conference table. I was nervous, but his compliment gave me some ease.
“You have been working on the Golden Energy account out of Denver and specifically with its President, Samuel Gold, to get his company an OTC listing?”
“Yes,” I acknowledged.
“Well Mr. Gold likes your work. It seems you mentioned to him that while you were in law school, you helped your grandfather—a private detective in Brooklyn, is it?—solve a few cases, including the murder of a butcher in Boro Park and the disappearance of a Hasidic child in Williamsburg.”
I blushed. A few weeks ago, Sam Gold and I had had finished up a document filing. Gold said he always liked to get to know his lawyers better and invited me to dinner. Since he was an orthodox Jew who kept kosher, we met at Fine & Schapiro’s on the upper West Side. As a new associate working 18-hour days, naturally I agreed. Gold insisted that we don’t discuss business, and after a couple of glasses of wine, I gave him a rundown of my life, including my work with my grandfather, Frank Wolf, on the Joe Stein murder and Yosele Rosenstock disappearance.
“Yes sir,” I said to Reis apprehensively. “I did tell Mr. Gold about those cases.”
Reis gave me an odd smile. “Well, Gold has made an interesting request. Never came across anything like it. Do you remember around three years ago reading about the murder of a sixteen-year-old boy in the dormitory of a Jewish school—a ‘yeshiva,’ I believe you call it—up in Washington Heights?”
I told Reis that I had a vague memory of it.
“That boy was Ori Gold, Sam’s son. The murder remains unsolved. Now here’s the thing. Sam Gold wants to hire not only your granddad to look into the case, but he also wants to pay for your time according to PWR rates for you to assist him. I’ve got the ball rolling to set up a separate PWR account billed directly to Sam Gold and not to Gold Energy for your time including incidentals. Granddad, of course, would bill separately. So, Gordon, can you see to it?”