Bear Stearns Cos. (NYSE: BSC) Chief Executive Jimmy Cayne may soon be following his protege and bridge-playing buddy Warren Spector out of the venerable Wall Street bank.

Late Sunday, Cayne fired Spector, whom Bloomberg News says once viewed a potential successor, in a scene that must have been quite dramatic. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal's accounts have Cayne delivering the bad news in a dimly lit office. Spector was apparently shocked, but he shouldn't have been.

The meltdown in the subprime mortgage market has rocked Bear Stearns. Two hedge funds have blown up costing investors more than $1 billion. Standard & Poor's cut its outlook on the company's A+ credit rating to negative on Friday. Bear Stearns' stock is in freefall, plunging more than 30 percent over the past three months. Cayne failed to reassure investors that things were going swimmingly even though he pointed out that the company was "solidly profitable" during June and July.

What's next for Bear Stearns? Well, the Journal argues that Wall Street has been "buzzing with speculation that the firm will need to seek a strategic investor."

If that's the case, it's hard to imagine that any big investor would do that with Cayne still running the show.