Bitter Business (10 page)

“Okay, okay,” I relented.

The whole way back to my office I kept shaking my head. I parked my car in the empty garage. Stephen pulled in beside me. Fred, the night security guard, did a double take while I signed in. In the elevator, to my utter astonishment, Stephen stood behind me and played with my hair.

The reception room was dark, softly lit by a few brass lamps that the janitorial staff allowed to bum all night. I checked the alcove where we had pigeonholes for messages and picked up mine. Out of habit, I flipped the switch that illuminated my name on the night call-board. All the other names were dark.

Stephen trailed me into my office, whistling a complicated passage from Bach. I didn’t turn on the overhead light. I didn’t want to see all the files piled up and waiting for me in the morning. Instead, I switched on the small reading light on my desk. I slipped off the heavy sable of my mother’s coat, feeling it rub agreeably against my bare skin. I laid it carefully over the end of the couch. Stephen shifted some files to make room for himself next to it. Then he stretched his long legs out in front of him and watched me from the darkest comer of the room.

Cheryl had left the files I’d asked for on my chair. I leaned over carefully in the tight dress, throwing the unfamiliar tangle of my hair over my shoulder. The fax from Jack Cavanaugh was on top. I scanned it quickly. While he acknowledged that Lydia was attending our meeting in the hopes of beginning negotiations for the sale of her shares, he announced that no other family members would attend in order that I might have a better chance of gaining his daughter’s confidence and dissuading her from selling. I groaned.

I flipped through the folders that Cheryl had pulled for me, checking to make sure that I had everything I would need in the morning. As I clipped Jack’s fax onto one of the files, I felt Stephen’s eyes on me like a cat watching a careless bird.

“Is that all you need?” he asked softly. I was surprised, when I turned, to find him standing over me.

He took my hands and pulled me to him in one long, smooth motion. Sometimes, when he is close, the sheer size of him overwhelms me. I am tall enough that I spend my days looking most men in the eye. With Stephen, even when I stand on tiptoe he must bend himself to me.

As I heard the quiet growl of the zipper of my dress being lowered inch by inch, I cast a cautious glance toward the door. The hallway was dark. We were alone in the churchlike confines of Callahan Ross and Stephen had made a bed for us of Russian sable on my office floor.

I did not expect Lydia to come to our nine o’clock meeting alone and she did not disappoint me. A phalanx of lawyers preceded her into the conference room. Her husband was at her side.

Arthur Wallace was a small man, slim and dark, with a manicured black beard and the narrow waist and slim hips of a dancer. It was easy to see why Jack Cavanaugh must have hated him on sight. My own impression was that he was an oily little man, obviously on the make, whose birdlike eyes seemed to display an almost infinite capacity for calculation.

The resemblance between Lydia and Peaches was startling. There was the same blond hair, swept straight back from the face, the same carefully applied makeup, the same kind of expensive designer suit I was confident that Peaches would have chosen for the occasion. But while Jack’s wife radiated warmth and telegenic charm, unhappiness was telegraphed by Lydia’s every gesture. Her face was set in a discontented frown calcified by habit.

As I introduced myself her eyes darted around the room, as if looking for someone else, and the hand she gave to be shaken was stiff with rings.

“Where’s Babbage?” she demanded as she claimed the seat at the head of the table. “I told Daddy specifically that I wanted to meet with the company’s head lawyer and not be pushed off on some young flunky. No offense.”

“Why ever would I be offended at being called a flunky?” I inquired coldly. For years people had been bowing and scraping before Lydia, giving her exactly what she wanted. So far it didn’t seem to be doing anybody any good. I decided on a different approach. “The first time I went to court after I graduated from law school, the judge looked right at me and asked where the lawyer was. Women lawyers learn early not to take offense. To answer your question, Daniel Babbage is dying of cancer. I am replacing him as corporate counsel.”

Lydia looked at me and chewed her gum. If I’d offended her, she didn’t show it, and if I had, I didn’t care. I’d been up since five o’clock in the morning reading the Superior Plating file and I was in no mood to take shit from anybody, especially anybody named Cavanaugh.

“Well, he couldn’t have picked a worse time to be sick,” she said finally. “It would have been easier to deal with someone who knows our family.”

“Your family is wondering why you’ve chosen to sell your shares,” I cut in.

“It’s a purely business decision,” replied Lydia, her tone of voice implying the exact opposite.

“I see.” My internal bullshit meter was already edging toward the red zone. “Would you mind being more specific? What exactly are your concerns with the way in which the company is being managed?”

“If you can call what’s going on at Superior Plating management.” Lydia sniffed. From the looks she was getting from her lawyers I could tell that she’d been coached not to get into a discussion of her motives. But Lydia, I guessed, had never been one to take direction. Besides, it was obvious that she couldn’t resist an audience.

“My father runs the company like he runs the family. It’s all just an extension of his own ego. He reaches into the company’s coffers like he’s putting his hand into his own pocket. Who do you think pays for his plane? His horses? His houses? Now that he’s married that bimbo, he’s been looting the company to keep her in style. Who do you think’s paying for all those shopping trips to New York? It’s disgusting.”

“Have you discussed this with the other board members?”

“What do you mean?”

“Have you talked this over with your brothers and sister?”

“Why? I know exactly what they’ll say. This family has always been divided. There’s an inside group and an outside group. Philip and Dagny are the insiders because they go to the office every day and suck up to my dad. Eugene and I are left out in the cold. The three of them pay themselves whatever they feel like. Whatever’s left over they pay out in dividends like throwing scraps to a dog. Well, I for one am fed up.”

“I’ve read through the minutes of the board meetings for the last five years,” I reported. “I saw no mention of you ever having raised any of these concerns. I’m interested in why you seem to have suddenly developed such strong feelings about the manner in which the company has been run.”

“That’s immaterial,” interjected one of Lydia’s lawyers, a man named Cliff Schaeffer, who was married to a woman I went to law school with. “We came here to discuss the terms of a possible buyout—”

“I told you. It would be pointless to even try and discuss it with Daddy on the board,” Lydia continued, completely ignoring him. “He just pats me on the head and tells me to go out and play. Daddy’s behavior is all very preconscious. He has difficulty dealing with the conflict between his image of me as an idealized child and the reality of my being a grown woman capable of making decisions on her own. He’s blocked because he doesn’t want to face his own fears about aging and declining sexual potency. It’s obvious from his decision to marry Peaches. If he’s not willing to listen to his inner child, it’s futile to expect that he’ll be able to listen to his actual child.”

“You still haven’t told me why you want to sell your shares,” I prodded.

“I have a new therapist who has been helping me fight back against my father’s domination for the first time in my life. Finally I’m beginning to understand the systematic financial oppression that men like my father perpetrate. She’s made me realize the importance of severing the connection between financial and emotional control so that I can deal with each of them separately.”

I stifled a giggle, but Lydia didn’t seem to notice. She just droned on about her inner child in a tone of great gravity. I looked at the other people in the room. Arthur Wallace watched his wife with the same rapt attention made famous by Nancy Reagan whenever she appeared at her husband’s side. In the meantime Lydia’s attorneys shifted restlessly in their seats.

As she spewed out a steady stream of psychobabble about how her shares in Superior Plating represented the bonds of emotional slavery to her father, I began to make a mental list of other attorneys at the firm whom I might be able to convince to take on the company’s file. Any affection I might feel for Daniel Babbage aside, it should have been clear to everyone in that room that Lydia Cavanaugh Wallace was a very disturbed woman. This was clearly turning into the kind of case I’d gone into corporate work specifically to avoid—messy, personal, and offering no satisfactory conclusions.

I looked across the conference table at Lydia, still engrossed in her rambling monologue about her inner self. Cecilia Dobson’s death was an omen, I decided. One that I was not about to ignore.

8

Once Lydia had run through her reasons for feeling oppressed, she signaled the end of the meeting and swept out of the room. Cliff Schaeffer, her lead lawyer, hung back for a quiet word with me. Besides having been at school with his wife, I’d been across the table from him on a couple of deals. In general I’d found him a snarling pit bull of an advocate, not to mention something of a jerk.

“Since when did you start representing mental cases?” I asked with more truth than tact.

“The shares belong to her,” he replied. “She has the right to sell them if she wants.”

“I’m not disputing that. I’m just curious about how you bill her—is it only for a forty-five-minute hour?”

“What’s your point?”

“My point is, how can you know whether she’s even really going to sell? She’s sat on the board of Superior Plating for the last seven years. She’s drawn a salary from them for the last fourteen and not once has she voiced a single concern about her shares or how the company is being run. Don’t you think that if she’s capable of making a snap decision to sell her shares, she’s just as likely to change her mind and decide to keep them? I understand that you’re going to get paid either way, but how can you expect me to negotiate in good faith with a nutcase?”

“
I’m
not a nutcase,” Lydia’s attorney protested, “and neither is Mark Hoffenberg and the bankers at First Chicago. Now that I think of it, Lydia’s husband Arthur’s no slouch either. I’ll grant you that my client is a little... well, shall we say, emotional. But that doesn’t mean she’s not capable of making a good business decision.”

“You mean, with you pushing and Hoffenberg pulling?”

“Let me give you a little bit of advice, Kate. If you don’t want to see a big chunk of your client’s stock being sold to an outsider, I’d get busy and come back with a respectable offer—and pronto.”

Once I make up my mind about something, I stick to it, and since I had definitely decided to end my brief tenure as counsel for Superior Plating and Specialty Chemicals I wasted no time in going to Daniel Babbage’s office to tell him of my decision. I didn’t intend to go into my feelings about the Cavanaughs but would merely explain that my caseload was too heavy for me to give the file the attention and the hours that it was obviously going to require. I wanted, in all fairness, to tell him immediately, before events moved ahead and I billed any more hours to the file.

But when I arrived at Daniel’s office, I found it empty. I went in search of Madeline, his secretary, and found her hunched over her desk weeping over a stack of unopened mail. Babbage, she explained in a halting whisper, had been rushed to the emergency room in the middle of the night. She wrote down the number of his room at Billings Hospital and I trudged back to my office filled with a sense of resignation mingled with dread. For some reason, instead of making it easier, news of Daniel’s illness made bowing out seem cowardly and impossible. From that point on there was no turning back.

Dagny Cavanaugh came to the door of her lovingly restored brownstone dressed in a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. She looked about sixteen. After learning of Daniel’s relapse, I’d called her and asked for an urgent meeting and she’d agreed to see me that evening provided that I’d be willing to come to her house. She had, she explained, another commitment, but she thought there would still be time for us to talk. Besides, she’d added cryptically, there was a good chance I’d find it interesting.

“Welcome to the Mount McKinley Expedition planning meeting,” she said with a smile as she swung the heavy oak door wide. From somewhere inside the house I heard the faint tinkle of laughter. “We’re just finishing up and then we’ll have dinner. I hope you haven’t eaten yet. Here, let me take your coat. Why don’t you take your shoes off, too? We’re very casual in this house.”

“I didn’t realize that you live right across the street from your father,” I exclaimed, handing her my coat.

“Oh, it’s even worse than that.” Dagny laughed. “It’s hard to see in the dark, but Philip and his wife, Sally, live in the brick house next door to Dad and Lydia lives right across the street. Eugene’s house is next to Dad’s on the other side. My grandfather may not have known how to run a company, but he knew a bargain when he saw one.