Bitter Business (2 page)

“Eugene’s the only other son,” Daniel replied, choosing to ignore my sarcasm. “But he’s not in the running.”

“Why not?”

“He’s just not front-office material,” Daniel answered a shade too quickly.

“So who does that leave us with? Anybody else in the picture?”

“Lydia.” Babbage sighed. “She was Jack and Eleanor’s surprise package—back then we called them bonus babies. Eleanor died three days after she was born.”

“So Philip’s the oldest and Lydia’s the baby of the family,” I said, trying to keep them straight in my mind.

“She’s more of an
enfant terrible.
In my line of work you can always tell which kid had the bad luck to grow up after the company’s cash flow turned positive. Lydia’s thirty-three going on thirteen. She’s had four kids, three husbands, and it’s a safe bet she spends all her money on shrinks.”

“Does she work for the company?”

“She draws a salary, but believe me, they pay Lydia to shut up, not show up.”

I looked over the notes I’d made.

“Let me see if I’ve got this straight. Jack Cavanaugh is the CEO of a large and highly profitable plating and specialty chemical company. His oldest son, Philip, has the title of company president, but no real authority. His sister Dagny has the brains to be CEO, but no balls, while brother Eugene has balls, but no brains. In the meantime baby Lydia gets herself psychoanalyzed and presumably makes trouble. Jack, who is pushing seventy, plans on living forever, while Philip, I presume, can’t wait to give him the shove.”

“Correct on all counts,” replied Babbage.

“Jesus, Daniel!” I exclaimed. “Is this a corporate file you’re handing me or a soap-opera plot?”

“It gets worse. Read this. Jack received it by messenger at his home first thing this morning.” He handed me a faxed copy of a single sheet of letterhead stationery. I scanned it quickly. It was from Lydia’s attorneys, announcing her decision to sell her shares of Superior Plating and Specialty Chemical stock.

“I bet this made Jack’s day,” I observed. “How many shares does she own?”

“Twelve percent of the company. Jack owns fifty-two percent and the rest is divided equally among the four adult children.”

“Can I see a copy of the buyback agreement?” I asked. Family-owned companies invariably had some sort of agreement that said that if one family member wanted to sell their shares, the rest of the family got first dibs on the stock.

“Jack had me draw one up when Lydia turned twenty-one and got control of her shares.”

“Good, then it should be straightforward. We’ll bring in the investment bankers to do a valuation. Then we’ll start haggling over the share price.”

“Unfortunately, with Lydia, nothing is straightforward.”

“What do you mean?”

“We prepared a buyback agreement, but Lydia refused to sign it.”

“You’re kidding!” I exclaimed. “Why wouldn’t she sign?”

“Because Lydia is a little girl in a woman’s body,” Daniel Babbage answered with surprising venom. “A spoiled, wealthy little girl who likes trouble the way that a vampire likes blood.”

It was spring in Chicago, but you wouldn’t have known it. The sky was the color of cold slate and it seemed to bleed into the drab hues of the concrete until the entire city seemed washed in muted shades of gray. It was snowing again and the March wind, blowing in unpredictable gusts, flung wet flakes into the faces of the miserable lunchtime crowds.

Huddled in the back of a cab on my way to meet Jack Cavanaugh, I couldn’t help thinking about Daniel Babbage. At the office we all worked hard to maintain the fiction that his illness was a temporary inconvenience, tiresome but best ignored. But I knew that pancreatic cancer is painful, difficult to treat, and invariably fatal. Daniel, no weakling when it came to facing facts, undoubtedly knew it, too.

Up until now I’d done very little work for Babbage, but that didn’t prevent me from liking him enormously. Daniel’s uncanny ability to put people at ease had served him well over the years and I for one was not immune to his avuncular charm. But more importantly, Daniel was one of the few people at the firm who seemed completely unimpressed by my family. For that alone I would be undyingly grateful.

There’s no getting around the fact that the Millhollands are famous in this town. There is even a statue of my great-great-grandfather, Theodore Millholland, in the park on East Lake Shore Drive across the street from the Mayfair Regent Hotel. Every morning before the guests get up, the doorman goes over and chases off the homeless men who sleep at his marble feet.

Theodore’s father made his money running guns and selling opium to the Chinese, but nobody built him any statues for it. Theodore proved his genius by giving some of that money away, thereby securing for himself and all the Millhollands to follow a level of respectability and influence that is beyond price.

Unfortunately, from my point of view, it is also beyond escape. The Art Institute, the Lyric Opera,

Pres.-St. Luke’s Hospital, the Chicago Symphony, the University of Chicago—go into any temple of healing, education, or culture in the Windy City and you’re sure to find the name Millholland carved somewhere into the hard, gray stone. It doesn’t help that my parents enthusiastically embrace their role as scions of philanthropy or that my mother, Astrid, and her coven of well-bred friends rule north-shore society with a grip so absolute that they are referred to as “the syndicate” only partially in jest.

It’s no secret that I went to law school in order to escape them and the gauntlet of parties and shopping that in my parents’ world fills the gap between debutante and bride. But once I got there, I fell in love with the elegant rationalism of the law. By the end of my first year I’d concluded that I’d rather work hard at something I’m good at than to blindly do what was expected of me just because I was Astrid Millholland’s daughter. Daniel, with his long experience of dynastic families and difficult children, seemed to understand completely.

No matter what I do, there will always be people who will not be able to look at me without seeing my entire family tree spread out behind me. There will always be rumblings that my success is not really my own—that it’s been bought and paid for with generations of Millholland money. Over the last few years, as I’ve grown more sure of myself and my talents as an attorney, I’ve become less hysterical about that stuff. Recently I’d been too busy to give it much thought at all. I was taking on new clients and new cases at a frightening rate. I’d begun to feel like a juggler who suddenly finds herself in the spotlight with one too many chain saws in the air. And that was before Daniel Babbage and his Cavanaughs.

I was flattered that Daniel had asked me to take over the Superior Plating file. But I confess that I was puzzled, too. I am a deal lawyer, a specialist. Someone you call in to orchestrate a complex transaction or craft the terms of a tricky acquisition. My strengths are my technical knowledge of securities law and my tenacity as a negotiator. I’m the person you call in when you need your lawyer to play hardball with their lawyer, not when you need your client’s hand held.

On my way to my first meeting with Jack Cavanaugh, as the bitter wind tossed snowflakes like confetti into the air, I realized that try as I might, I could not think of one good reason why Daniel Babbage would choose me to take over the Superior Plating and Specialty Chemicals file.

2

Jack Cavanaugh’s house was one of those mansions that are all the more remarkable for being in the center of the city. On the corner of Schiller and Astor, just a few blocks from the thrumming commerce of Michigan Avenue, it was a tutn-of-the-century brick pile with a deep porch, tall windows, and massive pillars of red granite that had been polished to the color of dark blood.

I paid the cabdriver, climbed the wide stone steps, and rang the bell. From deep inside the house I heard the high-pitched barking of a small dog. The yapping grew louder and more hysterical until the door was finally opened by a very pretty woman, not much older than me. She had classic features, long blond hair swept straight back from a high forehead, and skin that had no pores that anyone had ever noticed. She wore a red-and-black suit that I recognized from Escada’s spring line. Whenever she moved there was the faint jingle of expensive jewelry.

“You must be Kate Millholland,” she practically purred, stooping to pick up the silly powder puff of a dog in time to prevent it from sinking its teeth into my ankle. “I’m Peaches,” she said, holding the shih tzu up next to her face. “I’m Jack’s wife.”

Daniel hadn’t said anything about a current Mrs. Cavanaugh and I certainly hadn’t anticipated the elegant confection before me. But even in the half-light of the entryway, I realized that I’d seen her somewhere before. It took me a couple of seconds to figure it out. Once I did, I felt stupid. After all, during my first year at Callahan Ross, I’d driven past a sixty-foot billboard of her face every night on my way home from work. She had been Peaches Parkenhurst back then, the anchor of the six o’clock news.

“Let me take your coat,” she offered. “I’m so glad you’re here. Ever since Jack got that hateful letter from Lydia, he’s been in an absolute state—just storming around the house. I’m just thankful that he wasn’t planning on going into the office today. He and Philip are flying to Dallas to visit a customer. It’s a good thing, too. In the mood Jack’s in there’s no telling what he might do. I almost feel sorry for Philip.” Her voice was wonderful, silky and melodious with a subtle undercurrent of the South. She played with it as she spoke, pitching it at different levels to keep it interesting. “But I don’t know what I must be thinking, chattering away like this,” she declared as if the thought had suddenly occurred to her. “We don’t want to keep Jack waiting.”

I followed in the wake of her expensive perfume. She led me through the heart of the house into a high-ceilinged room that was decorated like a department-store version of a drawing room at Versailles.

Jack Cavanaugh was forty years older than his wife and a full head shorter. A muscular bulldog of a man, his gray hair was brushed straight back from his face. He seemed every bit as tough as I remembered, wearing his dark suit like a mantle and carrying himself with the quiet authority of a man who knows that other men fear him. He did not smile, but shook my hand with a fierce grip while his black eyes fixed on me with the disconcerting intensity of a shark circling its dinner.

“What can I get you to drink, Kate?” he asked once Peaches had withdrawn, leaving us to perch on her bandy-legged furniture and discuss business. His voice was gruff, flat, and stripped of pretense.

“I’ll have a Diet Coke if you have one,” I replied. “If not, water is fine.”

Jack Cavanaugh got up, crossed the room to an ornately carved armoire, which, when opened, revealed a fully stocked bar. He took two glasses down from the shelf, dropped a handful of ice cubes into each one, and proceeded to drown them in bourbon. He handed me a drink, sat down in his chair, and drained half his glass in one long swallow. It was one o’clock in the afternoon and I hadn’t yet had anything to eat. I took a sip and suppressed a shudder.

“I don’t know what Daniel’s told you about me,” he said, “but if you’re going to be my lawyer, there’s something you and I had better get straight from the start. Superior Plating is my company and at my company things get done my way. That applies to all of my employees from the guy who sweeps the floor to my lawyer. And it applies double to my children. I don’t give a rat’s ass about anything Lydia or her lawyers have to say. There is no way that I’m going to let a panty-waist little schemer like Arthur Wallace hoodwink my daughter and cheat my grandchildren out of their birthright.”

I took a swallow of bourbon and looked Jack Cavanaugh in the eye.

“Who,” I demanded, “is Arthur Wallace?”

Jack Cavanaugh poured himself another bourbon and walked over to the window.

“My daughter Lydia has rotten luck and piss-poor taste in men,” he explained. “She’s been married three times and every time’s been a bigger mistake than the one before. Arthur Wallace is mistake number three.”

“So you think that Lydia’s husband is behind her decision to sell her shares?” I ventured.

“Lydia doesn’t really want to sell her shares. What could she gain from it? She already has everything she could possibly want. Believe me, this is all Arthur’s doing. He’s been trying to figure out a way to get his hands on Lydia’s money from the minute he first laid eyes on her. I’ve told her so a hundred times, but she won’t listen.”

“How long have they been married?”

“It’ll be two years in October. The twins were born six months after the wedding. What a mess.”

“So you don’t think Lydia herself is interested in the money? She doesn’t have any liquidity issues or big expenses...

“Oh, Lydia always has big expenses. I’ve never seen anyone spend money like she does, but she knows that she can always come to me for money.”

“What does Arthur do for a living?”

“He’s some kind of stockbroker. That’s why this whole thing doesn’t surprise me. He thinks that I don’t see it, but he’s been snooping around for months, asking questions, trying to figure out what Lydia’s shares are worth.”

“What are they worth?” I asked.