Bitter Business (28 page)

“Where is everyone?” I asked as she paused for breath.

“They quit when they heard about the cyanide,” she replied grimly. “These young girls are so ignorant. You must be Miss Millholland. I’m Loretta, Mr. Cavanaugh’s secretary. Mr. Jack Cavanaugh that is. Philip is waiting for you over in the specialty chemicals building.”

“Will Jack be in today, do you know? I need to speak to him.”

“He just got off the phone with Philip, but he won’t be coming into the office until tomorrow. There’s some sort of problem with one of our big customers, so he took the plane to Dallas this morning. I guess when it rains it pours.”

The phones started ringing again and I waited until she’d answered them.

“I’ve never been to the specialty chemicals building,” I told her. “Can you tell me how to get there?”

“Do you know how to get to receiving?”

“I think so.”

“Then the best way is to just go out the loading dock and turn right. You’ll see a long, white, one-story building. There’s no sign or anything, but you can’t miss it.” She unclipped the ID card from the front of her jacket. “Here, you’ll need this to work the lock. It’s a swipe-card security system. You’ll see the doohickey on the side of the door. I wish I could show you the way myself, but I’m the only one here. If you just drag the card through it, you’ll hear the click when the door opens.”

“What do you keep over there that you need such tight security?” I asked, accepting the card. I couldn’t help thinking about the poisons that were kept behind a simple locked door in the equivalent of a hall closet.

“There’s nothing valuable or anything, unless you count the lab equipment,” she answered, punching the button on her ringing phone. “When it was so very cold this winter, Philip found out that the factory workers were sneaking into the specialty chemicals building to smoke. That’s why he had the swipe-card system put in.”

I found the specialty chemicals building without difficulty. Antiseptic and nondescript, it looked as if it had been built within the last five years. Like the rest of Superior Plating, function and the desire to avoid unnecessary expense seemed to have been the guiding principles in its construction. The swipe-card reader was mounted, just as Loretta had said, by the side of the door. I pulled the card through three different ways before finally hitting on the right one—yet another reminder that technology hates me.

Once inside, there was a spartan entry with vending machines on one wall and a vinyl couch on the other—no doubt a good spot for a smoke when it was thirty below outside. At the other end were two glass doors that opened onto a flight of linoleum-covered stairs. At the top was a large room laid out like every chemical lab I have ever been in, from Dr. Allen’s sophomore chemistry class in high school to any of the research divisions at Stephen’s company, Azor Pharmaceuticals.

Four rows of black-topped lab benches, all crowded with equipment, filled the room. Neon lights and a system of ventilation hoods hung from the ceiling. There were Gary Larson cartoons taped up every few feet and someone had hung one of those stuffed animals with suction cups on its feet upside down from the ceiling. White-coated technicians looked up from their work as I passed, obviously unaccustomed to seeing visitors.

I asked a woman with a pipette in one hand where I might find Philip Cavanaugh. She directed me to an office at the far end of the lab.

From the few words we had exchanged earlier that morning, I expected to find Philip in full rant mode. Instead, he was sitting calmly behind a cluttered desk, going over test results with another man, who excused himself as soon as I entered the room.

“You’ve never been over in this building before, have you?” Philip asked in a weary voice. His body was slumped in the chair, his hands flat on the desk in front of him, as if he found himself without the energy to move them.

“No. When I was here last week I never got this far.”

“It’s hard to believe it’s only been a week since everything started happening.” There was a catch in his voice when he said the word
everything.
Philip Cavanaugh was obviously a man strained to the breaking point. It was taking everything he had just to maintain his composure.

“I don’t know whether you read the obituaries, but it was in the paper this morning,” I said. “Daniel Babbage died on Saturday. The funeral is tomorrow.”

“My father told me. Coming on top of everything else, this seems to have hit him especially hard. Did you know that our entire administrative staff quit this morning? They just walked out and left. Loretta, my dad’s secretary, is the only one who stayed.”

“I saw her a minute ago. That kind of loyalty is a rare thing,” I said, thinking of Daniel’s secretary, Madeline, weeping as she sorted through his papers the day after his death.

“Eugene’s on the plant floor right now trying to convince the workers to stay. They’re all afraid that there’s some sort of poison in the air here. I can run a company without secretaries, but if the line workers walk out, We’re out of business.”

“Loretta told me that your father is in Dallas. When you talk to him next time, will you be sure to tell him that I need to speak with him right away?”

“After our last conversation, I don’t know when that Will be. We just had a big argument.”

“What about?”

“This.” He slid a single file across the desk toward me.

I picked it up and looked inside. There were two items: a single sheet of letterhead and an article that had been cut out of a magazine. A quick glance at the letterhead revealed it to be a bill from First Chicago, the investment banking firm that Lydia had hired to help her sell her shares. The total was for forty-seven thousand dollars. And people thought lawyers were stick-up artists, I thought to myself. I held up the magazine article.

“Do you want me to read this now?” I asked.

“Please.”

It was taken from
Metal Plating Monthly
and it made for surprisingly interesting reading. The article was titled BREAKING AWAY: CAVANAUGH SHAREHOLDER AIMS FOR TOP BID. Beneath it was a half-page photo of Lydia scowling into the camera with her arms crossed on her chest. Arthur stood behind her, looking sinister with his dark beard. The picture had been taken in front of their house on Astor Place.

In the article, the reporter had painstakingly cataloged Lydia’s list of grievances against her family, including the fact that her father had never been home while she was growing up; that Nursey, the black maid who had raised her, was the only real parent that she’d ever known, and that she felt that her father had always favored her brothers. She stated emphatically that she was “irrevocably committed” to selling her shares, citing “a complete lack of faith in my brother Philip’s ability to do anything competently, particularly running a business.” She went on to add, “Philip is one of the most ineffectual people I’ve ever met. It’s been obvious since he was ten.”

Lydia also announced that she was planning to use a portion of the money from the sale of her shares to start a foundation to support the work of women artists. She had already decided who was going to receive her first grant—an artist named Shirley Shegall, for a “public sculpture celebrating menstruation.”

I put both items back into the file and handed it back wordlessly to Philip Cavanaugh. He might be a pompous, unmitigated putz, but for the first time since his sister’s death I felt genuinely sorry for the guy.

“What did your father say?”

“He said to pay the bill.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

“Nothing about the article.”

“Nothing at all.”

“I assume that the magazine that ran this is widely read in the industry.”

“If it wasn’t before, it will be now,” Philip replied ruefully. “It’s bad enough that I’ve had to spend my whole life listening to people whispering behind my back, ‘You know everything would have turned out differently if Jimmy hadn’t died.’ Or, ‘You know that it’s really Dagny who’s the brains of the operation.’ Now everyone is going to be laughing in my face! And my own father won’t even say a word in my defense. Instead, he wants me to write a goddamned check for forty-seven thousand dollars so that I can make it easier for my little sister to stab me in the back!”

“So what do you want me to do?”

“Is the company obligated to pay Lydia’s investment bankers?”

“Off the top of my head, I wouldn’t think so,” I replied. “Even though Lydia is a director of the corporation, she doesn’t have the authority to contract with outsiders on the company’s behalf without a majority vote of the board. I think it can be argued that Lydia’s obligation to her bankers is a personal one. On the other hand, your father’s chairman of the board and CEO, so no matter what Lydia’s legal obligation may be, if he says pay it, I don’t see that you have much choice.”

“Isn’t that the story of my goddamned life,” spat Philip. I actually couldn’t help agreeing with him.

“Maybe this is actually a step in the right direction,” I ventured. “I mean, after he’s finished shelling out the money for Lydia’s investment bankers, it should be hard for him to delude himself about her not really wanting to sell her shares. Forty-seven thousand dollars is a whole lot of serious.”

“That’s not the way he sees it. He thinks once the bill is paid she’s finished with it. He actually asked me this morning if Arthur had reported for work yet. I guess I have no choice but to face up to it,” he said in a tone of bitter disbelief. “My father is a demented old fool and my life is turning into the final act of
King Lear
.”

In the cab on the way back to the office, I reflected that there was probably enough hatred in the Cavanaugh family to motivate a dozen murders. Who knows how Philip would have turned out if his older brother hadn’t died tragically before his eyes? But it was clear that after decades of trying to earn his father’s respect, he’d succeeded only in becoming his whipping boy—emotionally truncated and stripped of self-esteem. I felt sorry for him despite myself. Left hanging in the limbo of indifference by his father, publicly humiliated by his little sister; even his pathetic stab at extracurricular romance had found its conclusion not in the tearful recrimination of parting lovers, but in the tawdry inquisition of a police interrogation room.

I arrived back at my office with a headache only to find Cheryl in the midst of exasperated negotiations with two messengers about where to put a waist-high pile of dusty boxes, the kind the firm used for dead-document storage.

“What the hell is all of this?” I demanded, dropping my briefcase and shrugging off my coat.

“Back volumes of the Superior Plating file,” Cheryl replied, brushing the dust from her hands.

“What are they doing here? Why aren’t they in storage where they obviously belong?”

“Mr. Tillman’s orders, miss,” Mr. Jackson explained apologetically. He was the head of the mail room and had learned to deflect all manner of lawyerly abuse with the cheerful firmness of a kindergarten teacher. “All the files in storage that used to be Mr. Babbage’s have to be hauled out and sent to the new lawyer who’s assigned to the case.”

“There’s a memo that goes along with it,” added Cheryl, searching on her desk for the copy. “You have to go through each box and inventory it before it’s allowed to go back into storage.”

I opened my mouth to protest.

My secretary cut me off. “I already called his secretary and she says he’s serious.”

I looked at the six-by-eight cubicle that composed Cheryl’s work space. Every available inch of space was already filled. I motioned Mr. Jackson to follow me.

To a stranger, my office looked less like a place of professional employment than a cry for help. In terms of sheer volume of paper, my office alone probably accounted for the decimation of a small forest. One thing was certain: I needed either less work or a bigger office. I made a mental note to twist Skip Tillman’s arm for more space.

In the meantime Cheryl and I succeeded in shifting some files around in order to accommodate the boxes. Unfortunately it meant that I had to climb over them every time I wanted to get up to go to the bathroom.

That accomplished, Cheryl disappeared to get me some coffee. She reappeared a few minutes later with a fresh cup and paper towels for wiping the outside of the boxes, some of which apparently dated back to the fifties.

“Anything urgent while I was out?” I asked, taking advantage of my first chance of the day to look at my calendar. “What’s this at seven o’clock?” I demanded. “Dinner with Chelsea Winters. Who in God’s name is Chelsea Winters and why am I having dinner with her at Ambria?”

“It’s a recruiting dinner. She’s an editor of the
Yale Law Review
who has also interviewed with Barker & West. Jim Swain is very hot to have her come to Callahan.”

I sighed. Jim Swain was the head of the committee that hired new lawyers every spring and Barker & West was our chief rival in the legal-talent Olympics. No doubt because Chelsea was a woman, he’d set it up so that she’d be entertained by every female partner at the firm—all three of us—in the hopes that she’d somehow manage to draw the erroneous conclusion that Callahan Ross was by some stretch of the imagination a nurturing environment for female legal talent.