Madeline Carter - 01 - Mad Money (18 page)

Meanwhile, I told myself, I wasn’t a
kidnapper. I didn’t even play one on TV. The fact that I’d been at
Langton yesterday and been captured there on video didn’t actually
mean
I was a suspect. Not really. Not me: Madeline Carter.
Just some flickery black and white image of me as a possible
someone. The police were probably clutching at straws and ol’
Purple Twinset’s reportage of our encounter the day before had
likely been inflated beyond what had actually occurred.

Well, you
did
run away.

That voice again.

I flipped the television on in hope — or,
more accurately, in fear — of seeing myself. Amid the wash of soap
operas, game shows and reruns of old space series, there seemed
little likelihood of this occurring before the noon news
broadcasts. I left the set on when, finally, I got up to go to my
computer.

That in itself was an odd feeling. Again,
somewhat surreal: coming back to what was, for me, the most normal
of acts and finding myself facing it with trepidation. I have made
and lost big whacks — stacks! — of cash over the years with very
little emotion attached to it beyond the most obvious. This whole
Langton deal was turning into something quite different. Something
that, for whatever reasons, had less and less to do with money.
Which, as it turned out, was a good thing because when I finally
did get down to business, I received an unpleasant surprise.

“Four-seventy-five!” I said it out loud,
something that caused Tycho to pad over to see what was up. I was
down a buck and a quarter. I didn’t need a calculator to tell me
that added up to thirty thousand dollars and change. I sighed. And
admitted it: OK, part of it
was
still about money.

And then another thought: “Oh mom.” Again,
aloud. Because this meant that, unless Roddy had miraculously
managed to sell high this morning, if my mother was still holding
LRG she was now down about twelve grand. I tried not to think about
how many months salary at the golf course that was. How many trips
to Vegas (and Hawaii and Palm Springs and...). I tried not to feel
responsible. But I did.

There are two very strong thoughts on what
to do when you’re down that big a chunk of cash with what’s getting
to be pretty close to a twenty percent dive that shows every sign
of continuing to drop. Some guys I know sell all at the first sign
of a serious dip. If it hits a 10 percent decrease, they’re out of
Dodge. Me: I’m a little mixed. When it’s other people’s money?
Absolutely: sell now. Because 10 percent can turn into 20 can turn
into 30 and so on. And, when that happens with someone else’s hard
won cash, after a while you’re having to make calls to Urbana (or
Whittier or Tecumseh or Great Falls) and that’s never pretty.
“Well, yes. I understand that was your life savings and I’m
terribly sorry about that. What’s that? Why yes. I do care. I care
very much. However, the market does not. It eats people up and
spits them out for breakfast if they’re not watching every step
and, quite often, even when they are. It does not care whose money
it is. The market is a beast that feeds on virgins
and
the
wise and well-prepared. I hope you don’t have to eat dogfood for
the rest of your life, however I can’t do anything about it and the
market still does not care.”

No, not pretty. So, in cases like that —
other people’s money — the old 10 percent rule pretty much rocks.
But with
my
money? At 16 percent and dropping? And a
$30,000-plus drop? No thank you. I wanted that money back. All of
it. And bailing now would be kissing it good-bye. I set my jaw and
held.

And now I noticed that the stock’s sharp
drop wasn’t the only new wrinkle. The volume was to the moon. I
checked LRG’s price history — an at-a-glance record of the stock’s
high, low, opening and closing price as well as daily volume. And
the facts confirmed what Sal had told me yesterday. But it was a
new day now and things were much worse.

When I made the initial purchase of LRG, the
stock’s daily average volume had been a couple of million shares,
tops. The volume for today was 14 million and it had been going
great guns all day. I opened a screen that showed me the intraday
trading graphs: indicating the day’s price and volumes. What I saw
was even more disturbing: it looked like two more big whacks of
stock had been sold — one just after the bell and one an hour
before close — from a single source. They had likely been market
sells — in both cases, an order to sell five million shares in one
big lump at whatever price the market would give it. And, of
course, this had a disastrous effect on a conservative little stock
like this one: the price had plummeted under the weight of filling
two more big sell orders. Now with that kind of action going on,
there was no way someone at that Exchange wouldn’t notice and
investigate if things looked fishy. But that seemed too iffy a
possibility to bank on. And, after all, it wouldn’t help me
now.

So, with the limited resources that were
available, I did as much investigating as I could on my own.
Although all this activity
could
mean that a couple of big
investors got spooked when Ernie got snatched, it didn’t seem
likely. Anyone with that big a stake would know that selling at
this particular time could be suicidal. (And if they didn’t know,
their broker should tell them!) Especially since Ernie hadn’t even
taken over yet when he’d been grabbed: the kidnapping should not be
impacting the stock price this greatly.

Although there was no way I could be certain
about it, my gut told me this wasn’t an investor. As Sal had said
about what he’d seen the day before, this looked like more short
action. And, in this case, the short action combined with the
current general weirdness around this stock was leading to what
could very well turn into a death spiral: a downturn that — because
down seems like a sure thing — invites further and further drops
to, potentially, the very bottom of the market. It was an
unappealing thought. Was there really
nothing
I could do to
help avert it?

When I’m in heavy stock mode, as I am when
carefully studying the intradays, very little else can get my
attention. I get so fascinated running the numbers back and forth
and following graphs and charts and reading press releases and news
items that whole chunks of my life pass without my noticing. So it
wasn’t until I kicked back a little bit and scratched Tycho’s soft
ears and thought about perhaps eating something that the fullness
of everything began to hit me: Ernie had been
kidnapped.

Who kidnapped the new CEO of a glass
company? Some sort of weird Save the Jars organization? It wouldn’t
be someone looking for money, would it? In LA there were much
better pickings. Anything from high tech to high roller to high
society: any kind of high profile if you were just looking for
cash. Emily had mentioned a note. I wanted to know about it, wanted
to know what was in it. And
why
did I want to know? Well,
there was that thirty thousand bucks, for starters. There was —
although this was a minimal point — my past connection with Ernie.
And there was the fact that, for better or worse, I’d involved
myself in this whole thing up to
here
. I had a stake now, on
several levels. I knew I hadn’t done this thing. But someone
had.

And as though thinking about him had
conjured him up, suddenly there was Ernie: on the television
screen. It was a still photo that looked as though they’d pulled it
from some annual report. In the photo he looked older than I
remembered him from college, but perhaps slightly younger than he
had when I’d seen him at Club Z. I turned the volume up on the
set.

The announcer was standing outside the
building in Culver City I’d visited the day before. It looked just
as it had when I’d seen it, though it had been sans news team then.
Obviously, not much was going on, but it was a pretty building and,
with the prettier news guy in front of it, the shot worked quite
well.

“Though it’s now been over 24 hours since
Ernest Carmichael Billings was last seen, police have little to go
on,” the newscaster was continuing a story he’d started before I
got to the volume.

“All they have is a note with minimal
instructions and the image of a single suspect who infiltrated the
The Langton Group’s head office in Culver City yesterday
afternoon.”

Then there I was. The pounding in my ears
drowned out the droning of the announcer’s voice. It was
me
.
OK: it was pretty grainy and the angle was sort of strange: from
above. But
I
could tell it was me. I wasn’t entirely sure
that even my mother would know it, but I did.

Then my grainy visage was replaced by that
of Ms. Mauve Twinset, although there was no sign of the twinset
today. And she was
speaking.

“I was really quite frightened.”
She
was frightened? “She had this crazy look in her eyes. I thought any
second she would pull a gun out of her purse or something.” Which
of course brought a groan from me, because I had left my purse in
the car while I was in there and
she
was the one that had
been frightening.

Then the newscaster’s head filled the screen
again. Obviously, some paraphrasing was in order. “Ms. Farenholtz
reported that, when she confronted the woman, the suspect fled: not
once, but twice. Investigators continue to try to determine the
woman’s identity. For another aspect of this story, we join Cynthia
Marlowe at the Sherbrook Hotel.”

The image cut to a newscaster — presumably
Cynthia Marlowe — in front of a toney-looking low slung
building.

“Thanks, Malcolm,” said Cynthia. “We’re here
in Beverly Hills where Mrs. Arianna Carmichael Billings is
scheduled to attend a luncheon benefiting the Stop Hunger
Foundation. There she is.”

And the camera angle shifted to include the
hotel’s port cochere where Arianna was unfolding herself out of a
Porsche. A Boxster. And it was the most amazing green. A slightly
different shade and it would have been vile, poisonous. But this
managed to look bright, and right and rich.

Cynthia Marlowe — presumably with her news
crew in tow — headed off toward the car just as Ernie’s wife got
out and a parking attendant appeared to whisk the Boxster away.

“Mrs. Carmichael Billings!” Marlowe
approached her breathlessly. “We were hoping you’d comment on you
husband’s disappearance.”

Slow news day
, I thought. And,
really, what I wanted to know is what the heck Ernie’s wife was
doing attending a benefit luncheon the day after her husband was
kidnapped. Shouldn’t she be off somewhere wringing her hands or
crying? On the other hand, I know Ernie better than most. Maybe the
wife was just relieved.

Then she was filling the screen. And it was
the oddest sensation, because it wasn’t something I’d noticed when
I’d met her a Club Zanzibar. It wasn’t that Arianna Carmichael
Billings looked like me, exactly. But it was clear that we were cut
from the same sort of cloth, or pulled from the same kind of mold.
She was — and I say this with no attempt at false modesty, but
merely in fact — she was far more beautiful than I am. And perhaps
five years younger. But the similarities between us would have been
obvious to anyone who saw us standing side by side.

I didn’t for a second flatter myself in
thinking that, in Arianna, Ernie had found a replacement for me.
I’d never been that important to him. Rather, I realized what had
been missing between us, as a couple. To Ernie, I’d probably never
been anything more than the correct physical type. I had
looked
like the well bred boarding school brat. And I’d
known when we were together that the fact that my looks didn’t
really reflect my background was irksome for him. Hailing from
rural Wisconsin himself — his family had been in the cheese
business for three generations — he’d made no bones about making it
known that he desired — no,
required
— a wife capable of
opening the right kind of doors. The kind I clearly couldn’t open.
Of course, it had never been that serious between us. Though
perhaps the fact that he was always looking for Ms. Right in all
the wrong places got in the way. And here, finally, she was.

“There is not a great deal for me to comment
on,” Arianna told the camera in a controlled voice. “We’re hoping
for further word. And praying that whoever has him is treating him
well.” Though it was obvious Arianna was subtly trying to put
distance between herself and the camera, Cynthia Marlowe wasn’t
quite done and, in typical reporter fashion, having gone in softly
for the first quote, she now came in blazing for the close. By that
time, from a reporter’s perspective, there’s nothing to lose. I
didn’t mind so much, this time, as it was a question I wanted an
answer to, as well. I just hope if I’d asked it I would have looked
less feral than Cynthia did now.

“Mrs. Billings, your husband was kidnapped
twenty-four hours ago. Weren’t you afraid it would seem odd and
uncaring to attend a charity luncheon today?”

Arianna stopped inching towards the hotel
and turned to face the camera fully. “It is
not
odd,” and I
could see the controlled fury in her stance. “It’s entirely the
correct thing. My mother, Mrs. Nancy Enright, is the National Chair
for the Stop Hunger Foundation. I’m representing her today since I
live in Los Angeles and she does not. This is an
exceptionally
worthy cause. And, frankly, preparation for it
has provided me with a diversion from thinking about Ernest’s
plight. Good day,” she said, as she stalked regally off.

I found myself silently cheering her, this
new me (Or was I the old her?) as the camera focused on the
entirely unabashed-looking Cynthia Marlowe signing off, the hotel
behind her, while Arianna Billings disappeared inside.