Madeline Carter - 01 - Mad Money (8 page)

A waiter came by quietly and Ernie ordered a
couple of drinks: a single malt Scotch for himself — neat — and a
gin and tonic for me. I shook my head, fighting the wave of anger
that welled up at him for assuming I’d still favor the same thing
I’d been drinking over a dozen years ago, and ordered cranberry and
soda. I would be driving shortly and, anyway, I suddenly felt the
need to keep my wits about me.

“It’s a very small world, Madeline. Who
would have thought I’d run into you in a club in L.A.?”

I shrugged. What was there, really, to say?
I chose the obvious. “Are you here on business?”

“Moved here about a month ago. New gig,” he
said airily, like a rock star. “You’ll want to check it out.” He
ran two fingers down my forearm as he spoke as though it were a
natural gesture. I didn’t try to pretend I was doing anything but
avoiding his touch when I sat back and out of his reach,
simultaneously wishing I’d opted to wear something with a neckline
that didn’t plunge.

“Small world, Mandy,” I’d always hated that:
Mandy. No one else has ever called me this: it isn’t a proper
diminutive for Madeline, even if I was someone whom diminutives get
stuck to, and I’m not. “I was talking to Benson in New York,” he
said. “Not three days ago. He told me you’d left Merriwether
Bailey. You gone renegade?”

Another shrug. “That’s just silly.”

Ernie smiled which, for me, produced an odd
effect. The same smile in a face that was similar but not quite the
same. “No? Well, you’ll want to watch for this one anyway, Mandy.
Langton Regional Group. LRG on the Exchange,” he grinned in a
manner which was meant to be self-deprecating but which, on his
polished face, had quite the opposite effect. And he didn’t need to
tell me that when he said “Exchange” he meant New York Stock
Exchange. To both of us, it could only mean one thing. “I’m the new
CEO,” Ernie went on. “They’re making the announcement on Monday,
but it’s a secret until then. Don’t tell anyone.”

“Who would I tell?” I said it pleasantly,
though I didn’t feel pleasant. If anything I felt slightly sick. I
just wished Emily would get her butt back to the table and then,
hopefully, Ernie would go away.

“Are you here alone?” he asked, as though
he’d read my thoughts.

“No. I’m with my friend. Emily.” I looked
towards the dance floor, thinking to point her out and perhaps
somehow signal that her presence was urgently required, but there
was no one there. The dance floor was suddenly empty. Which meant
she was either smelling the lilies and chatting to the attendant,
or she’d decided to sit down somewhere to talk to her friend with
the nice suit.

“You?” I found I didn’t really care, but I
had to say something, and that seemed as good as anything.

“I’m here with my lovely wife, Arianna,”
he’d pitched his voice oddly, so I looked at him and saw I was
right: the words had been for someone else’s benefit. I followed
his glance.

Watching her come towards us was entirely
filmic: you could almost hear music and maybe a voiceover. The air
moved through her hair and her conservatively slit skirt as though
created in CGI. She was beyond beautiful. Tall, blonde, slender,
perfectly coifed, perfectly turned out.

“I wondered where you’d gotten to,” her
voice was perfect, as well. Attractively modulated, educated. In
another context, she would have been an easy woman to loathe. But
she was Ernie’s wife. Knowing what I did about him, I could almost
feel pity.

“Arianna,” he held out a hand, inviting her
to join us. “Come meet an old friend. Madeline Carter. Madeline,
this is Arianna Billings. My wife.”

I’m sure I must have smiled at her. Taken
the hand she extended to me quite graciously. I don’t remember
precisely. The only thing I could really think about was putting as
much space as possible between me and Ernie.

For her part, Arianna seemed to mull my name
over — as though running it through some internal Rolodex — until
she came up with a match. “Madeline, it’s delicious to meet you
after all this time. Ernie has told me so much about you.”

This surprised me. I was pretty sure I
hadn’t mentioned
him
to anyone other than my mother in more
than a decade. I’d read about him from time to time, whenever some
business magazine sporting his smiling face on the cover would end
up on my desk. Wunderkind, they’d call him. Golden Boy. And I’d
read as much as I could without retching and then practice my aim
on the recycling bin. But
speak
about him? Never. What we’d
shared was so long ago now. It just seemed better to bury it. The
year we’d spent together had certainly given me very few moments
I’d contemplate cherishing. “Well rid of him,” was how my mother
had put it. I hadn’t disagreed.

“Madeline, it was
so
nice to finally
meet you,” Arianna repeated, rising, the slender rustling of some
silky fabric following her. “But we really have to go.” Then to
Ernie, “the Gunnarson’s were expecting us 15 minutes ago.” He
nodded, threw back the remainder of his Scotch, dropped a twenty on
the table to cover our drinks, then rose, all in a single smooth
motion.

“It was wonderful seeing you again, Mandy.”
And I wondered if I was right in thinking that he’d angled his body
between me and his wife intentionally in order to cover the fingers
he ran once more down my arm. He couldn’t have missed how abruptly
I pulled it back, but he didn’t react. “And remember what I told
you: LRG. It’s a good tip.”

When they’d gone I just sat there for a
while thinking about stuff. When Emily reappeared I couldn’t wait
to get out of there. I didn’t want to see any more clubs. I got
home as quickly as I could and hit the shower. Afterwards, I still
didn’t feel clean.

Chapter Six

I spent Friday in much the same way I had
the previous four days: at my computer preparing for the following
week and my new occupation as a day trader. And I spent some time
reassuring myself: Sure: it was a crap market, but things were
still moving. And the fact that IBM is down is only really a
problem if you own a lot of IBM. I’m a pro: I
know
the
market. I know when movement means something real is afoot or
whether it’s just the hysterical reaction of an increasingly
inexperienced phalanx of traders — most of them at home in Helena,
Montana or Tulsa, Oklahoma or some other not-stock-connected place,
trading on their little PCs — and, in going kinda cowboy, I could
take advantage of that with my own money for my own gain. That was
the theory, anyway.

As much as I tried to not think about it,
the vision of Ernie and his “good tip” kept sneaking into my head.
The information he’d given me — if I acted on it — could be
considered only the most borderline kind of insider trading. I
wasn’t a broker anymore: no one cared very much what I did with my
own money. And if you meet someone you used to know in a bar and
they tell you they have a new job... well, is that any more insider
trading than acting on something you read in the newspaper? Well,
it is. But it’s pretty easy to rationalize around. Especially if
you think no one will be paying attention. So I went in for a peek.
What would be the harm?

As it turned out, the Langton Regional Group
was typical of the kind of company I’d been watching over the
previous week, now that I had no clients to service and quick
action on my mind. Langton’s 52 week high was over fifteen dollars
and they’d been trading around the six dollar mark for a couple of
months. Nothing exciting in either direction: just a solid and
long-term slide into the land of the not interesting. I knew an
announcement could change all of that quickly: news that would show
that their prospects were up. They seemed that kind of ripe.

To most people, LRG would have been an
uninspiring little security. The Langton Regional Group made those
little glass jars that companies order by the truckload for
stuffing jams into and sending out to supermarkets. Nothing
mysterious. No shaky high tech and — heaven forbid — no tricky
resources where an oil well can dry up or an engineer’s report can
bollocks everything or people can just decide they no longer want
whatever mineral is being raped from the ground. Just little glass
jars.

A few years earlier, LRG had been trading at
over twenty bucks, but that was then. After a while, analysts
frowned at all of the money they weren’t making and suggested this
wasn’t a very collectable stock. And, let’s face it, glass jars are
not sexy, by anyone’s standard.

Langton’s financials weren’t bad, but they
weren’t especially great either. LRG had a lot of employees, a lot
of overhead and — from the looks of things — fairly complacent
management. The current CEO was seriously old and was the grandson
of the guy who had founded the company back in the 1930s. The
family was prominent — what passes for old money in Southern
California — and they lived pretty well. The fact that the company
couldn’t always support their familial excesses didn’t seem to
really matter to anyone besides, of course, the stockholders and an
increasing number of grumpy analysts. And when enough stock
analysts get sufficiently grumpy, things start to change.

From what Ernie had told me, the change
they’d decided on was him. And, as he’d implied, it was a change
that could make all of the difference for this particular stock.
He’d said they were set to make an announcement Monday: my first
independent trading day.

Over the weekend I wrestled with the insider
trading thing, but — to be perfectly honest — not too mightily.
Let’s face it: it was a day trader’s wet dream. A teensy bit of
unasked for information could potentially make me a lot of money.
All of my instincts said: This Is It. And, in my business, you
listen to your instincts. At least, if your instincts have, over
the years, instructed you that they’re worth listening to. Mine
always had.

Monday dawned clear and bright. Tycho and I
pounded through the hills, but today I barely noticed the
eucalyptus and the palm trees and I ignored the ocean vistas
altogether. My mind was on other things.

Back at my computer, I scanned the early
notices. Nothing on LRG, which meant it would probably come around
nine am Pacific Time — my time in L.A. — which made sense as that’s
when, since they were based in the city, their office would be
open.

Regardless of when the office opened, the
stock was already trading. I checked it the way a moth checks a
flame. As I’d expected, even prior to the announcement, it was
starting to happen. Most of the time, just prior to the breaking of
some significant piece of news, a narrow column of insiders will
hop on board causing the stock to give a little jump before
anything really happens. I realized with a start that I was now
lining up to be part of that crowd.

And so I moved. While LRG hovered between
$5.88 and $6.00, I put in a buy order for 20,000 shares. To a lot
of people, $120,000 is hardly worth getting out of bed for but, at
this stage, it was a big chunk of my liquid wad. I tried to ignore
the sweat on my palms.

I kept my eyes on my newsfeed and when an
hour after my buy on LRG an announcement was made, I read the whole
thing:

LANGTON REGIONAL GROUP ANNOUNCES THE
APPOINTMENT OF NEW CEO

It was the usual company PR material — lots
of forward face and future optimism — but it was the announcement
that, essentially, Ernie had told me to expect. Between refreshing
my screen to watch how the announcement would hit the market, I
read the news release. Basically, LRG said that their old CEO,
William Gunnarson III, had opted for an early retirement (yeah,
right!) and that the company was — blah, blah, blah — pleased to
announce his replacement, one Ernest Carmichael Billings late of
NeanderTek.

It tickled me that two-timing,
double-dealing Ernie should have been the one to give me this tip.
I had no doubt he’d be able to turn the company around. Ernie was
tough as a garden slug and he had this incredible killer instinct,
even back in college. Sometimes being with Ernie then had been like
sharing a nest with a baby vulture. Baby vultures are cute in a
kind of repulsive way and, essentially, they are helpless but, at
some base level, they understand what they’ve been put on this
earth to do. Back then Ernie was like that. A baby vulture waiting
for his big break. It was not so easy to be around.

And, on a certain level, the vulture analogy
isn’t even a very good one. Despite their revolting habits and the
low opinion society holds of them, vultures are innocents. They’re
creatures of instinct and evolution. They can’t help what they are,
they just are. There was something more calculating about Ernie.
And controlled. On first contact, it came off as a kind of burning
intensity, something that my 22-year-old self had found incredibly
sexy and somehow reassuring.

From the beginning, he was emotionally and
sexually demanding. When we were in public together, he’d stand
very close — later I’d find it oppressively close — and across a
table or a room his eyes would always search for mine, ultimately
find them and hold them. He was intense on all levels. He took my
breath away. After a while, it felt like he was squeezing it out of
me.

To say that Ernie was arrogant sounds like
ridiculous understatement but, again at first, it struck me as an
arrogance he owned, not something borrowed or some hollow pretense.
That arrogance seemed balanced by a bold impulsiveness that, in my
youth, I took to be something pretty and romantic. Everything about
Ernie was big. His dreams, his ambitions, his ego. And none of that
was a problem for me. At first. Once it became a problem, I didn’t
stick around.

The little bit I knew about Ernie since then
had come from the trades. It was all around his growing reputation
as a corporate whizz kid who was making a career out of bailing out
public companies that were on the pale side of successful.