“Work on what?” I objected. “Your guy needs bankers, not brokers. Go talk to Sutherling.” He handled mergers and acquisitions all the time. Sutherling would know what to do.
“I did.”
That’s why they were so chummy during Strategy.
“Great. You’ll get a nice referral fee from Banking.”
“Not so fast,” she snapped, recoiling, her hands abandoning my balled fists. “Brisbane uses Morgan for all its banking. SKC’s play is to represent Jack Oil.”
“And I’m supposed to deliver Jumping JJ.”
“I can if you can’t,” Patty retorted, confident and borderline smug.
“Why doesn’t Sutherling call me directly?” I asked.
“Because I’m driving, O’Rourke. I figured out Brisbane’s interest in Jack. I alerted Banking. And I’m the only one who knows all the players, including JJ.”
The vein in my forehead almost burst. “You spent forty-five minutes with JJ and fucked up any shot I have at collaring his stock. What’d you tell him anyway?”
“Are we back to that?” It was Patty’s turn to sound sarcastic. “You don’t get JJ at all. He won’t collar his stock, O’Rourke. You’re missing all the cues here, pal.”
“And you’ve got the finesse of a gorilla in heat. There’s a right way and a wrong way to describe the trade to a CEO.”
“There’s no way,” she interrupted. “I checked with Halek. JJ can’t hedge Jack Oil. The borrow is for shit. Besides.”
“Besides what?”
“Halek priced out a collar. JJ can get about twenty-seven percent upside, maybe twenty-eight if he’s lucky. My guess is that Brisbane will pay a fifty percent premium. Your collar, O’Rourke, is a stupid trade.”
She does her homework.
“Patty, let me explain this in terms even you can understand.”
We heard a knock on the conference room door.
“Come in,” Patty called.
It was Casper, AWOL from clipping his fingers. “Can you guys keep it down?” he asked. “My client and I can hear you in the conference room next door. Grove, you’re louder than goddamn Scully.”
“Sorry, guy,” I apologized. Casper closed the door and returned to his meeting.
Patty and I returned to our brawl. “Gershon,” I said in measured decibels, “you’ve got a hunch, nothing more. No facts. No direct confirmation from your guy at Brisbane. You don’t know jack.”
“Funny.”
“No pun intended. I wish I had a dollar for every time somebody puts two and two together and comes up with some half-assed banking idea.”
“Sutherling wished he’d thought of it,” she replied coolly.
“So what. It’s a good idea. You’re smart.” I had to give on that issue. “But JJ is my client. I’ve known him for six years, Patty. Six years.”
“You finished?”
“Not yet. There’s no fucking way I’m splitting economics with you just because you gave Banking a heads-up. JJ uses Goldman for these deals anyway. He’s not hiring our bankers just because you spoke with him for forty-five minutes. Give me a break.”
“You finished?” she repeated.
“I’m not splitting economics, Patty.”
“You know those forty-five minutes? Those forty-five minutes you keep discounting? I did something you’ll never do.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Spoke to him in Polish,” she replied nonchalantly. “I’m fluent, O’Rourke. Did JJ ever mention how proud he is of his Polish roots? He gave a million bucks to the Polish-American Society. He funds a scholarship for kids of Polish descent.”
“Six years, Patty.”
“Let me explain so you understand,” she said, parroting my earlier dig. “SKC stands to make ten million dollars in fees from the deal. Maybe twenty million dollars. That’s more money than you can generate in ten years with JJ. I’m Sutherling’s best shot. No other bank can bring a native Polish speaker to the table. And you know Sutherling. He hates Goldman as much as anybody.”
“What do you want?” There was no resignation in my voice. I was still gathering facts, though one outcome was clear. If Gershon delivered a $20 million banking assignment, I would lose Jumping JJ as a client. SKC would assign coverage to Lady Goldfish.
Sensing her advantage, Patty began outlining her demands. “A onetime referral fee from Banking won’t cut it,” she stated. “That’s what, a half million? Chump change. I want sixty percent of all the money management fees with JJ.”
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck me?” she laughed. “No. Fuck you, O’Rourke. A twenty-million-dollar banking fee means I decide the split. I’m not sure you deserve a dime over thirty percent. But I like you, O’Rourke. And I’m feeling charitable.”
“Let’s see what Kurtz has to say,” I bluffed.
“Be my guest,” she shot back. “He’s already salivating over this year’s bonus. Our division refers a twenty-million-dollar banking assignment and the boss looks good.”
The hit-and-run was now official. I felt like my face had been plastered against the chrome grate of a Mack truck. But Patty, mother of three, was no eighteen-wheeler. She had outhustled, outthought, and outmaneuvered me in the battle of interdepartmental spin. I had no idea what to say.
Patty finally broke the silence. “Grove, you look ashen. You okay?” she asked disingenuously.
“Jestem udupiony,”
I muttered, remembering JJ’s words from when he lost his secretary.
“You got that right,” Patty muttered. “Only your accent sucks.”
“We need to do the right thing for the firm,” I finally said. It was the only thing to say. Gershon would report every word back to Kurtz.
“I knew you’d see it my way,” she gloated.
“I need time to think.”
“About what?” she demanded.
“I spoke with JJ today. He doesn’t want to speak again until next week. He was emphatic.”
“Don’t play games, O’Rourke. You better not talk to him behind my back.” Like every stockbroker, Patty knew the one way to win all turf battles: Get the client on your side.
“Wouldn’t think of it, Patty.”
Confession time.
“You’d better not blow twenty million dollars in fees,” she added.
“Give me until Monday afternoon. I’ll tell JJ to meet with Banking.”
“I’m on that call,” she snapped.
“Not a good idea,” I said. “It makes more sense for me to set up a meeting. JJ will wonder why you’re on the phone.”
“Let me worry about that,” she said. “I don’t want this deal to get away.”
“Me either.”
“And there’s one other thing, O’Rourke.”
“What now?”
“Keep away from those Web sites. I don’t want my new partner fired for surfing porn at the office.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The next morning I hunkered down, shelved Patty’s politics knowing our fight was far from over, and returned to my day job with no further thought of three sharks, Sam’s jewels, or the Kelemen Group. The markets consumed my attention. Radio Ray, who ran the high-yield bond desk, called and pitched the latest from his team’s petri dish. Using a bond trader’s inscruta-speak, he offered, “Five million Buckeye five and seven-eighths of ’47 to go at six.”
Translation: You can buy bonds from an Ohio issuer unrelated to the football team. Each year the bonds pay $58.75, the “five and seven-eighths” Radio Ray referenced. Given market conditions, buyers can purchase these bonds for less than their $1,000 face value and earn 6 percent annually through 2047. Business as usual.
“Too long. I want something that matures while we’re all living.”
“I like the Florida Dirt Panther Creek five and one-eighths of ’13 at six-fifty.”
“Better. I can use three million.”
“Done.”
For the next forty-five minutes I advised clients. That’s when Lila Priouleau called. “How are things?” she asked.
“Awesome,” I replied, staying in top-producer character even though Lila had been a friend since college.
She hesitated for a moment and whispered with all the sweet syrup of the sunny South, “Get off it, Grove.”
“What do you mean?”
“Something’s eating you. I can tell.”
Lila was right. Evelyn always said her third roommate read me like a book. Maybe it was the Dixie roots we shared. “I learned something about Charlie yesterday, and I’m not sure how to tell Sam.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Sam’s important to me,” she argued. “We slept together for three years.”
“Hey now.” I got the joke. Lila meant the same room at Wellesley, not the same bed. There was nothing funny about Charlie’s surfing habits. But I knew Lila’s guidance might help me say the right thing to Sam. “It’s awkward,” I ventured.
“Awkward,” she scoffed. “You don’t know awkward.”
Lila Priouleau was the most notorious woman who ever bussed into Harvard Square. She owed her fame to fifteen unfortunate seconds. Otherwise no one would have known her at Harvard. She rarely visited Cambridge. Few people knew her name. And almost no one from Harvard could identify her on sight. Lila spent all her free time down at Yale with that cretin Hurley.
Her celebrity, however, extended to nearly every graduate program. The future captains of industry at Harvard Business School knew about her. So did the craftsmen of jurisprudence from Harvard Law School. The male policy wonks at the Kennedy School of Government gossiped about Lila as they strolled through the ivy-lined courtyards and mingled with other aspiring diplomats. The creative types at the School of Architecture, those who would one day design the next generation of cityscapes, found artistic inspiration from the steamy urban legend that chased her everywhere.
The notoriety at Harvard began with a sophomore biology class at Wellesley. During one unfortunate lecture, the professor described the composition of male ejaculate. She turned the topic, fun stuff for a room full of
young women, into a marathon of tedium. On and on she droned. “Semen” here, “semen” there, “semen” everywhere. The professor’s flat delivery and matter-of-fact monotone elicited yawns rather than curiosity.
At one point she dully stated, “Fructose comprises over seventy-five percent of semen.”
Lila’s hand shot up. “Then why doesn’t it taste sweet?” she asked with the earnestness of the entire South in her euphonic drawl.
A hush gathered over the room. The professor, an exceedingly proper and schoolmarmish spinster of fifty or more years, retorted, “Would that be your opinion from field research, Miss Priouleau?”
Lila looked at her classmates. They had all swiveled in their seats to gawk. Their eyes dilated wide with amazement, and their jaws hung slack with surprise. Lila pondered for a moment. She assessed the attention. As the stunned silence in the room gave way to belly laughs and fingers pointing in her direction, Lila knew what to do. She stood. She excused herself from the lecture. She pranced out of the room, her hips rocking like the haughtiest models from Madison Avenue.
On the way out she heard a woman from ZA, the rival sorority, call out, “You go, girl,” and more laughter followed.
By the next day word of Lila’s comment had spread all through the grapevine of Wellesley’s mafiosi. That was just the start. Given the osmotic flow between campuses and the yakety-yak among girlfriends and boyfriends, Lila’s seminal query soon became the stuff of legend at Harvard University.
“Why doesn’t it taste sweet?” No doubt later Lila drew on memories from that embarrassing lesson. She understood the sting of public humiliation when she hired a biplane with a banner to circle Hurley at the Yale Bowl.
“You don’t know awkward.”
That line sold me. I briefed Lila on the gay porn, avoiding any reference to Sam’s financial woes. Nor did I tell Lila about Patty Gershon and the events following my unfortunate discovery. They were none of her business.
“Tell Sam,” Lila counseled. “She deserves the truth.”
“What do I say? Charlie was ambisextrous?”
“That’s a start.”
“There’s no proof. All I have are a few Web hits.” Last night in the relative safety of my apartment, however, I had traced Charlie’s Internet history. It contained nothing but gay porn. There were no bank accounts, brokerage sites, or answers to the only questions that mattered.
Who killed Charlie? Where is his money?
“What if Charlie didn’t wear condoms?” Lila persisted.
“I don’t want to spoil things.”
“Spoil what?”
“Sam’s pregnant, Lila.”
“She’s what?”
Mistake.
“Two months. Let Sam tell you.”
“Pregnancy doubles the urgency, Grove. You tell her about Charlie.”
“I’d rather get the facts first.”
“What will you do? Call the webmasters and cancel the charges to his credit cards?”
Charlie never used credit cards.
“I’ll speak with Crunch.”
“Let’s continue this at the gym tomorrow night,” Lila said. “I want to discuss some business in person.”
Nice.
We agreed to take a spin class together. Lila’s conversation with Crunch had been a ray of sunshine. Her account would serve as a beachhead into the Priouleau family’s wealth. So I thought. Her talk of business, I would learn later, had nothing to do with Crunch’s comments about Coach or the other retailers they discussed.
After we hung up, my thoughts returned to the dark side of the last twenty-four hours. Charlie Kelemen had surprised me from the grave. Best friend, savior, and now a dead father—he had been the king of private eyes, the one who hired gumshoes and exposed Lila Priouleau’s ex. Charlie had sniffed out philanderers, rescued wives from infidelity and husbands from cuckoldry. He was the patron saint of underdogs, a fat guy who gave meaning to “good.” The image was a joke. Gay was okay. My issue was whether Charlie had cheated on Sam.
