Bitter Business (18 page)

I made a quick stop at Big Jim’s Tobacco Shop under the bridge beside the train station. The backbone of Big Jim’s trade was rolling papers and boxes of blunts— cheap cigars that the neighborhood dopers soaked with whiskey, hollowed out, and filled with hash. But he was happy to sell me two of his best cigars, Paul Garmierian double coronas, each in its own pale cream cylinder, sealed with red wax.

Back at my apartment I showered quickly, dressed for the office, and twisting my still-wet hair into its usual French twist, packed as best as I could for my trip to Georgia. I had no idea what Tall Pines plantation would be like and, under the circumstances, had nobody I felt comfortable asking. I chose a dark suit for the funeral and then tried to cover the rest of the bases as best I could, stuffing everything into the hanging bag I used for overnight trips.

I flagged a cab down in front of the apartment and had the driver stop at Billings Hospital. I told him that I wanted him to keep the meter running. I had a ten o’clock meeting with the in-house counsel for Azor Pharmaceuticals and the lawyers from the firm that was representing Gordimer A.G. in the pending joint venture with Stephen’s company—-but I wanted to see Daniel before I left for Georgia.

I stood in the doorway of the hospital room, clutching the cigars, and I knew instantly that he’d never smoke them. Daniel looked like he was sleeping, but I could tell from listening to him that it was unlikely he’d ever awaken. His breaths were slow and shallow—after each one I waited, straining to hear if there would be another. When he finally exhaled it was with a rattle from deep in his throat.

A nurse was with him, busily checking his blood pressure.

“How is he?” I asked.

“Are you a relative?”

“No. Just a colleague.”

“He’s resting comfortably.”

I nodded, knowing full well what that meant.

I arrived at Azor’s corporate headquarters on South Michigan with my briefcase in one hand and my suitcase in the other. I parked the suitcase with Tamara, the beautiful Eurasian woman who manned the reception desk and made almost twice what Cheryl did because Stephen thought that she went well with the Art Deco decor.

Stephen did not come to the meeting—it was lawyers only—but he caught me in the hall before I went in and drew me around the comer, away from the attorneys for the Swiss. I stood against the wall between two abstract paintings that I particularly disliked. Stephen rested one of his massive hands on my shoulder and I felt overwhelmed by the sheer size of him.

“Cheryl told me that another woman died at Superior Plating. What happened?”

“Nobody knows. It might have been some sort of industrial accident.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m hanging in there,” I assured him, wondering whether it was concern for me, or for the negotiations with Gordimer, that had prompted the question.

“Come home with me tonight,” he said, dropping his voice to one notch above a whisper, his baritone so deep that some of the softer notes got lost. “I’ll make you dinner.”

“I can’t,” I answered with real regret. “I’m flying down to Georgia for Dagny Cavanaugh’s funeral. But I’ll be back in time for the party for Grandma Prescott.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

* * *

I was deep into a mind-numbing conversation about the relative capital depreciation structures of the United States and Switzerland when Stephen’s secretary slipped me a note to call my office. I excused myself and ducked into a small room that had been set up with a desk and phone for just such occasions.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Kate,” said Cheryl, who’d obviously been waiting for my call, “but I’ve got some guy named Cliff Schaeffer on the phone. He says that he’s Lydia Cavanaugh’s attorney and he will not take no for an answer. He says it’s urgent and he absolutely has to speak to you.”

“Can you connect him or do I have to call him back?”

“I think the switchboard here can connect you. Hang on.” I waited through dead air and a series of clicks before a male voice bellowed, “Schaeffer here.”

“Hi, Cliff. It’s Kate Millholland. What’s the crisis?”

“The first round of documents that Superior Plating is required to furnish to my client under section eleven-eight of the Illinois Shareholder Protection Act were due on my desk at nine o’clock this morning. I have no choice but to interpret their nondeliverance as a sign of bad faith on your part.”

“Hold your horses, Cliff. First of all, I don’t think that ‘nondeliverance’ is actually a word. Second, I don’t know how closely you’ve been in contact with your client, but in case you haven’t heard, her sister died on Wednesday.”

“I fail to see what that has to do with it.”

“Well, for one thing, Dagny Cavanaugh was the chief financial officer of Superior Plating and Specialty Chemicals, and since most of the documents were in her safekeeping, I’d say that her death slows things down a bit.”

“Don’t tell me she was the only one who knew how to work the photocopier,” Schaeffer snapped sarcastically. Lydia’s attorney had a reputation for being a hyperactive pit bull of an advocate, a man whose glaring personality defects were only justified by his ability to get results. He was pugnacious, argumentative, and suffered from an inflated opinion of his own skills, and I was in no mood to take his shit.

“Don’t pull this plaintiffs lawyer crap with me, Schaeffer,” I hissed. His indignation may have been an act designed to rile me, but there was nothing artificial about my anger. “I won’t get into the gutter with you. In the end you’ll be in the dirt all by your little self. I’m going to say this really slowly so that I’m sure you understand. Dagny’s death is going to slow things down. If you don’t think your client can live with that, I suggest you call her and ask her. But I’d do it soon. She leaves at four o’clock to fly to Georgia for the funeral.”

“For your information, Ms. Millholland,” he said, dragging the first syllable out until it sounded like a buzz saw, “I just got off the phone with my client ten minutes ago and she says that if you try to use her sister’s death as an excuse to delay production of the information we’ve requested, she wants me to file suit. Now, would you like me to repeat that for you slowly, or did you get it the first time?”

I found Ken Kurlander giving shorthand to his secretary in a voice that carried the seriousness of a benediction. He made a great show of interrupting what he was doing on my account. Ken was one of those partners who have been with the firm so long that they actually believed their comer offices imbued them with sovereignty. All those old guys are the same with their acres of calf-bound law books and their monster views. They drive me crazy.

“Did your secretary deliver the copy of Dagny Cavanaugh’s will that I gave her?” he asked.

“Yes, she did. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I was wondering if you knew what was behind Dagny’s decision to name her brother Eugene executor of her estate?”

“As you say, he was her brother,” Kurlander replied, playing coy.

“I know. But I’d have thought that Philip would be the more obvious brother to choose. After all, we’re talking about managing a considerable number of assets, not the least of which are the shares in Superior Plating. Assuming that Dagny believed it likely that she would survive her father, Philip is the only other family member that has the financial skills for the job. And if I know you, Ken, you laid that out pretty straight with her. So the question remains—why didn’t she choose Philip?”

“Eugene’s wife, Vy, took care of Claire from the time she was an infant so that Dagny could go back to work. Claire is exactly the same age as Vy and Eugene’s oldest daughter, Mary Beth. From what I gather, the two girls are almost like sisters. In Dagny’s mind there was never any question that Eugene and Vy would be named Claire’s guardians.”

“I understand,” I replied, wondering whether Kurlander was being deliberately obtuse. “That’s not what’s bothering me. Let me put it another way. Dagny Cavanaugh was the chief financial officer of a large manufacturing company. In short, exactly the sort of person you’d expect to be a very savvy testamentary planner. So why did she leave control over her only daughter’s financial future to the least educated, and arguably least capable member of her family? Why not give guardianship to Eugene and Vy, but name Philip executor?”

“Dagny and I did discuss that possibility at length, but in the end she decided against it.”

“Was she afraid that there would be friction between Eugene and Philip over what was best for Claire?”

“There is always that danger when one person has the authority to make decisions about matters of travel and education and someone else controls the money, but that wasn’t the overriding concern.”

“What was?”

Kurlander clasped his hands together and leaned forward across the polished surface of his desk. “Dagny did not want her brother Philip to control that many shares of Superior Plating stock, even temporarily,” he breathed confidentially. “She was afraid that if her father died and left his shares divided among his four children, and then she passed away before Claire turned eighteen, Philip would have effective control of fifty percent of the shares if he were Claire’s trustee.”

“And she felt that would make him too powerful in the company?”

“She feared that Philip would make any kind of deal he could with either of the surviving siblings in order to gain complete control of the company—even if it meant not acting in Claire’s best interest.”

I thanked Ken for his time and walked slowly back to my own office. The Medicis, I reflected, did not live in a world more filled with intrigue.

15

It was an awkward group that gathered in the passenger lounge of the executive terminal at Midway Airport. Earlier in the day Jack and Peaches had taken the Superior Plating jet to accompany Dagny’s body to Tall Pines. Jack had chartered a plane to take the rest of the family down, and confronted with the Cavanaughs en masse, I was sorry I wasn’t flying alone on some anonymous, commercial flight.

Philip’s wife, Sally, acted as self-appointed hostess, making introductions and filling me in on the details of the travel arrangements. We were, she pointedly explained, still waiting for Lydia and her family. From her tone of voice it was clear that waiting for Lydia was something at which the rest of the Cavanaugh clan had a great deal of practice.

Sally Cavanaugh was everything that Elliott had said— a stem, large-knuckled woman with parade-ground posture and disciplined hair. Looking at her, I couldn’t decide which was more incredible—that Philip had waited until meeting Cecilia Dobson to seek the comforts of another woman, or that he’d gotten up the courage to do it at all. He actually seemed careful when he was near her, the way you would be around a large, bad-tempered dog.

I had not seen Eugene since those few moments right after Dagny died. He still seemed pulled taut by grief, and my heart went out to him. He paced restlessly along the perimeter of the waiting area, a pair of hunting dogs slavishly at his heels. Eugene’s wife, Vy, a girlish woman with long brown hair and a simple cotton dress, sat quietly in the background, surrounded by her children. I counted six—from the oldest, Mary Beth, who was Claire’s age, all the way down to a little boy, still in diapers, who toddled happily between his father, the dogs, and the rest of his family, a toy truck clutched in each chubby fist. Between Vy and Mary Beth sat Claire. The three women seemed ill with grief.

When Lydia finally arrived it was like the circus pulling into town. Three taxis drew onto the tarmac outside the gate. Arthur emerged from the first as soon as it came to a stop, sauntered disinterestedly into the waiting area, and wordlessly pulled a cellular phone from his pocket and began dialing.

Lydia was left to supervise the unloading of what looked like enough paraphernalia for a yearlong cruise—strollers, car seats, boxes of diapers, duffel bags, tricycles, and one of every piece of luggage made by Louis Vuitton. Two-year-old twins seemed to escape from one of the taxis, their faces smeared with chocolate, and were pursued by their harried au pair. Peter brought up the rear, sullen and wretched. Vy made room for him beside his cousins—a heart-wrenching reunion of the Mount McKinley Expedition.

Lydia made her entrance preceded by three hyperactive shih tzus, whose barking escalated to a frenzy at the sight of Eugene’s dogs. The pointers, who had turned to assert their domination over the newcomers, dropped to the floor at a single word from Eugene. In the meantime Lydia’s dogs ran in circles around each other, threatening to hang themselves on their leashes.

By the time we all finally boarded the Jet Stream, it was packed to the bursting point. In the air, the twins seemed intent on occupying every minute of the flight running up and down the aisle with their grimy hands and runny noses, alternately taunting their exasperated relatives and their mother’s yappy little dogs. By the time we touched down in Tallahassee, we were all scrambling over each other to get off the plane.

Three identical minivans had been sent to pick us up. Lydia’s family took the first one while Vy and Eugene loaded their well-mannered brood and Claire into the second. I rode with Philip, Sally, and Lydia’s overflow baggage.

Up until this point my entire experience of the South had consisted of trips to my grandmother’s house in Palm Beach and one wild, sketchily recollected road trip to the Kentucky Derby with three friends during college. I found myself completely unprepared for how beautiful it was. After the eternity of the Chicago winter and the indifference of the Chicago spring, the warm Florida air was like a fragrant blessing. I rolled down the window of the van and drank it in.