Bitter Business (3 page)

“I have no idea and I don’t care. Why put a price on something that’s not for sale?”

“That may be, but when Daniel and I discussed Lydia’s letter this morning, we agreed that our first step should be to bring in a team of investment bankers to do a valuation of the company’s assets. I know that Lydia has never signed any kind of buyback agreement, but I assume that she’d still be willing to entertain an offer from the family, especially if the price was right.”

“You must not have heard me,” Cavanaugh growled. “I told you, Lydia’s not going to sell her shares.”

“I understand that as her father you know much better than I do what’s going on in her mind. But look at it another way. She hasn’t signed the buyback. She’s hired a lawyer. I’d say it’s just prudent to be prepared.”

“And I’m telling you that there is no way that Lydia is ever going to sell those shares.”

“How can you be so sure?” I demanded.

“Because,” Jack Cavanaugh announced grimly, “I’ll bum the whole damn company to the ground before I let that happen.”

When I got back to my office I found my secretary, Cheryl, waiting for me with a stack of messages and a pained expression on her face.

“Who are these Cavanaughs who keep calling?” she demanded, waving a wad of pink message slips at me as I passed her desk. “The phone has been ringing off the hook since you left. You’ve got messages from Dagny, Eugene, and someone named Philip, who is in need of some serious sphincter relaxation exercises. Are these people all related or something?”

“It’s a file I’ve picked up from Daniel Babbage,” I replied somewhat incoherently as I plunked myself down onto the familiar worn leather of my desk chair.

“Oh gee, just what we need around here, more work.” My secretary sighed, taking her customary seat and casting a weary glance at the files that lay in ramparts across my desk. “So what’s the deal with the Cavanaughs?”

“They own the Superior Plating and Specialty Chemicals Company. This morning one of the CEO’s children, his youngest daughter, Lydia, sent everyone a letter saying that she’s planning on selling her shares. I just came from a meeting with him.”

“How did it go?”

“I suggest you buckle up. This one’s going to be a royal pain in the ass.”

“Speaking of pains, your mother called while you were out.”

“What did she want?”

“You know she’d never tell me. She doesn’t believe in fraternizing with the help. She did say that she wants you to call her—it’s very, very important.” Cheryl rolled her eyes. “Ten to one they just got a new shipment of shoes at Neiman Marcus.”

Cheryl was a smart kid from Bridgeport who went to Loyola Law School at night. She’d been my secretary since I came to Callahan, and over the years had managed to develop her own brand of mother-daughter relationship with my mother, that is to say, Mother drove her crazy, too.

“What makes you think the Cavanaughs are going to be a pain?” demanded Cheryl. “I mean, besides the fact that they keep calling all the time.”

“So far I’ve only met Jack, but if he’s any indication, I’d rather wait awhile before I meet the rest of the family. Let’s say a year or two....”

“I hate to break it to you, but it’s going to be more like an hour or two.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve got a meeting with Dagny Cavanaugh at three-thirty. Madeline, Mr. Babbage’s secretary, set it up.”

“Are we doing it here?”

“No, at Superior Plating.”

“I guess you haven’t lived until you’ve seen a plating plant,” I groaned. “Wait a minute, don’t I already have something at three?”

“You had a meeting at three with Skip Tillman and the lawyers for Meteor Software, but it’s been moved up.”

“To when?”

Cheryl looked at her watch. “Forty-second-floor conference room in three minutes.”

“But I haven’t even had a chance to look at the file,” I protested. “I was going to do it this morning, but then this damn Cavanaugh thing came up.”

“I guess you’ll just have to fake it,” Cheryl advised. “You know how crazy Tillman gets if you’re late. Have you had anything to eat yet today?”

“Does bourbon count?”

“You’ve got to be kidding. I have half a corned beef sandwich in my desk. You can eat it in the elevator on the way up to the forty-second floor.”

“What would I ever do without you?”

“Miss your appointments, get lost, and starve to death,” was my secretary’s forthright reply.

I managed to leave the Meteor Software meeting in time for my meeting with Dagny Cavanaugh and with my reputation intact. Unfortunately, I also took away with me four pages of things that Skip Tillman had, with a nod of his patrician head, managed to dump in my lap.

I took State Street south from my office and followed Cheryl’s directions through the low-rent end of the loop into the working-class neighborhood that’s produced five of the city’s last six mayors. Bridgeport is an uneven enclave where tidy bungalows and comer taverns fill in the spaces between factories and vacant lots. I passed a meatpacking plant, a cardboard box company, and a lot filled with rusting scrap, including a couple of trucks and a city bus in various stages of disintegration.

I missed the plant the first time around. I was expecting to see a sign but there wasn’t one, so I ended up driving past it—a squat, windowless brick building set back from the street behind a ten-foot chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. Bits of newspaper had caught in the barbs and the shreds of newsprint undulated in the wind like seaweed rocked by an ocean current.

Inside, it wasn’t much better. A slack-jawed receptionist presided over a scarred Formica desk and a couple of chairs that looked like they’d been salvaged from the waiting room at the bus terminal. It was a wonder that Jack Cavanaugh didn’t get the bends every day going from the opulence of his house on Astor to the industrial shabbiness of his plant. I also thought it was a pretty safe bet that Peaches didn’t drop in on her husband at the office very often.

“Kate Millholland to see Dagny Cavanaugh,” I said.

The receptionist dragged her eyes from her copy of
Cosmopolitan.
“I’ll let them know you’re here,” she replied in a weary voice.

I wandered the perimeter of the waiting area, an expanse of brown linoleum surrounded by cinderblock walls that had been painted a depressing shade of yellow and hung with grainy photos of industrial goods. Family-owned companies, I knew, were less likely to squander money on nonessentials, and in a company like Superior Plating, where customers didn’t come around to call, the only place they’d give a damn about appearances would be the bottom line.

“You must be the lawyer who’s taking over for Daniel Babbage,” boomed a curt male voice as I examined a photograph of what I took to be a lamppost.

I turned to see a broad, battering ram of a man in his late thirties with a shock of black hair, a military bearing, and the imprint of Jack Cavanaugh on his face. He wore navy-blue work clothes, immaculately pressed. The hand he extended was clean, but so callused that when I shook, it did not feel warm, only dry and hard.

“I’m Kate Millholland,” I said.

“Eugene Cavanaugh,” he replied. “Around here they call me Gene. Dagny’s still with the auditors. She asked me to show you around.” He cast a disapproving eye over my clothes. “Are those the only shoes you’ve got?”

“I don’t mind if they get dirty.”

“Good. They’re going to.” He handed me a pair of safety goggles and reached around the back of the reception desk and pulled out a scuffed white hard hat. “Put these on,” he instructed sternly. “Visitors have to wear them in the plant.”

I did as I was told and immediately felt ridiculous. My expensive suit of plum-colored wool and my Ferragamo pumps—things that conveyed authority in my world— seemed frivolous and ridiculously out of place here. I followed Eugene down a narrow corridor and through a set of double doors.

“I don’t know if you know anything about our business,” he said, his tone implying a certainty that I did not, “but we’re a metal plating operation—mostly chrome and bronze. Occasionally we do some gold, but generally there’s not much call for it.”

“What about specialty chemicals?” I asked. “How much of your business is done by that division?”

“Like I said, we’re a plating operation. Specialty chemicals are just a sideline.”

I followed him into a large area that reminded me of the work bays in an auto garage. There was the same rock music playing too loud on an unseen transistor radio, the same concrete floor stained with motor oil. In one comer a first-aid kit was bolted to the wall between a fire extinguisher and a greasy, dog-eared safety poster. Wooden pallets loaded with cardboard boxes ringed the walls. Men in dark blue coveralls were slitting open the boxes, pulling out what looked like car wheels. Catching sight of Eugene, the workers sharpened up perceptibly— casual conversation evaporated and everything moved a half step faster.

“You see how dull the finish is on those?” asked Eugene, pointing to the wheels that, once out of their boxes, were being loaded onto a conveyor belt. “They’re made of aluminum. We polish them and plate them so that they’re shiny like you see on cars in the street. That belt takes them into the polishing room.”

I followed him into another area separated by a large, overhead garage door. In it, workers muffled to the eyes bent over powerful polishing lathes. The noise was deafening. Sparks flew. Despite the fact that the machinery gave off a lot of heat, the men all wore heavy hooded sweatshirts under their coveralls, which they topped with baseball caps, protective goggles, and bandannas tied around the lower half of their faces. On their hands they wore thick work gloves. In the entire room there was not one inch of exposed skin. The walls, the ceiling, the floor, even the men were all covered with a gray metallic dust.

“That’s aluminum dust,” bellowed Eugene, looking down at my shoes, which, along with my stockings, were completely covered with gray film. “They’re removing all the irregularities from the metal surface. The plated finish is only as good as the polish job.”

I picked my way carefully across the work floor and followed Eugene through a doorway hung with long strips of clear plastic that kept the aluminum dust from escaping the polishing area. We walked down a short hall in which someone had dumped the bench seat from an old truck. It was obviously used as a couch by workers on break. Above it hung a hand-lettered sign: THIS CORNER IS NOT A GARBAGE DUMP. PICK UP YOUR TRAHS OR GET SHOT!

Eugene pulled open a heavy sliding door at the other end. The smell was like a slap in the face, pungent and corrosive. In the uneven light from hanging strips of neon tubing and whatever feeble sunlight made its way through the grimy skylights were a series of rectangular tanks each about six feet wide, eight feet deep, and twenty feet long. They looked old. The outsides were scaled with corroded metal and the green traces of acid. Around the perimeter ran a rickety wooden platform under which fluid, an unhealthy shade of green, stood in brackish pools.

“This is one of our four chrome plating lines. The unfinished goods are put on racks, which are moved from tank to tank by a hoist-and-crane system,” said Eugene, pointing toward the ceiling. “It’s basically a four-step process with a rinse in between each step. The first tank is a heavy-duty industrial cleaner that’s heated to one hundred and sixty degrees. Whatever is being plated goes from the polishing room into there first so that we can be sure that it’s free from any grease or dust that’ll interfere with the process. From there it goes into the second tank that’s filled with water and then into the etching tank— that’s this one here, which contains caustic soda that’s also heated. The idea is to take away the first layer of aluminum or steel—again, to make sure you have a very clean, smooth surface to plate. Once it’s been etched, it’s rinsed again and then it goes into that fifth tank over there, which is the tri-acid oxidizer. That’s the desmutting step. It gets rid of any smut or trace elements that are still on the metal surface. Then it’s rinsed again and goes into the chrome bath. Come up here and take a look.”

I followed him up the pitted wooden steps onto the walkway, weakened over time by dripping acid, that ran along the side of the tanks. Overhead, rusted metal fans spat and clanked while the heat from the chemical tanks pushed up past my face like a fetid desert wind. Eugene stopped in front of the last tank and rested both hands casually on the edge. One of his sleeves was pushed back, exposing a tattoo of a snake. It circled his wrist and slithered up the inside of his arm. I looked down into the tank. It was filled with hot, bubbling liquid a brilliant shade of yellow—chrome yellow, in fact. It looked like the kind of thing you’d show pictures of to children in order to frighten them about hell.

“What’s your safety record like?” I asked, stepping back from the edge.

“We have guys from OSHA and EPA through here every day. In the last twenty-five years we’ve only had one serious accident, and there was no question of it being our fault.”

“What happened?”

“One of our workers forgot his paycheck at the plant one Friday a few years back. That night, after about a dozen beers, he decided he couldn’t wait until Monday to come get it. He and a couple of his buddies came by here, broke a window, and climbed in to retrieve it. Nobody knows exactly how it happened—they were all so drunk—but one of them tripped and fell into this very vat.”