Bitter Business (32 page)

“Christ!” I exclaimed, the time hitting me like cold water. “You told me ten minutes! I have to be back at the office by six. I have to go!”

“You can’t!” he exclaimed, taken aback. “Not until you tell me.”

“Stephen,” I replied, suddenly in motion, “I’ve got three lawyers, five investment bankers, and two secretaries who are being paid overtime waiting for me back at the office. We can talk about this later.”

Then I stood up on tiptoe, kissed the end of his chin, and was out the door.

I began the meeting with the bankers from Goodman Peabody in a preoccupied state of mind. A part of me was still intoxicated by the apartment. Besides being a true architectural gem, it was like being offered the best piece of my childhood back as a present. But try as I might to beat them back, there were other voices in my head, voices that wondered about a man who tells you that he wants to live with you but can’t scrape up the words to tell you why. Voices that questioned what a man who felt easy making a unilateral decision about buying a multi-million-dollar co-op knew about equality in a relationship between a man and a woman. And a terrible little voice, an echo of Mother at her worst, who whispered that he only wanted my name on the mailbox to grease the way with the co-op board, who might not hesitate to blackball the son of an Italian businessman whose father was rumored to have ties to organized crime.

Fortunately, before too long, the investment bankers launched a fusillade of technical issues with regard to a sale of all or part of Superior Plating that forced me to turn my mind to the matter at hand. By the time we had sorted them out and had developed a plan of action to carry us over the next few days, it was after nine o’clock.

When I got back to my office I found a note from the switchboard. Stephen had called to say that he was taking a night flight to Geneva and did not expect to return until late Friday night. That explained his insistence that I see the apartment before he left. Relief flooded through me. More than anything else, I needed time and space to think.

I was wired from the meeting with the bankers and still reeling from Stephen’s little surprise. I knew that if I went home, sleep would be next to impossible. I called home hoping that Claudia wasn’t working and I would find her there. I wanted to hear what she had to say about Stephen and the apartment, but it was the answering machine, not my roommate, that picked up after four rings.

Rather than going home to the empty apartment, I took my shoes off, clipped my Walkman to my belt, slipped an old U2 CD into the machine, and set to work on the small monument of Superior Plating files. The oldest ones were the most interesting, just for their glimpse back into time: typewritten pages blotched with Wite-Out reminding me that there had been a time without computers or even self-correcting typewriters; carbon copies smudged and faded; handwritten notes from Jack’s father, who was as uneducated as he was tough. I flipped through the oldest boxes just to say, if challenged, that I’d done it. The nitty-gritty of actually inventorying the contents I’d leave to Cheryl. Once she was done with this term’s exams, I’d have her come in over the weekend. I knew she’d be grateful for the overtime.

It wasn’t until I came to the pile of things that Madeline had turned up in Daniel’s office that my task got interesting. The material fell into two categories: private documents that fit into no neat category in a corporate file, and memorabilia. In the former category were the records that made up the kind of client’s dirty laundry that every lawyer accumulates over the years: personal-loan documents between Jack Cavanaugh and his children—Dagny seemed to have been the only one who’d never had to go to her dad for money; a document setting up something called the Zebediah Hooker trust to the sum of one hundred thousand dollars, signed by Jack Cavanaugh and witnessed by Daniel Babbage more than twenty-five years ago; even a copy of Jack and Peaches’s prenuptial agreement, surprising in that it had obviously been drafted to protect her assets from Jack and his children, not the other way around. I also came across a file jammed with bank records, including a set that appeared to pertain to the payment of some sort of ongoing annuity through a Georgia bank. I put it with the old trust agreement with a note to ask Madeline about them later.

The cardboard box that held memorabilia was the most interesting of the lot. There were old photographs, some of them black-and-white and crumbling with age. They were all of Daniel Babbage with various members of the Cavanaugh clan. There was a young Jack Cavanaugh, his hair a sandy brown and his brow less wrinkled, but with the same bulldog expression, his arm flung around Daniel’s much-younger shoulders. There was Daniel in hunting attire, shouldering a twelve-gauge shotgun and surrounded by teenaged Cavanaugh boys. I recognized the barn at Tall Pines in the background and the unformed features of Philip and Eugene. Eugene was gazing adoringly at a tall youngster with broad shoulders and a winning smile who I assumed was Jimmy Cavanaugh, the older brother who’d died trying to rescue Grace Swinton from drowning. I tried to guess from the picture how old they all were and decided that Jimmy couldn’t have been more than fifteen, which would have meant the photo was taken about a year before the tragedy.

There were more recent photos as well. Snapshots of Daniel shaking hands with Eugene in military uniform. Yellowing thank-you notes written in a child’s shaking hand, speaking of gratitude for a birthday gift and signed by Mary Beth, Eugene’s oldest. More recently there was a copy of an article about Peaches clipped from the newspaper, under the headline TV REPORTER STALKED BY DERANGED FAN, and another follow-up piece detailing the arrest of a west-side food-service worker who’d broken into Peaches’s north-side apartment claiming to be her estranged husband. I read it with interest, but it seemed like tabloid stuff.

I found a photograph of Dagny and Claire, both still in climbing harness, standing arm in arm in jubilation at the summit of some mountain, and a copy of an engraved invitation to the party celebrating Jack and Peaches’s first wedding anniversary. No doubt to help Daniel overcome his well-known aversion to parties, Dagny had written on the front of the invitation in her bold hand:
It just won’t be the same without you!

I sat looking at the invitation for a long time, seeing a kind of epitaph in her words. Finally, I set the card upright against the base of my desk lamp, propped the photograph of Dagny and Claire beside it, and forced myself to move on to another file.

27

Lydia refused to come to my office, so I had to go to hers. The new offices of the Illinois Foundation for Women were in a building on Wacker Drive where the Chicago River bends south just opposite the Merchandise Mart. They were still in the process of moving into their new space, so our conversation was punctuated by painters walking through with ladders and telephone installers asking questions about where Lydia wanted the lines put in. But I suspected that Lydia could not wait to show off her new digs—currently in the process of being painted an alarming shade of salmon, in order, she explained, to counterbalance the bright tones of the aquamarine carpeting currently rolled up in the hallway. I thought the whole thing was going to end up looking like the waiting room of a color-blind gynecologist, but I didn’t say so. This was, I reflected, my final peacemaking attempt with Jack’s wayward daughter and I wanted at least to get started on the right foot.

Lydia was in her element, parading from empty office to empty office, explaining which artists she planned on funding and laying out her grandiose plans for herself in her new role as feminist patroness of the arts. She’d changed her looks completely from the time I’d last seen her, which was at her sister’s funeral. Today she wore a black jumper over a black T-shirt, black tights, and a pair of brand-new black Doc Martens. Her hair hung straight and didn’t look like it had been brushed recently. She’d changed from the elaborate makeup she’d worn to emulate Peaches to plain white powder and generously applied lipstick in a particularly dramatic shade of dark red. I wondered how Peter felt about the fact that his mother suddenly looked as though she’d just raided one of his girlfriends’ closets. He was probably used to it. His whole life had no doubt been spent watching his mother’s attempts to reinvent herself.

Lydia was clearly enjoying herself. From behind an enormous desk of polished teak in an otherwise vacant office, she sat posed as if for an audience of reporters. She had already hired a woman from Los Angeles, she explained in the voice of announcement, to edit a woman’s alternative-healing newsletter. Its focus would be on ways to rechannel negative energy and the use of herbal cures for stress-related disorders like migraines and cancer. As I tried to keep my face under control and stifle an almost overpowering desire to laugh, I reminded myself that I was temperamentally unfit for this kind of law practice. Daniel had been wrong about me. I was not a sympathetic listener and I certainly wasn’t very forgiving—especially when it came to fools like Lydia.

“How are you going to get your funding?” I broke in, cutting her short on the subject of domestic violence. From her rambling discourse, it was impossible to tell if she believed that it was caused by a kind of mental illness that afflicted only the male of the species or was a symptom of men’s financial oppression of women. Personally, I couldn’t imagine what Lydia knew about either.

“Naturally, the Republicans are cutting off funds for any kind of meaningful programs for social change,” she replied bitterly, “so we’re going to have to raise the money privately. I am personally funding the initial phase of the foundation’s work, but if we are to institute the kinds of sweeping programs that are so necessary, we’re going to have to raise substantial amounts of money. Right now we’re still evaluating our fund-raising alternatives.”

“I confess I’m curious about the evolution of your feminist conscience,” I said, trying hard to sound earnest. “What exactly is it that made you decide to launch the foundation at this point in time?”

“I came to be under the care of the most wonderful therapist. She’s the one who really helped me to understand the issues of my life, especially how they relate to my family in terms of the feminist class struggle. She suggested that as part of my therapy I do volunteer work at a battered women’s shelter. Unfortunately, because of the twins, I was only able to work there one afternoon, but I’m telling you, that afternoon completely changed my life. I can’t begin to express how strongly I related to those poor, abused women. I knew instantly that we were sisters under the skin.”

I had no doubt that if Lydia succeeded in selling her shares, she would soon be parted from the money. And it didn’t bother me that Jack would end up footing the bill one way or another. But it seemed too bad that the proceeds were going to be frittered away on sculptures about menstruation and a crackpot newsletter instead of her “sisters under the skin” at the shelter.

“I admire your ambition,” I said, I hoped sincerely. “But as you’ve probably guessed, I’ve come to talk to you about your family’s business. Your father asked me to speak to you today. He is desperate to make peace with you. I’m sure you realize how much he loves you. He sent me to find out what it will take to mend this rift between you.”

“Ten million dollars,” Lydia answered in a hard voice without a moment’s hesitation. “I’ve been through the numbers with my hankers and that’s the price I want for my shares. Once my business is concluded, we can go back to being family as family. But until I get my ten million, there is no way that I can separate the two.”

“I’m sure you know that the company hasn’t concluded its own independent valuation,” I protested, “but I’ll tell you right now I think it’s unlikely that they’ll come anywhere close to ten million as a fair market price for your shares.”

“That’s your problem.”

“I understand that you want the money for a good cause,” I said, giving diplomacy my best shot for Daniel’s sake, “so naturally you want to get top dollar. But you have to be realistic. There just aren’t that many people out there who are interested in a minority stake in a family-owned company.”

“My bankers ran the numbers based on two different scenarios,” she reported. I found it disconcerting to be talking about a multimillion-dollar deal for shares in an industrial concern with a woman who looked like an aging groupie for some sort of grunge band—especially since she’d looked like a Nancy Reagan wannabe the week before. “They said that it would not be inconceivable to net ten million dollars for my shares if the entire company were sold.”

“But no one has said anything about selling the company,” I protested. I was confident that Jack Cavanaugh’s talk of a sale the day before was the desperate rambling of a grieving man. I certainly didn’t want to give it any more credibility by repeating it in front of Lydia.

“I don’t care if people think I’m being unreasonable,” Lydia replied, haughtily. “I want my money out of the company and I want ten million dollars for my shares. I might be willing to consider a lower offer from an outsider, but as far as my family is concerned, the price is ten million dollars or nothing.”

I got to my feet and reached for my briefcase, thanking Lydia Cavanaugh for her time. I’d seen enough of Jack’s youngest daughter not to be completely taken aback, but I was still surprised. I’d come to discuss a fair price for her shares, not blackmail.

When I got back to the office there was a stack of phone messages and twelve yellow roses arrayed in a crystal vase. The card was from Stephen. All it said was
Thinking of you.
The messages were less remarkable, but I was pleased that they included one from Nora Masterson asking me to join her and Claire for their first meeting over dinner the next day. According to Cheryl, Nora hoped that the presence of someone Claire already knew would put the teenager more at ease. When Cheryl added that we’d be dining at the Hard Rock Café, I knew that I’d picked the right lawyer for the job. I told Cheryl to check my calendar and tell her that I’d be there. Also I needed to see Daniel Babbage’s secretary for fifteen min-utes later that afternoon if there was some time that Cheryl could squeeze her in. I continued flipping through the pink phone slips, dealing them into piles—urgent, must call, leave until tomorrow, delegate—like cards at solitaire. When I came to the message from a Dr. Roger Dorskey, I put the rest of them down and reached for the phone. I didn’t know anyone by that name, but I recognized the number as being from Azor Pharmaceuticals and the message said he’d called about test results.