Madeline Carter - 01 - Mad Money (34 page)

I had little doubt that the Paul Westbrook
on the business card Arianna had shown me was the Paul I’d known.
And the significance of that name in Arianna — and formerly Ernie’s
— possession was now fairly clear. Paul had been a part of this all
along. I felt I should have known that. Time passes, you change and
you think everyone around you has changed, as well. And, in this
case, it looks like they had. But the thing between Paul and Ernie
seemed to have deepened, not been outgrown.

Just seeing Paul again had brought back a
lot of things that I thought I’d buried pretty efficiently. Paul
and Ernie. Ernie and Paul. In the quiet of the early morning hours,
with a little sleep behind me, things were beginning to make sense.
And then there was Anne Rand. What had
that
been about? I
knew I had to see Arianna. And that meant I had to find her. But
first, there were some things I needed to do.

I looked at the clock. Six-thirty. Too early
to call the sheriff's office to discover what they’d found back at
Camp Arrowheart: that would have to wait until later. But early
meant that traffic would be light and I could probably make it home
in under an hour. I pulled Emily’s sundress and sandals back on,
balled my crusty clothes up and stuffed them into a plastic
shopping bag I found under the sink (only half kidding when I
thought I should probably just go ahead and burn them), left a note
thanking Emily for her shelter, clothes and friendship and
reminding her to call me as soon as she’d talked to Corby. And
then, with a single and predictable stop at Starbucks for a latté
to go, Tycho and I were back on the road.

Chapter Twenty

I was surprised to see the FedEx package
stuffed into my door when I came home. I flipped it over as I
unlocked the door: the sender was listed as S. Shoenberger,
Lawrenceville, New Jersey. Sarah.

I couldn’t imagine what Sarah might be
sending me, but I steeled myself before I ripped the package open,
anticipating something that would make me sob. Pictures, maybe, of
me and Jackson. Or even a nice portrait of Jack. Or Jack and Sarah.
The kids.

I plopped the unopened FedEx pack in the
middle of the living room floor and circled it uneasily while I
went about getting myself together: putting my forest-stained
clothes from the day before into the laundry basket, getting the
coffee machine ready for the day. When I got out of the shower,
fresh-brewed coffee perfuming the air, the FedEx pack glinted at me
evilly from where I’d left it.

“Oh this is stupid,” I said aloud. Tycho
thumped his tail at me, mutely agreeing. I hunkered down next to
the package, ripped it open, then sat staring at the contents. I
knew what I was looking at, but not why Sarah would be sending it
to me.

Then a note in Sarah’s neat, schoolteachery
handwriting, caught my eye. Her tone was formal, but I understood
that.

Dear Madeline,

I can imagine that this package will come as
a surprise to you. When you mentioned the name on the phone, it was
unexpected and, even then, I couldn’t be sure. It seemed like too
much of a coincidence to believe. I had to go and check.

And now you have everything in your hand.
Jackson’s “weekend project,” as he liked to call it. You’ll see he
had his eye on your old friend for quite some time. You’ll note
from the clippings I’ve added (the most recent ones) that he might
even have indirectly had a hand in what happened to Jack.

Madeline, this was Jackson’s pet project for
so long, I almost couldn’t stand to let it go. But it sounds like
it will be more useful to you than the emotional flaying is doing
for me.

I hope you’re well. Come see us soon.
Failing that you might have the three of land on your doorstep one
day soon. We’ll make you take us to Disneyland.

Love...

Sarah

Jackson’s pet project floored me. A regular
FedEx envelope filled almost to bursting with company stats,
newspaper and magazine clippings and SEC filings. These last were
the most interesting, mainly SEC exemptions that several of the
companies that Ernie had been involved with had applied for and
mostly gotten: Exemptions that had been draped in innocent language
that, if viewed a certain way, might have had far-reaching effects
for the companies involved and their shareholders.

From the look of the paperwork that spilled
out of that FedEx package, Jackson had been following Ernie’s
career and the trades related to it for at least five years and,
from the type of stuff he’d been collecting, he’d been doing it in
order to prepare a case for the SEC.

I knew I hadn’t mentioned Ernie to Jack for
years: almost a decade. When the two of us had started at
Merriwether Bailey we’d both been so young and my Ernie wounds were
still relatively fresh. I thought Jack had forgotten all about it,
the way you forget someone else’s bad headache. I touched the
papers again, almost reverently, feeling Jack in the sharp edge of
every page.

“He didn’t forget,” I said softly, realizing
there were tears on my checks. I don’t even know when I’d started
crying.

I could tell the items that Sarah had
contributed, because they’d been added after Jackson’s death. One
was a photocopy of Jackson’s killer’s final account statement with
Merriwether Bailey — I could only guess how Sarah had gotten her
hands on
that
— and it indicated a huge loss on Salt Spring
Technologies, the company I knew Ernie had been CEO of about two
jobs ago. While SST was rising, the shooter had Jackson buy a huge
whack of shares on his behalf, against Jack’s advice. When the
stock had started to flag, Jackson had told him again to sell, but
the client had him buy still more. I’d probably never know how
Jackson had managed to connect Ernie to these shaky deals, the
press hadn’t thus far. But it stood to reason that if Jack had,
there were likely others who had, as well. That alone might have
been a good enough reason for Ernie to want to make himself
disappear.

With shards of Jackson’s handwriting and
signs of his deep interest all around me, I could feel his presence
very strongly. It was as if he was in the room. I could almost hear
his voice:
We’ll get him, Carter.
I whispered it back to him
now: “We’ll get him, Jack.”

Along with being a fairly complete dossier
on at least the top end of Ernest Carmichael Billing’s shady
dealings, Jack’s files presented me with possibilities for
connections that I’d previously missed.

I’d been looking at what was apparent and
supposing I had the whole picture. Jack’s files made me think about
Paul and Ernie, how they’d been when I’d known both of them well.
Over this I juxtaposed the snippet of conversation I’d heard
between them yesterday. It felt like a metaphor: what I’d heard
wasn’t real, just as it was quite possible that what could be seen
from the surface over the years between college and now wasn’t what
had been happening at all. Layers of deception. Shades of gray.
Sleight of hand and weight of air and nothing is what it seems.

Here’s what could be seen on the surface:
Paul and Ernie graduate. Paul goes away and does whatever it is he
was supposed to have been doing but — and here’s the salient bit —
he does it separate from Ernie. Ernie grows up to become this savvy
business dude who saves poor little struggling companies. Boys grow
up. After a while you outgrow each other, go separate ways, lead
your life. That’s what’s
supposed
to happen.

But I had a sudden sense — call it gut,
intuition or whatever you want — that what the world saw didn’t,
when it came to these two guys, reflect anything real at all.

In support of the material I now had from
Jack-via-Sarah, I did a Web search on Ernie. Fortunately, his name
was not Bill Smith or I would have been out of luck. But there are
simply not a lot of Ernest Carmichael Billings running around out
there. Every search response I got was relevant. And, with the
exception of a few society notices announcing his wedding,
engagement and the death of his father-in-law, they were all around
his various daring and impressive business exploits. I jotted down
the names of the companies as they came up and downloaded whatever
data I could find on his techniques as a savior. Then, armed with
dates, I went to my market data and started plugging stuff in and —
with Jackson’s research filling in a few holes — piecing things
together.

As I had expected, the surface data looked
good. Without exception, Ernie had brought each company he signed
on with greater glory and faster returns. All lined up, though,
that was the weird part. The first company had been just a couple
of years after our graduation. Too early, really, to be brought in
as a superstar, but there it was.

Publicly traded, the company made outboard
motors and lawnmowers and their paper was in such bad shape when
Ernie came on board that they were in danger of being delisted.
Then some virtuoso management shuffling, a sharp eye here, a well
placed kick there and, within six months, their papers were
pristine, the stock exchange was smiling at them again and Ernie’s
face was getting plastered in minor business rags as the fledgling
wunderkind of the turnaround.

That was the surface. That’s what you saw at
a casual — even careful — glance. But the market data showed a
different story. I noted that, without exception, trading volumes
went up almost as soon as Ernie took over the CEO’s chair. Most of
this new volume didn’t show up as insider action — that is, trades
made by officers of the companies in question and filed with EDGAR,
the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Electronic Data Gathering,
Analysis, and Retrieval system — which meant that — one way or
another, the new volume was coming from outside of the company.

Within three months, the company’s
price/earnings ratio had gone supernova. That ratio divides a
publicly traded company’s market price over earnings per share and
indicates a security’s market price in relation to its earnings. It
tends to be a pretty good indicator of what lies in store for the
stock price’s immediate future. After only four months at the helm
of this little company, the security was trading at a very
impressive five times trailing earnings. At the end of the year,
with the company looking much happier — at least on paper — Ernie
had replaced himself as CEO and resigned to take another post.
Where the same thing happened again. Only this time faster, with
results even more out of synch with the company’s financials. And,
once again, the business press chose not to notice this. Instead,
they plastered Ernie’s face on ever more impressive articles and
magazine covers. Wunderkind. Golden Boy.

All pretty on paper, but if you looked very
carefully and took a couple of artful leaps you could draw a
different conclusion, just as Jack had.

To really manipulate the market, you’d need
a talented and connected outside person. One that the rest of the
world wouldn’t necessarily associate you with. That was what Jack
couldn’t have known, even if he’d suspected it. Even Ernie and Paul
having been at university together wouldn’t be enough of a
connection: it was Harvard, I’d graduated with a lot of people I
was sure I’d never even seen before, as had Paul and Ernie. There
was nothing post-University that I could find to connect the two of
them to each other.

What
was
easy to track was the
meteoric corporate rise of Ernest Carmichael Billings. And, as the
years went by, the corporate recoveries he was responsible for got
increasingly more dramatic and took ever shorter periods of
time.

Understandably, before very long Ernie was a
hot property and articles about him starting blabbing about all of
the companies that were trying to snag him. After a decade of this,
and with a lot of experience under his belt and a great record, he
could pick and choose who he worked for. At that point he could,
I’m sure, have worked anywhere in the world he chose. He would have
had offers from all over the US and there would have been companies
in Hong Kong and Montreal and Leeds and
everywhere
competing
for a year or so of his time. They would have been big high techs
and resources and brand name electronics. And, out of all comers,
he chose a glass manufacturer based in Culver City, California. The
math of all of that really wasn’t very good. It was practically
nonsensical.

The more I thought about it, ran the
numbers, looked at the old clippings and Jack’s research and just
put everything together, the more I started thinking that Ernie —
and most likely Paul — had decided on Langton because it could
represent the big piñata. A company so lame, so badly managed, so
undervalued and so out of the mainstream that it was ripe for their
biggest, most outrageous and richest scam yet. They’d shortsell the
shit out of it, arrange a high profile kidnapping of the CEO and —
yes — the more I thought about it, the more sense it made, they’d
even arrange for a witness — me — to see that CEO killed. Just
thinking about what that little piece of news would do to the stock
price Monday morning made my head hurt.

So Ernie, I decided, wasn’t dead. Just
hiding out someplace new. Waiting to reap the rewards of his
ill-gained labor. I wasn’t sure how they’d arranged to have me
there to see their little show, but by now I was pretty sure there
must have been blanks in the gun, both when Ernie was “shot” and
when Paul took a shot at me. Which would, of course, let me off the
hook for allowing him to die in front of me, but my guilt was just
replaced with anger. I was so confident that I was right, I would
have put money on it: Ernie was not dead. He was alive. I could
feel it in my bones and, certainly, in my gut.

The ringing of the telephone stopped the
spiral of my thoughts.