Nothing but Gossip (12 page)

The building sat back from the street, fronted by a beautiful, parklike plaza where the wind blew around the corner at about a hundred miles an hour all the time and sent the water from a series of high-flying fountains into a permanent state of fine spray. In an urban tribute to Old Faithful and our Western heritage—or some other sort of high-minded explanation cooked up by our local arts council—the fountains were timed to go off every quarter hour for ten minutes. And they did.
The water misted our faces as we crossed toward the entrance. The air smelled like the stockyards on the edge of town.

“I’ve always been in love with Mercedes,” Elias confided in me as we rode the executive express elevator to the top floor. “I think she’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. I used to watch her sunbathing in their backyard when I was little. Her body was absolutely perfect.”

“Why don’t you ask her out?” I suggested. “She’s never gotten married.”

All the color drained from Elias’s bearded face. “Are you crazy? She’d never go out with me. No. Forget it. I’m sticking with Linda.” I could tell that just the idea of being in the same room with Mercedes scared Elias as much as if he were alone with, say, Madonna. He’d just stare and sweat.

I wasn’t in love with Mercedes Rutherford, but I have always thought she was extra-cool, and this visit to her office just reconfirmed that opinion. She was definitely way-cool. And maybe even heartless. Detached enough, certainly, to have shot her half-sister and not chipped a nail. Her figure was boyish, completely straight up and down, and she had on a chocolate Armani suit. I could easily picture her slipping a small handgun like my little Glock in and out of the jacket pocket. But not the actual murder weapon, a Colt .45. Too crude.

Her airy, penthouse office overflowed with tall, orderly stacks of bound reports.

“Sorry for the mess,” she greeted us, not really sorry but needing to offer something by way of a welcome before she got down to business. “Need to keep these confidential till the annual meeting tomorrow. No easy way.”

Mercedes was friendly without being effusive, clipped without being rushed, professional without being frigid, and precise without being precious. Power suited her. She never looked at her watch, but I knew she’d allotted a specific amount of time to this meeting and would move us all along until she got where she needed to be, and then the meeting would be over.

After taking her seat at the end of the conference table, Mercedes indicated we should sit wherever we wanted. A white-noise machine, a necessity in today’s world where privacy is nothing more than an arcane concept, was built flush into the center of the table and whirred soothingly.

“I appreciate your dropping by.” She slid an envelope across to me. “This arrived this morning.”

I removed my glasses, a pair of tight latex gloves, and a magnifying glass from my purse and examined the envelope carefully. It was plain white, the sort available in boxes of ten at the 7-Eleven, and addressed on what looked to me to be a standard laser printer:

The postmark was Roundup, the time and date the afternoon before. The stamp was a self-adhesive American flag. I got out my long-nosed tweezers, slid the sheet free, and spread it on the table. Plain white paper. Nothing immediately identifiable about its weight or texture. I examined the message, which was handwritten in Cyrillic letters and meant absolutely nothing to me.

I slid the paper across to Elias, who put on his glasses and studied it, then laughed and shook his head.

“What does it say?” I asked.

“It says …” The oddly guttural words flowed from Elias’s lips like a ballad from Mars. Then he grinned.

“That’s very nice Elias. But what does it mean?”

“It means, ‘Vote yes or you’ll diet.’ ”

“Excuse me?” Mercedes said.

“Yeah.” Elias shook his head. “Obviously this was written by someone who was in a hurry and copied down the wrong word in the dictionary.”

We all laughed, even though it wasn’t especially funny.

“Did this come through your regular company mail delivery?” I asked.

“Yes. My secretary said it was delivered with everything else.”

“Who do you think sent it?”

“I haven’t got the slightest idea.” She seemed bewildered by the message. “I suppose it could be just about anyone, even some of our Russian colleagues who are desperate for this investment. They’ll have a large, vocal contingent at the meeting. It’s a wild group, but they aren’t fumbling idiots who would send a note like this.” She leaned her forehead into her fingers and closed her eyes. “This person is a complete dolt.”

“Mercedes, where were you when Alma was shot?”
My question was purposely from left field, and I asked it slightly aggressively, not belligerently, but certainly straight out—a quick snap of the buggy whip.

The change in direction did not catch her off guard or force her to hesitate while she sought a suitable answer. “I was in the powder room with Johnny Bourbon trying to get his proxy.” She met my look dead on and started laughing. “This struggle has become shameless. You wouldn’t believe how high the stakes are.”

Elias blushed.

“How high?” I asked.

“The company’s survival is at stake. My grandfather started Rutherford Oil in the twenties.” As she spoke, Mercedes rolled a gold Cross pen in her fingers. They were long and slender, and her small oval nails were enameled in pale salmon. “He was a roughneck on Blackmer’s crew when the Teapot Dome was developed, and then when Blackmer took off for France rather than go to jail, Grandfather hammered together whatever leases he could from the government and ranchers, and started Rutherford Oil. We have crews and fields all over the world now. Our annual production is almost seventy million barrels. And that’s just oil. We’re diversified into all fields of energy.”

“Jeez,” Elias said. “That’s up from fifty-five million when you took over just two years ago.” Then he got a little flustered. “At least, that’s what I recall.”

Mercedes smiled at him affectionately. “You could turn your operation into something if you’d leave home now and then, Elias. You’ll never find a billion barrels under the Circle B.”

“Nah. I know. But we’ve got enough for now.”

Here’s the deal with Elias: He holds a B.A. in Russian Studies from Harvard and a degree in English Literature—
Shakespeare—from Oxford, and when he got home from Vietnam and Cambodia, China and Laos, and a few other places the CIA never was, he took over running the ranch and has not ventured far since. “I’ve seen more of the world than I ever needed to. More than enough to last my lifetime,” he says by way of explanation.

“I understand you and Alma each hold thirty-five percent of the stock?” I said.

Mercedes nodded.

“Help me out with the math.”

“The company has two million shares of common stock, fully issued,” Mercedes explained. “Alma and I each own seven hundred thousand. The company pays an annual dividend of five dollars per share.”

“So for each of you, that’s only three and a half million a year in dividends,” I said. Then I clamped my mouth shut and waited for her to tell me the rest. Saying nothing is the hardest thing in the world, which is why it is also so effective, which was not news to Mercedes Rutherford. She and I stared at each other. Who would blink first? She thought I didn’t know what the next question should be, and she wasn’t going to help me. “What about the preferred stock?” I finally asked.

“She and I own one hundred percent of the preferred stock.”

“How many shares are there?”

“Two million.”

“Dividend?”

“Twenty dollars.”

Forty million. Twenty million each. “Nice,” I said.

Elias whistled.

“Now you see why I’m so opposed to this Russian
venture. Rutherford Oil is solid as a rock, and for us to borrow five and a half billion could be disastrous. It’s too big a risk.”

“Tell me about the other major stockholders and where they stand.”

M
ercedes slid a wide sheet of computer paper toward me. It was stamped in red with
CONFIDENTIAL
in six different places. At the same time, she pushed a remote and the information appeared on a large screen on the wall.

“We printed out a copy of this for you. As you can see, besides Alma and me there are only a handful of major individual and institutional investors who make up the remaining total shares of common stock.”

I scanned the list.

What surprised me most was the size of Johnny Bourbon’s and Kennedy McGee’s holdings. They’d both implied their holdings were insignificant, when in fact they each owned two and a half percent, fifty thousand shares of Rutherford. Dividends of two hundred and fifty thousand a year. Not insignificant in any sense of the word. They held the same stock positions as Alma’s husband. I also wondered how Duke Fletcher and his late wife had come to have such a large position. A total of five percent.

Mercedes walked over and stood next to the projected image, staring up at it.

“Entek is a mutual fund,” she explained. “It invests only in environmentally responsible corporations, such as ours. Rutherford’s a new breed of corporation: We spend almost as much on environmental technology to keep our fields clean as we do on exploration and production. Entek’s very opposed to the Russian venture.”

“Why?”

“The Russians are eco-pigs. They won’t invest in cleanup, removal, disposal, protection. You should see their fields, it would scare you to death. They’re toxic wastelands where the ecology has been obliterated. Vast expanses of nothing but sludge. No earth, no water, no trees, no grass. Just noxious sludge.” She shook her head. “They’re in such a desperate race for hard currency, they don’t believe in safety—don’t have time for
it. Believe me when I say Chernobyl was nothing. The whole continent is one big environmental time bomb, and I, for one, don’t want Rutherford Oil to participate in, or contribute to, a continental meltdown.”

Her words sent a chill down my spine. On top of that, the noise machine disturbed me. Not the sound so much as the necessity. It felt as if we were meeting in Berlin in the sixties, in the hottest part of the Cold War, when visitors to Russia and iron-curtain countries joked that if they wanted to have a conversation, any kind of conversation—family, personal, business—and keep it private, the only possible way was to turn their radios on high, put their heads under their pillows, and whisper to one another. Now it’s the same in America. Virtually every communication is vulnerable, and you can be assured someone is listening. Executives with noise machines used to be considered paranoid. Now if they
don’t
have them, they’re considered stupid. It gives me the willies.

I studied the chart. “How long ago did Duke Fletcher’s wife die?”

“Two years. Duke’s record and platform are environmentally based. His whole presidential opportunity hinges on that message, so I can’t see him compromising himself for profit. But”—she smiled—“he is a politician, and we all know how that goes. Actually, I shouldn’t say that about him, because I don’t mean it. Makes me sound more cynical than I am. He’s a nice guy. He’s consulting for us until the campaign gets rolling. Do you know him?”

“A little,” I answered. “I’ve always liked his stand-up-and-take-it-like-a-man approach.”

“You mean like John Wayne? I agree. He’s as tough as this table.” Mercedes knocked on it to make her point.

I kept going down the list. “What’s
SIBA
Fund?”

“Ah,
SIBA
.” Mercedes sat back down. “This is seriously problematic.
SIBA
is a one-hundred-percent bottom-line-oriented, extremely high-risk mutual fund. High-level, high-risk investors. The fund’s director, Penn Holland, sits on our board, and he’s made it clear he’ll vote in favor of the Russian venture because the payoff potential is so enormous. And when I say ‘potential,’ I mean it in the broadest sense of the word. This is a long shot nonpareil.”