Till the Butchers Cut Him Down (3 page)

“And you’ve lived here how long?”

“A year?”

“A year.”

“What can I say? I’ve been busy.”

“Obviously. But why have a place like this if you’re just going to crash here the way you used to in the old days at our house
on Durant?”

“Well, I like the dry-cleaning and maid services. And there’s a heliport on the roof. But … come on.” He put his arm around
my shoulders and steered me to the terrace. “The view’s the real attraction. It’s what I need to keep my vision intact.”

I was about to ask what he meant by that when a great rumble came from below. Seizing the opportunity to escape his unwanted
touch, I went to the terrace wall and looked down. A scoop loader was creeping along the trench, belching nasty black exhaust.

Suits came up beside me and said something.

“What?”

He scowled down at the scoop loader, then motioned for me to precede him inside and banged the door shut behind us.

“I just wish they’d get the goddamn road built and go away,” he muttered. “Between the noise and the fumes and those fuckin’
beepers that sound off when they back up, I’m going nuts. Guy who invented those beepers ought to be shot.”

“How long’s that been going on down there?”

“Too long. Look, let’s get out of here, go grab a cup of coffee. Then we can talk.”

I was just as glad to do that, so I waited while he changed into a hooded sweatshirt, jeans, and running shoes. In them he
looked more like the Suits of college days. As the elevator took us down to the lobby, I asked, “Suits, what exactly is it
that you do for a living?”

He shook his head, glancing around suspiciously.

Good God, did he think the elevator was bugged? I shrugged and followed him outside, past the still-fawning doorman. Suits
skirted the trench, casting a hostile look at an idle workman, then darted across the pockmarked pavement of the Embarcadero,
eluding oncoming cars with the nimble-footed skill of a toreador. I waited till traffic cleared before joining him.

“Do you perhaps have a death wish?” I asked.

He didn’t reply, merely cut a diagonal course past the Boondocks restaurant and Red’s Java House and struck out southward.
I hurried along in his wake, caught up, and tugged at the hood of his sweatshirt. “Where’re we going?”

He pulled away and kept on in his curious scuttling gait—working off his irritation with the construction project, I guessed.
A fair distance along the waterfront, past the new marina and a few closed-up piers, sat another small eatery, Miranda’s.
Suits headed for the squat gray clapboard building and held its door open for me. Inside it was your standard longshoremen’s
diner: no tricking up for the tourists, no pseudo-nautical frills, just a lunch counter with a grill and coffee urns behind
it and yellow leatherette booths beneath the windows. I slipped into the one Suits indicated, and he asked, “What’ll you have?”

“Coffee, please. Black.”

“Nothing to eat?”

“No, thanks, just coffee.”

He shrugged and went over to the counter. The cook, a heavyset bald man in a stained white apron, apparently knew him, because
he nodded in brusque friendliness and called him T.J. Suits gave his order and sat down on a stool to wait for it.

I looked away, out the grimy salt-caked window. It afforded a view all the way from the Bay Bridge and Yerba Buena Island
to the drawbridge at China Basin. A gray view today, typical weather for August, although unusually dour for this area, which
enjoyed one of the better climates in a city of many climate zones. I watched a flock of gulls plane north above the water,
then pinwheel off in various directions. Farther out, a container ship moved slowly toward the Port of Oakland.

Suits returned in a few minutes carrying two mugs of coffee, then went back for a plate containing half a dozen little hamburgers.
Before I finished stirring my coffee to cool it, he’d wolfed down three of them. I’d forgotten that for a skinny guy, Suits
could consume enormous quantities of food.

“All right,” I said after taking a sip of what turned out to be a particularly nasty brew, “now are you ready to tell me what
this is about?”

He swabbed his mouth with a paper napkin. “Do you know what a turnaround man is?”

“One of those people who bring corporations back from the edge of bankruptcy?”

“That’s it. And that’s me. When they get down and desperate, I rescue ’em.”

While he ate the rest of his burgers I remained silent, recalling an article I’d noticed in an old copy of
Fortune
that had been the only thing to read in my dentist’s waiting room a few months back. It was titled “Turnaround Pros Sweep
the Compensation Ratings,” and the lead paragraphs—which were all I’d gotten through before being summoned to the drill—described
the turnaround men as a breed apart, white knights riding into battle in private jets and limousines. The image did not fit
the Suitcase Gordon I’d known, and the requisite skills were none he’d ever demonstrated.

“How’d you get into that line of work?” I asked.

He shook his head—an abrupt reflexive dismissal of my question. It reminded me of the way the savings-and-loan boys told reporters
“No comment” when the indictments came down. “Just fell into it by accident,” he finally said.

I hesitated, wondering if I should press for a better explanation. No, I decided, the set of his mouth indicated I wouldn’t
get one. Come to think of it, in all the time I’d known him, Suits had imparted very little personal information. He was a
tireless talker, but his conversational repertoire consisted of inconsequential chatter, aimless bullshit, and largely apocryphal
stories. I had not the slightest idea of where he’d been born, grown up, or attended school; I knew his full name only because
I’d once glimpsed his Massachusetts driver’s license when he wrote a check—which later bounced—at Berkeley’s Co-op Market.

I said, “Tell me more about what you do.”

Suits balled up his napkin, tossed it onto the plate, and belched discreetly. “Okay, here’s how it works. Say you’ve got a
company that’s about to go down the tubes. They owe millions, their creditors’re hounding them. The atmosphere’s bad: employees’re
stampeding out the door, management’s pissed off at the board, the board’s lost all confidence in management. Chapter Eleven’s
looming on the horizon, and the stockholders’re dumping their shares. What does the board do?”

I raised my eyebrows inquiringly.

“They make a last-ditch stand, send for a troubleshooter. A man who can turn things around.” He jerked his thumb at his chest.
“Me.”

I reached into my bag and took out my minicassette recorder. Might as well have the conversation on tape, in case I decided
to take him on as a client. “Do you mind?” I asked.

He shook his head, waved it away. “Nothing I say goes on somebody else’s tape. Nothing.”

I shrugged, put the recorder away. “Go on.”

“Okay, the turnaround man—me—comes on board. There aren’t all that many of us—maybe nine, ten, tops, in the country—who’re
first-rate. The board pays maximum dollar, maximum options and non-cash perks to get me. They agree to let me call all the
shots. I’m a dictator with a license to kill—and that’s exactly what I do. The first step is the bloodbath.”

Interesting how Suits, who had always claimed to embrace the values of peace and love, described his profession with such
violent metaphors.

“Okay,” he went on, “here’s how it goes down. You find a sacrificial lamb. Doesn’t have to be the guy responsible for what’s
wrong, just has to be somebody with high visibility. You find him and you crucify him. Bang! He’s gone. You’ve shown everybody
how ruthless you are, and people’re nervous now. Hell, you do it right, you’ve got them running to the can seventeen times
a day.”

“Nice.”

“Hey, it has to be done.”

“You’ve changed, Suits.”

His eyes met mine, level and candid. “Haven’t we all, Sherry-O?” he said mildly.

I acknowledged the implication with a rueful grimace.

“Okay, the bloodbath’s over, for the most part. Next you bring in your own people. I’ve got a permanent staff in my L.A. office,
but they’re just administrative. For my on-site people I draw on a talent pool from all over the country: a finance guy in
Chicago; a marketing guy in Dallas; a statistician in L.A.; an operations guy in Atlanta. These people come in. They’ve got
high visibility, they’ve got authority. And they show they know how to kick butt.

“Now’s the time when you clear out more deadwood. You clean things up, trim things back. You make your deals with the moneymen—the
banks and investors. You make your deals with the creditors. People’ll cut you any amount of slack if they think they’ve got
a chance of getting their money back. So basically what you do is get things stabilized. That can take about a year.”

“Is that why you’ve been too busy to buy furniture?”

He grinned. “You got it.”

I was still troubled by the tone of what he was telling me. The Suitcase Gordon I’d once known had been short on the social
niceties and often crassly insensitive, yes. But he’d never been cruel.

As if he’d heard my thoughts, he touched my hand gently with his forefinger. “Sometimes, Sherry-O, you’ve got to cause pain
to accomplish something worthwhile. The people who get hurt in the bloodbath generally’re the ones who contributed to how
bad things are. Or they’re people who’ll be better off out of there anyway. And the bloodbath and stabilizing stages lead
to what I call the visionary stage. That’s when you can really make things happen.”

I moved my hand away, reserving judgment and wishing he’d stop calling me Sherry-O. “What kind of things?”

Suits’s gray eyes began to take on a glow; his pale skin became suffused with color. My unease deepened. I’d seen that expression
before on the faces of zealots—and madmen.

He said, “Revolutionary things. Sweeping changes that reach far beyond the corporation. You can change the course of every
life you hold in your hands. You can change the course of a nation. You can completely alter history.”

Zealot, I decided.

Suits sat up straighter, fixed his burning eyes on mine. “What I’m offering you,” he announced, “is the chance to help me
alter the course of the history of San Francisco. But first you’ll have to find the bastard who’s trying to kill me.”

No, I thought. Madman.

Suits waited expectantly for my reaction. He seemed disappointed when I asked, “What makes you think somebody’s trying to
kill you?”

“There have been incidents.” He glanced over his shoulder.

“Such as?”

“Incidents,” he repeated darkly. “Here—I’ll have Carmen tell you about the latest.”

“Carmen?” I looked around, saw no one except the big bald man behind the counter.

Suits beckoned to him. He came around and crossed to our booth, rubbing his palms on his apron and grinning at my puzzled
expression. “They got to calling me that back in the sixties when I was offloading Costa Rican banana boats,” he said. “Carmen
Miranda, you know? Some guy’s idea of a joke. It stuck.” He shrugged philosophically. “What d’you need, T.J.?”

“Tell the lady about last Thursday night, will you?”

Carmen hesitated, frowning.

“It’s okay. She’s working for me.”

Suits’s words didn’t seem to reassure him. He hesitated some more, chewing on his lower lip. “Well, what happened, I’m locking
up. Maybe eleven-thirty. And there’s this big splash pierside. I turn on my floods, go out, take a look. And there’s T.J.
in the water, flopping around like a half-dead sea lion. I toss him a line, but he can’t grab it, and I realize he’s practically
unconscious. So I’ve got to go in after him, and when I haul him up on the pier, I see he’s got the start of a big knot on
the back of his head.” Carmen patted the back of his own skull. “And before I’m done with him he’s puked up about a gallon
of water.”

I looked at Suits. “How’d you end up in the Bay?”

“Somebody hit me and dumped me in. I’d stopped for a beer with Carmen, left around eleven twenty-five, and started back toward
my place. I remember footsteps coming up fast behind me, and nothing much after that until my friend here was pumping the
water out of me.”

I glanced back at Carmen; his expression was remote. More to this than he’s letting on, I thought.

“You see anybody?” I asked him.

He shook his head.

“Hear anything between the time Suits … T.J. left and when he hit the water?”

“Nope.”

“Was there anybody here in the diner who might have followed him?”

“Hadn’t had a customer for nearly an hour.”

I turned to Suits. “Was anything taken? Your wallet, for instance?”

“No, and I had a few hundred dollars on me, plus my Rolex.”

“So you think this has to do with the other—” I didn’t finish, because he moved his eyes from side to side, signaling that
he didn’t want to discuss the other incidents in front of Carmen.

“Thanks, Carmen,” I said. “If you remember anything else, let T.J. know, would you?”

He nodded brusquely and went back to the counter, but not before I glimpsed a trace of indecision clouding his eyes. Carmen
wanted to mention something else, but he wasn’t sure how it would go over with Suits.

“All right,” I said to Suits, “give me the whole story, starting with this current turnaround.”

“You know Golden Gate Lines?”

“The shipping company? Sure. They’re based in Oakland, aren’t they?”

“For now, yes. They called me in a little less than a year ago, after they filed for Chapter Eleven. I’ve already got them
stabilized, and I’m moving into the visionary stage. It’s a sweeping vision; like I said before, it’ll change the course of
this city’s history. And somebody doesn’t want me to live to make it happen.”

“Why not?”

“… Wait a minute.” He got up, went to the pay phone on the wall by the door, and made a quick call. When he finished, he motioned
to me. “Come on, I can show you better than I can tell you.” Before I could object, he waved to Carmen and hurried outside.