Jennifer Sturman - The Jinx

“That’s true. But it still makes me nervous. Especially now that Tom is dead.”

I had the feeling I knew where she was heading. “Would Barbara sell Tom’s shares?” Barbara was Tom Barnett’s widow.

“I don’t think so, but I’m not sure. When they read Tom’s will on Monday, she seemed surprised that he had only left her half his shares and that the other half reverted back to me. I thought she already knew that was the arrangement Tom made with my father years ago, before the company went public. But she’s always wanted Adam to be more involved in the business, and maybe she was hoping that if she had more control she could make that happen.” Tom had adopted Adam, Barbara’s son from her first marriage, when he married Barbara.

“What do you think?”

“I think that Tom didn’t want Adam to work at Grenthaler. He and my father agreed that I would take it over one day, and he didn’t think Adam would be a good fit there, anyhow. He’s much better off where he is.” Adam had worked for an investment company in Boston but had recently opened his own firm. I would bet that he was a superlative number cruncher, but I doubted he had the strategic vision or management skills to lead Grenthaler Media.

“What does Adam want?”

“Who knows what Adam wants? He’s so weird. At least he’s given up on trying to date me.”

I had to laugh. “Adam tried to date you?” Tom had invited me to dinner at his house while I was in town working on Grenthaler business, so I’d met Adam on a couple of occasions. He’d struck me then as a quintessential dork, the sort of guy who was more likely to spend his free time playing Dungeons & Dragons than man-about-town. He and Sara would have made a highly improbable couple.

“I know, it’s ridiculous. But he finally got the message. I wouldn’t be surprised if Barbara put him up to it-she has a blind spot where Adam’s concerned. She thinks he’s a genius.” I’d met Barbara, too, at those dinners, as well as at Grenthaler board meetings, and she was a piece of work, to put it mildly. Her most distinguishing feature, in my eyes at least, was that she’d been Miss Texas in the early seventies, and a close runner-up for the Miss America title. Thirty years later, she still had the perky blond looks and theatrical presence of a pageant contestant, although her aesthetic sense seemed to have stopped evolving at some point in the late eighties. Her marriage to Tom had always been a bit of a mystery to me-she seemed too ditzy for him, and he too staid for her-but she seemed to adore him, and by all appearances he’d been a good husband to her and a good father to her son.

“Does Barbara need to sell her shares? Does she need cash?”

Sara shook her head. “I can’t imagine that she would need anything. The dividends from ten percent of the company should provide a sizable income. She has more money than she could ever begin to spend.”

“Have you spoken to her about it?”

“No. Monday didn’t seem like the right time, and things have probably been so hectic for her, planning the memorial service and everything.” She hesitated again. “I was actually hoping that you might talk to her for me, to see what her intentions are.”

“What if she wants to sell?”

“Then I want to buy,” Sara replied without missing a beat. “My father trusted me with this company. It’s all I have left of him, and I refuse to let it go out of my control. In fact, even if Barbara doesn’t plan to sell, I want to figure out how to acquire another ten percent so that I will be the majority shareholder.”

“You would have to raise one hundred million dollars to do that,” I reminded her.

“I know. I thought you could help me figure it out. I have a trust fund from my parents, but it’s nowhere near big enough to help much.”

“Let me talk to Barbara. Maybe the two of you can work something out that would allow you eventually to own her shares without us having to find the cash up-front.” I wanted to talk to Barbara about as much as I wanted to go out with my grandmother’s dentist’s handsome associate, but Sara was a friend as well as a client.

“Thank you, Rachel. Maybe I’m overreacting-I hope I’m overreacting-but I can’t relax if I know that the company might get away from me somehow. I can’t let that happen.” Her gaze locked on mine.

“I won’t let that happen,” I promised her.

Exchanges like that sometimes made you forget that Sara was only twenty-five years old. She spoke with the focused confidence of the CEO she would one day become. However, once we had finished discussing business it was almost as if she switched that side of herself off. She was still far more self-possessed than most people her age, but as we talked about her classes and her friends her voice took on the casual cadences of her peers.

She described the tension that was gripping the campus now that Hell Week had descended upon it.

“Is there anyone I should look out for who’s interviewing with Winslow, Brown?” I asked Sara after I’d convinced her to order dessert.

“I’m glad you asked-I’d almost forgotten. One of my suite-mates, Gabrielle LeFavre, is trying to get a job in investment banking. I think she had her first round of interviews with Winslow, Brown today. She’s been talking to all of the usual suspects-Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Merrill. She has her heart set on this.”

“What’s her background? Does she have any finance experience?”

“No, not really. She was an accountant before business school. She’d put herself through college at a state school down South, and then she went to New York and tried to get a job in banking, but you know how it is-the big firms only recruit people out of college from Harvard, Princeton and Yale for the most part-nobody even gave her a chance.”

“That must have been tough. So she went into accounting?”

“Yes. She had earned her CPA at night when she was in college. Anyhow, she’s a bit of a stress case, but she’s really ambitious, and I think she’d work like a fiend if she were hired.”

“I’ll keep an eye out for her.” I made a mental note to myself, but from what Sara had said, her friend sounded like the sort of high-strung perfectionist who would fall to pieces the first time a partner yelled at her.

I turned the conversation to a lighter topic. “Now, what else is going on with you? How’s your love life? Besides Adam, of course,” I added with a smile.

“Nice.”

“Sorry. Couldn’t resist. But seriously, anything of interest?”

“Hardly,” she responded with a grimace.

“That good?”

“I was sort of seeing this guy before the holidays, but it didn’t go anywhere. I mean, he’s sharp and good-looking and everything, but we just didn’t click. It’s awkward, because he seemed to be really into it. We’d only been out on three or four dates and he was practically ready to propose. It was bizarre-we barely knew each other.” She looked up at me. “Actually, I think you might know him. He was an analyst at Winslow, Brown before business school.”

“Who?” I asked, not anticipating what the answer would be.

“Grant Crocker. Do you remember him?”

My heart sank as I tried to keep my expression even. I remembered Grant all too well, having had the misfortune of working with him several times during his two years at the firm, likely due to yet another of Stan’s none-too-subtle plots to torment me. Grant was unusually cocky in an industry where arrogance was nearly a prerequisite. He’d spent several years in the Marine Corps after college, so he was closer to my age than Sara’s, and the military seemed to have trained him well in various forms of chauvinism. He had difficulty following directions from a woman, and he more than once almost derailed a deal due to his reluctance to do the grunt work that fell to the most junior person on a team. Several of the secretaries had complained about his condescension and suggestive statements that came just short of overt passes. Most of the men in the department would have described him as a “great guy” and a “real go-getter,” and he was the star of the department basketball team, but the women in the department had their own nickname for him-Too Much Testosterone Guy-which was quite an achievement in our testosterone-rich environment.