Джозеф Файндер - Company Man

“Screw Noyce. This is our case, not his. You notice the way he’s been breathing down our necks?”

“Some.”

“He must smell something big about to pop.”

She didn’t know how much to say. “I think it’s more that he wants to make sure we don’t slip up.”

“Slip up? Like we’re rookies?”

Audrey shrugged. “It’s a big case.”

Bugbee said, with a crooked grin, “No shit.”

Audrey responded with a rueful smile as she turned to go back to her cubicle.

“That thing about the shell casing or bullet fragment or whatever,” Bugbee said.

She turned. “What shell casing?”

“That bluff?”

“Yes?”

“Not bad,” Bugbee said.

Nick was beyond weary. All the shit that was going on with Todd and Scott, all the crap he didn’t understand: it was draining. And that on top of Eddie and his warnings about Cassie: check yourself before you wreck yourself. And: What do you think she’s after? Could there be something to what Eddie was saying?

Was it possible, he’d begun to wonder, that, on some subconscious level, he wanted to be found out?

And worst of all, so awful he couldn’t stand to think about it, was this fragment of a shell casing the police had discovered on his lawn.

He’d always prided himself on his ability to endure pressure that would crush most other guys. Maybe it was the hockey training, the way you learned to find the serene place inside you and go there when things got tough. He never used to panic. Laura, always on the high-strung side, never got that. She thought he didn’t care, didn’t get it. And he’d just shrug and reply blandly, “What’s the use in panicking? Not going to help.”

But since the murder, everything had changed. His hard shell had cracked or turned porous. Or maybe all the stress of the last few weeks was additive, the worries heaped onto his back until his muscles trembled and spasmed. Any second now he’d collapse to the ground.

But he couldn’t, not yet.

Because whatever Todd and Scott were up to — all this maneuvering, the secret trips and the phone calls and the encrypted document — it had ignited a fuse in him that crackled and sparked.

You want to take a little sabbatical, a little break, might be a good thing .

Like Todd gave a shit about his emotional well-being.

Todd wanted him to take time off. Not resign: that was interesting. If Todd and the boys at Fairfield wanted to get rid of him, they’d have fired him long ago. So why hadn’t they? Was it really the huge payday, the five million bucks they’d have to pay to fire him without cause, that was stopping them? Given how many billions Fairfield had under management?

He tapped at his keyboard and pulled up the corporate directory, clicked on MARTIN LAI. A photo popped up — a fat-faced, phlegmatic-looking guy — along with his direct reports, his e-mail, his phone number.

He glanced at his watch. Thirteen-hour time difference in Hong Kong. Nine-thirty in the morning here meant ten-thirty at night there. He picked up the phone and dialed Martin Lai’s home number. It rang and rang, and then a recorded message came on in Chinese, followed by a few perfunctory words in heavily accented English. “Martin,” he said, “this is Nick Conover. I need to speak to you right away.” He left the usual array of phone numbers.

Then he spoke into the intercom and asked Marge to locate Martin Lai’s cell phone number, which wasn’t on the Stratton intranet. A minute later, a long number popped up on his screen.

He called it and got a recorded voice again, and he left the same message. He checked Lai’s Meeting Maker, his online corporate schedule, and the man appeared not to be away from Stratton’s Hong Kong office.

Todd’s words kept coming back to him: You want to take a little sabbatical, a little break, might be a good thing .

What the hell were Todd Muldaur and Fairfield Equity Partners up to, really? Who, he wondered, might know?

The answer came to him so swiftly that he wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before. A “cousin” in the extended Fairfield family, that was who.

He opened his middle desk drawer and found a dog-eared business card that said KENDALL RESTAURANT GROUP, and underneath it, RONNIE KENDALL, CEO.

Ronnie Kendall was a sharp entrepreneur, a quick-witted bantam with an impenetrable Texan accent. He’d started the Kendall Restaurant Group with a little Tex-Mex place in Dallas and turned it into a thriving chain and eventually a prosperous restaurant holding company. It was mostly a chain of Tex-Mex restaurants popular in the Southwest, but his company also owned a cheesecake chain, a barbecued-chicken chain that wasn’t doing so well, a lousy Japanese-food chain where chefs dressed like samurai sliced and flipped your food right at your table, and a “good times” bar-and-grill chain known for its baby back ribs and gargantuan frozen margaritas. Ten years ago he’d sold to Willard Osgood.

Nick had met him at some business conference in Tokyo, and they’d hit it off. Ronnie Kendall turned out to be a big hockey fan and had followed Nick’s college career at Michigan State, amazingly. Nick had confessed he’d eaten at the Japanese restaurant chain that Kendall’s group owned and didn’t much like it, and Kendall had shot right back, “You kidding? Every time I set foot in there I get diarrhea. Never eat there, but people love it. Go figure.”

Nick was put on hold several times before Ronnie Kendall picked up, sounding exuberant as always, speaking a mile a minute. Nick made the mistake of asking how business was, and Ronnie launched into a manic monologue about how the barbecued-chicken chain was expanding in Georgia and South Carolina, and then he somehow shifted into a rant on the low-carb craze. “Man, am I glad that fad is over, huh? That was killing us! The low-carb cheesecake never went over, and the low-carb diet Margaritas — forget it! And then just when we signed up our new celebrity endorser” — he mentioned the name of a famous football player — “and we’d even taped a bunch of fifteen-and thirty-second spots, then out of the blue he gets hit with a rape charge!”

“Ronnie,” Nick finally broke in, “how well do you know Todd Muldaur?”

Ronnie cackled. “I hate the slick bastard and he loves me just the same. But I stay out of his way, and he stays out of mine. He and his MBA buddies were trying to muck around in my business, got so bad I called Willard himself and said, you put a choke collar on your little poodles or I’m gone. I quit. I’m too old and too rich, I don’t need it. Willard must have taken Todd to the woodshed, because he started backing off. ’Course, he had his hands full, what with the chip meltdown.”

“Chip meltdown?”

“Isn’t that what you call them things? Microchips or whatever? Semiconductors, right?”

“Yeah?”

“You read the Journal, right? The semiconductor industry bubble, the way all those private-equity guys overinvested in chips, then the bubble burst?” He cackled again. “Gotta love it, the way all those guys took a bath.”

“Hold on, Ronnie. Fairfield Equity Partners overinvested in microchips?”

“Not the whole of Fairfield, just the funds our boy Todd runs. He made a massive bet on the chip business. Put all his chips on chips, right?”

Nick didn’t join Ronnie’s laughter. “I thought there’s some kind of limit to how much they can invest in one particular sector.”

“Todd’s an arrogant guy, you know that, right? You can smell it on him. He figured when the semiconductor stocks started sinking, he’d pick up a bunch of companies cheap, turn a big fat profit. Well, he’s sure gettin’ his. His funds are sucking wind. Willard Osgood has got to be madder ’n a wet hen. If Todd’s funds collapse, the whole mother ship goes down.”