Capitol Reflections (4 page)
For Mark, this was a personal emancipation proclamation, freeing him to be an iconoclast who stylized the eccentricities of the frenzied, dispirited commuters who poured into the New York City subway system every day so they could make a few bucks, go home, sleep, wake up, and do it all over again.
The column went platinum when the paper suggested he collect his observations into a book,
Sterner Stuff
. It spent a few weeks on the bottom of the bestseller list and spawned a sequel,
Latitudes and Attitudes
, that landed Mark on Letterman and Charlie Rose. The liberal management of the
Times
certainly gave Mark healthy latitude to lampoon everything from what he called “the Neanderthal nature of twenty-first century man” to the myriad verbal blunders of a sitting president. In short, he had achieved celebrity status, with his name and picture on the sides of hundreds of city buses. And he had done it all while keeping a few posters of whales and condors on his apartment walls.
Sterner Stuff
. It spent a few weeks on the bottom of the bestseller list and spawned a sequel,
Latitudes and Attitudes
, that landed Mark on Letterman and Charlie Rose. The liberal management of the
Times
certainly gave Mark healthy latitude to lampoon everything from what he called “the Neanderthal nature of twenty-first century man” to the myriad verbal blunders of a sitting president. In short, he had achieved celebrity status, with his name and picture on the sides of hundreds of city buses. And he had done it all while keeping a few posters of whales and condors on his apartment walls.
Reporters like Stern didn’t usually get calls from the
Wall Street Journal
, regardless of talent. The
Journal
was famous for supporting presidents and political potentates who were always optimistic, even if the Dow suggested that the nation’s financial roller coaster was bottoming out. The paper was decidedly conservative, always bullish, and rewarded writers who regarded William F. Buckley as a thoughtful moderate. Stern, however, had written eloquently on the Enron scandal while at the
Times
, championing workers while simultaneously skewering the likes of Ken Lay and company. And he had done so with less irony in his prose, showing compassion for the countless employees who lost a lifetime of savings to executives and their golden parachutes.
Wall Street Journal
, regardless of talent. The
Journal
was famous for supporting presidents and political potentates who were always optimistic, even if the Dow suggested that the nation’s financial roller coaster was bottoming out. The paper was decidedly conservative, always bullish, and rewarded writers who regarded William F. Buckley as a thoughtful moderate. Stern, however, had written eloquently on the Enron scandal while at the
Times
, championing workers while simultaneously skewering the likes of Ken Lay and company. And he had done so with less irony in his prose, showing compassion for the countless employees who lost a lifetime of savings to executives and their golden parachutes.
Articles on corporate greed, coupled with Mark’s high profile and clear ability to build readership, coincided nicely with the
Journal’
s sudden feelings of guilt over their deification of Lay and other recently fallen robber barons. In a moment of self-expiation, the publisher of the
Journal
called Mark and offered him the plum assignment of reporting on the movers and shakers who the
Journal
highlighted on page one, far left column. If your byline appeared in that coveted space, you had arrived. Mark extracted the promise of total autonomy, but wondered just how many sacred cows he would be able to gore before the publisher forgot his promise.
Journal’
s sudden feelings of guilt over their deification of Lay and other recently fallen robber barons. In a moment of self-expiation, the publisher of the
Journal
called Mark and offered him the plum assignment of reporting on the movers and shakers who the
Journal
highlighted on page one, far left column. If your byline appeared in that coveted space, you had arrived. Mark extracted the promise of total autonomy, but wondered just how many sacred cows he would be able to gore before the publisher forgot his promise.
His lawyer, always the realist, negotiated a million-dollar termination clause into Stern’s contract. Thus, each time Mark received the inevitable phone call from the publisher attempting to smooth over the roughing-up of yet another Wall Street deity, Stern would glibly ask, “Did I do a mil’s worth of damage yet?” So far, the answer was no, although over the years he had learned how to hone his journalistic dagger into a stiletto and slide it into his victim without a sound.
Even so, his trademark attitude was still visible to his loyal following that saw an undercurrent of dark satire hiding beneath the sometimes seemingly benign commentary. Stern saw himself as a modern-day Mark Twain, who was regarded as a humorist and children’s author when, in point of fact, he had been darkly pessimistic about humanity, even in works such as
Tom Sawyer
or
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
.
Tom Sawyer
or
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
.
Mark hit the exit key and Space Invaders disappeared from his screen. He was doing a piece on Gregory Randall, whose father, Charles Carson Randall, had been killed the previous month when his Lear 65 slammed into a mountain in the Peruvian Andes. Gregory Randall was the heir apparent, with Randall, Inc. coming in at number thirty-two in the Fortune 500. Randall was no Bill Gates, but he would now command an empire with enough subsidiary holdings to keep thousands of accountants and lawyers busy number-crunching year-round.
Stern opened a file on his computer titled, “Lifestyles of the Rich and Randall.” The Randall family had made its initial fortune—“the first of many,” Randall, Sr. had often bragged—by developing software that enabled mainframe computers to communicate faster and more efficiently with thousands of smaller PCs connected within a company network. The technology arrived at a time when desktop computers were first proliferating in the mid-eighties. That alone had given Charles Randall a net worth of twenty million dollars. But Randall became a player by buying several start-up tech companies in Silicon Valley and putting them on a par with Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, Yahoo, Symantec, and a dozen others. His new meta-search engine, InfoTech, was beginning to rival Dogpile and Google.
Always savvy, Randall sold most of his dot-com stocks right before they went belly-up, causing Stern to wonder if Randall and Martha Stewart had the same basic approach to maintaining wealth. He also wondered why Martha drew the heat for selling off a few hundred thousand dollars worth of shares while Charles Carson Randall had dumped more than fifteen million dollars worth of dot-com holdings.
Well, some people covered their tracks better than others—he’d learned that during the Enron debacle.
Randall, Inc. had also become a telecommunications giant, owning fifteen newspapers and eleven television stations. This part of his empire was called, according to the FCC documents scattered across Stern’s desk, Informed Sources, Inc., a corporate entity looking to expand even farther. Proposals were on the table in six states to acquire four more papers and three additional television stations. This grabbed Mark’s attention in and of itself since he had learned that some CEOs thought media-related companies were good investments—people were no more going to stop gobbling up information and entertainment than they were going to stop guzzling Coke—while others sought to control the population’s beliefs and spending habits through news and advertising.
Curiously, Randall, Inc. moved into produce in the early eighties. The company owned a hundred orchards in Florida and California, with the Grove Fresh label appearing on juice cartons in supermarket freezer cases in all fifty states. Randall also owned several banana plantations in Honduras, Panama, and Belize, and the scantily-clad woman highlighting the oval sticker on his bananas, “The Yellow Senorita,” was starting to rival Juan Valdez in recognizability.
Stern wondered why a man interested in tech stocks and media would be attracted to produce. Simple diversification? Greed? Lust for power? Perhaps. But any agribusiness was subject to fluctuating temperature and rainfall, and CEOs usually stayed within what was called “the corporate aggregate.” While a company might have dozens of subsidiary holdings, the typical mindset of the parent company’s board was to stay focused on related industries. There were exceptions among the super-giants of the corporate world, of course, such as R. J. Reynolds merging with Nabisco, or Phillip Morris acquiring General Foods and Kraft. To be sure, tobacco and macaroni ‘n’ cheese made for strange bedfellows, but Charles Carson Randall, as far as Mark Stern could tell, had not been the kind of person to dabble in both bananas and computer chips. Ultimately, Mark knew that’s why the
Journal
hired him. He had good instincts. After all, he titled a chapter in his second book with one of his favorite sayings, “Everyone is Naked Under a Double-Breasted Suit.” He knew what made people tick and his profiles always succeeded in showing the more human side of a man masked by a well-groomed corporate image.
Journal
hired him. He had good instincts. After all, he titled a chapter in his second book with one of his favorite sayings, “Everyone is Naked Under a Double-Breasted Suit.” He knew what made people tick and his profiles always succeeded in showing the more human side of a man masked by a well-groomed corporate image.
Mark Stern would do a little digging to find out more about the younger Randall. After all, that was what he did best.
5
Gwen Maulder was up most of the night. Jack did his best to comfort her and the conversations she’d had with friends gave her a bit of solace, but the force of what had happened seemed to have an increasingly greater impact on her. She hadn’t even begun to consider what she’d lost in Marci. All she understood for now was that her dearest friend was gone forever—and Gwen refused to believe it was something that “just happened.”
She entered the New York Medical Examiner’s Office the following morning looking for Dave Dardenoff , whom she regarded as tops in forensics. She had hated to see him leave the FDA but respected his decision considering that more than a few people still wondered why Gwen had made the jump from old-fashioned “doc with a lollipop” to epidemiologist. She found the tall, imposing medical examiner sitting in the lounge, feet propped up on a Formica table next to a soda machine.
“Well, bless my soul, if it isn’t Captain Maulder!” Dardenoff proclaimed as he jumped up to greet his visitor.
“Morning, doc,” said Gwen, pulling together the energy to smile broadly. “I think we can drop the formality. When the PHS gave me that fourth stripe, I realized that even I didn’t have big enough shoulders for it, so I had to settle for those Army eagles instead. You, of all people, should know that rank and intelligence are usually inversely related. But enough about me. What’s with you, Dave?”
Dardenoff, attired in green scrubs, returned the smile and shrugged. “I can’t complain, Gwen. The city gives me the stiffs and I do my thing. I like to call it ‘reading the bones.’ I stayed late last night so I could perform your autopsy personally. I figured you had a special interest in this one given your request for … well, you know.” They were alone in the lounge, but Dardenoff walked to the doorway and looked up and down the corridor.
“Marci was a good friend,” Gwen explained, and the smile that had blossomed during their exchanged pleasantries evaporated entirely.
She paused, steeling herself for a series of questions she could not have imagined asking when she’d left Washington two days ago. “Did you find anything unusual?” The question was extremely general, but given the decidedly personal nature of her investigation, it was the only way she could think to begin.
Dardenoff took a deep breath and ran his fingers through brown, wavy hair that was slightly tamped down from being under a surgical cap. “Not really,” he said. “Ultimate cause of death was from cardiovascular collapse.”
“I’m not interested in ‘ultimate.’”
Dardenoff shook his head. “Then I’m afraid I’m not going to be of much help. Your friend only weighed ninety-five pounds. She had the typical mitral valve prolapse seen in many young, thin women. That, by itself, can cause sudden cardiac death once in ten thousand cases, but this just isn’t the right picture for prolapse as a cause of death. The convulsions don’t fit, either. On the other hand, the prolapse might have made her heart more vulnerable, and the resulting convulsions might have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. Your friend also had low potassium and sodium levels, and her stomach contents didn’t go beyond some lettuce, carrots, and a few shrimp, all of it coming, I suspect, from a lunchtime salad. And speaking of the stomach, it looks as though she was a worrier. I noted some early ulceration, but nothing advanced. I’m guessing the obvious: high stress and poor diet, on top of an h. pylori infection. Workaholic?”
Gwen sighed and looked vacantly at the far wall as she answered.
“That would be an understatement, though she was supremely confident and not given to worrying. Successful lawyer with an aversion to exercise. Virtually no social life.” The last statement caused Gwen to jerk her head back and look quizzically at her former colleague.
“Any—”
“Nah,” the medical examiner said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “No semen on the vaginal swab.”
“Alcohol or drugs?” Gwen knew that Marci, consummate professional that she was, would not have taken a drink while working, not even at a power lunch with other legal gurus, and she had never known Marci to indulge in any kind of drug other than a little marijuana as an underclassman. She nevertheless had to ask these fundamental questions—not only for her own peace of mind, but for that of the Newmans, with whom she’d be speaking at greater length after the funeral. They would want answers. Marci had been an only child, and Lawrence Newman, a retired lawyer of considerable reputation in mergers and acquisitions, reveled in his daughter’s accomplishments.
“Blood and urine were clean,” Dardenoff replied. “Compared to other young, attractive women who come through here, your friend was a veritable Girl Scout. Any history of anorexia?”
“None at all. She was a picky eater, but she never starved herself.”
Gwen sighed and sat down in a plastic chair, frustrated. Dardenoff eased his large frame into a matching chair across the table. “What did you find?” she asked. “Anything at all?”
“Here,” Dardenoff said, taking a tube of unmarked blood from his floppy green shirt pocket and handing it to Gwen. “Spin it down and you’ll find the same things I did. There were trace amounts of aspirin and caffeine, plus the usual chemicals one sees in a smoker—nicotine, nitrosamines, cyanide, urethane, acetone, formaldehyde, butane, various metals—”
Gwen held up her hand as she took the vial of blood and slipped it into her purse. “I know the list, Dave, although I didn’t know Marci still smoked. I thought she gave it up years ago.”
Dardenoff folded hairy arms across his muscular chest. “Goes with the territory, Gwen. Stress, poor diet, heavy workload … ” He shrugged, as if the conclusion were a no-brainer. “And the cigarettes; I see it every day.”
“What did her lungs look like?”
“Pretty clean, actually. She couldn’t have been smoking for too long. As for the brain, kidneys—”
“Just send the report to my office in Rockville,” Gwen said, holding up her hand a second time. She didn’t want to hear any of the gorier details that would conjure up autopsy procedures in her mind. She would indeed look at the full report, but only after a few days had passed and she’d had time to say good-bye to Marci in her own way, and then again, properly, at the funeral.
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