Company Man (18 page)

Driving to work the next morning, Nick was in a foul mood. The news that a homicide detective was poking around the corporation had sent him spiraling into a tense, sleepless night. He thrashed around in the big bed, got up repeatedly, obsessed about that night.

What Happened That Night—that was how he thought of it now. The memory had receded to attenuated, kaleidoscopic images: Stadler's leering face, the gunfire, the body sprawled on the ground, Eddie's face, carrying the body wrapped in black trash bags.

He was out of pills, which was just as well; any more of them, he figured, and he was headed for the Betty Ford clinic. He tried to think about work stuff, anything but that night. But that just meant the board meeting in the morning. Board meetings always made him tense, but this time he knew that the shit was about to rain down.

On the way into work he stopped at a light next to a gleaming silver S Class Mercedes. He turned to admire it and saw that the driver was Stratton's VP of sales, Ken Coleman. Nick rolled down his passenger's side window, tapped on his horn until he got Coleman's attention. When Coleman—forty-one, a good seventy pounds overweight, a bad hairpiece—rolled down his window, his face lit up.

“Hey, Nick! Looking pretty slick.”

“Board meeting. New car, Kenny?”

Coleman's grin got even wider. “Got it yesterday. You like?”

“Must list for a hundred grand, right?”

Coleman, always hyper, nodded fast, up and down and up and down like some bobble-head doll. “Over. Fully loaded. Like, AMG sports package and, I mean, heated
steering wheel,
you know?” The top sales guys at Stratton made more than Nick did. He didn't resent it; someone had to do the soul-destroying shit they did.

The light turned green, but Nick didn't move. “Buy or lease?” he asked.

“Well, lease. I always lease, you know?”

“Good. Because it's going back to the dealer.”

Coleman cocked his bobble head, a movement like a terrier, almost comic. “What?”

Behind him, someone honked a horn. Nick ignored it. “We laid off five thousand workers, Ken. Half the company. To cut costs, save Stratton. Pretty much wiped out the town. So I don't want a member of my executive management team driving around town in a fucking hundred-thousand-dollar Mercedes, understand?”

Coleman stared in disbelief.

Nick went on, “You take that back to the dealership by close of business today and tell 'em you want a fucking Subaru or something. But I don't want to see you behind that heated steering wheel again, you understand?”

Nick gunned the engine and took off.

 

The five members of the board of directors of the Stratton Corporation, and their guests, were gathered in the anteroom to the boardroom. Coffee was being served from vacuum carafes, and not the institutional food-service blend that was served in the Stratton employee cafeteria, either. It was brewed from Sulawesi Peaberry beans fresh-roasted by Town Grounds, Fenwick's best coffee place. Todd Muldaur had complained about the coffee at the first board meeting after the buyout, poked fun at the Bunn-O-Matic. Nick
thought Todd was being ridiculous, but he ordered the change. That, and little cold bottles of Evian water, melon slices, raspberries and strawberries, fancy pastries trucked in from a famous bakery in Ann Arbor.

Todd Muldaur, in another of his expensive suits, was at the tail end of a joke when Nick arrived, holding forth to Scott, the other guy from Fairfield Partners, Davis Eilers, and someone Nick had never seen before. “I told him the best way to see Fenwick is in your rearview mirror,” Todd was saying. Eilers and the other guy laughed raucously. Scott, who'd noticed Nick's approach, just smiled politely.

Davis Eilers was the other deal partner, a guy who had a lot of operational experience. He'd done his time at McKinsey like Todd and Scott, only he'd played football at Dartmouth, not Yale. He later ran a number of companies, sort of a CEO-for-hire.

Todd turned, saw Nick. “There he is.” He tipped his cup at Nick. “Great coffee!” he said expansively and gave a wink. “Sorry to miss you last night. Busy being a dad, huh?”

Nick shook Todd's hand, then Scott's, then Eilers's. “Yeah, couldn't get out of it. My daughter's school play, you know, and given—”

“Hey, you got your priorities straight,” Todd said with an excess of sincerity. “I respect that.”

Nick wanted to toss the cup of hot Sulawesi Peaberry in the guy's face, but he just looked straight in Todd's too-blue eyes and smiled appreciatively.

“Nick, I want you to meet our new board member, Dan Finegold.” A tall, handsome guy, athletic-looking. A thatch of dark brown hair starting to silver over. What was it with Fairfield Equity Partners? It was a fucking frat.

Dan Finegold's handshake was a crusher.

“Don't tell me Yale football too,” Nick said cordially. Thinking:
Our new board member? Like, were they going to tell me? Just spring it on me?

“Yale baseball, actually,” said Todd, clapping both men on their shoulders, bringing them together. “Dan was a legendary pitcher.”

“Legendary, my ass,” said Finegold.

“Hey, man, you
were,
” Todd said. He looked at Nick. “Dan's got twenty years' experience in the office-supply space, with all the scar tissue. I'm sure you know Office-Source—that was his baby. When Willard bought it, he grabbed Dan for Fairfield.”

“You like Boston?” Nick asked. He couldn't think of anything else to say. He couldn't say what he was really thinking, which was: Why are you here, and who invited you onto the board, and what's really going on here? Fairfield had the right to put whomever they wanted on the board, but it wasn't exactly cool for them to just show up with a new board member in tow. They hadn't done it before. It wasn't a good precedent, or maybe that was the point.

“It's great. Especially for a foodie like me. Lot of happening restaurants in Boston these days.”

“Dan's part owner of an artisanal brewery in upstate New York,” said Todd. “They make the best Belgian beer outside of Belgium. Abbey ale, right?”

“That's right.”

“Welcome to the board,” Nick said. “I'm sure your expertise in Belgian beer's going to come in handy.” Something about Belgian beer and Abbey ale sounded familiar, but he couldn't place it.

Todd took Nick by the elbow as they walked to the boardroom. He spoke in a low voice. “Bummer about Atlas McKenzie.”

“Huh?”

“Scott told me last night.”

“What are you talking about?”

Todd gave him a quick, curious glance. “The deal,” he said under his breath. “How it fell through.”

“What?”
What the hell was he talking about? The Atlas McKenzie deal was all but inked. This made no sense!

“Don't worry, it's not going to come up this morning. But still, a
major
bummer, huh?” In a louder voice, he called out, “Mrs. Devries!”

Todd turned away and strode up to Dorothy Devries, who
had just entered the boardroom. Todd clasped her small hand in both of his large ones and waited until she turned her cheek toward him before he kissed it.

Dorothy was wearing a Nancy Reagan burgundy pants suit with white piping around the lapels. Her white hair was a perfect cumulus cloud with just a hint of blue rinse in it, which brought out the steely blue of her eyes. Fairfield Partners had left Dorothy Stratton Devries a small piece of the company and a seat on the board, which was a condition of hers that Willard Osgood had no quibble with. It looked good to have the founder's family still connected to Stratton. It told the world that Fairfield still respected the old ways. Of course, Dorothy had no power. She was there for window dressing, mostly. Fairfield owned ninety percent of Stratton, controlled the board, ran the show. Dorothy, a sharp cookie, understood that, but she also understood that, outside the boardroom at least, she still possessed some moral authority.

Her dad, Harold Stratton, had been a machinist for the Wabash Railroad, a tinsmith's apprentice, a steeplejack. He worked as a machinist at Steelcase, in Grand Rapids, before he started his own company with money provided by his rich father-in-law. His big innovation had been to develop a better roller suspension for metal file cabinets—progressive roller bearings in a suspension-file drawer. His only son had died in childhood, leaving Dorothy, but women didn't run companies in those days, so eventually he turned it over to Dorothy's husband, Milton Devries. She'd spent her later years in her big, dark mansion in East Fenwick as the town matriarch, a social arbiter as fearsome as only a small-town society queen can be. She was on every board in town, chairwoman of most of them. Even though she liked Nick, and made him the CEO, she still looked down on him as being from a lower social class. Nick's dad, after all, had worked on the shop floor. Never mind that Dorothy was but one generation away from having machinist's grease on her own fingers.

Nick, reeling from Todd's casual revelation, saw Scott sitting down at his customary place at the oval mahogany
board table. As Nick approached him, put a hand on his shoulder, he heard Todd saying, “Dorothy, I'd like you to meet Dan Finegold.”

“Hey,” Nick whispered, standing immediately behind Scott, “what's this about Atlas McKenzie?”

Scott craned his neck around, eyes wide. “Yeah, I just got the call on my cell at dinner last night—Todd happened to be there, you know…” His voice trailed off. Nick remained silent. Scott went on: “They went with Steelcase—you know, that joint venture Steelcase has with Gale and Wentworth—”

“They called
you
?”

“I guess I was on Hardwick's speed-dial, all those negotiations at the end—”

“You get bad news, you tell me first, understand?”

Nick could see Scott's pale face flush instantly. “I—of course, Nick, it was just that Todd was right there, you know, and—”

“We'll talk later,” Nick said, giving Scott a shoulder squeeze too hard to be merely companionable.

He heard Dorothy Devries's brittle laugh from across the room, and he took his place at the head of the table.

The Stratton boardroom was the most conservative place in the headquarters—the immense mahogany table with places for fifteen, even though there hadn't been fifteen board members since the takeover; the top-of-the-line black leather Stratton Symbiosis chairs, the slim monitors at each place that could be raised and lowered with the touch of a button. It looked like a boardroom in any big corporation in the world.

Nick cleared his throat, looked around at the board, and knew he was not among friends anymore. “Well, why don't we get started with the CFO's report?” he said.

Something about the way Scott went through his depressing presentation—his dry, monotone, doom-and-gloom voice-over to the PowerPoint slides projected on the little plasma screens in front of everyone—was almost defiant, Nick thought. As if he knew full well he was hurling carrion to the hyenas.

Of course, they didn't need his little dog-and-pony show, since they'd all gotten the charts in their black loose-leaf board books, FedExed to everyone yesterday, or couriered over to their hotel. But it was a board ritual, it had to go into the minutes, and besides, you couldn't assume that any of them had actually read through the materials.

Nick knew, however, that Todd Muldaur had read the financials closely, the instant he got them in Boston, the way some guys grab the sports section and devour the baseball box scores. Todd probably didn't wait even for the printouts; he'd surely gone through the Adobe PDF files and Excel spreadsheets as soon as Scott had e-mailed them.

Because his questions sounded awfully rehearsed. They weren't even questions, really. They were frontal assaults.

“I don't believe what I'm seeing here,” he said. He looked around at the other board members—Dorothy, Davis Eilers, Dan Finegold—and the two “invited guests” who always attended the first half of the board meeting: Scott, and
the Stratton general counsel who was here in her capacity as board secretary. Stephanie Alstrom was a small, serious woman with prematurely gray hair and a small, pruned mouth that seldom smiled. There was something juiceless, almost desiccated about Stephanie. Scott had once described her as a “raisin of anxiety,” and the description had stuck in Nick's mind.

“This is a train wreck,” Todd went on.

“Todd, there's no question these numbers look bad,” Nick tried to put in.

“
Look
bad?” Todd shot back. “They
are
bad.”

“My point is, this has been a challenging quarter—hell, a challenging year—for the entire sector,” Nick said. “Office furniture is economically sensitive, we all know that. Companies stop buying stuff practically overnight when the economy slows.”

Todd was staring at him, rattling Nick momentarily. “I mean, look, new office installations have plummeted, business startups and expansions have slowed to almost nothing,” Nick went on. “Last couple of years, there's been serious overcapacity in the office furniture sector, and that, combined with weaker demand across the board, has put serious downward pressure on prices and profit margins.”

“Nick,” Todd said. “When I hear the word ‘sector,' I reach for my barf bag.”

Nick smiled involuntarily. “It's the reality,” he said. He folded his arms, felt something crinkle in one of the breast pockets of his suit.

“If I may quote Willard Osgood,” Todd went on, “‘Explanations aren't excuses.' There's an
explanation
for everything.”

“Uh, in all fairness to Nick,” Scott put in, “he's just seeing these numbers for the first time.”

“What?”
said Todd. “Today? You mean,
I
saw these numbers before the CEO?” He turned to Nick. “You got something more important on your mind? Like, your daughter's
ballet recital
or something?”

Nick gave Scott a furious look. Yeah, it's the first time
seeing the
real
numbers, he thought. Not the fudged ones you wanted to fob off on them. Nick was sorely tempted to let loose, but who knew where that might lead? Nervously, he fished inside the breast pocket of his suit and found a scrap of paper, pulled it out. It was a yellow Post-it note. Laura's handwriting: “Love you, babe. You're the best.” A little heart and three X's. Tears immediately sprang to his eyes. He so rarely wore this suit that he must not have had it dry-cleaned last time he wore it, before Laura's death. He slipped the note carefully back where he'd found it.

“Come on, now, Todd,” said Davis Eilers. “We're all dads here.” Noticing Dorothy, he said, “Or moms.” He ignored Stephanie Alstrom, who had no kids and wasn't married and seemed to shrink into herself as she tapped away at her laptop.

Calm,
Nick told himself, blinking away the tears.
Stay calm
. The room revolved slowly around him. “Scott means the final figures, Todd, but believe me, there's no surprise here. I take heart from the fact that our profit margins are still positive.”

“No surprise?” Todd said. “No
surprise
? Let me tell you something, I don't really care how the rest of the sector's doing. We didn't buy Stratton because you're like everyone else, because you're
average
. We bought you because you were marquee. Same reason we use Stratton chairs and work panels and all that in our own offices in Boston, when we could have bought anything. Because you were the best in your space. Not just good enough. As Willard's so fond of saying, ‘ “Good enough” is
not
good enough.'”

“We're still the best,” Nick said. “Bear in mind that we did our layoffs early—at your insistence, let me remind you. Everyone else waited. We got ahead of the curve.”

“Fine, but you're still not delivering on your plan.”

“To be fair,” Scott pointed out, “Nick's plan didn't assume the economy was going to get worse.”

“Scott,” Todd said in a deadly quiet voice, “Nick's the CEO. He should have anticipated turns in the economy.
Look, Nick, we always like to give our CEOs a lot of rope.” He gave Nick a steady blue stare. What did that mean, anyway? Give a man enough rope and he'll hang himself—was that it? “We don't want to run your business—we want
you
to run your business,” Todd went on. “But not if you're going to run it into the ground. At the end of the day, you work for us. That means that your job is to protect our investors' capital.”

“And the way to protect your capital,” Nick said, straining to remain civil, “is to invest in the business now, during the downturn. Now's the time to invest in new technology. That way, when the economy comes back, we kick butt.” He looked at Dorothy. “Sorry.” She didn't respond, her icy blue eyes focused on the middle distance.

Todd, leafing through his board book, looked up. “Like spending thirty million dollars in the last three years in development costs for a new
chair
?”

“A bargain,” Nick said. “Design and retooling costs, twenty-six patents, two separate design teams. And that's actually less than Steelcase spent on their Leap chair, which turned out to be a great investment. Or Herman Miller spent on developing the Aeron chair. I mean, don't forget, product design and development is a core value at Stratton.” Todd was silent for a moment.
Score one for the defense
. Before he could reply, Nick went on: “Now, if you want to continue this discussion, I'd like to move that we go into executive session.” The motion was seconded and approved by voice vote. This was the point when Scott, as an invited guest but not a board member, normally got up to leave. Nick caught his eye, but Scott's expression was opaque, unreadable. He wasn't gathering his things, wasn't getting up.

“Listen, Nick, we're going to ask Scott to stay,” Todd said.

“Really?” was all Nick could think to say. “That's—that's not the protocol.”

Now Davis Eilers, who'd barely said a word, spoke up. “Nick, we've decided that it's time that Scott join the board formally. We really feel that Scott's become an important
enough part of the management team that we'd like his official participation on the board. We think he can add a lot of value.”

Nick, stunned, swallowed hard as he racked his brain for something to say. He tried to catch Scott's eye again, but Scott was avoiding his glance. He nodded, thought. The Dan Finegold thing was outrageous. But now, adding Scott as a board member without even telling him in advance, let alone pretending to seek his opinion? He wanted to call them on it, bring it all out into the open, but all he said was, “Well, he can certainly add value.”

“Thanks for understanding,” Eilers said.

“Uh, Nick, we're going to be making a few changes going forward,” Todd said.

As opposed to what?
Nick thought.
Going backward?
He said, “Oh?”

“We think this board should be meeting every month instead of quarterly.”

Nick nodded. “That's a lot of travel to Fenwick,” he said.

“Well, we can alternate between Boston and Fenwick,” Todd said. “And we'll be looking to see the financials weekly instead of monthly.”

“I'm sure that can be arranged,” Nick said slowly. “As long as Scott doesn't mind.” Scott was examining his board book closely and didn't look up.

“Nick,” said Davis Eilers, “we've also been thinking that, if and when you decide to fire any of your direct reports—any of the executive managers—that's going to require board approval.”

“Well, that's not what my contract says.” He could feel his face start to prickle.

“No, but it's an amendment we'd be in favor of. Sort of making sure we're all on the same page, personnelwise. Like they say, the only constant is change.”

“You guys are hiring me to do the best job I can,” Nick said. “Enough rope, like you always say. And you just said you want me to run the company—you don't want to run it yourself.”

“Of course,” Eilers said.

Todd said, “We just don't want any surprises. You know, keep things running smoothly.” He'd adopted a reasonable tone, no longer combative. He knew he'd won. “We've got an almost-two-billion-dollar company to run. That's a big job for anyone, even someone who's paying full attention. Hey, it's like football, you know? You may be the quarterback, but you're not going to have a winning team without linesmen and receivers and running backs—and coaches. Think of us as your coaches, right?”

Nick gave a slow, faint smile. “Coaches,” he said. “Right.”

 

When the board meeting came to an end an hour and a half later, Nick was the first to leave the room. He needed to get the hell out of there before he lost it. That wouldn't be good. I'm not going to quit, he told himself. Make them fire me. Quit and you get nothing. Get fired without cause, and the payoff was considerable. Five million bucks. That was in the contract he'd negotiated when he sold to Fairfield, when the idea of getting fired seemed like science fiction. He was a rock star then; they'd never dump him.

As he left, he noticed two people seated just outside the boardroom, a thuggy-looking blond man in a bad suit and a well-dressed, attractive black woman.

The woman Rinaldi had told him about.

The homicide detective.

The woman he'd seen at Stadler's funeral.

“Mr. Conover,” she called out. “Could we talk to you for a few minutes?”