Nothing but Gossip (16 page)

A
few scraggly pickets—
GIVE THE LAND BACK TO THE NATIVE AMERICANS, DEATH TO AMERICAN CAPITALISTS, DOWN WITH DOW CHEMICAL, SUPPORT GROCERY WORKERS
—stuff like that, shuffled back and forth behind a police barricade across the street from the hotel’s main entrance. We’re so behind in Wyoming, I love it. Bored camera crews from the local television outlets kicked invisible pebbles off the sidewalk.

“Sort of a disappointing group of protesters you’ve got here,” I said to Curtis, the doorman. Curtis was the Scatman Cruthers of doormen. A Roundup institution born at the door of the Grand in his brown-twill coat and gold-braided cap. They did a story about him in
National Geographic
once, and the picture they took of him was so good he kept it taped inside the key cabinet instead of a mirror.

He shook his head. “They’ve been using those same signs for years. I don’t think they dare carry any that say anything agin’ the oil business, ’cause they’re all a bunch of oil-business trust-funders. But you’d think
with all this Russia business going on, a few interesting people would show up. We’ve got all the networks set up inside, and nothing happening. Makes us look bad.” He pocketed my twenty and patted Baby on the head. “Don’t worry, I’ll keep an eye on the dog. Hey,” he said as an afterthought. “You seen those Russians yet?”

“Briefly.”

“Well, hold on to yourself. They’re staying here in the hotel and the word’s out: They’re such grabbers, they scared off all our best girls, and even the five-dollar street hookers won’t come near the place.”

Just then a black stretch limousine glided to the curb. Before Curtis could open the door, it flew open, cracking him in the knee, and a spry, tiny, wiry, old woman in a miniskirt and purple lace stockings leapt out and made a beeline across the street for the TV crew. She was a little bowlegged crab homing in on a dead jellyfish, and she’d flatten anyone or anything that got in her way. The camera lights blinked alive.

“My name is Edith Rochester Rutherford,” she shouted into their faces in the most grating New York accent I’ve ever heard in my life. “And I live in the Del Coronado Hotel in San Diego, California. My suit is a Galanos.” She extended a lilac-tweed arm. “Nancy Reagan wears lots of Galanos, but she wears too much red.”

It didn’t matter if the reporters knew who she was, she was alive, and that was better than any other story they had at the moment. I crossed the street and huddled up with the team.

“Are you related to the Rutherford family?” someone asked her.

“I
am
the Rutherford family,” she declared. “These girls—Mercedes and Alma—are a couple of ingrates. They’ve destroyed everything my husband—James
Rutherford—ever worked for, and I’m here today to see that they get their comeuppance.”

“I thought Bradford Rutherford was chairman before Mercedes,” said another. “What did your husband do for Rutherford Oil?”

“He was a Wall Street stockbroker and meat-packer, but what does it matter what he did?” Aunt Edith blew him off from behind white-rimmed dark glasses so large they made her look like an ant. “The fact is these girls have headed the company down a very slippery slope.”

“Do you care to elaborate, Mrs. Rutherford?”

“Yes. Come to the meeting.”

“How do you plan to vote today? Are you in favor of or opposed to the Russian deal?”

“Russian deal, smussian deal. That’s nothing.” Aunt Edith opened her lilac Kate Spade tote and pulled out sheets of typed paper, which she waved around with an arthritic, red-tipped claw. She had on a pearl ring so big it looked as if she’d glued a golf ball to her hand. “I plan to propose an entirely new slate of officers and directors and clean house.” She handed out the copies, which the members of the press studied diligently. “I already have commitments from every single one of these individuals, and once they elect me chairman, we will turn Rutherford Oil into the largest, classiest oil company in the world.”

“This is impressive,” Tom O’Neill said. He was the half-brain former coanchor of the KRUN-TV Evening News who’d gotten fired for staging pit-bull fights and then covering them as news. Now he was the catchall for the local community-access cable channel. “You say you have commitments from all of these people?”

“That’s what I said.”

“This is
big
.”

What a dope. I dropped out of the crowd and scanned the list. Here’s who was on it:

King Saud—King of Saudi Arabia

George Bush—Former President of the United States

Margaret Thatcher—Former Prime Minister of Great Britain

Julio Iglesias—Mexican diplomat

Barbra Brolin—Singer

Norman Schwarzkopf—Former General of Desert Storm

Werner Erhardt—Guru

Rosie O’Donnell—Media mogul

Daniel Baker, M.D.—Plastic surgeon

Jake Steinfeld—Personal trainer

Michael Jordan—Former Basketball player

Here’s the thing with some of the media that makes me crazy: They have no judgment, no discretion. They are just big vacuum cleaners that suck up information and then spew it out in high-fidelity, Surround-Sound diarrhea without a single thought as to the legitimacy of the information or the credibility of their sources. Hey! they exclaim. First Amendment. It’s news. While anyone with any sense knows it’s not news at all. It’s nothing but a load of crap.

Regardless, they all went on the air live at that very second, interrupting whatever oral sex was going on in their network soap operas, to announce the Rutherford Oil takeover by what they interpreted to be a legitimate new group that included
Michael Jordan
. This would really put Rutherford Oil on the map.

Wait till the actual business reporters, who were inside covering the actual meeting, get a load of this slate, I thought. They’ll fall on the floor in hysterics.

I followed Edith Rutherford into the hotel. She barreled along like a little door-slammer cloaked in a heavy cloud of Tea Rose perfume. I trailed her across the lobby and up the escalators, during which ride she opened her purse and, without looking in a mirror, ground a tube of smashed-up bright-red lipstick onto her mouth. I followed her to the mezzanine, where she passed the check-in tables and announced to the surprised receptionists with a wave of her hand, “I don’t need any of that junk,” then cruised through the metal detector and disappeared.

So far as I could tell, in spite of Mercedes’s claim that Security would be so tight it would be easier to get into the White House, it appeared minimal to nonexistent, and I decided whomever they’d used was either very, very good or not there at all. When I reached the entrance to the convention center/ballroom I noticed two gorillas in too-small cheap blue blazers with the Rutherford logo on their breast pockets, and too-tight gray pants. My first thought was that I hoped they didn’t have any weapons.

Three airport-type metal detectors stood at the open doors into the convention-hall lobby. I showed my badge to one of the fellows.

“We’re ready for anything, Marshal,” he informed me as I passed through. “Don’t worry.”

Ha. This was Mercedes’s show, not mine, but if those two goons were her idea of beefed-up security, we hadn’t communicated. A little hole began burning in my stomach.

I
’d never been to the annual meeting of a major, publicly held company before. All our businesses are family-owned, so when the Bennetts gather officially once a year at the main ranch house, we sit down around the thirty-foot-long dining-room table where the ranch hands have their meals, suck up a number of cocktails, tell a lot of lies, laugh a lot, get into a few shouting matches, listen to my father report on the banks and say how much we made or lost overall (although we’ve never actually ended up in a deficit position), listen to Christian report on the newspapers and railroads, listen to Elias report on the ranch and the oil and the cattle, and listen to Cousin Buck tell us what a bunch of assholes he thinks we all are. Then we vote to keep everything the way it is and have some more drinks and rib eyes and pineapple upside-down cake. So even though I own stock in a few corporations and get invited to their annual meetings annually, this was my first time to attend.

And I was totally unprepared for the chaos.

The lobby was like a political convention, a mob scene of Americana, a combination of Wall Street, downtown Boulder, and Barnum and Bailey. Granola-heads, tree-huggers, and bean-counters, everything from people wearing hats in the shapes of oil derricks and oil-well pumps to a giant, very friendly looking Russian bear who was followed by a curvy young woman in a tiny, mink-trimmed Russian peasant outfit carrying a tray filled with shot glasses. The bear waved Wyoming and Siberian flags in one paw and handed out vodka from the tray with the other. Another young woman—heavyset, hirsute, simian, and arrayed in a large rhinestone crown and a mink-trimmed silver-lamé bathing suit with a banner introducing her as Miss Manily-Siberia—was kissing all the men, which none but a handful of the company’s oil-field workers brought down from Alaska for the meeting looked too crazy about.

I spotted Wade having what appeared to be angry words with Kennedy McGee, who towered over him and spoke directly into his upturned face. Judging by Wade’s expression, his breath smelled like onions. Wade had just handed him an envelope with something written on its front.

“We had a deal, McGee. So just give me the proxy and get the hell out of town,” I heard him say through clenched teeth as I approached them.

“Not bloody likely, you mewling little mole-butt.” Kennedy slid the envelope arrogantly into his jacket. A cruel, defiant grin curled his lips. “I’ve changed my mind, and there’s not a bleeding thing you can do to stop me. The Russians’ offer makes this look like bus fare, you stupid gull. As far as I’m concerned, you can go screw yourself. It’s not as if you weren’t used to it.”

“Hey, good morning, Lilly,” Johnny Bourbon yelled
from behind. He spun me around by my shoulder and took my hand. Diamonds sparkled from the gold cross that held his leather-thong bolo tight to his throat. The brim of his white beaver Stetson shaded his eyes. I wondered if he knew the whole shebang now rested on his vote. “Praise the Lord,” he declared.

Shanna hung back a little in her curvy powder-blue Western suit with bleached deer-antler buttons, a frilly little white crinoline-lined peplum, which needed to stick out at least six more inches if it were going to match her bosom, and oceans of fringe hanging from her sleeves and skirt. I wondered if she had as active a libido as her husband, and if she had a young Italian as her assistant. The more I looked at her, the more I decided she probably had two young Italians.

“Excuse me.” I pulled away to see what had happened between Wade and Kennedy, but Kennedy was gone, and Wade, still red-faced, was trying to have a friendly conversation with someone else. I turned back to Johnny and Shanna. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised you’re here,” I said. “I mean … well, I don’t know exactly what I do mean.”

“You mean why would a man of God, a man with feet of clay who begs for a living, be at an occasion that so concerns itself with earthly matters? Don’t you know, ‘Even the rich are hungry for love, for being cared for, for being wanted, for having someone to call their own’? Mother Teresa herself, God rest her soul, said that.”

“No, I had no idea she’d ever said any such thing.”

“And I’ll tell you something else,” Johnny pressed his case. “Over the years, Alma gave Johnny Bourbon’s Christian Cowboys plenty of stock in this fine company, and I believe, although we won’t know until she’s gone—whenever that day is that the Lord decides to
call her home—that she left our ministry a significant endowment. Now, I don’t know that for sure—you and I both know what our Alma’s like, that girl can change her mind quicker than the weather—but she loves the Lord, sure enough, and I pray He’ll have mercy and restore her to us.”

“Praise the Lord,” said Shanna in her best television voice: long on delivery and short on conviction. I’m not saying she wanted Alma to die, and I’m not saying she didn’t. But I also didn’t think she especially cared if she lived or not, because Shanna and I both knew there always had been, and always would be, Almas orbiting Johnny. Just as there are always people anxious and willing to pay for salvation.

Wade was now surrounded by a group of men who looked as if they’d been dressed by Hopalong Cassidy’s wardrobe person. All six of them were big, stocky, sturdy, muscular. Much too hefty for the wildly expensive high-slide-heeled, gila-monster-skin cowboy boots that kept them constantly rocking over backward and scrambling for balance. They had bandannas at their necks, color-coordinated with skintight shirts cowboy-trimmed with silver medallions and fringe and different-colored piping—red on white, white on red, white on black, black on white, saddle brown on Wedgwood and vice versa—tucked into matching skintight piped pants tucked into the boots, and absurd, old-fashioned ten-gallon hats.

The Russians.

They were yelling at Wade and towering over him like giant cannibals getting ready to snatch him up and stick him in the pot.

“Wade,” I said. “How’re your friends?”

“Hey!” They all turned and said at the same time. “It’s lady?”

Then the biggest one, the chief oaf, the red-on-white, my old friend Sergei said, “Bride. She’s bride.”

What they tried to do was bend their knees and thrust their pelvises forward and act out a little hokey-pokey, but the boots prevented the action and simply turned them into a bunch of cheap, drunk Elvis impersonators.

“Gentlemen, you know Marshal Bennett.”

“Oh,
da
, lady policemans. You very beautiful, nothing like Russian policemans.” With this they all removed their hats and gave me a little teetering bow. Red-on-white snapped his fingers and the bear rumbled up next to him. “You want vodka?”

“Not quite yet, thanks.”

“Vodka good for you.” With that, they all tossed off shots.

“You want hokey-pokey with me?”