Rough Trade (15 page)

What is the worst thing you can say to someone?

The baby was born dead.

The biopsy showed cancer.

Your father was murdered and the police think you killed him.

As I drove up to Milwaukee the next morning, I wondered how anyone ever found the courage to say any of them.

It had turned cold overnight, and the roads were iced over in patches and dangerous. I drank coffee out of a Styrofoam cup and drove slowly, thinking about what whoever had killed Beau had managed to accomplish. The embalmer was probably already laying out his supplies— the gloves, fluids, needles, and implements of stainless steel—that mark our final journey from the is to the isn’t. But beyond that I could think of nothing concrete that had been accomplished and certainly nothing that had been gained.

I arrived at Chrissy and Jeff’s house, feeling cramped from the drive and even more puzzled than when I’d set out. The domestic tableau that awaited me inside the kitchen made my errand seem all the more difficult. Jeff, dressed in a ripped Monarchs T-shirt and a pair of flannel pajama bottoms, was at the stove frowning at pancakes on the griddle and making tentative stabs at them with a spatula. At the sight of me he raised the utensil in a mock salute. Chrissy was in her rocking chair, the portable phone wedged between her shoulder and her ear, feeding Katharine her bottle.

Over the top of the baby’s head Chrissy rolled her eyes to indicate that whoever she was on with wouldn’t stop talking, and I pantomimed asking her if I could take the baby. She nodded and I gathered my namesake up in my arms, effecting the transfer without disturbing either baby or bottle. I found a comfortable spot on the other side of the hearth and looked down at the baby, blond like her mother, eyes closed and furiously sucking down the funky-smelling formula, oblivious to everything else. The relaxation in her small body was practically intoxicating.

I waited through a series of Chrissy’s yeses and uh-huhs in response to whomever she was talking to on the phone. Jeff poured a cup of coffee and set it at my elbow, returning to the griddle in time to fill a serving plate with overdone and vaguely misshapen pancakes.

Chrissy finally punched the end button with barely disguised relish and ran her fingers through her hair with a sigh. “That was Mr. Massy from the funeral home. He says that we’re all set up for visitation this afternoon.”

“Does that mean they’ve already released the body?” I asked.

“I guess so,” replied Chrissy, getting up and taking three plates out of the cupboard and laying them on the table. “I don’t think many people are going to be willing to make the trip to the funeral home just to pay their respects to us.”

“Did he say anything about when the death certificate would be issued?”

“No, he didn’t mention it,” replied Chrissy.

“What’s the big deal about the death certificate?” inquired Jeff, setting the plate of pancakes in the center of the table and rooting in the back of the refrigerator before coming up with a bottle of syrup.

“I talked to a friend of mine who knows a detective in the Milwaukee Police Department,” I replied.

“You mean the cute private detective Claudia is always telling me you should dump Stephen for?”

“His name is Elliott,” I said, not at all pleased that my friends had apparently been discussing my love life behind my back, “and according to what his friend says, ' Beau was strangled.”

“Strangled?” cried Chrissy, instinctively reaching out for the baby and gathering her back up in her arms. “There must be some kind of mistake. They told us that he’d had a heart attack. Everyone knew he had a bad heart—”

“Are you saying that he was murdered?” asked Jeff, incredulously.

“I’m afraid so.”

“Who could have done such a thing?” he inquired, his voice hollow with shock.

“It had to have been someone at the stadium that morning,” I replied, taking his question at face value. “Who else was there?”

“Probably a couple of hundred people. The security people could give you a list. What day was it? Monday? The team was there, broken up into specialty teams reviewing Sunday’s game films with the coaching staff. The grounds crew was probably getting the field ready for afternoon practice. The front office people were there. The concession guys are always in cleaning up and taking inventory the day after a game.... I still can’t believe they’re saying he was murdered.”

“Who was on your father’s appointment schedule that morning?” I prodded.

“I don’t know. Gus Wallenberg was supposed to have a meeting, so I’m sure Feiss was somewhere around. Dad always sat down with Bennato the morning after a game. But what does any of it matter? Aren’t the police in charge of trying to figure out who killed him?”

“Right now the police think it was you,” I said softly. Chrissy and Jeff’s response was a stunned silence that was eventually interrupted by the ringing of the telephone. As if in a daze, Chrissy picked up the portable phone.

“Hello?” she asked, sounding unsure whether this was the appropriate greeting. She listened for a few seconds, frowning, then handed the phone to me. “It’s for you,” she said.

“Who is it?” I whispered, holding my hand over the mouthpiece.

“I have no idea,” replied Chrissy with a bewildered shrug of her shoulders. “But whoever he is, he sounds really upset.”

CHAPTER 12

It was Sherman Whitehead, who along with Cheryl was supposed to be holding down the fort on the Avco case. He sounding like he was calling from his car phone, but Chrissy was wrong about his state of mind. He wasn’t upset. He was hysterical.

“We have a terrible problem,” he whimpered through the static.

“What is it?” I shot back, getting to my feet and heading toward the dining room in search of privacy. Unlike a lot of associates, Sherman wasn’t an alarmist. If he said we had a terrible problem, then that’s exactly what we had.

“I was just out at Avco’s offices getting the updated financials like you said. Of course, they didn’t have them ready, so I had to sit around and wait for them. After a while I started noticing that there was something going on—you know, people rushing around, whispering, like something big had just happened—-but whenever they saw me, they would clam up. When I started asking around, everybody started looking at their shoes. Nobody would tell me what was wrong.”

“So did you find out what had happened?”

“I got it out of some girl who works in accounting. She’s only been with the company a couple of weeks, and I don’t think she realized that I didn’t work there.”

“So what is it?”

“Avco was served with an EEOC suit this morning.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said, suddenly feeling weak-kneed and sick to my stomach. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is the federal agency responsible for all suits claiming employment discrimination. “What’s the complaint?”

“Four male plaintiffs are alleging that they applied for jobs as food servers at a Tit-Elations in Muncie and were turned down because they’re men. They’re alleging sex discrimination.”

“The only reason is that they didn’t look good in pasties and a G-string,” I snapped. “I told Eisenstadt that this whole ‘they’re-only-food-servers’ stance would eventually come back and bite us.”

Anticipating problems from what he darkly described as “conservative elements,” Stuart Eisenstadt had insisted that in all our public filings we characterize Tit-Elation’s barely clad female employees as food servers.

“Wait. There’s more. Supposedly it’s Reverend Mar-pleson who’s behind the whole thing. They think that a lawyer in one of his watchdog groups must have spotted the red herring for the IPO and realized that if they were really food servers, then there was no reason they couldn’t be men. The whole thing with the four men applying for jobs was probably a setup.”

“What does Eisenstadt have to say about all of this?”

“I don’t think you want to hear this.”

“Try me.”

“Well, as soon as I found out about the EEOC suit, I went straight to Colin Brandt’s office and asked him when the hell he was planning on telling us about it. He says he called Eisenstadt first thing this morning—the minute they got it.”

“And have you talked to Eisenstadt?”

“I called you first.”

“Did you get a copy of the complaint?”

“Yeah. I made one before I left. I’ve got it with me.”

“Good. You head back to the office and wait for my call.”

I hit the end button when what I really wanted to do was hit Stuart Eisenstadt. The fact that I’d always feared that something like this would happen, that I’d practically held my nose through the entire IPO process, offered no consolation. Knowing you’re going to wind up in shit doesn’t make the reality of finding yourself hip deep in it any less unpleasant.

Again and again I’d warned Eisenstadt not to underestimate the ingenuity of the morally righteous. It is always fatal to assume that just because someone holds opposing beliefs—or in this case, any beliefs at all—it makes them unintelligent. I may not have agreed with much of what the Reverend Marpleson stood for, but I also knew that he hadn’t become a political force to be reckoned with by being stupid.

And there was no denying that the good reverend had done his homework. Not only had we characterized the dancers as food servers in all of our preliminary offering documents, but in subsequent communications with the SEC we’d argued that the tips they received (and no doubt tucked into their G-strings) were food service gratuities for IRS accounting purposes.

I punched in Eisenstadt’s number and paced the floor.

“Kate,” said Eisenstadt. “I’m so glad you called. I’ve been trying to get hold of you.”

“How? Using smoke signals? Sherman didn’t have any problem finding out how to reach me.” I was disappointed. I’d expected him to be a better liar.

“You’ve already talked to him?” he demanded, uneasily.

“What I want to know is why I haven’t talked to you. Why is it that the only way I find out our client has been sued is after an associate accidentally overhears it from an accounting clerk? Were you ever planning on telling me, or were you going to wait until I heard about it on CNN?”

“You have no right to take that tone with me,” snapped Eisenstadt, as if he was actually capable of being offended.

“Knock it off, Stuart. Right now we have to figure out whether this is an issue of material disclosure that has to be reported to the SEC.”

“Don’t you think you’re overreacting just a little bit?” he demanded, but there was no mistaking the fear in his voice. “You and I both know that this is a frivolous lawsuit.”

“How would I know that, Stuart? I haven’t even seen it. But frivolous or not, defending against it is going to rack up some substantial legal expenses for a company that’s already having cash-flow problems. That in and of itself is something that has to be considered.”

“How can you be talking about telling the SEC when we’re this close?” he practically shrieked.

“Panic doesn’t become you, Stuart,” I replied, sounding exactly like my mother. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” I continued, softening. “I’m sure you agree with me that it’s only prudent to review the complaint before offering an opinion to the client. But I’m telling you right now, if this is a material development, then we have absolutely no choice. We have to disclose it by submitting an updated registration to the SEC. Not only is that the law, but if it is material and we don’t reveal it, the SEC will come after us, and the shareholders will be right behind them. If it turns out that the EEOC levels a judgment against them down the road and it adversely affects the company’s share price, we’ll be defending ourselves in court faster than you can say ‘class action suit.’ I’m stuck in Milwaukee today so I’m going to have Sherman drive up and bring me copies of all of our filings and correspondence with the SEC along with a copy of the complaint. We’ll talk about what to do after I’ve had a chance to review them.”

“Are you out of your mind? The SEC has been looking for an excuse to sink us since day one. Now you’re saying that you’d be willing to turn around and give them the gun to shoot us with. I can’t believe you’d be willing to torpedo the deal after we’ve come this far.”

“And I can’t believe you’d be willing to whore yourself to see it close.”

There are plenty of lawyers who get off on being angry. They like the chest-thumping and the adrenaline, the way it invigorates them like a five-mile run without the sweat. Unfortunately, I’m not one of them. When I lose my temper, it’s because I’m really angry, and after I’ve lost it, I feel rotten and guilty. No doubt it has something to do with my childhood.

I spent a few minutes alone in the dining room, looking out the window and willing myself into some kind of internal order. Chrissy and Jeff had enough of their own hysteria to deal with; they didn’t need any more from me. By the time I’d calmed down sufficiently to return to the kitchen, Jeff was all alone, looking somber in his black dress suit, carefully knotting his dark tie using the front of the microwave as a mirror.

“Chrissy wants you to go and talk to her upstairs. She’s putting on her face. I’ve got to get down to the funeral home.”

“We have to talk,” I said.

“Can’t it wait?” asked Jeff, frowning with concentration at his reflection in the microwave.

“No. We have to decide what, if anything, to tell the police about what’s going on with the team.”

“Why do we have to tell them anything?”

“Because the longer they stay in the dark, the longer they’re going to spend running the ball in the wrong direction.”

“You mean, thinking that I did it.”

“Exactly.”

“Listen, Kate,” he said, smoothing his tie with the flat of his hand and turning to face me. “I don’t like the idea that my father was murdered, and I like the idea of being a murder suspect even less. But I don’t want any of this getting out until after the funeral. My father was a big deal in this town. He made a couple of big mistakes, but he made them because he wanted to give the Milwaukee fans a winner, and whatever else you say about him, he should be remembered for the good things, not the bad. He wasn’t the world’s best father, and lord knows I wasn’t a perfect son, but the least I can do is give him that. The funeral is tomorrow morning. Let’s wait until after it’s over, then let’s tell them. Fair enough?” He caught sight of the clock and let loose a groan. “Christ, look at the time. I’ve got to run.”