The Chairman (9 page)

“She had three.”

“How old were they?”

“Nine, seven, and four. Two girls and a boy. She was divorced, and the kids have gone to live with her sister on Long Island. There’s child support from the ex, but it isn’t much, and the sister has a full plate with four kids of her own.”

Gillette glanced out at the Brooklyn Bridge as they headed north on the FDR toward midtown. “Give each child a quarter of a million.”

“That’s a lot of money,” Cohen said. “It isn’t our fault she was—”

“They’re kids, Ben. Young kids. It doesn’t matter whose fault it is.”

Isabelle’s image drifted suddenly through Gillette’s mind: long black hair, sculpted cheekbones, smooth, honey-brown skin, and dark eyes. There was something about her that haunted him, something he couldn’t shake. Thinking about her was distracting, and he hated being distracted.

He’d only spoken to her for a few moments in Jose and Selma’s kitchen. Not long enough to really even draw a first impression. But here he was, thinking about her—again.

“Take it out of my bonus,” Gillette instructed.

“Okay, okay. I agree.” Cohen put his hands up, giving in. “We need to do the right thing here. I’ll make the arrangements, and we’ll
all
share the burden. Not just you.”

Fifteen minutes later the limousine eased to a stop in front of the Everest building.

“I have a few more things I want to cover,” Cohen said, “but I guess they can wait until we get upstairs.”

“We’re stopping here for you,” explained Gillette. “I’m on my way to see Tom McGuire, then I’m having lunch with Senator Stockman. What do you want to cover?”

Cohen checked the list of items scrawled on the legal pad resting on his knees. “We need to talk about all the companies you’re chairman of now. All twenty-seven of our control investments, with Bill dead and Troy fired. You can’t possibly handle that many chairs
and
raise ten billion dollars.”

“I agree, and the target isn’t ten billion anymore. It’s fifteen.”

“Fifteen?”
Cohen asked, squinting.

“Miles convinced me to go for that much. He wanted to commit a billion five.” An exaggeration of the number and not the real reason Whitman wanted Gillette to raise the target. But Cohen needed confidence. “But he can’t be more than 10 percent of any individual fund. That’s an internal NAG limit.”

“Jesus,” Cohen muttered under his breath. “I hope we can raise that much.”

“I have no doubt we can,” Gillette said. “Okay. Let’s talk about the chairmanships. What’s your recommendation?” He saw that Cohen had been taken off guard.

“Well, I . . . I guess I would—”

“From now on,” Gillette interrupted, “when you bring up an issue, do it along with a recommendation. I may not agree, but I always want a recommendation.”

“Okay.” Cohen paused. “Um, how about this? You keep fifteen chairs and split the balance between Faraday and me. That would be six each for the two of us.”

Gillette shook his head. “Nigel’s going to be focused on raising the new fund. That’ll be a full-time project. And I need you to run the office.”

“So you aren’t going to give me a single portfolio company?”

The cell phone vibrated again. Gillette pulled it out and flipped it open. It was Jeremy Cole. “Hi, Jeremy,” he said, holding up his hand to Cohen.

“Hey, I got a message that you called. What’s up?”

“I talked to the Giants yesterday. They’ll be contacting your agent in the next few hours, if they haven’t already. They’ll be offering you six million per for five years with a $10 million signing bonus. Take it. Don’t let your agent get greedy,” Gillette warned. “I’ve gotten everything there is to get. Understand?”

“I . . . I understand. My God, Christian, how did you do that?”

“Don’t worry about it. Now
I
need a favor.”

“Anything. Just name it.”

“I need tickets to the Super Bowl. Whether you and the Giants get there or not.” Gillette could have called the owner’s son, but he wanted Cole to step up. “It’s in New Orleans this year, right?”

“Right.”

“Okay. I need four seats. Good ones, too. It’s for a very important friend.”

“Done. I’ll make the arrangements right away. For all the other stuff, too: passes to the parties and as many luxury suites as you need at the best hotel in the French Quarter. I’ll take care of everything.”

“Good. By the way, how’s Faith Cassidy? Weren’t you two supposed to see each other this week.”

“How did you know?”

“Word travels.”

“Uh-huh. Well, she canceled on me,” Cole grumbled. “Something about having to go to L.A., but she wouldn’t reschedule. That hasn’t happened to me in a while.” He laughed. “Maybe you could help me with that, too.”

Faith had done exactly as she’d been told. Power was a beautiful thing. “Maybe,” Gillette said. “Look, I’ve got to get going. Remember, tell your agent not to get greedy. If he does, I can’t help.”

“I’m calling him right now.”

Gillette closed the phone, ending the call.

“Is it Miles who wants Super Bowl tickets?” asked Cohen.

Gillette nodded. “Let’s get back to the chair positions. Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to promote Marcie and Kyle to managing partner. Both of them are already board members at several of our portfolio companies. They’ll replace me as chairman at those companies, and I’ll appoint them to chair positions at a few others as well. As you suggested, I’ll keep fifteen and split the remaining twelve between Marcie and Kyle. Of course, you, Nigel, and I need to talk about how much of the ups we’re going to give Marcie and Kyle. I’m leaning toward splitting 10 of Mason’s 25 percent between them: 5 and 5. We’ll keep the other 15. At least for now.”

“You’re not even going to give me one chairman seat?” Cohen asked angrily.

“I told you. I need you focused internally.”

“Just one, Christian. Being chairman of a company is something you’ve always taken for granted because you’ve always had lots of those positions. I just want to be able to tell my daughters I’m chairman of one of our companies. Please.”

“No, Ben. And don’t beg. It’s pitiful.”

“Hi, Vicky.” Mason leaned into the young woman’s small office.

Vicky looked up from her desk. “Are you and Paul done?”

“Yes.”

She smiled self-consciously, starting to say something, then stopping.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“Come on.”

“I don’t usually do this.”

“What?”

“I was going to ask you to lunch, but you’re probably already busy,” she added quickly.

Mason’s eyes ran down the plunging lines of her top. “No, I’m free. Let’s go.”

His cell phone rang as they headed toward the door. It was his wife. He shut it off without answering.

Paul Strazzi watched Mason and Vicky move toward the elevators. He loved how predictable a man like Mason was. It made the pursuit of money so much easier.

8

Unconditional Trust.
In a world dominated by the cutthroat race to extraordinary financial gain, unconditional trust is nonexistent. In the end, a private equity professional must assume that those circling around him are ultimately driven by money—and nothing else. Otherwise, he’s setting himself up for failure.

TOM MCGUIRE MOVED INTO THE back of the limousine, letting out an exasperated breath as he eased onto the seat beside Gillette. He’d been standing on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street for the last twenty minutes—cooling his heels.

Gillette knew the heavy breath was meant to let him know McGuire was angry, but he didn’t care. He didn’t have time for egos. It was all about what was best for Everest. “Hi, Tom. I’m having lunch over on Fifth, so we’ll talk while we ride. The driver can take you wherever you want to go after he drops me off.”

Tall and lanky with gray, unkempt hair and round, tortoiseshell glasses, McGuire reminded Gillette of several of his Princeton professors. He always seemed disheveled in his unpressed, button-down shirts, khakis, and rumpled sports jackets with elbow patches.

Vince, Tom’s younger brother by four years, was the opposite. Short and muscular, he wore crisp turtlenecks, designer jeans, and cowboy boots. And while Tom had an easygoing manner about him, Vince was intense.

They were night and day, black and white, but they made an excellent team. Tom the brains, Vince the muscle. The perfect combination to run a global security company. They were co-CEOs, and they’d doubled the company’s revenues since Everest Capital had bought the company three years ago.

Bill Donovan had been chairman of McGuire & Company, and now Gillette was taking over. It would be one of the fifteen chairs Gillette would keep. He’d been the other Everest board member since the beginning, so he’d known the McGuire brothers since the beginning.

McGuire nodded subtly to the bodyguard peering back at them over his shoulder from the passenger seat. “You’re meeting with Senator Stockman, right?”

“Yes.” Gillette glanced from the bodyguard to McGuire, catching the exchange. “You dig up anything else on Stockman?”

McGuire winced.

“What’s wrong?”

“I hate this crap.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s so predictable.” McGuire reached for the console on the limousine door, and pushed the button that raised the panel between the front and back seats. “I found out this morning that Stockman’s having an affair with a woman who works for him. Her name’s Rita Jones. She’s twenty-four and pretty,” McGuire stifled a chuckle, “in her own way.”

“What’s so funny?”

“She’s black. It kills me when these lily-white guys like Stockman get the jungle fever because they—”

“Enough,” Gillette interrupted. McGuire didn’t air his prejudices publicly, but once in a while he let loose with a comment Gillette didn’t appreciate. And there were no African-American senior executives at McGuire & Company, a situation Gillette was going to change now that he was in charge because there were plenty of deserving candidates in middle management. “Just tell me what’s happening.”

McGuire rolled his eyes, irritated. “The affair’s been going on for six months. Stockman uses an apartment in Queens a couple of nights a week. One of his aides pays for it so there’s no direct money link. He’s also brought Jones down to Washington a couple of times. His wife has no idea what’s going on, not, at least, from what we can tell.”

Good. It was something he could use, especially if Stockman’s wife didn’t know. “How do you find this stuff out, Tom?”

“Hang out in the gutter long enough and eventually all the garbage flows past you.”

The McGuire network was broad and deep. Gillette had checked on that before Everest made the investment. He’d found that the brothers knew a lot of people in a lot of different places, not just the gutter. “Take me through Stockman’s background one more time, will you?”

“Sure. He’s from upstate New York, near Albany. Cornell undergraduate, then the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania after two years as a Chase Manhattan corporate banking trainee. After business school he worked as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley for ten years, then went into politics. Served a couple of terms as a state senator before moving on to the big time in D.C.

“Wealthy?”

McGuire shook his head. “Not really. No major money in his or his wife’s family. Both families belong to all the right clubs, but that’s because they settled in the area two hundred years ago, so they know everybody. Stockman made some bucks at Morgan Stanley, but he put a lot of that into his campaigns. And his investment portfolio got dinged pretty bad when the tech stocks got crushed in 2001. It hasn’t come back.”

“Anything else?”

“No, but we’re still looking.”

“What about Donovan?” Gillette asked. “Any more news there?”

“Yeah, one of Vince’s guys spoke to somebody he knows at the coroner’s office in Connecticut. There were bruises on Donovan’s body consistent with a struggle,” McGuire explained. “No heart attack, either. Bill’s ticker was fine, but the cops are still calling it an accidental drowning. They aren’t following up. We don’t know why.”

“Could they be involved? Paid off, maybe?”

“With the stakes as high as they are, anything’s possible at this point.”

“But who would want Donovan dead?”

McGuire ran a finger inside his collar. His shirts always hung loosely around his thin neck. “I might have an idea.”

“Talk to me.”

“Well . . .” McGuire hesitated. “I don’t know if I want to—”

“Come on, Tom.”

McGuire gazed out the window for a moment. “For starters, how about the guy you’re having lunch with?”

“Stockman?”

“Yeah.”

“Why would Stockman want Bill Donovan dead?”

McGuire flashed Gillette an odd look. “You don’t know?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

Gillette cleared his throat, making certain McGuire heard his frustration. “Tom.”

“I just assumed Bill told you this stuff. After all, you were his partner.”

“Don’t assume anything.”

“Look, here’s the thing. Bill told Stockman a few months ago he’d do whatever he could to keep him out of the White House, said he’d spend a ton of dough on negative ads himself. Call people. Anything.”

“Why?”

“
That
I don’t know. Bill told me he’d found out something about Stockman that really pissed him off, but he wouldn’t tell me what.”

“You think it was the affair with the Jones woman?”

McGuire chuckled. “Ah, no.”

“Maybe it was just that Stockman’s a Democrat and Donovan was a big Republican.”

McGuire shook his head. “I don’t think that was it, either.”

“Well, it seems like a stretch to me that Stockman would go as far as having Donovan killed.”

“I know for a fact that Donovan was going to try to derail Stockman’s campaign.”

“Yeah, but who knows if he really could have.”

McGuire smirked. “You’re selling Bill short. Even though he was a Republican, he was
very
connected on both sides of the political aisle. He could have made things tough for Stockman, and he had the economic muscle to get his message out. Particularly with that network of radio and television stations Everest owns.” McGuire hesitated. “Believe me, they hated each other from a long time back.”

“Still, it seems like a long shot.”

McGuire shrugged. “Hey,
you
asked
me
to speculate.”

“Who else?” Gillette asked as the limousine turned right onto Park Avenue.

“Bill’s widow,” McGuire replied bluntly.

“What?”

“Boy, I never gave Bill enough credit,” McGuire said, shaking his head. “I figured you guys would have known about this, too. I never thought Bill could keep a secret, but I guess I was wrong.”

“Known about what?” Gillette demanded.

“He’s dead, so it doesn’t really matter,” McGuire muttered.

Gillette was getting frustrated.
“Tom.”

“All right, all right. Bill liked younger women. The same way Stockman does.”

“Really?” Gillette never had a clue, never even caught Donovan looking at a woman that way.

“That’s why I don’t think Bill would have cared about Stockman’s affair,” McGuire continued. “Bill was old school about all that. He thought powerful men deserved distractions. As compensation for all the stress.”

“I assume Ann wasn’t on the same page.”

“Not even the same book.”

Gillette hadn’t realized until just now how close Bill Donovan and Tom McGuire were, and it struck him as strange that McGuire would air the dirty laundry so fast. There had to be another motive here. “Did Ann know what Bill was doing?”

“She probably suspected for a while, but I don’t think she knew for sure until a few months ago.”

“What happened?”

“There was an incident at the mansion. Ann was traveling in Europe with an old girlfriend from college and came back a few days early. She wanted to surprise Bill, and she sure as hell did. Caught him with a twenty-three-year-old in their bedroom. World War Three broke out. Bill had to spend a bunch of money to put the place back together. He told me they reconciled, but maybe Ann was just taking her time.”

“That’s hard to believe.”

“You’ve known Ann longer than I have, Christian, but you haven’t spent as much time with her. She’s a spitfire. She might seem quiet on the outside, but there’s a temper and a mean streak in there.” McGuire laughed harshly. “And Bill was relentless. Maybe Ann found out a while ago, and the thing in the mansion was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Did you know he tried to tag Faith Cassidy one night?”

Gillette looked up.

“Yup. It was about six months ago,” McGuire continued. “Took her to dinner in Manhattan, supposedly to talk about her next contract. Basically attacked her in the limousine on the way back to her apartment. She had to fight her way out of it, then catch a cab.”

“Jesus.”

“Bill put her contract negotiations on hold the next morning, and ordered the record label to cut back on marketing dollars for her next album.”

The limousine pulled to a stop at a traffic light. They were only a few blocks from the Racquet Club.

Gillette gazed at McGuire. Now it was beginning to make sense. Why Faith had been so tight-lipped about what was going on with her second album. She probably thought his ultimate loyalty would be to Donovan, that he wouldn’t believe some story about Donovan coming on to her in the back of a limousine. That he’d figure it was just a pathetic attempt to extort marketing money out of the record label.

“How do you know all this?” Gillette asked. He made a mental note to check into Faith’s contract negotiations this afternoon. And to check the amount of ad dollars she was getting.

“I guess I was the one Bill told his secrets to,” McGuire said. “The
only
one, I’m finding out. I suppose Bill needed to tell someone these things. Obviously, he couldn’t tell Ann.” He smiled. “In the end, most human beings need to tell someone their secrets. If they didn’t, my job would be a whole lot harder.”

“Does Vince know about this stuff?”

“Yes,” McGuire answered directly. “He and I tell each other everything. We keep each others’ secrets.”

Gillette took a deep breath. He wanted to see if Tom thought there were others who had motive, but he’d have to follow up on that later. There was something else they needed to talk about before his meeting with Stockman, and he was already forty minutes late. “What about the limousine, Tom? Any more information on the explosion?”

“Yeah, we’re pretty sure the bomb was set off by a remote control device and not a timing mechanism. One of Vince’s boys got that from his contacts inside the NYPD crime lab.”

As they pulled to a stop in front of the Racquet Club, Gillette rubbed his eyes. His contacts were beginning to burn. He was supposed to have picked up new ones last week, but there hadn’t been enough time. And he hated asking Debbie to do things like that. “So someone was watching me that day,” he said quietly.

“Apparently.”

“Then why—”

“It must have been a warning, Christian,” McGuire interrupted. “Probably meant to scare you. Maybe from being chairman.”

Gillette stared at McGuire for several moments, then patted the other man’s knee. “Good work, Tom. Thanks. Let’s talk again later today or tomorrow. What’s your schedule?”

“I’m around for a day or so, then I’m flying to London Thursday afternoon.”

The bodyguard opened Gillette’s door, allowing bright sunshine to stream in.

“Okay,” Gillette said, shading his eyes. “I’ll call you later.”

“Christian.”

Gillette turned back around. “Yes?”

“There’s something else I want to talk about.”

“I’m really late, Tom.”

“It’s important. Please.”

Gillette nodded to the bodyguard, who shut the door. “What is it?”

“I want to talk to you about the firm,” McGuire began. “About McGuire & Company.”

Maybe he was about to find out why Tom McGuire had been so open about Bill Donovan’s secrets, Gillette thought. Maybe that had all been bridge building leading up to this. “What about it?”