The Franchise (64 page)

A.D. often sent the Pistolettes to the Cobianco parties when the brothers were entertaining “associates” from out of town. A.D. hoped that those favors kept him in good stead with the Cobianco brothers. He didn’t look at it as pimping but as public relations. At one of the parties a nude, drunken, nineteen-year-old blond Pistolette drowned in the swimming pool. It took a lot of money and fast talk to keep the story out of the news. A.D. complained to Don Cobianco about the trouble.

“Trouble? What trouble?” Don snarled over his breakfast. The two men were meeting in Don’s hotel suite. “There ain’t no trouble. That’s why you got them alternates. Next time, send us some alternates.” He waved A.D. off and went back to reading the Chandler Communications, Inc., newspaper.

A.D. called Suzy Ballard Chandler out at the Hot Springs Ranch.

“Don’t complain to me, A.D.,” Suzy yelled over the phone. “I have enough trouble out here. The crazy old bastard wants to either give all his money to that goddam Jesus freak Billy Joe Hardesty or support the Players Union director Terry Dudley for governor. I’ll bet he’s written five hundred checks to those two. If I hadn’t burned them, we’d be dead broke.” Suzy changed hands with the telephone. Her palms were sweaty. “And he seems to be getting
better.
The Valium doesn’t seem to be keeping him under control.”

“He’s probably built a tolerance to the stuff,” A.D. said. “Give him more.”

“I’m giving him a hundred milligrams a day now,” Suzy whined. “It keeps him drowsy and a little confused, but now he’s talking about getting back to the city. I’m scared to death that the next time Billy Joe Hardesty flies in, he’ll take Cyrus off with him.”

“Put one of those cowboys at the airstrip with a shotgun and blow Billy Joe to Jesus if he steps out of his plane,” A.D. replied.

“Really?”

“I’m serious. We can’t fuck around anymore with that guy. I got a lot of trouble up here with the Cobiancos. They’re taking over the Franchise. Johnny is my assistant and they got all sorts of goons on the payroll.”

“Shit!” Suzy said into the phone. “What are we going to do? I don’t understand all this stuff. Most of the other companies seem to run themselves with presidents and boards of directors, but Dick Conly ran that damn franchise out of his head. You know what Cyrus has been doing?” she asked but didn’t pause. “He’s been transferring the Franchise stock into his grandson’s trust. Ten percent a year on his birthday.”

“Taylor and Wendy’s kid?” A.D. asked. “Randall?”

“He doesn’t have any other grandkids that I know about,” Suzy said. “The kid has forty percent already. It was Dick Conly’s idea, the bastard. I asked Cyrus to stop the trust and leave the stock to me, but he said he can’t do it; he doesn’t control it.”

“Jesus!” A.D. was startled by their sudden precariousness. “If he does that much longer, the trust fund’ll run the Franchise. I thought you had him under control?”

“That is what I have been saying, you jerk!” Suzy clenched her damp palms. She ached to hit A.D. one good shot in the nose, watch him bleed, his eyes water. “Since the Trust already has forty percent and Wendy Chandler’s got ten percent, we already got a standoff.”

A.D. whined. “I got trouble at both ends and in the middle. They will clean house. What the hell am I going to do?”

“They’ll try, but you don’t have to let them,” Suzy condescended. “I got my tit in a wringer down here. I may just kill the old bastard. I’m tired of fucking with him. They want to fight, I’ll fight.”

“Jesus! Wait a minute, Suzy,” A.D. cried. “Cyrus may not be ready to die—
taxwise,
I mean. You’ll need a hell of a lot of cash to pay inheritance taxes on that old bastard, and as far as I know he doesn’t have the cash or the insurance policies. Let’s not go looking for trouble. Let’s deal with it as it comes.”

“Well, talk to Cobianco!” Suzy yelled. “Let’s do something. I’m tired of this
shit.”
She slammed the phone down.

A.D. sat numbly at his desk and talked to himself. “A fucking roller-skating carhop got a covey of houses, maids, servants, a half-million-acre ranch with high-blood herds of horses and cattle, her own hot springs, God’s most spectacular Rio Grande canyons,
and now she’s tired of this shit.”
A.D. laughed weakly.
“Shit,
she called it.
Shit.”
He lay his cheek against his arms, folded on the desk top. “ ‘Let’s
do
something,’ ” he mimicked Suzy. “Fucking roller skates made her crazy.
Do
something? Do
something
? Goddam cunt, this ain’t
nothing
I’m doing. I don’t know what it is, but it’s
something.”
A.D. sat resting his head on his arms, wondering how it had gotten so complicated.

“Taylor was right,” he whined. “Years ago. He’s always right. I never did have no fucking luck with carhops.”

S
UZY
B
ALLARD
C
HANDLER
decided to double Cyrus’s Valium dosage and see if that didn’t reduce him back to the half-vegetable that spent his days doddering around the house, picking imaginary lint off his bathrobe. In the short term Suzy achieved her goal and Cyrus was quickly back to drooling and wetting himself.

Unfortunately, one Sunday afternoon, after a lunch of Froot Loops, Cyrus Chandler choked to death on his own vomit during his afternoon nap.

As A.D. Koster had feared, Cyrus Chandler was not ready to die.

Taxwise.

The Chandler Industries were protected; Dick Conly had seen to that before Amos Chandler died. But no provisions had been made to shelter Cyrus Chandler’s personal holdings, including his remaining fifty-percent ownership of the Franchise; the Hot Springs Ranch with its buildings, fencing, airstrip, twenty-five thousand head of Santa Gertrudis, fifteen hundred purebred quarterhorses and miscellaneous vehicles; and his $2.7 million home in the city.

The will was simple, leaving everything to Suzy.

The only insurance was a $2,500 burial policy.

Two months after Cyrus died, the Internal Revenue Service presented Suzy with an inheritance tax bill of a little over sixteen million dollars.

S
UZY
B
ALLARD
C
HANDLER
had no idea how to raise that much cash. Nor did A.D. Koster.

Other than the fifty percent of the Franchise, the only assets with much liquidity were the purebred cattle and quarterhorses; even those showed the peculiar bind that Suzy faced. The ranch foreman had kept meticulous records of the high prices paid for the breeding stock, which the IRS used to compute the growing value of the horse and cattle herds. The actual distressed market price, however, was much lower, closer to the value of slaughter cattle and saddle horses. The foreman’s careful records had been good for depreciation but bad for depreciation recapture upon inheritance.

The shelters for tax avoidance had not yet been created to pass Cyrus Chandler’s personal wealth intact to the next generation. The taxes were staggering and pressing, since the Government was also in a liquidity crisis and the IRS insisted on prompt payment and preferred cash.

Sixteen million cash. Pronto.

It might take years to sell the ranch and the expensive mansion in the city.

Dick Conly could have extricated Suzy from the seemingly desperate cash-poor position with just a few phone calls. It wasn’t even genius-level work. But A.D. and Suzy were swimming with the sharks, and Conly merely watched.

Quite soon the IRS began making threatening noises about property seizures and attachments, and their target of first choice was the Franchise.

Even at that late date, if Suzy and A.D. found an honest lawyer, they would have been all right. Instead they called Charlie Stillman. The lawyer, union organizer, player’s agent, part owner in Cobianco Brothers Construction and counsel for the Laborers Union, said he would call back.

When the phone rang, A.D. Koster answered.

“It’s set,” Stillman said.

“What’s set?” A.D. shrugged his shoulders at Suzy, who was chewing the polish off her nails.

“The meet.”

“What meet?” A.D. looked to Suzy for some indication of what his response should be if he ever figured out what Charlie Stillman was saying. “What meet?” A.D. repeated. Suzy suddenly pulled her bare foot to her face and began chewing on a toenail.

“About the sixteen million,” Charlie Stillman said. “I got it for you.”

“Oh.”

Suzy and A.D. went to see Don Cobianco. He was expecting them.

“I can have the money for you next week,” the eldest brother said. “But first you will
both
have to take out life insurance policies in the amount of the loan, payable to me. We don’t want this same sort of problem cropping up again. It won’t cost you anything. My brother Roger has an agency that does business with one of those fast-track companies out of Detroit. They pay a hundred-and-fifteen-percent commission on the first year’s premium. So we’ll make your premium payment and keep the fifteen percent.” Don Cobianco smiled. “Don’t worry about the physicals. We got doctors.” Cobianco reached into his desk drawer and pulled out two insurance forms. “Just sign here and leave the rest to me.”

“I don’t know....” A.D. said.

“Well, if you don’t want the money ...” Cobianco began to put the sheets back into his desk.

“Goddam, A.D.,” Suzy snapped, “what else can we do?”

Cobianco pushed the papers back out in front of the two confused and desperate people. “It’s just a precaution. You’ll be able to pay me back easy with the cash flow that the Franchise will generate in the next few years. I’m charging you less than prime-rate interest. IRS charges more interest; they’re the real sharks. Where else could you get a better deal?”

Suzy and A.D. had no answers.

Suzy snatched up the pen and quickly signed the insurance form. A.D. hesitantly followed suit.

Donald Cobianco slid the papers into the drawer.

“Now, of course we’ll just fill out a simple loan statement. I’ll want the ranch and the Franchise as my collateral.”

When the paperwork was finished, A.D. and Suzy got up to leave.

“Now, remember,” Don Cobianco said, “you check with me on all fiscal matters involving the ranch and I will exercise a certain amount of day-to-day control over the Franchise.” The two people nodded.

“Let’s see if we can get to the Super Bowl this year,
partners.
Since it’s going to be played in the Pistol Dome, it means lots of tickets and a home-field advantage. We ought to make a killing. Give someone else a liquidity crisis.”

“How does it feel to be so liquid?” Suzy asked A.D. when the money arrived.

“We’ve made room.” A.D. finally spoke. His mood was low. “For bigger and bigger sharks.”

“H
OLD THE LINE,
please, sir.” The female voice on the phone had a nasal clipped eastern sound. “The White House is calling.”

Taylor Rusk pulled the phone onto his bed and lay on his right side, the receiver wedged between his left ear and shoulder. Motionless while the phone made clicking and buzzing sounds, he wondered what time it was, but was too sore to look for the clock radio.

It was dark.

Taylor Rusk had just crawled into bed. The team plane returned late from the Los Angeles Monday Night Playoff game and the sun was up when Taylor eased his aching body onto the king-size mattress.

Los Angeles blitzed the shit out of them. The Los Angeles linebackers, halfbacks and free safety kept coming all night; Taylor took some terrific blows to the ribs and back after he had released the ball. They called some roughing-the-quarterback penalties, but that didn’t keep Taylor’s bones and muscles from bruising or his rib cartilage from tearing.

Los Angeles’s game plan was to “intimidate” the quarterback by attempting either to break Taylor’s back and ribs or rupture a major internal organ. Failing that, Los Angeles figured that the Texas quarterback would begin to hear footsteps. The constant blitzing was a personal vendetta for Dick Portus. The young Los Angeles owner wanted some retribution for the trouble his attempt to sign Taylor had caused him. Chastised and publicly embarrassed, Dick Portus exacted his revenge.

“I want you to kill him,” he had told his defense. They didn’t need much encouragement and battered Taylor all night. Speedo Smith and Screaming Danny Lewis made the correct pass-route adjustments every time, but the young offensive line missed a few blocking changes. Fortunately Taylor made up some time himself and had to eat the ball only once. Ignoring the pressure and finding the right receivers, Taylor picked the LA defense apart.

Texas beat LA 36–6 in front of a national television audience, but Dick Portus got his pound of flesh. By Taylor’s reckoning, aching in his bed, the telephone against his ear, Dick Portus got maybe three to five pounds. But it cost him the Playoff, putting the Pistols one step closer. If they got by Washington, they were in the Super Bowl. It was exactly what Red had expected Portus to do, and he designed his game plan into it. Red offered the LA players the chance of doing their jobs and stopping the play or a free shot at Taylor Rusk.

“It’s just for one game, Taylor,” Red explained when Taylor figured out the reason for naked bootlegs and fake QB draws. “This is the year. This is the only way to beat them for sure. Try and protect yourself, but don’t flinch.”

“Hello?” a familiar voice came on the line. Taylor flinched.

“I’m ready with your call to Texas,” the White House operator said.

“Taylor? Taylor, my boy?”

“Yeah?” Taylor groaned, too sore and tired to attempt to place the voice.

“It’s me, Terry Dudley. I’m calling you from the White House.”

“Good, Terry,” Taylor said weakly. He didn’t move from his side or open his eyes.

“Thought I’d call.” Dudley’s cheery voice irritated the sore, aching quarterback. “It’s beautiful Foggy Bottom on the old Potomac River. Me and the wife are up here to meet the President. Pretty hard to believe, huh?”