The Second Time Around (22 page)

“The one good thing that woman has done for me is that people are no longer treating me as a pariah,”
Lynn said. “At least now they believe that I was as taken in by Nick as all the rest of them. When I think—”

“Ms. DeCarlo, when do you expect your story to be published?” Adrian Garner asked.

I wondered if I was the only one at the table irritated at the high-handed way he interrupted Lynn. I was sure Garner made a habit of doing that.

I deliberately gave him an “if this, if that” answer, hoping to irritate him in turn. “Mr. Garner, we sometimes deal with two opposing elements. One is the news aspect of a cover story, and of course Nicholas Spencer is big news. The other aspect is telling the story honestly and not having it become just a collection of the latest rumors. Do we have the full story of Nick Spencer yet? I don't think so. In fact, every day I become convinced that we haven't even scratched the surface of the story, so I can't answer your question.”

I could tell that I had managed to anger him, which pleased me no end. Adrian Nagel Garner may be a hugely successful business tycoon, but in my book that does not give him license to be rude.

I could see that we were drawing our battle lines. “Miss DeCarlo—” he began.

I interrupted him. “My friends call me Carley.” He's not the only one who can interrupt people when they're talking, I thought.

“Carley, the four people at this table, as well as the investors and employees of Gen-stone, are all victims of Nicholas Spencer. Lynn tells me you invested twenty-five thousand dollars in the company yourself.”

“Yes, I did.” I thought of everything that I had heard about Garner's state-of-the-art mansion and decided to see if I could make him squirm. “It was the money I was saving for a down-payment on a co-op apartment, Mr. Garner. I had dreamed about it for years: a building with an elevator that worked, a bathroom where the nozzle on the shower worked, maybe even an older building with a fireplace. I've always been big on fireplaces.”

I knew that Garner was a totally self-made man, but he wouldn't take my bait and say something like “I know what it is to want a shower that works.” He ignored my humble dreams of a better place to live. “Everyone who invested in Gen-stone has a personal history, a personal plan that has been shattered,” he said smoothly. “My company went out on a limb by announcing plans to buy the distribution rights to the Gen-stone vaccine. We were not hurt financially because our commitment was contingent on FDA approval after the vaccine was tested. Nevertheless, my company has been seriously injured in the reservoir of good will that is an essential element in the future of any organization. People bought Gen-stone stock in part because of Garner Pharmaceutical's rock-solid reputation. Guilt by association is a very real psychological factor in the business community, Carley.”

He had almost called me Ms. DeCarlo but hesitated and said “Carley” instead. I don't think I've ever heard a more contemptuous spitting out of my name, and I realized suddenly that Adrian Garner, for all his power and might, was afraid of me.

No, I thought, that's too strong. He
respects
the fact that I can help people understand that not only Lynn but also the Garner Pharmaceutical Company was a victim of Spencer's colossal scam, the cancer vaccine.

The three of them were looking at me, waiting for my response. I decided it was my turn to get a little information from them. I looked at Wallingford. “Do you personally know the stockholder who claims he saw Nick Spencer in Switzerland?”

Garner raised his hand before Wallingford could answer. “Perhaps we should order now.”

I realized the captain was standing to the side at our table. We accepted menus and made our selections. I absolutely love the crab cakes at The Four Seasons, and no matter how hard I look at the menu or listen to the specials, that dish and a green salad are almost inevitably my choice.

Not many people order steak tartare in this day and age. Raw beef combined with raw eggs is not considered the best way to live to a ripe old age. It interested me, therefore, that steak tartare was Adrian Garner's choice.

“The necessaries,” as Casey puts it, out of the way, I repeated my question to Wallingford: “Do you know the stockholder who claims he saw Nick Spencer in Switzerland?”

He shrugged. “
Know
him? I've always been interested in the semantics of saying you
know
somebody. To me ‘know' means you really know about him, not just that you see him regularly at large gatherings such as stockholders' meetings or charity cocktail parties.
The stockholder's name is Barry West. He's in midmanagement in a department store and apparently has handled his own investments fairly well. He came to our meetings four or five times in the last eight years and always made it a point to talk to both Nick and me. Two years ago when Garner Pharmaceutical agreed to joint distribution of the vaccine after it was approved, Adrian put Lowell Drexel on our board to represent him. Barry West immediately attempted to ingratiate himself with Lowell.”

Wallingford shot a glance at Adrian Garner. “I heard him ask Lowell if you were in need of a good, solid, management type, Adrian.”

“If Lowell was smart, he said no,” Garner snapped.

Adrian Garner certainly didn't believe in taking his gracious pill in the morning, but to a certain extent I realized that I was overcoming my irritation at his abrupt manner. In the media business you hear so much bifurcation that someone who says things straight can be a refreshing change.

“Be that as it may,” Wallingford said, “I do think that Barry West had the opportunity to see Nick often enough and up close enough that whoever he saw either
was
Nick or else looked a great deal like him.”

It had been my first impression at Lynn's apartment on Sunday that these men cordially disliked each other. War, however, makes strange bedfellows, and so does a failed company, I thought. But it was also clear to me that I was not here solely to help Lynn explain to the world that she was a helpless victim of her husband's infidelity and larceny. It was important to all of them to
get some sense of the way the cover story in
Wall Street Weekly
would turn out.

“Mr. Wallingford,” I said.

He raised his hand. I knew he was going to ask me to call him by his given name. He did. I did.

“Charles, as you well know, I'm only writing the human interest element of the Gen-stone failure and Nick Spencer's disappearance. I believe you've been speaking extensively with my colleague Don Carter?”

“Yes. In cooperation with our auditors, we have given full access to our books to outside investigators.”

“He stole all that money, yet he wouldn't even go with me to look at a house in Darien that was a great bargain,” Lynn said. “I wanted so much to make our marriage work, and he couldn't understand that I hated living in another woman's house.”

In fairness I had to agree that she had a point. I wouldn't want to live in another woman's house if I married. Then for the quickest of moments I realized that if Casey and I ended up together, we wouldn't have that problem.

“Your associate Dr. Page has been given free access to our laboratory and to the results of our experiments,” Wallingford continued. “Unfortunately for us, there were some promising results early on. This is not uncommon in the search for a drug or vaccine to prevent or slow down the growth of cancer cells. Too often, hopes have been dashed and companies gone under because the early research simply did not prove out. That's what happened at Gen-stone. Why would he steal so much money? We'll never know why he
started to steal it. When he knew the vaccine didn't work and the stock would start to tumble, there was no way he could cover his theft, and that was probably when he decided to disappear.”

Journalists are taught in Journalism 101 to ask five basic questions: Who? What? Why? Where? When?

I chose the middle one. “Why?” I asked. “Why would he do that?”

“Initially perhaps to buy more time to try and prove the vaccine would work,” Wallingford said. “Then, when he knew it could not work and that he'd been falsifying data, I think he decided he had only one choice: to steal enough money to live on for the rest of his life and then to run away. Federal prison is not the country club that the media depict it to be.”

It crossed my mind to wonder if anyone had ever seriously thought of federal prison as a country club. What Wallingford and Garner were saying was that in essence I had proven myself to be true blue by standing by Lynn. Now we could agree on the best way to summarize her innocence, and then I could help rebuild their credibility through the manner in which I submitted my part of the research for the cover story.

It was time to once again say what I thought I'd been saying right along: “I have to repeat something that I hope you realize,” I told them.

Our salads were being served, and I waited to finish my statement. The waiter offered ground pepper. Only Adrian Garner and I accepted. Once the waiter was gone, I told them that I would write the story as I saw it, but in the interest of writing it well and of getting everything
right, I would need to schedule in-depth interviews with both Charles Wallingford and Mr. Garner, who I suddenly realized had not encouraged me to call him Adrian.

They both agreed. Reluctantly? Probably, but that was too hard to call.

Then with business somewhat out of the way, Lynn held her hands out to me, reaching across the table. I was forced to meet the gesture by touching the tips of my fingers to hers.

“Carley, you've been so good to me,” she said with a deep sigh. “I'm so glad you agree that while I might have burned hands, they're also clean hands.”

The famous words of Pontius Pilate raced through my mind: “I wash my hands of the blood of this innocent man.”

But Nick Spencer, I thought, no matter how pure his motives may have been originally, was certainly guilty of theft and deception, wasn't he?

Clearly that's what the bulk of evidence indicated.

Or did it?

B
efore leaving the restaurant, we agreed on times for my interviews with Wallingford and Garner. I pushed my advantage and suggested I meet them at their homes. Wallingford, who lives in Rye, one of the toniest suburbs in Westchester County, readily said that I could call on him on either Saturday or Sunday afternoon at three o'clock.

“Saturday would be better for me,” I responded, thinking of Casey and the cocktail party I was attending with him on Sunday. Then, crossing my fingers, I slipped him a curve. “I do want to go to your headquarters and speak to some of your employees, just to get them to express their feelings about the loss of their 401k's and the bankruptcy and how all that is going to affect their lives.”

I saw him trying to think quickly of a polite way to refuse me, so I added, “I took names of stockholders at
the meeting last week, and I'll be talking to them as well.” Of course, what I really wanted to talk to the employees about was whether it was common knowledge that Nick Spencer and Vivian Powers were emotionally involved.

Wallingford clearly didn't like the request at all, but yielded because he was trying to get good press out of me. “I don't suppose that would be a problem,” he said after a moment, his tone icy.

“Tomorrow afternoon, about three o'clock, then,” I said quickly. “I promise I won't be long. I just want to get an overall reaction to put in the story.”

Unlike Wallingford, Garner flatly refused to be interviewed in his home. “A man's home is his castle, Carley,” he said. “I never conduct business there.”

I would love to have reminded him that even Buckingham Palace was open to tourists, but I held my tongue. By the time we'd finished espresso, I was more than ready to put on my traveling shoes. A journalist is not supposed to let emotion get in the way of a story, but as I sat there, I could feel my anger rising. It seemed to me that Lynn was downright cheerful at the thought that her husband had been involved in a serious romance before he disappeared. It made her look better, even sympathetic, and that was all that mattered to her.

Wallingford and Garner were also on that same page. Show the world that we are victims—that was the thrust of everything they told me. Of the four of us, I thought, I'm the only one who seems remotely interested in the possibility that if Nicholas Spencer could be tracked down, there might be a way to recoup at least
some
of that money. That would be great news for the stockholders. Maybe I'd get back part of my $25,000. Or perhaps Wallingford and Garner were assuming that even if Nick could be found and extradited, he'd probably have buried the money so deep that it would never be found.

After denying me a home visit, Garner did agree that I could call on him in his office in the Chrysler Building. He said he could give me a quick interview at 9:30 on Friday morning.