She laughed too. Her brown eyes sparkled. “Well, maybe some of us more than others. But, honestly, I for one am relieved to know you’ll be examining this offer carefully. Frankly—”
“Hey, Gabby,” someone called out. A young man in Dockers and a blue button-down shirt jogged to catch up with us.
“My husband,” Gabby said by way of introduction. “Dermott Kennedy. He’s teaching history here this year, part-time.”
“Yeah,” Dermott said, grinning at me and giving his wife a kiss on the cheek. “Nepotism.”
“So not true,” she said. “As if I have any pull with the dean.” She turned to me. “Dermott got his doctorate last year, but tenure-track jobs are hard to find. We’re lucky we both got jobs here. Where are you headed?” This last to her husband, who hitched his faded backpack higher on his shoulder as he explained he was hustling to attend a departmental meeting.
“Not that I’d be missed. They only tolerate me because I’m properly humble and have no illusions that I’ll ever get tenure.” The briefest of frowns darkened his face and then he changed the subject, making arrangements to pick her up after work before he took off in the opposite direction at a trot.
“Nice guy,” I said. “How long have you been married, Gabriela?”
She blushed and self-consciously touched the thin gold band, still shiny with newness, on her ring finger. “Six months. I’ve known him for several years, though. We met here in his senior year. I was a sophomore. And, it’s Gabby. So, where would you like to start?”
Protocol demanded I start with the director of development as well as the dean of the school that would be managing the collection, and Larry Saylor, whose office had to vet the gift and agree to its valuation. Gabby told me the first was easy since he was waiting for me. The dean might be harder to find right away, and Saylor would be anxious to see me even if he hadn’t been able to stay for my meeting with the president.
“Mr. Saylor has been the financial vice president at Lynthorpe for thirty years. He’s a great guy, you’ll like him,” she said. “I’m the development office’s researcher, and my boss assigned me to work directly with Mr. Saylor on the Margoletti project.” She stopped at the door to what looked like an old house half covered in blooming wisteria, hesitating. “He told me he isn’t sure what to make of some of the information we’ve collected, and hopes you can clear it up.”
“What kind of information?” I said.
“I’m not exactly sure. My job is to gather everything I can, but he handles Lynthorpe’s financial matters and so he does most of the analysis. It’s so great that Mr. Johnson proposed having you come to Lynthorpe. You know more than we do about making sure someone who promises a multi-million dollar gift doesn’t back out, on top of evaluating an art collection. Whatever it is, Mr. Saylor told me the president and the dean weren’t worried. Of course, no one wants to question anything, or upset Mr. Margoletti. I heard he has a temper.”
She opened the carved wooden door. “Sorry, I’m gossiping. Please forget what I said. How about I take you to the art gallery after your last meeting today? The collection’s small now. Come back next year. If all goes well, this place will be so exciting.” She beamed, and after I said that sounded like a plan, introduced me to the development director’s assistant and sped off to set up the rest of my day. Her energy revived me. This might be fun after all.
****
After listening to Jim McEvoy, the director of Lynthorpe’s fundraising program, for twenty minutes, I understood why Geoff had asked for my help. The director began our meeting by complaining in a high-pitched whine that the board of trustees didn’t understand fund raising. Then he went on about his close working relationship with the president, laced with implications that the gifts the president claimed credit for were really the result of his hard work. He had started in on the difficulty of finding good staff when I interrupted as politely as I could to ask about the Margoletti gift.
“Geoff Johnson told me it’s by far the biggest the college has received.”
“Well, it’s big, yes, but we have gotten other big gifts,” he said. “Last year we got a two-million dollar bequest. Nothing to sneeze at.” The difference between two million and the roughly one-hundred-million-dollar gift we were there to talk about was a lot to sneeze about, but I didn’t point that out.
“Frankly, Danielle, the sooner we nail this, the happier I’ll be. No fuss, no muss, you know?” This was beginning to sound like a refrain. “Larry Saylor’s a wonderful man and I would never say a word in opposition to him, but I do think he’s finding problems where they don’t exist. In fact, I had to be firm with him last week when he told me he wanted to talk to Mr. Margoletti directly about a simple bookkeeping matter.”
“Bookkeeping? Related to the cash or the art?”
“He didn’t share that with me. I said he should tell me and I’d bring it up with Vince, but he said he had called Mr. Margoletti’s office himself and was working to clear it up. Between us, I’m surprised Rory asked him to get involved in this. It’s clearly my office’s job. Larry’s in a little over his head.” He sniffed.
I recognized the symptoms of bureaucratic turf wars. Luckily, I would be outside the fray. My cell phone vibrated, saving me from having to comment, and I excused myself to peek at the display. Damn it. Dickie, my ex. When I had bumped into him at a trendy Asian restaurant near the Devor a few nights before I left, I mentioned that I was going to do some consulting work for Lynthorpe. He had reminded me that his old prep school was in the next town, and told me it was holding its annual alumni reunion right about now.
“Come with me, Dani,” he had said. “I hate these things and everyone asks me embarrassing questions about us. If you’re there, they can’t.”
That’s the kind of reasoning that drives me nuts about my ex-husband. I never know where to start in telling him how illogical it is. Since I had attended one of the reunions with him right after we were married, I could think of many reasons to say no. A lot of middle-aged men in navy blue sweaters emblazoned with the school’s crest, standing around drinking gin and tonics and guffawing about the time they threw Jimmy in the cold shower or glued the headmaster’s Bible to his desk, ha ha. If I were lucky, I’d be on a plane back to San Francisco a whole week before the rah-rah alumni parade and the annual picnic and mosquito convention. I ignored the phone’s buzzing.
The development director agreed to have Gabby bring me copies of the documents related to the Margoletti gift so I could start reviewing them right away. He jumped up the moment his assistant poked her head in the door to say my guide was waiting to take me to my next meeting.
“Have you had anything to eat? We have some time,” Gabby said as we exited the building.
I breathed in deeply the fragrant air. Peonies? Magnolias? Whatever they were, the perfumes were different from San Francisco’s ocean breezes flavored with Chinese cooking, and I inhaled greedily. When I admitted to Gabby that I hadn’t figured out where to get lunch, she detoured to the student union, where I grabbed a salad and sat with her on a shady patio, surrounded by twenty-year olds chattering and laughing, and seemingly unaware of the big, bad world beyond the college’s stone gates. Lucky kids.
“I had the rest of the day worked out for you, but something’s come up,” Gabby said, munching on a chocolate chip cookie that I tried not to fixate on. “Mr. Saylor was set to meet with you next, but he got called away from the office, believe it or not, to play golf.”
“Sounds good to me,” I said. In some non-profits, golf is major donor networking time, so it could be job-related.
“He said to tell you he would love to take you to dinner tonight near your hotel, if you’re available. He wants to get started on the review as soon as possible. If that’s okay, I’ll let his assistant know and she’ll leave a message on his cell phone. The golf club doesn’t allow cell phones to be used on the course.”
I agreed, and she flipped open her own phone and passed the in
formation along. “The dean of the liberal arts school is too busy today. He’s in charge of the academic unit that includes the art program. He says it’s important that you meet with him, but it will have to be tomorrow. I set it up for first thing, if that’s okay. That means we can go to the art gallery now if you like.”
I begged off for an hour or two, explaining that I had to call my office. We agreed to meet at Lynthorpe’s art gallery late in the afternoon. I used part of the time to send Dickie a text message saying I would be gone by the weekend of the reunion. Then I turned the phone off.
****
Gabby was waiting for me at the gallery door when we reconvened shortly before five o’clock. With her ponytail and skinny pants, she looked more like a student than a member of the development staff. As promised, she handed me a plastic folder full of papers, my homework, from the development office’s files.
The building was the shabbiest I’d seen since I arrived, a boxy structure newer than the imposing building where the president’s office was located, and less personal than the development director’s den in a converted house. A “Closed” sign hung crookedly inside the glass doors.
“You can see why a gift to completely redo the gallery is so exciting,” Gabby said as she unlocked the door. “They’re talking about razing this and starting again, assuming all goes as planned.”
She flipped on lights. The main space was empty. Moveable walls, a few ladders, and some canvases were scattered around. “The senior show is being hung,” Gabby explained. “It’s the last of the academic year. Mr. Margoletti is hoping the demolition work can begin right after graduation.”
“You started to tell me why you have reservations about this gift, Gabby. I’m really interested to hear your concerns.”
“Mr. Saylor will explain tonight over dinner,” she said quickly. “He’s the right one to bring this up. I’m only a low level staffer. All I really know is it came out of his review of the material we pulled together from a lot of sources. Something he hadn’t seen before. I think he’s been trying to resolve it with Mr. Margoletti’s staff and members of his family.”
“Margoletti’s divorced, isn’t he?”
“He has a grown son who went to Lynthorpe for a couple of semesters, a guy about Dermott’s age, although Dermott doesn’t think they ever met. I heard he didn’t do very well and dropped out.”
She led me around a corner and into what must have been the permanent gallery, a low-ceilinged room dwarfed by several large and undistinguished ceramic pieces. Along one wall was a line of small oil paintings, country scenes with ponds or lakes.
“Charles Woodbury,” she said when I walked over to look more closely. “Nineteenth century, had a studio in Boston, if I remember, and is in the collections of a number of regional museums. Occasionally, a scholar will come to study them.”
“Lovely,” I said. “Is this the kind of work the Lynthorpe gallery has collected to date?”
“Yes, mostly New England artists up through about 1960. No big names that I recognize.”
There wasn’t much more to see in the gallery except that no self-respecting collector would allow his treasure to be housed in such dilapidated, un-secured quarters. Vincent Margoletti’s gift would be a game changer and I was getting excited on Lynthorpe’s behalf. The college was about to break into the big time and it was a heady feeling. No wonder the leaders here were nervous.
CHAPTER 3
While I waited in my hotel room for Larry Saylor to pick me up for our dinner meeting, I started reading the development office’s files about the gift and the man who was making it. There wasn’t anything in them about the critical magazine article that I remembered reading. The gist of that piece was that the attorney, who had become rich enough to turn around and invest as a venture capitalist, had brokered some of the biggest business deals of the last decade. Impressive, but in other cases, he engineered deals that benefited insiders but set other investors grumbling. In a handful of cases that went to litigation, his firm agreed to confidential settlements, which suggested some fault but conveniently muzzled everyone involved. I thought I recalled the gossipers saying part of his fees were paid in private stock in the new companies, on whose boards he then sat. Margoletti wielded blunt power in the Valley, like him or not. I’d have to ask Gabby if Saylor had decided to hold the article back for political reasons. The file included a list of the boards he sat on and another of the pieces he was donating, some published estimates of his wealth, and some clips from social columns and non-profit annual reports.
The correspondence with Lynthorpe in the file made it clear Vince Margoletti wanted his treasure to go somewhere where it would be the star attraction. Understandable, especially for collectors who had spent lavishly to score big name artists and wanted major bragging rights.
Half an hour later, I glanced at my watch. Saylor was running late. Maybe he got stuck at the “nineteenth hole” with a garrulous college donor. I was glad I’d had a salad earlier. I turned the phone back on in case he was trying to reach me by cell phone instead of the hotel’s line. Two messages, one from Dickie, the other from Geoff. Since it was earlier in San Francisco, I could call them both back.
Geoff wasn’t picking up his phone but Dickie answered on the first ring. “How’s it going, cupcake?” he said, starting off on the wrong foot as usual. I am not his cupcake and have not been since the day he phoned me from the top of a snow-covered mountain in another country where he’d gone skiing by himself to tell me our marriage was over because he had met his soul mate, Miss Sexiest-Underwire-Bra-You-Ever-Saw-and-Only-$39.95 in the hot lingerie catalog.
Our divorce was way too public, in part because of the supermodel’s status with the paparazzi. Dickie’s two Porsches, Paris apartment, and four hundred and fifty million dollars, none of which I took with me out of the marriage, fueled the gossip columns for several months. When he periodically tells me that he will do better next time, I remind him there will be no next time. He doesn’t need to know that I have argued that point with myself more than once, and that my heart still flips for a millisecond when he looks at me with that lopsided smile. When that happens, I remind myself of the miserable weeks I spent hiding out at my sister’s house, convinced I could never go back to San Francisco and what I was sure would be constant snickering and whispers behind my back.
“I’m flying in next Thursday evening. How about I drive over and see the campus? If you’re winding things up, we can swing by my school to see the old place and I can take you to dinner at one of my old haunts.”
“I’ve been to your old haunts before, remember? Greasy cheeseburgers and French fries? Soda and potato chips?” One meal like that and I obsess that I’ll be back in the size fourteen corner of my closet, which I fought my way out of only last year. My women friends tell me I’m lucky to be tall and that a few extra pounds don’t show. My mirror disagrees. “No thanks.”
“Let’s leave it open, okay? I promise a good meal. I’ll call you when I get in.” He signed off before I could say no a few more times.
I realized I didn’t know how to reach Larry Saylor or Gabby and it was getting late, so I left a message at the front desk for my absent dinner companion telling him I was in the hotel’s restaurant. I worked my way through a tired Chicken Cordon Bleu that might have come out of a microwave, made more interesting by a piece of coconut pie I had no business ordering. There were no messages for me when I got back to my room, so I spent the next hour reading about Vince Margoletti and his plan for Lynthorpe College. Rory Brennan’s update about Margoletti’s sense of urgency made it clear he was a man who, having made up his mind, was impatient for results.
****
Gabby was waiting for me when the cab dropped me off the next morning, and was surprised to hear Saylor hadn’t shown up. “I’m sure he got the message,” she said. “His assistant is terrific and she said she left it on his cell phone. I’ll call to set something up while you’re at the dean’s office.”
Coe Anderson was short, on the plump side, and wore a silk handkerchief in the pocket of his suit jacket that coordinated nicely with his tie. The suit was several cuts above the president’s and was accessorized with a gold pinky ring.
His harried assistant kept interrupting us with papers he had to sign, announcements about upcoming meetings that had to be shifted, and calls from people who could not be put off. In between interruptions, he whipped out a stick for chapped lips and applied it. “A little too much sun at my club last weekend,” he said with a smirk, waving it in my direction. Anderson favored me with fake expressions of apology every time he broke off our conversation to deal with “the million little crises that a dean’s life entails,” as he put it in a high tenor voice that bore traces of a southern accent. My own inner voice, which does not suffer pomposity gladly, was kept busy with the kinds of retorts one should never utter out loud as Dean Anderson sighed loudly, flipped calendar pages, peered into file folders, and otherwise demonstrated how important he was.
His main point with me was the same as the development director’s and President Brennan’s: Don’t mess this up. “Gabriela tells me she took you to the gallery, so you don’t want me telling you how badly I need the funds to create a space up to the quality of his collection.”
Having heard the chorus twice already, I was impatient enough to ask if he thought there was something that could cause a delay.
“Absolutely not. I had dinner with Vince the other night and he’s champing at the bit to get going. I’d say he’s on the verge of being annoyed if we act like we’re looking a gift horse in the mouth.”
I paused to admire his ability to use matching clichés before asking, “Do you think he might renege?”
“Of course not. You know how these things are. The longer they sit around, the easier it is for other people to pick at them, that’s all.”
“Who do you think is objecting?” I said, thinking he was referring to the vice president for finance. I felt sorry for Saylor, who would clearly be the fall guy if Margoletti’s gift didn’t work out.
Mixed Up With Murder Page 2
