“No one. I shouldn’t have spoken.”
“Rory Brennan said almost the same thing to me, Dean Anderson, but I haven’t seen anything so far that would cause a problem. I started reviewing the papers last night,” I said to calm him. “Based on my work at the Devor Museum, I think the collection may grow to be worth more than his lawyers are claiming. Housing it properly and safely is going to be critically important.”
The dean beamed at me, throwing his arms wide and tilting back in his chair. “What did I tell you? A sweet deal. So, can we cut this short, get your stamp of approval, and get moving? My wife wants to do a private dinner party the night before we announce this formally, and she’s on me like a hen after corn to set a date.” Another smirk and another application of lip gloss. He swung forward in his chair and stood up, ready to see the last of me.
“I want to do a bit more reading first. I should check media coverage of Mr. Margoletti’s business dealings. These days you want to be sure your donors aren’t likely to be exposed for business practices that may make it awkward to accept their money.”
It was actually comical. Dean Anderson froze, one arm outstretched toward his door, the big smile still pasted on his face, for a count of five.
“Awkward,” he said, lowering his arm as his face turned pink and his voice hardened. “Awkward? I’ll tell you what would be awkward, Miss O’Rourke. Telling him Lynthorpe College is too pure to accept twenty million dollars in hard cash. Telling the richest, most successful member of our little board of trustees that his money isn’t good enough.” His southern accent was becoming more pronounced, I noticed. “Never mind me being the butt of jokes from here to Memphis…” He trailed off, glaring at me. So that was the source of his drawl, I thought, to distract me from the hostility in his voice and face.
“I’m not suggesting anything. I was brought in to make sure there are no surprises later. We do this kind of due diligence all the time at the Devor.” This consulting business was harder than I had imagined. At the Devor, I felt comfortable stating my opinion and arguing for something. I knew everyone, they knew me, and we all had to work together a year from now. Here, I felt off-balance. Was Coe always like this? Was he about to lose his job? What was it I wasn’t getting?
“Well, I’m sure the Devor Museum can afford to be choosy, but let’s be realistic. Without this gift, Lynthorpe College is another small school in a crowded market. Plus, people already know that Margoletti’s offered this to us. If we turn it down, do you think he’s going to tell his pals that? No, he’s going to put an entirely different spin on it, Miss O’Rourke.”
“You mean he’ll suggest he pulled the gift because Lynthorpe couldn’t manage it correctly? You may be right, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
“Then what are you saying?”
“One, we do this background check quietly,” I said, holding up my fingers and congratulating myself on getting a manicure before I left so they looked authoritative. “Don’t mention to outsiders that it’s happening. Two, we operate on facts, and not gossip. In other words, because a magazine article questioned his business deals, that’s no reason to turn the gift away.”
Anderson had been calming down until I mentioned the article. He sputtered for a minute, but I sat silent. He went back to his chair.
“Three, we’re ready with some spin of our own if the situation requires it. I’ll propose something if I think we need it.”
“How long will all this take?” he said, somewhat mollified. “I’m supposed to meet with him again in a day or two.”
“Go ahead with your plans since finding a problem big enough to derail the gift is unlikely. If it falls apart later, no real harm done. In the meantime, he’ll be happy. I promise I’ll be as quick as it’s possible to be and still be accurate.”
The dean had to be satisfied with that. He looked at his watch, told me he had meetings the rest of the day, and instructed me to report to him directly as the research progressed. Since the president and the director of development had given me the same order to report directly to them, I had choices to make, or lots of copies. All three men had obvious control issues, as we say in California. I murmured something noncommittal and had stood up to go when the door opened.
This time, the dean’s assistant looked more than hassled. Her face was white and her hands shook as she looked from him to me. “Gabriela’s here. Something’s happened. The president wants to see you in his office right away, Dean Anderson.”
Gabby rocketed into the office, one hand clutching the other, and stopped abruptly in front of the dean’s desk. “The police called. They found him.” She gulped audibly. I was having trouble following her. “Dead.”
“Who?” the dean said. “What’s going on?”
“Mr. Saylor,” Gabby said in a strangled voice. “He died. In a lake on the golf course. He drowned.”
“Drowned? Where did you hear this?” Coe Anderson said, making it sound like an accusation.
“From his assistant. She’s with President Brennan and the police right now. President Brennan wants the Cabinet members there right away. I guess the police want to ask you all some questions.” Gabby couldn’t stall her tears any longer and she started weeping. “He was such a nice man.”
I stood up and put my arm around her, leading her to a chair. Anderson stood too and with a muttered comment that we could use his office as long as we needed, he was out the door. His assistant hovered for a minute, came back with a box of tissues, then left, doubtless to share the news with other people down the hall.
There wasn’t much I could do, so I sat and thought while the woman sitting next to me snuffled softly. Was that why Larry Saylor hadn’t met me for dinner? I don’t golf, but I never thought of it as a lethal sport.
Gabby’s tears trailed off and she blew her nose. “I’m sorry, Dani,” she said in subdued tones. “This is such a shock.”
“Maybe this isn’t the time to continue my review of the Margoletti donation, Gabby. Everyone will be preoccupied with this tragedy and it will be a while before they want to turn their attention to fundraising. I think I should head back to California.”
“Oh no,” she said, “you can’t do that. Mr. Saylor said he needed to have you check out what he noticed in the records. At least say you’ll look at his files before you go. I know he’d want that.”
“His files are different from the development office’s?”
“There’s material we hadn’t summarized, documents he was still reviewing. I’ll pick up what you need. When you’ve read it, you and I can meet. I’ll tell you what I can about it and you can decide what to do from there.”
“I hardly think this project’s going to be anyone’s main thought right now.” I have developed an allergy to being anywhere near where people are dying. Chalk it up to having had the awful luck of stumbling into more than one ugly situation in the past. Plus, the longer I stayed here, the greater the chances Dickie would track me down and start nagging me to spend a long hour chatting with his former headmaster’s wife or, worse, the prep school’s bursar, who showed signs of suffering from age-related dementia when I met him years ago.
“Mr. Johnson told Mr. Saylor that if anyone could be counted on to help us, it was you.” Smart girl, my inner voice said. Perhaps sensing my instinct to bolt, she was reminding me who my boss was and what he would want. Geoff’s worried face swam into my mind. Damn.
We agreed to meet at the same café patio where I’d had my lunch the day before. “I’ll read,” I said, “and I’ll talk to you tomorrow. As soon as possible, I’ll give the president my report in person or from San Francisco, so it’s available whenever he can turn his attention to it. But I think it’s best I stay off campus. Things are going to be busy, and, from what you said, Larry Saylor was so well liked that his death will throw everyone off balance. Does he have family?”
“His wife died before I came to Lynthorpe. The college was his life, at least since I’ve known hi
m. Oh, Dani, I can’t believe this.” She stifled a new sob, and squared her shoulders. “I think he was the smartest, most principled man I ever met. Except for Dermott, of course.”
She jumped up and left and, while I walked over to the cafeteria, I thought about the abruptness of death, and what a loss like this could do to a small campus community. I regretted not having met him except in passing, given how much Gabby admired him.
A half hour later, I was finishing a chai latte when Gabby arrived, her eyes still red, and handed me a sheaf of paper. “These aren’t copies, so please take care of them,” she said. “I may have done something I shouldn’t have.”
I gave her a quizzical look as I thumbed through the thick stack.
“He kept this on a work table where we met to go over the research. No one was there, so I picked them up and left. What if the police want to see them?”
I couldn’t imagine why the police would care, but liked Gabby even more for her caution. “Tell you what. I’ll work in the library so I don’t take them off campus, make notes and get them back to you in a couple of hours if that’s okay. You can put them back today. No harm done.” I made sure I had her office phone number this time. “I wanted to ask you something,” I said, remembering again the negative article about Margoletti. “The development director’s file didn’t include a particular piece on Margoletti from a national magazine in which the writer reported some really harsh opinions of him. Does it ring a bell with you?”
She sighed. “Oh yes, it came up in any Google search and I copied it, but Mr. Saylor was reluctant to pass it along to the president, and I can understand. It’s mostly gossip and innuendo. My guess is he mentioned it when they met, though.”
“Didn’t it say something about a deal or two that benefited his clients but supposedly squeezed others out of a share in the rewards of their own technology ideas? My memory’s a bit sketchy.”
Gabby said she thought so, but would make sure I had a copy before I left campus.
I could see why everyone at Lynthorpe shied away from talking about an article in which their board member and major donor was labeled something close to a crook. Who wants to be the one to carry that hot potato to the powers that be?
CHAPTER 4
Three hours later Larry Saylor’s reasons for wanting to get someone else’s perspective made more sense to me. Stripped of the negative press, Vincent Margoletti appeared to be a great guy, posing with other attendees at charity tennis matches, symphony balls, and art gallery openings. A gushy photo spread of his house in Atherton, which is an estate-studded San Francisco suburb, focused on his taste for luxury. A large, vividly colored Anselm Kiefer painting dominated the white-on-white living room décor and the article mentioned his growing art collection. A photo of him in Town & Country with his son in Florida, the younger Margoletti muscular, grinning in jodhpurs and a helmet and holding a champagne flute, was captioned “Vincent and Jean Paul Margoletti celebrate polo win.” None of this set off alarm bells. There are some people who, through skills, connections, luck and timing, manage to earn vast sums of money. That they spend it lavishly on themselves is none of my business unless it intersects with my fundraising for the Devor.
When I turned back to Vince’s professional bio, something piqued my curiosity. Vince sat on a number of corporate boards, again, no surprise. The people who are on boards tend to look for new members from their own set, which means the same people wind up sitting on numerous boards. It’s not progressive, but it’s not illegal. What caught my eye were penciled asterisks on the page next to the names of several companies on whose boards Vince Margoletti sat, big names in the last decade’s tech burst, still privately owned, the research said.
What did it mean? Possibly nothing, but in my consulting role I needed to make sure the companies weren’t delaying their decisions to go public because they were in financial trouble. That’s something Lynthorpe’s vice president and treasurer would have needed to know. After all, if Margoletti owned ten million shares in a company that was about to go belly up, they would be worthless. Would he have the cash to make good on his pledge once Lynthorpe committed to spend the money on building the art gallery? More than one institution had been left with massive construction loans when a donor failed to follow through on a cash pledge, and a small college like Lynthorpe would be particularly vulnerable.
There was a draft of the gift agreement, of course, in lawyerly terms, with a list of artwork included in the transaction along with a copy from his accountant’s office. On a yellow sheet of lined paper, Saylor had handwritten a list. “Call VM office,” was at the top of the page, which must have been what the development director was unhappy about, wanting to be the big cheese where contact with the donor was concerned. The next said only “Call Sotheby’s.” Sotheby’s and Christie’s are the two major auction houses that handle most of the top tier secondary market for art worldwide. Their breathless promotion of big-ticket paintings gets lots of media coverage and no wonder, with prices in the multimillion-dollar range becoming more common every month. Right after that on the handwritten to-do list, a reminder to “check all against master,” whatever that meant.
Farther down the page was a phone number preceded by an international code I didn’t recognize, with a check in the left margin to show, undoubtedly, that he had made the call. The next two items were times of appointments with the dean and the development director on the same day two weeks ago. The last one noted the meeting with President Brennan two days ago, the day I arrived and saw him coming out of Brennan’s office, too irritated to do more than mutter a greeting to me.
I recalled the discomfort of the three men I had met with, and the implicit messages to avoid stirring up trouble, and wondered if their meetings with Saylor had made them—or him—nervous. How frustrating that Larry Saylor had passed away before we had an opportunity to talk. He must have been seriously concerned to risk making his peers at Lynthorpe angry with him. Who would want to be blamed for losing a huge gift, especially one that so many others were clamoring to take credit for?
And how convenient, my inner voice chimed in, that if he was seriously questioning Margoletti’s gift while the donor and the senior college officials were pushing hard to get it accepted quickly, he should happen to die. The thought made me shiver.
I was tapping my pencil on the pages when Gabby spoke behind me. “There you are.” The girlish enthusiasm and big smiles were gone. Even her ponytail looked less perky. “The president’s assistant says he’d appreciate it if you could drop by for a few minutes this afternoon.”
“Of course. I’m pretty well through with this material, if you want to get it back to Saylor’s office,” I said. “Any chance I could make copies of this handwritten list of meetings?”
She nodded. “Everything if you’d like it.”
“Thanks. Only the material that he annotated for now. You did a great job researching Margoletti’s Silicon Valley ties. Did Saylor satisfy himself about the value of the shares Margoletti owns in the companies on whose boards he sits?”
She dropped into an empty chair, looked around cautiously. “I think so. It’s a humungous position for someone who started out as a solo practitioner thirty years ago, don’t you think?”
“Yes, but not without precedent. I’d guess Margoletti’s a sharp businessman who drives a hard bargain. I thought maybe the college’s chief financial officer was worried that the shares weren’t worth enough to guarantee such a large cash gift.”
Gabby shook her head slowly. “He didn’t discuss that with me. He did ask me to see if there was anything in the California papers about Margoletti’s son, his hobbies or his job, stuff like that.”
“And did you find anything?”
“Sorry. He mentioned it only the day before you came and I was too busy to start looking.” Her voice trailed off and she squirmed in her chair. “I got a message from the dean a little while ago. I need to bring Mr. Saylor’s files over to his office. I�
��m sorry to rush you, but his assistant was pretty firm that he wants everything related to Mr. Margoletti transferred to him.”
“Let’s walk back to Saylor’s office now. We can talk on the way,” I said, standing as I gathered everything into the folders Gabby had left with me. “Do you have any clue about why he met several times in the last two weeks with the senior leadership here?” I didn’t say that his concerns were apparently pointed enough to spark the animosity of his peers.
“I know he was worried about something he found out,” Gabby said. “I don’t know what it was. He told me he needed to talk directly to Mr. Margoletti.”
“And did he?”
“I assume so,” she said. “That’s who he was playing golf with yesterday.”
CHAPTER 5
Where is your own personal policeman when you need him? Charlie Sugerman, half of a seasoned San Francisco team of homicide inspectors, and, if not my boyfriend exactly, then as close to that position as he was willing to get, would have teased me about letting my imagination run wild. If I were looking into his startlingly green eyes, I could have let go of my jitters right away.
Gabby’s news made me uneasy. My proximity to murder in the past, I reminded myself, didn’t mean Larry Saylor’s death was anything other than an accident. Yeah, right, said my inner voice. Then why did your stomach turn a cartwheel and why is the muscle in your eye beginning to twitch? An investigator turns up material he thinks may call for increased scrutiny of a donor. A few days later, he drowns while playing golf with the donor? Not good, definitely not good.
I took a deep breath and exhaled noisily. Gabby looked at me questioningly. “Too much caffeine,” I said. “How about you make me a copy of this page of notes he wrote to himself? Then I’ll head over to the president’s office on my own while you round up what the dean wants.”
Mixed Up With Murder Page 3
