Mr. Massy met us at the door and took Chrissy by the hand, drawing her into the building. He murmured a mixture of condolences and instructions as he led her to her place beside Jeff at the foot of the coffin. Beau, the man who could not have afforded a pauper’s pine box, lay in a handsome bronze coffin lined with satin. Dressed in the fine blue suit that Chrissy had selected from his closet, he looked very much as he had in life—cantankerous, demanding, and formidable.
I cast my eyes around the room and eventually found what I was looking for—the two police detectives who’d come to the house to question Jeff, loitering near the service door, conferring quietly. Suddenly the whole thing seemed ridiculous and far-fetched and I was tempted to just walk up and tell them so.
Coach Bennato appeared from nowhere and took up his place beside me, both of us watching the pair of detectives from the distance.
“I see that the police are here,” he announced conspiratorially and without preamble. “They were out at practice this morning.”
“Really, what were they doing?”
“Asking questions.Snooping around.”
“Who did they talk to?”
“Me, the security guard who found Beau, a lot of the front office people. I also heard they went down and talked to Jack McWhorter and some of the concession people to see if they saw anything.”
“I’m sure it’s all just routine,” I replied.
“When my father-in-law dropped dead of a heart attack at the barber shop last year, the cops didn’t come around asking questions.”
“He didn’t own a football team,” I pointed out.
“That’s true. He also really died of a heart attack.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, come on. You don’t think that the cops would waste the whole morning trying to pin down Jeff’s movements if all they were worried about is what time Beau died of a heart attack, do you?”
“I’m sure they asked other people where they were, too,” I said, not feeling happy at all about the direction this conversation was headed.
“Of course, they did,” he answered. “But you can be sure they didn’t get anything out of me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, suddenly finding myself looking at the face that had been caricatured on a thousand sports pages: the eyebrows knitted to- gether into a single line, the jutting chin, the flinty eyes narrowed to a slit, giving nothing away.
“I don’t know what you think has been going on with this team, but if you think that Beau was the only person who had something to hide, you’re sorely mistaken.”
The Pfister Hotel is a Milwaukee landmark, a lovingly restored shrine to the Victorian era that sits in the shadow of Monarchs Stadium. I pulled up to the curb, ignored the look of barely concealed disdain the doorman gave my Volvo, and consulted the slip of paper on which I’d written the room number I’d scribbled off my voice mail.
It was the break between afternoon and evening visitation, and I’d left Chrissy and Jeff in the hands of some friends who’d swooped them up and offered to feed them dinner. Lack of courtesy being the partner’s prerogative, I didn’t bother to call up from the lobby, but instead just made my way to the gilded elevator, took it to the fourth floor, and knocked on the door. I knew that Sherman Whitehead would not be taking a shower or a quick nap or indulging in the illicit pleasures of pay-per-view. What I expected was to find him pacing the floor with a copy of the EEOC complaint in one hand and a Diet Coke in the other. That’s why I was so surprised to see Stuart Eisenstadt open the door.
“Hello, Kate,” he said. “Come on in.”
“Where’s Sherman?” I asked, crossing the threshold into the living room of a large suite furnished in hotel Chippendale. The client might be hurting for cash, but that didn’t mean that Stuart was cutting comers.
“I thought I’d bring the complaint up myself. That way you and I could just hash things out ourselves.”
“Where’s the complaint?” I asked, taking off my coat, eager to get this over with and get back to the funeral home.
“Over there on the table.”
I sat down and made myself comfortable. Then I read everything through twice, determined to not let Stuart’s presence make me feel under the gun.
“So what do you think?” he asked when I finally looked up. “Is that a baseless suit or what?”
“There are a lot of similarities to the Hooters suit,” I pointed out. “Some of the language is nearly identical.” Hooters was a privately owned chain of restaurants whose main draw was amply endowed waitresses in skimpy outfits. Got up in short shorts and tight-fitting tops, the female food servers earned all of $2.13 an hour plus tips dispensing food, drinks, and jiggle at over two hundred restaurants around the country. The company had recently settled a class action suit that had been brought against them by seven Chicago men who’d claimed sexual discrimination when the chain had refused to hire them as waiters.
“I thought that thing was settled,” protested Eisenstadt, for whom the facts had never been much of a strong suit.
“Yes. For almost $4 million, which was peanuts compared to what the government tried to get them for, which as I recall was damages plus setting up a $22 million fund to assist ‘dissuaded’ male job applicants. In the end I’m sure the suit cost the company something like $6 million. Besides, you’re forgetting, Tit-Elations isn’t as classy as Hooters. At Hooters the waitresses not only wear clothes, but they actually serve food.”
“Let’s not start splitting hairs-—”
“If Avco’s looking at a potential $6 million settlement, then you and I both know there’s no question that this suit will have a material adverse impact on the company’s financial performance. That, I remind you, is the issue at hand. Not whether tank tops and pasties are similar articles of clothing.”
“And I’m telling you that this kind of frivolous suit is already covered by the routine-litigation-incidental-to-the-conduct-of-business clause in the registration document.”
“It’s really a question of where you draw the line between what is material and what is incidental. That’s a lot of what-ifs. I just wonder whether in your zeal to deliver what you’ve promised to the client, you’re losing sight of your responsibilities in this.”
“Our responsibility at this point is to get this deal closed,” snapped Stuart.
“By making sure that the letter of the law is satisfied,” I shot back. “That’s what I have to sign my name to, and I’m telling you right now that I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to risk exposing this firm to shareholder lawsuits down the road based on our failure to make necessary disclosure. Frankly, I don’t care enough about whether the world has more topless bars to take the risk.”
“I knew it,” seethed Eisenstadt. “This has nothing to do with the law. This is about the fact that you’re so uptight about a little skin that you can’t see straight. If this were some other kind of company, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation!”
“If this was a different kind of company, I wouldn’t be worried about how Tillman will look on Hard Copy,” I pointed out. “You’re the one who took us into the gutter in the first place. Don’t insult my intelligence by trying to convince me that we’re on some mountaintop.”
“I always knew you were a prude,” said Eisenstadt. “Right or wrong, that still doesn’t change the fact that I’m going to call the client right now and tell them that we need to call the SEC and edit the language in the legal proceedings section before I’ll sign off on it.”
“I’m going to bring this up with Tillman and the management committee,” huffed Eisenstadt.
“Be my guest,” I said. “But if you think that I’m a prude, wait until you talk to them.”
CHAPTER 13
I’m usually not one of those lawyers who let their clients’ problems keep them up at night—those are the guys who make their psychiatrists rich instead of making partner— but that night in Chrissy
’s guest room I could not sleep. While there is something about a late-night conference call with your client that turns into a screaming match that hardly seems designed to facilitate slumber, it wasn’t Avco that was keeping me awake. It was Beau Rendell’s murder.
As I tossed and turned in Chrissy’s guest room I struggled to put what had happened into some kind of focus, but any sort of rational perspective stubbornly eluded me. I felt as though no matter how hard I tried, I was always either too close to things or too far away to see them clearly. The problem was that when it came to Chrissy and Jeff, I was completely incapable of being objective.
It wasn’t just that I had a hard time believing that my friends were involved in anything as sordid as murder, but that I felt torn between the two roles that I was being called upon to play. I had the nagging sensation of always being forced to operate outside of my element—standing with Chrissy at the funeral home when I should have been at my desk figuring out a way to keep the team solvent and rushing off to meetings when I should have been at her side.
I must have finally dozed off because when I woke up, Chrissy was sitting beside me on the bed, shaking me and calling my name. I struggled to sit up, feeling disoriented and surprised to find that it was still dark.
“What is it?” I mumbled, rapidly clawing my way from sleep to panic. “What’s happened? Is it the police? Have they come for Jeff?”
“No,” whispered Chrissy, her voice sounding shocked and thin, “but you have to see today’s paper.”
I sat up and scrabbled clumsily at the nightstand, fumbling until I was finally able to switch on the light. Chrissy was dressed in a heavy flannel bathrobe. She smelled of winter and outdoors, and the newspaper that she handed me was still stiff and cold from lying out on the driveway. I was expecting to see a picture of the Reverend Marpleson beside an article accusing Avco of participating in the white slave trade. Instead I was assaulted by a two-inch headline, the size usually reserved for mass murderers and declarations of war: MONARCHS MOVE IN WORKS, it screamed.
At first I couldn’t say anything. It took all my energy and concentration to force myself to breathe. Coming as it did so soon upon waking, my sense of internal disorder was so profound that for a fleeting moment I found myself wondering whether I also needed to tell my heart to beat.
I forced myself to read the entire article, whose main thrust appeared to be that Jeff Rendell, without even waiting until his father was decently in the ground, was determined to move the team to L.A. in order to not only enrich himself, but also enjoy the glamorous California lifestyle at the expense of the loyal Milwaukee fans. This was incendiary stuff designed to sell a ton of newspapers. That much of it was untrue seemed practically beside the point.
There was absolutely no mention of the team’s financial predicament, only the lurid retelling of Jeff’s acrimonious battles with his father and his disagreements with Bennato about how the team was to be run. While Chrissy was outraged by the unfairness of the portrayal of her husband’s motives, what troubled me was not what the paper had gotten wrong, but what it had gotten right.
What I found most terrifying were the details—the exact number of luxury boxes that were in the plans for the new Los Angeles stadium and the exact dollar amount that had been offered to help move the team. Whoever had fed the information to the paper had had access to the term sheet that Jack McWhorter had distributed last Sunday morning in Beau Rendell’s dining room.
“Has Jeff seen this yet?” I asked.
“No, he’s still asleep. I gave him another one of those sleeping pills last night. I didn’t have the heart to wake him.”
“Let him sleep for now,” I said. I needed time to think. From somewhere in the house I could hear the telephone ringing. “Don’t get that,” I instructed. “It’s probably a reporter.”
“That’s who woke me up this morning. Somebody called. That’s why I went out to get the paper.”
That made me think of something. “I wonder why no one from the paper called Jeff for confirmation before they ran the story,” I mused out loud. “You’d think they would have if only to be able to run a denial or ‘no comment.’ It doesn’t make sense.”
“Maybe they tried. Ever since Beau died we’ve gotten so many calls from reporters, we’ve been taking the phone off the hook.”
“Either that or you’re being deliberately sandbagged.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe whoever leaked the story didn’t want you to know that it was being written.”
“Who would want that?”
“Maybe the cops.”
“How would the cops have found out about the L.A. offer?”
“Maybe somebody fed them the term sheet.”
“Beau may have had a copy in his office. Maybe the police found it after he died.”
“No. Beau didn’t have a sheet. He tore his up at the meeting on Sunday morning. Jack handed out four numbered copies. I still have mine. Assuming that Jeff still has his, that leaves Harald Feiss.”
It has been said that there is a shorthand to every crisis, a rhythm to the swells and troughs of catastrophe that, if you are adept enough, can be anticipated and ridden like the surf. John Guttman, the partner I’d been assigned to when I first went to work at Callahan Ross, went a step further and contended that it could be mapped out in code. Like Morse, he favored a binary representation with B for big problems and s for small. According to Guttman, most crises fell into a BssssBssssBssssBBssss pattern. Even in Avco, the IPO from hell, there were more ss than Bs. But from the morning of the funeral the buzz on the Monarchs was BBBBB!
While Chrissy got dressed and fed the baby, I got on the phone and started waking people up. Poor Sherman, who’d spent most of the night researching case law on sex discrimination, had fallen asleep at his desk. Cheryl, grouchy at having been rousted from her bed at this hour, was nonetheless grateful for the warning. By the time she arrived at the office, everyone from CNN on down would be clamoring for a piece of me. I felt guilty about leaving her on the hot seat, but I had my own problems. When going to a funeral seems the least stressful part of the coming day, you know you’re in for one hell of a rough ride.
All things considered, Jeff took the news well. I honestly think he had been so bludgeoned by the events of the past few days that he was beyond all feeling. As he sat at the kitchen table looking at the breakfast that Chrissy had cooked for him, but not eating it, I found myself thinking of my roommate Claudia’s patient, the man who’d had his arm amputated while pinned under a truck on Wacker Drive. Looking at Jeff’s bloodless face, I found myself wondering whether the wounds that are not physical may be the ones from which it is most difficult to recover.
The doorbell rang and I went to answer it, mentally steeling myself for a horde of reporters. Instead, when I opened the door, I found a single messenger in a black government car delivering an envelope. It was addressed to me. I knew immediately what it was. I opened the envelope and scanned the letter. His Honor Robert Deutsch, the mayor of Milwaukee, felt that under the circumstances it would be inadvisable for us to meet at this time. I realized that this was just politics, the first step in what would no doubt end up being a very complicated dance. Still, I couldn’t help but find it disheartening.
Just as I was about to shut the front door, I saw Jack McWhorter pull up in his black Porsche. He stepped out looking handsome and sinister, like a seductive undertaker in a B movie.
“I came straight from the airport,” he said, slamming the car door behind him.
“So I take it you’ve heard,” I said.
“Are you kidding? They have huge posters at the newsstands. From the size of them you’d think we’d just invaded China.”
“People don’t care that much about China,” I pointed out, holding the front door open to let him pass.
“Who the fuck leaked it?” he demanded, giving me the evil eye.
“Why Feiss?”
“Because he wants to build
a stadium in the middle of the cornfields of Wauwatosa. You know. If you build it, they will come. He leaks the news that the team may move and then starts waving the plans for his suburban stadium around and suddenly he’s a hero.”
“You realize this makes everything much trickier at my end,” confided Jack. “I’m not sure my people ever anticipated getting involved in a situation where there would be negative publicity before the fact.”
“Then tell them to grow up,” I replied. My entire plan for keeping the team in Milwaukee was based on the credible threat of the Monarchs moving to California. The last thing I wanted was Jack and the Greater Los Angeles Stadium Commission folding on me now. “I want you to set up a meeting for Jeff with your people in L. A.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow,” I answered. The sooner I managed to get Jeff out of town the better. “I’ll arrange for someone from Callahan Ross’s West Coast office to come in and start hammering out the terms of the deal. It’s put-up-or-shut-up time.”
It was hardly the send-off Beau would have hoped for. Not only was there no young widow to sob prettily at the graveside, but the son he left behind to follow in his footsteps stood in the shadow of a murder indictment. As stunned as we’d been by that morning’s headline, none of us had given much thought to the fact that in addition to the news of Jeff’s apostasy, the paper had also published a map of the route the funeral cortege would take.
From the minute our limousine pulled out of Chrissy and Jeff’s driveway, the streets were lined with people. They were dressed in Monarchs colors, and many held hand-lettered signs bidding farewell to Beau Rendell. The communications directed at Jeff were significantly less pleasant. We passed more than one sign that read BURY JEFF INSTEAD! From the underpass near the Art Museum someone had dressed a dummy in a Monarchs uniform and hung it from the bridge so that the funeral procession passed directly beneath its dangling feet. There was a knife stuck into its back and a sign around its neck read JEFF DID THIS.
Rough Trade Page 13
