Madison's Avenue

by Mike Brogan

  She felt her last ounce of hope drain away. “Do you expect to find him?”

  Loomis shrugged. “Hard to say. Tidal currents in the East River are very strong. They may carry him out to sea.”

  The image of his body being battered against rocky ocean reefs brought fresh tears to her eyes. Suddenly, she felt incredibly hot. The walls of the cramped, stuffy room seemed to close in on her. She leaned back and drew in a deep breath.

  “We’re done here, Ms. McKean,” Loomis said, gently ushering her from the room.

  Back out on Pitt Street a light rain was falling. The cool rain washed away her tears. She wanted it to wash away any memory of this painful night. But of course it wouldn’t. This night, like the night her mother died, would be branded in her memory forever.

  She got in the police car, and minutes later, it stopped in front of her father’s apartment building.

  Detective Loomis turned to her. “The NYPD and the Coast Guard will keep looking for him.”

  Madison nodded.

  “Do you have someone to stay with you tonight?”

  No, she thought. “My brother’s in Paris and most of my friends are in Boston, but I’ll phone someone, Detective. Don’t worry.”

  Loomis nodded, but concern lingered in his eyes.

  She stared up at the dark, empty apartment. Never again would her father’s smile brighten the rooms. Never again would his contagious laugh bounce off its walls and cheer everyone around him. Never....

  She stepped from the police car and walked toward the entrance, fresh tears filling her eyes. She thought of all the good times she and her father recently spent in this apartment. Their talks had been therapeutic for her, like she was catching up on all the time she’d missed with him growing up.

  Here, she told him how badly his absence had hurt her. He listened patiently and said he now recognized that he’d failed her and asked for her forgiveness, which she had gladly given him along with her tears and hugs. He then revealed that his father also had been too busy for him due to long working hours, constant travel and weekend golf games. She was surprised by her father’s revelations.

  Then he told her how much her refusals to work with him at his agency had hurt. She apologized, explaining that she’d joined the Boston agency to prove to herself that she could make it on her own before she came to work for him. He said he understood.

  * * *

  Harry Burkett watched Madison McKean step inside the apartment building alone. Then he watched the taillights of the police car fade away down Seventy-Sixth Street. Smiling, he sipped some aquavit and looked up at Mark McKean’s apartment window.

  A light came on.

  Her tall, shapely shadow moved behind a curtain.

  First, papa deserts you ... and now the two cops desert you.

  How convenient.

  Four

  Throw it now!” Mark McKean shouted at the seaman in the Coast Guard rescue boat.

  The tall seaman leaned over the railing and tossed him the orange life ring. It splashed into the water fifteen feet away. McKean swam for it with everything he had, but a huge wave pummeled him down into a vicious current. He gagged his way up to the surface, but the ring was now forty feet away.

  The seaman tossed him another ring.

  Much closer.

  McKean swam hard for it. Five feet, two feet.... He touched the slippery ring – but a monster wave swept it away, then pushed him deep beneath the surface. He fought the raging, churning currents, but they only forced him deeper....

  Now, he was upside down, thirty feet under, on the other side of the Coast Guard cutter, caught in a whirlpool swallowing him even deeper.

  His lungs screamed for air. His arms and legs felt like frozen icicles.

  He was being dragged deeper into the freezing black abyss....

  “DAD!” Madison shouted, bolting upright in bed, trembling in her sweat-soaked nightgown.

  A nightmare, she told herself. But real. Like her father was alive and calling out to her. She tried to wipe the terrifying images from her mind, but they lingered. Her clock read 5:17 a.m. Sleep was impossible. But continuing to search for her father’s accuser was possible.

  Easing herself out of bed, she noticed that she’d knocked the phone off the bedside table during the night after talking to her brother in Paris. She placed the phone back in its cradle and headed to the bathroom. After showering, she toweled off briskly, and got dressed.

  In the living room, she walked over to the window and looked out at the rays of dawn now touching the top branches of their Wishing Tree. Suddenly, the reality of her father’s death hit her again and she began to weep uncontrollably.

  As she looked away from the Wishing Tree, she noticed the same parked, dark Lincoln she’d seen the previous night. The driver stared straight ahead. Probably a chauffeur. He sipped something from a silver flask.

  She walked to the kitchen, made coffee and took a steamy mugful into her father’s study. She sat in his soft leather chair where he’d always sat, reading the newspaper, puffing away on his briarwood pipe stuffed with Mixture 79. The sweet tobacco scent was still present, unlike him....

  She looked back at the green folders on his desk. Last night, she’d gone through them twice, searching for any hint of who might have accused him. She found nothing.

  Over three decades, her father had built Turner Advertising from 54 employees and $68 million in advertising billings to 1,920 employees and $2.4 billion dollars with 24 affiliate offices around the world. Today, it was one of the largest, most profitable independent advertising agencies in the country. No wonder ComGlobe and other conglomerates were drooling over the possibility of acquiring Turner Advertising.

  Two weeks ago, her father told her that he was still opposed to the ComGlobe merger for sound business reasons.

  Did his opposition frustrate someone so much that they accused him of misappropriating funds to force him to resign – a resignation that would have guaranteed the ComGlobe merger? Did his opposition cause someone to stage his fake suicide?

  Certainly, in today’s ruthless, agency-merger environment, with billions of dollars at stake, certain individuals might go to any extreme, including blackmail and even murder, to acquire the cash-rich agency of their corporate dreams.

  As she placed her coffee on the table, she noticed a red emergency button on the wall. She wondered if any of the old red buttons, installed in each room over twenty years ago for an invalid woman, still worked today.

  The phone rang. She saw NYPD on Caller ID.

  They’ve found dad’s body....

  “Hello.”

  “Detective Loomis, here.”

  She squeezed the phone tighter.

  “How you doing, Ms. McKean?”

  “So-so, Detective.”

  “I understand. I just called to tell you the Coast Guard hasn’t found any trace of your father yet. They said yesterday’s rapid tidal currents probably carried his body out into the bay.”

  ... and then into the Atlantic, she thought.

  Detective Loomis went on to tell her the NYPD and the Coast Guard would continue searching for the next seventy-two hours. If the body was not found by then, they would be forced to discontinue their investigation.

  Madison thanked him for his update and hung up. She understood Loomis’s position, but it meant she would have to find out who’d accused him and forced him to write the suicide letter.

  She began searching his desk, drawer by drawer, examining each scrap of paper, looking for a name, a hint, something.

  After four hours, she had found nothing suspicious. Fortunately, her brother Thaddeus, an attorney with UNICEF, would arrive from Paris tonight. It would be much easier with Thaddeus here.

  Madison walked over and stared out at sun-drenched Central Park.

  As she turned, she noticed the same dark Lincoln parked in the same spot across the street. The driver seemed to be looking up at her window, but when he noticed her looking at him,
he leaned back into the shadows. Could the man be watching this apartment?

  The tiny hairs on the base of her neck stiffened.

  She double-checked the locks and re-set the alarm, then went back to reviewing her father’s files.

  Twenty minutes later, the doorbell chimed.

  She walked into the foyer, looked through the peephole and saw no one. She turned the tiny telescopic hole to the right and left and still saw no one. Her pulse kicked up a notch. Had someone left a package?

  Keeping the chain on, she opened the door a bit and saw a man’s back. He was bending down, reaching for something.

  Her heart started pounding.

  As he spun around, she froze.

  She was staring at her brother’s handsome, but tired face. His light-brown eyes seemed strained with worry and his six-foot-three-inch frame appeared to have shrunk a few inches.

  “How’d you get here so fast?”

  “Caught an early Air France flight.”

  He hugged her tightly.

  “It’s just us now, Maddy.”

  She nodded, slowly, burying her face in his shoulder.

  They sat down in opposite leather chairs and stared at each other in silence for a few moments.

  Thaddeus pushed his dark brown hair back off his forehead and loosened his tie. “I should have spent more time with Dad. Called him more often. I assumed there’d always be time....”

  “Me, too.”

  He nodded. “I talked to Dad’s attorney, Chester Beale, last night. He just phoned me back in the taxi from JFK. Very interesting conversation.”

  “Why?”

  “Chester is filing a petition with the Probate Court to request that Dad be officially declared dead.”

  “But I thought the Probate Court required seven years if the person’s missing?”

  “Generally they do, but Chester feels certain the judge will grant the petition now, in view of dad’s handwritten suicide note, and because the Coast Guard has just officially stated that it’s highly unlikely Dad’s body will ever be recovered.”

  She nodded, but held onto the unrealistic hope that her father was still alive, perhaps clinging to driftwood somewhere.

  “What happens after the Probate Court grants the petition?”

  “Chester can execute Dad’s will, which as you know splits everything fifty-fifty between us.”

  She recalled her father telling them that after their mother’s death.

  “Chester really surprised me though.”

  “About what?”

  “How much stock Dad had acquired in Turner Advertising. His working agreement permitted him to increase his Turner stock holdings every two years, and Dad did that religiously.”

  She didn’t know anything about the stock.

  “I thought he owned about 40 percent of the stock,” Thad said.

  “How much does he own?”

  “Chester said 79 percent.”

  She sat back, astonished at the amount. “I had no idea.”

  “Dad kept it quiet. Mr. Turner’s widow retains 10 percent of the shares, and the remaining 11 percent are owned by the top ten Turner EVPs.”

  Her mind was spinning. “So ... you and I split 79 percent of Turner stock?”

  He nodded.

  She thought back to how her father had always wanted Thaddeus to work at the agency with him. But Thaddeus only had eyes for international law, much to his father’s dismay. Thad had recently become serious about a beautiful woman from Brussels. Madison had met her two months ago and liked the blonde linguist instantly.

  “Seventy-nine percent gives you and me some serious voting leverage,” she said.

  “You.”

  “What?”

  “You, not me! The voting leverage is all yours, Maddy.”

  She stared at her brother, wondering what he meant.

  “I told Chester that I’m assigning the proxy to vote my shares over to you. You’re the adwoman. You know the ad biz. I don’t. Besides, my job has me traveling to remote places around the world, half of which are difficult to reach by phone. So congratulations, sis! You now control the voting rights to 79 percent of the stock in Turner Advertising. And you know what that means?”

  “What?”

  “That you could be named chairwoman.”

  She was too stunned to respond.

  “But I’m not ready for – ”

  “You’re a fast learner, sis.”

  “Not that fast!”

  Suddenly, his eyes tightened with concern and he looked away from her.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “I’m worried.”

  “About what?”

  “You.”

  “Why me?”

  He looked back at her for several moments. “The person who stopped Dad from using his 79 percent, will probably try to stop you.”

  Five

  Evan Carswell, the thin, gray-haired vice chairman, and a close friend of Madison’s father, counted each raised hand slowly, then smiled at her.

  “Congratulations, Madison. You’ve just been elected to our board of directors of Turner Advertising. We’re delighted.”

  Except for my father’s accuser, she thought. Probably one of you.

  “Thank you all very much. It goes without saying that I’m honored to be on your board.”

  Two days earlier, the New York Probate Court had officially declared her father deceased, based primarily on his handwritten suicide note and the Coast Guard’s final report that it was very unlikely his body would ever be found.

  She looked out at the other directors, five men and five women, the governing body of Turner Advertising whom she’d chatted with briefly earlier in the morning. The directors developed the agency’s corporate goals and the strategies to achieve them. They also controlled the various agency departments: namely, the account service people who dealt with the clients, the media personnel who bought the advertising space and time for the clients, creative people who dreamed up the ads, production specialists who made the ads, and others.

  As she looked around the table, most directors smiled at her with friendly, welcoming faces. A few smiles, however, reminded her of hungry crocodiles. Everyone sat around the gleaming cherry wood conference table in the lavishly appointed, multi-screen, high-tech board room.

  Carswell rested his hand on the empty chairman’s leather chair and faced the group. “Now, to our most important task. The election of our next chairman. The floor is open for nominations.”

  “I nominate you, Carswell,” Leland Merryweather said. Merryweather, she knew, was the agency’s Executive Vice President of International Operations. He looked distinguished thanks to his tanned, patrician face, gray hair, trimmed moustache and a black velvet eye-patch over his left eye.

  “I second it!” said Finley Weaver, the short, hard-charging, redheaded EVP of direct mail.

  A number of directors nodded approval.

  “Forget it,” Carswell said. “You all know I’m retiring in ten months. My grandkids, my 30-foot Catalina, and several large-mouth bass have invited me to come play in the Florida keys. And I’m damn well going to. I’m not the person to build our agency’s future on. And that’s final!”

  Inga Kruger, the EVP chief financial officer, a heavy-bosomed woman in her fifties with large black-rimmed glasses and brown hair that hung down over her ears like tiny springs, raised her hand. “I nominate Karla Rasmussen.”

  “Seconded,” someone said.

  Madison looked down the table at Rasmussen, a nice-looking but stern-faced woman around fifty. She wore a dark blue wool suit with braided trim and what looked like a Hermes burgundy scarf. Thick Joan Crawford eyebrows arched over steely, close-set dark eyes. Her hair, lustrous and black, was pulled back tight in a bun at the nape of her neck. The namecard in front of her read, ‘Karla Rasmussen, EVP, Director of Media Services.’

  Madison recalled her father telling her that Rasmussen was a brilliant, hard-working executiv
e whose abrasive remarks sometimes created problems, and on occasion, enemies.

  “Any discussion?” Carswell asked.

  Halfway down the table, an attractive woman in her early forties, with long brown hair and high, sculpted cheekbones raised her hand. She wore a gray striped business suit. Her nameplate said, ‘Alison Whitaker, EVP, Director of Client Services.’ Madison’s father had said that Whitaker was a consummate professional who handled things no matter how difficult.

  “Karla,” Whitaker said, “You know I have great respect for your abilities and all you’ve done for this agency over the years. But you also know a number of our major clients have voiced concerns about working with you. So, my fear is that these clients would not be comfortable with you as our Chairperson. Their discomfort might risk our business with them.”

  Rasmussen stared daggers at Whitaker. “Which clients?”

  Whitaker named six.

  “Their concerns were minor,” Rasmussen shot back, her eyes blazing.

  “Not if they asked to have you moved off of their accounts.”

  Rasmussen scowled back, but said nothing.

  “Any more discussion?” Carswell asked.

  There was none.

  “In that case, all those in favor of electing Karla Rasmussen as our new chairperson, please raise your hand.”

  Merryweather, Kruger, Weaver and Rasmussen raised their hands.

  “Those opposed....”

  Six other directors raised their hands. Madison did not need to vote since the majority had already voted down the motion.

  “Motion fails,” Carswell said. “Other nominations?”

  Madison looked around the room, waiting.

  “In that case,” Carswell said, “I would like to nominate someone I believe can take this agency to even greater successes in time. I nominate Madison McKean to be our new chairwoman.”

  Muffled gasps broke the silence.

  “I second it,” said Alison Whitaker, smiling at her.

  “It is moved and seconded that Madison McKean be elected chairwoman of Turner Advertising,” Carswell said. “Any discussion?”

  Madison felt tension hovering over the room like a high-voltage wire. She waited for an avalanche of objections decrying how young and inexperienced she was to take control of a 2.4 billion dollar global advertising network. Frankly, she was young and inexperienced, and she had serious concerns about whether she was up to the job. But when Evan told her earlier this morning that he might nominate her, she quickly developed a transition plan she thought might compensate for her relative inexperience.