at First Sight (2008)

by Stephen Cannell

  As I exited the elevator and felt it wheeze closed behind me, I found myself standing in a very ordinary entryway.

  A young, overweight girl was seated behind a marble desk reading Vanity Fair. Above her head was some kind of brass logo that resembled a lily, and under that, appropriately enough:

  THE LILY FUND

  I crossed to her. “I’m Charles Best,” I said, handing her my card. “I have an eleven o’clock appointment with Mr. Lily.”

  She took my card and frowned at it as if it contained the results of her last Pap smear. She wrinkled her brow; she pursed her lips; she dangled it in two fingers like a cat turd fished from her litter box. Then she set it down on her desk and frowned at it.

  I should say here that the card cost me a bloody fortune. In the middle it says BESTMARKET. COM in raised gold letters. Our logo, which is a unicorn, is embossed on the top left corner of the card. Why a unicorn? I don’t know … I really don’t. Somebody else picked it. But it seemed kind of show businessy, so I agreed. At the bottom, my name was also in embossed letters.

  CHARLES “CHICK” BEST

  CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER

  She picked up the phone and spoke softly to somebody inside, then looked up at me. “You can wait over there.” She pointed to a worn leather sofa and went immediately back to her magazine.

  I walked over and sat. I put my briefcase in front of me and picked up that morning’s Wall Street Journal. I tried to read an article about the mortgage meltdown, but I couldn’t make my mind stay focused. My heart was pounding, my senses quivering. I was trying to calm myself down, trying to get my hands to stop shaking.

  I kept thinking my entire future was coming down to a meeting with a guy who had been alternately called a grave dancer or the Great White of Wall Street. He was what was commonly referred to as garbitrageur, a derogatory blend of the two words “garbage” and “arbitrageur.” I knew he would try to lowball me. That’s why I had the doctored spreadsheets Martin Worth had pencil-whipped, putting the best possible face on a large array of unexploded financial grenades.

  It was eleven-twenty before I was finally shown into Lily’s office.

  As bleak and foreboding as the waiting area was, the inner sanctum was just the opposite. Money and wealth reeked off polished wood walls and ornate Louie XV furniture. Louis XV is my least favorite style ever since I noticed that all of the pictures of Liberace I’d ever seen had him sitting in rooms full of that kind of French furniture.

  But it was everywhere in the Lily Fund offices: pushed up against the polished oak walls, decorating every available open space. Gold-leaf lion-claw legs stood on carpet that was some kind of expensive custom weave, stretched to fit under the heavy wood moldings.

  I was shepherded by a sallow young man in a gray suit, past offices full of people who were so busy making money for my host, they didn’t even look up to see who Mr. Lily’s next victim was.

  I was shown into his outer office. A woman who was in her mid-fifties paused and glanced up. A corporate diva, she studied me fiercely over half-glasses.

  “Mr. Best?” she asked, coldly.

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m the best Best there is!” giving her one of my cute openers. Then I smiled, flashing my full sixteen, the old Chick Best ivory personality blitz.

  She didn’t waver under its effect. Total points won: zip. “Go in,” she instructed coolly.

  The shepherd in the gray suit opened the office door and guided me into Mr. Walter Lily’s inner sanctum, then positioned himself right inside the door. I was feeling like a condemned man about to hear a life-altering sentence.

  The office surprised me. I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but it wasn’t what I found.

  To begin with, despite the pricey Louis XV furnishings, Lily’s workspace was unusually small and cluttered. There were books and financial statements stacked everywhere. One small window looked out on the back wall of a large building. No effort was wasted on frills in this room.

  My office, by comparison, was huge and full of expensive geegaws. I had a two-hundred-thousand-dollar sound system you could operate with a laser remote, a door that electronically opened and closed from a button under my desk, and a hidden bar that rotated out of one wall.

  I instantly saw the dichotomy. I was going broke in my huge tricked-out office, while Lily was making billions in a closet that wasn’t big enough to store my sports equipment.

  How did I get so fucked up?

  Sitting behind a desk piled with spreadsheets was the tiniest little man I’d ever seen. He was bald, and as I came through the door, he had his arms out, his palms flat on his blotter. My initial impression was of a large head suspended on spider legs. Then he rose to his full five-foot-two-inch height and came around the desk to meet me. He had a skinny build and hair tufting out of his ears. A gnome. I’m not going to waste a lot more time describing him or our short visit—our chat—because it was the most ludicrous business meeting I had ever attended.

  “Mr. Best?” Walter Lily asked. His voice was high, a squeak actually.

  “Yes sir, the best Best there is!” I flashed my grill and got no more out of him with this line than I had with his cold-ass secretary.

  “I understand you’re interested in selling your company.”

  “Well, sir, I’d certainly consider it, but only if I got a blowout bid. We’re not exactly pursuing a sale right now, because we’re quite excited about where we’re heading and our new quarter spreadsheets are showing renewed longterm profit and capital return. However, that said, under the right circumstances I might consider taking on the right strategic partner if appropriate terms could be negotiated.”

  I know, I know. You’re thinking, what a load of bullshit. But this is the way you negotiate in business. You don’t sell because you’re strapped for cash; you take on a strategic partner. You don’t roll over and expose your soft underbelly to the Great White of Wall Street; you pretend you don’t need him.

  The little man wearing Sears Roebuck trousers stood for a long moment before he pulled a slip of paper out of his shirt pocket and handed it to me.

  “What’s this?” I said, smiling.

  “My offer. Not a penny more or less,” the midget intoned, looking and sounding like a tiny Shylock, or a badly turned-out Ebenezer Scrooge.

  Now, let me say right here, this is not the way business is done. My company, while currently experiencing hard times, was once the third-largest Internet site on the Web.

  I admit, we made no profit, but that was a calculated strategy. We used every cent, plus all we could borrow, to expand. Product was flying out the door. Millions and millions of website hits a month. We lost money, but we built volume and name value. Name value equates to dollar value. This is a business truth. A brand name can be sold. If you owned the name “Kleenex” for instance, you would have something you could sell for a fortune. I’m not saying bestmarket. Com was as well known as Kleenex, or that it was a brand name by which all Internet entertainment sales were referred to, but I am saying that people knew who we were, and in the intensely competitive world of Web commerce, this is a very valuable asset. Millions of people hit our site just because they knew it was there.

  I looked at the slip of paper and I couldn’t believe what was written there. Two million dollars.

  “Two million dollars for what?” I asked, dumbfounded. I was personally on the line for big longterm leases: the warehouse and our six-story L. A. office building. Walter Lily had to know all that if he’d done his due diligence, which I was sure he had. The two million dollars wouldn’t even cover my litigation costs when I terminated all the longterm contracts with my employees, or handle the breach-ofcontract problems I was sure to face.

  The only thing that was keeping my creditors from swarming me was the knowledge that I had nothing but a thinly capitalized company. If they put me into Chapter 11, they’d get ten cents on the dollar for what we owed them, so they were carrying us, hoping we’d work our way out o
f debt. But Lily knew this. He knew if I tried to walk away from these contractual obligations, I’d be in court forever.

  This little asshole was trying to steal my company for nothing. He had the cash and personal assets to restart the operation, reinstate my studio and record-company deals. He’d make my fortune instead of me.

  Ten years ago, in the good old dot-com wizard days, we’d had a paper value of six hundred million dollars, as estimated in Forbes magazine. Admittedly, we’d slipped some, but this offer was nuts.

  “T … two million?” I said, stuttering my disbelief.

  “Yes.” He looked at me like a malicious child who had just pulled the wings off a moth and was watching it flop around helplessly on a windowsill.

  “But, sir, … the liquidated break-up value is at least seven,” I said, retreating immediately to my absolute bottom-line number. I snapped open my briefcase and went for the doctored spreadsheets.

  “Don’t bother with any of those,” he said as I pulled them out. “That’s the offer. This time next month, you won’t get a dollar from me or anyone else.”

  “I can’t sell for two million. The name alone is worth four times that much.”

  “Goodbye, then:’ he said. The little bandit turned and walked out of his office, leaving me standing there with the narrow-shouldered shepherd in the gray suit.

  “Is he kidding?” I said.

  “I’ll show you out:” the man said.

  It appeared I’d come three thousand miles just to let a dwarf in shiny pants shit on me.

  Chapter 8

  SECONDS LATER I WAS BACK ON THE STREET, SLEET washing my head, running down my back.

  I still had options. The Brooklyn Bridge was only a few miles away. I could give these Wall Street assholes a great headline. I should’ve cabbed over there and jumped. If I had, I’d be way ahead of where I am now. But that isn’t what I did. Instead, I did something much worse.

  Somehow, I found my way to the Hertz Rent a Car in downtown Manhattan. Somehow, I managed to rent a blue Ford Taurus. Somehow, I got out of New York City. I didn’t really know where I was going. The windshield wipers clicked and clacked. I was out of options. My tortured thoughts circled the edge of this new business dilemma like a hungry wolf at the edge of a campfire. I drove for hours and hours, not even knowing where I was going … not caring. I vaguely remember Arlington, then Myrtle Beach. I drove without stopping, except for gas. My mind was chewing on all the terrible consequences of my life, starting with my father’s death .. .

  Okay. As long as I brought it up, let’s get on that broken-down mule for a minute. When I was a child, my father always seemed to me like somebody who had all the answers. He wasn’t some big-time show-biz powerhouse, I admit, but he was funny and smart. He could make you laugh, make you believe. An agent.

  He loved Hollywood Park … loved the ponies.

  He was always taking me to the track. Money was power, he told me. And he bet heavily, trying to become more powerful. He let me pick horses and taught me how to read the racing sheet. I learned to handicap by going to the track with him at dawn, studying workout times and injury reports just like all the other six-thirty railbirds. Once, when I was ten, I got a four-horse parlay, won three hundred dollars. I started carrying wads of money around. I was only in fifth grade, but I learned that my father was right. Money was power, even in elementary school.

  Mom didn’t get it. She was always bitching about Dad losing the egg money, because lots of times he did. She didn’t understand that money won was twice as valuable as money earned.

  But Dad understood that, and so did I.

  Ever since childhood, I’ve been a regular at the Jockey Club. When I was in the chips a few years back, a lot of my dot-corn bonus cash went right through the pari-mutuel window. Call it a learned behavior, a conditioned response. Dad was Chick Sr. I was Chick Jr. We lived in a parallel universe. The rest of the world ran in the next lane over. He got to drink and screw the B-girls at the Paddock Bar. I went to elementary school and flashed my track cash. Got my first piece of ass in eighth grade when I bought the girl a fifty-dollar ring and got laid in return. I was fourteen. Talk about a defining moment.

  Then came the night when dear old Dad ruined it. The night he got drunk and put the silver Jag into the bridge abutment. They had to cut him out of the car. He came out in four pieces.

  Since I didn’t get my mother’s vibe at all, I had focused everything on Dad. I wanted to be like him even though I’m not sure I even knew who he was. He was a big, happy guy in a checkered coat who taught me that people will respect you if you’ve got cash in your wallet and bullshit on your lips. Mostly what I liked about him was he paid attention to me. I thought it was about me back then, but as I grew older and gained insight into what motivates people, I realized it wasn’t about me at all. It was about him. I was the only person in his life who gave a shit what he thought.

  We buried him at Forest Lawn and I remember thinking back then that it was pretty much over the day they closed his casket. You see, my one goal in life had been to please him, to one day make him proud of me. And then, before I could do it, he took off for the big paddock in the sky. I was only fifteen when he died.

  I was left to be raised by women—my mother and grandmother. What a hen party that was. They clucked and prodded, complained and bitched. My grades were never good enough, my hair never short enough, my girlfriends never refined enough. Then, under all this criticism, I sort of started to veer toward drugs and sleazy women, just like Dad. I went into the army, where I heroically defended my post on Wilshire Boulevard, winning the war of one-liners. Afterward, it was a decade-long party that ended with six months in the Hawaii State Prison.

  Through all of this, I slowly began to form a different opinion of my father. More and more, I’ve come to realize that Dad was just a loser with a great line of b. S. A guy who nobody listened to except sleazy women and a son who had nobody else. So, the hero of my youth slowly became an emotional stone around my neck. As an adult, I came to hate what he stood for and prayed I wouldn’t end up the same way. I actually threw away my two checkered sport coats the day this realization finally dawned.

  I grew up with no real male role models—nobody to try to be like. So whom did I eventually choose? Pop culture assholes. The celebrities in People magazine. First, it was drug-culture rock bands, then investment sleaze balls like Ivan Boesky and John Delorean. I lusted after all the things that the product machines on Madison Avenue told me were cool. I didn’t like who I was, so I bought everything these false prophets and culture hucksters told me would validate me. I blew money on exotic cars, dressed out of GQ, put almost a quarter of a million dollars into the sound system in an office so large you could use it to play half-court basketball. I married a woman other people wanted to fuck. She gave great blow jobs but had thoughts so thin they disappeared completely in a flurry of demands, complaints, and recriminations.

  The age-old loser questions started waking me up at night. How did I get here?

  What do I really want?

  Why am I so damn unhappy?

  And then the big, scary ones: Am I turning into my father? Is that why nobody takes me seriously?

  These were the things I was thinking as I pushed the little blue Taurus south out of the sleet of New York City, onto the cracked, dry roads of Virginia, heading nowhere special, not knowing where I was going until I got there.

  I drove all afternoon, into the night, my mind elsewhere, yearning for something I was unable to even describe.

  You’ll never guess where I ended up. Or, maybe you already have. I ended up in front of Paige Ellis’s house on a residential street in Charlotte, North Carolina.

  It was 10 P. M. on the night my whole life changed.

  Chapter 9

  THE HOUSE WAS SMALL, WITH A TINY FRONT LAWN. IT was not the kind of place you’d expect to find the scion of the Chandler media fortune, certainly not a house I would choose if I had his money. I was
parked a little way up the street. The address, written down so carefully in Hawaii, was open now on my lap. The letters, in her delicate hand, were wavering under my blurring vision.

  2367 LIPTON ROAD, CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA

  I looked at the house and I remember saying out loud, “Chick, this is nuts?’ Of course it was way beyond nuts. This was real, hard-core, front-of-the-line stalker nonsense.

  I had driven more than six hundred miles to park outside another man’s house, so I could look into his lighted living room, hoping to catch a glimpse of his wife as she passed by the window. Unacceptable.

  It was as if just letting the vision of her find its way into my brain might salve the pain of these past few days—of Melissa in jail, my sorry business going bankrupt, and the dwarf in the shiny pants with the hair growing out of his ears.

  I watched. I waited. What was I doing? I swear, at that moment I didn’t have a clue. I wanted to start up the blue Taurus and leave, but I couldn’t move my hand to the ignition key. Every time I tried, I hit some sort of powerful force field. My fingers hovered inches away, unable to make contact and close the distance, which would have saved me.

  I don’t know how long I sat there. My thoughts were becoming pretty jumbled … pretty abstract. I thought about my dad, my wife. The first time I saw Evelyn at Mike Donovan’s pool party. I thought she was beautiful then, never seeing the woman she would become. Not seeing the anger or the self-hatred that now drove her to pump iron obsessively for hours in our basement gym. I thought about Paige and Chandler Ellis and this little house so far away from L. A. I thought about the insanity of this trip down here, not knowing until I pulled the address out of my pocket what I was really doing, but then knowing in a flash that it had been my plan to come here all along.

  That realization, that truth, hit me harder than any of the events of the past month. I knew this was insane, and still I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t put the little car in gear and save myself, because, you see, I knew that no matter what happened to me, whether I stayed or left, I would never again be the same Chick Best. Somehow, I knew right then that my coming here had changed who I was forever.