by Anna Burke
The third member of their party was not so lucky. His name was released late last night as Dr. Richard Carr. A well-regarded psychiatrist in the Los Angeles area, Dr. Carr was reportedly treating the Van Der Woert woman. It’s not clear, yet, what happened or why the three of them were up there. Police have confirmed that Dr. Carr suffered a gunshot wound to the chest before he fell. They have not yet determined cause of death, however. Dr. Carr fell much farther than either of the women, so other injuries may have led to his death.
We still have so much more to learn about what went on up there near the peak of Mt. San Jacinto. Police are not saying, but there are reports that hikers heard shouting before that gunshot. We’ve also learned that Jessica Huntington may have saved the life of the other woman who fell. Dubbed the ‘angel heiress’, supposedly Jessica Huntington grabbed Elizabeth Van Der Woert, pulling her close enough so she landed on the outcropping of rocks, not too far from where Ms. Huntington ended up. One thing’s for certain, a couple feet more in the other direction and both women might have shared the fate met by their companion, Dr. Carr. This is Angelina Collier reporting, live, from the top of the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway. Back to you, in the studio, Ed, Lisa.”
“I need to think about this. I’ll call you back.” With that, Eric ended the phone call and sat down in the large leather chair behind his desk. He took a moment to relight his cigar and then pondered his options. He hated to decide on the fly, but he was behind the curve on this event already. There was no choice but to figure out something quick. What had that idiot Carr been up to? What on earth was he doing up there with those two women? Surely he couldn’t have imagined the place was private—not with the all holiday tourist traffic at sites like that.
“I told that son-of-a-bitch to cool it. We had things under control,” he was mumbling, moving the cigar around in his mouth as he spoke to himself. He stood and moved to a small alcove where a mirrored wall supported glass shelves filled with bottles of expensive spirits. When he reached for the bottle of Louis XIII Black Pearl Cognac his hand shook. The shaking was rage, tinged with fear.
“Damn it, Carr!” His voice bounced off the walls of his large, well-appointed office. Carr had been right that the Van Der Woert woman was coming unglued. They had an endgame for that—several of them, in fact. So, what had gone wrong? The only thing Eric hated more than being behind the curve on a dustup was being out of the loop altogether. True, they would have had to use finesse to handle Libby, given the Shannon Donnelly scenario was still a work in progress. Turning fantasy into reality was Carr’s area of expertise, but selling stories was Eric’s forte.
Once the police found Donnelly’s body it would have been a piece of cake to pin it on Elizabeth Van Der Woert. Nor would it have been a surprise to find that a looney tune like Libby had taken herself out of the picture after killing her friend. A drug overdose or a dive off of that mountain up by the tram would have been an easy sell, later. Jessica Huntington was another matter, but she would have had nowhere to go once the Van Der Woert woman was dead, even if she continued to snoop, trying to stir up trouble. Had Carr been holding out on him? What could he have been hiding? His mind raced, and the shakes ramped up.
“Ah!” Eric sighed, audibly, as a sip of the expensive cognac sent a surge of warmth down the back of his throat. Not before dazzling his palate and delighting his tongue. He felt his whole body relax as he gazed out of his 20th floor office at the gathering shadows on the streets below. The lights were shining on the street and in the surrounding buildings. La-La land was winding down, the inhabitants like herds of sheep, heading for their concreted paths to pasturelands throughout the burbs. He relaxed further, sitting down in a comfy club chair facing the wall of windows. When the sheep slept, a wolf like Eric Conroy did his best work.
By the time he had finished his cigar and cognac, it was clear what had to happen next. Most likely, the police were already at Carr’s office. They wouldn’t find much, even if they knew what to look for, and they did not. The same thing was true about anything Carr had at his home in Pacific Palisades, when the cops got around to checking that out, if they weren’t already there, too. The most sensitive material, having to do with the little enterprise he and Carr had going, was in Eric’s possession. That information was kept in his own safe at home. He had insisted on that, trusting the top of the line vault and security system he had installed at his Bel Air estate. Eric also had doubts about Carr’s savvy for taking proper precautions. Still, there had to be files in his office or home on Libby Van Der Woert and Shannon Donnelly. Who knew what seemingly innocent note or comment might trigger something in the mind of some Columbo wannabe? By moving swiftly, he could get a team to clean the place out before the police could get permission to go through the dead psychiatrist’s client records. He might have no choice to let the police take an initial look around, but they would not get a second chance. Sending in a cleanup team probably wasn’t necessary. Carr’s office and house would get ‘sanitized’. Break-ins at both places would raise suspicions, but the trail would be blocked. So check!
“And mate,” he muttered, hitting the recall button on his cell phone. Not his personal cell phone, but the dedicated cell phone he used for the more surreptitious sidelines in which he was engaged. A phone he tossed and replaced often. Maybe it was overkill, but there was another way to guarantee the police reached a dead end quickly. “Overkill, ha! Dead end, ha! That’s even better than checkmate! Eric, my boy, you have a way with words,” chuckling and speaking those words aloud as he waited for his call to be answered. He had to hand it to himself, if nothing else, he was thorough.
Just a few more days and he would have no further need of this whole operation anyway. When the board met one last time about the IPO, there would be no turning back. Not that he’d let that happen anyway. He’d be set, though, once even the most reluctant board members piled onto the good news bandwagon. In fact, all of this could work out well. It was a relief to have Carr out of the picture. A less splashy end would have been preferable, but this would do. Unfortunately, with Carr dead there was no chance to find out what that little meeting at the top of the tram was about. Shouting and gunshots meant it wasn’t a love fest. Libby Van Der Woert had been practically stalking Carr. Had she lured him up there to kill him? Why was Jessica Huntington there? No matter, he had moves to block her too.
“Yeah,” barked a disembodied voice on the phone.
“The minute the cops have cleared out I want a team at Carr’s office and his home. I want the places cleaned out—not a scrap of paper or electronic device is to be left behind. You know, take all the stuff he uses to communicate and keep records. Also, make sure that whack job, the Van Der Woert broad, never comes to. I don’t want her telling squat to the cops. The Huntington busy-body will be released from the hospital any minute now, so you may have to take care of her later. For now, keep tabs on her. I’ll give you the ‘go’ signal on Huntington, depending on what happens after you take care of Libby Van Der Woert. You know the drill. It should look like she just didn’t make it, if you can do that, but do whatever it takes.”
The decision made, Eric Conroy, Executive Vice President of Pinnacle Enterprises, Inc., relaxed. Eric could make a decision, even a tough one. He did not stew about it or second guess himself and could get on with the business at hand.
That’s why he stood out as a leader. Well it was one reason. He could stay cool and think strategically, even in a crisis. It had moved him up the ranks, quickly, as a purveyor of perception management. That’s why he was much sought after as a so-called “spin doctor” when trouble erupted for their elite clients and the firms they represented. His ability to get out ahead of the other wolves he ran with was yet another sign of his capacity to lead the pack. That he had helped manufacture a few of the crises he was called in to manage was a measure of true genius. It’s why they needed him at the helm of the flagship P.R. firm. The fact he was not already at the helm was their loss and they�
�d know that soon enough.
He was getting too old for this garbage, anyway. Soon the keys to the kingdom would be his. Eric knew exactly what he would do with those keys, too. It had taken him more than five years to be named Executive Vice President, but without assurances that he was next in line for the CEO position. He could have forced that to happen anyway, but he decided instead to pursue his Personal Liberation Plan. Eric shook his head thinking about what a naïve shmuck he had been when he stepped from college into his first job at CC & R—“Create Crap & Run,” as he and other low level chumps referred to the firm behind the scenes. The job he had landed at that small advertising firm in New Jersey was just a hop, skip and a jump from the Big Apple. That’s where he planned to go after honing his craft through a lot of hard work, grit and determination. Boy oh boy, had he been a fool. A Hoosier, from the Midwest, he was fodder for the grist mill that was the norm for advertising, public relations, marketing and consulting firms when he entered the field.
They had busted his chops while working him like an indentured servant. From day one he was “nobody from nowhere” with his Hoosier-U marketing degree and his Hicksville, aw-shucks-demeanor. They had him cold-calling and hustling 24/7, trying to explain the value of marketing and media to half-witted, half-drunk prospects in charge of marketing and advertising at firms all over the country. He learned to call early before multi-martini power lunches put the jerks in a surly stupor.
The experience had opened his eyes. He was a quick study and had a penchant for innovation. As the first few years of his career unfolded he saw the seemingly endless horizon that stretched ahead. Decades loomed. That’s when he took matters into his own hands. He would apply the skills he had learned to market his own life, orchestrating a public relations campaign that propelled him ahead before he entered the second decade of his career.
The third decade would be his last as a “spin doctor” and “Mad man,” not that there was much of the old Madison Avenue left. Despite all the Hoosier-bashing he had endured you could do a lot of your master-minding from just about anywhere these days. So much of the action took place in cyberspace. A big splashy, brick and mortar presence, in one of the power centers like New York, L.A., or D.C. still made a statement, though. Eric had decided to go west and try to strike gold on the “Left Coast,” taking a job with a bigger firm than CC &R. By then he had learned one of the key secrets to success: leverage.
So much for honing your craft and working hard as the way to getting ahead, Eric had decided. Turns out having a little something-something on somebody did so much more. It opened doors, cleared pathways and removed obstacles. Eric sort of stumbled across that truth about business after running into one of the more egregious Hoosier-bashers at CC &R in a rather compromising situation. An old story, not the least bit original: he had practically bumped into the man coming out of a posh hotel sucking face with a gorgeous woman. She was not his wife. Eric had merely winked at him in passing, not even stopping to say hello. After that, the grateful department head at his firm could not do enough to help Eric. As soon as he could, in fact, he had helped Eric right out of CC &R and into another firm.
Somehow he had a knack for being in the right place at the right time—the person on the other end of that situation might have considered it the wrong place at the wrong time. Oh well, that was no concern of his. Not all the situations could be kept hush-hush. Some of the unfortunate circumstances members of Eric’s widening circle of hotshots found themselves in created opportunities for him to save the day with el primo crisis management, spin control, and a re-branding PR package. If he played his cards right—and he did—he could make hay from someone else’s grand faux pas on both a personal and a business level.
Thinking about how close he was now to the brass ring, he basked in reminiscences about how his greatest innovation in self-promotion had occurred. He was already in L.A., mingling with a whole new crowd of potential clients. So many of the high-profile firms and individuals in Tinsel Town or the Silicon Valley were one tiny, precipitous step away from joining the ranks of the “reputation-impaired.” One of his first big ideas was to sell “reputation insurance” to headline-makers. Kind of like insurance sold to protect against identity theft. Unfortunately, he couldn’t find underwriters that could develop an algorithm to estimate the costs associated with a damaged reputation. Libel and slander courts had struggled with that issue in awarding reparations, but still thrashed it out, one case at a time.
From that failure, though, came the revelation it wasn’t much of a leap from anticipating hypothetical reputation-damaging situations to documenting them when they occurred. Much like that accidental meeting as his old boss strolled from the hotel, in the arms of his mistress, but being more organized and at the ready. The most susceptible clients were headed so clearly for a fall that, with the help of some well-placed gumshoe or shutterbug, all he did was capture the moment of indiscretion and make sure it got into the right hands. Heck, with cameras on cell phones, he could practically rely on the trend spotters he hired to do that work for him. It was as easy to capture an indiscrete moment as it was to snap shots of hot ideas teeming the streets that could be marketed as the next big thing in fast fashion or fast food.
Taking that last step from documenting to manufacturing disreputable behavior had actually been the brain-child of Dr. Richard Carr. The man was sitting on a gold mine when Eric stumbled upon the doc’s antics. That had come about as the result of one of those fortunate accidents Eric was poised to use to his advantage. One of his biggest clients, who also held a seat on Pinnacle’s board, had a weakness for young women. He had come to his office, one night, in a drunken state.
“Eric, I need your help. Not for my firm, but for me, personally. My daughter has accused me of the most horrendous thing. I’m about to consult a lawyer, but I will need all the help I can get if this gets out to the public. This is so impossibly disgusting. She says I molested her, years ago when she was a child. I admit I like younger women, who doesn’t? But my own daughter, never! And never a child! Who could think of a child in a sexual way?”
The man had careened from Eric’s office into the private bath nearby, retching violently. He was obviously overcome, not just by drunkenness, but disgust or worry about the damage this might do to his reputation. When he came back into the room they sketched out a game plan. They would get ahead of this thing with some well-placed PR. That included donations to high-profile agencies known for saving babies, children, or animals, ending hunger and preserving the wilderness. Word of Edwin ‘Ned’ Donnelly’s good deeds would be leaked. That would include photos featuring the man donating blood, releasing rehabilitated animals back into the wilds, standing next to a doctor in scrubs and mask at a neo-natal unit featuring teeny, tiny babies. It was all pro forma, really.
“They’ll be calling you Saint Ned by the time we’re through with you. If your daughter goes after you publicly, it’ll get you hailed as a martyr,” Eric had assured the man, patting him on his slumped shoulders. The plan would be implemented, off the books, as a personal favor for a long time agency client and a current member of the board.
“I consider you more than a client and colleague, Ned. You’re a friend,” he had said in his most confident and reassuring tone. “Go home, get a good night’s sleep, and let me get the ball rolling.”
“How can I ever thank you?”
“Let’s not worry about that now. Friends help friends when they need it. Who knows when I might need your help, right?”
As he spoke those words he knew exactly what help he needed and when. That was not long before Pinnacle’s board was set to vote about taking the company public. An initial public offering, netting the company hundreds of millions of dollars, was a no-brainer to Eric. Some of the founding fathers at Pinnacle had raised objections. “Dinosaurs, they deserve extinction,” he had growled under his breath, after battling with them at a board meeting.
Donnelly, however, was easily t
alked into supporting an IPO, when Eric brought it up a short time later. In fact, you would have thought it was his idea, given his advocacy for an IPO at meetings of the board. His enthusiasm might have been related to the effectiveness of the campaign he was waging on Donnelly’s behalf. Eric had reassured Donnelly that regardless of any aspersions cast by his daughter, he would come out of it smelling like a rose.
Dr. Richard Carr was another matter. Eric smelled a rat. Questions put to Donnelly that night in his office set off his scam detector. Shannon Donnelly had seen a new shrink in the past year. Ned’s daughter had become more distant, but they thought, maybe, that was a good thing.
“We took it as sign of greater self-reliance. A new shrink, new meds, and she even had a major, finally. Now this... ” More sober after heaving his guts out and a few sips of coffee, he was still crestfallen. “Then out of the blue, she attacked me.”
During her most recent tirade she had demanded money. Ned Donnelly had taken no notice of the money angle because he was so horrified by the accusations his daughter was making. Bailing his daughter out of trouble had been a regular event even though she was on an allowance from a trust fund set up by grandma.