by Jon Talton
“We need to talk to you now,” he says. I don’t like being pushed, but I climb in the truck. They drive south, past King Street Station and the stadiums and the clotted incoming traffic. We’re not going to police headquarters on Fifth Avenue or the precinct on Virginia. I say this.
“We’re not police. We’re federal officers.”
The SUV isn’t going to the federal building, either.
“What do you want?”
“We want to talk to you.”
My heart is pounding to a beat of why? why? why? I guess everybody reacts that way. I try to keep my game face cool. I’m unshackled in the back seat of the SUV, both the feds up front. The door is unlocked. It can’t be that threatening. I have a small, petty, apprehensive thought: could Rachel have done this? I decide, no.
Eight blocks go by and we’re deep in the anonymous warehouse district east of the port. We pull up to a new red-brick building with no windows, where a heavy gate opens. They pull into a small walled-off parking lot, then wait for a garage door to rise. The SUV slides slowly into an immaculate garage area with two other SUVs and three black Crown Victorias. A camera is mounted from one corner of the ceiling. The garage door closes and we step out into cool artificial light. The floor is spotless. We walk toward a wall with four doorways and a larger entrance with a metal door rolled down. We go to the one that has a rectangular metal box attached to the wall on the left. The box is painted the same gray as the rest of the wall and has a glass cover and beneath the glass LED lights emit a reddish glow. The man in the suit looks into the box and there’s a solid metal click from the door. They lead me through an empty, blank corridor, painted the same gray. The one in the suit holds open a door and we all step inside.
It looks a lot like an interrogation room.
“Am I under arrest?”
“No, relax.”
The first man takes off his leather jacket, revealing a short-sleeved, black polo shirt. He’s buff and proud of the muscles in his arms. His knuckles are raw. But I most notice his light-brown leather shoulder holster and in it, the biggest handgun I have ever seen. It’s a semi-auto, silver with a black grip and the barrel must be eight inches long. The bore is huge. It hardly looks federal issue. The man in the suit tells me to relax again and pulls out a chair. He sits across the table and opens a leather portfolio with a legal pad. The first man stands to my right, just at the edge of my peripheral vision. They still haven’t told me their names.
I look straight ahead at the man in the suit.
The first man leans against the wall and crosses his arms. He says my full name. “You were born in Seattle in 1961. You look younger than you are. Your father died in federal prison. Your sister, Jill, killed herself six years ago. You graduated from the University of Washington and served in the military.”
“What the hell is this?” I sit straight in the chair. My feet feel funny.
“You were part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize eight years ago. As a columnist for the Seattle Free Press you make $108,000 a year and your taxes are in order. But your personal finances are a mess, not something I’d want to advertise if I were a business writer. You were married once and divorced. Now you see Rachel Summers, Pamela Moffat, and Melinda Stewart. At the same time. You get around, brother. You have no close friends.”
The room is as bare as my mind at that moment. Coffee stains dot the tabletop like meteor strikes. “What do you want?”
“How long have you known Troy Hardesty?”
So that’s it. “Seven years,” I say. “I met him when he worked for Lehman back East, then we both ended up in Seattle.” The man in the suit makes notes in a neat hand on the legal pad. He places his left hand in front to conceal what he’s writing.
“What did you talk about yesterday?”
“A column I was working on, among other things. Why are you asking?” I wonder what Troy was into. Securities fraud, insider trading? That’s not the kind of thing that gets a journalist picked up outside his building. It had to be something else. They just stare at me.
“Did Troy kill himself?” I ask. “Or do you suspect foul play?”
They actually say it: “We’ll ask the questions.”
My mind replays those last moments with Troy. He seemed his usual carefree, arrogant self. He let me out the side door, so I didn’t know if he met his next appointment or if he ever had one. They demand to know more about our conversation. I had cooperated with the police. After all, a man had just died. Now I start to wonder about First Amendment issues, about telling the confidences of a news source. I tell them I want to talk to the newspaper’s lawyers. My mouth is so dry it takes me a moment to finish the sentence.
The man in the suit glances at his partner. The partner pulls over a chair and sits close to my right. I can smell his cologne and it reminds me of something I tried in high school. Brut? Old Spice? He starts nervously shaking his leg. The butt of the big handgun jiggles inside the holster.
“We need to know the details,” he says.
“I can’t tell you until I talk to our lawyers.” I say it in a stronger voice and his leg stops shaking.
“So what do you do in your spare time? What kinds of things does a guy in your position have to read?” The man in the suit smiles at me as if we are just having coffee together. He has shifted the dynamic of the interview, from confrontational to friendly. I should know: I’ve done it many times myself.
What do I read? How much time do you have? It sounds like a job interview. I give the short list: eight newspapers in print or online, four magazines, ten Web sites, documents from various federal agencies and dozens of companies, and let’s not forget those sexy reports from the Federal Reserve Banks.
“What else?”
“That’s about it,” I say. “Sometimes a novel or a work of history. My eyes get tired at the end of the day.”
Writing, writing, writing. The man in the suit makes his notes. I try not to let my leg shake, the leg that knows deadline is coming down on me like a runaway train.
I try to take control. “So what kinds of cases do you guys specialize in?” I direct it to the buff one sitting beside me. He just stares.
“What about the Internet? Do you write a Web log?” This, again, from the man in the suit.
This one is easy to answer. It’s public knowledge. I write a short blog entry every day on the newspaper’s Web site, on economic and business topics. I tell them that I was one of the first business columnists to start a Web log, more than a decade ago, and that the Free Press has one of the nation’s busiest newspaper Web sites—something the “you guys are buggy whip makers” critics conveniently overlook. My column and blog are promoted on Twitter, where I have hundreds of followers, and on Facebook. I want to throw them off stride, take some control, find out what they’re after. He ignores me.
“Do you keep a personal Web log?”
I shake my head. “No time. Anyway, I do this to get paid, not because I’m a wannabe writer with a site nobody sees.”
“Are you interested in conspiracies?”
I watch his eyes for a tell. A skilled interviewer won’t let you know when he’s asked a question that’s vital to his story. This guy’s pretty good: his eyes stay steady, his mouth straight and friendly. But he stops writing, even puts down his pen. When I take notes during an interview, I try to put the pad on my leg, beneath the table and out of the view of the subject. I make continual eye contact as I make notes. It only took a few years to learn how to make notes without looking at the notebook.
Am I interested in conspiracies? How the hell does that go with Troy Hardesty’s suicide?
I say, “Only if I can prove them. I’m a professional skeptic.”
“So what did Troy tell you?” the first man says, circling around behind me. “Specifically.”
We’re back to Topic A.
“I can’t discuss that. There’s this little matter called the Constitution a
nd the Washington state shield law.” I think: Troy asked about eleven-eleven. And the prostitute screamed it. Eleven-eleven. I would sound like a nut. I keep my mouth shut.
“We’ve got an amateur lawyer here, Stu,” says the round-faced man.
“Let’s trade information,” I volunteer. “Why are you looking at Troy?”
They look at each other and stay silent.
“C’mon guys, what’s up? I keep confidences all over town. Probably some from your bosses.”
The room overtakes us with its silence. It’s not a nice sound. Nothing penetrates the walls, which means nothing can escape, either. I tamp down the paranoia. Andy Grove of Intel said only the paranoid survive and it’s a good credo in one’s professional life. But I also have a certain family history.
“We can keep you here,” Stu says.
I say, “I want to see your identification again.”
The agent starts writing again. He looks up mildly. “We’ll give you a ride back. And we’ll be in touch.”
I decide not to push it. We repeat the path back through downtown. This time I sit in the passenger front seat and the man in the leather jacket sits in the back seat. The digital clock on the dash says 8:30. I have only four-and-a-half hours before deadline. Before the SUV pulls to the curb, the man in the suit turns to face me.
“Rachel, Melinda, and Pamela,” he says, staring at me intensely. “A man who has so many compartments in his life makes me suspicious. Have a nice day.”
“Can I have your card, in case I think of anything else?”
The window rolls up and the SUV spurts away from the curb into traffic, too fast for me to get its tag number.
Chapter Five
Who.
What.
Where.
When.
Why.
The traditional news story begins with those five Ws. It’s intended to get the most critical information at the top of the article where more readers will see it. This pyramid style consigns the less important background material to further down, where it can be cut if space gets short. I’d just as soon cut mine, whether the feds are telling the truth about me or not. I’m old school: I know the first paragraph of a story is spelled l-e-d-e, to differentiate it from the l-e-a-d in an old-time, hot-type Linotype machine, and I don’t believe the journalist should become part of the story.
I make a quick stop at my loft. Nobody else has returned my calls or emails yet. You can spend a lot of hours waiting for sources to call back. I don’t have those hours now. But I think I have enough to weave tomorrow’s column. Troy’s background information is critical. Even though we agreed that I couldn’t quote him, he told me that someone is accumulating Olympic International stock and is intent on taking it over and breaking it up. When I go on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s EDGAR site, I hit pay dirt. A new 13-D filing for Olympic has been made at 9:14 a.m. Eastern time. It’s required by law if an investor acquires more than five percent of a company’s shares. In fact, 9 percent of Olympic’s shares are now held by something called Animal Spirits LLC. My adrenaline washes away all my other worries. This is big.
I have no idea who Animal Spirits LLC is. It sounds like the kind of band that would have played down at the Crocodile in the old days, but I know it was a phrase from John Maynard Keynes. He talked about the role of “animal spirits” in the market. I use Google and Nexis to search for the firm and come up with nothing. Nobody has written about it. LLCs are notoriously murky; they’re meant to conceal the identity of their principals. The 13-D tells me nothing more than the name. I guess it’s a private equity outfit, still one of the largely unregulated playpens for the very rich to invest their money and reap huge returns, or, sometimes, big losses. Their specialty is “rip, strip, and flip.” They buy companies on the cheap, take them private, lay off as many employees as possible, close unprofitable business lines, bolster the profitable sides, strip and sell assets, then take what’s left public again. It’s big money for the winners. Private equity operates largely in the shadows, parallel to, and in competition with, traditional Wall Street. Even so, many private equity houses have their own Web sites. Not Animal Spirits. This won’t stay in the shadows long. Usually a letter to management is made public, saying the company is undervalued and either making an outright takeover or demanding change. That will rock the world of Olympic’s chairman and CEO, Pete Montgomery, Troy’s old college buddy.
I link into the newspaper’s system and write pieces of the column as fast as I can, about its recent performance, speculation on the Street, the SEC filing. Sometimes stories come from press conferences. Everybody gets the news when the company or government allows them to have it. Me, I try to find news as it is becoming. Now I have followed a hunch about an old-line company into a potential exclusive. While I write, I wish more people would call me back so I can write with more confidence. I don’t just want to tell readers about the filing. The Times could easily get that, too, if they have a reporter covering the company or an editor watching the SEC. The Wall Street Journal can get it. The news may already be online. I type fast and hard. I wear out computer keyboards.
I have to explain what it means and try to look ahead. Here, my source’s insights will make a big difference, especially about the defense subsidiary. I sell business intelligence, to shareholders, employees, vendors, competitors—anybody who wants to shell out fifty cents for the Free Press. Hell, you can get it online for free. Anybody can be a columnist for two weeks, and then he or she runs out of ideas. Anybody today can be a “columnist” on a blog. But to be a real columnist for a major newspaper, to be one of the most popular destinations at the paper—whether on the dead-trees edition or online—that’s one of the hardest gigs to attain and sustain in the working press. A few of us were born to it and nothing else. I’m one.
Finally, I recharge my cell and use the land-line to call in a favor. Once I helped the owner of a parking management company who was being screwed by the city. He knows he owes me big, and after my initial call he gets back to me in twenty minutes with the information I want. I use that twenty minutes to keep writing, and all the while I know that I am losing time, losing time, deadline is coming. I grab my suit coat, a couple of props, and make a fast walk ten blocks.
Olympic International occupies an award-winning glass tower on First Avenue. The lobby has twenty-foot-tall Diego Rivera murals of forests and mountains, and the rough-hewn men who are taking their bounty. They came out of the old headquarters and were commissioned when natural resources were the company’s main business. Reinstalling them in the new tower lobby caused consternation among the local environmental crowd, which is sizable. On the other hand, people in Seattle said, Rivera was a socialist so the art provides an ironic critique of rapacious capitalism. And the preservationists were happy to see them saved. But the murals stay because Pete Montgomery wants them to. I walk past the murals to the elevator bank and wait.
Five minutes go by and a pretty Asian woman with a briefcase walks up to one of the elevators for the parking garage. I join her and we step into the elevator. She swipes her card as I hoped she would and the elevator heads for level P-3.
“Thank you,” I say.
She smiles and doesn’t give it another thought. I’m in a suit, and made sure I am carrying both a cardboard file box, to keep my hands too full to swipe a key card, and my expensive Coach briefcase, to show I am safely in the executive class. The file box is empty. I’ve attached my Seattle Free Press employee ID to my belt; facing inward it looks pretty much like the ones worn by Olympic employees. I’m just the nice fellow management employee who can’t get to his card. When the elevator stops I let her go first, then step out and turn in the opposite direction like I know where I’m going. Which I do, thanks to my parking guy. As I was doing sniff work for the column, I looked at the paperwork for an acquisition Olympic had made the previous year for its energy division. That gave me the names of four mergers-and-acq
uisitions lawyers who worked here at headquarters. Now I am walking toward their assigned parking spaces. I turn a concrete corner and all the spaces are empty. These aren’t people who take mass transit. If their BMWs and Benzes aren’t there on a weekday, I’d bet they’re out of town. Maybe they’re already working on a deal to sell the company. It’s a small thing, nothing I can use in the paper, but it bolsters my confidence. I take the fire stairs to the street.
On the way up the hill to the newspaper, I call the head flack and get her secretary. Do I care to get her voice mail? You bet. I leave her a detailed message, about the 13-D, about word that the company could be for sale, about sources telling me that their M&A team is already working on a deal. I am giddy with news but keep my voice steady and calm. “This is going to run tomorrow, and I’d sure like the company’s perspective.” This is the third call I’ve made to get Olympic’s comments. Maybe this will work.
***
“So is this budget line real about Olympic International?” The business editor stops me in the hallway. It’s a sign of the tension in the newsroom that she would ask. I don’t write budget lines—the summary of the story or column—that don’t work out. I say it is.
“Make sure you make deadline.”
I can’t tell if she’s kidding or not. I say, “Stand back and nobody will get hurt.”
The flack never calls back. I wrap up my column, move it along into the CCI system, and call the editor. Then I make a new round of calls to sources, but all I can do is leave messages. Why would the feds be investigating Troy Hardesty’s death? One guess would be his hedge fund got into trouble, maybe made a wrong bet on sub-prime mortgages, maybe got into something criminal. But with disclosure for the funds so limited, I can only hope to find a well-heeled client or rival who knows something.