“Yes.”
“Good. Good-bye, Michael.”
Wilson heard the line click dead. His eyes were still closed. On the other side of the room, the drone of the fax machine continued. He was deep, deep in self-revulsion. Now he was hoping that Prinzi’s thugs had gotten hold of the girl. Every time he thought he’d reached bottom, he found himself sinking lower.
He heard a knock. He spun around. The door was open. Lyall Gelb was in the doorway.
“How long have you been there?” he demanded sharply.
“Just a second.”
Wilson stared at him suspiciously.
Lyall came into the room. “You all right, Mike?”
“What do you want?” demanded Wilson.
“I just got off the phone with Trewin. Their due diligence is done.”
“And?”
“They’re happy.”
Wilson stared at Lyall Gelb a moment longer. Then he pulled himself together. He grinned. “That’s great. Come over here. Come on, let’s call Bassett.”
Wilson punched the speaker button on the phone. A moment later, he had Bassett on the line. They exchanged jokes about their due diligence, about each not being able to find the skeletons the other party had buried.
“Andy, laughs aside,” said Wilson, “I want you to be absolutely one hundred and ten percent happy that you’ve seen everything you wanted to see. We gave you all the data we thought you could possibly need.”
“Oliver’s team said they’d never seen so much data in one place.”
“Good.”
“Said they could have used another six months, actually.”
Wilson winked at Lyall. “Andy, I wish I could have given it to them.”
“Absolutely, Mike. One must do one’s best in the time, eh?”
“Exactly my philosophy. There’ll be no reservations on my side when I recommend this deal to my board tomorrow, and that’s how I want you to feel as well. You still talking to your board as scheduled?”
“Absolutely. Eleven o’clock tomorrow. There’ll be no reservations on my part, either, rest assured.”
“Well, we may just have a deal!” said Wilson.
“I think we may,” responded Bassett.
“Great. I’ll tell my guys they can shut down the data room and file all that stuff away,” said Wilson.
“Ahh … technically, Mike, I think we should just keep it open for the moment.”
Wilson glanced questioningly at Lyall. “Why’s that, Andy?”
“Well, if the board were to ask for clarification on any point, I wouldn’t want to say we don’t have access anymore. Wouldn’t look good.”
Wilson glanced at Lyall again. Lyall didn’t speak.
“Sure, Andy. We’ll keep it open. Let those lawyers get another couple of days’ room rent out of us. You can shut yours down. We’re happy.”
They arranged to speak again the next day, after their boards had met. It would be evening in London by the time the Louisiana Light board finished. Bassett told Wilson to call him on his home number.
Mike Wilson looked at Gelb after he cut the line. “How much stuff did you put in that data room?” he asked.
“Everything I could find.”
Wilson laughed. “You want someone to miss the tree, put him in the forest. A big, fat, Hungarian forest.”
Lyall Gelb nodded. But there was a part of him that had almost wanted that tree to be found. He didn’t realize it until now, when he knew it hadn’t been.
“I’ve got things to do,” he said.
“Sure, Lyall.” Wilson watched as Lyall got up and walked out. The door closed behind him.
Mike Wilson leaned back in his chair. It was close now. Close enough that he could almost touch it.
But not close enough that he could afford to celebrate. Three days to go. Three more days of bluffing.
He was thoughtful again, calculating. He went through the elements in his mind. The due diligence was done now. The bridge loan was more or less finalized. The board meeting tomorrow was the last obstacle. The extra cash that he had offered to Bassett, and the structure of the loan that was necessary to raise it, was going to be an issue. The board didn’t know about that yet. Even the friendliest board would be bound to ask questions.
Wilson began to go over his strategy for the meeting. He had arranged to have dinner that night with Ed Leary to get him primed. Carefully, methodically, Mike Wilson went through what he was going to say to Leary in eight hours’ time. He thought through the angles, how Leary might react, how he was going to play it.
Robert Holding and his girlfriend and what was going to happen to them at the hands of Tony Prinzi had slipped entirely from his mind.
46
Sammy Weiss leafed impatiently through the draft of the due diligence report. He was waiting for Mike Wilson’s corrections to come through. Cynthia was proofreading the other document that would be going to the board, which outlined the structure of the bridge loan and the financial arrangements for the deal. They had both worked through the night. Once Wilson’s corrections arrived and once Menendez had vetted them, they would only have to make the changes, print out the hard copies, and address them for the courier, and finally they could get out of there.
The phone rang. Sammy picked it up. It was Menendez, wanting to know if Sammy had seen the corrections. He was calling about every ten minutes to find out, and just as Sammy had told him ten minutes earlier, the answer was still no. Sammy didn’t know why he kept calling anyway. The corrections were going to go to Stanzy first, and Stanzy would send them to Menendez. Phil was going to see them before they got anywhere near Sammy.
A few minutes later the phone rang again.
“Oh, give us a break!” muttered Weiss. He grabbed the receiver. “Yes?” he said.
It wasn’t Menendez. “Is Robert Holding there?” said a voice.
“No,” said Sammy, trying to repress his irritation. “He’s not here.”
“Do you know where I can find him?”
“Who is this?”
“I’m calling from the Eighteenth Precinct. Sergeant Berry. What’s your name, son?”
“Sammy Weiss.”
“Listen, Sammy.” The man coughed. “We’re looking for Robert because of a certain crime—”
“I heard about the murder,” said Sammy. “I’ve already spoken to a detective.”
Cynthia looked around.
“Of course you have. There’s certain things we need to follow up. We’re actually looking for Robert’s girlfriend and I’m trying to find someone who can help us.” He coughed again. “Excuse me. You don’t know where his girlfriend lives, do you?”
“No,” said Sammy.
“The information seems to have gone missing.”
“How could it go missing?”
“Tell me about it. I’m just following up. What’s her name, his girlfriend?”
“Emmy.”
“Her last name?”
“I don’t know her last name.” He looked at Cynthia questioningly. Cynthia shook her head.
“Emmy. Okay. You know her address? Her phone number?”
“No,” said Sammy. “Hold on.” He turned to Cynthia. “You know where she lives? Rob’s girlfriend?”
Cynthia shook her head again.
“What about where she works?” said the voice on the phone. “Do you know that?”
“She’s an editor at a publishing company.”
“Lascelle Press,” said Cynthia. “I lived in a street with almost the same name.”
“Lascelle Press,” said Sammy into the phone.
“Lascelle Press. She’s an editor there? Very good. You’ve been very helpful. Sammy Weiss, right? How do you spell that?”
Sammy spelled his name.
The man coughed. “Thank you, Sammy.”
“No problem. Listen, if you find Rob—”
Sammy stopped. The phone was dead. He looked at it in surprise, then put it down.
�
��Police again?” said Cynthia.
Sammy nodded. “Apparently some information’s gone missing. The police, for Christ’s sake. You’d think they could get things straight the first time.”
* * *
Caitlin and Andrea exchanged a glance. “I’ll get it,” said Caitlin.
She pressed a button on her phone and raised the receiver. The phone on Emmy’s desk in the office they all shared stopped ringing.
It was Nicole, the Lascelle Press receptionist. “I’ve got someone asking for Emmy.”
“Emmy’s not here, Nicole,” said Caitlin.
“I know, but they’re very insistent. It’s the police.” Nicole whispered the word, as if it were too scary to say it out loud. “Perhaps you can help them.”
Caitlin glanced at Andrea and rolled her eyes. Nicole was way too much a pushover to be a receptionist. She had been known to give out private cell phone numbers in her efforts to be helpful.
“Nicole,” said Caitlin, “I can’t make her appear out of nowhere.”
“Please, Caitlin…”
Caitlin rolled her eyes. “All right, put them through.” She waited. “Emmy Bridges’s phone,” she said.
“Is that Emmy Bridges?” asked a male voice.
“No. Emmy’s not available, I’m afraid.”
“Do you know when she will be available?”
“I’m afraid I can’t say that. Can I take a message?”
The man coughed. “This is Sergeant Berry from the Fourteenth Precinct. Who am I speaking with?”
“This is Caitlin Jones, Sergeant. I work with Emmy.”
“Well, Caitlin, I’m not sure if you’re aware, but there was a certain crime—”
“Yes,” said Caitlin quickly. “I’m aware. I’m very aware.”
“Well…” The man coughed again. “Excuse me. We need to find Ms. Bridges, but we’ve had some information get kind of lost or something and I’m trying to follow up.”
“She’s not here, Sergeant.”
“No, I understand. Do you have her address, please?”
“Umm…” Caitlin looked questioningly at Andrea.
“What?” whispered Andrea.
“We’re not supposed to give that kind of information out,” Caitlin said to the man on the phone.
“I realize that. This is urgent, Ms. Jones. Let me make sure I’ve got your name right. That’s Caitlin Jones. Can you spell ‘Caitlin’ for me?”
Caitlin spelled it.
“I hope you’re going to cooperate, Ms. Jones.”
“Can you hold on a second?” Caitlin put her palm over the receiver. “It’s a policeman,” she whispered to Andrea. “He needs Emmy’s address. Should I give it to him?”
“Give it to him.”
“You sure?”
Andrea nodded.
“Sergeant…”
“Berry.”
“Sergeant Berry, I’m not supposed to do this, but you did say it’s urgent?”
“It is.”
“Okay. I know she lives on West Seventy-sixth Street. I think it’s one forty-four.”
“I think it’s one forty-two,” whispered Andrea.
“It might be one forty-two. I know it’s apartment seven.”
“Ms. Jones, I need it exactly. It’s very important.”
“Okay. Hold on a second, please.” Caitlin opened the internal company database on her screen and searched through it quickly. The man on the line coughed as he waited. “It’s one forty-two,” she said.
Andrea smiled smugly.
“So that’s apartment seven, one forty-two West Seventy-sixth? Is that correct, Ms. Jones?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you.”
“Sergeant Berry, if I see her, do you want me to tell Emmy—” She took the phone away from her ear and looked at Andrea in surprise. “Rude! He just hung up.”
“Well, he got what he wanted, I guess.” Andrea shrugged. “Like any man.”
* * *
One hundred forty-two West Seventy-sixth Street was an old brownstone. The two men let themselves in easily, looked around, and moved quickly up the stairs. They stopped outside apartment 7 and slipped on surgical gloves. Then they knocked.
One of the men had the inflamed nose and watery eyes of a cold. He coughed. “Go ahead,” he said quietly to the other.
The second man quickly picked the lock. They went in, closing the door behind them.
They stood for a moment, looking around. Then the man with the cold pointed at the corridor that led to the bedroom. The second man moved silently toward it.
He came back a minute later. “No one,” he said. “No one in the bathroom, neither.”
“You check the cupboards? Under the bed?”
The man nodded.
“Okay.” The man with the cold looked around the room. He picked up a letter. It was addressed to Emmy Bridges. “It’s the right place.”
“You want I should call Nick?”
“I’ll call him.” He dialed a number on a cell phone. There was a short conversation. He looked back at the other man. “We wait.”
“How long?”
“As long as it takes.” The man with the cold walked over to the kitchen area. He pulled open the fridge. “Let’s see what we got in here,” he muttered. “You want a beer?”
“Why not?” The other man came over and pulled open a couple of cupboards.
“What’s she got in there?”
“Not much. We might have to send out for pizza.”
“Yeah, right.” The man with the cold closed the fridge and put a beer in the other man’s hand. He looked in the cupboards. “Well, she likes corn chips. There’s enough here for weeks.”
“I hate corn chips.”
The man with the cold took out a bag and pushed it into his hand. “Learn to love ’em.”
“So who gets the bed?”
The man with the cold looked at him questioningly.
“If we’re here overnight, who gets the bed?”
The man with the cold grinned. “What, Danny, you gone all shy? You telling me you don’t wanna share?”
“Get the hell—”
The phone rang. The two men turned to look at it.
The answering machine kicked in. “Emmy? Emmy, it’s Mom. I tried your cell phone but I thought you might … I’ll try your cell phone again, honey. Okay. If you get this, call me, huh? I just want to see if you’re all right. Umm … okay, I’ll try your cell.”
The men glanced at each other.
“Sounds like she’s not answering her cell.”
The man with the cold nodded. “Well, we’ll be here if she comes home.”
In Rochester, Emmy’s mother put the phone down. She looked at her husband in concern. “That’s the third time today I’ve tried to get hold of her, Marty.”
“Did you leave a message on her cell?”
“Every time. That’s not like Emmy. She always answers when I leave a message.”
“She’s probably trying to get some peace.”
“Are you saying I don’t give her peace?”
“I’m not saying that, Rose.”
“Then what are you saying?”
“It’s a tough thing, what happened. That’s all.”
Emmy’s mother frowned with worry. “She sounded very upset last night, Marty. I couldn’t sleep, thinking about it.”
Marty nodded.
“I offered to go down.”
“I know.”
“And you know, things haven’t been good with Rob.”
“Haven’t they?”
“You know they haven’t. I told you, remember? I’m just worried she’s lying there with the phone turned off, all by herself, just, you know, really upset.”
“Honey, that’s not like Emmy.”
“Maybe they’ve broken up.”
“Did she say they’d—”
“They could have. These things happ
en at stressful moments. Marty, you didn’t speak to her last night. She was really upset. And Rob wasn’t there. She didn’t know where he was!”
Marty frowned. He didn’t know what to say.
“Maybe I should go, Marty.”
“She told you she’d let you know if she wanted you to go down.”
“Maybe I should go anyway.”
47
The night was cold and drizzly, but that was about the only similarity to the last time Rob had flown into London, only a little over a week previously. This time, he arrived economy class and there was no car waiting. And instead of Cynthia Holloway, he was with Emmy.
They had been at JFK before six that morning, but couldn’t get on a flight until nine-thirty. They went through passport control and spent three nervous hours sitting at the back of a restaurant, hiding themselves behind newspapers. Rob wasn’t taking any chances. Just because they were in an airport didn’t mean they were safe. They weren’t going to be safe until all of this was over.
He came across a report of Greg’s death in the Times. A couple of short paragraphs on an inside page. DA MURDERED IN HELL’S KITCHEN. No real details. A police spokesman quoted as saying the investigation was being pursued with all available resources. Those were the two detectives, Rob supposed, Engels and Nabandian. He showed the article to Emmy. She read it silently.
He fell asleep after the flight took off, having slept so little the night before. When he woke up a couple of hours later, Emmy was dozing beside him. He watched her. He thought about what she had said that morning. She hadn’t been trying to guilt-trip him, he realized, when she said it was all or nothing, when she said there was nothing involving him that didn’t involve her. She was simply saying how it was. That was how it was for her. It was a scary thing, to hear someone say that about you. Not just to hear it, but to actually see it in action. To see her get out of bed and say, unquestioningly, I’m coming with you, before she even knew where he was going. To say, Fuck them, if they get one of us, they get us both. It was awesome, and scary. Overpowering. He felt he had never really understood it before. He felt like a kid, as if he never really knew what love was until that moment. Not just the feeling you have for someone else—but the ability to let someone else have that same depth of feeling for you. To surrender to it, to give them that right, as Emmy had said. And she deserved an answer. Was that what he was prepared to do? Did his love go that far? Because hers did.
Due Diligence: A Thriller Page 36