The hands on my shoulders startled me. And the voice. Deep and male. Too close and disturbingly familiar.
“Madeline,” the voice said. I would have bolted from my seat at his touch, but he squeezed my shoulders — gently but firmly — and held me in place before he swung into the chair opposite me. His face held wonder but no real surprise. “Madeline Carter,” he repeated. “In LA. With me. How did this happen?”
I couldn’t say anything. I was surprised to see him, sure. But also — and maybe more — I was surprised at my reaction to him. I wanted to feel anything but what I felt. I wanted to feel revulsion, annoyance, even fear. Fear can be a healthy emotion. Fear keeps us safe. But I felt none of the predictable things I might have hoped for.
There had always been something compelling about Ernest Carmichael Billings. A charisma, even when he was still in the process of shedding his callow youth. I had too often been a rabbit to his snake: mesmerized to submission. Exposing my throat when it would have been far safer to flee.
I hadn’t seen him since our senior year at Harvard, almost 12 years before. There were changes to note now. He seemed larger. And sleek, like an eel. He owned the well-fed look that men in their mid-30s can acquire if their lives have gone pretty much as planned. His features were more clearly drawn, though his eyes hadn’t changed: they were still as cold and flat as stones.
College Ernie might have been an early sketch: today I was looking at the finished product. That finished product reminded me of what I’d run from: his presence now compelled and revolted me at once. While he dropped into the vacant seat opposite me, I touched my wrist surreptitiously under the table. I could feel the galloping of my pulse and a faint glow of perspiration. I hoped it didn’t show in my face.
A waiter came by quietly and Ernie ordered a couple of drinks: a single malt Scotch for himself — neat — and a gin and tonic for me. I shook my head, fighting the wave of anger that welled up at him for assuming I’d still favor the same thing I’d been drinking over a dozen years ago, and ordered cranberry and soda. I would be driving shortly and, anyway, I suddenly felt the need to keep my wits about me.
“It’s a very small world, Madeline. Who would have thought I’d run into you in a club in L.A.?”
I shrugged. What was there, really, to say? I chose the obvious. “Are you here on business?”
“Moved here about a month ago. New gig,” he said airily, like a rock star. “You’ll want to check it out.” He ran two fingers down my forearm as he spoke as though it were a natural gesture. I didn’t try to pretend I was doing anything but avoiding his touch when I sat back and out of his reach, simultaneously wishing I’d opted to wear something with a neckline that didn’t plunge.
“Small world, Mandy,” I’d always hated that: Mandy. No one else has ever called me this: it isn’t a proper diminutive for Madeline, even if I was someone whom diminutives get stuck to, and I’m not. “I was talking to Benson in New York,” he said. “Not three days ago. He told me you’d left Merriwether Bailey. You gone renegade?”
Another shrug. “That’s just silly.”
Ernie smiled which, for me, produced an odd effect. The same smile in a face that was similar but not quite the same. “No? Well, you’ll want to watch for this one anyway, Mandy. Langton Regional Group. LRG on the Exchange,” he grinned in a manner which was meant to be self-deprecating but which, on his polished face, had quite the opposite effect. And he didn’t need to tell me that when he said “Exchange” he meant New York Stock Exchange. To both of us, it could only mean one thing. “I’m the new CEO,” Ernie went on. “They’re making the announcement on Monday, but it’s a secret until then. Don’t tell anyone.”
“Who would I tell?” I said it pleasantly, though I didn’t feel pleasant. If anything I felt slightly sick. I just wished Emily would get her butt back to the table and then, hopefully, Ernie would go away.
“Are you here alone?” he asked, as though he’d read my thoughts.
“No. I’m with my friend. Emily.” I looked towards the dance floor, thinking to point her out and perhaps somehow signal that her presence was urgently required, but there was no one there. The dance floor was suddenly empty. Which meant she was either smelling the lilies and chatting to the attendant, or she’d decided to sit down somewhere to talk to her friend with the nice suit.
“You?” I found I didn’t really care, but I had to say something, and that seemed as good as anything.
“I’m here with my lovely wife, Arianna,” he’d pitched his voice oddly, so I looked at him and saw I was right: the words had been for someone else’s benefit. I followed his glance.
Watching her come towards us was entirely filmic: you could almost hear music and maybe a voiceover. The air moved through her hair and her conservatively slit skirt as though created in CGI. She was beyond beautiful. Tall, blonde, slender, perfectly coifed, perfectly turned out.
“I wondered where you’d gotten to,” her voice was perfect, as well. Attractively modulated, educated. In another context, she would have been an easy woman to loathe. But she was Ernie’s wife. Knowing what I did about him, I could almost feel pity.
“Arianna,” he held out a hand, inviting her to join us. “Come meet an old friend. Madeline Carter. Madeline, this is Arianna Billings. My wife.”
I’m sure I must have smiled at her. Taken the hand she extended to me quite graciously. I don’t remember precisely. The only thing I could really think about was putting as much space as possible between me and Ernie.
For her part, Arianna seemed to mull my name over — as though running it through some internal Rolodex — until she came up with a match. “Madeline, it’s delicious to meet you after all this time. Ernie has told me so much about you.”
This surprised me. I was pretty sure I hadn’t mentioned him to anyone other than my mother in more than a decade. I’d read about him from time to time, whenever some business magazine sporting his smiling face on the cover would end up on my desk. Wunderkind, they’d call him. Golden Boy. And I’d read as much as I could without retching and then practice my aim on the recycling bin. But speak about him? Never. What we’d shared was so long ago now. It just seemed better to bury it. The year we’d spent together had certainly given me very few moments I’d contemplate cherishing. “Well rid of him,” was how my mother had put it. I hadn’t disagreed.
“Madeline, it was so nice to finally meet you,” Arianna repeated, rising, the slender rustling of some silky fabric following her. “But we really have to go.” Then to Ernie, “the Gunnarson’s were expecting us 15 minutes ago.” He nodded, threw back the remainder of his Scotch, dropped a twenty on the table to cover our drinks, then rose, all in a single smooth motion.
“It was wonderful seeing you again, Mandy.” And I wondered if I was right in thinking that he’d angled his body between me and his wife intentionally in order to cover the fingers he ran once more down my arm. He couldn’t have missed how abruptly I pulled it back, but he didn’t react. “And remember what I told you: LRG. It’s a good tip.”
When they’d gone I just sat there for a while thinking about stuff. When Emily reappeared I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I didn’t want to see any more clubs. I got home as quickly as I could and hit the shower. Afterwards, I still didn’t feel clean.
Chapter Six
I spent Friday in much the same way I had the previous four days: at my computer preparing for the following week and my new occupation as a day trader. And I spent some time reassuring myself: Sure: it was a crap market, but things were still moving. And the fact that IBM is down is only really a problem if you own a lot of IBM. I’m a pro: I know the market. I know when movement means something real is afoot or whether it’s just the hysterical reaction of an increasingly inexperienced phalanx of traders — most of them at home in Helena, Montana or Tulsa, Oklahoma or some other not-stock-connected place, trading on their little PCs — and, in going kinda cowboy, I could take advantage of that with my own mon
ey for my own gain. That was the theory, anyway.
As much as I tried to not think about it, the vision of Ernie and his “good tip” kept sneaking into my head. The information he’d given me — if I acted on it — could be considered only the most borderline kind of insider trading. I wasn’t a broker anymore: no one cared very much what I did with my own money. And if you meet someone you used to know in a bar and they tell you they have a new job… well, is that any more insider trading than acting on something you read in the newspaper? Well, it is. But it’s pretty easy to rationalize around. Especially if you think no one will be paying attention. So I went in for a peek. What would be the harm?
As it turned out, the Langton Regional Group was typical of the kind of company I’d been watching over the previous week, now that I had no clients to service and quick action on my mind. Langton’s 52 week high was over fifteen dollars and they’d been trading around the six dollar mark for a couple of months. Nothing exciting in either direction: just a solid and long-term slide into the land of the not interesting. I knew an announcement could change all of that quickly: news that would show that their prospects were up. They seemed that kind of ripe.
To most people, LRG would have been an uninspiring little security. The Langton Regional Group made those little glass jars that companies order by the truckload for stuffing jams into and sending out to supermarkets. Nothing mysterious. No shaky high tech and — heaven forbid — no tricky resources where an oil well can dry up or an engineer’s report can bollocks everything or people can just decide they no longer want whatever mineral is being raped from the ground. Just little glass jars.
A few years earlier, LRG had been trading at over twenty bucks, but that was then. After a while, analysts frowned at all of the money they weren’t making and suggested this wasn’t a very collectable stock. And, let’s face it, glass jars are not sexy, by anyone’s standard.
Langton’s financials weren’t bad, but they weren’t especially great either. LRG had a lot of employees, a lot of overhead and — from the looks of things — fairly complacent management. The current CEO was seriously old and was the grandson of the guy who had founded the company back in the 1930s. The family was prominent — what passes for old money in Southern California — and they lived pretty well. The fact that the company couldn’t always support their familial excesses didn’t seem to really matter to anyone besides, of course, the stockholders and an increasing number of grumpy analysts. And when enough stock analysts get sufficiently grumpy, things start to change.
From what Ernie had told me, the change they’d decided on was him. And, as he’d implied, it was a change that could make all of the difference for this particular stock. He’d said they were set to make an announcement Monday: my first independent trading day.
Over the weekend I wrestled with the insider trading thing, but — to be perfectly honest — not too mightily. Let’s face it: it was a day trader’s wet dream. A teensy bit of unasked for information could potentially make me a lot of money. All of my instincts said: This Is It. And, in my business, you listen to your instincts. At least, if your instincts have, over the years, instructed you that they’re worth listening to. Mine always had.
Monday dawned clear and bright. Tycho and I pounded through the hills, but today I barely noticed the eucalyptus and the palm trees and I ignored the ocean vistas altogether. My mind was on other things.
Back at my computer, I scanned the early notices. Nothing on LRG, which meant it would probably come around nine am Pacific Time — my time in L.A. — which made sense as that’s when, since they were based in the city, their office would be open.
Regardless of when the office opened, the stock was already trading. I checked it the way a moth checks a flame. As I’d expected, even prior to the announcement, it was starting to happen. Most of the time, just prior to the breaking of some significant piece of news, a narrow column of insiders will hop on board causing the stock to give a little jump before anything really happens. I realized with a start that I was now lining up to be part of that crowd.
And so I moved. While LRG hovered between $5.88 and $6.00, I put in a buy order for 20,000 shares. To a lot of people, $120,000 is hardly worth getting out of bed for but, at this stage, it was a big chunk of my liquid wad. I tried to ignore the sweat on my palms.
I kept my eyes on my newsfeed and when an hour after my buy on LRG an announcement was made, I read the whole thing:
LANGTON REGIONAL GROUP ANNOUNCES THE APPOINTMENT OF NEW CEO
It was the usual company PR material — lots of forward face and future optimism — but it was the announcement that, essentially, Ernie had told me to expect. Between refreshing my screen to watch how the announcement would hit the market, I read the news release. Basically, LRG said that their old CEO, William Gunnarson III, had opted for an early retirement (yeah, right!) and that the company was — blah, blah, blah — pleased to announce his replacement, one Ernest Carmichael Billings late of NeanderTek.
It tickled me that two-timing, double-dealing Ernie should have been the one to give me this tip. I had no doubt he’d be able to turn the company around. Ernie was tough as a garden slug and he had this incredible killer instinct, even back in college. Sometimes being with Ernie then had been like sharing a nest with a baby vulture. Baby vultures are cute in a kind of repulsive way and, essentially, they are helpless but, at some base level, they understand what they’ve been put on this earth to do. Back then Ernie was like that. A baby vulture waiting for his big break. It was not so easy to be around.
And, on a certain level, the vulture analogy isn’t even a very good one. Despite their revolting habits and the low opinion society holds of them, vultures are innocents. They’re creatures of instinct and evolution. They can’t help what they are, they just are. There was something more calculating about Ernie. And controlled. On first contact, it came off as a kind of burning intensity, something that my 22-year-old self had found incredibly sexy and somehow reassuring.
From the beginning, he was emotionally and sexually demanding. When we were in public together, he’d stand very close — later I’d find it oppressively close — and across a table or a room his eyes would always search for mine, ultimately find them and hold them. He was intense on all levels. He took my breath away. After a while, it felt like he was squeezing it out of me.
To say that Ernie was arrogant sounds like ridiculous understatement but, again at first, it struck me as an arrogance he owned, not something borrowed or some hollow pretense. That arrogance seemed balanced by a bold impulsiveness that, in my youth, I took to be something pretty and romantic. Everything about Ernie was big. His dreams, his ambitions, his ego. And none of that was a problem for me. At first. Once it became a problem, I didn’t stick around.
The little bit I knew about Ernie since then had come from the trades. It was all around his growing reputation as a corporate whizz kid who was making a career out of bailing out public companies that were on the pale side of successful.
It interested me that Ernie was doing exactly what he’d set out to do: he was in the business of running stuff and bossing people around. You don’t do an MBA at Harvard to be a stockbroker. Sometimes life just happens, as it had to me. I was betting the market would respond to the news of his appointment.
I checked the stock price: it already was. $6.07 now. And climbing. So I put in another buy order — a market buy this time — for an additional 4500 shares. I was sweating, but it was happy sweat. I had a good feeling about it. It was practically all of my working capital — the cash I needed to make my living — but Ernie knew his stuff.
The electronic purr of the telephone nearly caused me to push my keyboard onto the floor as my hand sought to make the ringing cease.
“Hi Maddy!” The voice was cheery. Bright. A post-breakfast daughter salute.
“Hey Mom. How’s Seattle?”
“Incredibly dry, sweetie. How’s your life?”
Broad ques
tions are my mother’s specialty. And no matter how many times I hear it, “how’s your life” always floors me. Like I should start cataloging stuff: I’m trying to eat more bran and whole grains, I think my body will thank me for the consideration when I’m 40. I’m regular. So is my period. Which reminds me: no, in case you’re thinking of asking, I’m not seeing anyone and am therefore not getting laid.
I didn’t say any of that.
“Great, Mom. You?”
“Oh, you know. Clarisa Meyers and I are thinking of going to Vegas in November. On a bus. And I thought: wouldn’t it be fun if Madeline joined us? In Vegas. Do you think you could?”
“Geez, maybe Mom. November isn’t for a while yet.”
“But if you planned sweetie. If you planned. Then maybe you could go. You’re so close now. Not like when you were in New York.”
“It’s true. OK. It’s only about a few hours drive for me. It might be fun. But listen, remind me in October, OK?”
“Great! That would be so great. So is anything new?”
Now this was a question I could actually handle: I even had a bit of news.
“Well, guess who I ran into last week?”
“Am I really supposed to guess?”
“Ernie Billings.”
“No!”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“At a club in Santa Monica. He was there with his wife.”
“His wife? Oh Madeline, I’m sorry honey. Did it hurt?”
I thought for a second before answering, but only for a second. “You know Mom, it didn’t. Not at all. But it’s been a long time, hasn’t it? And so much has happened. I was pleased to discover I was relatively fine with it all.” And I was pleased, now, to discover that what I was saying was true. The romantic aspects — if you could call what Ernie and I had shared a romance — had not fazed me. When I saw him I had been revolted by his touch and intrigued by potential stock announcements, but there had been nothing that felt like pain.
Madeline Carter - 01 - Mad Money Page 6