“I haven’t seen you around here before.” The owner of the voice was tall, maybe 25 and good-looking in that cookie cutter corporate way. Well-trimmed hair, closely shaven, strong features, well-pressed suit. What he had said was so cliché I wasn’t sure if I should laugh or act chagrined. Since it was also true, I settled on the former.
“Well, I haven’t seen you either.” Also true.
“I work out of the sales office down at the factory in Orange,” he said by way of introduction.
I nodded knowledgeably and decided to try a stab. “You just came up for the… stuff today?” I said airily. But it stood to reason that the announcement of a new CEO would provide the sales department with a lot of… stuff. Even so, I didn’t breathe again until he nodded.
“Yeah. And look how that turned out. I may as well have stayed in bed today.”
Another knowing nod while I pondered my next pithy-yet-leading remark. Instead, I came up with the rather bland: “Yeah. Who’d have thought?” Good, I said to myself, just go with it.
“Seriously. And then those guys hanging around all afternoon?”
I nodded. What could I say?
Fortunately he didn’t wait for my comment. Have you ever noticed that if, when you’re talking to someone you don’t know well, you pretty much keep your mouth shut, they’ll just blab on and on. And on. Wanting to fill up the empty space with their heated air. This seemed like a good tack now. To be honest, though, the fact that I was too nervous to trust myself to speak for any length of time in a way that was perfectly normal is to be credited for what actually became a good course of action. “I’m sure at least some of them were cops,” he said. “Some of ‘em even looked like they might have been rent-a-cops.” He was growing more animated as he spoke. And he clearly watched too much late night television.
“You really think so?” Demure and ready to be convinced seemed to be the way to go.
“Sure,” he answered knowledgeably. “All the signs are there. And who else would act like that? Did you see the way they were storming around like they owned the place?”
“I… I didn’t, actually,” I said truthfully. “I was busy at my computer for most of the day.” I didn’t mention that my computer was an hour’s drive away.
“Did you see anything? Like, no one I’ve spoken to has even seen the mysterious Ernest Billings. So I figure it must all have something to do with him.”
“What else?”
“Exactly,” he nodded as though I’d echoed his thoughts. And since I’d said precisely two words, I thought that was an interesting reaction. He was continuing. “I got the word to come up here in order to be addressed by the new chief. Then nothing and then all of this,” his gesture encompassed the building and I took it to mean whatever foolishness was being cooked up by head office: a universally understood gesture. “A completely wasted day: even the donuts were lousy.” Then another universally understood gesture: the late-arriving charm: “but I did get to meet a tall and striking blonde.”
“I don’t think we can say we’ve properly met.” I stuck out my hand, “I’m Madison.” Then silently cursed myself. Could I have thought of anything closer to Madeline? And why on earth had I thought it necessary to introduce myself anyway? The answer was obvious even to me: I was stalling. And filling up the blank space with inane stuff and hoping he’d either get to the good stuff soon (although I was beginning to doubt he knew any good stuff), or provide cover that would get me inside. By now, though, I was figuring that with out of town sales people flitting around the office, there was a good chance no one would notice a sales-appropriate dressed woman hanging around, as long as I stayed out of reception, which I completely intended to do.
“Steve,” he supplied. Of course. What else? “Steve Rundle.”
He was looking at me expectantly and I was suddenly just blank. A part of me was already storming the gates. Another part sensed that I’d better move quickly if I wanted to avoid a dinner invitation. And did I? I had to think about it for a second. Yes. I did.
If I were the betting type — and, come to think of it, I am — at that moment I would have bet that if I were to make a move to go into the building, he would accompany me, thereby providing the cover I desired. I tried it on:
“I guess I’d better get going,” I indicated the elegant zig-zag building with my head. “Phone calls, you know.”
“Yeah, I guess I should see what’s up as well,” he said, stubbing out a Marlboro Light. “After you.”
Too bad there’s no profit in making bets with yourself.
My heart headed to my throat as we headed towards the door. This was it. I was imagining all sorts of high tech nightmares by now: a single lowly retina scan (now who’d been watching too much late night TV?) followed by the low thrum of sirens and the jangling of alarm bells ending with me getting hauled off in handcuffs: “Renegade stockbroker attempts to infiltrate privately held company after the call of a halt to trading. Film at 11.”
What I was forgetting, and what all that late night TV hadn’t prepared me for, was that this was a company that made jam jars. And maybe jars for peanut butter. Nobody on TV does that. The companies in those shows are always deeply involved in making top secret nuclear systems for submarines and interesting stuff like that. No one ever sets movies or television shows in glass jar companies because there wouldn’t be anything exciting going on. Certainly, little that would be top secret.
The side door that we entered was just a door. No high tech stuff at all beyond a very formidable-looking lock, which wasn’t locked. The door led to a nice, quiet little staircase that led to an unexceptional hallway. Steve looked like he was headed right so I opted to go left.
He stopped me before I could make good my escape, “Do you think they’re still having the thing tonight?”
I must have looked as blank as I felt, because he went on: “You know, the Hyatt hail-the-chief thing.”
“Geez, Steve,” geez? “I don’t know. I haven’t heard anything.” Also the truth.
“Me neither. Well, if they are, I’ll see you there, OK?”
“Sounds good. And if they’re not,” I said with a smile as brightly casual as I could muster, “I’m sure I’ll see you around.” And I headed down the hallway in what I hoped was the direction completely opposite reception.
I followed the long hallway, still carrying my take-out bag — I’d finished the coffee while chatting with Steve — and trying to look nonchalant while I looked for a place to land. It was nearing five o’clock on the afternoon of an exceptional day for the company, so while some people were still beavering away in the offices I peered into as I walked by open doors, other offices were empty while still others were occupied by two or more workers having the sort of urgently quiet chats that people have when the corporate ground beneath their feet has moved. My confidence soared.
In this moment — having just concluded a successful “interview” with an insider and moving with easy confidence through an unfamiliar building, I felt like I’d missed my calling. Suddenly I was Madeline Carter, girl detective on the case (though on the case of what I wasn’t sure) and I promised myself more encounters like this one, just to get the old adrenaline pumping. I was, for the second time in one day, deliciously smug. And, like that earlier smugness, the feeling — unfortunately — wasn’t permitted to last. Smug is definitely an area I need to target for self-improvement.
That smugness was challenged when two men and a woman came out of an office directly in my path — nowhere to run — and started heading down the hallway in my direction.
“So you haven’t had any calls from the press yet?” the woman was saying.
“Not yet, not at all,” said one of the men and, from the context and from the voice, I thought it might be Hewitt, the PR flack I’d spoken to earlier. “We’ll just have to hope that holds.”
I mustered my courage to greet them with a nod, a smile and a bored expression as we passed each other in the hallway
. I thought the first man looked at me piercingly, questioningly. For one tense moment I thought he was going to stop me, but he didn’t and in another minute they passed into a different office and closed the door behind them. I felt like collapsing against the wall in relief, but I pulled myself together and kept going. This was hardly the moment to fall apart: that could come later, I told myself, once I was out of here. I kept moving.
The distant yet familiar “beep-beep-beep” of a microwave that has completed its mission came from still further up the hall. I could smell the odor of something soup-like and that, together with the beeping, gave my plan an immediate target. Some sort of lunchroom was not far ahead. I could stop there, appear engrossed in smearing cream cheese on my bagel and consuming it while fitting and listening in and planning my next move. I increased my pace.
As I’d known from the beeping, the lunchroom wasn’t empty. And the moment I stepped inside the door, I saw something that my subconscious hadn’t allowed me to contemplate as a possibility: the person removing a steaming cup from the microwave was wearing a mauve twinset. I started to back out the way I’d come, but either my determinedly casual entrance had alerted her or her preternaturally sharp and bat-like senses had caught me on her sonar, because she looked up sharply, like an eagle might look at a mouse.
“You!” she probably didn’t scream it, but that’s how it seemed.
I backed up half a step.
“Don’t even think about moving,” she said as she went for the phone, never taking her eyes off me. It didn’t take a lot of mental exercise to figure she was calling the much-hallybalooed security.
The lunchroom telephone was situated on a table deeper into the room where munching workers could be conveniently disturbed while they grazed. It seems quite likely that my lilac-clad nemesis had made a quick calculation based on appearances — I could see I wasn’t the only one who had done it — and decided that a 30-something woman in a Prada suit was an unlikely candidate to flee. If that is, in fact, what she thought, she was wrong. While she entered the necessary extension numbers I did some quick calculations, wished I hadn’t flunked calculus and had passed on philosophy altogether, collected myself and… bolted.
Though I had an almost unbearable urge to flee further down the corridor I’d been following when I came upon the lunchroom, commonsense prevailed and I headed back the way I’d come, towards the things I knew: the little hallway, the smoking area and the safety of my nondescript car in the next block. I remember little of this flight beyond seeing a couple of curious eyes raise from their desks as I headed down the hallway at breakneck speed. None of the publicly traded companies that I know of have rules against running in hallways, but you never actually see anyone doing it. Even when things are super busy, no one is ever in more of a hurry than what can be accomplished with a determined trot or a studied lurch or maybe even a casual gambol. I did none of these more dignified things. I ran, as they say, like I was being pursued by the hounds of hell. Which I guess I was, if hellhounds ever wear mauve twinsets. I ran headlong, pellmell and hell bent for leather.
I had the presence of mind to collect myself just before I erupted out of the hallway into the outside world and the expected smoke cloud in order to not draw attention to myself. I needn’t have bothered: there was no one there. A good thing, because I’m sure I was wild-haired and wild-eyed by now.
With no one to impress, I threw my temporary quasi-decorum out the window and my bagel on the ground and ran for my car as quickly as my low-heeled pumps could carry me.
By the time I got to the car I was shaking, breathing hard and had trouble finding my keys. It was difficult to keep it together long enough to beep open the doors, fire the engine and drive away. I kept expecting a band of rent-a-cops (what would a rent-a-cop even look like, I wondered?) exploding out of the door behind me and, once they caught up with me, throwing me to the ground, handcuffing me and driving off with me to points that were unknown, but completely scary anyway. Or, while I ran, a platoon of police cars — lights blazing — once again bearing down and… from there the scenario looked pretty much like the first one, except this time there was a lot of blue polyester and static from police communication devices punctuating the air. Scary stuff, either way.
I drove around aimlessly for a while, trying to calm my nerves and determine my next move. It still wasn’t time to meet Emily on La Cienega, so I did the only thing possible under the circumstances: I looked for the familiar green logo and the comfort of a well made latté. And, yes: I’d had that coffee with Steve in the smoking area not long before, but it didn’t count towards my caffeine total for the day. Not really. It only counts if you enjoy it: and I’d been too nervous to even taste that one.
As I parked near a Starbucks on Venice Boulevard — which I figured was too far out of the range of Langton to be feasible to find me, even if they bothered following me — I checked over my shoulder for signs of pursuit. It wasn’t until I was settled in the cheerily familiar surroundings — mercifully soft jazz playing in the background and a steaming cup of java clutched in my still-shaking hands — that I began to relax. I was being ridiculous, I began to see. After all, I was a stockholder, I reasoned. While it’s not exactly smiled upon to waltz through an office back door unannounced, I also, strictly speaking, hadn’t been doing anything illegal.
Except trespassing, a little voice whispered.
I ignored her and went on.
As an — admittedly quite new — shareholder, I had a right to know what was going on, didn’t I? And if it involved not showing my driver’s license and brandishing a bagel and more or less pretending to smoke, what of it? None of those activities were Federal offenses, even if they were on private property.
While I knew a lot of this rationalizing was worth about as much as most rationalizing ever is, it made me feel better.
By the time I’d talked myself around to not having reasons to be afraid, I actually wasn’t and I stopped looking over my shoulder. Fortunately, once I’d finished with all of that silliness, I still had enough hot beverage left in my cup — more than half — to contemplate what all of this adrenaline-raising had accomplished so far. Not much, I had to admit. In fact, with all of the running and schmoozing and pretending I’d done on this day, the handful of facts I had were the same ones with which I’d left the house, though some were now more sharply confirmed. They were (in no particular order):
1. The Langton Regional Group was a large company with many satellite offices.
2. LRG had a new CEO who happened to be my ex-boyfriend.
3. The new CEO hadn’t shown up today and no one — at least outsiders and relatively unimportant (i.e. Steve Rundle) insiders — had any idea why.
4. If, as Sal had suggested, Ernie was missing, I hadn’t disproved it.
5. LRG’s receptionist probably didn’t like me.
Oh, and one more:
6. There were people who sleuthed around for a living. I was not one of them, nor should I consider pursuing it in future.
In short, nothing. And, really, what had I expected? That I’d arrive on the scene and the whole place would collapse around me in an unruly heap of unburdening? “Oh, Madeline! There you are. Now that you’re here we can get to the business of straightening the world out about what’s been going on. Have a seat and we’ll tell you everything.” And so on.
In fact, as the fortifying caffeine seeped into my bloodstream, I began seeing the venture as more and more silly. There could be any number of reasons Ernie hadn’t turned up for work today. Just because Steve hadn’t known about it…
What about the trading halt?
… didn’t mean that everyone higher than him — a junior sales drone — knew exactly what was going on and…
And the rent-a-cops?
… even though Steve said he saw the rent-a-cops, I hadn’t seen them. And it might just have been ill-dressed business dudes from some other company. That happens. Ernie might have been inking some
new deal…
The day an internal company meeting and an evening blowout were planned?
… and it pushed everything else out of the way. Made it more important.
And so on. And here I felt I had to face facts; stuff I hadn’t thought about before this instant: My life had changed a lot over the last few months. I’d had an awful, soul-shattering shock when Jack was killed, followed almost immediately by many changes in my life so drastic, it was almost impossible to see where the two worlds joined. After having had such a high pressure career, was it possible that my body was craving the adrenaline rushes that had come to me in New York on a daily basis? Never mind the market: in New York sometimes crossing a street could be pretty hairy. Was I somehow trying to compensate for my new, slower pace of life? I groaned inwardly at the thought. I’d have to get out more. And, I added, I’d have to curb myself from further adventures like this. Maybe cycling or mountain climbing would be a better outlet for this type of energy.
While I mentally shopped for climbing shoes, I closed the door on the little voice that had called me to LRG in the first place. There might be smoke, but there didn’t seem to be a fire and, even if there was, who was I to think I could put it out?
Chapter Eight
I don’t believe there is a culture on Earth that would be compelled to describe Emily as physically beautiful. She is neither heavy nor thin, but has a certain physical solidity about her that is not currently in vogue. Her features are equine, in a way: large, dark, liquid eyes, a full mouth and lots of big, white teeth. I think her hair is beautiful, but she says it makes her crazy. It is dark and abundant and resists all of her well-intentioned attempts at domination: it springs out of hair clips and scrunchies and all types of elastic as though intent on having a life independent of she who grew it.
All of this combines in a way that you’d think would be entirely unappealing, yet when Emily smiles you just feel happier. Everyone does. And you can see it in the way they interact with her. She brightens things. And her world, not surprisingly, is a bright place. As a result, she has a lot of friends and there never seems to be any shortage of interested men in her immediate vicinity. It’s why she’s good at her job, I think. She can make things happen just with her presence and energy. And though she’s still a first AD, one day she’ll be a director, just as she wants. It seems inevitable. She draws people to her and they are warmed by the proximity of this grace that is Emily.
Madeline Carter - 01 - Mad Money Page 10