Mergers & Acquisitions

by Jennifer Griffith

  “From Grady? No. Like I say, I’m hoping this thing is going to develop into something bigger. I know he’s older, but he’s got to be at least a little lonely up in that messy studio every day. Plus, he and I both love being gluten free together— it’s hard to find someone who gets that quirk, you know, and—”

  “Well, I meant more like career-wise.”

  “From BGG? Are you being serious? When you’ve reached the top, that’s where you stop.”

  Yeah, well, or stagnate. That was a thesaurus word for stop.

  “So you’re finding your life fulfillment here, is what you’re saying?” I clicked the controller on my treadmill to only three-point-five so I could keep walking instead of running. Running and I didn’t mix. “None of it feels … I don’t know, vapid?”

  “Oh, vapid as the depths of outer space. Totally. But that’s not why people work for BGG.” Tyanne’s machine was set at a full-blown six-point-five miles per hour, and her long legs barely had to strain to keep the stride going. How long she’d been running before I came in at five, I had no idea. She might have stayed here all Sunday night and been on the running mode since four a.m., for all I knew. Tyanne was a machine in many ways, if ever BGG hired one.

  Because of that, asking her about this didn’t make sense. She’d never get how much I pictured a steady stream of ions and atoms of my soul being pulled out of me into an ethereal cloud and then down an invisible drain at the center of the six-story BGG building on Hollywood Boulevard, right along the Hollywood Walk of Fame, with its stars and their names, many of whom now stepped across their own personal stars to head into BGG to see their agents.

  Yeah. A-listers galore walked through the halls downstairs. I should have felt like I’d arrived, not dead-ended.

  “Come on, you can’t be considering a move. Not with the client list you’re amassing. One, hello, sister. Ryker. How many young stars out there get away with a single-name SAG listing?”

  To my shock, Ryker had called BGG after Saturday morning’s events at Thrillsville and told them he wouldn’t meet with anyone but me until further notice.

  “Several names you’ve lined up on your client list are up and coming, while others aren’t exactly has-beens. You yourself just told me last week you’re catching fire.”

  I’d meant in the gone-to-Hades sense, like sold my soul to the devil, but maybe now wasn’t the time to point that out.

  Something made me speak my mind anyway. “I’m going to open a gallery.”

  “What is that? A new kind of online portfolio for all your clients? Because while it needs to be confidential, that’s an interesting idea for advertising, and—”

  “No, I mean an art gallery. In Old Town Pasadena. I know just the building, right next to a gelato shop, three doors down from the Tesla dealership.”

  “What? What are you talking about?” Tyanne jumped and put her legs on the pads on either side of the conveyor belt which was now sliding by at Olympic speed. “Say all of that again?”

  As I spoke it, the plan solidified in my mind. “I saw a place for rent yesterday when I was going through, only a few blocks from my apartment. It’s got all the class and tone you’d expect in a high-end gallery, and it’s right on the main walking tour of Old Town. Every tourist and parent dropping off his brainiac kid at Caltech is going to walk past it and come inside, especially once they realize it’s the place to see the lost Mars Yuber portrait.” And the other paintings I’d already collected and was hoping to line up— and take a commission for selling on behalf of my creative friends.

  As I described my plan and thought about it, my pace sped, and I had to crank up my treadmill to four miles per hour to keep up with my excitement. Aero Jantzen’s nudges must have gelled in me over the weekend, because all this was making more and more sense, especially as I said it out loud.

  Mars Yuber and his gorgeous Woman Draped in Red were my ticket out of this moral vacuum.

  “Have you gone off the rails? Have you been sniffing paint thinner all weekend? You, Jillian Price, have every single entertainment lawyer on the West Coast’s dream job— and there are thousands of us entertainment lawyers around here, girl. You’ve got the brass ring and you’re chucking it into the dirt?”

  She didn’t believe in me. I frowned. “You mean you think I’m chasing some kind of fragile bubble and it’s going to pop? You think I can’t do it?”

  “Oh, it’s not that. I know you can do it. You’re Jillian Price.”

  What was that supposed to mean? “You think it’s a bad detour.”

  “That depends on the destination you’re trying to reach. You know where you want to go, don’t you?”

  I used to. “I used to think I wanted to be top tortoise on the totem here at BGG.”

  “You were on track for that. You’ve only been working here four years and they’ve already given you Ryker, for heaven’s sake. Ryker.” Tyanne jumped back on her conveyor belt and hit it at top speed running. “You were fast tracking, and all of us know it. If we didn’t all love you, we’d hate you.”

  Aw. That was the nicest thing Tyanne had ever said to me. I softened a little and had to be honest with her, open up how I really had been feeling.

  “It’s just this past few months, I’ve started to look at BGG like” — I pointed at the treadmill and gave a halfhearted shrug “— a whole lot of running, but when I get off, I’m still in the same mental, emotional, physical, spiritual place I started when I took the job.” Nobody here was about making connections— other than career ladder-scaling connections. Nothing and nobody, except maybe Tyanne, felt real. “It’s not bad here, it’s just not good, either.”

  “Neutral. Got it.” Tyanne daubed her forehead with a towel but kept her pace. “I won’t lie. I’ll miss you. But I also won’t lie— without you there’s one less major hurdle to my own success.” There was the Tyanne I knew and loved: frank and pragmatic to a fault. “So, with that in mind … Girl! What can I do to help you make this happen?”

  I knew without any hesitation. “Do you have any clients who do oil paintings or watercolors on the side?”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  It wasn’t a picnic, working my seventy-hour weeks at BGG and cobbling together a business plan for the Hopes and Dreams Gallery, which was its working title for now, until I came up with something less cheesy. Luckily, there were no major fires to put out in Rykerland for a short stretch to suck up any other hours in my day and weekends. I thought about messaging Aero and letting him know what changes his encouragement had wrought, but a shyness at remembering the kiss’s passion stopped me. If he’d liked the kiss, he would have called me immediately, and it had been several days without word.

  I buried that concern and dug into my project, excusing him on the basis that everyone who’d ever worked with Ryker knew he could absorb every waking hour of an assistant’s time, as well as some of the traditionally expected sleeping hours.

  Tyanne was true to her word about funneling artistically minded celebs my way. Besides my five B-listers and a few higher-level indie stars I’d located, she’d run down three others, including an aging actor whose name everyone still knew, although he hadn’t done any screen work in a decade.

  And then, she dropped a major bomb on me.

  “Chickadee. Guess who you’re meeting with later this afternoon to talk about a little art venture? Stop. Don’t guess. It could embarrass us both if you guess too high up on the famosity scale, or too low like you don’t trust me.”

  “Kato Kaelin.” She had me on the hook big time, and I shouldn’t have interrupted with a joking guess when I was dying to know.

  “Nicole Brown Simpson’s boy satellite? No. But two points for a random celeb. Good call.”

  “Who?”

  “Mindi Dresser.”

  I about fell off my chair. “You’re lying.”

  But she wasn’t, and that afternoon I met with Mindi Dresser, who, it turns out, between her shoots on the set of hit TV show Dingo Nigh
ts in the hills west of San Diego, spent all her free time making meticulous drawings of the desert wildflowers from those hills. Her depictions could have passed for the drawings found in the botanical study portfolios of the 1880s now bringing top dollar from collectors and lovers of flowers. Pen and ink, colored pencil, some watercolor— they were each a revelation of skill and eye for exquisite detail.

  Best of all, she was game to show them in Hopes and Dreams Gallery. Boy, I really had to come up with a better name and fast, now that I had a real client with formidable talent. Simply taking Aero’s little joking jab and turning it into the title for my gallery probably wouldn’t work for the clientele I hoped to attract, but I’d always secretly be giving him credit on some level.

  Mindi Dresser, my first serious acquisition! I couldn’t believe it. By the next afternoon, I had two contracts all written up. One was an agreement for showing only, another for sale and consignment fees. I took off early from BGG and headed for Burbank to meet Mindi and see which contract, if either, she would go for, silently hoping she’d take the leap and allow me to sell her work.

  “Mindi, I have a couple of options for you today.” My hands were clammy as I spoke to the mega-star of fake-Australian TV as we met in a hole-in-the-wall kolache sausage roll café in Burbank, where she’d come to shoot some indoor scenes on the studio’s stage. “You’re in the driver’s seat. We can either just display, or we can arrange to make your art for sale.”

  “I can’t believe you like it. Really? Are you sure?” She had a hand to her heart. Maybe it shouldn’t have surprised me, but here in front of me sat this gorgeous woman at the top of her game, riding as high as it got, and she was so insecure about whether I would approve of her artwork. In fact, she’d apparently been veritably holding her breath, as though I held her heart in my hand.

  Why care about what I thought? Who was I, even? The disbelief in her eyes plucked a string inside me. What if this venture didn’t have to be all about my escape from the dreary, heartless world of BGG? Maybe this could also be about giving a boost of confidence to fledgling painters and sculptors who needed validation and encouragement.

  A buzzing started inside me, low and humming but growing steadily louder, and it reminded me of that energy Aero Jantzen had talked about seeing in people’s faces when they came to him with their new creative ideas, just ready to burst with enthusiasm.

  How would I look to him if he saw me right now? Eager and overanxious to please? Because that was exactly how I felt. I took a bite of my kolache to gather myself back together.

  “Of these two contracts, which option works better for you, Mindi?”

  The ravishing blonde bit a knuckle, and in her real Southern Californian accent, not her affected Aussie lilt, said, “You don’t actually think someone would pay for them, do you?”

  “I do, or I wouldn’t be offering you consignment.”

  Slowly she shook her head back and forth. “I’m setting myself up for disappointment. If no one offers, I’ll be gutted.”

  So would I. However, I couldn’t imagine that happening, especially once her fans got wind of the fact Mindi herself had created them. There might even be a frenzy to purchase them, so I’d have to consider the timing of putting a certain number up for offer at any given time.

  My mind swirled with the possibilities of everyone involved getting a chance to win if Mindi agreed. Mindi would win because she’d get to share her work with others who appreciated it; her fans would win because they could feel a closer connection with her; art buffs would win because they could purchase something excellent; and me? I’d win for a lot of reasons, some of them monetary.

  Mindi Dresser, star of screen and television, looked up at me with the vulnerability in her brown eyes that had graced a hundred magazine covers. “These are my soul, you know? Sure, I act, but that’s my day job. I’m playing a part, one written by someone else. I’m just portraying someone else’s idea on film. That’s not me. However, these flowers,” she pointed at the stack of pretty pictures in the open portfolio between us, “are the real Mindi. If that part of me gets rejected, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

  I couldn’t help myself. My lawyer disguise slipped off, and I reached over and grabbed Mindi’s hand. “These pictures are really good.” They were. I wasn’t lying a bit. “I’ve studied artists— hundreds, maybe thousands of them. You’re good. Whether or not they sell will only depend on whether I can attract the right patrons, those with an eye for beauty. Your talent is not on the line, my ability to connect it to the right people is. Your talent is not in question.” I gave a half-laugh. “Besides, I can’t imagine your rabid fan-base not going crazy for them, seeing the softer side of Mindi. They’ll devour them like dingoes at night, so I don’t know why you’re worried.”

  Mindi’s face clouded over. “Oh, I don’t want these to sell by trading on my stage name or on my acting success.”

  Oh. Her words dropped with a thud, like an anvil on pavement inside me. My gallery’s connection to a big-name star was going to be its cachet. I tried to keep the disappointment out of my voice as I probed her line of reasoning.

  “Is there a reason for wanting to keep your name out of the art world?” I knew my parents were none too disappointed when I originally left the art world to pursue law instead. In fact, they might not be too happy when I broke the news to them that I was headed back to that world now with my gallery-opening plans.

  “I’d rather know buyers liked the art for its own sake.”

  My business model clinked the sound of an empty tin can in my mind. Without the famous name to trade on, my gallery had a lot less going for it.

  Nevertheless, I couldn’t let Mindi down by telling her I was walking away from the deal just because she wasn’t going to attach her name to her pieces. That would negate almost everything I’d just told her, and it was the kind of move I’d seen far too often in my time at BGG, where if the what’s-in-it-for-me part of the deal didn’t measure up perfectly, the other party walked away, regardless of what had already been promised or discussed.

  I didn’t want to be that kind of businessperson— or person, for that matter.

  Mindi wrung her hands as I mulled the situation. With her nerves this tightly strung, she hadn’t even touched her kolache.

  “As you wish,” I finally said, the faint echo of an imaginary cash register’s bell getting fainter all the time. If I was in this for the bigger picture of supporting hopes and dreams, I’d have to let some of the cash flow plans get sidelined, at least for a while.

  “Can you rewrite these contracts and include a non-disclosure agreement, then?” She took a bite at last, her eyes alight with both excitement and strength for the first time since we met.

  If anyone ever hinted that actors were brainless, I always countered that claim. And here, Mindi Dresser gave me more ammo. She wasn’t just going to trust me to keep her identity a secret, she was smart enough to insist on having it in writing.

  “Sure.” I took both contracts back. “I’ll have a new one sent over to you.”

  After she left, sunglasses on and hat pulled low over her head, I sat back and exhaled. I’d just managed to bring in my first celebrity artist— win! I couldn’t tell anyone the art was done by said celebrity— lose!

  Where that left me in my grand scheme toward success, I wasn’t sure. Part of me wished I could call up Aero Jantzen and pick his brain. But as Ryker’s agent, and having a day job as an investment banker, I was pretty sure he had his hands more than full.

  At least he wasn’t also trying to balance a girlfriend or a wife through the work mayhem. He was single— Ryker had made a point of letting both of us know each other’s relationship status. Was the kid trying to set us up, beyond just insisting that we kiss on the Swept Away ride? I wouldn’t put it past him. Little megalomaniac, he thought he could control even our private lives.

  Although, truth be told, I should have been kissing Ryker’s feet, thanking him. Without that lit
tle ride through the Tunnel of Love with Aero Jantzen, I’d still be in my own hopeless tunnel of despair, with no apparent exit into the light of day and freedom from working for BGG.

  On the other hand, I wouldn’t have the twice-a-minute distraction of remembering that earth-shattering kiss, coerced or not.

  Did Aero Jantzen remember it? Maybe not. He was gorgeous enough, and an investment banker, so he probably had girls chasing him and getting kisses like that from him every weekend.

  Well, that was a bummer of a thought.

  Maybe I should call him. Maybe he’d have some advice about funding the grand opening. Not that I’d ask him for money, not personally, considering the way things had started out between us, but I could at least tell him the good news about his ingenious idea coming to fruition. Everybody liked to be congratulated on having a great idea. He’d be glad to hear from me.

  Where was New Holland Savings, anyway? I’d never checked. Normally, back in my pre-law-school days I would have gone straight to internet background checking before I dated a guy, rather than waiting until after I’d kissed him.

  Normally, I’d have also kissed him after I’d dated him.

  This job had messed me up and had thrown off my dating groove.

  I checked my watch. In twenty minutes I needed to leave BGG for my appointment with the realtor in Old Town Pasadena to check out the rental space. By scraping here and there, and without the constant struggle against my enormous student loan payment anymore, I had put together enough cash for a deposit as well as first and last month’s rent for the gallery’s space. It was getting real.

  Twenty minutes gave me just enough time to do a little side research, even though I had a couple of piles of files filled with BGG contracts that needed review and attention.

  Let’s see. New Holland Savings. I typed it in, plus California. First, there were a bunch of ads for huge red tractors and other farm equipment on sale. That was a bummer of a brand name confusion for them, I was sure. In fact, I had to scroll several clicks beyond the first results page before I came to something that resembled a banking establishment. My eyes about popped when I saw it wasn’t in L.A. but Pasadena— Old Town, to be exact.