“You’re going to do it, aren’t you?”
“The thing is, Don, Kate was a lot of things, but she was nobody’s fool. If she thinks there is something suspicious about her husband’s death, she might be right.”
Scarne picked up the contract and took out a pen.
“You know my bank info. You can call Todd.”
***
Back in his office, Scarne told Evelyn and Sealth what had transpired.
“I bet you’re sorry now you instituted a profit-sharing plan,” Evelyn said.
Scarne laughed.
“Hell, I never expected profits. See what you can find out about Vallance and BVM. And get me everything on his death. And the guy who killed him. Names of the cops involved, witnesses, the whole shebang. You know the drill.”
Evelyn was a marvel putting together reams of information on Scarne’s cases. He turned to Sealth.
“Noah, you have any contacts in Hawaii?”
“A couple. Had a couple of cases in common with the Honolulu P.D.”
“I love Hawaii 5-0,” Evelyn said. “Book them, Dano.”
“Those are fictional state cops,” Sealth said. “Hawaii doesn’t have state police.”
“Really? Why not?”
“This is all very fascinating,” Scarne said. “Maybe you can discuss TV trivia and Hawaiian law enforcement history somewhere else. I want to call Huber at the Times. Noah, see if you can get me the name of a Honolulu cop who actually exists. Someone who won’t throw me off Diamond Head when I show up.”
“Fly coach,” Evelyn said. “Remember the profit sharing.”
“Get out of here.”
***
“Is this going to be one of those conversations where you bend me over a fence and I tell you everything I know? Then, in return, all I get is a bagel to be named later after the poop hits the lawn mower?”
“Probably,” Scarne said. “Maybe two bagels.”
“Such a deal,” Bob Huber said.
“I might also keep my print subscription to the Old Gray Lady, although the digital-only price is very tempting.”
Robert Emmett Huber, the acerbic business reporter at The New York Times, had often helped Scarne in the past. And despite his protestations that the relationship was one-sided, Huber knew that Scarne, if he could, would give him the inside track on any stories that resulted from his investigations. Indeed, one of them, involving the Chinese and New York real estate, had recently earned Huber another George Polk Award for business reporting.
“What do you need?”
“Anything you can tell me about the BVM Corporation that I can’t get off the web or a corporate report.”
“What makes you think I know anything about them?”
“Because I just Googled the company and your name. You’ve written a half dozen articles about them, including a Sunday magazine piece.”
“Trapped again. I suppose it would be useless to ask why you are looking at BVM. You’ll just lie and say you are just doing research for a security consulting job. Then it will turn out that there is a hydrogen bomb planted in a tub of margarine.”
“Margarine?”
“BVM produces one third of all the margarine in the United States, or the world, I forget which.”
“Gee, now I really hope I get the security consulting gig.”
“Point is, the company is huge. More than $90 billion in sales, and it churns out profits like a technology company, which, and most people don’t know this, it basically is.”
“They make high-tech margarine?”
“Just listen and learn, wise guy. BVM stands for Barker Vallance Macgruder, the names of the three founding Illinois families. Personally, I liked the old name, which is what the company was called for a hundred years before some Wall Street genius thought it would sound better as a bunch of initials.”
So, Bryan Vallance was not just an employee. He was related to whoever the Vallances were. Scarne decided to play it coy.
“BVM is based in Illinois?”
“Yeah. The headquarters and all the major American facilities are in Boone City, about 150 miles south of Chicago. Damn place should be named Boondocks. I spent a week there one day when I was researching a story a few years back. Ever have a soy burger?”
“No.
“Don’t.”
“Is BVM still a family business?”
“Not anymore. The Vallance family bought out the Barkers and Magruders during the Depression when the company was balls to the wall. BVM started out as a Midwest agricultural operation and got hammered by the collapse of farm prices. Half their holdings blew away and wound up in New Jersey during the dust storms.”
“But the Vallance family held on?”
“Yeah. Until Bryan Vallance was killed in that skydiving fuck-up. You must know about that.”
“Sure. It was all over the media. He was murdered by some nut job with a gripe against corporate America.”
Scarne hoped he wasn’t laying it on too thickly. Huber could smell a story under a skunk.
“I never could understand,” Huber continued, “why anyone would participate in a sport where one of the pieces of equipment is called a shroud line. Makes no sense. You’re only asking for trouble. Anyway, Bryan was the great grandson of Bartholomew Vallance, who founded the original company back in 1890 something with Clarence Barker and Angus Macgruder. He was the last of the Vallances.”
“Sounds like one of The Leatherstocking Tales,” Scarne said. “How did the company survive the Depression?”
“By the skin of their teeth. If it wasn’t for Bryan’s father, they never would have made it. He built up a relationship with the Soviet Union and wound up feeding half of Russia when the war came.”
“Was he a Communist?”
“Hell, no. Aaron Vallance was just a good businessman. He didn’t see why he couldn’t sell wheat, corn and soybeans to the Reds when other American companies were selling steel to the Japs that they later used in bombs at Pearl Harbor. I heard he was a favorite of Joe Stalin, even after the war ended. He kept his Russian contacts during the Cold War, which didn’t make him too popular in D.C., but he never gave a rat’s ass. He had bigger fish to fry. He didn’t want Barker Vallance Macgruder to be vulnerable to commodity prices, so he transformed it into an agribusiness giant that controls much of the nation’s food supply, as well as the means to move it to market. Bought trucking companies and took big positions in the railroads. The Mississippi was, and probably to a great extent, still is, the company’s lifeblood. BVM owns or operates probably half the barges that sail the river. The guy was a visionary, and Bryan was a chip off the old block. Cornell, M.I.T., Wharton School of Economics. Realized that there was more to grains than just corn flakes. What his father built, he reorganized. Instituted efficiencies of scale. Cut some dead-wood divisions and made savvy acquisitions, mostly high-tech. BVM is now one of the world’s leading producers of chemicals, vaccines, vitamins, health care products, food supplements, genetically-altered crops and animals, you name it. Some of it is Frankenstein stuff. He created some of the best research labs in the country. Pity, really.”
“What?”
“Well, a lot of family businesses suffer from generation to generation. The genes get thinner, or something. But not the Vallances. They seemed to get smarter. Didn’t seem to be anything they couldn’t do.”
“Except fly.”
“Yeah. There’s that. Company’s stock took a nose dive when he did.”
“Who replaced him?”
“Well, with no one in the family left, the board opted to reassure the big institutional investors who own most of the company’s shares, so they picked Roland Lenzer. Dr. Roland Lenzer. German. Another whiz-kid type who was the head of BVM’s research division. Wall Street liked the move. Stock has recovered nicely.”
“Isn’t it unusual for a researcher to get the top managerial position at a corporation?”
“It happens. Especially in companies tha
t are now more dependent on science than in the past, such as BVM. Lenzer is a brilliant guy. He’s more than a scientist, anyway. Has plenty of managerial experience. He ran one of BVM’s subsidiaries in Europe before he came to the States. He was the obvious choice. Some would say the only choice.”
“What do you think of him?
“I interviewed him after Vallance died. Bit of a cold fish, I thought. I mean, he said all the right things. Bryan was a wonderful man and a friend. Real tragedy. Hard to replace. That sort of stuff. But he’s a typical German. I couldn’t help but get the impression he thought he could do a better job than his predecessor. Look, I might be overly critical. I only met or spoke to Bryan Vallance a couple of times but I kind of liked him. He was a warmer person than Lenzer seems to be. But that doesn’t mean Lenzer isn’t the right man for the job. He’s dumped some of Vallance’s loyalists. That’s his prerogative, of course. Probably a smart move. And they all were well taken care of, with lucrative golden parachutes.”
Huber chuckled.
“Hell, I bet Bryan would have preferred a golden parachute to the one he got.”
CHAPTER 6 - MAGOO’S
“It has catastrophe written all over it,” Dudley Mack said.
“With a capital ‘K’,” Bobo Sambuca added from the front seat of Mack’s latest “business office,” a black, six-door, 1998 Cadillac DeVille limousine.
In the spacious rear compartment of the funeral car, Scarne and Mack looked at each other. They knew spelling was never Bobo’s long suit. The driver/bodyguard, sensing their confusion, looked in the rear mirror.
“What? ‘K’ for Kate, right?”
“Not bad, Bobo,” Mack said. He turned to Scarne. “When are you going to see her?”
Scarne had been filling Mack in on his new case after being picked up at the ferry terminal in St. George.
“A couple of days. Todd is going to set it up.”
“Do you think there’s anything to it? Never mind. I know you. You’re going to go through with it anyway.”
“I’m getting a hundred grand.”
“So what? It’s Kate Goddamn Ellenson. You’d do this for a cheeseburger and fries.”
“That reminds me,” Scarne said. “Where are we going to dinner, Duds?”
“Thought we’d shoot down to the Highlands and see how Bahr’s Landing is doing. I like to give the Jersey Shore restaurants some business after Sandy. They’ve had it tough. You can catch a Seastreak ferry from Connors Highland Terminal back to Manhattan. But first I have to make a short stop at Magoo’s.”
“Magoos? That dive in Mariners Harbor near the Bayonne Bridge?”
“Please. You’re talking about the future linchpin of my Staten Island tavern empire on the north shore.”
“You bought it?”
“Well, let’s just say I inherited it.”
Dudley Mack owned restaurants and bars throughout Staten Island. Many of the bars featured strippers and lap dancers, allowing the funeral home magnet to frequently brag that he got his customers “coming and going.” A few minutes later they pulled up in front of the bar on Morningstar Rd., a few blocks from the Bayonne Bridge in Mariners Harbor. The bar was in a one-story building nestled between a wholesale furniture outlet and a candy store. Compared to Magoo’s, all the other stores on the block looked recently renovated, although none had been. The sign above the door was missing a letter. It said “agoo’s.” The Budweiser beer sign in the single, and slightly cracked, window was not plugged in and the front door panels didn’t match up. There was a large black spot below the roof line that looked like fire damage.
“Nice acquisition, Dudley,” Scarne said. “I think you finally found a place we can’t be thrown out of.”
“Bobo, wait here,” Mack said. “We won’t be long.”
“Your limo is about four blocks long,” Scarne commented. “It’s not a good sign for a business when you can park a boat like this right out front. By the way, how many corpses to the gallon does this thing get?”
They entered the dark gin mill, and were assaulted by a dank odor.
“Eau de beer,” Scarne said. “With a nice overlay of vomit.”
“Yeah. Place smelled a lot better before they banned smoking.”
“I take it back,” Scarne said. “I’d throw myself out of this joint.”
There were four men, of indeterminate age, sitting at the bar, spaced far apart. All had shot glasses and beers in front of them, and were staring at the smoky mirror behind the bottles that lined the wall in front of them. The only sound in the bar came from a 19-inch TV perched precariously on the far corner of the bar that was tuned to Judge Judy. No one was watching it. The linings on most of the bar stools were cracked and a couple of the swivel seats were unnaturally tilted. A series of Formica tables, with metal chairs, lined the other wall. On one side of the cash register were two large jars, one with pickled pigs’ feet and the other with hard-boiled eggs in a cloudy liquid.
“Oh, good,” Scarne said as they walked up to the bar, “we beat the dinner rush. Why don’t we skip Bahr’s?”
When he looked closely at the mirror that seemed to be fascinating everyone else he realized that it wasn’t made of smoked glass. It was just filthy. Its reflective qualities were nil, something that was probably an advantage in Magoo’s, he decided. The patrons staring into it wouldn’t have liked what they saw.
On the other side of the register stood a very fat bartender wearing a bulging t-shirt that said “McKee Technical Wrestling Team 1996.” It didn’t quite cover a navel that looked like an open clam. He visibly blanched when Mack walked behind the bar and checked the register.
“Slow day, Pete?”
The bartender swallowed, hard. He had undoubtedly heard what the new owner did to employees who skimmed.
“Yes, Mr. Mack. But these guys are running a tab.”
One of the men at the bar furrowed his brow in an attempt at concentration and looked at the pile of singles in front of him.
“Sure they are,” Mack said.
The man shrugged, stuck a cigarette in his mouth and went out the door to have a smoke.
“Shut the goddamn door,” one of the other drinkers said, “You’re gonna let the flies out.”
Scarne walked up to the bar.
“Pete, I want to buy my friend Dudley a drink in his new establishment. How about the Johnny Walker Black, on the rocks?”
The bartender stammered, “Let me get you a fresh bottle from the back room.”
“Nonsense,” Mack said, “that bottle right there will do just fine.”
After the bartender poured, the men clinked glasses and Scarne took a swig, not noticing that his friend didn’t.
“Jesus,” Scarne said, spitting out the liquor. “What the hell is this!”
One of the drinkers said, “Fuckin’ pussy.”
Mack laughed.
“Who knows? Probably could take the camouflage off a Tiger tank. This is a funnel joint. Remember the old Red? Same routine.”
The Red Lantern was a Staten Island pub Scarne and Mack had frequented when in college. Scarne had occasionally even tended bar there. One night he accidentally dropped a bottle of Canadian Club and it smashed. The owner was distraught.
“I’ve had that bottle for five years,” the man wailed. “Now I have to buy another one.”
He then took Scarne down to the Red Lantern’s basement, where gallon jugs of what was basically artificially colored rotgut were lined up next to the funnels that the staff used to refill the venerable bottles upstairs.
“Three rules, kid,” the owner had told him. “Don’t clip too much from the register, only drink beer and never drop a fucking bottle.”
As words to live by, Scarne thought, not a bad philosophy.
“Those guys seem to be doing fine,” Scarne now said, nodding to the hard-core drinkers at the bar.
“Their livers could cut a diamond,” Mack said.
The door opened and four boys came in,
noisily, and set themselves up at the bar between a couple of the drunks. They were big, all wearing Port Richmond football team jackets. One of them, a tall black kid with dreadlocks yelled to the bartender.
“Yo, Pete, fuckin’ booze is flowin’ like molasses. Get your fat white-bread ass down here.”
The other boys, all white, hooted. It was obvious Magoo’s wasn’t their first stop. Mack walked up to them.
“You guys want to keep it down a bit,” he said pleasantly. “And watch the language. This is a family place.”
The footballers looked at him as if he was from Mars. Even the resident drunks turned to stare at him.
“Family place,” one of the white kids said, looking around, “this shit hole?”
“Appearances are often deceiving. Why aren’t you boys home studying calculus?”
“Why ain’t you in a nursing home, bro?” the black kid said.
They all thought that was very funny. So did Scarne, who laughed. Mack gave him a withering look.
“I don’t suppose you geniuses have any I.D.?” Mack said. “Some of the bottles in here are older than you.”
“Hey, blow me, man,” a beefy kid, probably a tackle, said. He had arms like Virginia hams. “We drink in here all the time. Who the fuck are you?”
“I own this fine establishment. And I told you to watch your mouth.”
“Suck my two-pound dick. What happened to Magoo?”
“Health problems.”
“What was wrong with him?”
“Me.”
Mack looked at Pete the bartender, who had drawn two beers and was standing by the cash register holding them with a frightened look on his face.
“Pete, pour those out and give my friends here some Diet Cokes before they leave. On the house.” He turned back to the boys. “Then, don’t come back until you’re old enough. And when you do, talk to my staff like the gentlemen I know you really are.”
The black kid took a swing at Mack, who knew it was coming and easily dodged it. He hit the kid two fast shots in the kidneys and watched him drop to the floor. Properly done, Scarne knew, kidney shots will do that. The tackle moved on Mack until he heard some squawks behind him. He turned to see his two other pals being held off the floor by their collars. Bobo Sambuca had one in each massive fist.
THE VIRON CONSPIRACY (JAKE SCARNE THRILLERS #4) Page 4