Peter, realizing he was dismissed, had no choice but to pick up the signed contract on the desk and do as he was instructed. “Mr. Farrell,” he said hesitantly, “I’ve been wondering why you’re sending me to Houston to handle these negotiations. It’s out of my line—”
“It shouldn’t be a difficult deal to close,” Matt said with a tentative, reassuring smile. “And it will broaden your experience. As I recall, that was part of the reason you gave for wanting to join Intercorp.”
“Yes, sir, it was,” Peter replied, but the burst of pride he felt at Farrell’s obvious confidence in him to handle things took an awful blow when Farrell added, as Peter headed for the door, “Don’t bungle it, Peter.”
“I won’t,” Peter assured him, but he was shaken by the unspoken warning he’d heard in Farrell’s voice.
Tom Anderson, who’d been quietly standing near the windows throughout Vanderwild’s dissertation, spoke up as soon as he left. “Matt,” he said with a chuckle as he returned to the chair he’d vacated in front of Matt’s desk, “You scare the hell out of that kid.”
“That kid,” Matt pointed out dryly, “has an I.Q. of one sixty-five, and he’s already made Intercorp several million dollars. He’s proving to be an excellent investment.”
“And is that land in Houston an excellent investment too?”
“I think it is.”
“Good,” Tom replied, sitting down and stretching his long legs out in front of him. “Because I’d hate to think you were spending a fortune just to retaliate against some society dame who insulted you in front of a reporter.”
“Why would you leap to a conclusion like that?” Matt asked, but there was a gleam of sardonic amusement in his eye.
“I dunno. Sunday, I just happened to read in the paper that a chick named Bancroft gave you the cold shoulder at the opera. And tonight, here you are, signing a contract to buy something she wants for herself. Tell me something—how much is that land going to cost Intercorp?”
“Twenty million, probably.”
“And how much is it going to cost Ms. Bancroft to buy it from us?”
“A hell of a lot more.”
“Matt,” he drawled with deceptive casualness, “d’you remember the night eight years ago, when my divorce from Marilyn was final?”
Matt was surprised by the question, but he remembered the time well enough. A few months after Tom started working for him, Tom’s wife suddenly announced that she’d been having an affair and wanted a divorce. Too proud to plead and too crushed to fight, Tom had moved his things out of their house, but he’d believed until the day the divorce went through that she’d change her mind. On that day Tom hadn’t come into work or telephoned, and at six o’clock that night, Matt understood why—Tom called from the police station, where he’d been taken that afternoon after being arrested for being drunk and disorderly.
“I don’t remember much about that night,” Matt admitted, “except that we got drunk together.”
“I’d already gotten drunk,” Tom corrected wryly, “then you bailed me out of jail, and we both got drunk together.” Watching Matt closely, he continued. “I have a hazy recollection that you commiserated with my misfortune that night, by ranting about some dame named Meredith who’d jilted you, or something. Except you didn’t call her a dame, you called her a spoiled little bitch. At some point before I passed out, you and I drunkenly agreed that women whose names start with the letter M are no good for anyone.”
“Your memory is obviously better than mine,” Matt said evasively, but Tom had noticed the imperceptible tightening in Matt’s jaw at the mention of her name, and he leapt to the instant and correct conclusion.
“So,” he continued with a grin, “now that we’ve established that the Meredith that night is actually Meredith Bancroft, would you care to tell me what happened between you two to make you still hate each other?”
“No,” Matt said. “I wouldn’t.” He stood up and walked over to the coffee table, where he’d laid out the engineering drawings for the Southville facility. “Let’s finish our discussion about Southville.”
21
Traffic was backed up for blocks near Bancroft’s corner. Crowds of shoppers huddled tightly in their coats rushed across the intersection, ignoring the DON’T WALK signal, their heads bent against the bitter wind that blasted across Lake Michigan and whirled through the downtown streets. Car horns blared and drivers cursed the pedestrians, who were causing them to miss their green light. In her black BMW, Meredith watched as droves of shoppers paused at Bancroft’s windows and then went into the store. The weather had turned cold, and that always brought out the early shoppers who preferred to beat the Christmas rush. Today, however, her mind wasn’t on the numbers of shoppers entering the store.
In twenty minutes she had to make a formal presentation to the board of directors on the Houston store, and although they’d already given a tentative nod to the project, she couldn’t proceed any further and finalize arrangements without their formal approval this morning.
Four other women were gathered around Meredith’s secretary’s desk when Meredith got off the elevator on the fourteenth floor. Stopping at Phyllis’s desk, she peered over their shoulders, half expecting to see another issue of Playgirl magazine like the one they’d huddled over last month. “What’s up?” she asked. “Another male centerfold?”
“No, not that,” Phyllis said as the other secretaries hastily disbanded and she followed Meredith into her office. Rolling her eyes in amusement, she explained, “Pam ordered another printout of her astrological forecast for next month. This one says true love is coming her way, along with fortune and fame.”
Lifting her brows in shared amusement, Meredith said, “I thought that’s what the last one said.”
“It did. I told her for fifteen dollars, I’d do her next one.” The two women regarded each other in laughing harmony, and then they switched to business. “You have a board of directors meeting in five minutes,” Phyllis reminded her.
Meredith nodded and picked up the folder with her notes in it. “Is the architect’s model in the boardroom?”
“Yes. And I got the projector set up for the slides.”
“You’re a complete jewel,” Meredith said, and she meant it. With the folder in hand, she started for the door, then she turned and added, “Call Sam Green and ask him to be available to meet with me as soon as I finish with the board of directors. Tell him I’d like to go over the preliminary purchase contract he’s drawn up for the Houston land. I want to get it to Thorp Development by the end of the week. With a little luck,” Meredith added, “I’ll have the board’s approval on the Houston project by this afternoon.”
Phyllis picked up the telephone on Meredith’s desk to call the chief counsel and gave a thumbs-up sign. “Knock ’em dead,” she said.
The boardroom was very much as it had been fifty years earlier; only now, in the age of glass and brass and chrome, there was a nostalgic grandeur about the immense room with its Oriental carpeting, the intricate molding on dark-paneled walls, and the English landscapes hanging in their baroque frames. Stretching down the center of the huge room was a massive carved mahogany table, thirty feet in length, with twenty ornately carved chairs upholstered in scarlet velvet arranged around it at precise intervals. In the center of the table was an enormous and elaborate antique sterling silver bowl filled with red and white roses. Beside it was a matching tea and coffee service with delicate Sèvres porcelain coffee cups rimmed in gold and hand-painted with tiny roses and vines. Silver pitchers, frosted from the ice water within them, had also been placed at intervals down the table.
The room, with its oversize, heavily carved furniture, had the atmosphere of a throne room, which Meredith often suspected was exactly what her grandfather had wanted when he commissioned the furnishings to be made a half century before. There were times when she couldn’t decide whether the room was impressive or ugly, but either way, every time she entered it, she felt a
s if she were stepping into history. This morning, however, her thoughts were more on making history by opening another store than on feeling a part of past history. “Good morning, gentlemen,” she said with a bright, businesslike smile at the twelve conservatively dressed men fanned around the table who had the power to accept or reject her proposal for the Houston project.
With the exception of Parker, whose smile was warm, and old Cyrus Fortell, whose smile was lecherous, there was a marked reticence in the chorus of polite “good mornings” that answered her greeting. Part of their reserve, Meredith knew, sprang from their awareness of the power and responsibility they held; part of it was due to the simple fact that she had repeatedly forced and cajoled them into investing Bancroft’s profits into expansion rather than using it to pay large dividends to shareholders—including themselves. Most of all, however, they were restrained and guarded with her because she was an enigma and because they didn’t know exactly how to deal with her. Although she was an executive vice president, she was not a member of the board, therefore they outranked her. On the other hand, she was a Bancroft—a direct descendant of the founder of the company—and entitled to be treated with a measure of respect. And yet her own father, who was both a Bancroft and a member of the board, treated her with curt tolerance and nothing more. It was no secret that he’d never wanted her to work for Bancroft & Company; it was also no secret that she’d excelled in every way, and that her contribution to the company had been great. As a result of all that, the board members were caught in a situation guaranteed to make successful, confident men become temperamental and brusque—uncertainty. And because Meredith was indirectly the cause of that unpleasant feeling for them, they reacted to her with frequent and unprovoked negativity.
Meredith understood all that, and she refused to let their unencouraging expressions ruffle her confidence as she took her place at the foot of the table where the projector had been set up, and wait for her father’s permission to begin.
“Since Meredith is here,” he said, his tone implying she was late and had kept them waiting, “I believe we can now get down to business.”
Meredith waited through the interminable reading of the minutes of the last board meeting, but her attention was on the architectural scale model of the Houston store that Phyllis had wheeled in earlier. Looking at the magnificent Spanish-style mall the architect had designed with space for other shops in its enclosed courtyard, she felt her resolve harden and her confidence soar. Houston was the perfect place for this newest and largest member of Bancroft’s growing family, and the proximity of the land to Houston’s Galleria would ensure its success from the moment Bancroft’s opened its doors. When the minutes had been accepted as read, Nolan Wilder, who was the board’s chairman, formally stated that Meredith wished to present the final figures and plans for the Houston store for their approval.
Twelve perfectly groomed, masculine heads turned to her as she stood up and walked over to the slide projector. “Gentlemen,” she began, “I gather you’ve all had ample opportunity to look over the architect’s model?”
Ten of them nodded, her father glanced at the model, but Parker quietly regarded her with the half-proud, half-puzzled smile he usually wore whenever he watched her perform her job—as if he couldn’t quite fathom how or why she insisted on doing it, but was pleased with how well she did it. His position as Bancroft’s banker gave him his seat on the board, but Meredith knew she couldn’t always count on his support. He was his own man; she’d understood that from the beginning, and she respected him for it.
“We’ve already discussed most of these cost figures in past meetings,” Meredith said, reaching behind her and dimming the lights, “so I’ll try to go over these slides as quickly as possible.” She pressed the button on the projector’s remote control, and the first slide showing the anticipated costs for the proposed store dropped into place. “As we agreed earlier this year, the Houston store will be approximately three hundred thousand square feet. Our projected building costs are thirty-two million dollars, which includes our new store, fixtures, parking lot, lighting—everything. The land we intend to purchase from Thorp Development will be an additional twenty to twenty-three million depending upon our final negotiations with them. We’ll need another twenty million for inventory—”
“That’s seventy-five million maximum,” one of the directors interrupted, “but you’re asking us to approve an expenditure of seventy-seven million for the store.”
“The other two million is to cover pre-opening expenses,” Meredith explained. “If you’ll look at line four on the screen, you’ll see that it covers grand-opening expenses, advertising, et cetera.”
She pressed the button and the next slide fell into place, showing much higher figures for the project. “This next slide,” she explained, “shows our projected costs for building the entire mall when we build our store rather than waiting until later to expand. You already know that I feel strongly that we ought to build the entire mall at the same time we build our store. The added costs are fifty-two million, but we’ll recover that from leasing out space in the mall to other retail tenants.”
“Recover it, yes,” her father stated irritably, “but not immediately, as you implied, Meredith.”
“Did I imply that?” Meredith asked politely, knowing she’d done no such thing. She smiled at him and let a pulse beat of silence reprimand him for his injustice and impatience. It was, she’d learned, the most effective way to deal with him when he was unreasonable. Even so, his voice sounded strained, as it often had since his heart attack, and she had to subdue a sharp jab of worry.
“We’re waiting,” he warned.
In a tone of calm reason, Meredith continued. “Some of you feel we ought to wait before constructing the entire mall. I think there are three strong reasons to build it all at once.”
“For the record, what are those reasons?” another board member asked as he filled his glass with ice water.
“In the first place, we’ll have to pay for all the land whether we’re using it for the mall or not. If we go ahead and build the mall on it at the same time we build our store, we’ll save several million dollars in construction costs, because as you all know, it is cheaper by the square foot to build it all at once rather than to add on later. Second, construction costs are bound to rise as Houston’s economy continues to improve. Third, if we have other, carefully selected tenants in our mall, they will help bring traffic into our store. Are there any other questions?” she asked, and when there were none, Meredith proceeded to the remaining slides. “As you can see from these graphs, our area research team has thoroughly evaluated the location I’ve chosen for the Houston store, and they’ve given it the highest possible rating. The demographics of the primary trade area are perfect, there are no geographic barriers—”
Her explanation was interrupted by Cyrus Fortell, an eighty-year-old reprobate who’d been on Bancroft’s board for fifty years, and whose ideas were as antiquated as the brocaded vest and ivory-handled cane he always carried. “That’s all a bunch of jibberish to me, missy,” he exclaimed in his reedy, irate voice. “ ‘Demographics’ and ‘primary trade areas’ and ‘area research teams’ and ‘geographic barriers.’ What’s it mean, that’s what I want to know!”
Meredith felt a mixture of exasperation and affection for Cyrus, whom she’d known since she was a child. The other board members thought he was getting senile, and they planned to retire him. “It means, Cyrus, that a team of people who specialize in studying the best places to open retail stores have gone to Houston and studied the site I’ve chosen. They think the demographics—”
“Demowhatsas?” he scoffed. “We didn’t even have that word when I was opening up drugstores across the nation! What does it mean?”
“In the way I’m using it now, it means the characteristics of the human population in the surrounding area of our store—how old they are and how much money they make—”
“I didn’t
pay any attention to all that in the old days,” he persisted irritably, glaring at the impatient faces around the table. “Well, I didn’t. When I wanted to open up a drugstore, I just sent people out to build one and filled it up with inventory, and we were in business.”
“It’s a little different today, Cyrus,” Ben Houghton said. “Now, just listen, so you can vote on what Meredith is talking about.”
“I can’t vote on something I don’t understand, now, can I?” he said, turning up the control in his pocket that was connected to his hearing aid. He looked at Meredith. “Proceed, my dear. I understand now that you sent a bunch of experts to Houston who discovered that there are people living in the area who are old enough to get to your store on foot or by motor car, and who have enough money in their pockets to share some of it with Bancroft’s. Is that about it?”
Meredith chuckled and so did several of the others. “That’s about it,” she admitted.
“Then why didn’t you just say so? It baffles me why you young people have to complicate every little thing by inventing high-sounding words to confuse us. Now, what are ‘geographical barriers’?”
“Well,” Meredith said, “a geographical barrier is anything that a potential customer might not want to have to drive through in order to get to our store. For example, if customers had to drive through an industrial area or an unsafe neighborhood to get to our store, those would be geographical barriers.”
“Does this Houston site have any of those?”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“Then I vote in favor of it,” he announced, and Meredith swallowed a giggle.
“Meredith”—her father’s curt voice cut Cyrus off from further comment—“do you have anything else to add before the board votes on the Houston project?”
Meredith glanced at the inscrutable faces of the men seated at the table, and shook her head. “Inasmuch as we’ve discussed the details of the Houston project in great depth in prior board meetings, I have nothing to add to all that. I would, however, like to state once again that only by expanding can Bancroft’s hope to compete successfully with other full-line department stores.” Still slightly uncertain as to whether the board would actually vote in favor of the Houston project or not, Meredith made a final effort to gain their support by adding, “I’m sure I don’t have to remind the members of the board that every one of our five new stores is showing profits that equal or surpass our projections. I believe much of that success is due to the care with which we’ve picked the locations we open in.”
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