by Janet Dawson
Thirty-five
WALKING INTO THE BATES BUILDING MONDAY MORNING felt a lot like walking into an intensive care unit, one where the prognosis for the patient’s recovery was precarious.
Word was out on the Sheffield acquisition and the move to El Paso, as well as the Friday afternoon massacre that had tossed Jeff Bates and Alex Campbell overboard. In fact, there were two memos addressed to all Bates employees taped on one of the elevator walls.
I perused both of these as the car rose to the fourth floor. Neither offered much information. The first merely announced the personnel changes, without giving the slightest hint as to what this meant for Bates and the people who worked there.
The second was sparse on details. Amid all the corporate puffery about how the El Paso move would make Bates more competitive in today’s business climate and deliver more value to the company’s shareholders was the singular nugget that the move was supposed to take place next summer.
My fellow passengers crowding the elevator, the ones whose jobs were going south, looked understandably worried as they glanced at the memos with lowered eyes and gloomy expressions. They talked in low discontented mutters, comparing notes and wondering about their job prospects.
The whole building seemed to be reeling from the double whammy. The boat was rocking still on the fourth floor. According to a conversation I’d overheard in the lobby while waiting for the elevator, the former general counsel seemed resigned to his fate and almost eager to be gone. Alex had cleared his belongings out of his office over the weekend, and Hank was moving in this morning.
As for Jeff Bates, he’d done nothing of the kind, or so he’d informed me yesterday. It seemed to indicate some vain hope on his part that his abrupt dismissal from his position as CEO of the company his father founded wasn’t really happening. However, when I stepped off the elevator I glanced to my right at the corner office that belonged to the CEO. In the small outer office I saw Ann Twomey, Jeff’s secretary. Now she worked for Yale Rittlestone. If that bothered her, it didn’t show on her face. Between her desk and the closed door leading to the inner sanctum there was a stack of cartons. Evidently Ann was doing Jeff’s packing for him.
Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry? I thought, dredging up the old saying.
I wondered whether Yale Rittlestone was already ensconced in Jeff’s office, eager to take up the hands-on running of Bates. Somehow I didn’t think so. Yale didn’t strike me as an early-to-work kind of guy. Besides, he was probably waiting until Ann cleared away all traces of his predecessor.
When I arrived in Cube City, Nancy was at her desk, looking upset in her own quiet way. No wonder. She’d worked for Alex for years. I said good morning. Nancy murmured a reply, but she appeared to be too distracted even to ask me about my phony illness excuse for not coming to work on Friday.
As for Gladys, she was ignoring the filing and the dictation tapes that awaited us in the rush box. Instead, she had the classified section of Sunday’s edition of the Oakland Tribune open on the surface of her desk, sipping a cup of coffee as she studied the listings in the Help Wanted section.
“Looking for a job?” I surveyed her over the top of the divider.
“Are you shitting me?” She shot me a disgusted look. “The damn company’s moving to El Paso next year. They’re gonna fire us all. Those sons of bitches.”
“Are you going to quit right away?” I asked.
“Hell, no,” Gladys declared. “Unless I should see some fabulous job in these classifieds, I can wait until they lay me off. That way I’ll draw unemployment and get the severance package. But I’m going to polish up my résumé and interviewing skills, all the same.”
“What kind of severance are they offering?”
“No details yet, but it’s usually one week’s pay for every year you’ve worked, and some health care continuation. That amount of money won’t last me long, with the cost of living in the Bay Area.”
“When is the company going to move? I heard next summer, but do they have a specific date?”
Summer was a fairly elastic goal, with plenty of wiggle room. The office building was there, I’d seen it. Presumably the administrative side of the company could move right in and start conducting business. But if Rittlestone and Weper planned to process food under the Bates Best label, they had to bring the long-dormant Sheffield plants up to speed.
“Not that I’m aware of,” Nancy said, her voice subdued, from the other side of my cubicle. “Just next summer.”
“A lot can happen between now and then,” I said.
And the show must go on, I thought, as Patricia stalked into Cube City. To say she didn’t look happy was an understatement. She didn’t bother to say good morning. Instead she flung a dictation tape into the rush box as though she was tossing a Molotov cocktail through a window. She departed in the same ill humor. I took the lid off the latte I’d bought before coming to work and speculated about the source of her nasty mood. Not that she’d been Little Miss Sunshine most of the past two weeks, but this latest behavior seemed downright ugly.
Was she irked about Hank’s elevation to general counsel? Lauren Musso had hinted that Patricia herself wanted the job. Patricia had been at Bates longer than Hank. Of course, he’d been brought into the company from the Berkshire and Gentry law firm for the express purpose of stepping into Alex’s job. Had Patricia been cozying up to Yale Rittlestone in hopes of gaining that position? Or did her attitude have something to do with the phone call she’d received from Charlie Kellerman Thursday, the day before he was run down by a car and killed?
“I guess you’re short an attorney” I told Nancy, “now that Hank has moved into Alex’s office.”
“No, that was this morning’s bombshell.” Nancy’s mouth quirked into something that might have been a smile, if she’d been able to put her heart into it. “Tonya Russell has been moved into that slot.”
I recalled what Lauren Musso had told me about Tonya. She was an attorney, and Lauren had wondered why Rittlestone and Weper had moved her from their Chicago office into the position of Bates’s human resources director. Perhaps they’d been planning this vacancy in the legal department, and the HR job, of barely two weeks’ duration, was merely a means to an end to get her in place at Bates. If that was the case, it meant R&W had played a particularly cruel form of job roulette by forcing Laverne Carson to retire.
“Who’s filling her job?” I asked. “Another Rittlestone and Weper clone?”
Gladys laughed. “Clone? I like that. You’ve picked up the Bates lingo. Next thing, you’ll be calling ’em Rattlesnake and Viper, like the rest of us.”
“I don’t know.” Nancy shot me another look like those she’d been sending my way on Thursday, as though she somehow knew that I wasn’t the run-of-the-mill ordinary office temp. I asked too many questions. “I’ll let the people in human resources worry about that. I’ve got enough on my plate right here in legal.”
I wasn’t in the mood to transcribe Patricia’s tape, so I caught up on filing for the next hour. I was exiting the file room when I saw David Vanitzky in the north hallway, coming out of the human resources department. I could tell from the look on his face when he spotted me that he wanted to talk, but now wasn’t the best time. I’d hoped to dodge him and his corporate intrigue awhile longer. He stopped, looked around to make sure no one observed us, and said, “Lunch,” in a low tone that sounded more like an order than an invitation.
“Can’t,” I told him, just as economically. “Got a date.” It was the truth. I was meeting Darcy at noon, so I could find out what she wanted to discuss.
Before David had a chance to respond, Tonya Russell bustled out of human resources. “Oh, David, glad I caught you. We need to talk about...” He shot me a narrow-eyed look as he turned and headed for his office, with Tonya at his side.
I walked back to Cube City. A blinking light on my phone told me I had voice mail, so I picked up the receiver and punched the necessary buttons to retrie
ve a message from Sue Ann Fisk, Nolan Ward’s secretary down in production. After I listened to it, I told Nancy I had to go down to the mail room and headed for the stairwell. Down on the second floor, I found Sue Ann behind her desk, sticking labels on envelopes.
“You didn’t have to come down, you could’ve just called me back,” she said with a friendly smile.
“I had to go to the mail room anyway. What was it you wanted?”
She set aside the sheet of labels, glanced at Ward’s closed door, and leaned forward. “Those eleven call sheets you were asking about. It really bothered me that I didn’t have those logged. Like I said, that’s too many to simply get misplaced. I’ve been checking around, and I can’t find any record of having received them. Struck me as really strange. I mean, you were sure about the dates and all. I even asked Nolan.” She glanced at the door again, as though she were afraid that the mention of her boss’s name would bring him storming out.
“Did he remember them?”
“No.” She paused, and in the ensuing silence, I was about to thank her for her extra effort in trying to locate the call sheets, when she frowned, looking perturbed. She said, almost as an afterthought, “It was the oddest thing.”
That piqued my interest, as did the expression on her normally cheery face. “What was, Sue Ann?”
“Why, he acted peculiar.” She pointed her thumb at Ward’s door. “Like he was nervous about something. Something he didn’t want me to know anything about. He asked me why I wanted to know. I said someone from legal had been down here asking about them. And then I remembered. That young man that worked in your department, the one who died recently. Rob, that was his name. He was down here in August. He was asking about the same call sheets you are. And he was the one who requested a printout of the calls about dairy products.”
I’d thought so, all along. I peered past Sue Ann, at the door, wishing I could see through it for a good look at Ward. “What was Nolan’s reaction when you told him someone from legal was asking about those call sheets?”
“He, well...” She said it with body language rather than words, giving a pretty good imitation of someone being taken aback at my snooping. “Then he called in one of the plant managers. He’s in there with Nolan now.”
“Was it the same manager who was there Thursday?”
Sue Ann looked surprised. “Leon Gomes? Why, yes, how did you know?”
“Just a guess.”
It was more than a guess, though. After leaving the Bates house yesterday, I’d gone to the Oakland library, to continue my background investigation on Leon. I’d also made some phone calls of my own, one of them to Al Dominici, the former food-safety manager who’d retired and whose job hadn’t been filled. I also called several of the people whose names and phone numbers were on those call sheets Rob had hidden. Both the library and the phone calls answered some questions and left me with others. I was planning to spring those questions on Leon at a time of my own choosing.
Which wasn’t now. Judging from the perplexed look on Sue Ann’s face, I had to tone down my interest in what was going on behind that closed door. That didn’t mean, of course, that I was going to stop pumping her for information.
“That guy,” I continued, “Leon, you said his name was? When he came storming out of Nolan’s office the other day, I figured something terrible had happened. You mentioned one of the plant managers, so I wondered if he was back for a return engagement. Any idea what’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She glanced down at her phone console. “Nolan’s on the phone, his line’s lit up. I don’t have any idea who he’s talking with. Now, Leon Gomes runs the dairy plant. He was promoted to that manager slot late last spring, and as far as I know, he’s done a good job. Nolan’s real pleased with his work.”
“Do Nolan and Leon talk frequently? I mean, that might be a sign something’s wrong at the plant.”
“Yes, they’re on the phone quite a bit,” Sue Ann said. “And Leon comes up here for meetings, and such. But I’m not aware of any problems down at the dairy plant.” She sighed. “It’s been one of those days, Jeri, and it’s not even noon yet. Of course, we’re all on edge, what with this business about Mr. Bates and Mr. Campbell.”
“And moving to El Paso,” I added.
“I don’t think any of us will be moving to El Paso.” She shook her head slowly, and her face turned bleak. “From what I hear, only the executives are going. Everyone else, the hourly people like me, will be out of a job. They can hire people in Texas for less salary.” She smiled again, but this time it seemed to be with an effort.
“My husband’s on permanent disability. He can’t work, so I have to. He gets some disability pay, but it’s not enough. I’m past fifty. I know it’s illegal to discriminate against people my age, but employers do it all the time. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
Thirty-six
WHEN I’D CALLED DARCY SUNDAY NIGHT TO FIND out why she wanted to get together for lunch on Monday, she’d insisted she couldn’t discuss it over the phone. In fact, she’d been rather cryptic about the whole thing. But that was Darcy. She had a highly developed sense of drama. I figured her need to talk had something to do with her living situation, and the fact that she wasn’t getting along with her mother.
We’d arranged to meet at noon, on the corner of Webster and Second. But Darcy was waiting, if you could call it that, right outside the Bates building.
I could hardly miss her. She was wearing black slacks and an oversized T-shirt so yellow it was a toss-up as to whether she looked like a big lemon or a large bumblebee. I spotted her when I approached the glass double doors in the reception area. I paused and surveyed the scene that awaited me at the bottom of the steps. When I pushed open one of the doors and left the building, Darcy didn’t see me right away. She was too busy staring at Yale Rittlestone.
The new CEO of Bates had just exited the passenger seat of the shiny gold Mercedes I’d seen him get into last week. He stepped right into camera range. The camera and microphone were wielded by a crew from nearby Channel Two, the Oakland independent. Rittlestone was flashing a smile as he spoke to the reporter, a small woman who kept peppering him with questions. At Rittlestone’s elbow was Morris Upton, the head of public affairs, in his ubiquitous navy blue suit and red power tie. He had pasted on a grin that looked forced. No doubt he was trying to put a favorable spin on the media attention.
It seemed the local news media had decided not to give that Friday afternoon press release from Bates short shrift, as Morris no doubt had wished. Instead, the changes at Bates wound up on the front page of this morning’s Oakland Tribune, along with an extensive sidebar on the history of the company, from its founding by Clyde Bates back in the thirties. It could have come straight from Diana Palmer’s corporate history of her grandfather’s company, and when I read it, I wondered if it had. The Trib had also done a shorter sidebar about Rittlestone and Weper, using smiling head shots of both men.
There was an additional story in the business section of today’s San Francisco Chronicle, which had reprinted the Forbes magazine cover showing the smiling golden boy, Yale Rittlestone, and his partner Frank Weper, who definitely looked like the gray, stodgy partner. The Chron article had speculated about what this meant for Bates, now that the founder’s son was no longer the CEO.
I knew what was on the agenda, as did the employees—the El Paso move. But I doubted the local newspaper and television reporters knew. If they’d found out that yet another Bay Area business was leaving the region, there would have been more headlines.
I toyed with the almost irresistible prospect of making an anonymous phone call to several reporters. Might be fun to step back and watch the shit hit the fan. However, I fought down the impulse. I gave it about twenty-four hours before one of the employees who was going to be without a job made that call.
A corporate drone, male variety, also in a blue suit, had the car’s trunk open. I guessed he was Rittleston
e’s personal assistant, Eric Nybaken. I saw several banker’s boxes, but the guy in the suit was leaving the heavy lifting to one of the mail room workers, who hefted boxes onto a hand truck.
Darcy loitered on the sidewalk, practically leaning on the bumper of the Mercedes. It was as though she wanted to get into Rittlestone’s lap.
What was she up to? With Darcy, I never knew. She couldn’t be all that interested in Rittlestone, even if she had thought him attractive when she’d first seen him last week. Come to think of it, she’d been even more interested when she realized my interest in the man, moving quickly to the obvious conclusion that it had something to do with the case I was investigating.
I caught Darcy’s eye as I walked down the steps and edged past the media people, heading for the corner of Webster and Second. By the time I’d reached the Embarcadero, she’d caught up with me, casually, as though she hadn’t intended to run into me on the street.
“What was that all about?” I asked. “I told you he was too old for you.”
“I’ve changed my mind. He’s not as good-looking as I thought. Something about the eyes. They’re awfully cold, don’t you think?”
“Yes, I do. So why were you ogling him?”
“Had to make sure it was him. It was, all right. The guy I saw, I mean.” She stepped off the curb and headed blithely into the street, without even looking to see if there was any oncoming traffic. Fortunately there wasn’t.
“I thought it was him, when I saw his picture in the papers this morning. But I had to be certain. So I took a chance he might be around that Bates building today and came over for a look. I lucked out. Not five minutes after I got there, he arrived in his coach with his entourage.”
“What are you talking about?” Now it was my turn to catch up with her.
“Your Mr. Yale Rittlestone.” She grinned at me as we reached the other side of the Embarcadero and headed across the parking lot toward Jack London Village.