Feast of Murder(15)

Julie called Mark a son of a bitch in a voice loud enough to be heard across the river in New Jersey, and Charlie stood up, went to his door, and looked into the hall. This was the hall where most of the really important offices were, the offices of the senior executives and the one or two lower-level people expected to make it all the way up, and as Charlie would have suspected, most of those offices were still inhabited. Calvin Baird’s office was certainly inhabited, sitting down there at the end of the hall next to Jon’s illuminated shrine like a dog at its master’s feet. At Baird Financial, there had never been any ambiguity about who ran the company or from where. Jon had pleaded guilty to a count or two of insider trading, not to major fraud. He hadn’t been barred from the securities industry or made ineligible to own or run a bank. What he’d been jailed for wasn’t even illegal in Europe and Japan. He was the founder, chairman, chief executive officer, and patron saint of Baird Financial—and if he’d been sent to jail for ten years instead of just over one, it would still have been his company.

Charlie edged out into the hall, past Mark Anderwahl’s door—passing strangers in the halls had sometimes been pulled in to Mark and Julie’s fights; Charlie didn’t want any part of that—and then started making time toward Calvin’s door. Mark and Julie seemed to be arguing about the McAdam thing, which figured. To Charlie’s mind, there was a lot to argue about in the McAdam thing. On the other hand, it had been Jon Baird’s personal decision, and that really ought to settle it. Charlie got to Calvin’s open door, looked in at Calvin bent over a spread of papers on his desk, and knocked.

“Cal?” he said. “Don’t you think you ought to go home?”

Calvin Baird wasn’t much like his brother Jon. Instead of being barrel chested and bandy legged, he was tall and thin. Instead of having eyes full of humor and a mouth that crinkled up at the edges, he had the face of a Puritan preacher. He was angled and sharp, self-righteous and cold, impossible to deal with—at least on the surface. Charlie had known Cal for what felt like forever and not been able to figure him out yet.

Charlie knocked a second time, and coughed, and said, “Don’t pretend you don’t hear me. I know it’s been a long day. That’s my point.”

Calvin Baird looked up from his papers and sighed. It was mostly in profile that he looked intransigent. Full-face, he simply looked exhausted.

“Charlie,” he said. “Hello. It has been a long day.”

“Is that more on Mr. Donald McAdam? I’d think you’d be sick of him by now.”

“I am sick of him. You don’t know how it annoys me that Jon couldn’t wait to get out of jail to do this thing. If he had waited, at least it would have been his problem and not mine. But, no. This isn’t Mr. McAdam. This is Europabanc.”

“Everything going smoothly?”

“As smoothly as it can when you deal with the French.”

“Ah,” Charlie said. He came fully into Calvin’s office then and sat down in the single chair kept for visitors. Calvin was one of those people who preferred to keep his appointments in public places, like restaurants. “I heard Mark and Julie having a fight just now. About McAdam. About selling McAdam.”

“There’s no way to sell McAdam,” Calvin said. “I tried to tell her that. She’s too much of a perfectionist. In the meantime I’ve got this Europabanc thing, and there’s been a leak. In the middle of all this McAdam business nobody seems to have noticed, but someone will.”

“Noticed what?”

“Noticed this.” Calvin reached into the bottom drawer of his desk and pulled out a copy of the Wall Street Journal, folded carefully back to a center page. Calvin passed it across the desk to Charlie and said, “Column three. Halfway down what you’re holding.”

Charlie looked at column three, halfway down what he was holding, and found:

    “Rumors on the street suggest that the long-anonymous ‘significant bidder’ in the Europabanc buyout may be none other than Baird Financial Services—”



Charlie put the paper down. “Well,” he said.

“Well,” Calvin echoed. He looked down at the papers on his desk and rubbed his eyes. “I’ve been going over it and over it,” he said. “All the people who were privy to the information. All the people who might have had reason to sell the information, or give it away, for that matter. It’s an impossible job.”

“It ought to be,” Charlie pointed out. “The secretaries must know. And if one secretary knows—”