Feast of Murder(95)

“Someone might have hired you to,” Tony Baird said.

Gregor pivoted, so that he was facing Jon Baird. Jon Baird was still leaning against the spool, keeping his arms crossed on his chest. Now he looked amused.

“I could sue you for this,” he said happily. “You’ve got no proof. You couldn’t have any proof. You don’t even have a body. The body just went—”

“I heard the body go,” Gregor said. “It doesn’t matter. You’re right. I can’t prove you killed Charlie Shay.”

“Well, then,” Jon Baird said.

“What I can do,” Gregor Demarkian told him, “is prove you killed Donald McAdam, and how, and tell any police official who might be concerned where to lay hands on the physical evidence. How about that?”

Jon Baird didn’t look in the least bit worried. “When Donald McAdam died, I was in jail,” he said. “Nobody knows that that was a murder anyway. And there is no physical evidence.”

“Would you like to hear what I have to say?”





2


Whether Jon Baird or anyone else wanted to hear what Gregor Demarkian had to say was moot. They were going to hear it no matter how they felt about it. They were incapable of moving out of its way. Gregor had seen reactions like this before. That was why he’d never been as harsh on the people who stopped to look at accidents as some of his colleagues inevitably were. He knew the paralysis of fascination. He thought it was normal.

He moved into the middle of the group, taking over Jon Baird’s place at the center of the bow’s small triangle and Tony Baird’s place as the center of attention. The two men yielded without protest.

“It all starts,” Gregor told them, “a few years ago, at least two, when Jon Baird decided that the time had come to rival the Rothschilds. He wanted to buy a European banking conglomerate called Europabanc. He still wants that. On purely objective grounds, he could even afford it. Baird Financial had stepped in during the last serious market slump and bought a controlling interest in Donald McAdam’s McAdam Investments. Part of what came along with that acquisition was a large portfolio of junk bonds that weren’t really junk. Maybe I should say they were the right kind of junk. The problem was, Jon Baird could only sell those junk bonds and use the proceeds for the Europabanc deal if he either had Donald McAdam’s permission—which wasn’t going to happen—or if he bought McAdam out of his employment contract. Between the time Baird Financial had bought its interest in McAdam Investments and the time Jon Baird wanted to use McAdam assets for his pursuit of Europabanc, McAdam himself had become a pariah in the American financial community. He had turned state’s evidence in a number of highly publicized insider trading investigations. He had tattled on his friends and caused a great many people to go to jail who would have been safe from the law otherwise. He had stirred up a great deal of enmity. According to the terms under which Baird Financial bought McAdam Investments, with Donald McAdam installed as head and virtually unfirable, McAdam Investments was no use to Jon Baird in the Europabanc deal at all. Junk bonds aren’t cash. He couldn’t use them in figuring his cash on hand for the initial round of mutual guarantees that started the merger. McAdam junk bonds were truly junk. Jon Baird couldn’t sell them at their true value as long as Donald McAdam was still in the picture. Even if McAdam himself was willing to sell, almost nobody would be willing to buy as long as the sale benefited McAdam himself. That meant either selling the bonds at a discount—and I don’t think Mr. Baird could have done that; I think he needed all the money he could get—or getting rid of McAdam. Since I’ve started paying attention to the facts in the McAdam case, I’ve heard one thing over and over again. Nobody at Baird Financial, people said, had any reason to kill Donald McAdam except pure spite or good old-fashioned hatred, because the contracts terminating McAdam’s employment had been signed. McAdam was no longer a thorn in the side of the new owners of the company he himself had founded. I came to realize that that wasn’t exactly true. In order to get rid of McAdam, Baird Financial had to fork over twelve and a half million dollars, and nobody was happy about it. On several occasions people have told me that various members of the financial community were almost as upset at that twelve and a half million dollar payoff as they were about McAdam. In order to get a full field for an auction of those junk bonds, with no residual anger damping down the prices, it was much better for Donald McAdam to be dead. Not necessary, mind you, but better. And Jon Baird has always been a man who insists on perfection.