The Knowland Retribution (11 page)

Louise Hollingsworth looked at Nathan Stein. She knew he trusted her, relied on the opinions she offered, and demanded unanimous consent for a move like this. Option three was hers. She felt the pressure to support it like rocks stacked on her chest.

“Okay,” she said. And with that simple, single word, all doubt vanished from her mind. Her energies were already concentrated on
success.

“Sell this,” Nathan demanded.

“I'll call Billy Mac,” Tom said.

“Call Hopman too,” said Nathan.

Houston

Billy MacNeal was an
OTO:
a golden boy among those energetic, innovative Houstonites who owed their wealth to ventures Other Than Oil. As a kid he'd been called by two names: Billy Mac. When he grew up (in his mind becoming a millionaire in his twenties qualified him as a grown up) he decided to add the final note. Thereafter, most folks called him Billy MacNeal—emphasis on the “Mac.”

He was a handsome boy: tall, slim, blonde, Texas to the core. He had an engaging way about him. People just naturally loved Billy Mac. At twenty-three he started a company called First Houston Holding. Using practically no cash, he bought undeveloped land no one else seemed to want. His very first purchase included a commercial parcel that he sold to Wal-Mart forty-eight hours after buying it. That, as he enjoyed telling newly-met admirers, really got him started. In the following months he bought a small fishing fleet in the Gulf, two restaurants in Dallas, and a charter bus company connecting Houston, Oklahoma City, and Phoenix, Arizona. In the following year he bought a record company in New Orleans and five radio stations in Louisiana and Mississippi. He didn't care what the company did as long as he could buy it cheap, find a way to inflate its numbers, and sell it for twice (more or less) what he paid.

While attending community college he took up with one of his teachers. They fell in love and got married. Billy Mac was twenty-two. She was thirty-one. She left him three and a half years later, taking their baby son and too much of First Houston Holding for Billy's tastes. That's when he started Second Houston Holding, which in less than eight years accumulated nineteen businesses, including golf courses in Florida, ski resorts in Colorado, a shipping company in the Philippines, textile producers in Central America, half a dozen television stations in the central plains, and several U.S. food processing concerns. The largest of Billy's companies, Knowland & Sons, operated five meat packing plants in the Midwest and southeast.

It was Tom Maloney's idea to make Billy MacNeal a billionaire. He and Wesley Pitts worked out the details with Billy Mac and his top man, Pat Grath. It took only ninety days to reach a substantive agreement, and Tom told Billy to expect a successful IPO within six months. They planned to take Second Houston public and structure the deal so that another, larger holding conglomerate, Alliance Inc., would act as the major buyer. Stein, Gelb, Hector & Wills Securities would sell Billy MacNeal's company to Alliance and others for a total of $1.85 billion. Maloney's meticulous plan allowed for Billy himself to bank four hundred million dollars while retaining a substantial stock position in Alliance Inc. Billy MacNeal's net worth would then exceed a billion dollars.

Getting married again was Billy Mac's idea. Carol Ann Cheetham stood five feet ten, with big tits, a small waist, a pretty face, and the longest, reddest hair you'd ever want to see. Her physical gifts pleased Billy almost as much as her gentle, accepting nature. She had not, in the two years they'd been seeing each other, refused him anything. Nor had she been the one to suggest that every billionaire should have a wife. That was entirely his idea. And so, at nineteen, she became his.

The wedding took place at his home just north of Houston, and for months conversations throughout the state focused on how much it cost. Did Willie Nelson really get a half million, or was it more?

There was no honeymoon. Billy Mac was a workaholic, as Carol Ann imagined most thirty-three-year-old billionaires must be. She sensibly considered her entire life a honeymoon, and waited only for Billy, in one of his many special ways, to grace the towering sundae of her good fortune with a fat, sweet cherry.

Aside from her, Billy's only recreation was diving. Every morning without fail he'd brush his teeth, put on his Speedo, and head for the pool. He'd had it and its three-level diving board apparatus designed and built by the best he could find. The ladder was padded. Most days he'd stand at the midpoint of the second board, twelve feet above the water. He'd breathe as his high-school coach had taught him to not that many years ago: slow and calm to smooth the muscular fibers and settle the jelly in the brain. He'd take three measured steps, bend his right leg at the knee, extend his arms upward, step down, and spring. Once airborne, he'd flip, twist, lay out, and float until he hit the water—long legs straight, feet joined at the ankles, toes curled in. Then he'd swim in one easy stroke to the edge, haul himself out, and do it again and again. His mantra, Pat Grath called it.

Carol Ann liked sitting at poolside reading the paper, lifting her eyes to catch the moment when Billy Mac rose like a god, or an angel. On this particular morning she was looking at the new issue of
Fortune
and her eye caught a story she figured might interest him. Depending on the look in his eyes, the look that told her how much of a good time he was having, she might mention the story when he got out, or wait until he was done for the day.

When she lifted her eyes from the magazine to see him jump, she saw that Billy Mac lay on his side, along the length of the diving board, left leg dangling, something dripping into the water. She screamed, and as though the vibration launched a hideous wind that pushed him off, he rolled over and hit the water, making a sickening splash. Carol Ann fought to bring his leaden form to the side. Once she had him out of the water, white and floppy, on his back, she saw the walnut-sized hole in his chest and the rivulet of blood creeping across the smooth terra cotta surrounding the pool. The blood was coming from what proved to be a ragged crater beneath his left shoulder blade.

The last thing on Carol Ann's mind as she yelled for the servants and fumbled at her cell phone was the name she'd heard Billy mention more than once before, or the unhappy fate of Christopher Hopman, whose story had caught her eye a scant ninety seconds before.

New York

A month after Christopher
Hopman's murder, Isobel Gitlin found herself preparing an obit for Billy MacNeal, the baby billionaire. Also shot to death. Also by high-powered rifle, from a distance. Also taken in silence, the crime absent any trace of perpetrator identity, possible motive, or useful physical clues. Absent, in any case, evidence the police admitted to having. Hopman on a golf course, MacNeal on a diving board. The two of them tied together by a billion dollars.

Isobel snatched the glasses from her nose as though they threatened her view of the truth. What magnitude of coincidence could possibly account for a thing like this? She shook her head and replaced the specs. At seven thirty that morning, Isobel began reviewing the histories of companies comprising First and Second Houston Holding from their inceptions. Now, midway through her third container of coffee, she noticed that Second Houston, which, she remembered, had been sold to Hopman's Alliance Inc., was also parent to the villainous Knowland & Sons. Isobel felt the kind of thrill she imagined her hairy ancestors experiencing with the mind-shaking revelation that the sharp stone embedded in their heels might do the same to a rabbit's belly. The caffeine did not calm her down.

She told her editor that she had discovered a link between the killings of MacNeal and Hopman, and therefore a possible story. He told her she was suffering from the heat. She outlined the facts she had, but he only heard her out; he did not listen. “Jesus!” he thought, as Isobel talked, “doesn't she know this is the fucking obituary page.” Then he shook his head and said, “Very hard case to make off what you've got. Really. Not worth pushing further.” He wanted nothing more to do with it, or her, for that matter. When he considered Isobel Gitlin, which was hardly ever, Ed Macmillan had only contempt for what he figured was her free ride. He had worked to get where he was. Macmillan was New Irish, very much in favor at the
Times
. He was not the red-nosed, hard-drinking Fordham product native to New York newsrooms in nostalgic yesteryears. He was in his early forties, Cornell, health-club fit, a white wine drinker. No spots on his one- hundred-dollar tie. He did, however, affect a manner that he believed echoed an earlier, ballsier day. He imagined himself a menacing Lou Grant. Isobel knew him to be a complete asshole.

“Look,” he said to her, “if it's news, we have news people working it. If it's an obit, it's you. That's what you do. You write obituaries. So go do one.” She pushed back, starting her pitch all over again until Macmillan interrupted her.

“Dog days of summer,” he told Isobel, with a cold, dry chuckle. Then he sought to end the matter by saying, “The heat's getting to you. We don't sell the
New York Times
at the supermarket checkout. Why don't you try a weekend at the beach?”

Isobel watched Ed's little smirk spread and become a chaste, hence pointless, leer. His undistinguished, knob-nosed face turned into a caricature of adolescent self-regard.

“Do you know where the term comes from?” Isobel said. “‘Dog days of summer'? Do you know what that means?” She stuttered severely on “do” and “dog.”

He shrugged, condescension rising with sweet cologne. “Sweetie, even the dogs can't take the summer heat. They walk around with their tongues hanging out, huffing and puffing and beat to hell. It makes their little doggy minds go whacko. Watch out it doesn't happen to you.”

“No,” replied Isobel. “It's from the da-da-Dog Star. It's how the Indians knew it was the height of summer. The da-Dog Star is the brightest object in the night sky in August.”

She paused, attempting to follow that up with her most ferocious, cobra-snaky stare.

He rolled his eyes and waved her away.

Isobel Gitlin's byline topped Billy MacNeal's obituary, but nowhere in it was she permitted to mention Hopman's name.

New York

Tom Maloney thought it
was a very strange thing for Nathan Stein to say. “That could have been me,” he said the day after Hopman was murdered. “Hopman was always asking me to play golf with him. ‘Come up to Boston and bring your clubs.' Shit, I hate golf.” And then Nathan said it once again: “That could have been me.” The little man had entered Maloney's office seconds before, shoulders hunched, shuffling. He leaned over the front of Tom's desk, gray eyes moist behind silver-rimmed spectacles, voice subdued, mouth showing no tension, almost at rest. Tom said nothing, but it struck him that Nathan Stein obviously believed Christopher Hopman's killing had been a random act of violence, that Hopman was murdered purely by chance. No such possibility ever occurred to Tom. Why, he asked himself, did he think it might not be? A man like Hopman, he reasoned, a man who played under the boards with elbows flying, had enemies. It was only a thought, and Maloney quickly relegated it to
a far corner of his perpetually crowded mind. “You know, Nathan, many people think there's a reason for everything.” In rare moments Tom's better nature got the better of him and he could not deny or conceal his continued affection for Nathan Stein. Somewhere in the daily strain of minding, handling, nursing, he could actually experience sympathy for the small man around whom his life revolved. This was such a moment. He wanted to give it oxygen.

“You really think so?” Nathan looked at him with a curious, sentimental expression.

“At times I do believe that,” Tom said, nodding benignly.

“Well, I guess you may be right. Thanks for being here, Tom.”

Maloney didn't think about Hopman's killing again until a month later when reviewing a proposal by the Whitestone Broadcast Group, which desired to compete with the industry giants and required $465 million to do it. Tom liked the package. Broadcast ownership fascinated him. You get your license, your exclusive franchise, straight from the federal government and pay nothing for its asset value. Not much different from getting a driver's license. You make money—often a fortune—using the public's airwaves, and when you've grown tired of it, or for any other reason that strikes your fancy, you sell the now inflated asset value of the very same license you got for nothing. “What a racket,” Tom thought. The Whitestone people didn't have a chance in hell of achieving their goal, and with a flicker of regret Tom tossed it on his pile of deals he'd have nothing to do with. CNBC was droning from one of the lineup of monitors on his wall. Tom heard the cute anchor, the one with the tiny waist and the collagen puffed lips, announce that Houston whiz-kid Billy MacNeal had been murdered. It happened at his home, she reported, right in front of his wife. On his diving board. Maloney was astonished. Mother of God! “In his own fucking house!” he thought. Jesus Christ!

Nathan Stein did not see it on TV. His secretary got a call. This time he did not shuffle into Tom's office. He barreled in, chin out, shoulders held rigidly back, thrusting his toes outward, strutting as he did when adrenaline drove him. He went straight for the liquor in the corner and poured himself a bourbon and water.

Maloney's office was traditionally decorated: restful dark woods and carpet, and modest lighting from a few table lamps and two floor lamps, each smoothed by heavy brown shades. The glass wall overlooking Manhattan was framed by a soft, shadowy, maroon window treatment. He kept the white, translucent drapes closed. Tom cultivated an understated, old-school look. It made him feel more than successful; it suggested to him that he was comfortable with success. Nathan often sought escape from the overwhelming sunlight and dramatic cityscape pouring into his own brash fantasy of an office. When stress rose within him, threatening to bust him wide open, Nathan came here looking for nurture, and Tom's décor seemed to help. Nathan threw a couple of ice cubes in his drink and plopped himself down on the oxblood leather couch in front of Tom's impressive array of televisions.

“A little early for that, isn't it?” Tom suggested, pointing at the whiskey.

“Maybe it's a little late, a little too late.” Nathan took a long swallow. “This MacNeal business,” he said. “I don't like it. Hopman a couple of weeks ago—”

“Last month,” Tom said.

“Yeah, a couple of weeks ago. Now MacNeal. Christ, Tom, they said Hopman was cut in half. Can you imagine that? Have you thought at all about—are we both thinking what I am?”

“Anything's possible, Nathan. You want to check into it?”

“Fuck yes, I do. If this has anything to do with that mess, we've got a double shithouse on our hands.”

“I doubt it,” Tom said. He'd spent the morning thinking the complete opposite of what he just said to Nathan Stein. Maloney knew Stein had his gifts, and he was often at his best in threatening situations, but not when he envisioned personal jeopardy. That sort of danger, perceived or real, more often than not threw Nathan into confusion and paranoia. Tom was determined to do his utmost to keep Nathan on an even keel. “I'll take care of it,” he said.

“How?”

“Put it out of your mind, Nathan. I've got it covered. I'm sure there's nothing here, but it never hurts to look.”

“If we have a problem, it's got to be fixed. You understand?”

“Nathan, put it out of your mind, please.” Tom walked slowly to the couch and put his arm on Nathan Stein's shoulder, offering him a familiar reassurance. “We know people who know people. I'll get someone on it immediately.”

“People for
this
? We never did
this
.”

“Well, we're doing it now,” said Maloney.

Tom Maloney made two telephone calls and then told his secretary to cancel his appointments and transfer certain calls to Wesley Pitts. He left the office and didn't return until late in the afternoon. On his way back he called his secretary, who confirmed that Mr. Stein was still in Tom's office, having left only once, presumably to use his own bathroom. Tom found him, drink in hand, on the couch.

“Been sitting there all day?” Tom asked.

“I like it here,” Nathan said. “Watch a little TV. Have a little something to drink. Take a nap if I want.”

“Mi casa, su casa,” said Tom while thinking, “You've got a bedroom, for Christ's sake.”

“So, what have you got?” Stein asked, suddenly alert and impatient.

Maloney told him he had spoken with “a friend” right after their earlier discussion. The “friend” gave Maloney a name and a number. “I called him. We set up a meeting and had a good talk.”

“Where?” Nathan asked.

“A deli on Queens Boulevard. Great corned beef. He's on the job already. We got the right man for the job.”

“Really?” said Nathan Stein. “You don't look so sure.”

“Well, look, Nathan, we don't have much to get him started. I certainly didn't share any sensitive information—not that he wanted to know—but I couldn't tell him who to look for, could I?”

“Right,” said Stein. “I know that. You think he'll find out who this guy is?”

“We don't even know if it's anyone at all. These things may be totally unrelated. Either way, it's under control.”

“Sure,” Nathan said, playing with Tom's universal remote, switching channels on the various monitors. Then he sat straight up and looked directly at Tom Maloney. “Who does this kind of work anyway?” he asked.

Maloney was afraid he'd ask that. He had devoutly hoped not to have to answer that question. It was better left unsaid. “Actually,” Tom thought, “everything about this is better left unsaid.” But Nathan Stein was the boss, and the boss wanted to know. “We retained a team, Nathan. There are always people who do things like this. Our ‘friend' referred me to such a person.” Tom hoped he could leave it there, but Nathan's narrowed eyes told him otherwise. He explained that he had met with an FBI agent who had described ex-cops, former FBI agents, and even some retired military who hire out. They work in teams. The teams are led by individuals still active in law enforcement. The best teams—and that's exactly what Maloney had been led to—often have an FBI agent as team leader. The FBI agent runs the whole operation. He provides direction as well as damage control. If they fuck up, Tom was told, the leader pulls down a mask to make the whole thing look official, or have it evaporate in thin air. But things don't fuck up. They invariably go well. And then the leader's official connections shield the client absolutely.

“We got to somebody like this so quickly? Just like that?” Stein eyed him with admiration and suspicion.

“We have many friends, Nathan. We help a lot of people. There's nothing mysterious here. We always get the help we need, do we not?”

Stein stood and began pacing. He started to huff—almost a full-blown wheeze—and switched on a determined look. He was pumped up like his Andover wrestling coach.

“They know to kill him, right?” he said. “Right?”

“Right,” Tom answered, angered that Nathan had actually said the words out loud, in his office. “They know, but, Nathan, you're getting all excited about nothing. There's nothing to indicate these incidents are related. There's even less reason to assume that any of this has anything to do with us.”

“You're sure these guys are the best we could find?”

Maloney believed they were. A couple of hours earlier he called Special Agent Robert Wilkes. He introduced himself only as Tom and mentioned the intermediary. Wilkes suggested meeting at David's Deli on Queens Boulevard, near the Woodhaven Boulevard exit, anonymous territory for both. Tom began describing what he would be wearing and Wilkes interrupted, saying, “I'll know who you are. Don't worry about it.” They both laughed and the phone went dead in Maloney's hands.

Wilkes was right. He had no difficulty recognizing Tom Maloney. The late lunch crowd was sparse. Tom Maloney had to be the only customer who ordered a corned beef sandwich on white bread or wore a suit that was well pressed. Wilkes watched him from a booth near the back, thinking, “These rich ones, they couldn't hide in an empty cave.”

“Hello, Tom,” he said, walking up to the counter where Maloney's sandwich was being handed to him. “Bob Wilkes.” He held out his hand and Maloney shook it warmly. Wilkes was six feet, lean, and trim, even with his overcoat still on. His narrow, square shoulders supported a thick neck dressed in a white shirt at least a half-inch too large.

“I'm glad you could make it, Bob,” Maloney said. Tom turned on the combination of charm and unspoken power that was his trademark. It was like a faucet, and he opened it wide. Tom said that one man may have killed both Christopher Hopman and Billy MacNeal. He did not say why. Each of these men was a friend as well as a customer—an extremely important customer. Tom wanted the assassin found and “taken care of.” Maloney had given a lot of thought as to how to say that. He'd never done this before. Not quite this way anyway. He'd considered “Eliminate.” “Terminate.” “Neutralize.” The phrase “rub out” crossed his mind in the midtown tunnel. As he entered David's, inhaling the scent of mustard and garlic, he settled on “taken care of.” Wilkes seemed to understand and accept the term, and with that, Tom felt mild relief.

Wilkes had a surprisingly deep and gentle voice. “Done,” he said. He then explained in specific detail the composition of his team and how it would work. No names of course, referring only to “our guys,” “subjects,” and “clients.” From the looks of him, Wilkes figured, Maloney needed no assurance. Nevertheless, he added, “We know what we're doing. This sort of thing is not unusual. But there are lines we can't cross, people we won't touch. We can handle things everywhere, across the country, anywhere. We've got ‘friends' too—people in every major city—and they have their own circles of influence, which I have described. Philly, LA, Chicago, New Orleans, Seattle. You name it. And the ones I interact with personally have been my friends for twenty years.”

“How will we know you've got the right man?” Maloney asked.

“If you're not happy, we're not happy. More than that I can't say.”

And then Wilkes asked, “Who is he?”

That was the tough part, Tom told him. If the two shootings are unrelated, no further action is required. If they are, you resolve it. “Either way, you get paid in full. That won't be a problem for you, will it?”

Wilkes had just been told the job was more complicated than he thought. Maloney could see he was not pleased with that prospect. Wilkes frowned, but did not reply. He stared absently past Tom, at the heavy waitress tapping her fingernails at the far end of the counter, near the steamed-up deli window.

“Double.” Wilkes's voice was mellow as ever, but Tom glimpsed tension in the fingers gripping his coffee cup. “The price is double.”