Rough Trade (12 page)

“So now what?” asked Jeff.

“Now you go down to the funeral home and make arrangements for your father. I’m going to head back to Chicago and start digging through the boxes of Monarchs documents in my office. I’m also going to fax you a letter to sign authorizing the transfer of any files and records from Harald Feiss to Callahan Ross’s Milwaukee office. They’ll make arrangements for someone to go to Feiss’s office and pick them up.”

“I didn’t realize you had an office in Milwaukee,” said Chrissy.

“It’s relatively small, less than fifty attorneys, but they’ll make sure we get what we need from Feiss.”

“And then what?” asked Chrissy.

“Then we come up with plan B.”

“You realize we only have six days before Wallenberg calls the loan and puts us under,” said Jeff.

“Wasn’t there some famous coach who said, ‘It ain’t over till it’s over’?”

“That was Yogi Berra,” replied Jeff, “and he was talking about baseball.”

By the time I got back to Chicago, there were two dark green shopping bags waiting for me on top of my desk. I had wanted to stop at my apartment and change clothes on my way to the office, but when I’d called Cheryl from the car, she’d informed me that the porno brothers had just arrived and were closeted in the conference room with Stuart Eisenstadt, eagerly awaiting my arrival. With a groan I told her to scare up something for me to wear, find me a bag of M&M’s, and put on a fresh pot of coffee. It was turning out to be one hell of a day.

Drawn as much by curiosity as the necessity of bringing me coffee, Cheryl followed me into my office to see what the personal shopper had sent over this time. As one of eight children, she’d grown up in a household where anything new was cause for excitement. Besides, most of my emergency purchases ended up in her closet anyway. By the time she graduated, Cheryl was going to be the best dressed first-year associate in the city.

“Stuart just buzzed to say that they’re still waiting for you in the north conference room,” she said, setting my coffee on the corner of my desk and standing on tiptoe to peer eagerly into the bags. She had a heart-shaped face, a cap of blond hair, and the kind of ferocious intelligence that is prized in any profession. I could not imagine what my life was going to be like without her.

“Have we heard anything from the SEC today?” I asked, pulling a black jacket from the bag and freeing it from a cocoon of tissue.

“I talked to Janice right after I got off the phone with you,” she reported. Janice was the secretary of the SEC administrator assigned to Avco, and from the very first, Cheryl had cultivated a phone friendship with her. They spoke three or four times a day. Cheryl knew everything about Janice—about her crazy mother-in-law and her husband who was finishing up a three-year hitch in the navy. She was also able to pick up a stunning amount of information about where Avco stood in the regulatory process at any given moment. “She says they’ve accepted our latest answer and that it looks like they won’t be sending us another comment letter.”

“Yessss!” I said, making one of those gestures of victory that we’ve all learned from watching pro athletes on TV. “Any idea how long it will take to get final approval?”

“It’ll be four or five days before everyone who has to has signed off on it.”

“When this deal closes, I’m sending you to Bermuda for a week,” I said. “You can take Janice with you.”

I pulled the skirt out of the bag and held it up to my waist with a frown. The hem hit me somewhere between midthigh and scandal. They say that skirts go up with the stock market—the stronger the market, the shorter the skirts. I thought about sitting down, getting in and out of taxis, and walking outside in the cold and found myself fervently wishing for an economic downturn.

“Oh, good,” I observed, “now I’ll have something to wear in case I ever have to go to a funeral for a hooker.”

“Don’t worry,” replied my secretary over her shoulder as she headed for the door. “I guarantee you don’t have anything the porno brothers haven’t seen already.”

Most men may lead lives of quiet desperation, but there was certainly nothing quiet about Avery and Colin Brandt. For one thing there were two of them, and while identical twins might be adorable when they’re below the age of five, there’s something distinctly creepy about two adults who are exact duplicates of each other, especially when they’re two middle-aged men who look like Marv Albert clones complete with gold chains and bad toupees. It didn’t help that they both had heavy tanning salon habits, so that even in the dead of the Chicago winter they both looked like they’d been dipped in cocoa.

“Ah, finally, the woman we’ve been waiting for!” declared Avery in his weird pan-Atlantic accent as I pushed open the conference room doors. You couldn’t tell them apart until they spoke. Colin, the one who handled the financial side of the business, had the softer voice—also a slight lisp.

“I’m so sorry to have kept you gentlemen waiting,” I said, giving the bottom of my skirt a quick tug in the hopes of miraculously making it cover more of me. “I didn’t realize that you would be coming in today.”

“We were just in the neighborhood, as it were, in a meeting with the investment bankers,” said Avery with a toothy grin no doubt meant to be charming. I knew immediately that something was up. Until now both Brandts had treated me like hired help.

“So how’s everything with the bank?” I asked.

Grisham & Polk were the underwriters for the deal. They were a shady outfit with a reputation as the hyenas of the financial world, feeding on scraps and making their living from marginal, cast-off deals. Every time I thought of them performing due diligence or maintaining a fiduciary relationship, I got chest pains.

“They say everything’s still a go on their end,” Avery assured me smoothly. “They’re just waiting for SEC approval so that we can close.”

“That’s what we’re all waiting for,” I replied, thinking of all the things I should have been doing instead of sitting locked in a conference room restating the obvious.

“So, I guess the $40 million question is when?” demanded Colin anxiously. “According to what Stuart was just saying, we should be hearing practically any minute.”

“I’m afraid that the government never moves that fast,” I replied, silently wishing Eisenstadt dead. So much of getting a client through the IPO process was just managing their expectations. “Even if they don’t hit us with another comment letter, it’ll be at least another five or six days before they sign off.”

This is not what the Brandt brothers had come to hear. One look at their faces and I knew that Avco must be having cash-flow problems. Not that there was anything unusual about that. As a rule, companies go public because they need to raise money; unfortunately the costs associated with an IPO usually did a pretty good job of depleting whatever cash reserves they might have had. Although Callahan Ross and the investment bankers would take their fees out of the proceeds, there were plenty of upfront costs to be paid. In Avco’s case I knew that the bill from the legal printers alone was more than $200,000. No doubt the fact that the SEC had dragged out the process to more than four times its usual length had taken its toll, as well. The Brandts were probably over the same kind of barrel as Jeffrey Rendell and the Monarchs, though I suspected that the Brandts’ lender might be the kind who starts breaking legs when his customers defaulted—at least, I secretly hoped so.

“It won’t help us to go public if we go bankrupt first,” complained Colin miserably.

It occurred to me that this was probably what the SEC had had in mind all along, but I didn’t say so.

“Perhaps you should sit down with your investment bankers and see about setting up some kind of short-term bridge loan,” I offered, not eager to get into a discussion of Avco’s cash-flow problems.

“That’s exactly what we’ve just been discussing,” Avery assured me. “But afterward, talking to Stuart here, my brother and I had a little thought. You see, all we really need is a small bridge, somewhere in the neighborhood of a million dollars, just to get rid of some long-running payables and meet our payroll until we close the IPO. Grisham and Polk say that naturally they’d be happy to raise the money, but their fee is fifteen percent right off the top. Do you have any idea how much money that is?”

“A hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” I replied, pleased to be offered this opportunity to show off my mastery of simple arithmetic.

“But don’t you see? If we’re really just a week or ten days away from SEC approval, then we’ll end up paying a six-figure fee for a ten-day loan.”

“Very few people have the liquidity to write that kind of check,” I said. “That’s what you’re paying for.”

“I bet you do,” said Avery.

“Pardon?”

“I bet you could write that size check.”

For some reason my thoughts immediately turned to the apartment renovation—probably because that’s what the plumbing contractor thought about my checkbook, too.

“I’m afraid that I’m not in a position to do that,” I said. It was horribly inappropriate for them to even ask, and I was furious that Eisenstadt had let them put me in this position.

“Oh, I’m sure for someone with your background what we’re talking about is pocket change,” pressed Avery.

I wanted to tell him that no matter what anyone’s background was it was still a million dollars. Instead I said, “Perhaps Stuart didn’t realize it because he’s relatively new to the firm, but Callahan Ross has a policy against attorneys investing in a client’s business. It’s a clear conflict of interest.” I didn’t even bother to keep the contempt out of my voice. I was having a hard enough time trying not to sound as if I’d just been slimed.

When I got back to my office, I ripped open the bag of M&M’s and had Cheryl hook me up to the telephone headset I used when I had an impossibly long string of calls to return or was feeling too hyper to sit down. Whenever I used it, I felt like a cross between a Hollywood agent and an air traffic controller, but today was definitely one of those days when I knew I’d think better on my feet.

First Milwaukee’s refusal to budge on the default deadline had put us on immediate combat footing. There were a million things that all needed to have been done yesterday. Not only that, but I couldn’t help but feel handicapped by my incomplete knowledge of Beau Rendell’s business dealings. I called Harald Feiss, hoping to get some answers and offer him the professional courtesy of letting him know that he’d be receiving a change-in-representation and transmittal-of-records letter from Jeff Rendell shortly, but his secretary said that he was unavailable to come to the phone. I suspected he’d instructed her to refuse my calls.

I tried to call the Honorable Robert V. Deutsch, the mayor of Milwaukee, but was informed by an aide that hizzoner was attending an international conference of mayors in Beijing of all places. However, he was planning on cutting short his trip in order to return for Beau Rendell’s funeral. I explained that I was the new attorney for the Milwaukee Monarchs, and the aide agreed to set up a tentative meeting for me with the mayor the afternoon of the funeral. After I hung up with city hall, I put a call in to Jack McWhorter and left a message for him to get in touch with his people in L.A. It was time for them to come up with a proposed timetable for making a deal.

As I worked, the irony of what I was doing did not escape me. While I was prepared to fight to the death to allow Jeff and Chrissy Rendell to hang on to their football team, the truth is, I don’t really much care for football.

Talk of sports lubricates the world of men. It gives them a common language and sets them on common ground. In my office, at Super Bowl time, men who command $500 an hour joke and wager as equals with men who empty their wastebaskets for minimum wage. I can think of nothing else, not even religion, that is such a powerful leveler.

I started reading the sports page when I first came to work at Callahan Ross. I did it for the same reason that a refugee makes the effort to master the language of his adopted country—to assimilate and survive. I have also, in the interests of entertaining clients, gone to see every kind of game that can be played with a ball. Over time I have even learned to appreciate the rough ballet of pro hoops, the indolent poetry played out by the boys of summer, but I have never really developed a taste for football.

There is a reason for this. At its primitive heart football is a game about knocking people down. It is also monumentally boring. There was even a time when I was foolish enough to tell people this. Whenever I did, they would look at me sadly, start talking slower, and explain that I didn’t really understand the game. After seriously weighing the possibility, I have to say that they are wrong.

Last year I handled a transaction involving four telecommunications companies from three different countries. My clients traveled to Chicago from Tokyo, Frankfurt, and Taipei because I’d figured out how to put $2 billion in their pockets in a way that had simply not occurred to anyone else. I refuse to believe that the game of football is beyond my understanding—especially when it is widely assumed that men with beer bellies the size of the moons of Jupiter are able to grasp every nuance of the game.

But that doesn’t mean that I don’t understand what football means to people, how it lifts them up and binds them together. With Beau’s death, the Monarchs might now belong to Jeff and Chrissy Rendell, but they also belonged to the working people of Milwaukee who, year in and year out, put down their hard-earned dollars and went to the stadium to root for the team they’d grown up cheering for.

Of course, I knew that Jack McWhorter would probably disagree. He would argue that football was a business, and when they bought their tickets, the fans got their money’s worth. To him the NFL was a brand, entertainment was the product, and the players, albeit overpaid, were as interchangeable as workers on an assembly line. As I worked on through the afternoon, sifting through the possibilities and weighing the alternatives, I found myself wishing that I could subscribe to his point of view.