Bitter Business

me. But even in the half-light of the entryway, I realized that I’d seen her somewhere before. It took me a couple of seconds to figure it out. Once I did, I felt stupid. After all, during my first year at Callahan Ross, I’d driven past a sixty-foot billboard of her face every night on my way home from work. She had been Peaches Parkenhurst back then, the anchor of the six o’clock news.
    “Let me take your coat,” she offered. “I’m so glad you’re here. Ever since Jack got that hateful letter from Lydia, he’s been in an absolute state—just storming around the house. I’m just thankful that he wasn’t planning on going into the office today. He and Philip are flying to Dallas to visit a customer. It’s a good thing, too. In the mood Jack’s in there’s no telling what he might do. I almost feel sorry for Philip.” Her voice was wonderful, silky and melodious with a subtle undercurrent of the South. She played with it as she spoke, pitching it at different levels to keep it interesting. “But I don’t know what I must be thinking, chattering away like this,” she declared as if the thought had suddenly occurred to her. “We don’t want to keep Jack waiting.”
    I followed in the wake of her expensive perfume. She led me through the heart of the house into a high-ceilinged room that was decorated like a department-store version of a drawing room at Versailles.
    Jack Cavanaugh was forty years older than his wife and a full head shorter. A muscular bulldog of a man, his gray hair was brushed straight back from his face. He seemed every bit as tough as I remembered, wearing his dark suit like a mantle and carrying himself with the quiet authority of a man who knows that other men fear him. He did not smile, but shook my hand with a fierce grip while his black eyes fixed on me with the disconcerting intensity of a shark circling its dinner.
    “What can I get you to drink, Kate?” he asked once Peaches had withdrawn, leaving us to perch on her bandy-legged furniture and discuss business. His voice was gruff, flat, and stripped of pretense.
    “I’ll have a Diet Coke if you have one,” I replied. “If not, water is fine.”
    Jack Cavanaugh got up, crossed the room to an ornately carved armoire, which, when opened, revealed a fully stocked bar. He took two glasses down from the shelf, dropped a handful of ice cubes into each one, and proceeded to drown them in bourbon. He handed me a drink, sat down in his chair, and drained half his glass in one long swallow. It was one o’clock in the afternoon and I hadn’t yet had anything to eat. I took a sip and suppressed a shudder.
    “I don’t know what Daniel’s told you about me,” he said, “but if you’re going to be my lawyer, there’s something you and I had better get straight from the start. Superior Plating is my company and at my company things get done my way. That applies to all of my employees from the guy who sweeps the floor to my lawyer. And it applies double to my children. I don’t give a rat’s ass about anything Lydia or her lawyers have to say. There is no way that I’m going to let a panty-waist little schemer like Arthur Wallace hoodwink my daughter and cheat my grandchildren out of their birthright.”
    I took a swallow of bourbon and looked Jack Cavanaugh in the eye.
    “Who,” I demanded, “is Arthur Wallace?”
     
    Jack Cavanaugh poured himself another bourbon and walked over to the window.
    “My daughter Lydia has rotten luck and piss-poor taste in men,” he explained. “She’s been married three times and every time’s been a bigger mistake than the one before. Arthur Wallace is mistake number three.”
    “So you think that Lydia’s husband is behind her decision to sell her shares?” I ventured.
    “Lydia doesn’t really want to sell her shares. What could she gain from it? She already has everything she could possibly want. Believe me, this is all Arthur’s doing. He’s been trying to figure out a way to get his hands on Lydia’s money from the minute he first laid eyes on her. I’ve told her so a hundred times, but she won’t listen.”
    “How long have they been married?”
    “It’ll be two years in October. The twins were born six months after the wedding. What a mess.”
    “So you don’t think Lydia herself is interested in the money? She doesn’t have any liquidity issues or big expenses...
    “Oh, Lydia always has big expenses. I’ve never seen anyone spend money like she does, but