Bitter Business

“Daniel Babbage died on Saturday. The funeral is tomorrow.”
    “My father told me. Coming on top of everything else, this seems to have hit him especially hard. Did you know that our entire administrative staff quit this morning? They just walked out and left. Loretta, my dad’s secretary, is the only one who stayed.”
    “I saw her a minute ago. That kind of loyalty is a rare thing,” I said, thinking of Daniel’s secretary, Madeline, weeping as she sorted through his papers the day after his death.
    “Eugene’s on the plant floor right now trying to convince the workers to stay. They’re all afraid that there’s some sort of poison in the air here. I can run a company without secretaries, but if the line workers walk out, We’re out of business.”
    “Loretta told me that your father is in Dallas. When you talk to him next time, will you be sure to tell him that I need to speak with him right away?”
    “After our last conversation, I don’t know when that Will be. We just had a big argument.”
    “What about?”
    “This.” He slid a single file across the desk toward me.
    I picked it up and looked inside. There were two items: a single sheet of letterhead and an article that had been cut out of a magazine. A quick glance at the letterhead revealed it to be a bill from First Chicago, the investment banking firm that Lydia had hired to help her sell her shares. The total was for forty-seven thousand dollars. And people thought lawyers were stick-up artists, I thought to myself. I held up the magazine article.
    “Do you want me to read this now?” I asked.
    “Please.”
    It was taken from Metal Plating Monthly and it made for surprisingly interesting reading. The article was titled BREAKING AWAY: CAVANAUGH SHAREHOLDER AIMS FOR TOP BID. Beneath it was a half-page photo of Lydia scowling into the camera with her arms crossed on her chest. Arthur stood behind her, looking sinister with his dark beard. The picture had been taken in front of their house on Astor Place.
    In the article, the reporter had painstakingly cataloged Lydia’s list of grievances against her family, including the fact that her father had never been home while she was growing up; that Nursey, the black maid who had raised her, was the only real parent that she’d ever known, and that she felt that her father had always favored her brothers. She stated emphatically that she was “irrevocably committed” to selling her shares, citing “a complete lack of faith in my brother Philip’s ability to do anything competently, particularly running a business.” She went on to add, “Philip is one of the most ineffectual people I’ve ever met. It’s been obvious since he was ten.”
    Lydia also announced that she was planning to use a portion of the money from the sale of her shares to start a foundation to support the work of women artists. She had already decided who was going to receive her first grant—an artist named Shirley Shegall, for a “public sculpture celebrating menstruation.”
    I put both items back into the file and handed it back wordlessly to Philip Cavanaugh. He might be a pompous, unmitigated putz, but for the first time since his sister’s death I felt genuinely sorry for the guy.
    “What did your father say?”
    “He said to pay the bill.”
    “That’s all?”
    “That’s all.”
    “Nothing about the article.”
    “Nothing at all.”
    “I assume that the magazine that ran this is widely read in the industry.”
    “If it wasn’t before, it will be now,” Philip replied ruefully. “It’s bad enough that I’ve had to spend my whole life listening to people whispering behind my back, ‘You know everything would have turned out differently if Jimmy hadn’t died.’ Or, ‘You know that it’s really Dagny who’s the brains of the operation.’ Now everyone is going to be laughing in my face! And my own father won’t even say a word in my defense. Instead, he wants me to write a goddamned check for forty-seven thousand dollars so that I can make it easier for my little sister to stab me in the back!”
    “So what do you want me to do?”
    “Is the company obligated to pay Lydia’s investment bankers?”
    “Off the top of my head, I wouldn’t think so,” I replied. “Even though Lydia is a director of the corporation, she doesn’t have the authority to contract with outsiders on the company’s behalf without a majority vote of the board. I think it can be argued that Lydia’s