Swimming to Catalina

them—producers, directors, studio executives—know that what we have is unique and can never be recreated. They’re all wealthy people, so they don’t need a lot of money from the sale. There’s a traditional practice, but not a hard rule, that if someone wants to sell his stock, the studio will buy it back, with the price determined by a previously agreed formula. The same if someone dies—the studio will buy back the stock from the heirs. There’s no real market for small parcels of stock outside the studio family, so it worked for everyone. Whoever was behind this wanted to gain control by assembling a block of shareholders, ignoring the buy-back tradition, then buying out everyone else.”
    “I see. But then the new owners would be in the same position as the old owners, wouldn’t they? They’d have a big asset that makes money and that would cost as much to move as to stay. They wouldn’t just close down the studio, raze it, and sell the land, would they?”

    “Lou thinks there’s more to it. He thinks they’re using Century City as their example.”
    “The big group of office buildings?”
    “Yes. Century City was built on what used to be the back lot of Twentieth Century—Fox; they sold out to developers. Lou thinks the prospective owners—let’s call them Sturmack and Ippolito, since they already own a substantial minority of the shares—don’t want to sell the land; he thinks they want to do the development themselves, and with Safe Harbor and other money behind them they could do it. It would be worth billions in the end.”
    “One bank could finance all that?”
    “No. But there’s something else I haven’t told you.”
    “Go ahead.”
    “A couple of years ago, Oney sent me to a man named Barone, who runs some sort of financial services company. Barone asked me if I’d like to make a substantial investment for an absolutely amazing return, tax-free.”
    “Uh-oh.”
    “Yes, but I didn’t see it at the time. I gave him half a million dollars, and every month a man delivered cash payment to me. I’d give the money to Barone and he would send it abroad, for a fee, where it would be invested in a company name.”
    “He’d launder the money?”
    “Yes, I suppose that’s what you’d call it.”
    “Sounds like loan-sharking or drugs. Nothing else could bring that kind of return on an investment.”
    “It was working out to about ten percent a month,” Vance said.
    “Sounds like a lot. Vance, but if Barone was loan-sharking,he’d be bringing in ten percent aweek.”
    “I was stupid, I know. After a few months, I put in another million dollars.”
    “They were digging you in deep, then.”
    “Yes, very deep. So when I told Oney I wouldn’t be his television spokesman and that I was resigning from the Safe Harbor board and moving all my accounts, Barone came to see me.”
    “I can guess what’s coming next, I think.”
    “Probably. I told him I was pulling out of his investment scheme, too. He told me that I couldn’t—that if I tried, I’d be in deep trouble with the IRS, that the publicity would destroy me. I got pretty angry. I—I believe the expression is cleaned Mr. Barone’s clock—and I threw him out of my office into the street. I was about to call my lawyer when I got a call from David Sturmack. He asked me to wait twenty-four hours while he tried to sort things out to everyone’s advantage. I agreed. That was around one o’clock. Late that afternoon, Arrington was kidnapped. I got the first phone call around six.”
    “Let me guess,” Stone said. “In all this, Ippolito and Sturmack can’t be directly implicated; they could deny everything, and it would be your word against theirs.”
    “I realized that when I got that phone call; that’s when I decided to take matters into my own hands.”

56
    Stone listened to this with a sinking heart, having the strong feeling that a bad situation was about to get worse. “What did you do?” he asked Vance Calder.
    “First, I talked with Lou Regenstein, and told him I planned to fight these people. He didn’t disagree with that, because he and his studio were under attack, and he was not inclined to just fold. He suggested we confide in Billy O’Hara, who is the head of security for Centurion.”
    “I’ve heard of him,” Stone said.
    “Billy was very sympathetic, and I was surprised, since he is a former police officer, that he didn’t insist that I go immediately to the police and