Scandalous (30 page)

Lise, his secretary, looked at her shoes. Even Bob Massey, not usually the shrinking violet type, developed a sudden, burning interest in his cuticles. Standing next to Dan Peters, like Oliver Hardy to Peters’s tall, lean Stan Laurel, Bob looked positively embarrassed.

Dan Peters was the first to speak. “We’ve been trying to get ahold of you. All day. Where were you?”

“What do you mean, where was I?” said Jackson, irritated. “I was on a plane as you well know.”

“We tried you first thing this morning, hours before your flight. And yesterday.”

“Jesus, Dan, what is this, the inquisition?” snapped Jackson, defensive because he knew he was in the wrong. “I was in meetings halfway up a fucking mountain, OK? No phone reception.” From the look on Peters’s face, the lie sounded as unconvincing to him as it did to Jackson. Deciding that attack was probably the best form of defense, Jackson squared his shoulders belligerently. “Now perhaps
you
wouldn’t mind telling
me
what the hell’s going on?”

At that moment an ashen-faced Lucius Monroe and most of the rest of the board filed in. Suddenly Jackson’s palatial corner office was starting to feel like a sardine can.

“It’s Sasha Miller,” said Lucius.

Jackson felt his heart tighten. “Of course it is. Don’t tell me. She’s gone to one of our competitors and taken a bunch of the retail group with her? I hate to say ‘I told you so.’” He looked at the shifty glances being exchanged between his fellow board members. “What? It’s worse than that? Don’t tell me she’s gotten McKinley to go with her?”

“No,” said Lucius cautiously. “Wrexall retains eighty-five percent ownership in the McKinley partnership. That was part of the deal.”

Jackson’s eyes narrowed. “What deal?”

“She left us with no choice,” said Bob Massey. “It’s an MBO.”

“A management buyout? Of what?”

“Of the entire retail division.”

Jackson laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous! That’s the core of our business. It has been for almost a century.”

“They raised twenty percent of the money themselves,” said Bob. “McKinley fronted the rest. Evidently Sasha’s become very tight with Joe Foman, their CEO. Very tight indeed.”

Jackson paused, trying to process this information. He knew Joe Foman socially, though not well. An aging letch, once extremely handsome but now a paunchy caricature of his young self, complete with slicked-back, receding hair and open-necked, wing-collar shirts, the idea of Joe Foman and Sasha being “tight” made Jackson physically sick. Forcing it out of his mind, he turned back to business.

“It doesn’t matter. So Sasha found the money and enough willing bodies to go with her. So what? She can’t effect a buyout without unanimous board consent.” The shoe shuffling and awkward glances intensified.

“It’s like Bob said,” muttered Lucius Monroe weakly. “We had no choice. If we didn’t agree to the deal, McKinley would
have nixed the joint venture altogether. This way we get eighty-five percent of the biggest transaction in our history. As opposed to zero percent of nothing.”

“And for what?” added Bob Massey. “We’d still have lost the heart of our retail division. Sasha had a backup offer from Jones Lang LaSalle, and another from CB Richard Ellis Group, to take the team in whole or in part. They were out the door, Jackson.”

Jackson couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “So? So what if they were out the door? That’s human capital. It’s renewable! We could have rehired, we could have recruited. Instead you traded the living, beating heart of this company for a stake—a
stake
—in
one deal
! You must be out of your minds, all of you. Where’s your backbone? Where are your fucking balls?” He waved an accusing arm around the room. “Well it’s not going to happen. You know the statutes better than anyone.” He turned to look at Bob Massey, who blushed. “I think you’ll find they’re very clear on this point. The board decision on any MBO must be unanimous and it
must
include the family vote. Well, the family vote is me. And I vote no. Now where the hell is Lottie Grainger? I need to make a statement to those locusts outside, come to feast on Wrexall’s remains.”

“It’s too late for that, Jackson,” Dan Peters said stiffly. Dan had expected Jackson to take the news badly. They all had. But he for one was getting tired of being lectured by a long-haired upstart who couldn’t keep it in his pants. If Jackson felt so damn strongly about the company’s well-being, he shouldn’t have spent the last three days screwing his way around a ski resort like a dog in heat.
“No phone reception” my ass.
Sasha Miller had put them in a unique position, both dangerous and potentially profitable. Yes, there were risks involved, on all sides. That was business. But the board had acted in Wrexall Dupree’s best interests, and that was all there was to it.

“The deal was already signed, an hour ago. The board’s decision
was
unanimous. And we
did
secure the family vote.”

“That’s impossible!”

“Not at all. In the light of your absence and inability to be contacted, we put the vote to the next most senior family member with significant shareholdings, as we are legally entitled to do. Sasha Miller met with that senior family member this morning, explaining in full the relative advantages to Wrexall Dupree of this deal. After that meeting, he added his signature to our eleven. The deal is done. We believe it is a good deal. You may disagree, but the decision is nonetheless irrevocable.”

“Who added his signature?” Jackson’s voice was barely a whisper. “Who did Sasha go and visit, and dupe, and convince to sign in my name?”

With a small smile of satisfaction, Dan Peters said, “It was Walker Dupree, Jackson. Your father.”

S
ASHA LAY BACK
on her bed, elated but exhausted. The last five days had been a whirlwind. She still had to pinch herself to make sure she wasn’t dreaming.
Have I really just bought out Wrexall’s retail business? Am I really going to be running it as my own company?

She’d been fielding the same questions from the media all afternoon. Her phone hadn’t stopped ringing: CNN, MSNBC’s
Squawk Box, Forbes
magazine, the
Wall Street Journal
, and photographers were camped outside her luxurious Upper East Side apartment building. (She had finally allowed herself to move out of her poky Brooklyn flat when Georgia, her old friend from her St. Michael’s days, had flown out to stay and complained that the place was little better than a student squat.) The press all wanted to know just how such a young, not to mention female, Wrexall executive had managed to convince the board to sell out of one of their most profitable businesses. And of course, Sasha answered all their questions with the same measured, poised responses: She hadn’t “outmaneuvered” anyone. This was a great deal for Wrexall Dupree, as well as for McKinley and the new group, tentatively christened Ceres (after the small but fertile breakaway planet between Mars and Jupiter, a nod to Sasha’s physics past). All sides felt that the time was ripe for a change, etc., etc.

In reality, Sasha had been overtaken by events almost as much as everybody else. Sure, she’d fantasized about one day running her own firm. But that was all it was, a fantasy. It was only as the McKinley deal drew to a close and Joe Foman, desperate to prolong his daily contact with Sasha, had started floating the idea of backing her, that she began to see the possibilities. Initially, Joe was suggesting that his private equity firm, Cosmos, fund a brand-new start-up company with Sasha at the helm. As appealing as the idea was to Sasha’s ego, it was far too high risk. Most start-ups sank without trace, however well managed they were; it was the law of the jungle. No, the ideal was a buyout, taking an established business with clients and a revenue stream and breaking it off from its parent. The problem was, of course, that parent companies tended not to want to let go of their most profitable divisions. They needed to be persuaded. And that’s when the idea came to her: What if she were to link the entire seven-hundred-million-dollar McKinley deal with an MBO proposal?

Joe Foman loved the idea and had no trouble selling it to the McKinley board. It was the Wrexall board that was always going to be tricky. Or so Sasha thought.

“How’d it go?” Joe Foman called her the second her meeting was over.

“Believe it or not, it went well,” laughed Sasha. “I thought they’d throw me out of there on my ass, but by the time I finished the pitch they actually seemed kind of excited.”

“What did I tell you?” said Joe. “Sure, they’ve got their pride. But eighty-five percent of seven hundred million dollars buys you a lot of pride. So will they sign?”

Sasha sighed. “No. We’re short one vote. Jackson Dupree. He’s out of town on business.”

“When’s he back?”

“Tomorrow. But it doesn’t matter. He’ll never go for it.”

She’d hung up the phone from Joe Foman feeling deflated. She’d come so close, so close she could smell it. But of course
Jackson
would have to be the wrench in the works. It wasn’t until much later that night, in bed, that it came to her. Using her security card to get back into her office, Sasha sat at her desk, poring over the company statutes into the small hours. At six a.m. she was on a plane to Martha’s Vineyard.

The Duprees, Mitzi and Walker, had homes all around the United States, but they spent most of their time on their ten-acre compound on the vineyard. In the last five years, since Walker’s health had declined, they had rarely left the island, preferring their own company and that of old friends to socializing in Manhattan or Palm Beach. Walker had a round-the-clock nursing staff living in at the house, a classic, white clapboard Cape home with dark-green shutters, to-die-for ocean views, and the most exquisite gardens Sasha had ever laid eyes on.

“It’s so kind of you to come all this way to see us. You’re a friend of Jackson’s, you say?” Mitzi, an elegant woman in her early seventies with swept-up gray hair and Katharine Hepburn cheekbones, poured Sasha a glass of hot homemade apple cider.

“Um, sort of, yes,” said Sasha guiltily. “We work together.” She felt bad lying to this kind old woman. It didn’t help that every inch of polished mahogany furniture seemed to be covered with silver-framed photographs of Jackson, reproaching her from all angles. There was Jackson as a baby, looking surprisingly fat in an old-fashioned Oxford pram; Jackson, gap-toothed and grinning on his first day at kindergarten; Jackson on horseback, endlessly, holding polo sticks or trophies or both; Jackson graduating college, looking more like his dissolute, arrogant self with his long hair tied back in a ponytail and a taunting,
admit it, you want me
look in his dancing brown eyes.

“He’s a good boy,” said Mitzi dotingly, noticing Sasha staring at the pictures. “And so good at business, just like his father.”

Sasha glanced at Walker Dupree, the man who had once run Wrexall with an iron fist and whose name was still spoken of in the halls with a combination of reverence and fear. She knew of the rift that existed between father and son. Jackson never spoke of it, but it was common knowledge. Even so, disapproving of your child’s lifestyle did not necessarily mean you stopped loving them. Sasha wondered what the old man’s true feelings toward Jackson were. The mother clearly still doted on him. Sitting in an old-fashioned bath chair with a plaid blanket over his knees, Walker Dupree seemed barely aware she was there, gazing out the window at the gray, misty ocean, pausing occasionally to smile at his wife.

“Walker and I are alone here most of the time now, but that suits us just fine,” said Mitzi, patting her husband’s knee affectionately. “Of course we’d like to see more of Jackson than we do. But he’s so busy with work, it’s not easy for him.”

Sasha thought of how easy it had been for her to hop on a plane from JFK this morning and wondered how such sweet, kind,
normal
people had produced such a selfish, egotistical son.

“But listen to me, prattling on like an old woman. You said you needed to talk to Walker about something?”

“Yes. It’s nothing to worry about. We’re trying to push through a deal, something that should make a lot of money for the company.”