Treadwell had a lot of New York restaurants that he loved, but Basel was the best for seduction, and it was within walking distance of his pied-à-terre. The restaurant was dark, with lots of wood beams and tasteful frescoes on the wall, and it was usually sparsely populated at lunch.
Heather was already seated at a table in the corner when he walked in, and before Marcelle, the maître d’, came over, he went to her. She had changed into a sheer white silk blouse, with no bra, and a short plaid skirt that rode halfway up her well-shaped thighs.
She smiled brightly as he bent down to give her a kiss on the cheek. But at the last second she turned so their lips met, and she held the kiss for a moment before parting.
“Were you waiting long?” Treadwell asked, sitting next to her.
“Just a few minutes,” she said. She placed a hand on his leg. “I didn’t want to be late.”
“This is one of my favorite places, especially for lunch. It’s never too busy.”
“More intimate,” she said. “I like it.”
“I’d hoped that it would be just the two of us.”
“If you mean my father, he won’t be joining us. Our stock is down over the Chinese rumors, and he’s in one of his moods. He’s somewhere drinking Jamesons and sulking. He’ll fly back home later today.”
The old man had become a pain in the ass, and Treadwell was glad for more than one reason that he hadn’t shown up. “It happens sometimes with IPOs. But the stock will come back because Rockingham is a solid company, and from what I understand you’re doing a damn fine job of marketing.”
“Maybe not if China goes south.”
“There are ways around something like that if it happens—and I do mean if.”
“My hundred grand is taking a hit, but if we don’t raise the twenty-five mil we were counting on, we’ll have to scale back our expansion plans.”
“Like I said, there are things we can do,” Treadwell said. He wasn’t liking where this thing with her was going.
“For instance?” she asked.
“We could always do a secondary offering once your price-per-share rebounds, which it will.”
She smiled, but it was more mischievous than warm. “Well, no matter what, BP will do okay.”
“We might be able to lower your fees,” Treadwell said. “BP likes to take care of its customers.”
She smiled again, this time the warmth back, and she touched the back of his hand. “I like being taken care of, Reid.”
“Can do,” Treadwell said, returning her smile.
Marcelle came over with a flourish as usual. “Mr. Treadwell, welcome, welcome to you and your lovely lady. May we start you with a cocktail?” Over the years Treadwell and other Burnham Pike execs had spent a lot of money here.
“I think a bottle of Chasselas Ilex Grand Cru would be nice,” Treadwell said. The white wine came from one of the best vineyards in Switzerland.
“Excellent choice, sir,” Marcelle said, and he hurried off.
“I agree,” Heather said.
“You’re young to be head of marketing for a company the size of Rockingham. How’d you get there?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Actually I want to know everything about you, and your background is a good start.”
“MBA from the University of Wisconsin four years ago, top of my class. Two years at Lee, Johnson and Ballard and then over to Daddy’s company, where I took them from a stodgy old man’s fly-fishing clothing company to a younger demographic into anything having to do with the outdoors, from mountain climbing to skateboarding.”
LJ&B was the largest marketing company in Chicago and the fourth largest in the entire U.S. Treadwell was impressed, and he told her so. “No wonder you’ve done so well,” he said. Left unsaid was that it helped to be beautiful, rich, and Rockingham’s daughter.
“My motto from the beginning has been ‘Balls to the walls, boys,’” she said and smiled again. “So what about you, Reid? Is everything I’ve read in the tabloids true?”
“They like to make up stories, and the more outrageous, the more papers they sell,” Treadwell said. “But wasn’t it P. T. Barnum or someone like him who said, ‘I don’t care what they write about me as long as they spell my name right’?”
“Some people said it was George M. Cohan, or W. C. Fields, but I’ve always preferred to believe it was Mae West. I think I’m something like her.”
“When it suits you.”
“They say that you take no prisoners.”
“Business isn’t a kid’s game.”
“I particularly liked the story about Ted Partridge, who it was said had the inside track of becoming BP’s head of senior client investing but instead ended up being indicted for front-running. He went to jail, and you got the job instead.”
“He was a crook, and I found out about his scheme and reported it.”
“One of the financial newspapers hinted that you set him up. That he wasn’t guilty.”
“And when I threatened to sue if they couldn’t come up with the proof, they retracted the piece.”
“I read about that too. But you were on the way up, and no one was going to stop you,” Heather said.
“Just like you?”
“Just like me.”
In fact Partridge was innocent, charged with the crime of front-running, which meant using secret, inside information from his Burnham Pike job to buy shares of stock cheaply just before big positive news about it went public, and cleaning up when the price surged. But the evidence that Dammerman had planted was so well done and so overwhelming that no one had believed the man.
Marcelle brought the Chasselas, made a show of uncorking it, and poured a sample for Treadwell.
“Superb,” Treadwell said.
Heather studied him the entire time, with such an enigmatic smile on her lips that he had to wonder what her game was.
Marcelle filled both of their glasses, left menus, and when he departed, Heather raised her glass. “A toast to you, Reid.”
“Why?” Treadwell asked.
“For being a man I admire a great deal.”
“I’m glad you said that.”
“My father taught me that to get ahead you sometimes had to break a few heads. It’s something we’ve both done.”
“Why would you need to do something like that when your father is the boss?”
“Are you kidding?” Heather said, her laugh harsh. “The old guys who were with my father from the beginning had reached their shelf life. They blocked every idea I came up with, so I convinced Daddy to offer them buyouts. These guys were stubborn but they weren’t stupid, so they accepted. All but one of them.”
“What happened to him?” Treadwell asked.
“Supposedly he was dipping his finger in the till, and when he was arrested, he died of a heart attack.” She drank some wine. “He didn’t have what it takes. “Tant pis,” she said in French. Too bad.
“Entendu,” Treadwell said. Agreed. He raised his glass. “To Heather Rockingham, hard-nosed businesswoman definitely on her way to the top.”