25
SAM ASKS FOR HELP
Sam had to do something. He had known that all along, of course, but now he had no choice. The ZT 5000 mess was creeping into the Wyatts’ family life in such a way that Sam knew, if he refused to act much longer, he might lose not only his career, his reputation and his self-respect but Harriet as well. At least her trust—which, in Sam’s mind, was as good as losing her altogether. Sam and Harriet had driven Samantha up to Camp Wyononi in New Hampshire over the weekend. The drive up had been fine; Samantha, in her usual buoyancy, had chattered and sung her head off for the first four hours and then had gone to sleep in the back of the station wagon, nestled in her baggage for a month-long stay. Harriet had spent the quiet time writing marketing plans.
“You know, Sam,” Harriet said, “that ZT machine is really wonderful.” (Sam had had a working model installed at Gardiner & Grayson, an arrangement he had made long before the trouble started.) “The kids in promotion are having a ball with it. When that review of the Klendon novel appeared in the Times, within an hour they were sending out blowups to our major accounts to use for point-of-sales.”
Sam missed their exit.
They had made the obligatory tour of the camp (“Honey,” Harriet whispered, leaning on Sam’s arm by the lake, “I think we need to go to camp”); Samantha had only cried for five minutes when they were leaving (as opposed to the year before, when she had to be pried loose from Harriet and forcibly dragged away); and they checked in for the night at an inn a mile down the road.
The Wyatts had eaten a delicious dinner, had strolled down a country lane in the moonlight; they had kissed for a long while by a pond (until the insects got them), and had walked, hand in hand, back to their room. And then, after an hour of trying, Sam had thrown himself out of bed in frustration and self-disgust.
“Sam, come back,” Harriet whispered. “Please just come back and hold me.”
Sam got dressed and went out for a walk. When he came back, he found weeping in the bed. He felt as guilty and awful as he had in the old days; it was as if he was returning, still warm, from another woman’s bed. There was no other woman—but there was guilt. He had tried to comfort Harriet, but his heart was simply not in it. All he could think about was what Harriet would think if she knew the truth about the mess he was in. Sam Wyatt, executive extraordinaire—business friend to South Africa! And still he had done nothing.
The drive home Sunday had been even worse. Harriet was silent and every time Sam looked at her he saw an expression resurrected from the long-ago past—an expression of pain, of fear, of helplessness. And it killed Sam to see it.
When they arrived home, Althea reported that Charles Washington had called Sam about the business seminar Sam ran every year for the Urban League. Sam called Charles back—from the bedroom—and said he was terribly sorry but Charles would have to find someone else to run it this year.
When Sam finally succeeded in getting Charles off the phone, he went into the kitchen, only to find Harriet with that expression on her face again.
“Why are you looking at me that way?”
Harriet had not answered; she had turned away from him to start fixing dinner. That, too, was behavior from years long gone by. The Silent Treatment.
Althea had come into the kitchen at that moment, eating sunflower seeds, one by one, out of the palm of her hand. “So why aren’t you doing the seminar, Dad? John signed up this year—at my suggestion.” Munch, munch. “What am I supposed to tell him?”
“What, are you eavesdropping now, Althea?” Sam said.
“Your voice isn’t exactly quiet, you know.”
Harriet glanced back at Sam over her shoulder.
“Tell John—whoever the hell that is—that your father’s busy,” Sam said, walking out.
On Monday night Sam took Cassy Cochran to an alcoholism treatment center on West 59th Street to sit in on a group therapy session for the spouses of alcoholics. Although Harriet had offered to take her, Cassy said that it would be better if Sam did. (“You’re too gentle, Harriet,” she had said in front of both them the week before. “I’d be sure to cancel. But I wouldn’t dare cancel on Sam—I’d be too scared to.”) Afterward, they walked all the way home, with Cassy talking the entire way about Michael. When they reached the Cochrans’ building, Cassy hugged Sam and said she didn’t know how she would ever repay his kindness.\
At that moment—whether it was because of the nature of the evening they had spent, or Cassy’s vulnerability, he didn’t know—Sam heard himself say, “I’m in trouble, Cassy.”
Cassy pulled back in surprise. “You’re joking.”
He gave a sarcastic laugh. “I wish I was.”
He walked Cassy across the Drive to sit on a bench by the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument. Pacing back and forth, he told her the story as best he could: about the ZT 5000 being assembled in Pretoria, about his suspicions that it had been deliberately set up by Canley to increase profits, about Brennan’s refusal to do anything about it. He told Cassy that he had to do something—but was at a loss as to how to go about it without completely destroying his career, his reputation and—long sigh—his family. At the last, his voice faltered.
Cassy didn’t seem shocked, nor did she seem surprised; she merely sat there, listening, periodically interrupting to ask a question.
“Well,” she said when he was finished, “the doing part is easy. WST can find that plant in no time and break the story. As you say, Electronika will move assembly fast enough after that.” She paused, thinking. “But what bothers me, Sam, is how Brennan has handled this.” She paused again, biting her lower lip.
A breeze blew up from the river, making the trees overhead rustle.
Sam sat down on the bench, sighing. “It doesn’t add up, does it? If they were setting me up as the fall guy in case they got caught—”
“Why tell you about it?” Cassy finished for him. “Why give you a chance to prepare yourself?” She shifted around on the bench to face him. “That’s what’s so strange.”
“You know—” Sam started.
“What?”
He shook his head. “It’ll sound crazy—”
“Say it.”
He leaned toward Cassy, dropping his voice. “I feel like I’ve been dared. Like Brennan and Canley are daring me to do something. You know? It’s as if—’Think you’re a tough guy, Wyatt? Prove it.’’’
Cassy nodded, staring off in the dark somewhere past Sam. “Yes,” she said slowly. “It does sound like a dare. I wonder...”
“And this will sound paranoid, for sure,” Sam added, watching a Yorkshire terrier being led past them. “I think my office phone is tapped.”
Cassy gave a half laugh. “Probably is,” she said, looking at him. “Come on.” She stood suddenly. “We’ve got to make a call.”
In the study of the Cochrans’ apartment, Sam sat on the couch while Cassy called a former colleague of hers in the WST newsroom, Paul Levitz, an investigative reporter for Conolly’s Financial News. She outlined the situation, naming no names, wondering if Paul had any instincts about it. Cassy listened into the phone for some time, her frown deepening, and then she glanced at Sam. Putting Paul on hold, she asked Sam, “How long has the new president been at Electronika?” When he said eight months, Cassy reported this information to Paul and then her eyebrows shot up. She put him on hold again. “Sam,” she said, “Paul just asked me if I was talking about Walter Brennan.”
“Oh, man,” Sam said, lurching to his feet.
“Look, Sam, I’d trust Paul with my life.” She paused. “I think you’d better pick up in the kitchen and talk to him.” Sam sighed, rubbing his forehead. “Okay,” he said. They were on the phone for two hours. After they swore themselves to secrecy—Paul, Cassy and Sam—Paul explained how it was he knew it must have been Brennan & Canley Cassy was talking about.
Two years before, Paul had been assigned to write a feature story on Caswell Zander, one of the most illustrious brokerage houses in America. Since a new, younger management team had taken over in 1981, Caswell Zander had increased its profits by two thousand percent. As Paul’s research continued, he found that the increased profits had been largely generated by four key employees—the managing director, the trading chief, an analyst and a stockbroker. The four had an uncanny capacity for “hunches” concerning individual stocks that, again and again, made the house and its major accounts millions. Based only on his preliminary investigations, Conolly’s reclassified Paul’s feature-in-the-making as top secret.
At the time Paul was working on the story, DarkStar Inc. was being slapped with a multi-million-dollar negligence suit by a man who claimed his wife had been electrocuted by a DarkStar food processor—a product that accounted for nearly half of the company’s revenues. The publicity was explosive, sales crashed, and DarkStar stock fell eight points on the American Stock Exchange. Two days before the suit was filed, Caswell Zander had sold short three million shares of DarkStar stock (an order to sell the shares it did not yet own) at fifteen dollars. When the stock fell to seven dollars, they bought the three million shares, thus fulfilling their sell order from days before.
“That’s—that’s,” Sam stuttered, “a profit twenty-four million dollars.”
But wait. That wasn’t all. Caswell Zander then turned the twenty-four million around to buy up DarkStar shares. Ten days later the suit was thrown out of court as a hoax, and DarkStar screamed that it had been set up by its competitors. A PR campaign ensued, the food processors regained their number one share in the market, DarkStar’s stock rose five points, and Caswell Zander started unloading their shares at fourteen dollars.
“That’s got to be over forty million dollars they made,” Sam said.
“Closer to fifty,” Paul said.
At the time, Walter Brennan had been president of DarkStar and Chet Canley executive vice-president.
Caswell Zander had an even bigger “hunch” about an automotive stock, and it was that direction Paul had pursued. It was clear—at least to Paul that Caswell Zander had been fed with inside information from not one but several companies. But how to prove it? Reaching dead end after dead end, he tracked back a few years in Caswell Zander’s dealings to look for clues. And there, in 1982, the name DarkStar surfaced again. In February of that year Caswell Zander had bought two million shares of DarkStar stock at four dollars for its clients; in June, ICL Industries filed an official takeover bid for DarkStar and the stock soared; and in August Caswell Zander started unloading their shares at eleven dollars.
Walter Brennan and Chet Canley had not been at DarkStar; they had been corporate officers at ICL Industries.
So, as Paul said over the phone, Cassy and Sam could see why Brennan and Canley were two of the forty-eight corporate executives he was keeping an eye on in connection with Caswell Zander. Paul had checked to see if Caswell Zander had benefited from ICL’s stock swap to bailout Electronika from the El-San Industries takeover attempt—but no, they hadn’t. Paul had interpreted it to mean one of two things: that Brennan and Canley were no longer “playing,” or, with DarkStar to run, their parent company had not seen fit to inform them of its pending stock swap with Electronika. But, from what Sam had told him, Paul thought Brennan and Canley might now be playing again for Caswell Zander.
“They’re counting on me to leak the Pretoria story, aren’t they? To drive the stock down?” Sam said.
“Ten to one,” Paul said. “But Electronika’s back-page news compared to the story I’m after.” He was getting more excited by the second. “Cass, if this pans out, this Electronika angle, I’ll go partners with you. Conolly’s with WST. I get the stands, you get the air. But I need help—now—there’s a million loose ends.”
Sam sat there, perspiring heavily, as he listened to them bargaining over resources. Manpower, computers, legwork, the Securities and Exchange Commission. On and on Cassy and Paul raced, ending by agreement to meet at 7 A.M. at WST.
By the time they hung up, Sam was a basket case. Cassy came flying into the kitchen, face flushed with excitement. Sam was not to worry. Sam was not to say or do anything until he heard from her. If Sam needed to call her, he should use a pay phone. When she needed to get hold of him, she would send a note to his doorman by messenger. Just talk and walk as usual. Walk? Why did she say that? Did Cassy think they had been followed tonight? No, no, don’t worry, but even if they had, look where they had been followed to—they’d hardly think Sam went to an alcoholism center to leak the story. Sam! Sam! Sam! Did he realize the enormity of a story like this? Caswell Zander? Inside trading at one of the most prestigious financial institutions in the world?
Sam got so flustered that he forgot to ask what could happen to him.
It was almost twelve-thirty when Sam walked into the apartment. Harriet was sitting in the living room, still dressed, waiting for him.
“You’re alive,” she noted, rising from the couch. “I just wanted to make sure.”
“I’m sorry,” Sam said, “I should have called.” He rubbed his face, dropped his hands, and slowly walked toward her. “I was at Cassy’s.”
Harriet turned away from him, toward the window and crossed her arms, holding herself. “You realize, of course,” she said, voice trembling, “that she’s very vulnerable right now.”
Sam closed his eyes. “Oh, no, Harriet.” He opened his eyes and moved behind her. “No, honey,” he whispered, sliding his arms around her. He lowered his head to speak softly into her ear. “Honey, you couldn’t have thought that.”
She turned around, looking up at him. There were tears in her eyes. “Why couldn’t I?” she asked him. “She’s a very lonely—very beautiful woman.” Her head slowly fell forward, forehead sinking against his chest.
Sam pulled her close, pressing his chin down on the top of her head. “Baby, no,” he murmured. “Cassy’s trying to help me get out of a mess. With E1ectronika.”
Harriet’s head flew back. “E1ectronika?”
He nodded. “Come on,” he said, sliding his arm around her shoulders and steering her toward the kitchen. “I’ve got a lot to explain to you.”