Where The Bodies Are Buried Read online

  We walked out toward the fountain. Rows of white metal tables, each with four matching chairs, all bolted to the pebbly surface, ranged along one side of Embarcadero Four, facing the cascading water in the Vaillancourt Fountain. Most of the tables and chairs were unoccupied at this late afternoon hour. I saw a man and a woman seated nearby, drinking coffee as they perused a map of San Francisco. Beyond them, a homeless man with uncombed hair and a bristly gray beard probed one of the trash cans. He was looking for something to eat, I guessed. All around us the pigeons were doing the same, pecking at crumbs and morsels left by the lunchtime crowd.

  Out on the plaza near the fountain, three adolescents with baggy jeans and skateboards were practicing their acrobatics. Two women sat on the low stone rim of the fountain, talking. One trailed her hand in the water. I turned to the left and led the way to a table at the end of the row, where we were less likely to be overheard.

  “Cassie Taylor told me you needed some information on Bates,” Lauren said, after we sat down. She eyed me warily. But, I reasoned, she had agreed to meet me, so she must be willing to talk. “So what do you want to know?”

  “Did Cassie tell you anything about me, or my reason for asking?”

  She sipped her latte. “Not really. She told me you’re a private investigator and you’re looking into Rob Lawter’s death. I didn’t know he was dead. I was shocked when Cassie told me. Rob was such a nice guy.”

  “You don’t have any contact with your former coworkers, then?”

  Was there a chance, I wondered, that someone at Bates might find out I was working undercover at the company? If Lauren was on the phone to Gladys or Nancy, or one of the Bates attorneys on a regular basis, that was a risk. But if no one had bothered to let her know about Rob, maybe the risk was negligible.

  Lauren smiled, somewhat ruefully. “Occasionally. I still have some friends in the company. Not in the legal department, though. Unless you count Martha Bronson, who used to be my secretary. She just bailed out for a better job. You see, after the way I was treated, I’m not particularly keen on talking with any of the legal staff.”

  I recalled what Gladys had told me about why Lauren Musso no longer worked at the company. I wanted to get Lauren’s take on the situation. “What happened? Were you fired?”

  “Fired?” The word triggered a flare of heat in her dark eyes, one she almost immediately masked. “No, I wasn’t fired. Not in so many words.”

  “Laid off, then.”

  “The British have a term for it. Made redundant.” Lauren’s smile turned chilly. “That’s accurate. They wanted to give my job to someone else, so I was redundant. Superfluous. Excess baggage.”

  As she spoke, the bitterness in her voice grew stronger. She gave me a sidelong glance from her dark eyes. “Oh, I know I sound like a disgruntled ex-employee. I suppose I am. It took me over eight months to find a job after Bates let me go. That’s a damned long time. The severance money had run out, and I was borrowing from my folks so I wouldn’t lose my condo. That’s a hard pill to swallow, at my age. Especially since I’m a good lawyer, a hard worker. I didn’t like being told I wasn’t doing my job. Because I was. It’s just that the rules changed.”

  “How had they changed?” I asked, sipping the iced latte.

  She wrapped her hands around her own cup and leaned forward over the painted white surface of the table. “Let me give you some background here. I worked for Bates six years before the leveraged buyout. I left a good job to go there.” She rattled off the name of the law firm. I recognized it as one of the largest in the city.

  “I was an associate on the partnership track,” she continued. “I’d been at the firm since I got out of law school and passed the bar. They never had any complaints about my job performance. In fact, I took a salary cut to go to Bates. Alex Campbell needed a corporate lawyer, so he wined and dined me, really put on the hard sell to get me to come to work for him. So I did. And I did a damned fine job of it, too. But after the LBO, it was a different story. I couldn’t do anything right.”

  “Because the rules changed,” I said, repeating her words.

  She nodded. “I should have seen it coming. But I was focused on doing my job, being a good soldier, showing the company they could count on me. I worked overtime all during the hostile takeover bid and the LBO. I thought being a team player would help me keep my job. No one in the legal department got laid off, of course. They needed us to mop up the blood.”

  Her mouth twisted, then she continued. “Then, two months after the LBO, I was out of a job. And damned mad at Alex Campbell. I thought he had a stronger backbone than that. But he was just like the rest of the executives, scrambling around trying to save their own jobs and letting their underlings be the sacrificial lambs. Those jerks at Rattlesnake and Viper wanted their own lawyer in that corporate slot, and Alex said, sure why not. We’ll get rid of Lauren, and bring in someone from Berkshire and Gentry.”

  “A yes-man?” I thought of the seemingly affable Hank Irvin, who now occupied Lauren’s position over at Bates.

  “That’s an oversimplification.” She paused, and the fingers of her right hand beat a rhythmic tattoo on the table surface.

  “They wanted someone who would more readily see the world according to what is best for R&W rather than what is best for Bates.”

  “Someone,” I speculated, “who, when Bates goes public again, will write the annual report so cleverly that the shareholders don’t know exactly how many stock options the executives are getting.”

  She snorted with laughter. “Oh, hell, they all do that. The Securities and Exchange Commission should give out awards for best snow job of the year. Of course, most people see all those lines of type in an annual report or a prospectus, and their eyes just glaze over. They never read it. If they did, they might get angry. I think the people who write that stuff do it on purpose, so no one will read it. Y’know what gets me?”

  I looked at her expectantly over the rim of my cup. I was sure she’d tell me. Lauren Musso was on a roll, and I was just as happy to sit back and listen.

  “These corporate types—of which I am one, I admit—are always talking about giving good value to the shareholders.” Her tone gave the words emphasis. “That’s the excuse these days for all the downsizing and reorganizing that’s going on. Gotta cut those health benefits and lay off a bunch of people, make the company lean and mean and profitable, so we can give good value to the shareholders.”

  She laughed again, although what she was describing wasn’t funny.

  “Of course, they’re not talking about Mrs. Jones who decided to take a flyer on fifty shares of Amalgamated Whatsis. Or the low-level employee who funnels twenty bucks a payday into the employee stock option plan so he can feel like he’s got a stake in the company.” She shook her head. “Oh, no. They’re the shareholders, all those executives with their big fancy offices on the top floors of every company in America.” She waved her hand at the skyscrapers of San Francisco’s Financial District.

  “They’re the ones who are heaping stock options on themselves, while they hold rank-and-file employees to salary freezes, or minuscule wage increases that barely keep up with inflation. Something is really skewed when executives make so much more than the people they employ. I mean, how much is enough?”

  She glared at me, in proxy, but I didn’t have an answer. In fact, I agreed with what she was saying.

  “The whole system is obscene,” she continued. “I finally get a job, at this manufacturing company here in San Francisco, and they start having layoffs, too. I’m starting to feel like Typhoid Mary. ‘Layoff’ used to mean you’d get recalled to work, eventually. Now it just means you’re shitcanned, out the door, never to return. You know what the latest euphemism for firing people is? ‘Disappearing.’ Sounds like those people who were ‘disappeared’ by death squads down in Latin America, doesn’t it?”

  Disconcertingly so, I thought. For a moment I was quite grateful to be self-employed, even if
there were times over the past few years when I wondered if J. Howard Investigations was going to make it.

  “What have you heard about this plan to take Bates public again?”

  Lauren looked spent, as though venting her anger had taken a lot out of her. She shrugged. “I’ve heard they’re working on an S-1. That’s a registration statement that they’ll file with the SEC prior to the IPO, the initial public offering. But I don’t know what percentage of the company they plan to sell, or what the common share price will be. Or when they’re going to file the S-1. My source tells me the IPO will happen before the end of the year, though.”

  “Who is your source?”

  She flashed a smile. “Sorry, I can’t tell you that.” She stopped and took a sip from her iced latte.

  “As for that IPO,” she said, “you can bet a lot of the Bates execs have cut themselves in for a big piece of the action. Stock options that will let them pick up shares at a lower price. What they don’t realize is that their jobs aren’t safe, either. R&W doesn’t give a damn about Bates. It’s just another cash cow to them. And once the cow runs dry, R&W will just toss the company aside.”

  “How would they do that?” I asked. “Sell it?”

  “Here’s an example of what’s going on these days. I’ve only been employed for a couple of months, and now it looks like I could be out of a job again. This company I’m working for now is planning to move a lot of its operations to the border. Rumor has it they’ll shut down the office here and open one in San Diego. As for the factories, I’m guessing they want to take advantage of NAFTA. Don’t have to pay those people in the maquiladoras in Tijuana a living wage, like you do here in California. Just take those jobs over the border.”

  It was true that many companies were moving out of both the Bay Area and California. In the former case, I’d heard that housing costs and traffic congestion were factors. As for leaving the state, those two items also applied as negatives. So did the pluses of states with lower taxes, lower wage bases, and less regulation.

  I thought about Hank’s trip to El Paso, and Project Rio. Was it company expansion, or something else entirely?

  I glanced across the table at Lauren, who was gazing moodily at the remains of her iced latte. “Well, there I go running off at the mouth, and I haven’t answered any of your questions. My checkered tenure at Bates certainly doesn’t have anything to do with Rob falling out a window.”

  “It might,” I said. “It looks as though Rob didn’t fall.”

  Lauren paled. “Murder?”

  “Before he died, Rob was concerned about something that was going on at work. He said he was about to blow the whistle. But I don’t know exactly what he was going to expose. I thought maybe if you could just give me some background information about some of the people who work at Bates. Maybe that would give me a lead.”

  “Well...” She shrugged. “If you think it will help.”

  She gave me her take on the people who worked in the Bates legal department, starting with Nancy Fong and Gladys Olivette, whom she liked. It was downhill from there. It was evident from the tone of her voice, and her earlier words, that she’d lost all respect for Alex Campbell, the general counsel. Evidently Patricia Mayhew had been a difficult person to work with as long as she’d been at Bates.

  “I’m sure Patricia wants to be the next general counsel,” Lauren added, “when R&W cans Alex. But it was clear the minute Hank Irvin walked in the door that he’s the designated replacement. And he’s made sure ever since to stay on the good side of both Rittlestone and Weper. If either of those guys has a good side.”

  “What do you know about David Vanitzky?” I asked, curious about the whiff of danger emanating from Bates’s chief financial officer.

  “The pirate. Oho!” She grinned. Her description matched the one Gladys had given me. “He has an eye for the ladies, but I think he likes the horses better.”

  Cards, too.

  “Vanitzky’s one of R&W’s men,” Lauren said. “They booted the old chief financial officer, Len Turley, out the door, just like they did me. Gave him a better severance package than I got, I’ll bet.”

  “Is Vanitzky qualified for the job?”

  “Oh, I’m sure he’s just a whiz with figures.” She laughed. “He must be to spend that much time at the rail at Bay Meadows or Golden Gate Fields and still come out even. Or maybe it’s female figures. He’s been divorced twice, probably because he has such a roving eye. I heard a rumor before I left that he was dallying with a woman in marketing. Let’s just say David Vanitzky’s best qualification to be chief financial officer of Bates is that he is a loyal foot soldier of Rattlesnake and Viper. Which is probably why the hottest rumor over at Bates is that Jeff Bates’s tenure as CEO is limited.”

  So Bette Bates Palmer had been correct when she told me it was only a matter of time before Rittlestone and Weper removed her brother as head of the company and replaced him with their own man.

  “And David Vanitzky is the man in line for that job?”

  “Of course. That’s the only reason he’s got an office down the hall from Jeff Bates.”

  “Just what does the chief financial officer do?” I asked.

  “He’s supposed to look after the financial health of the company,” Lauren said. “He oversees accounting, audit, pension funds, although Ed Decker in human resources has plenty of responsibility for the retirement investments.”

  I wondered again about the conversation I’d overheard between Hank Irvin and David Vanitzky, concerning a million bucks and figurative blood all over the floor.

  “Tell me about Ed Decker.”

  “I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him,” Lauren said. “Oh, I don’t mean I think he’d abscond with the pension fund. But Ed’s a knife-in-the-back kind of guy, always looking out for number one, and too bad if you get in his way. I think he hoped being made senior vice president of human resources would lead to something bigger, like a spot on the board. But it hasn’t. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was put out to pasture, and soon.”

  Her prediction seemed accurate, given that severance agreement I’d revised, the one with Decker’s name on it.

  “There are several other former R&W people in positions over at Bates,” I said. “Nolan Ward in production, for one. Laverne Carson is being replaced as human resources director by someone named Tonya Russell from R&W’s Chicago office.”

  “They’re never ‘former’ R&W people.” Lauren sneered. “Believe me, their first loyalty is to Rittlestone and Weper, not Bates. Vanitzky was Frank Weper’s right-hand man for years, even before Rittlestone hooked up with Weper. And Nolan Ward served the same function for Rittlestone, chief spear carrier and toady. Nolan has no experience for that production job. Neither does Tonya Russell have any human resources experience. She’s a lawyer. She was in my class at Penn. I’ll bet they get rid of Ed and make Tonya the senior VP in charge of HR.” She looked at her watch. “I’ve got to go. I hope what I’ve told you helps.”

  “May I call you if I have additional questions?”

  “Sure.” She took a business card from her purse and scribbled her home phone number on the back. “Anytime.”

  We both stood, and I walked to a nearby trash can to dump the containers that had held our drinks. Somewhere above me I heard a woman’s voice, and I looked up, catching sight of a dark-haired woman standing near the railing on the mezzanine level of Embarcadero Four. She radiated intensity as she gestured. It seemed as if she was doing all the talking. Her back was to me as she talked with a man whose face I couldn’t see. Then they moved. I saw their faces clearly enough to recognize both of them.

  “Well, well,” Lauren said, her voice snide as she joined me at the trash can. “Looks like our old friend Patricia Mayhew is consorting with the enemy. That’s Yale ‘the Rattlesnake’ Rittlestone, in the all-too-scaly flesh.”

  Twenty-two

  WHY WAS PATRICIA MAYHEW MEETING YALE RITTLESTONE at Embarcadero Four at si
x-thirty Monday evening?

  I thought about the possibilities as I boarded the 7:10 P.M. ferry for the return voyage to Oakland. True, their meeting could have been business related. Rittlestone and Weper had an office at Embarcadero Four. The firm owned a majority share of Bates Inc. Patricia was a Bates lawyer. She may have needed to consult with Rittlestone on a corporate matter.

  She certainly hadn’t mentioned any off-site appointments during the legal department staff meeting earlier today. In fact, the only meeting she had mentioned was her one o’clock with Nolan Ward in production. She’d gone downstairs, and as far as I knew when I left the office at four-thirty, she hadn’t returned. I’d take a look at her calendar tomorrow.

  Besides, Patricia didn’t deal with corporate matters. Hank Irvin did.

  I recalled the sight of Patricia and Rittlestone standing on the walkway at Embarcadero Four. Had there been something furtive about their manner? Or was that just my imagination? I’d been so steeped in corporate intrigue over the past few days, it was possible I was reading too much into their tête-à-tête. Lauren Musso had said Hank made sure to stay on Rittlestone’s good side. Perhaps Patricia was trying the same tactic.

  Patricia wasn’t in her office the next morning when I delivered the first batch of mail. Before picking up the contents of her out box, I glanced at the weekly calendar, which lay open on the credenza behind her desk. The only meetings noted for yesterday were the ones I already knew about, the legal department get-together and Patricia’s date with Nolan Ward. His big empire in production included the buyers who purchased fruits, vegetables, and other commodities that went into Bates Best products, as well as the plants that produced them and the merchandisers and marketers who sold them to grocery stores all over California.

  There was nothing to indicate that Patricia had gone over to R&W’s office in San Francisco. She may have done just what I’d done, headed for the city after work. If that was the case, it made her rendezvous with Rittlestone look less like business and more like a personal encounter.