CHAPTER seven
I got up and walked around my desk and stood in front of the closed door. Time to face the troops. Jackie and Sandra, the two legal secretaries and Jessica and Ken, the two paralegals deserved better from me this morning. As much as I was grieving for Ev, I’m sure they were just as shocked and saddened about her death. They had all worked closely with Ev over the years and would miss her dreadfully. The way I had broken the news to them wasn’t fair. I’m always telling people to suck it in and buck-up so I gave myself a mental thrashing and opened the door. I walked around the partitions into the open-concept area where the four of them had their desks. They must have heard me open my door because all four had their heads down and looked like they were diligently working.
"Hey guys." Four faces looked up at me. Jackie still had tears in her eyes and Ken looked like he was going to break down.
"I’m sorry for snapping everyone’s head off. You know I’m not good at that stuff. We’re all gonna miss Ev." I paused and swallowed. "Thanks," I ended off. Big speech for me. Ranting and raving is more my style. I felt awful and shrugged my shoulders. Jackie smiled at me and I knew it was okay.
I turned around and went and stuck my head in Didrickson’s office. He was sitting behind his massive, antique partner’s desk with the phone stuck to his ear. He was taking notes on a legal pad and punching numbers into the phone. Obviously still checking his voice mail messages. I cleared my throat. He looked up and I motioned for him to call me when he was finished. He waved me in and I wandered over to the window to check out the view. Didrickson had one of the prime corner offices in the executive suite and the back wall of his office was all windows. I placed my forehead up against the window and stared down at the street. The cold glass felt good on my face.
I heard Didrickson hang up the phone and I turned around. He finished writing something and looked up at me. He said nothing.
"I’m fine, and you?" I said.
The man was either the coldest person I’d ever met or incredibly shy. After four years I was still trying to figure him out. On a personal level, he didn’t speak unless spoken to, especially to people ‘below’ him. He never initiated personal conversations and showed little interest in anything except work.
"Sorry," he smiled slightly, but quickly put on his serious face. "I got your message about Ev. God, this is terrible. Who’s going to look after her work?"
Fucking typical, I thought disgustedly. "Don’t worry Harold. I’m sure we’ll cope. Technically, she died before midnight, so should I tell payroll not to pay her for yesterday?" I deadpanned.
"Take it easy Kate. It’s just that this is a bad time with the board meeting only a week away. There’s a lot of work to be done." The man had such a heart.
"I’m sorry you’re so shook up about Ev’s death, Harold." I waited. I wanted to see if he understood my tone because sometimes I felt like I had to hit him with a brick - to him everything was so black and white. When he didn’t respond I decided not to waste my breath on the issue. I changed the subject.
"What do you want me to start on for the board meeting?" I asked.
As Corporate Secretary of the company, Didrickson had responsibility for preparing all material to be sent out to the board members in advance of meetings. This was to allow the board members time to look over the material before they were asked to approve it. Usually the two week period before a board meeting was a mad rush trying to get all the papers together and nine times out of ten we ended up giving the material to the directors at the meeting because we never got our shit together in time. Didrickson took this very personally because when he joined the company he vowed that he would get the process in shape and the directors would always have plenty of time to look over the materials they were being asked to approve. It became an obsession with Didrickson and I think the other departments in the company deliberately sabotaged his efforts just to see him squirm. The worst culprits were the beancounters in the finance department who couldn’t organize a senior citizen’s game of shuffleboard. On a quarterly basis the most important documents the directors needed to approve were the financial statements. And the financial statements were never done on time.
Now, call me kooky, but when you know, on a perpetual calendar until the year 2030, when every financial quarter ends, why is it so hard to plan to have something done on time? That’s why Didrickson was sure the other departments were conspiring against him, just to make him look bad. He took it very personally. Sometimes rightfully so, because Harold became the scapegoat every time one of the directors would wake up from his seasonal slumber and realize what he was being asked to approve.
"Draft an agenda and remind me what sub-committee meetings we’re having. You’ll have to do agendas for each of the committees as well. Get the file from last years’ third quarter meeting and bring it in. How are the arrangements for the dinner coming?"
"I’ll check with Vanessa. She’s doing all the meals and looking after the out of town directors. I’ll get some drafts done up for you."
I left his office and went to the kitchenette. I like to embarrass Didrickson by bringing him coffee. He’s never once asked for one and for that reason, I serve him regularly. When I’m really pissed off at him, I’ll wait until he has someone in his office and I’ll poke my head in and ask him if he wants a coffee. It makes him blush every time. Didrickson is so by-the-book, he would never dream of asking the support staff to do anything personal for him. I grabbed the third quarter board meeting file from last year on my way back to his office. I tossed the file in front of him and very gently placed the coffee on a coaster on the leather-top desk. He looked up at me and turned a nice shade of pink. Gotcha, I thought.
I wandered down the hall to Vanessa’s office to talk about the board meeting. She was on the phone, as usual, and I stood in her doorway waiting for her to finish. As usual, Vee was impeccably dressed. Today she had on a classic, navy blue suit with a crisp white blouse. Her hair was perfectly done and it fell to her shoulders in soft waves. We were both cursed with gray hairs but Vanessa had the good grace to colour hers to cover it up. Her make-up was subtle and I caught a slight smell of her perfume. Perfect. She was beautiful but certainly had no pretensions. She went to the gym a couple of times each week and it showed. Vee looked up at me and made a face and I knew she was talking to Oakes.
"Chris, I can’t hear you. Chris... Chris... are you there?" she said into the phone in a loud voice. And then she hung up the phone and started to chuckle.
"Quick," she said, grabbing her purse from under her desk. "Let’s get out of here for coffee." She scrambled out from behind her desk and pushed past me in the doorway and started down the hallway. I trotted to keep up. Vee is the fastest walker I know and I’m always running behind her. How she can walk so fast in her three inch heels is something that defies physics.
"If he calls, I’m in the bathroom," she said to the receptionist as we headed for the elevators. She punched the button. "He was on his cell phone in the limo and I got fed up listening to him so I told him I couldn’t hear him. He’ll be on the phone now chewing out the phone company." We laughed. At least she maintains her sense of humour. Frankly, I think the woman is a saint. She puts up with an incredible amount of shit from Oakes.
Vee’s desk had been next to mine when she started with the company about six years ago. I was working as Shirley Benton’s secretary and Vee had been hired to work as a project secretary in the research and development department. She had kicked her husband out and needed to support her eight year old daughter. Her skills were a little rusty but she quickly picked up the office procedures. She had been Oakes’ secretary now for two years. I knew she took the job with Oakes because she needed the money and it paid well. Her ex missed more support payments than he made and she couldn’t depend on him.
We grabbed our coffees at the counter in the lobby cafe and sat down at a table
in the enclosed room designated for smokers. We didn’t speak until we had both had a couple of drags from our cigarettes. Our favourite coffee shop was soon going to be smoke-free when the city introduced the latest by-law which would ban smoking in all public places.
"God Kate, I didn’t sleep last night. All I could see was Ev’s face. I can’t believe she’s dead. I checked my voice mail about five o’clock and got your message. What happened? Was it a reaction to nuts?"
"The doctors wouldn’t say. The resident in emergency said it looked like a reaction but wouldn’t say one way or the other. He wanted to talk to the immediate family and I couldn’t get in touch with Danny until later. I never went back in to talk to them after she died."
"How did Danny take it? How is he?" she asked.
I shrugged. "OK, I guess. I’ll have to call him later and see if he needs help with anything for the funeral." I changed the subject. "What’s up? What’s going on? Where’s CEO today?"
Vee and I referred to Chris Oakes by his initials.
"He’s off on another secret mission. Totally hush-hush. If anyone asks, he’s in the New York office meeting clients."
"Yeah, right. Now where is he really?"
"He’s meeting with Jack Vincent."
"Well isn’t that interesting," I said slowly. "We haven’t heard of Jack for about three years. What’s going on Vanessa? Come on. What’s the dirt?"
Jack Vincent was a principal of one of the largest underwriting firms in Toronto and his firm had been the lead underwriters on a deal the company had tried to do that went sour. Sour and rotten. The consortium of banks that held the majority of the shares of our company when the original founder died five years ago had hired Jack’s firm to find a buyer for their shares. Because we’re a public company, this was of course highly confidential information, but before long, word leaked on the street and our shares started to inch up. There was speculation on the street that we were going to be bought up by IBM. That was one day. The next day the rumours had us being bought up by AT&T, and the next day it was another rumour. And the share price kept going up.
All of these rumours were way off base. In fact, the big fish on the hook was a German manufacturer that was looking to get into the North American market. The representatives of the banking consortium along with our executive team had been holed-up in a hotel in New York City for a week when the deal was almost ready to close. The owner of the German firm, Jozef Glass was leading his team of executives and his guns for hire, a Wall Street law firm. The negotiations were completed and the lawyers were finalizing their mountains of paper when the deal was suddenly called off. The Germans left town that day and our guys all returned home.
I heard later that Chris Oakes was the reason the Germans pulled out. Jozef Glass was a typical German and expected everything to be orderly and done his way. He must have thought he was awake in the middle of a nightmare when he finally called off the deal. Chris Oakes had done his smooth sales job about the company to Glass and the German bought it, hook, line and sinker. But as we got closer to the closing date, and everyone was practically living together, working around the clock, Glass got a taste of the real Chris Oakes. Manic depressive and psychotic behaviour became the norm. Chris would agree to something, in front of witnesses and then change his mind minutes later, denying total knowledge of his previous agreement. Bizarre behaviour that we were all used to but it finally got to Glass. After a particularly gruelling, eighteen-hour negotiation session, Jozef Glass telephoned Oakes at two in the morning and told him the deal was off. Of course, Oakes told all of us that he called off the deal, but we knew better. I guess it wasn’t meant to be a marriage made in heaven. Our shares dropped from $16.00 to $8.00 overnight. The rumours on the street were right on the money that time.
Jack Vincent became persona non grata at TGC. The banks were desperate by then to dump their shares so they sold their shares to the public. This was accomplished in two public offerings in the space of twelve months. They got their money and we got some more shareholders. Right now we have one shareholder who holds six percent of the stock and the rest is disbursed among thousands of other shareholders.
If Jack Vincent was back in the picture after three years something must be up. If we were doing another public offering by selling treasury shares to the public to raise more money, I’d know about it. The board would have made the decision and we would have rammed the paperwork through and got the issue sold. We had done that several times in the past couple of years. And each time, we used a different underwriting firm than the one Jack worked for.
"You think they’ve hired Jack to find a buyer again?" I asked Vee.
"I hope so. And if they find a buyer, I hope they fire Chris' ass," Vee said disgustedly.