Текст книги "The Villiers Touch"

Автор книги: Brian Garfield

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“Part of them,” Hastings said. “The rest of it must have been done by cooking the books. A lot of things. I’ll lay a few examples on you to give you the drift. First, the company deals in a low-down-payment product-airplanes. Say a plane costs fifty thousand and the customer buys it with five thousand down. Ordinarily you report only the five thousand as income. But when Villiers took over, suppose his accountants cooked the books by inflating earnings with the whole thing in the income column-they report the full scale price as income, not just the down payment. Shady, but legal. They can juggle the inventory accounts to make the assets look greater. They can bring in their own team of auditors, who’ve been coached to show how depreciation has been taken inaccurately, and fiddle with earned-surplus figures and net working capital and other vagaries. They can report the company’s subsidiaries at book value instead of original cost. They can choose between accelerated depreciation and straight-line depreciation. They can take research costs immediately instead of amortizing them over a five-year period. They can announce they’re going to grant stock options, which aren’t charged to income, in lieu of cash bonuses. They can credit capital gains to income. They can, and did, declare a cash dividend last week to increase stockholder confidence. Villiers has created a bull market in Heggins stock overnight by operations like that and by putting out sales literature that convinces the readers it’s a good company to invest in. All kinds of happy talk about talented scientists and engineers, capable financial leadership, and a new management that’s balanced in depth so that the loss of a key exec won’t wreck the company. A spirit of innovation. An aggressive intent to exploit existing markets and create new ones. A good record of sales expansion five years ago, and never mind the years in between. Hell, our boy’s been a one-man inflation for Heggins stock. And it’s easy enough to see what he’s doing now. It’s relatively cheap for one company to take over another company by issuing interest-bearing Chinese money like these Heggins debentures in Villiers’ ad. And I’m not even sure the NCI board of directors will put up a fight.”

Quint said sharply, “Why the devil shouldn’t they?”

It was Burgess who answered him. “Because according to our information, at least two of them have got themselves into a trap that Villiers ingeniously set for them. And if two of them fell into the trap, it’s possible one or two others are in it too that we don’t know about. If it makes up a majority of the board, then the rest of the board members can’t act-they’ve got to sit on their hands while Villiers moves right in.”

Quint said, “Explain yourselves. What sort of trap?”

Hastings said, “Villiers bought himself a speculator’s dream when he took over Heggins. God knows where he got the money. Some of it was an exchange for Melbard Chemical stock, but just the same, he had to raise an incredible amount of capital to pull it off. What he did, in the old-fashioned phrase, he cornered the market in Heggins. There weren’t a hell of a lot of outstanding shares drifting around the market anyway. Villiers planted word, just before he bought the company, that Heggins was overvalued and bound for collapse. He planted it in the right places. Amos Singman and Daniel Silverstein and maybe two or three other NCI board members, among others. They expected a dive in price, and so they sold Heggins short, in big bundles.”

“Now, of course, the price is up, and they’ve got to cover their short sales, and they suddenly find out Villiers has bought up all the shares. Put simply, the short sellers owe Villiers half a million shares, and to pay him they’ve got to buy the shares from him and then give them back to him-and he’s got every legal right to name the price. So he’s got them in a bind, and the only way they can squirm out of it is to sit it out while he moves into NCI.”

Quint said, “It can’t be legal. He’s a control stockholder and he didn’t advise us of his movements in Heggins stock. We can nail him for fraud and failure to divulge inside information.”

“Nuts,” Burgess said sourly. “Do you think he’s done all this in his own name? You can be damn sure Villiers personally doesn’t own more than five percent of Heggins’ outstanding stock. It all belongs to Swiss trusts, and you know damn well how far you’d get trying to prove they belong to him. Even if we could hit him with that technicality, the worst he’d suffer would be a slap on the wrist and a meaningless fine.”

Quint made a face. “You can take a man out of the gutter, but Villiers has never washed off the smell, has he?”

Burgess showed his unhappy consternation by letting his hand dangle limply from his wrist and shaking it back and forth as if wearily drying his fingertips. “We can’t lay a finger on him unless we can prove fraud or extortionate coercion, and you can bet your ass none of the jokers involved are going to admit a thing-unless we can crack Steve Wyatt open.”

Quint put his big head down, thinking. Bill Burgess said, “Don’t forget, we’ve only been moving on this thing for a matter of hours and days. Villiers has had years to plan it out. He’s not an impulsive man-he wouldn’t have this ad in the papers if he hadn’t thought it through. He doesn’t blurt things out, and he doesn’t make easy mistakes.” He shook his head apologetically and uttered a dispirited little laugh.

Hastings shot to his feet. It made Quint’s head skew back with dignified astonishment. Hastings strode back and forth impatiently, hair falling over his eye; he said, “It’s not a question of finding some technical loophole to collar him with. There’s got to be a way to nail the bastard to the wall, pin him like a butterfly so he’ll never get loose.”

Quint murmured, “Do I detect a note of personal animosity? He’s been seen with your wife, I understand.”

“My ex-wife, damn it. And what does it matter whether it’s personal? The man’s guilty of a criminal assault, half of Wall Street will know it by Monday morning, nobody can touch him legally, and we sit here trying to decide if we’ve got enough evidence to hang a parking ticket on him! For God’s sake, there is no such thing as a little rape-we’ve got to stop him cold.”

Quint cocked his head to one side. “You’re really quite an emotional being underneath it all, aren’t you?”

Hastings made an exasperated sound.

The fat man said, “How would you handle it, then? Strap on a revolver and shoot it out with him in Wall Street at high noon?”

He was in no frame of mind for Quint’s brand of drollery; he formed his big hands into loose fists. “Just turn me loose on him, Gordon. Ill bring him down.”

“Large talk,” Quint observed, not visibly stirred. “Are you deliberately implying I’m the only thing standing between you and Villiers’ downfall?”

The skin on Hastings’ face tightened. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

Bill Burgess said uncomfortably, “Cool it down, hey?”

But Hastings wasn’t through. He put his hands on Quint’s desk. “You gave me a speech about why you always go by the book. But this time we’re not in the kind of game that’s played according to Hoyle. It’s a dirty back-alley crap game and if you want to win it you don’t carry your book of Hoyle along, you carry a knife and a set of brass knuckles instead-otherwise you’re a dead loser.”

Quint’s eyes glinted. “I’ll only ask it again, Russ. What do you want? How would you handle it? I’ll listen-sit down and talk.”

He went back to his chair and cuffed the hair back out of his eyes; he glanced at Burgess and said, “Villiers can make his scheme work only as long as NCI doesn’t fight him. He knows he’s got the directors on the run. He must know Judd won’t fight him. With a relatively small cash investment he’s trying to take over a giant corporation worth billions. It can work only if people are willing to give him their NCI shares. If he had to pay for those shares, he’d be stopped-he hasn’t got the money, nobody’s got that kind of money. All right-I say we go to the directors, and we make it hotter for them than he’s making it. We fight him with his own weapons. We force them to switch sides and fight him. Faced with a proxy fight right down to the wire, he’ll go under; he hasn’t got the kind of financial backing it would take to fight it through. Even if he did try to go all the way with it, at least it would give us more time to dig into this thing and develop evidence against him. There have got to be chinks in his armor, and the longer we force him to fight, the more likely he is to make the kind of mistakes that can hang him.”

“I suppose you know exactly how to force the NCI board to turn against him?”

“If there’s one thing I learned with Jim Speed,” Hastings said softly, “it’s how to put pressure on people.”

“I don’t like it.”

“I didn’t think you would.”

“Go on,” Quint said, “both of you. Get out of here and leave me in peace.”

“You’re not buying it, then?”

“I didn’t say that, did I?” Quint did not smile; he glowered. “Every decision I make in this office is subject to review by higher authority, Russ. I can’t authorize you to use threats or extortion. On the other hand, you’re under no obligation to explain to me the nature of every stitch you sew into the fabric of your case. If you get results, that’s all anyone will notice. If you fail, it’s your neck, not mine. Clear?”

“Clear,” Hastings said. Feeling vital and alive, full of juices, he bolted out of the chair and strode to the door. “Come on, Bill.”

Burgess trailed him into his own office. Miss Sprague was out to lunch; there were three or four phone messages on his desk. He glanced through them and put them aside. “Damn it,” he said, “I feel good. For the first time in months.”

“Something you can sink your teeth into,” Burgess said. “I’ve been watching you flounder around like a headless chicken. Waiting for you to snap out of it. Ever since you got divorced, you’ve been acting as if you didn’t know who you were or what you wanted.”

Hastings gave him a look of surprise. “You see a lot, don’t you? You’re right, you know. Until a short time ago I was wandering around as if I’d lost myself somewhere in all the confusion. It’s like a nightmare-you keep trying to see yourself in terms of other people, like looking in a distorted mirror. I fell in love with a woman I didn’t even know. Whipped up all kinds of enthusiasm for a job Elliot Judd offered me when I knew all the time it wasn’t for me, it had nothing to do with me.”

“Forget it, Russ. You’ve turned the leaf over-I’ve seen the change in you. You could have ignored this NCI trouble, it was nothing but a vague hunch-but you sank both hands in it right up to the elbows.”

“Sure I did. Because right down inside I’m a gut-fighter, Bill. It took a long time to discover it, and I feel like a fool. But something clicked on this job. I’m a predator just like Mason Villiers. I like a good fight. I need to be where it’s at. Right down at bedrock, I’ve got the temperament of a good old-fashioned cop. Set me down in a precinct station house and I’ll bet I’d blend right into the woodwork.”

Burgess grinned at him. In a different voice, Hastings said, “I’m going to enjoy matching wits with Mason Villiers. And I think I’m going to beat him. It can’t be done Quint’s way, but it can be done.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“I’ve got to have you with me right down to the wire, Bill, and it may get sticky. We’re going to tromp on some important toes.”

“Which Quint won’t know about?”

“Which Quint won’t know about.”

“Then I guess my boss better not know about it either,” Burgess said, and spread his grin even wider. “Where do we start?”

“With Ansel Cleland. Villiers got himself a corner on Heggins, and he’s using it to whip Cleland’s board into line. All right. Cleland can get back at him by staging a bear raid on stock in every company Villiers controls. He puts together a syndicate which sells Villiers short and publicizes the fact. They force the market price of those stocks down to levels where Villiers’ creditors will sell him out to protect their loans-I’m taking it for granted Villiers has hocked every share he owns to finance this operation. Maybe he’ll pull in his horns, and maybe he won’t, but at least he’ll have to scramble to raise the cash to pay off his margins, and when a man like Villiers goes after cash in a hurry, he’s likely to do something we can nail him for.”

“Fine. But how do we persuade Cleland to stage a counterraid against him?”

“Any stockholder has a right to file a private suit demanding a full accounting of the board’s activities. All we need to do is find one man who owns one share of NCI and who’s willing to file suit. We explain that to Cleland.”

“I see. It puts the heat on his directors-‘full disclosure.’”

“Exactly right. Cleland’s directors will have to fight Villiers, no matter what it costs them, because if they don’t, our stockholder suit will drag them into court, and they’ll have to admit out loud, under oath, that they knuckled under to Villiers’ extortion. They won’t dare have it brought out in open court. They’ll fight Villiers.”

Burgess said mildly, “It’s all pretty shady, isn’t it? I mean, I don’t know anywhere in the regulations where it says the SEC or my department are empowered to pull this kind of stunt. It’s pretty raw-what if Quint finds out about it?”

“Why don’t we worry about that if and when it happens?”

“Okay. You’re the boss.” Burgess stood up. “Who goes to Cleland? You or me?”

“We both do. When he knows both our departments are cooperating on it, he’ll be impressed.”

“If he only knew,” Burgess said, and chuckled.

Hastings reached for the phone. “I want Villiers hung in a proxy fight where the whole world can see him fall down. If we don’t pin him to the wall with legal evidence, at least we’ll make damn sure he never does business in this town again.”

“You don’t mind fighting a little dirty yourself, do you?”

“I told you,” Hastings said, finding Cleland’s number in the Wheeldex and beginning to dial, “I’m a cop. My job is to stop the bad guys-any way I can.”

29. Diane Hastings

There was a phone call from Mason Villiers at four o’clock. He merely asked if he might drop by Diane’s apartment after dinner to discuss a business matter. “Or perhaps you’d rather meet somewhere?”

She let the silence run on before she said, “No. Come up to my apartment.”

She had trouble keeping her mind on work for the last hour of the working day; she was alarmed by the way she responded to him with both fear and fascination. She knew she could be an absurdly easy mark for Mason’s seduction, if she wanted it. She did not want it, and that was what troubled her. She was afraid.

At home she ate a silent dinner served by the unobtrusive day maid, who after washing the dishes removed her apron and said good night and left. Diane sat in the living room with a cup of coffee, irritable and impatient, trying to read an art-museum catalog. If only I could stand being alone at night.

When the doorman buzzed to announce her visitor, she paused on her way to the door to inspect herself in the mirror. Her lips were spotted; she had chewed the lipstick from her lower lip in her agitation. She repaired it quickly and opened the hall door when she heard the elevator arrive.

His cool, handsome face glittered; he was in high spirits, not bothering to conceal his satisfaction. He strode past her into the apartment and made the customary appreciative remarks about the decor, which surprised her, coming from him-and then it occurred to her he might have done it for just that reason: he liked to keep everyone off balance.

She made drinks, and they sat facing each other across the coffee table, and Mason Villiers said, “I’ve got good news.”

“Tell me.”

“You’re about to make your fortune,” he said.

She arched her eyebrows. “Indeed?”

“I’m on the verge of pulling off the biggest financial coup this town has seen in twenty years-and you’re going to share in it.”

“I am?”

“You’re the one who made it possible,” he said.

“I didn’t realize Melbard Chemical was all that much of a coup.”

“It’s the key that’s opening the floodgates. By this time next month you’ll be a millionaire in your own right.”

“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand,” she said.

“Let’s just say the price of Melbard stock is going to shoot through the roof-which means Nuart will go right along with it, since Nuart’s merged with Melbard.”

She laughed uneasily. “I still don’t understand, but I’ll take your word for it.”

“Yes,” he said. He was staring fixedly at her. She swallowed the last of her drink and realized she had finished it too quickly. She felt light-headed and hot.

He rose from his seat with the flowing lazy grace of a well-fed lion and came around the coffee table, put his hand at the back of her neck, and bent his head toward her. Fear quivered in her eyes; she drew back and shook her head violently. “No, Mason.”

He straightened, but his hand remained at the back of her neck, hard and heavy. For a moment, staring into his face, she could not get her breath; she was frozen with an unknown dread. She whipped away from him and went striding away to a neutral side of the room, still shaking her head. When she got her breath she said finally, “No, I won’t have it. I won’t be just another scalp for you to hang on your belt.”

“I thought we’d celebrate our success. But have it your way-we’re both grown up, aren’t we? I can hardly expect you to start breathing hard every time I come in sight. All right, I won’t make it cheap-you don’t have to be afraid. Come back and sit down. I’ll keep my distance.”

She returned to her seat, still half-consumed by disbelieving wariness. “I’m grateful.”

“Are you? I’m not altogether sure you wouldn’t have preferred to have me overpower you. Maybe you need to be taken by force, for it to work.”

“Now you’ve made me feel cheap. Is that what you really think of me?”

“I’ve never been altogether sure what to think of you,” he said. “You’ve turned down my advances three times running. Three strikes, I’m out. I won’t try it again.”

“You didn’t really try all that desperately hard, now, did you?” she said recklessly.

“Is that an invitation?”

“You know better than that.”

He sat back with his drink; his eyelids drooped. An effervescence had begun inside her, and she denied it silently, but it crept through her body, a sultry heat like alcohol in the blood; it made her body feel looser, but it conjured up at the same time an image of rutting sweat and tangled sheets, and that image was all she needed to regain her resistance. She put on a cool smile, an arch look of self-confident control, and she said, “Thank you for not pressing the point. It would have made things disagreeable if you’d forced me to throw you out.”

He put his glass down on the table. “How long has it been since you’ve had a man?”

She blanched; she bridled. “You love taking people by surprise, don’t you?”

“Sometimes it’s the best way to break through to the answers.”

“Your questions can be very crude. That one was. You don’t honestly expect me to answer it?”

“You might have surprised me.”

“I won’t. In any case, it doesn’t matter that much to me. There are some of us who think about other things than sex, hard as that may be for you to believe.”

He only smiled a little and stood up. “Can I freshen your drink?”

“A weak one.”

“I didn’t have it in mind to get you smashed.” He took her glass away, and she put her head back and closed her eyes, listening to the clink of ice cubes as he made the drinks.

When he returned and settled facing her, she opened her eyes and said, “Are you going to tell me about your magnificent coup?”

“Do you want me to?”

“Of course. It’s what you came for, really, isn’t it? To do a little genteel bragging?”

That made him laugh softly, but his eyes didn’t laugh. “Not really. You don’t know much about me, after all, do you?”

“I know you’ve always fascinated me. You’re real, I’ll give you that-the kind of violence and force most people have never remotely tasted and can never understand.”

“But you do?”

“There’s a little of the same thing in me. I’ve met only a very few people who really understand how to enjoy power. Mostly they just go after it because it’s the way they were brought up, it’s part of the value system they’ve always been surrounded by. But they don’t really comprehend it. They make money because everybody approves of you when you make money. Even millionaires-they’re just doing it because it’s a game to play, a way to pass the time. But you’re not like that, I know that much. You don’t really care about money for its own sake, do you? What counts with you is the power to dominate the world. The difference between being kept waiting and keeping others waiting. Doesn’t it come down to that?”

He drank silently, and when his eyes narrowed she had the feeling, in that brief instant, that he was unguarded; something she had said had stripped the carefully crafted armor from him and left him naked before her. She comprehended that in this precise moment she had the absolute power to get total control of him-if only she knew the right method.

He said in an odd, light voice, “It’s funny. I’ve got dozens of people involved in this thing, and all any of them can see is the Goddamned money. They look at it, and the only thing they see is the size of the risk and the dollars-they’re awed by all those zeros. All those people and all those brains, and you’re the only one who sees the point, you’re the only one who can put your finger on what I’m really after.”

The armor had rejoined; the moment was gone; and now she said uncertainly, “I don’t think you’re pleased that I know. It bothers you, doesn’t it? It was your secret.”

Instead of giving her a direct reply, he got onto his feet and went over to the front wall and stood pretending to look at the Cezanne and the Corot. With his back to her he said, “This deal of mine is going to make you very rich. Or very powerful, choose your own word. I told you that, didn’t I?”

“You told me.”

“Has it occurred to you to wonder why I went out of my way to bring you into this thing? You, rather than someone else, some other company?”

“Of course it has.”

“You haven’t asked. Not once.”

“If I had,” she said, “would you have given me a straight answer?”

He turned to face her. “I will now.”

She kept her face strict and composed.

He said, “You’ll see the beauty in the irony of it. You see, the big coup I mentioned-I’m taking your father’s empire away from him.”

It took a moment for it to sink in. Her face changed slowly as realization came to her.

He said, “It’s intriguing, in an odd way, that you’ll profit from your father’s defeat. It always appealed to me.”

She was stiff, cold; she said in a hoarse breath, “Why?”

“A Freudian nutcracker might say I was raised by nuns and I learned to hate women in positions of executive authority. I doubt it, but it’s as good an excuse as any. Of course, it might be because you turned down my advances. If you think I’m that cheap. Actually, I doubt I could give you a good sensible answer. The design of it, the composition, the balance-that’s what appealed to me from the start. Years ago I went to your father with a deal that would have made him richer and made my fortune. He turned me down flat-not because the deal was no good, but because he didn’t want to have anything to do with me. Me, personally. I wasn’t good enough for Elliot Judd.” He gave her a very quiet, soft little smile and turned his hands over as if to say, You see how it is.

Watching him in horror, she became slowly enraged-flesh aquiver, eyes bulging. She caught herself; she said in a stiff low voice that trembled, “You’ll never do it. My father has hung tougher men than you out to dry!”

“Your father,” he said gently, “won’t live long enough to stop me.”

He strolled unhurriedly to the door, went through it, and pulled it shut behind him.

She walked toward the door woodenly, as stubbornly blind as a wind-up toy; she leaned both arms against the door, and after a while she heard the soft chunk of the elevator door. She went back to the drink she had left by her chair and drained it at a gulp. Then, still moving like a mechanism, she reached for the telephone and dialed the operator and said in a voice that broke, “I want to call Arizona.”

Brian Garfield

Villiers Touch

30. Russell Hastings

By Sunday night the young prisoner was hoarse from the sixty cigarettes he had consumed in the last eight hours. He had chewed his manicure to pieces. The small room was all but empty of furniture; Hastings and Bill Burgess camped hipshot against the spindly wooden table-the room wasn’t designed for sitting.

Steve Wyatt got up after ten minutes’ graveling silence and began to stride back and forth. His eyes were pouched, his clothes punctuated by wrinkles and creases.

The room’s air was thick with heavy body heat. Russ Hastings, stripped down to a rumpled pink shirt, felt tired and angry.

Bill Burgess said, “Nobody’s after your cherry, Wyatt. Why don’t you relax?”

“Why don’t you cool yourself off? You’re melting my butter.”

“We don’t want you, Wyatt. We want the big one. Villiers.”

“Look, I’m nobody’s flunky. Not Villiers’, not anybody’s.”

Hastings drawled mildly, “It’s no time to get contentious, Steve. We’ve got enough documentation to put you away for quite a few years, if the impulse strikes us.”

“Yeah. What other heroic kinds of work do your snoops do besides inspecting the contents of vacuum-cleaner bags and wastebaskets?”

“It netted us your copies of the phony sheets you planted on your employer, didn’t it?”

“Suppose I say somebody must have planted that stuff in my apartment?”

Burgess shrugged. “You could try that on a jury. I don’t think they’d like the fit of it much, but you could try. Now, quite waltzing with us, kid. You can’t afford to-you don’t know how much we know. Go back and sit down, and let’s talk.”

“God, you’re a stubborn pair of bastards!”

“We have to be. And you’d be wise to remember it.”

Wyatt’s eyes flickered when they touched Burgess’. Finally he pulled the chair out and sat down. “Look, can I get bail?”

“If you decide to cooperate, you won’t need any.”

“You bastards make it sound easy, don’t you? You make it sound as if I’d get off free as a bird. The fact is, if I tell you what you want to know, there’s going to be a hell of a lot of mud flying, and a good deal of it will stick on me.”

“You took that chance when you threw in with Villiers,” Burgess said. “Isn’t it a little late to worry about it now? Look, we’re all tired, and if you don’t want to testify, you don’t have to. I offer my personal guarantee you’ll end up making mail sacks in Atlanta, but it’s your choice.”

Wyatt’s jaw muscles stood out like cables. He looked from Burgess to Hastings. His eyes were tired and raw. He lit a cigarette and held it in the manner of an actor preparing to turn toward the audience and deliver the line that would bring down the curtain, and Hastings felt himself tense up. But what Wyatt said was, “I don’t suppose there’d be any way of keeping it from my mother?”

“I won’t kid you,” Burgess said. “It’s going to be the biggest Wall Street news break since Robert Young went after the New York Central. I’m just stating facts, not enjoying it. You understand?”

There were signs stamped in Wyatt’s face that Hastings saw with quick and easy recognition, and a slight contempt. To prime him, Hastings prompted, “You went with Villiers and another man to a board meeting of the NCI directors. Who was the third man with you?”

“Sidney Isher. You must know that if you know I was there.”

“All right. Who’s Isher?”

In the corner, the telephone rang. Burgess went to answer it. Hastings said, “Who’s Isher?”

“He works for Villiers.”

“Doing what?”

“Keeping the flies off him, maybe. I don’t know. He’s a lawyer. He draws up papers, that kind of thing. You’d have to ask him.”

“We will. Now, what about-”

At the phone, Burgess had turned, catching his eye. Hastings went to the phone, crossing paths with Burgess, who said to Wyatt, “Ready to have your statement taken down by a stenographer now?”

“I guess so,” Wyatt said, drained.

Burgess went to the door to call outside; Hastings picked up the telephone.

“Russ? It’s Diane.”

“Hello,” he said, unable to think of anything else to add.

“It’s important, Russ.” She sounded dulled, as if she had taken a drug. “I’ve been trying to find you all weekend-I’ve been on the phone several times with Lewis Downey in Arizona. It doesn’t look as if my father’s going to last the night out, but I’m flying out there now to be with him. I’m at the airport now-I only have a minute. I hope I can get there in time. But I had to reach you-I saw Mason Villiers Friday night. You remember when you asked me about him?”

“Yes, I remember. My God, I’m shocked to hear-he seemed to be holding his own when I saw him…”

“It seems to have hit suddenly. Lewis said the doctors had warned him this could happen almost anytime. But Russ-they’re calling my plane, I must hurry-listen to me. I’ve told my lawyers to try to break off the deal with Mason Villiers, if it isn’t already too late. You were right about him, I should have listened to you. He’s a dangerous megalomaniac. But something he said the other night has been echoing around in my head ever since, and it just came to me how important the implication was. He said-let me see if I can remember the exact words-he said he was going to take my father’s company away from him, and then we argued, and I said my father would never let him do it, and then he said to me-I’m sure these are his words-‘Your father won’t live long enough to stop me.’ Do you understand what I’m saying, Russ?”

“I understand it very well. Diane, tell your father-Oh, hell, what’s the point?”

“You’ve always loved him, Russ, he knows that. I’m glad you went out to see him-Oh, God, I’ve got to run, I’ll miss my plane. I’ll call you from the ranch.”

The line went dead. Hastings hung up and turned. The stenographer was settling in a chair with her notebook; Burgess looked up at him. He said, “Villiers knows Elliot Judd is dying.”