Vance Sterling: The Cuyahoga Docket — Book 2
Nancy Hale had made three lists since noon, and the storm had beaten two of them.
The first had been the sensible one — the caterer’s girl on Larchmere, the walks salted, Mr. Albright’s gray suit back from the cleaner before the roads went. The snow started eating that list around two. The second was shorter and involved the telephone, and by four it had come down to a single call, the one she had placed to the twenty-third floor of the Terminal Tower at ten minutes past four, standing in the butler’s pantry with the door shut so Gordon Albright would not hear how his own secretary’s voice sounded when she asked for help.
The third list she was keeping in her head, because writing it down would have made it real. It was a list of everyone who would be sleeping under this roof tonight, and what each of them stood to gain if her employer lost everything by morning.
Wayne Talbot had driven her over at four thirty, before the county trucks gave up on Shaker Boulevard — her fiancé, who dispatched freight for a living and so was the only man she knew who treated a night like this one as an ordinary Thursday. He had carried in the folding chairs from the garage without being asked, and found the card table for the coffee service, and he was out there now with a flashlight, running an extension cord to the porch light that had burned out a week ago and mattered tonight. Through the front window she could see the beam swinging in the snow, patient as a lighthouse.
She was checking the percolator when the doorbell rang, and it was not the enemy. It was the help.
Vance Sterling filled the doorway the way a door fills a wall, and behind him, in a coat that had seen worse winters and declined to discuss them, stood Irene Miller with a briefcase in each hand.
“Miss Hale,” Sterling said. “You made the right call.”
“I made the only call, Mr. Sterling.”
“Those are usually the same thing.” He handed her his hat and stepped past her, and then he did something none of Gordon’s other visitors had done in the eleven years she had run this house: he stopped in the middle of the front hall and simply looked at it. Doorways. The stairs. The long corridor west toward the guest wing. The telephone on its table, and the second one, visible through the library door, on the desk. He looked at the house the way she imagined a surveyor looked at a field where somebody intended to put a road.
Miller had already set both briefcases on the hall bench and opened the first one. “Two lines or one?”
“Two,” Nancy said. “The library and the kitchen. The kitchen’s a party line.”
“Then it doesn’t exist. Where do I work?”
“The morning room. There’s a desk and the light’s good.”
“You keep the coffee coming and I’ll love you till spring,” Miller said, and carried her own cases in, and that was the entire negotiation. Nancy had spent six years learning which of the men who came through this house needed handling and which needed feeding. It took her four sentences to learn that Irene Miller needed neither.
Gordon came down at five thirty, dressed like a man going to his own hearing, which by nine tomorrow morning he would be. He had lost weight this year that he could not spare, and he stood in the library doorway with his hands in his pockets, watching the snow fill up the yard.
“They’ll be late,” he said. “Carl’s never been on time for anything he didn’t want.”
“He wants this,” Nancy said, and regretted it, and Gordon smiled at her anyway, the tired smile he used now instead of arguing.
“Yes,” he said. “He does.”
The tally she was not writing down: one client, who a year from tonight — a year almost to the day, though she had decided not to count — had walked in his sleep with an ice pick in his hand and frightened his wife out of the house, the marriage, and the state of Ohio. One decree, set for nine in the morning, that would finally let him stop paying for a thing he could not remember doing. And one business partner, driving in from Pepper Pike through a storm the radio was calling the worst since last January’s, to explain what the last eighteen hours of that marriage were going to cost.
Brandt arrived at seven, stamping like a draft horse, in a camel coat gone dark across the shoulders with snow. He gave Nancy the coat without looking at her, took the best chair in the library without being offered it, and ate four of the sandwiches she had made for eight people, which told her the number that mattered: he intended to be here a long time.
The lawyer he brought was another kind of animal entirely. Bernie Ostrander came in on rubber galoshes he removed at the door and set together, toes out, like a man leaving his shoes at church. He said, “A dreadful evening, Miss — Hale, is it? — and I apologize for our part in it,” and she believed the apology about as far as she could have carried him, but she noticed the sentence. It had been counted before it was spent. Every one of his sentences had. All evening he would say precisely as much as he had decided to say in the car, and not one word of the rest.
Ted Mercer came last, at half past seven, though he had the shortest drive of anyone. Through the sidelight she watched him stamp the snow off his shoes on the porch — outside, in the cold, so that nobody would have to mop the hall — and then he came in with the two ledger books under his arm and his reading glasses already out of their case, as if the numbers might be needed at the door.
“Nancy,” he said. “You shouldn’t have had to do all this.”
“It’s what I do, Mr. Mercer.”
“Ted. It’s my brother’s house.” He looked down the hall toward the library, where Brandt’s voice was already up and going like a furnace, and something crossed his face that in a bolder man might have been anger. “Half past seven,” he said, “and he’s already performing.”
That was the entire complaint. He hung up his own coat, and went in to be the only man in the room who knew what the company was actually worth, and the last one anybody would ask.
It was Sterling who raised the question of Erie.
He did it in the back hall around a quarter to eight, quietly, to Miller and to her — and Wayne was there too, because Wayne had been everywhere all evening, being useful. Sterling laid it out in that unhurried voice that made everything sound like the third point of five: whatever was agreed or not agreed in that library tonight, the divorce lived or died at nine o’clock, ninety miles east, with Helena. If she left the cottage before dawn, they should want to know it. If lawyers came to her, they should want to know that more.
“In this,” Miller said. She meant the storm. “Nobody’s watching anything tonight. Cruz couldn’t get a man to Erie by morning if he owned the turnpike.”
“The turnpike’s closing behind the plows now,” Wayne said. “It was on the radio.”
“Then it can’t be done,” Sterling said, in the tone of a man crossing out point three.
“I could do it.”
Nancy turned and looked at him. They all did. Wayne stood there with the flashlight still in his hand, snow melting on his shoulders from the porch, and shrugged — the same shrug as the day he offered to drive her mother to the clinic every Tuesday, all winter, and had done it, all winter.
“I-90’s still open eastbound, or it was an hour ago. I’ve run that road in worse, dispatching. Freight moves in this, you know. Somebody’s got to tell it where to go.” He smiled at her, then at Sterling, deflecting. “I’m no use in there anyway. I can’t even follow what a stock buyback is. But I can sit in a warm car and watch a cottage, and there’s a pay phone at the Lake City exit. I checked the change in my ashtray already.”
I checked the change in my ashtray already. Every other man under this roof tonight was circling Gordon Albright like weather, and the one she was going to marry had gone out to his car for dimes before anybody had thought to ask him for anything. He was ready first, and quiet about being ready. Nancy stood in the back hall and let herself feel lucky.
Sterling took longer to answer than the offer seemed to need. He looked at Wayne the way he had looked at the front hall.
“Call the house when you’re in position,” he said finally. “And again if so much as a light changes. There’ll be someone by the phone all night.”
“That’ll be me,” Nancy said.
“That’ll be her,” Wayne agreed, and grinned, and went to find his gloves. She watched him go with the flashlight swinging at his side. A dispatcher’s habit, the dimes — the change counted and the road run in his head before anybody had asked him for either. She had never once had to ask that man for anything.
He left at twenty to ten. But before that, at a few minutes past eight, she carried the second pot of coffee into the library, and the room went quiet the particular way a room goes quiet when the number in it has just been said aloud.
The fire was up. Gordon stood at the window with his back to all of them. Ted had his glasses off. Ostrander was examining the crease of his trousers as though the figure had nothing to do with him, had merely passed through the room on its way somewhere else.
Carl Brandt stood at the hearth, warming his hands, enormous and easy, a man entirely at home in the eleventh hour of somebody else’s life.
“One million eight,” he said to the fire, agreeably, as if the coffee arriving had reset the conversation and he didn’t mind saying it twice. “Cash terms, signed tonight. Or at nine o’clock Helena walks into that courtroom and takes it all off the table — the decree, the wedding, the whole spring thaw.” He turned around and smiled at the room, and warmed his hands behind him now, and looked, Nancy thought, exactly like a man who had already measured these walls for his own pictures.
“Somebody should freshen the pot,” he said. “We’re going to be here a while.”
By the time Bernie Ostrander had finished reading the buyback clause aloud — the second complete reading, at Sterling’s request, on the theory that the first had been performed too quickly to be understood by the ordinary shareholder, of whom there were two in the room — the mantel clock in the Albright library had given up half past eight, and Vance Sterling had settled into the particular patience he reserved for men who believed they had him on a schedule.
They did have him on a schedule. That was the trouble with it.
He sat where he had chosen to sit, in the wing chair with its back to no door, with the fire on his left and the whole chessboard in front of him: Brandt planted at the hearth like a man who had bought it; Ostrander upright at the desk with the documents squared in front of him; Gordon Albright at the window, looking at the snow the way prisoners look at weather; and Ted Mercer in the corner with the ledgers open on his knees, present in the way furniture is present, which suited every man in the room but Sterling.
“Thank you,” Sterling said, when Ostrander stopped. “Now the valuation schedule. Exhibit B.”
“You have Exhibit B in front of you, Mr. Sterling.”
“I have it. I’d like to hear it. A number a man won’t say out loud is a number he doesn’t plan to defend.”
Brandt laughed at that, a big warm sound with nothing warm in it. “You want to hear numbers, counselor? Here’s a number. Twelve hours. Whatever else is in that stack, that’s the one doing the work tonight.”
“I’m aware of the hour, Mr. Brandt. It’s why we’re proceeding carefully. Haste at this table costs your client money and mine his company, and neither of us is here for that.” Sterling turned a page he had already read twice. “Exhibit B, Mr. Ostrander. From the top.”
It was not a defense, what he was running. He wanted to be clear with himself about that, the way he made junior men be clear in memoranda: state what the motion actually does, not what you wish it did. Delay standing alone won a client nothing. At nine o’clock the doors opened on the third floor of the Domestic Relations division whether this room had agreed to anything or not, and Helena Albright would either walk through them and take her decree, or walk through them and take everything else. No amount of reading aloud moved that by a minute.
What the reading did was starve the close. A man who deals in pressure needs the pressure rising; Brandt had built his whole evening — the late hour, the storm, the fireside geniality with the numbers in it — around one instrument, and the instrument had a flaw Sterling had been turning over since Nancy Hale’s telephone call that afternoon.
The threat was Helena dismissing her own case. Very well. Point one: the case was hers. Her petition, her year of grinding through the lists, her extreme cruelty count with the ice pick in it, drafted by careful counsel who had so far filed nothing tonight, moved nothing, noticed nothing up. Point two: a dismissal did not merely punish Gordon. It kept Helena married — married to the house she had fled barefoot down a snowbound street a year ago, married to the man she had seen over her bed with steel in his hand. Every month of delay a new petition would cost her was a month of staying Mrs. Gordon Albright, which was the one condition on earth that woman had demonstrated she could not endure. Point three, therefore: the gun on this table was loaded with a cartridge Helena could not afford to fire, and the man waving it around either knew that or did not, and the lawyer behind him —
Sterling glanced at Ostrander, who was reading Exhibit B in a voice like a court reporter’s, giving each figure the same weight, favoring nothing, promising nothing.
— the lawyer behind him knew it to the penny. Worth knowing, all of it.
So: no panic in the room. Feed no clocks. Make every stage of the thing cost an hour, and watch whether the man holding the gun got louder as the night got older. Loud was good. Loud meant the trigger was still theater.
At ten minutes to nine, Sterling asked for the 1976 audit.
“The ’seventy-six audit,” Brandt said. “Almighty God.”
“You’ve valued a going concern at one million eight, Mr. Brandt. A third of the exhibit rests on your machine-tool inventory, which was appraised —” Sterling found the line without looking for it ” — in March of 1976, by a firm in which I count two of your golf partners. If the number is honest it will survive the evening. Honest numbers generally do. It’s the other kind that can’t sit in a room this long.”
“You’re stalling.”
“I’m practicing law. I concede the two have been mistaken for each other before.” He said it mildly, and Brandt grinned in spite of himself, and somewhere behind Sterling, Gordon made a small sound that was almost a laugh and died as one. The first sound he had made in an hour.
It was Ted Mercer who went and got the audit. Of course it was. He came back with it snow-dusted from the car and handed it over wearing his glasses, and Sterling took the moment while he had it in the room.
“Mr. Mercer. You keep these books.”
“I do.”
“In your judgment, as chief financial officer — what is Cuyahoga Precision Gear worth? The whole company. Tonight.”
The corner went very quiet. Ted looked at Brandt, which told Sterling most of what the ledgers would have; and then he looked at Gordon, which told him the rest; and then he answered anyway, which told him the kind of man was sitting in the corner.
“A million one,” Ted said. “A million two, if the winter holds and the Erie Gear contract renews in March. I could defend either number in front of anybody. I couldn’t defend more.”
“For a forty-percent stake, then. His share.”
“Four hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” Ted said. “Generously.”
“Generously,” Sterling agreed, and laid the audit down, and let the arithmetic stand in the middle of the room where everyone could walk around it and view it from all sides. One million eight for a four-hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar interest. The premium wasn’t a price. A price is what a thing costs; a premium like that is what a man costs, and the thing it purchased had been sitting at the window all evening with his back to the room.
Brandt had stopped smiling. “You want to talk about generous, counselor. Eleven years I carried the sales side of this company while Gordon played engineer —”
“Carl,” Ostrander said. One syllable, no weight on it.
“— while Gordon played engineer, and I’m entitled to be bought out at a figure that respects that, and if the family doesn’t see it my way, the family can explain to Helena why her situation ought to keep being her problem. That’s not a threat. That’s the market.”
“My client has made a proposal,” Ostrander said, to the room at large, in the tone of a man reading a correction into a transcript. “He has threatened no one. Mrs. Albright’s decisions regarding her own litigation are hers alone, and no representation concerning them has been made at this table.”
Sterling looked at him for a moment with real appreciation.
It was beautifully done. It was being done, in fact, continuously, the whole evening long — a lawyer laying plank by plank the record of everything he had not said, every representation he had not made, so that whatever happened at nine o’clock, the transcript of Bernie Ostrander’s conduct would read like the Code of Professional Responsibility set to music. Extortion was being conducted through him at a walking pace and there would not be one sentence of it anyone could quote. The disciplinary rules did not forbid a man to be a conduit, Sterling thought, only to be a quotable one. He filed the observation where he filed things: Ostrander’s sentences were not caution. They were masonry. Whatever this man said plainly, ever, in any room, could be taken to the bank at face value, because plain statement was the one expense he never permitted himself except on purpose.
Sterling had known perhaps four lawyers like that. Two were judges now. One was disbarred. He declined to finish the count, and asked for the inventory schedule instead.
The evening went on the way a freight train goes through a crossing, slowly and all at once. Nancy Hale brought the second pot of coffee, and then the third; the storm leaned on the west windows and the west windows held; at some point after nine thirty Wayne Talbot put his head in wearing his coat, said something to the room about the turnpike closing behind the plows that made Brandt look at him without recognition, kissed the air toward Nancy in the hall, and was gone into the general howl. Gordon left the window at last and sat, not at the table but near it, in the manner of a man attending his own case in the third person — and once, when Brandt rounded a figure up by thirty thousand dollars in passing, Gordon opened his mouth, and Sterling moved two fingers on the armrest, and Gordon closed it. Pay anything, the client’s face had said all evening. Pay it and be done and let me be married in Nevada by Sunday and never again wake up owing anything to anyone I frightened. It was a confession looking for a cashier, and if Sterling let the room see it, the price would find another half million in it by ten o’clock.
What does Brandt actually want, Sterling asked himself, watching the big man refill his glass at the bar cart uninvited. Not the money; the money was fantasy arithmetic and Ostrander’s careful face said his own client had been told so. A man asks for the impossible figure when what he wants is the refusal — the refusal, and then the wreckage. Gordon convicted of nothing, merely ruined; the company on the block in a bad market; and one buyer already warm inside it, knowing to the penny where the value ran. Brandt kept glancing at the machines’ schedule the way some men glance at other men’s wives.
The mantel clock offered ten o’clock. Sterling declined it and asked Ostrander to walk him through the covenant not to compete, subsection by subsection, beginning with the definitions.
“We accept the definitions,” Ostrander said.
“I don’t,” Sterling said peaceably. “Definitions are where I was raised, Mr. Ostrander. Humor me. ‘Restricted territory.’ Whose geography —”
The house went off like a shot.
It came up through the floor, a single flat concussion somewhere below the west wing, and after it a long shuddering exhale of pipes all over the house, as if the building had been holding its breath since seven o’clock along with everyone in it. The lights stayed on. The radiator under the west window ticked twice and began, audibly, to die.
Brandt was on his feet with his glass held out from his body like a man aboard a listing ship. “What in the hell —”
“Boiler,” Ted Mercer said, already moving, glasses folded into his breast pocket, quiet as ever and first to the door. “That was the relief valve. Nobody go down there in leather shoes.”
Sterling looked at his watch, and then at the window, where the snow was going past sideways, with ninety miles of it between this house and the only woman whose vote counted; and he put down the covenant not to compete, and revised, without haste, his estimate of how long this night intended to be.
She gave Ted Mercer the guest room over the library, because it shared the chimney with the hearth below and would hold its warmth all night, and she gave Carl Brandt the west bedroom, because the bed in it was long enough for him and because it was at the other end of the house from everyone she liked.
“Mr. Mercer in the guest room — the warm one, over the library,” she said to the linen closet, counting pillowcases. “Mr. Brandt in the west room. The bed’s longer.”
“Nobody’s measured me for a bed since the army,” Wayne said. He was leaning in the doorway of the closet with his coat already on, jingling his keys, watching her count. He had come up to say he was going, and had stayed ten minutes, being no help at all in a manner that somehow shortened the work.
“Nobody’s putting you in one tonight either. Go, if you’re going. Sterling said before eleven.”
“Before eleven.” He straightened up off the