Deadline Man

I have no idea who Animal Spirits LLC is. It sounds like the kind of band that would have played down at the Crocodile in the old days, but I know it was a phrase from John Maynard Keynes. He talked about the role of “animal spirits” in the market. I use Google and Nexis to search for the firm and come up with nothing. Nobody has written about it. LLCs are notoriously murky; they’re meant to conceal the identity of their principals. The 13-D tells me nothing more than the name. I guess it’s a private equity outfit, still one of the largely unregulated playpens for the very rich to invest their money and reap huge returns, or, sometimes, big losses. Their specialty is “rip, strip, and flip.” They buy companies on the cheap, take them private, lay off as many employees as possible, close unprofitable business lines, bolster the profitable sides, strip and sell assets, then take what’s left public again. It’s big money for the winners. Private equity operates largely in the shadows, parallel to, and in competition with, traditional Wall Street. Even so, many private equity houses have their own Web sites. Not Animal Spirits. This won’t stay in the shadows long. Usually a letter to management is made public, saying the company is undervalued and either making an outright takeover or demanding change. That will rock the world of Olympic’s chairman and CEO, Pete Montgomery, Troy’s old college buddy.

I link into the newspaper’s system and write pieces of the column as fast as I can, about its recent performance, speculation on the Street, the SEC filing. Sometimes stories come from press conferences. Everybody gets the news when the company or government allows them to have it. Me, I try to find news as it is becoming. Now I have followed a hunch about an old-line company into a potential exclusive. While I write, I wish more people would call me back so I can write with more confidence. I don’t just want to tell readers about the filing. The Times could easily get that, too, if they have a reporter covering the company or an editor watching the SEC. The Wall Street Journal can get it. The news may already be online. I type fast and hard. I wear out computer keyboards.

I have to explain what it means and try to look ahead. Here, my source’s insights will make a big difference, especially about the defense subsidiary. I sell business intelligence, to shareholders, employees, vendors, competitors—anybody who wants to shell out fifty cents for the Free Press. Hell, you can get it online for free. Anybody can be a columnist for two weeks, and then he or she runs out of ideas. Anybody today can be a “columnist” on a blog. But to be a real columnist for a major newspaper, to be one of the most popular destinations at the paper—whether on the dead-trees edition or online—that’s one of the hardest gigs to attain and sustain in the working press. A few of us were born to it and nothing else. I’m one.

Finally, I recharge my cell and use the land-line to call in a favor. Once I helped the owner of a parking management company who was being screwed by the city. He knows he owes me big, and after my initial call he gets back to me in twenty minutes with the information I want. I use that twenty minutes to keep writing, and all the while I know that I am losing time, losing time, deadline is coming. I grab my suit coat, a couple of props, and make a fast walk ten blocks.

Olympic International occupies an award-winning glass tower on First Avenue. The lobby has twenty-foot-tall Diego Rivera murals of forests and mountains, and the rough-hewn men who are taking their bounty. They came out of the old headquarters and were commissioned when natural resources were the company’s main business. Reinstalling them in the new tower lobby caused consternation among the local environmental crowd, which is sizable. On the other hand, people in Seattle said, Rivera was a socialist so the art provides an ironic critique of rapacious capitalism. And the preservationists were happy to see them saved. But the murals stay because Pete Montgomery wants them to. I walk past the murals to the elevator bank and wait.

Five minutes go by and a pretty Asian woman with a briefcase walks up to one of the elevators for the parking garage. I join her and we step into the elevator. She swipes her card as I hoped she would and the elevator heads for level P-3.

“Thank you,” I say.

She smiles and doesn’t give it another thought. I’m in a suit, and made sure I am carrying both a cardboard file box, to keep my hands too full to swipe a key card, and my expensive Coach briefcase, to show I am safely in the executive class. The file box is empty. I’ve attached my Seattle Free Press employee ID to my belt; facing inward it looks pretty much like the ones worn by Olympic employees. I’m just the nice fellow management employee who can’t get to his card. When the elevator stops I let her go first, then step out and turn in the opposite direction like I know where I’m going. Which I do, thanks to my parking guy. As I was doing sniff work for the column, I looked at the paperwork for an acquisition Olympic had made the previous year for its energy division. That gave me the names of four mergers-and-acq

uisitions lawyers who worked here at headquarters. Now I am walking toward their assigned parking spaces. I turn a concrete corner and all the spaces are empty. These aren’t people who take mass transit. If their BMWs and Benzes aren’t there on a weekday, I’d bet they’re out of town. Maybe they’re already working on a deal to sell the company. It’s a small thing, nothing I can use in the paper, but it bolsters my confidence. I take the fire stairs to the street.

On the way up the hill to the newspaper, I call the head flack and get her secretary. Do I care to get her voice mail? You bet. I leave her a detailed message, about the 13-D, about word that the company could be for sale, about sources telling me that their M&A team is already working on a deal. I am giddy with news but keep my voice steady and calm. “This is going to run tomorrow, and I’d sure like the company’s perspective.” This is the third call I’ve made to get Olympic’s comments. Maybe this will work.

***

“So is this budget line real about Olympic International?” The business editor stops me in the hallway. It’s a sign of the tension in the newsroom that she would ask. I don’t write budget lines—the summary of the story or column—that don’t work out. I say it is.

“Make sure you make deadline.”

I can’t tell if she’s kidding or not. I say, “Stand back and nobody will get hurt.”

The flack never calls back. I wrap up my column, move it along into the CCI system, and call the editor. Then I make a new round of calls to sources, but all I can do is leave messages. Why would the feds be investigating Troy Hardesty’s death? One guess would be his hedge fund got into trouble, maybe made a wrong bet on sub-prime mortgages, maybe got into something criminal. But with disclosure for the funds so limited, I can only hope to find a well-heeled client or rival who knows something.

I Google “eleven-eleven.” I get a rock band, a real-estate trust, a psychic hotline. It’s the date World War I ended. The real-estate trust might be what Troy had asked about and it seems innocently boring.

Next I email the day police reporter, Amber Burke, to see if she knows anything about the investigation into Troy’s death. I’ve seen her byline, but can’t place her. The Free Press still has more than 200 newsroom employees and I can’t claim to know all of them, especially the young ones that often cover the mayhem, er, public safety beats. In a moment, she emails back: “I’m going to pull the police report. Want to come along?”

I’m in a jittery post-deadline mood, so I agree. She says she’ll pick me up in ten minutes.

***

As I wait, I think about those essential five Ws and my encounter with the feds. I’ll tell you this much. They’re wrong that I don’t have close friends. They just happen to be the women I sleep with. They tend to be professional, middle class, attractive but not beautiful, in-between the chapters of their lives. They like sex, and not everyone does. I’m their transitional man, the one they will fondly remember but never admit to once they have returned to the conventional world.

There are a few rules: I don’t sleep with sources or fish off the company pier in the newsroom. Technically, Melinda Stewart breaks the second rule, but we go way back. No married women, although Pam has a regular boyfriend who is pleasant and steady, but he bores her in bed. I avoid women with children. No starry-eyed young girls looking for marriage—I broke that with Rachel. Four lovers are about the most I can juggle, although three is best. I try to make it a point not to mix pleasure and love. I married for love once. The sex ended almost immediately and the companionship soon after. I’ll never make that mistake again.

I make no claim to be a ladies man. I didn’t even lose my virginity until I was twenty-one. Now my lovers appreciate that I like women; I always have liked and related to them, far more than to men—insert family-drama causality here. I’m easy to talk to, good in a crisis, and clean up well for a night at the symphony. I’m discreet. I have the rules so nobody gets hurt, me included. And I know this blissful arrangement of the planets of pleasure can’t last forever.

Who, what, where, when, why: The two men in the SUV had left me at the curb outside my place, and I can’t answer that basic, critical information about our forty-five minutes together. All I know was that I had been on the other side of a hostile interview. Now I have to shove a growing bundle of dreadful feelings into one of my infamous compartments.

At least one compartment is untouched by my new acquaintances, the feds. They mentioned Melinda Stewart among my lovers. They apparently don’t know about Melinda Hines. Hey, I like the name.

Chapter Six

I climb into an old black Jetta and greet Amber Burke. She throws a stack of files from the front passenger seat to make room for me, adding to piles of file folders, reporter’s notebooks, and old newspapers in the back seat.

“Why are you all dressed up?” she asks. I get that all the time in Seattle. I want to answer people, “Why are you dressed like hell?” But I don’t. I say, “Today it’s the rebels that wear suits.”

Amber is wearing a black coat, black hoodie, black-and-white striped sweater, distressed denim miniskirt, and gray tights so thick they could be long-johns. Below all this are brown boots that might work well to muck out a stable. It’s a classic local look. The ensemble can’t quite conceal the attractive young woman inside. She has lush titian red hair, pulled into something like a bun in back. She’s probably been complimented on it since she was a baby. Her face is pretty in a deceptively simple way, the kind of face that you’d find growing more in beauty the longer you looked at it. She has a wide mouth. I stop looking.

“Sorry to do this,” she says. “My editor wants me to check something out before I can go to the police station. Want to tag along?”

I agree and we drive.