Madeline Carter - 01 - Mad Money by Linda L. Richards Page B

not. Any
receptionist who gave me that information should be fired on the
spot. Shot, even. This one was in no danger. In fact, having
recovered from the hard line I was taking, she was having no more
of me. I couldn’t blame her: I would have put up with less of me
than she had.
    “I’m sorry, Miss,” and I could tell she
wasn’t. “If you’re not going to leave a message, I’ll be forced to
terminate this call.”
    Telephones are so safe, aren’t they? So
pleasingly anonymous? “So now you’re the Terminator?” I quipped
before I hung up, feeling pleased with myself for about 42 seconds.
Because all of that had gotten me exactly... nowhere. And anyway,
really, what was so weird about him not being in the office?
Sure, Sal had said he was missing and Hewitt had sounded — to my
prejudiced ear — somewhat cagey, but there were any number of
places Ernie could be that had nothing to do with being missing. He
could be at home changing his children’s diapers — because, of
course, there seemed no possibility that Ernest Carmichael Billings
wouldn’t have children by now. (Though the diaper part was probably
stretching it: he’d have people to do that.) Or he could be
on the golf course. Or in a boardroom. Driving to a meeting. And
yet, none of this really made sense. Sure: he might be “in a
meeting” or “unable to come to the telephone,” or “not taking
calls, can I direct you to someone else in the company” (with the
words “someone less important” left silent). But the day that a
publicly traded company with a less than sterling recent record
chose to announce a new CEO, you’d think that said new CEO would be
somewhere on the premises, holding court or rolling heads or
otherwise making his presence felt so that the damn stock would go
up. That was how it was supposed to work. That’s what he’d implied
to me at Club Zanzibar that night. That’s what I wanted him doing
now.
    But here, on the heels of their big
announcement, a trading halt. Which could mean any number of
things; most of them not good. The most obvious possibility — and
the least likely considering the nature of this company — was that
they’d somehow and suddenly run afoul of the Securities and
Exchange Commission. But it just didn’t seem like that kind of
company. Or they might have botched some sort of official
paperwork. And, here again, it didn’t seem likely. For one thing,
the Ernest Carmichael Billings that I knew wouldn’t have gotten
himself mixed up with an operation that wasn’t doing things the
right way. For him, even wrong things had to be done the right way.
He would have done his own sort of due diligence before signing
on.
    The most frequent non-SEC reason for a halt
to trading was that something was going down that would impact the
stock price one way or the other and, in order to keep insiders out
before the announcement could be made, trading was stopped. And, to
be honest, at this point I would have almost preferred some lost
paperwork scenario to this last possibility. Because that sort of
trading halt at this stage in the game likely meant a plummet would
happen when the halt came off.
    Back to the phones. Ernie had told me he’d
moved into the area the month before. I might be able to get a new
residential listing from information. But, even as I dialed, I knew
this was just me trying to make myself feel like I was doing something. Ernie was as likely to have a listed phone number
as he was to live in Reseda. And I was right. No listings anywhere
in the greater Los Angeles area — including Reseda — for an Ernest
Carmichael Billings or any corruption thereof. Back to square
one.
    By now the markets were closed and I could
safely leave my terminal without all hell breaking loose. Except,
somewhere inside, I was planning hell breaking loose without even
being completely aware of it.
    First I called Emily who, as luck would have
it, was home. I told her I was planning on being in town