"You can't be serious!" Leonard X. Bates was shouting. "If we don't make a move now, take this into our own hands, we're going to get frozen. One or more of us is selling and killing the market for everyone else. We have to move now, Laura. Sell the Tennessee land, dispense the assets. I understand we have a buyer on that property."
Everybody started talking at once.
"Mr. Lacy had very strong opinions about liquidating that asset, and the offer on the table is ridiculous," Victoria yelled out. "Once we do that, we're basically out of business. That property is leveraged against our bank loan. Besides, we feel we have certain development fields that show wonderful promise. We're not in a crisis situation here, at least not yet."
"If we're not, I'd sure as hell like to see your definition of a crisis!" Theodore Bates barked.
"I'm holding way too much of this paper. I'm not gonna stand here and eat it, sheet by sheet," another sharper yelled.
"This is the worst quarterly P and A field report I've seen in twenty years," another interrupted.
And then everybody in the room started shouting over one another and Victoria was clapping her slender, out-of-proportion hands to get them all to quiet down. "If we can please speak one at a time," she yelled, but arguments were raging all around the table.
Beano leaned toward Tommy. "This thing is so ripe. We won't even need the whole five mil. Make an offer."
Tommy looked over at Alex, who shook his head, and Tommy leaned back. He was going to wait, like he thought his brother Joe would do.
Beano was stuck, so he flashed a sign at Theodore. It was time to play the cross-fire.
"Miss Luna, I want to adjourn for a while. I have partners in Texas I need to speak with. Could we have a few minutes, please?" Theodore yelled.
The din in the room lessened with planned orchestration, so Victoria could give her line. "Okay, I think we all need to cool down. Weil take five."
"I know this fat broad from someplace," Tommy said. "I fucking can't pin it down, but when it comes to pussy, even ugly pussy, I got fucking unbelievable instincts."
"Let's go find a room to talk," Beano said.
He moved with Tommy and Alex out of the conference room. All of the sharpers were growling and arguing at the turn of events, cursing the falling stock and the stockholder among them who was selling. They filed out into the hallway. Beano led Tommy and Alex to an empty office.
All the offices on twenty-four were less impressive than the ones on twenty-five. The offices had half-walls with decorative, frosted glass up to the ceiling to create an open feeling.
Beano motioned them into an office, then hesitated. "I gotta take a quick leak," he said. "Be right back." He closed the door, counted to ten, then opened the door and quickly re-entered the office.
"Fuck! I knew it!" he exclaimed, turning Tommy and Alex around. "He's here. He's fucking here. I knew it!"
"Who's here?" Tommy said.
"Dr. Sutton. He's talking to that old guy, Theodore Lanaman, the guy who called for the recess. They just went into an office across the hallway."
"You think he's making a deal with that guy?" Tommy said, concern crossing his feral features.
"Of course. Whatta you think? He's not at this stockholders' meeting to give a geophone report. We're fucked," Beano said, totally defeated. He pointed at Alex. "If you hadn't listened to this guy, we could've already owned this thing."
"Where is he? Let's go see," Tommy said, then opened the door and walked out. Beano and Alex followed.
Beano pointed to the office across the hall; then Tommy saw that there was a door right next to it. He opened it. It led to a secretarial area which was between two executive offices. One was the office that Duffy and Theodore were in. The other was empty.
They walked into the secretarial area and looked through the frosted-glass dividing wall that separated them from Duffy and Theodore. They could see Duffy talking animatedly, but his voice and image were muffled by the decorative glass partition. Beano finally found the secretary's speakerphone and hit a button. Immediately they could hear the conversation, because Beano had connected the speakers between the two phones:
"… I been doing it just like we planned," Theodore was saying, and through the distorting glass they could see him holding up a piece of paper. "These are the trading slips."
Duffy was standing facing him, his Einstein hair frizzy in the distorted backlight. Beano grabbed a miniature tape recorder out of his pocket to record the conversation.
"I'm telling you, Mr. Lanaman, they won't find out you're the one selling… The price is going down. It's already in the mid-fives."
Beano, Alex, and Tommy were hunkered over the speakerphone, eavesdropping, while Beano recorded the "betrayal."
"I'll call my broker and dump the rest of my stock. That should drive it down to the mid-fours and then they'll be desperate to sell. It gets me out at an average price of about six, which is not all that bad."
"Then let's get to work," Duffy said as they left the office and Beano turned off the recorder.
"If Sutton told him about the field and all the oil, why is he selling his stock?" Tommy asked, his brow knit. Business had always been hard for him. It wasn't like clipping guys where you just stepped up and did it. In business you tried to fool them or bluff them. Sometimes it just didn't make sense.
"It's very simple," Beano said slowly. "He wants the stock price to fall so these other stockholders will panic and sell him their stock right now. He'll pick up control of the company for bubkes."
Tommy looked at Alex. "Zat sound right?" he asked. Alex thought for a second then nodded. "Yeah… it's probably exactly what he's doing," he agreed, beginning to be a believer himself. "By buying it here at the stockholders' meeting, he doesn't have to buy it over the counter and create a higher and higher market as he goes. He also avoids the five-day stock exchange clearing procedure. Pretty damn smart," Alex said grudgingly.
"It's fish-or-cut-bait time," Beano said. "It's us or them or it's the V.S.E. in Vancouver. This time tomorrow this company and that billion-dollar field is gonna belong to somebody else. I'm saying it should be us."
Victoria reconvened the stockholders' meeting, and as they sat at the now more subdued table, Duffy walked into the room and sat behind Theodore Bates.
"Who is this gentleman?" Victoria asked in her breathy Miss Luna voice.
"He's my assistant," Theodore said in his authoritative Mr. Lanaman voice. "And I'd like to make an offer to everybody in this room. I understand you want out, but I think it would be nothing short of criminal to sell that Tennessee land grant for what's being offered. I always believed in this company and in Chip Lacy, so I'm willing to buy your stock certificates, the Class-A as well as the outstanding Class-C, at one point over Close of Market today."
Immediately the room broke into a flurry of discussion. Finally, the buzz died down and the stockholders looked over at Theodore.
"Why would you do that? The stock is dropping like a rock," one of the point-out sharpers asked Theodore.
"Frankly? Because I've been semi-retired for a year and I'm bored. I'd like to give running this place a shot. Gimme something to do, but I'm not gonna spend that much time and energy unless I own it."
Beano looked over at Tommy, and now Tommy nodded, so Beano exploded to his feet. "He's not trying to own it. He's trying to steal it! It's Lanaman who's been selling his stock and knocking the price down so he can buy it for nothing."
"That's patently absurd," Theodore thundered.
"Is it?" Beano asked rhetorically, as he turned on the little tape recorder and set it on the polished mahogany table.