"You know who else?" He looked down at the legal pad. "We’re carrying two million bucks in land-and attachments paper on Shankland Chev, which they couldn’t get a half-million anywhere else. And Dave Shankland…"
"… is married to Peg Bose." Peg Bose was Dafne’s daughter. "We couldn’t use that right away, it’d look too much like blackmail. But if we got in a squeak…"
"Here’s the list I’ve got so far," Wilson said. He passed the legal pad to Audrey. "Seventeen board members, so we need nine. Four I can count on-Eirich, Goff, Brandt, and Sanderson. If we can get Dafne, we can probably get Rondeau and Bunde, ’cause they pretty much do what she suggests. Then we’d need two…"
"How about Young? You know he wants to get into Woodland."
"Oh, man, I don’t know if I could swing that," Wilson said doubtfully.
"We need a black member anyway, because of that government thing, and who’d be better than Billy Young? His father was a minister and he’s really pretty white. And he must be worth…"
They began working down strings of possible supporters, analyzing relationships, working out who knew who, who owed who, who could be bought, and with what.
Later, getting coffee, Audrey without thinking brushed her cheek, and flinched at the sudden lancing pain. The black eye: she’d forgotten about it, and Wilson had never really paid any attention to it anyway. The excitement of conspiracy, she decided: some of their tenderest moments had occurred in the study, working over legal pads…
Marcus Kent was an assistant vice-president in corporate operations, working for Bone; he sat on one end of Susan O’Dell’s couch. Carla Wyte, who technically worked for Robles in the currency room, lounged on the other end. Louise Compton, wearing blue jeans and a Nike sweatshirt, sat cross-legged on the floor.
"… either Bone or me," O’Dell was saying. She was on her feet, as though she were a junior exec making a presentation to the board of directors. "McDonald can’t get more than six. He’s the obvious first thought, because of his family, but twelve members would be dead set against him. When that becomes obvious, things will start to move. I can see myself with eight votes; and I can see eight for Bone, but only a couple are solid for each of us. Everything is very fluid… So I think we’re gonna have to start maneuvering here."
"How about Robles?" Wyte asked.
"No chance," O’Dell said. "It’s gonna be Bone or me."
"Bone is good," Wyte said. "His division makes the big bucks."
"Most of it by me," Kent said.
O’Dell looked at Kent: "But it’s his division, not yours. He gets the credit."
Kent said, "Before we get any further in this, let me ask… What do we get out of it? Carla and Louise and me? We know what you get."
O’Dell said, "You get Bone’s job. He won’t stay around long if I’m picked for the top spot. And Carla’s eventually going to move into Robles’s slot. But right away-and I mean right away-she gets money."
"How much?" Wyte’s eyebrows went up.
"Fifty more. Fifty is the number I had in mind."
"Fifty is a nice number," Wyte said.
"And it’ll be twice that when Robles leaves."
Compton said, "How about me?"
"You’re gonna be my executive assistant. You’re gonna be my ears. My intelligence department. You’ll do real well-in terms of clout, if not in title, you’ll be number two in the bank."
"So how do we do this?" Wyte asked. "What do we do… assuming we’re all in."
O’Dell looked around the room. After a second, Kent said, "I’m in," and Compton said, "Yeah." Wyte nodded.
"So…" O’Dell said. "I’m going to start putting together a pitch for the board. It’s got to be good, and it’ll take time. And I’ll start working the board: that’s something I have to do personally."
"To some extent, it’s gonna be like a political campaign, but with fewer voters," Compton said. She’d come to the bank from the state capitol. "One thing we can do is, we can make the point with the newspapers that you’d be the first woman ever to run a major bank in Minnesota. Or anywhere, as far as I know. Any other major bank CEOs are women?" She looked around, then answered herself. "No. Okay. I’ll check that out, but I can also start working the papers."
"That’s good," O’Dell said. "But we’ve got to get it going. How long before we could see it on the news?"
Compton looked at her watch: "I’ve got time today. I’ll have to talk to a couple of people, but we should see some action by tomorrow morning. When they call, you’ve got to be modest and all that… you know, the board has to make a decision."
"I know," O’Dell said. "I can do that."
Kent leaned forward, took a cinnamon candy out of a bowl on the coffee table, peeled off the crinkly cellophane wrapper, and popped the candy into his mouth: "Speaking of negative campaigning…"
"Were we speaking of that?" Compton asked, with a quick, cynical smile. They would have come to it sooner or later.
"We are now," he said. "We all know Bone’s weakness."
"Women."
O’Dell shook her head. "That won’t help. We just don’t have the time-even if we could find somebody willing to dig into it, it’d take weeks."
Kent was shaking his head. "Not really. Not if the cops look into it and if somebody tips the papers that the cops are looking into it."
"Why would they?" Wyte asked.
" ’Cause of the woman," Kent said, sitting back, savoring his little nugget.
"Marcus…" O’Dell said.
"James T. Bone is fucking Marcia Kresge. And has been for a while."
O’Dell’s mouth had literally fallen open. "You’re kidding me."
Kent shook his head: "Nope. I saw her one night at Bone’s place-I was in the ramp, I’d been over at Casper Allen’s, about his idiot trusts…"
"Casper lives right downstairs from Bone," O’Dell said to the others.
"… and she’d been fuckin’ somebody, believe me. And as she’s getting into her car, who should come out after her, carrying something? James T. Bone."
"The cops need to know that," Wyte said, with an effort at sincerity. "I mean, even if we weren’t trying to… to … help Susan, they’d need to know that. Dan’s death is worth millions to her, and opens the top job for her lover."
"That’s what I thought," Kent said, leaning back on the couch, sucking on the cinnamon.
Two hours later, O’Dell ushered Compton into the elevator, the last of them to go, and stepped pensively back into her apartment. Kent was a rat: she’d have to remember that. Starting now. The other two should be okay…
She spotted her rifle case, dumped in the corner Saturday morning. The case was empty: the Garfield sheriff still had the rifle. She picked it up, carried it back to a storage closet, and slipped it inside. Stuck on the wall of the same closet was an instant-open gun safe. Acting on impulse, she jabbed at the number pads, rolling her hand like a piano player, and the door popped open. Inside lay an Officer’s Model Colt. She took it out, pulled the magazine, pulled the slide back to make sure the chamber was empty, let it slam forward.
She moved slowly through the apartment, dry-firing the pistol from various hiding spots and corners; corny but fun. After ten minutes, she carried the pistol back to the safe, reseated the magazine, and shut the safe door.
She’d have to get out to the range one of these days; she was losing her edge.
Marcia Kresge was getting comfortable on James T. Bone’s couch: "Are you going to get the job?"
"I don’t know. O’Dell’s pretty strong."
"How about McDonald?"
"We can handle McDonald."
"Good. He’s an asshole. O’Dell, you know, smokes dope."
"So what?" Bone said. "So do you."
"I’m not trying to get to be a bank president," Kresge said.