Brewing Up a Storm Read online

  Mr. Elliman, Head of Sloan travel department seeking to broaden the horizons of Sloan executives business travels by including sightseeing, and usually failing.

  Characters only in Brewing Up a Storm

  Paul Jackson, defense attorney with Wall Street clients, especially defending corporations and white collar criminals and is representing Quax and Kichsel in their lawsuit filed against them by the Ludlum family, paid for by NOBBY.

  Arthur Cleve, representing the Ludlum family suing Quax and their owners, Kichsel on behalf of Wayne Ludlum, Junior, who got beered up and wrapped his car around a telephone pole,

  Dr. Schumacher, expert witness who favors NOBBY’s point of view.

  Mrs. Madeleine Underwood, the Director of NOBBY, No Beer-Buying Youngsters. Challenging Quax as a non-alcoholic beer enticing youngsters into its franchise, and then on to real beer.

  Sean Cushing, the administrator for NOBBY.

  Karen Zwick, who survived a cut back Sean Cushing did not in their old company, but still were business friends.

  Claudia Fentiman, PR person for Quax and the brewery, Kichsel.

  Elmer Rugby, owner of a chain for hamburger franchises, Southwest Rugby’s that was just moving from a strong regional to a national fast food company that carried Quax.

  Roger Vandermeer, president of Vandermeer & Adler, a public-relations firm. Head of SDI, the soft drink lobby that didn’t want Quax as a competitor.

  Monroe Biggins, the president of the Soft Drink Institute.

  Dean Kichsel, the latest Kichsel at the helm of the company that owned Kix regular beer and their new non alcoholic entry, Quax.

  Alec Moore, Quax division manager, related to the Kichsel family that owned the company.

  Theo Benda, non family CFO, who was in line to be company CEO upon Dean Kichsel’s retirement until Alex Moore surfaced.

  Congressman Harry Hull from Texas who held hearings about the impact of Quax and non alcoholic beers upon the youth of America.

  Congressman Leon Rossi (D.-N.Y), institutes an investigation of Quax and is involved with Congressman Hull from Texas in that process.

  Iona Perez, mother of two children, joined NOBBY as a volunteer, and became Interim Director.

  Christina, Iona’s sister, who coached her into better pay when becoming Interim Director of Nobby.

  Inspector Timothy Reardon, in charge of the murder investigation.

  Dave, who works for Inspector Reardon and does much of the research on the case.

  Peggy Roche, on the NOBBY Board of Governors, poised to fire Underwood.

  Jeremy Pfizer, on the NOBBY Board of Governors with Peggy Roche. His accounting background put him in charge of auditing.

  Cheryl Zimmerman, NOBBY office manager.

  Theresa Dominguez, Rugby’s victim at the store riot.

  Emma Lathen Political Mysteries

  As R. B. Dominic

  31. Murder Sunny Side Up 1968. Agriculture.

  32. Murder in High Place 1969. Overseas Travelers.

  33. There is No Justice 1971. Supreme Court.

  34. Epitaph for a Lobbyist 1974. Lobbyists.

  35. Murder Out of Commission 1976. Nuke Plants.

  36. The Attending Physician 1980. Health Care.

  37. Unexpected Developments 1983. Military.

  Tom Walker Mysteries

  Patricia Highsmith Style

  Deaver Brown, Author

  01. 18. Football, Superbowl & Business

  02. Abduct. Sexual Misconduct.

  03. Body. Planned Eliminations for Money.

  04. Comfortable. Avoiding Consequences.

  05. Death. Wrong Place at the Wrong Time.

  06. Enthusiast. Opportunity Murder.

  07. Fraud. Taking Your Chances.

  08. Greed. Heirs Who Know Better.

  09. Heat. Heir Arrogance.

  10. Island. Startup.

  A similarly popular Simply Media mystery series.

  Financial & Other Facts

  Emma Lathen and Tom Walker

  are about money and emotion.

  Simply Media will be offering Emma Lathen and Tom Walker

  eBook Collections at a discount.

  Thank you for reading our series.

  Enjoy and prosper!

  Deaver Brown, Publisher & Editor.

  www.simplymedia.com

  Chapter 1.

  At the Bar

  Wall Street is the unrepentant bastion of one form of segregation. A privileged minority deals constantly with asset allocation, cash flows and leverage. The toiling masses farther down the pyramid contemplate high finance once a month, when their bills arrive.

  Historically, communication across this divide has posed problems. The Sloan Guaranty Trust, for example, was a great money center bank where John Putnam Thatcher, senior vice president, always knew what ailed capital markets from Hong Kong to Frankfurt. Like most of his peers, he was shakier about Main Street USA and the malls off the interstate.

  This had led to precautions whenever fanfare about a new retail product reached his desk. In the dark days before the microwave oven, when Crock-Pots were being touted, Thatcher had taken counsel with Miss Corsa, his secretary.

  “Yes, I know the food is supposed to cook while you’re at work,” she had said, wrinkling her nose over rave reviews from one of Wall Street’s premier researchers. “I’d rather stop on my way home for a pizza.”

  Furthermore it developed that Miss Corsa’s mother did not like gadgets and that her cousin Louise, a schoolteacher in Yonkers, cooked over the weekend and froze.

  “Thank you very much,” Thatcher had said.

  Since then Miss Corsa and her family had become his private data bank about real life. When the first Toyota appeared among them, Thatcher knew that Detroit was in trouble long before the analysts.

  “Rose is worth her weight in gold,” Charlie Trinkam, Thatcher’s second-in-command, often observed.

  “True enough,” Thatcher would say. “If we could only chart how she and her family spend, or plan to spend, their hard-earned money, the Sloan would know more about GDP than it does. But there are limits to what I feel I can ask.”

  Charlie fully appreciated the link between consumer behavior and the profits at the Sloan.

  “Ask me anything you want,” he said cheerfully, ready to bare all secrets.

  But contributions from this quarter, although colorful, came with one drawback.

  “You spend too much time in Tiffany’s,” Thatcher pointed out. “And not enough at Wal-Mart.”

  “That’s why I’m here on Wall Street,” said Charlie happily. “If you want to hear the heartbeat of America, you have to go someplace else.”

  Even to improve intelligence gathering, Thatcher was not ready to relocate. Nevertheless, the next ripple in the consumer society reached him within days of their conversation. Curiously enough, it arrived by way of a prominent trial attorney, not Miss Corsa and her invaluable relatives.

  Thatcher encountered Paul Jackson in the lobby of their lunch club. Since Jackson was one of the livelier members, this was all to the good. Jackson did, however, tend to assume that everybody shared his current enthusiasms.

  “You know I hated to recess for lunch today,” he said, despite the excellent meal he had just finished. Still talking rapidly, he selected mints from the bowl on the library table, popped one into his mouth and pocketed several others for later use. “This is going to be one helluva case. Even the preliminary hearing is a laugh a minute.”

  The zest with which Jackson defended white-collar criminals had made him famous—or infamous—in certain circles. Thatcher himself applauded anybody who obviously enjoyed his work, and so, although his appetite for legal pyrotechnics was modest, he politely inquired about the nature of the current litigation.

  “. . . a nineteen-year-old got himself beered up and wrapped his muscle car around a utility pole out in Astoria. They could get him for damaging Nynex property, but Wayne Ludlum, Junior, isn’t wi
th us anymore. Luckily it was two in the morning, so Junior didn’t take anybody with him when he went.”

  Tragedies like this are common enough, but they did not normally figure in Jackson’s lucrative practice.

  “Who’s suing whom?” Thatcher asked.

  “It’s Ludlum—that’s the parents—versus the Kichsel Brewery,” said Jackson with a wicked grin. “I’m representing Kichsel.”

  “Oh, really?” said Thatcher. The Kichsel Brewery, while not a national giant like Anheuser-Busch, ran a respectable second or third. More to the point, George C. Lancer, Thatcher’s nominal superior at the Sloan, sat on the Kichsel board, returning from all directors’ meetings to report solid performance and earnings by a conservative old-line firm. From Lancer, this was high praise.

  However, it was not this tenuous connection with the Sloan that stirred Thatcher’s curiosity. Retaining Paul Jackson indicated that Kichsel was bringing heavy guns to the fray.

  “Am I correct in assuming your opposite number is not a recent graduate with a night-school degree?” he asked.

  “Arthur Cleve,” said Jackson, naming a rival legal superstar. “He’s got a psychiatrist and a team of clinical psychologists lined up. I think he may be hoping to make Court TV. And it wouldn’t bother me a bit.”

  As Thatcher knew, when the courtroom is transformed into theater, either large sums or weighty issues are involved.

  “Is the senior Ludlum a man of substance?” he asked, thinking of Arthur Cleve’s fees.

  “He’s a dispatcher for Citycab,” said Jackson. “But he has friends with deep pockets and they think they’ve got the test case of the century.”

  Obviously there was more to Ludlum versus Kichsel than met the eye, and Thatcher asked what it was.

  “I don’t want to spoil the fun,” said the lawyer. “You’ve really got to see this for yourself, John. If only for an hour.”

  As a result, instead of diligently returning to duty, Thatcher found himself accompanying Paul Jackson uptown. Given George Lancer’s role at Kichsel, this detour could be defended as a prudent allocation of time to almost anybody except Miss Corsa.

  The fun began on the steps of the courthouse, where Jackson halted and, figuratively speaking, doffed a sombrero.

  “Mrs. Underwood!” he cried, gallantly leaping forward to swing wide the door of a taxi from which a woman was alighting.

  “Thank you,” she murmured, pausing on the sidewalk as her companion paid the cabby.

  “And may I present John Thatcher from the Sloan Guaranty Trust,” Jackson continued. “John, this is Mrs. Madeleine Underwood.”

  Neither young nor old, Mrs. Underwood was expensively dressed in a spring coat of green linen that complemented her short brown curls. Her large blue eyes were the best feature in a face that was photogenic, if not otherwise remarkable. Her lips were a shade too thin but that, Thatcher suspected, might be attributable to Jackson’s approach.

  As he shook hands, however, Thatcher realized that Mrs. Underwood was more than an attractive matron come to witness legal shenanigans. She was the center of a retinue that had discharged from attendant taxis. Hovering discreetly in the background was a band of business suits awaiting her pleasure. Even in the absence of this entourage Thatcher would have guessed that Mrs. Underwood was a force to be reckoned with. She carried herself with the quasi-regal self-possession that, forty years ago, would have signaled an heiress or world-famous soprano. Nowadays it could mean anything.

  “Mrs. Underwood is the founder, the director and the guiding spirit of NOBBY,” declaimed Jackson with suspicious gravity.

  But Madeleine Underwood knew how to deflect even incipient mockery. “That stands for ‘No Beer-Buying Youngsters,’ Mr. Thatcher,” she amplified cheerfully. “You probably haven’t heard of our organization yet, but I’m happy to say that our activities are beginning to attract the support of responsible institutions, and I’m sure the Sloan—”

  “Oh, no you don’t, he’s mine,” Jackson interrupted. “Keep your fund-raising hands to yourself, Mrs. Underwood.”

  “There’s no mine and no yours on this issue. Before I’m done we’ll even have enlisted you, Mr. Jackson,” she predicted with a subdued twinkle. “It will of course take a great deal of time and education for NOBBY to—”

  Before she could continue, the slight young man who had accompanied her in the cab detached himself from a nearby group and came hurrying to her side.

  “Sorry to interrupt, Madeleine,” he began, “but the people from Channel Twenty-five would like a few words from you. I’ve explained that you can only give them two or three minutes.”

  “This is Sean Cushing, our administrator for NOBBY,” she said, already withdrawing. “I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me now.”

  Belatedly Thatcher saw that, in addition to those entering the building, there was a tiny clot of reporters and one lone video crew stationed at the base of the steps.

  “Wait until you get an earful of this,” whispered Jackson, leading Thatcher to the circle forming around Mrs. Underwood.

  “NOBBY is a grassroots organization of volunteers and concerned parents devoted to protecting our children from the terrible ravages of adolescent alcoholism,” she began with practiced fluency.

  Thatcher eyed his companion sternly. “If you’ve dragged me down here to listen to a latter-day Carrie Nation . . .” he began.

  “Nope,” Jackson assured him. “It’s more complicated than that. Just hear Madeleine out.”

  “. . . no quarrel with beer or non-alcoholic beer sold to adults,” she was saying quietly. “The danger that NOBBY is confronting comes from Quax.”

  Without bothering to ask the obvious, Thatcher simply turned to Jackson.

  “Quax is the non-alcoholic beer that Kichsel introduced two years ago,” the lawyer supplied sotto voice. “Basically it’s just another soft drink.”

  That was not the way Madeleine Underwood saw it.

  “. . . to target young children deliberately as a market for Quax, to promote it as a safe and wholesome alternative to sodas is unconscionable. As the Ludlum family has learned to its sorrow, Quax is merely the first step in an inevitable progression to early consumption of alcohol. By packaging Quax as a clone to Kix, its heavily promoted beer, Kichsel is intentionally introducing confusion. They are conditioning young people to drink the company’s products without any differentiation. Kichsel’s claim that this look-alike policy is based on a desire to maximize trade-name recognition is specious, to say the least. That is why NOBBY is supporting the Ludlums. Nothing can repay them for their own loss, but they hope to spare hundreds of other families a similar tragedy.”

  Whatever the validity of her cause, Madeleine Underwood’s performance could not be faulted. She was avoiding the hectoring shrillness of so many ardent proselytizers while radiating a serene confidence that her message would, in due time, appeal to all right-thinking sensible people.

  In the meantime Paul Jackson had heard enough. “That’s her sermon for you,” he said, heading for the doors. “Ludlum versus Kichsel is, in a nutshell, NOBBY claiming that little Wayne got hooked on Quax, then shifted up to Kix without ever noticing the difference. Mrs. Underwood wants governmental action to treat Quax as a dangerous substance, not because it contains alcohol—which it does not—but because of what she perceives as a psychological threat to the young.”

  “And with that kind of argument the main thrust of the plaintiff’s case will have to be carried by psychologists as expert witnesses?”

  “And how! She’s got five of them she’s trying to put on the stand.”

  No wonder Jackson was so enthusiastic about this case. While the most notorious weapon in his powerful armory was the ability to deflate any expert witness, he approached psychologists with special relish.

  “For that matter, I’ve got a couple of my own,” he added as a palpable afterthought.

  “Planning to give as good as you get?”

  “Planning t
o do a hell of a lot better,” Jackson said dulcetly just before he went off to confer with his colleagues.

  Searching for a seat, Thatcher spied a single vacancy in the second row and from this vantage point he turned to count the house. The usual recognizable groups were out in full force. First there were the professional observers, called forth whenever commercial interests are at stake. Then there were the hobbyists—the courthouse regulars wise in the ways of litigation tactics, versed in the laws of evidence, and familiar with the grandees of the New York bar. The size of this particular contingent was probably a personal tribute to Paul Jackson. And, last of all, occupying two full rows, was a solid phalanx. Displaying neither blase patience nor carefree camaraderie, they all gleamed with the light of battle and conspicuously sported large NOBBY badges.

  When Madeleine Underwood finally entered, she paused in her progress down the aisle to bestow a few words on her supporters before following young Cushing to the seats in front of Thatcher. They were both too preoccupied with their own exchange to notice his presence.

  “It’s wonderful to see so many members turning out,” Mrs. Underwood remarked as she sat down.

  Cushing’s mind must have been elsewhere. “Yes, Iona scheduled a different bunch to show up every day,” he replied, absently destroying the illusion of spontaneity while he focused a disapproving glance at the remaining empty seats. “The Ludlums are running it close again. I wish to God you had let me look for a better test plaintiff instead of settling for the first ones who approached you.”

  “Now, Sean, you know as well as I do that they’re perfect for our purposes. The jury will be watching them all the time and just think how they look. Nancy Ludlum is too bereaved to respond to anything while Mr. Ludlum manages to project grief but also determination.”

  “It’s the victim I’m talking about, not the parents,” he countered. “I still say we could have gotten more mileage from a younger boy, say a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old.”