Family Trust Read online

  Family Trust

  Amanda Brown

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 2003 by Amanda Brown

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email [email protected]

  First Diversion Books edition November 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-68230-909-2

  Also by Amanda Brown

  Legally Blonde

  For my Lovebug who always makes me smile, my mother who always believed in me, and my husband without whom none of this would be possible. Not to be forgotten: My furry babies Gomez and Underdog.

  Acknowledgments

  Special thanks to Jim Hornstein, Hillary Bibcoff, Nancy Nigrosh, Michelle Forrest, Daniel Greenberg, and Laurie Chittenden.

  CHAPTER 1

  All Business

  Becca Reinhart laughed. Her eyes were bright, shining with humor as she listened to her telephone call. Her loose black hair brushed her shoulders as she shook her head in protest. She laughed, but her answer was firm. No way.

  She stood leaning against her desk, her long, graceful arms supporting her tall figure as she turned her eyes toward Central Park. In a second she had absorbed the lush view of dewy treetops surrounding the pond. She breathed deeply, adjusting her headset. She began to pace.

  Worn into the border of her Turkish carpet was a footpath, the wake of her intense relationship with the telephone. The carpet was rubbed to a vague crushed pattern of scarlet, gold, and cobalt in that rectangular path, once a meticulously designed border, hand-woven and delicate. It was, perhaps, a mismatch from the start. Nothing about Becca Reinhart or her restless, money-drenched world was delicate.

  “A thousand times no!” Becca insisted, grinning with amusement. “Listen, I’ve met him. The guy’s rude to his own shadow. Abby Joseph Cohen wouldn’t give him a buy.”

  She stopped in front of her brass-studded leather chair, which functioned mainly as a padded shelf for her incoming files and faxes. To those who knew her, the end of her pacing was a sign that she was ready to end the discussion or the deal. If she had a nickel for every lawyer her mother wanted her to date!

  “Not even a hold, Mom,” she said firmly. “He’s an absolute sell.” Becca glanced down at her open desk-calendar, searching it quickly for an excuse. “Anyway, I’m out of town. I’m in Hong Kong next week through Saturday.”

  Though Becca’s feet were still, she kept her hands busy. With a stray pen she scribbled idly on the Saturday block of her calendar.

  “I know it’s a holy day, Mom,” she said. She hung her head.

  Her eyes traveled for comfort out the northern window of her West Fifty-seventh Street office, her gaze resting again on the unparalleled extravagance of Central Park. Manhattan’s great, enduring, beckoning heart. Inhaling the view like pure oxygen, Becca spoke with renewed confidence.

  “I’m meeting with the finance minister, Mom. What was I supposed to do, reschedule?”

  She leaned against her desk, staring at its scattered papers. Her hair brushed her chin and her shoulders as she nodded. She glanced at the screen of her computer, which indicated several dozen new messages had arrived. All were first priority.

  “All right, Mom. I’ll try,” she promised.

  Becca waved her hand as the quick little figure of Philippe, her secretary, popped his head into her office. His hair, until recently jet black, had been highlighted with some gray, achieving a salt-and-pepper look that people typically paid to erase. With a gesture of welcome, she invited him to take a seat on her couch.

  Philippe returned her smile and reclined on the couch to wait. He began to page through an issue of The Economist, the only reading material displayed on Becca’s coffee table.

  Today is the third of September, but it feels like June, thought Philippe. A dull haze hung in the thick, humid air. The sun seemed to have ripened, swelling in intensity as if to remind the city masses that summer held court for another three weeks.

  Philippe looked affectionately at Becca, who had resumed pacing as she laughed into the telephone. Her restless energy had made him nervous when he first met her, but Philippe had come to appreciate, even to crave, the warmth of Becca’s style. She was an incredible creature.

  Between board meetings, speaking tours, conferences, and the usual round of deal negotiations, Becca had been traveling every week this summer. It was natural to her; travel suited her pace. There were days at a time when she was nothing but a blur to Philippe, racing past his desk with her Pullman suitcase bumping and rolling behind her, hurrying to finish the call on her headset before she lost cellular service in the elevator.

  Becca had fire, the effects of which he saw reflected in the faces of the clients and hopefuls that revolved through her office. Sometimes their worn lines of anticipatory tension were soothed by her competence, her iron reliability. And other times he ducked to search for imaginary files under his desk, unwilling to meet the violent eyes of the seekers of capital who came away burned.

  Philippe was amazed that Becca could survive the physical pressure of travel on top of her intense load of back-to-back meetings. She changed time zones with chameleonlike agility. Every day she met with companies at the make-or-break stage, and handled their urgent pleadings with integrity and dispatch. He wondered, sometimes, what Becca would have done without this demanding career. Would she run marathons? Climb mountains? He knew she was cut out for something extraordinary.

  He smiled to see her suitcase by the door, standing at the ready. Becca prepacked her bags for different climates and labeled each piece of luggage for maximum travel efficiency. A brass-rimmed tag that dangled on the Louis Vuitton rolling bag that leaned against the wall read LONDON, AUTUMN.

  Philippe knew she was tightly scheduled as usual. She would hardly have time to adjust to the five-hour time change before she was supposed to conduct a meeting to evaluate an offer for the shares of Machovia, a Davis Capital portfolio company in whom she was the single largest private investor. Though they had not put the company up for sale, an unexpected and tempting offer had come in. She would take a helicopter from the city to the Teterboro Airport in New Jersey where the Davis Capital plane would land her at Heathrow at 10 A.M. London time. Most people took at least three days on the ground before returning from business in London. Becca would be three days door-to-door.

  She had succeeded quickly in this unyielding world, thanks to the gamble Dick Davis had made on her when he gave her the chance to join the partnership five years ago. She was leading the technology group at Morgan Stanley at the time, a young analyst with a sterling reputation for her exhaustive, diligent research and an iron stomach for risk. Her returns, even in the bear market, were unbeatable.

  Dick Davis, the founding partner of Davis Capital, had left Bear Stearns nearly twenty years before to found the venture capital firm. He had seeded it at first with the fortune that his wife inherited from her grandfather’s piece of Standard Oil. Today the firm managed eleven billion dollars of invested capital.

  Becca would never forget what Dick Davis made possible for her: to enter the elite, private partnership of Davis Capital as a relative child. She was twenty-six years old when she started with the firm. Dick’s confidence in Becca was aggressive, and she soon proved it to be we
ll-placed.

  Though it carried the Davis flag, the name that came to mind when anyone thought of Davis Capital was Becca Reinhart. At thirty-one years old, Becca Reinhart was by far the firm’s youngest partner, and on their portfolio compensation scheme, she was also the best paid. Her own portfolio made up nearly forty percent of revenues and over half the profits of the firm. Becca had high visibility from her very first day at Davis Capital.

  Her brash entry into the firm was an industry legend. The day she accepted Dick’s offer, Becca got his secretary, Philippe, on the phone, asked him what he made, and offered him more money to come and work for her. She wanted somebody who knew the business, she said, and who better than her boss’s secretary?

  “Poached my secretary,” Dick would laugh, pretending to complain about her hard bargaining, “and she didn’t blink an eye!” He told the story all over Wall Street. He had wisely chosen not to fight her. With a knowing smile, he told Philippe to pack up his desk. Dick realized at that moment that Becca’s confidence was going to make the partnership rich.

  Philippe was happy with the switch, as he had never been fond of Dick Davis’s overbearing wife. For Becca, as long as he could talk fast, type fast, and schedule every ten minutes precisely for the next three months, he stayed above the water. He managed Becca’s calendar, and her travel, copied the reports for her meetings, and trotted in with her faxes, sorted her mail, and kept her files secure. She had another assistant to handle the phones, and the analysts took care of her research. The clippings service prepared its own news summaries.

  Becca could have a staff of fifty, Philippe marveled, and she wouldn’t know what to do with it. She had never quite learned how to delegate. She put a bear hug on her own companies, and served on dozens of their boards. For travel, however, she had learned to lean on Philippe.

  In a moment she was rushing toward the couch to join him.

  “Did you get my message?” She held her breath, glancing at the eastern standard clock on the wall. Eleven-thirty. Her eyes, dark and expressive, shone with energy as she turned toward Philippe for his answer.

  “Check,” he said, nodding simply. “Consider it done.”

  He stroked his hair, intending to draw her attention to it. This color was a big change for him. Alexander, his partner, who ran a fashionable Upper East Side salon, had worked for days to get just the right silver tone in the gray on his temples.

  She paused. “I’m in London till Tuesday; I arrive in New York at six-thirty in the morning. We’re doing an eight o’clock meeting at Wasserstein; I won’t have time to get back here after the flight.”

  He ran a hand over his salt-and-pepper hair. “I know, Becca. I scheduled the meeting. I love to wait on you in my spare time.”

  “What is spare time?” she shot back with a laugh.

  She dug the JFK locker key from her desk drawer, being careful not to confuse it with the La Guardia key, and scribbled down her combination to the electronically secured file room in which she kept the permanent records for her portfolio companies. She began to describe the precise location of the Wasserstein files when Philippe waved impatiently.

  “I filed them, sweetie, I know,” Philippe assured her. He was practically pointing to his hair with both hands in his eagerness for her to notice it. He tried to catch Becca’s nomadic eyes and saw that her glance had passed him already. She was moving again, headed toward the coffee bar.

  Philippe began to feel a little testy, and paused to console himself that his hair was not at fault in her failure to notice him: It was Becca’s fundamental lack of attention to appearances. He remembered the day she asked Dick Davis when he had started wearing glasses. It was just a few months ago, when they were working late in his office on the Celex deal.

  “Nineteen-ninety two,” Dick had informed her, to Becca’s enormous surprise. Dick still laughed about that.

  Philippe declined the latte that Becca, standing in front of her coffee bar, offered to him. Her imposing black coffee machine, mounted into the wall, featured over thirty small silver buttons that produced on demand an infinite variety of coffees. For herself she pushed the espresso button five times before placing a large mug below the coffee spout.

  Philippe broke down. “Look at my hair, Becca,” he pleaded.

  She turned her head at once. “Philippe,” she said, smiling broadly, “it’s great!”

  “The Old Economy’s back in,” he boasted, sauntering toward her. “Alexander says people are rushing into the salon for gray temples and sideburns. Gravitas is hot, you know. Credibility is back.”

  Becca put the coffee in the refrigerator to cool so she could drink it quickly.

  “Good thing,” she said, grinning. “Now how do we sell it?”

  She closed the door behind Philippe, turning quickly to answer a call that the secretary had put through. She said hello to David Sheffer and simultaneously pulled on her nylon warm-ups. She had determined that it saved a few minutes for her run if she pulled on the workout clothes at the same time she was undressing. For one second she moved the phone and slid off her shirt and bra. Becca was in a hurry. She had scheduled herself to take a run at twelve-fifteen, and she stuck to her schedule.

  Sheffer was the external lending director of the European Investment Bank. Becca had known David when he ran the European equities platform at Morgan Stanley. It was a strange time to call from Luxembourg, she said; he replied that he was in New York. He had a German paper company he wanted to put her on to, which the EIB wouldn’t fund because of his family’s stake in the business. She agreed to meet with the German CEO next week, if she could get a translator, and appreciated him sending over the company’s information. She tapped an e-mail on her computer directing Philippe to adjust her schedule to leave open a half hour next Thursday.

  David held for a second while Becca slipped her jogging bra and a T-shirt carefully over her headset. Her eyes roved around her office. There were a half-dozen stacks of paper to read, all before she left for London. The messages and faxes piled up by the minute; if she had an impromptu social conversation in the hall, it knocked her off schedule. Empty mugs lined the coffee machine, alternating with empty Evian bottles. Now and again one pile of mugs would disappear and clean ones would appear in their place.

  Becca glanced at the bagels, still untouched, which she had delivered to her office every morning to guard against the real possibility of starvation. She tried to keep a bagel in her purse for the times when she ran to get a cab and felt the sidewalk spinning.

  Becca used time as efficiently as she thought it could be used.

  Marking the time on the clock, Becca started the treadmill on Alpine Walk, making conclusory remarks into her headset to let David know she had no more business with him. Then David got to the real point of his phone call.

  He had a nephew that he would like her to meet for dinner this week.

  She cranked the machine up to Hard Jog. Not another nephew!

  Becca did her best to listen politely, since she did want to check out the German paper firm as a possible investment, but the setup was difficult to endure. Was she wearing a sign? DESPERATE SINGLE GIRL: MARRY ME PLEASE? She pounded through her workout, fueled by indignity.

  “He’s thirty-four,” David offered, a bit tragically. “Lawyer at Simpson Thatcher, good practice, good prospects. Never married.”

  “Frankly, David,” she told him flatly, “I’m more interested in the business piece. I’ll let you know how the paper company looks after we talk.” She cut off the call and ran for several minutes as hard as she could.

  Becca couldn’t understand why capable professionals, with whom she had a solid business relationship, were always trying to get her married. She didn’t ask after their prospects. She didn’t comment on their divorces, their affairs. Why was her personal life so interesting to them? Didn’t they see how busy she was?

  It had gotten worse since she turned thirty-one last year. Even her mother, for whom marriage had ne
ver done any favors, was constantly after her to give a nice boy like Gary Yahkzen a chance. Everybody had something to offer, her mother would point out, despite apparent shortcomings. Who says it’s not nice to be a urologist?

  Her father must have found something useful in the state of marriage, Becca reflected, with the spite she reserved for the man who had abandoned her mother. He had tried it twice. When her mother was being treated—successfully, thank God—for her cancer, Becca’s father and the chemo nurse began an affair. He eventually married her. Her father’s betrayal never lost its bitterness.

  He had left her mother when Becca was only ten, and for all practical purposes, she considered her father to be dead. She never spoke of him. But Becca’s mother, Arlene, had more than filled the void her father left. To Becca, Arlene was both parents and a dear friend, not to mention a conscience.

  Becca tried to get to Brooklyn on Friday for Shabbos dinner with her mom, but these days she only made it every other month or two. Things were all right between them, though, in spite of Becca’s absence. Becca and her mother were secure in their love for each other, and both were good friends of the telephone.

  Becca was her mother’s sole source of financial support, outside of the part-time work Arlene did at her temple, where really she went just to stay in the congregation’s loop. Lately Arlene had been hearing about everybody’s grandchildren. If Becca had spent an afternoon kibitzing with Arlene’s friends, she would understand the logic that motivated Arlene’s sudden interest in matchmaking.

  She felt the muscles of her calves stretching from the pull of racing with the treadmill. The workout was an extreme one. Becca tried to exhaust her natural intensity before she conducted client meetings. Even the hours of travel, she knew, would not wear her down. She hoped she would appear mellow and reasonable if she conducted the meetings in a state of physical exhaustion. Her feet and her mind raced together as Becca rehearsed the speech she was giving at the Capital Markets meeting next week.