noon, and if he misses that, his twenty-five million are yours.”
Dino came out of the guesthouse and joined them. “Witness this, will you?” Stone said, passing him the document and the pen.
Dino signed the document with a flourish. “There you are.” “What does your day hold?” Stone asked him, slipping the document and the check into his briefcase.
“Rivera and I are working on something,” Dino said.
“What are you working on?”
“It’s a secret for the time being,” Dino said smugly. “You’ll know when you need to know.”
“You’re very mysterious, Dino,” Arrington said.
“Yes, I am,” Dino replied, smiling.
Stone’s cell phone rang. “Hello?”
“Stone, it’s Harvey Stein. I’m sorry, but I was down at Palm Springs for the weekend, and I didn’t get your message until this morning.”
“Thanks for calling back, Harvey. I’ve heard some rumblings about Jim Long’s trying to back out of our stock sale.”
“Well, it’s too late for him to do that, isn’t it? Mrs. Calder owns the stock now. What’s done is done.”
“Harvey, you know Barbara Eagle, don’t you?”
“I’ve met her a couple of times; she and Jim are close.”
“She’s back in town, and last night she had dinner with Terry Prince. You know anything about that?”
“Not a thing,” Stein replied.
“Did you speak with Jim over the weekend?”
“Yes, I called him yesterday from Palm Springs, just to see how he was doing, and he sounded much like his old self.”
“Did he mention Barbara?”
“No, he didn’t.”
“I’d heard that she might be staying with him while she’s in town.”
“That would be news to me,” Stein said.
“Are you coming to the shareholders’ meeting tomorrow?”
“Since I no longer represent a shareholder, no.”
“Well, if I don’t speak to you again, Harvey, thanks for all your help in getting this sale closed.”
“My pleasure,” Stein replied. They both hung up.
Stone called Rick Barron. “Rick, I just spoke to Harvey Stein, and he says there’s no problem, that Jim Long’s shares now belong to Arrington.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” Rick said. “We’re perilously close to the fifty-one percent level, and his stock just puts us over the top.”
“Then we’re okay.” Stone heard noises in the background. “Are you still in the editing suite?”
“Yes, it will be tonight before we finish scoring and tomorrow morning before we have a print.”
“I can’t wait to see it, whatever it is,” Stone said.
“I think you’ll find it entertaining,” Rick said. “Gotta run.”
They hung up. “Everybody’s mysterious today,” he said to Arrington. “First Dino, now Rick Barron. He’s working on some sort of presentation for the meeting tomorrow.”
“I think I know what it is,” Arrington replied, “but I’m not going to tell you.”
47
It occurred to Stone that he had not heard from Jack Schmeltzer, and he wondered why. He called the producer’s office at Centurion, reached his secretary, and gave his name.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Barrington,” the woman said, “but Jack is in a meeting and will be for the entire day. I would expect the earliest he might be able to get back to you would be, perhaps, tomorrow morning.”
“Thank you,” Stone said, and hung up. What had been a feeling of mere uneasiness now grew into a solid knot of anxiety in his stomach. Was Schmeltzer going to renege? They were little more than twenty-four hours from the shareholders’ meeting, and Stone had by now expected to be fully confident of success. Unwillingly he allowed himself to think of the consequences if Rick Barron did not prevail at the meeting. Stone had been operating on a steady wave of mostly good news for the past week, especially his elevation to partner at Woodman amp; Weld, but now what had seemed within grasp-the rescue of a fine, old name in filmmaking-seemed to be slipping away. The fabric of their plan was unraveling.
Arrington had repaired to her rooms to do whatever women did in the morning, and Dino had gone off to do whatever it was he was doing with Rivera, and Stone was uncomfortably alone. His cell phone rang, and he picked it up, not recognizing the number displayed on the screen. “Hello?”
“Mr. Barrington?” a well-modulated female voice said.
“Yes?”
“My name is Eleanor Grosvenor.”
Stone was taken aback. “Yes?”
“Do you know who I am?” she asked.
“Yes, Mrs. Grosvenor,” he replied. This was the woman who had married his friend Ed Eagle, then attempted to steal his accumulated wealth and had, after that, repeatedly tried to murder him, a woman who had escaped from a Los Angeles courtroom, not realizing that she was about to be acquitted; who had escaped from a Mexican prison and somehow wangled a pardon for that and other crimes; who now was one of the richest women in the United States. Stone felt at once overmatched. “You are the former Barbara Eagle, are you not?”
“I am,” she replied, “and since you know that, I hope you will not hold against me whatever you may have heard.”
“Mrs. Grosvenor, so much of what I have heard about you strains credulity, and I hope I may be forgiven for not having had time to formulate an informed opinion.”
She laughed, a pleasing sound. “You must know that we dined in the same garden last evening, but I would not wish you to be overly concerned about my presence there.”
“I have not been able to decide whether I should be concerned or merely baffled.”
She laughed again. “You and I may soon be doing business,” she said, “and while I don’t want to go into that on this occasion, I do want you to know that what I have heard of you is favorable, and I don’t want you to be alarmed about my presence in town at this moment.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand what any of that means,” Stone replied. Had she really gained a favorable impression of him by dining with Terry Prince? That seemed unlikely in the extreme.
“I’m sorry to be mysterious, but you will know more soon. Now I must go. Goodbye.” She hung up.
Stone sat with the phone still in his hand, wondering what had just happened. He called Ed Eagle.
“Hello, Stone.”
“Ed, I’ve just had the most extraordinary phone call from your ex-wife.”
“What?”
“She called me just a moment ago.”
“For God’s sake, why?”
“I have no idea; I hardly understood anything she said, except that she seemed to want to be reassuring.”
“Reassuring about what?”
“I’m not sure. I think she may be mixed up with Terry Prince in the Centurion deal.”
“Believe me,” Eagle said, “if she is, then you should not take that as reassuring.”
“But if she is in bed with Prince, why would she call and say that she has a good opinion of me?”
“Stone, I would normally say that anyone of whom Barbara has a good opinion is not worth knowing or is, at the very least, someone to steer clear of.”
“She must understand that if she’s in bed with Prince, I’m her opponent.”
