At First Sight

Chapter 7

I took the red-eye.

The weather in New York was dismal. A bone-chilling sleet washed the city, falling from a gunmetal sky.

My Jamaican taxi driver couldn't speak American English. He spoke some kind of indecipherable island patois where every sentence either began or ended with "mon." This angry asshole sat in the front seat of his paint-chipped yellow cab, looking back at me through dirty braids, his Rasta beads clicking ominously every time he moved his head. He made me repeat the address three times, laying the groundwork for getting lost later-conning me, trying to drive up the fare. I hate all these immigrants. I'm tired of my tax dollars going to support a bunch of lazy border jumpers.

"Huh? Whatchu tellin, mon?" he asked.

"Financial District, downtown." I handed him the slip of paper with the address on it. We were outside the American Airlines terminal at JFK.

"Huh? What be dat district, mon? Where dat be at?" Who did he think he was kidding? He drives a cab in New York and can't find the Financial District? Then he got on the radio and pretended to get instructions from a dispatcher with a Middle Eastern accent. Urban terrorists, both of them.

I hate New York. I don't get the vibe here. Since September 11th, it's gotten even worse. They all act as if the Big Apple is the new center of the moral universe. Of course, I'm from Southern California and the only things that got knocked down in L. A. on 9/11 were some IRA accounts, so I'm probably the wrong guy to listen to.

My Jamaican cabbie managed to find the address in downtown Manhattan after giving me a fucking tour of Brooklyn and the Lower East Side. The cab fare was a mind-boggling $85.50. See what I'm saying? Thieves, all of them.

The man I was going to see was named Walter Lily. The Lily Fund basically bought assets low and sold high, which was another way of saying they acquired sick companies. Walter Lily had a reputation on Wall Street as a "grave dancer," a man who profited from other men's misfortunes. But I was more or less down to my last few lifelines, so I had no choice. I had to pursue it.

The Lily Building was one of those New York addresses that looks like it was squeezed in as an afterthought, probably when some holdout finally sold his hotdog stand and made his postage stamp of ground available to the hovering killers in the New York real-estate cabal. The building sat on only about an eighth of a city block. The architecture was expensive, turn-of-the-century stone and brick to the second floor, where more cost-effective steel and glass took over and went up for fifty stories. Like nobody on the streets would ever look up and spot it.

I rode the elevator to the top floor. My heart was pounding, and my hands sweating. I clutched the handle of my briefcase, which was full of carefully fabricated numbers and spreadsheets that my CFO, Martin Worth, had supplied.

I was meeting with Mr. Lily himself. He had insisted that I come alone. His appointment secretary explained that he liked his meetings one-on-one. I was told he had allowed fifteen minutes for our little chat.

How the last twelve years of my life could come down to a fifteen-minute chat still baffled me. But I had shot through all of the more probable suitors, swinging from the heels, trying to hammer one out of the park, missing the ball each time, going down in a whirl of air and curses.

As I exited the elevator and felt it wheeze closed behind me, I found myself standing in a very ordinary entryway.

A young, overweight girl was seated behind a marble desk reading Vanity Fair. Above her head was some kind of brass logo that resembled a lily, and under that, appropriately enough:

THE LILY FUND

I crossed to her. "I'm Charles Best," I said, handing her my card. "I have an eleven o'clock appointment with Mr. Lily."

She took my card and frowned at it as if it contained the results of her last Pap smear. She wrinkled her brow; she pursed her lips; she dangled it in two fingers like a cat turd fished from her litter box. Then she set it down on her desk and frowned at it.

I should say here that the card cost me a bloody fortune. In the middle it says BESTMARKET. COM in raised gold letters. Our logo, which is a unicorn, is embossed on the top left corner of the card. Why a unicorn? I don't know… I really don't. Somebody else picked it. But it seemed kind of show businessy, so I agreed. At the bottom, my name was also in embossed letters.

CHARLES "CHICK" BEST CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER

She picked up the phone and spoke softly to somebody inside, then looked up at me. "You can wait over there." She pointed to a worn leather sofa and went immediately back to her magazine.

I walked over and sat. I put my briefcase in front of me and picked up that morning's Wall Street Journal. I tried to read an article about the mortgage meltdown, but I couldn't make my mind stay focused. My heart was pounding, my senses quivering. I was trying to calm myself down, trying to get my hands to stop shaking.

I kept thinking my entire future was coming down to a meeting with a guy who had been alternately called a grave dancer or the Great White of Wall Street. He was what was commonly referred to as garbitrageur, a derogatory blend of the two words "garbage" and "arbitrageur." I knew he would try to lowball me. That's why I had the doctored spreadsheets Martin Worth had pencil-whipped, putting the best possible face on a large array of unexploded financial grenades.

It was eleven-twenty before I was finally shown into Lily's office.

As bleak and foreboding as the waiting area was, the inner sanctum was just the opposite. Money and wealth reeked off polished wood walls and ornate Louie XV furniture. Louis XV is my least favorite style ever since I noticed that all of the pictures of Liberace I'd ever seen had him sitting in rooms full of that kind of French furniture.

But it was everywhere in the Lily Fund offices: pushed up against the polished oak walls, decorating every available open space. Gold-leaf lion-claw legs stood on carpet that was some kind of expensive custom weave, stretched to fit under the heavy wood moldings.

I was shepherded by a sallow young man in a gray suit, past offices full of people who were so busy making money for my host, they didn't even look up to see who Mr. Lily's next victim was.

I was shown into his outer office. A woman who was in her mid-fifties paused and glanced up. A corporate diva, she studied me fiercely over half-glasses.

"Mr. Best?" she asked, coldly.

"Yes, ma'am. I'm the best Best there is!" giving her one of my cute openers. Then I smiled, flashing my full sixteen, the old Chick Best ivory personality blitz.

She didn't waver under its effect. Total points won: zip. "Go in," she instructed coolly.

The shepherd in the gray suit opened the office door and guided me into Mr. Walter Lily's inner sanctum, then positioned himself right inside the door. I was feeling like a condemned man about to hear a life-altering sentence.

The office surprised me. I don't know what I'd been expecting, but it wasn't what I found.

To begin with, despite the pricey Louis XV furnishings, Lily's workspace was unusually small and cluttered. There were books and financial statements stacked everywhere. One small window looked out on the back wall of a large building. No effort was wasted on frills in this room.

My office, by comparison, was huge and full of expensive geegaws. I had a two-hundred-thousand-dollar sound system you could operate with a laser remote, a door that electronically opened and closed from a button under my desk, and a hidden bar that rotated out of one wall.

I instantly saw the dichotomy. I was going broke in my huge tricked-out office, while Lily was making billions in a closet that wasn't big enough to store my sports equipment.

How did I get so fucked up?

Sitting behind a desk piled with spreadsheets was the tiniest little man I'd ever seen. He was bald, and as I came through the door, he had his arms out, his palms flat on his blotter. My initial impression was of a large head suspended on spider legs. Then he rose to his full five-foot-two-inch height and came around the desk to meet me. He had a skinny build and hair tufting out of his ears. A gnome. I'm not going to waste a lot more time describing him or our short visit-our chat-because it was the most ludicrous business meeting I had ever attended.

"Mr. Best?" Walter Lily asked. His voice was high, a squeak actually.

"Yes sir, the best Best there is!" I flashed my grill and got no more out of him with this line than I had with his cold-ass secretary.

"I understand you're interested in selling your company."

"Well, sir, I'd certainly consider it, but only if I got a blowout bid. We're not exactly pursuing a sale right now, because we're quite excited about where we're heading and our new quarter spreadsheets are showing renewed long-term profit and capital return. However, that said, under the right circumstances I might consider taking on the right strategic partner if appropriate terms could be negotiated."

I know, I know. You're thinking, what a load of bullshit. But this is the way you negotiate in business. You don't sell because you're strapped for cash; you take on a strategic partner. You don't roll over and expose your soft underbelly to the Great White of Wall Street; you pretend you don't need him.

The little man wearing Sears Roebuck trousers stood for a long moment before he pulled a slip of paper out of his shirt pocket and handed it to me.

"What's this?" I said, smiling.

"My offer. Not a penny more or less," the midget intoned, looking and sounding like a tiny Shylock, or a badly turned-out Ebenezer Scrooge.

Now, let me say right here, this is not the way business is done. My company, while currently experiencing hard times, was once the third-largest Internet site on the Web.

I admit, we made no profit, but that was a calculated strategy. We used every cent, plus all we could borrow, to expand. Product was flying out the door. Millions and millions of website hits a month. We lost money, but we built volume and name value. Name value equates to dollar value. This is a business truth. A brand name can be sold. If you owned the name "Kleenex" for instance, you would have something you could sell for a fortune. I'm not saying bestmarket. Com was as well known as Kleenex, or that it was a brand name by which all Internet entertainment sales were referred to, but I am saying that people knew who we were, and in the intensely competitive world of Web commerce, this is a very valuable asset. Millions of people hit our site just because they knew it was there.

I looked at the slip of paper and I couldn't believe what was written there. Two million dollars.

"Two million dollars for what?" I asked, dumbfounded. I was personally on the line for big long-term leases: the warehouse and our six-story L. A. office building. Walter Lily had to know all that if he'd done his due diligence, which I was sure he had. The two million dollars wouldn't even cover my litigation costs when I terminated all the long-term contracts with my employees, or handle the breach-ofcontract problems I was sure to face.

The only thing that was keeping my creditors from swarming me was the knowledge that I had nothing but a thinly capitalized company. If they put me into Chapter 11, they'd get ten cents on the dollar for what we owed them, so they were carrying us, hoping we'd work our way out of debt. But Lily knew this. He knew if I tried to walk away from these contractual obligations, I'd be in court forever.

This little asshole was trying to steal my company for nothing. He had the cash and personal assets to restart the operation, reinstate my studio and record-company deals. He'd make my fortune instead of me.

Ten years ago, in the good old dot-com wizard days, we'd had a paper value of six hundred million dollars, as estimated in Forbes magazine. Admittedly, we'd slipped some, but this offer was nuts.

"T… two million?" I said, stuttering my disbelief.

"Yes." He looked at me like a malicious child who had just pulled the wings off a moth and was watching it flop around helplessly on a windowsill.

"But, sir,… the liquidated break-up value is at least seven," I said, retreating immediately to my absolute bottom-line number. I snapped open my briefcase and went for the doctored spreadsheets.

"Don't bother with any of those," he said as I pulled them out. "That's the offer. This time next month, you won't get a dollar from me or anyone else."

"I can't sell for two million. The name alone is worth four times that much."

"Goodbye, then:' he said. The little bandit turned and walked out of his office, leaving me standing there with the narrow-shouldered shepherd in the gray suit.

"Is he kidding?" I said.

"I'll show you out:" the man said.

It appeared I'd come three thousand miles just to let a dwarf in shiny pants shit on me.