Paul envied him. Two days ago he had asked where Williamson had got the gun — how he’d got a license for it.
“Well, you don’t need a license to buy one. You’ve got to register it, of course — the federal act — but they can’t refuse to sell you a gun as long as you can prove you haven’t got a criminal record. Technically you’re not supposed to carry a concealed weapon, and the cops enforce that if they catch you with a gun in your pocket, but I never heard of anybody getting arrested for carrying a piece in his car or keeping a gun in his house. Course you can get a concealed-weapon permit from the local cops if you really want one. Not like back East, thank God.”
They were all right-wing down here, it was Gold-water country. He hadn’t lost his contempt for their attitudes on almost everything. They supported free enterprise for the poor and socialized subsidies for the rich. They insisted on your right to die if you didn’t have enough money to afford expensive private medical treatment. They saw Communists behind every bush and wanted to drop Nukes on Moscow and Peking. You had a right to good transportation if you had the price of a Cadillac; Tucson had no public transportation to speak of.
But they had a hard-nosed fundamentalist attitude toward crime and he knew now they were right about that.
Jainchill’s head offices occupied the top three floors of a very new high-rise building near the foothills of the mountains that loomed over the city. The building was all plastic and glass, it had all the warmth of a digital computer. He put the car in the vast parking lot and went into the lobby and felt the blast of chilled air hit him like an arctic wind after the heat outside. He pressed the elevator’s depressed plastic square and watched it light up.
They had assigned a conference room to him. The long table was littered with ledgers and documents. He spent the morning alone with columns of figures; at noon he left the building and drove to the restaurant to meet George Eng for lunch. On the way he got caught in a little knot of traffic; a fool blocked his way, one of those uncertain drivers who crept through the intersection and inevitably put on a burst and squirted through the traffic just as it turned amber, leaving Paul stranded at the stoplight. He looked at his watch and chafed.
On the corner beside him stood a small shop with fishing tackle and bicycles and guns in the display window. Hunting rifles, shotguns, more varieties of handguns than he had ever thought existed. He stared at them.
A horn blared behind him. The light had changed. He drove across the intersection, craning his neck to find the street signs. He couldn’t see them. The idiot behind him blatted again and he drove on, never having found out what cross-street it had been. But he knew he was on Fourth Avenue; he’d be able to find it again. He dipped down into the sudden dimness of the railroad underpass and when he emerged from it he began to look for a place to park.
“The shrimp’s pretty good here. It’s Guaymas shrimp, they fly it up here fresh.”
“I bow to the wisdom of the East,” Paul said and closed the menu.
George Eng smiled at the little joke and gave the order to the hovering waiter. When they had been left alone at the table with their drinks he said to Paul, “How’s it going?”
“Steady and tiresome. I haven’t found anything shocking.”
“Kind of hoped you wouldn’t.” George Eng was fleshy around the face and his movements were those of a heavy man but he was not overweight. Paul had only met him within the past year; he assumed Eng had done a good deal of dieting in the recent past but hadn’t yet got used to being slender. He had a thin feathering of dark hair and a self-conscious Fu Manchu moustache that lent his Oriental features a sinister appearance. He had been born in Hawaii into a wealthy family; he had no discernible accent. He dressed with conservative care and had expensive tastes; he was a good businessman with a quick decisive mind. Paul had met him only at business affairs and gatherings associated with business — cocktail parties, luncheons. He knew nothing about the man outside of that context; Eng was a private person, he didn’t open up. It had been months before Paul had screwed up the nerve to crack mild and inoffensive Oriental jokes at him, and he’d only started because it had become evident that Eng expected it and enjoyed it. He played the role of Chinese man-of-mystery with deliberate intent.
It was the sort of restaurant that did most of its business at the noon hour and attracted a business-lunch clientele of the kind that didn’t stint on expense accounts: The drinks were generous, the menu straightforward but served with a proper elegance, and the tables were separated by pillars and rubber plants and discreet distances. The lighting was recessed and indirect but you didn’t have to strain your eyes to read your partner’s expressions.
“All right,” George Eng said, “let’s wheel and deal. You’ve been at it all week. What can you tell me?”
“It’s pretty much what we expected. Nothing alarming. Naturally they’ve done everything they can to put the company in the best light — they’ve seen you coming, for quite some time.”
“In a way we did that on purpose. Wanted to see how much skulduggery their management was willing to indulge in. We’ve given them ample opportunity to show their true colors, don’t you think?”
“I’d say so, yes.”
“And what are their true colors?”
“I’d call it pale gray,” Paul said. “You’ve already seen the routine posting-and-footing audit; that was done back in New York with electronic data-processing. We already knew they’d done some mild fiddling with their earned surplus and net working capital and other vagaries like that.”
“You’re suggesting I needn’t be surprised to find they’ve carried that policy through to the rest of the company.”
Paul nodded. “I didn’t think it would put you off.”
“What specifically are we talking about now?”
“I’ve found half a dozen points you can use for leverage, I think. For instance, they’ve tried to show a sharp increase in assets by reporting the company’s subsidiaries at book value instead of original cost.”
Eng made a face. “That’s a little cheap. I’m disappointed in Jainchill.”
“You can’t really blame him for trying.”
“I had a sneaking hope he’d be a little less obvious than that. What else?”
“Well, they’ve started amortizing their research costs over a five-year span. They only started doing that last year — before that they were absorbing them immediately in each fiscal year. Nothing dishonest about it, but it does paint a brighter picture. The only other thing of any consequence I’ve been able to find is a sharp increase, within the past eighteen months, in stock options to their executives.”
“In lieu of cash bonuses, you mean.”
“Yes. They used to pay cash bonuses almost exclusively.”
“What do the stock options amount to?”
“I’m still working on those sheets. If I had to make a general projection I’d say it would be in the neighborhood of four hundred thousand dollars.”
Eng put a cigarette into a stubby silver holder and lit it with a jeweled lighter. “And of course those stock options aren’t charged to income.”
“No.”
“Stock options,” Eng muttered, “can turn out to be a long-run drain on per-share dividends. They could end up diluting their capitalization if they kept it up at that rate.”
“Well, I’m sure they had no intention of keeping it up. They knew you were nosing around, there was a good chance of a take-over bid from Amercon — you’d have done the same thing, in their shoes.”
“In effect, then, they’ve been paying bonuses to their own executives in the form of options on what they hope will be Amercon stocks.”