A shrewd pitch. She had zeroed in on the one angle I’d be happy to talk about all day.
“Anyway.” The smile again. “I promised to shut up after two minutes. May I leave you my card? My cell number’s on it, in case you ever want to talk.” I accepted the ivory rectangle from her outstretched hand, intending to chuck it in the trash the second she left.
“Oh!” She twirled around. “I almost forgot. Here. For your convalescence.”
Alexandra James held up a white box tied with string. I recognized the elaborate, cursive P of the Patisserie Poupon logo.
My eyes narrowed. “How did you . . . ?”
“Like I said, I called the university before I walked over here. To check when they were expecting you back at work. I didn’t want to disturb you if you’d just been released from the hospital an hour ago or something.”
“And Rhonda gave out my home address?” I would need to have a word with her.
“No, no. I already had it. You’re in the phone book, you know. Rhonda didn’t tell me anything except that you’re on leave for the rest of the semester. And that if you weren’t at home, I might find you here.” She tapped the P logo on the pastry box. “I share your addiction, by the way. I’m a fiend for their lemon tart.”
I bit back a smile. Say what you would about the woman’s journalistic ethics, she was clever. I carried the box through to my kitchen. Lifted the lid. Bacon quiche. Still warm.
You are not supposed to accept food from strangers. That must be one of the earliest lessons that my mother—hell, probably both my mothers—had drummed into me. But they also taught me to trust my instincts. Right now mine were telling me that Alex James wanted to -interview me, not poison me.
I opened a drawer and pulled out a fork.
? ? ?
I HAD POWERED my way through two slices of quiche and was eyeing a third when the doorbell rang again.
What now?
It was a tiny skeleton. In plump hands it clutched a hollow, plastic pumpkin. “Trick or treat?”
I had forgotten it was Halloween. Bizarre holiday. Dressing children up as witches and vampires, telling them stories about monsters and ghosts. As if real life didn’t pack enough nasty surprises.
Forty-one
* * *
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2013
For many years, if you wanted to make a phone call in Atlanta, you were routed through the switchboards of Southern Bell.
In the early days, the 1880s, the only long-distance call you could place was from Atlanta to Decatur, six whole miles away. That would set you back fifteen cents for a five-minute chat. It was 1915 before the first transcontinental call, voices dancing from the East Coast to the West across thousands of miles of suspended copper wire; 1951 before you were allowed to dial long distance without the assistance of an operator; 1956 before the first transatlantic phone cable was laid. Southern Bell thrived through the changes, survived a dizzying number of mergers and spin-offs and splits, until the company name was finally retired in 1998.
I mention all this by way of backdrop. Backdrop to what, for our purposes, is by far the most interesting date in Southern Bell’s corporate history: March 25, 1971. That’s when a Mr. Verlin Snow walked through the doors. He was hired as a senior vice president, poached from a Boston bank, forty-five years old. Technically he was brought in to oversee the completion of the transition to touch-tone phones. They’d been available to subscribers since the early sixties, but folks seemed slow to catch on. But Snow’s real talent was as a rainmaker. He possessed an exceptional knack for greasing political connections to increase profits. A columnist for the Atlanta Business Chronicle noted that most weekdays you could watch him in action at the Coach and Six, the Peachtree Street power-lunch spot favored by the city’s old guard. Verlin Snow stood out, the columnist added with a trace of suspicion, not only for his Yankee accent but for his puritanical habits. Snow conducted business stone-cold sober, in a town where men were disposed toward downing a second martini before the food arrived.
Sometime in the late 1970s, though, he had gotten into trouble. He had hired a young lawyer by the name of Ethan Sinclare, a rising star in one of Atlanta’s white-shoe firms. I couldn’t tell quite what kind of trouble Snow was in. Beamer Beasley didn’t seem to know either, and whatever it was, Sinclare appeared to have earned his fee and succeeded at making it disappear. A Forbes magazine profile of Snow in 1981 (“The Man Who Killed Off the Rotary Phone”) alluded only to an extended leave of absence, taken at his summer home on Nantucket, from which Snow had returned to work energized and more bullish than ever.
What Beasley did know was that late in 1979, when Sinclare was questioned about the murders of Boone and Sadie Rawson Smith, he had had an impeccable alibi. He had been locked in a conference room at his downtown office, conferring with his client Verlin Snow. Snow confirmed this when police followed up. Yes, he was absolutely certain about the date and hours in question. No, Sinclare could not have slipped out for any length of time. Lawyer and client had been hunkered over stacks of documents, heads bowed together, the entire -afternoon. Snow was a pillar of the business community, a member of the right country club, on the executive committee of the Commerce Club. His word was gold.
I was able to piece together most of Verlin Snow’s background from my kitchen table. Astonishing what you can accomplish these days, armed with a laptop and a fast Internet connection. But the press clippings petered out after his retirement in the early nineties. He was quoted a few times, trotted out for expert analysis, in news stories covering various telecom antitrust lawsuits. The last reference I could find was from 1997—sixteen years ago—when the student newspaper for Northwestern University mentioned that Snow would be guest--lecturing at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management.