Antitrust and Infidelity

By Peter Helmberger

Donald Quimby is a prosecuting attorney with the Federal Trade Commission. Judged a nincompoop by his colleagues, his quixotic quest in life is to bring big business to heel in a radical restructuring of the American economy. Though longing for a wife and family, he refuses to commit to any woman because of the locker-room concern he has with what he calls his shortcoming.

Sandra Panatella is Mr. Quimbys assistant. She is desperately in love with Mr. Quimby and believes he loves her back. Unaware of his psychological hang-up, she cant understand why he refuses to take her in his arms to do a mans business.

Arnold Armentrout is a smart, hard-driving CEO of Apple-A-Day Packing, Inc., a fast-growing diversified food company. When the company was in financial peril some years back, he entered a conspiracy with Professor Charles Kozicki to rig the prices paid to the Pacific Northwest apple growers. (Professor Kozicki is an influential consultant to the Pacific Northwest Apple Growers Cooperative, a bargaining association.)

Mr. Armentrout owes his position with the company to his marriage to the major stockholders daughter Louise. He is dissatisfied with his marriage in part because of his wifes hearty appetite for no-frills sex. He longs for a love life with greater subtlety, tenderness, and beauty, where, he tells himself one day on the way to work, lovemaking is a bond not a bang.

Steven Burt is an ambitious and conniving vice-president of Apple-A-Day Packing. He plots with his wife Peggy to destroy Armentrout and take over the company.

The novels characters collide when a corrupt U.S. senator, to placate a right-wing congresswoman from Idaho, with whom hes having an affair, secretly pressures the Federal Trade Commission into filing a complaint charging Apple-A-Day Packing with attempting to monopolize the processed potato business. Donald Quimby is chosen to lead the prosecutorial team because the FTC leadership doubts that any of its other attorneys wold take charge of a case so devoid of merit. (The FTC has no knowledge of Arnold Armentrouts conspiracy to rig prices paid to apple growers.)

Arnold Armentrout is both enraged and terrified, enraged because he knows the charge against his company is bogus; terrified on the one-thing-leads-to-another principle. If the FTC prosecutors investigate his companys position in the processed potato business, mightnt they find out about his conspiracy to fix apple prices? Which would likely land him in jail?

When Donald Quimby and his team of prosecutors arrive in Seattle to take depositions, the Burts spring their plot to upend Mr. Armentrout. The lives of the novels protagonists are soon strewn with confusion, guilt, broken hearts, and wounded pride. Solemn legal proceedings eventually give way to a comic wrestling match in which Quimby and Armentrout, confused but nonetheless fighting doggedly for the women they love, learn to bear lifes desperation with both a little more understanding and a little less disquiet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 15, 2002
• ISBN: 9781469108346

Peter Helmberger

Peter Helmberger was born in Perham, Minnesota. He has B.S. and M.S. degrees from the University of Minnesota and a Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley. He has served on the faculties of Pennsylvania State University, the University of California-Berkeley, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Now a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, he has launched a wildly successful second career, writing comic novels that earn royalties in the tens of dollars annually.

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CHAPTER 1

Monday, March 20th, 1997. Washington D.C. Inscribed on the nameplate on the door to Room 217 in the Federal Trade Commission Offices on Pennsylvania Avenue at Sixth Street, NW, were the name and abbreviated honorific, Donald Quimby, Esq. It was early morning, and since no one was in Mr. Quimby’s office the lights were out; it was still and everything was in its place. On the pale green walls were hung two double-matted diplomas, one indicating that Mr. Quimby had a baccalaureate from Dartmouth and the other that he had studied law at American University. Also hanging on the wall was an autographed photograph of Mr. Quimby’s current boss, President Bill Clinton. The photograph was greatly revered by Mr. Quimby, who seemed oblivious to the FTC Commissioners’ distribution of such photographs to all their attorneys, no matter how undeserving, as a means of bucking up morale and quickening the unspooling of red tape.

In the spirit of a whistle-blower willing to sacrifice all for the common good, Donald Quimby occasionally studied the President’s boyish good looks and contemplated sending him an urgent message regarding the serious erosion of competition in the American economy. On every such occasion, however, his faithful assistant Ms. Sandra Panatella, given to differentiating for Mr. Quimby the world as it was from what he imagined it to be, had dissuaded him from doing so. With patience and forbearance she urged Mr. Quimby not to fire off well-intentioned memoranda to the White House that might be misconstrued as an attempt to undermine the authority of his immediate superiors, thus chilling his chances for promotion. Such reminders touched a responsive chord in Mr. Quimby’s grandiose designs.

After fourteen years of jousting with the smarty-pants lawyers in the pay of big business and having his ideas rejected by his superiors, not always politely, Mr. Quimby had become increasingly aware that he lacked clout: that as the Executive Director of the FTC, or, better still, as one of its commissioners, he would be in a much stronger position to bring corporate America to heel. In his office with the door closed, he and Sandra Panatella often pored over a large flow chart depicting the executive branch of government as a hierarchical pyramid. They plotted various switchbacks that would take Mr. Quimby further up from the bottom, where subalterns carted away shredded documents, to the dizzying heights, where the really big decisions were made.

With her heart on her silk sleeve, exuding expensive perfume she could ill afford but bought anyway to pique Mr. Quimby’s libido, Sandra Panatella tried steadfastly to interpose elements of reason, caution, and practicality into his fanciful designs. Although she could not readily explain why, she was hopelessly in love with Mr. Quimby and believed he loved her back, unaware that he had a significant psychological hang-up, that he was afraid to enter a serious relationship with her (or with any woman, for that matter) because of what he told himself was his shortcoming. Thus, Ms. Panatella waited in vain for Mr. Quimby to do a man’s work: to take her in his arms, kiss her on the lips, and make her his very own, thus to ward off other aggressive males with their flirty eyes, cunning remarks, and restless hands.

At eight o’clock sharp, Donald Quimby unlocked the door to his office and walked in. He flicked on the lights and draped his overcoat on a hanger hooked on a coat tree. From a briefcase stuffed with newspaper clippings, government documents, a recent book on antitrust policy, and photocopied articles from learned journals, he extracted a squashed peanut butter sandwich in a plastic bag and put it a desk drawer. He sat in a high-backed black swivel chair and surveyed with satisfaction the top of his desk. It was clear except for a push-button phone, a miniature flag hanging from a flag pole anchored in bronze, and a three by five photograph of his mother. He wheeled across the plastic island that covered the carpet between his writing desk and his computer desk and turned on his terminal. There was an immediate whir and in a few moments the screen of his monitor lit up. Flexing his fingers as on every other workday of the year, save the two weeks of vacation he spends with his mother in St. Petersburg, Florida, Mr. Quimby was prepared once again to search out and expose the nefarious misdeeds of corporate America and to seek just punishment for the offending parties. With a nimble finger, he palpated his mouse. In a flash the first page of the document of interest appeared on the screen. With a malevolent grin, he read what was there: "United States of America, Before Federal Trade Commission, Docket No. W 4183, in the matter of: Apple-A-Day Packing Company, Inc., COMPLAINT."

Fingering the page-down button of his keyboard, he read on and became increasingly excited by this the latest draft of a complaint he hoped would soon be served on Apple-A-Day Packing. On page six, he substituted one word for another. Better to use the word indicates when building a case against wrong-doing, he believed, than the namby-pamby word suggests, particularly if the evidence was at best suggestive. By the time he got to the climactic section, the one entitled Notice of Contemplated Relief, his breathing had become irregular. He rested his hands on his upper thighs. Unconsciously, in a habit that had evolved over the many years of his bachelorhood, a habit that aroused considerable mirth among his colleagues, his thumb gently groped at his crotch until it found the sought-after object. Through layers of worsted wool and cotton knit, his errant thumb twitched nervously against the head of his stubby penis.

You must win this case, he demanded of himself as he eyed with satisfaction the last page of the complaint. The FTC is counting on you. The USA is counting on you, not to mention the NAFTA. You don’t know it yet, Mr. Armentrout, but you’re SOL. Giving his irritated member a rest, he rubbed his hands together in fervent anticipation of doing good. He uttered under his breath an ejaculatory prayer: gird up now thy loins like a man.

*

By then it was 5:15 A.M. Pacific Standard Time. The very object of Donald Quimby’s scorn, Mr. Arnold Armentrout, President and CEO of Apple-A-Day Packing, Inc., lay awake in bed with the morning sweats, harboring thoughts that were both terrifying and irrational. Always a hard-driven, hard-driving man, Arnold Armentrout had been in the habit of going to bed at a late hour ever since he was a college student majoring in industrial engineering. Unlike normal people, however, his rapid-eye-movement sleep would commence almost immediately. Amorous dreams often accompanied his REM sleep as a young man, but the passing years had taken their toll. Now his dreams were rare, and when they did come, flashing across the lobed landscape of his mind like heat lightening in the night, the images he saw more often than not were of bugs the size of grain combines, grinding inexorably through the orchards of the Yakima Valley, devouring apple trees and apple growers alike.

Just when his morning sweats began, Arnold Armentrout would be hard put to say, but it was some years back after the Alar scare sent Apple-A-Day’s profitability down the drain. Hysteria, he told anyone who would listen, which excluded his wife who only bought fruits and vegetables that were grown organically. Hysteria brought on by those know-nothing do-gooders from the Natural Resources Defense Council, he said at the time. You pump enough daminozide into a rat’s belly and of course the little bugger is going to keel over, if not from cancer, then from something else for chrissake.

And now that the Alar crisis had subsided, those assholes from the Environmental Protection Agency were descending upon the industry with new pesticide regulations that caused Arnold Armentrout’s blood-shot eyes to blink open in terror. And what was worse, ten times worse, easily, was the possibility that someday Apple-A-Day apples would become infected with the E. coli bacteria as in the recent case of unpasteurized apple juice. The experts from Washington State University told him not to worry, that all he had to do was avoid shipping apples that fell on the ground or came from trees where birds roosted.

Well, great. How in the hell do you do that? he asked himself one day while driving home from work. Sing a little song to the birdies?

Won’t you shit on the apple trees of everybody else but me? Everybody else but me? Everybody else but me? Ya, ya, ya . . .

He sang in a good tenor voice, pleased with himself and grinning at his impromptu lyrics. Then he honked his horn at the SOB who had cut in front of him.

And if swatting bugs and dodging bird shit wasn’t enough to keep a good man awake, what about trying to fix in the consumer’s mind a brand name for a commodity such as apples? It was damned hard: that’s what it was. Some mornings Arnold Armentrout’s mind was like a TV run amok, flicking faster and faster from one channel to the next. William Tell extracts an arrow from his quiver, bends his bow and, swish, nails a kid’s ear to a tree just like that. Flick. Wearing her steel spiked bra in the Garden of Eden, Madonna offers an apple to David Letterman wearing nothing but a fig leaf and a dopey grin. Flick. Bearing a remarkable resemblance to Roseanne, a cartoon witch says to Snow White, Have an apple from Apple-A-Day Packing, my little precious. Snow White takes a bite, turns jungle green, and keels over kerplunk. Flick, flick, flick: image after image smacked him in the eyeballs, faster and faster, in one inextricable blur of horrors.

In recent months, competing with bugs, bureaucrats, bacteria, and brand names, Arnold Armentrout’s family had also begun intruding on his early morning repose. For one thing there was his son Gary, a ski-bum shacked up somewhere in Colorado with a blonde bimbo who painted her fingernails blue. Earlier in the year, on January 31st, Arnold and Louise had received an E-mail message from their son telling them to watch ABC on Channel 4 the following morning at ten o’clock. He said he might be on TV. Sure enough, he was. Next, the sports announcer cried out, as if to herald the coming of Jesus Christ Himself on a pair of skis, we have Gary Armentrout who plans to do a triple-twisting-doubleback-flip. Arnold Armentrout’s heart flopped about like a freshly caught fish on a pier when he saw his son slam-bang down the hill and up a ramp that shot him into the air like a frigging rocket. Against a perfectly blue sky, practically in orbit, Gary put his body through contortions that were enough to give a father heartburn, and did. Then he landed on his head, bounced up on his skis, and schussed down to a mob of adoring fans who strained against a bulging snow fence to touch his red, white, and blue jacket. Gary took off his helmet, grinned handsomely, and said Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad, as the camera zoomed in on a square jaw and bronzed cheeks crowned by a halo of sun-bleached curly brown hair, the spit and image of his dad providing you added a paunch and removed the handiwork of the sun.

Godalmighty, Arnold said to Louise, mercilessly grinding a Tums between his molars, did you see that? He fell right on his frigging head.

Well, except for that, she replied, it was fantastic. I’d like to see you try something like that.

Yeah, I bet you would, Arnold snorted in reply, giving his wife a sharp look. That stupid kid of yours should be filling his head with calculus instead of ramming the goddamned thing into a snow bank in Colorado.

Don’t you worry about him, Arnie, she replied. He’s got himself on network TV. I’ve never seen your sour puss on TV.

Holy busting balls, what does that mean? Arnie spluttered to himself, too enraged for coherent speech. Here I am working fourteen hours a day so she can drive around in a Mercedes coupe and our two kids can spend money as if there’s no tomorrow and what thanks do I get? None. Nada. That’s what I get. Zilch. Does the ditzy broad really believe that getting on TV by doing some harebrained stunt is more important than running a company that markets nearly half the state’s crop of apples for chrissake? Not to mention the pears and plums, or running the five food processing plants we’ve recently acquired, or building up a company that twenty-five years ago was little more than a few tarpaper packing sheds straight out of Dogpatch. Shit, a good strong westerly would have blown the goddamned things clear to Toledo. Yeah, and some would have said good riddance, too.

Sitting with Louise on the smart leather sofa in their rumpus room in his stockinged feet, waiting to see if Gary was going to fall on his head again, Arnie’s thoughts suddenly flipped from Toledo to the East Coast where his daughter Connie had been (and still was as far as Arnold knew) majoring in English at Wellseley. Majoring in English, my tush, he complained under his breath. She’s learning how to become a total snot.

He remembered the time when Connie came home for Christmas and insisted the family watch the Nutcracker on TV, to soak up a bit of culture, she explained. Reading out loud from a preview in the newspaper, Arnie mispronounced corps de ballet, and Connie cackled, Oh, Daddy. You’re so dreadfully illiterate. Of course, she couldn’t just come right out and say it in plain English. Oh no, Arnie reminded himself during a TV commercial. She had to say it in French so she and Louise could enjoy a private laugh at your expense and you didn’t find out about it until later when you were having a row with Louise and she told you about it out of pure spite. Well, by god, you won’t forget that so soon, he nursed his grudge, still waiting for his son’s turn at the top of the hill. When did you ever have time to study poetry, French, Shakespeare: shit like that? When you were in school, you were too damned busy studying linear programming, computer integrated manufacturing, stochastic processes, industrial design: shit like that. I’d like to see those two twits try to learn shit like that. And that’s the kind of shit you have to know if you want to make this country great: building plants; creating jobs for people; providing moms with food for their kids, goddamnit; competing with those assholes in South America.

At 5:35 A.M. Arnold Armentrout sat up in bed, leaned against the headboard, lifted his arms, and rested his head on laced fingers. He froze momentarily when Louise murmured something and reached for him, putting a hand on the crease between his hirsute gut and upper thigh. He breathed easier when she didn’t wake up, when she slept on like an oversexed octopus with a solitary tentacle attached to its mate, ever attentive to the possibility of a quick copulation. He sighed quietly and, though he knew better, started to think about the FTC complaint that was on its way. Soon his head reverberated to a raucous colloquy of inner voices.

Poor Me: Why me, O Lord? Why in the name of god does the federal government allow Phillip Morris to merge with General Foods and then with Kraft, which had already gobbled up Oscar Mayer, and then step on a piss-ant company like us? And what about RJR and Nabisco? Or ConAgra and Beatrice Foods? You can’t talk rationally about something this outrageous, this . . . this . . . Well damn, you can’t even find a word for it. You can only weep.

Tycoonan the Barbarian: And that fucking Donald Quimby. That total ignoramus. Someday I’ll get my hands on him and I’ll wring his neck till his tongue hangs down to his navel.

Rational Self: Well, your lawyers say the FTC doesn’t have a prayer. They should know, the shysters, considering how much they’re soaking the company. You’ve got to let them take care of it, got to keep your eye on the business, got to hang tough with the buyer from Safeway. All his yackety-yak about how they’re going to start asking for microbiological verification is just that: yacketyyak. Just a ploy to get you to lower your prices. You lower your prices and we won’t raise the safety bar: they might as well come right out and say it, the blackmailing bastards. They’re bluffing. Got to be bluffing. Got to be . . .

Worry Wart: You’re in danger, Arnie, grave danger. You’ve been breaking the law. The FTC is barking up the wrong tree now, but they’ll stumble on to what you’ve been doing with that crooked professor from Pullman. Sure as the devil, they will. Just you wait. You’re going to end up in the state penitentiary in Walla Walla. It’s going to be the sodomy ward for you, brother.

Alibi Ike: You had to do it, pal. Everyone knew the company was about to go belly up. Don’t be so damned hard on yourself. Everyone has his breaking point.

Man for all Seasons: Nonsense, Armentrout. You should have told the crooked professor to get lost, but oh no. You wouldn’t listen to me. You rarely do.

Little Boy: Darn it all, Arnie. We never have any fun anymore. We never have any time to play.

Rational Self: You’ve got to keep the FTC focused on prices at wholesale. That’s the key. If you can keep them from snooping into how you set prices paid to growers, you’ll come out of this all right. You’ve got to hammer this into the heads of the lawyers.

Man for all Seasons: And what about your venality, Armentrout? That’s the word for it, you know. Susceptibility to bribery.

Alibi Ike segueing into Poor Me: You couldn’t risk losing the company, pal. Think of all the men and women who depend on you for their jobs. And their kids. Don’t forget their kids. No one appreciates how hard you work, Arnie. No one. When was the last time you had a vacation? you poor son of a gun.

Man for all Seasons: Oh, so that’s it. You’re working twelve hours a day for the good of your workers instead of yourself, huh? Fat profits and stock options have nothing to do with it, huh? Don’t kid yourself, brother. The Big Guy in the sky ain’t going to buy it and you know it. And oh, by the way, you don’t work fourteen hours a day like you like to tell yourself when you’re listening to that sorry ass, Poor Me.

Worry Wart: Yes, yes. Oh yes indeedy. You can instruct the lawyers to keep the FTC from looking into how you conspire to fix grower prices, but how are they going to do that? Those hard-ons from DC will do whatever they damn well please. You can’t control them. No one can. Once they start snooping around wholesale pricing, they’ll find out what you’ve done and you can kiss your tush good-bye.

Little Boy: Why not just chuck it all, Arnie? There are beaches out there, long sandy beaches where we could build sand castles and listen to the roar of the surf and the gulls wheeling overhead. Let’s me and you go have some fun for a change.

Tycoonan the Barbarian: Shut the fuck up, you little runt. You wanna get picked up by the ears? I’ve got food industries to conquer, competitors to destroy, monopolies to build. I’ve got to get into heavy manufacturing: steam shovels, cranes, trucks. Yeah, with offices in London, Paris, Rome. We’re going to get our own jet, you little shit. Yeah, A Gulfstream Five, baby. Sand castles my ass. Think of those Mediterranean beaches where the women go topless. Acres and acres of young titties nestled snugly on the warm sand. Yeah, and I’m going to run around on them barefoot.

Man for all Seasons: Armentrout, thou art truly weird. Think of your wife, man. Doesn’t she give you all the lovemaking a man could possibly desire? Remember what Father O’Malley used to tell you about harboring impure thoughts? When you were thirteen?

Rational Self: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Think about baseball, he used to say. A fat lot of good that did.

Man for all Seasons: Now that you’re rich, Armentrout, you should think what you can do for others instead of always thinking about making more money.

Alibi Ike: You’re not so selfish. What about the workers in your packing plants? Right? You’re the only one who provides medical insurance at no cost to the workers.

Man for all Seasons: Ah, but why is it that you started providing medical insurance only when you heard the Teamsters were going to organize the workers?

Tycoonan the Barbarian: I’ve got it. Fuck the workers. We’ll acquire Consolidated and merge with Amalgamated. We’ll become totally conglomerated. Then we’ll downsize the workforce. The whole world’s gonna be ours, baby.

Little Boy: Toys aren’t us, Arnie. That’s for darn sure. Let’s . . .

Worry Wart: I keep telling you over and over again to remember Walla Walla.

Rational Self: Stop! Stop! You’re driving yourself nuts, Arnie. You’ve got a business to run, a family to support, taxes to pay. You can’t afford to go nuts. You’ve got to get up, Arnie. Right now. You’ve got to get to work.

With the care required to defuse a bomb, Arnie lifted his wife’s hand from his thigh. Slowly, slowly, he slid his bare butt over a silken sheet to the edge of the bed and sat up, swinging his big feet to the floor.

Oh, honey, you don’t have to get up this early. Come back to me. Louise floated over to Arnie’s side of the bed and slipped her arms around his rib cage, long, graceful, sinuous arms with thick-lipped suckers on one side.

Arnie could feel his wife’s voluminous breasts pressed against his back. I hafta pee, he said.

Oh, really. Well, baby, baby, we know how horny you can get when you have to pee. Let’s have a little feel. Is the old boy dead? No, there’s life in the old boy yet . . . Oh my word. Such arrogance!

Arnie sighed forlornly and turned to see what time it was. Five forty-nine. He didn’t want sex, but knew Louise could change his mind. She was right about the peeing bit.

After giving Louise something less than an earth-shaking orgasm, more like a hiccup, Arnie showered and shaved. With little thought, he chose from among several suits still in their plastic bags from the cleaners. They were all rather dark and conservative anyway so whether he chose this one or that one made little difference. In the habit of not putting on his tie and coat before breakfast, he stuffed his arms through the sleeves of a crisp white shirt, pulled his britches up around his furry fence-post legs, and clomped downstairs. He started brewing a pot of strong coffee before going out the front door to pick up the morning paper. Well into a slice of toast and a cup of coffee, he grunted when his wife entered the kitchen and asked if there was anything of interest in the paper. She poured herself coffee and got a sweet role from the refrigerator.

Don’t you want one of these? she asked Arnie, instead of that dry toast. Arnie’s grunt again seemed to signify the negative.

Is today the day you’re going to receive the FPC complaint? she asked.

FTC, Arnie corrected her, not bothering to look up or answer her question. Stands for the Federal Trade Commission.

Whatever, sniffed Louise. I had a long talk with Daddy about the FTC complaint yesterday and he doesn’t like it one bit. I told him you should never have gotten into the potato processing business. You brought this whole thing on yourself, Arnie. You can’t blame anyone else this time.

Whaddya mean? Arnie said, rising to the bait like a pike to a minnow. How the hell do you make money peddling apples for chrissake? We’ve got to get into new lines of the food business if we’re ever going to amount to a hill of beans. You’ve got to sell products, not commodities. There is no money at all in commodities.

Well, that’s how my daddy and my granddaddy made their money, peddling apples as you put it. But I suppose selling fresh fruit is too mundane for a high roller like you.

Oh, shut up forever. We’ve been over this a thousand times.

Yeah, and you’ve been wrong a thousand times, too.

Well, I did what I could, trying to build a brand name for our fresh fruit, which was your daddy’s idea, if you’ll recall. (Arnie mimicked the way his wife was always saying daddy just to irritate her.) The effort didn’t pay off worth a shit. Anyway, what the hell do you know about the food business?

Oh sure. I’m just a know-nothing stupid old cow now that I’ve given you and your children the best years of my life.

During the pause that followed, Arnie glanced irritably at his wife over the top of his newspaper, annoyed by the muffled gulping sounds she made with every swallow of masticated Danish.

Louise continued after a pause: Speaking of the children, I just remembered that Connie wants to go to Italy with her friend next summer to study renaissance art. She called me yesterday. I said I was sure we could give her the money.

Who wants money?

Connie. You know. Your daughter?

Oh yeah. How much is it going to cost?

Well, how should I know. You’ll have to ask her . . . Have you given any more thought to my idea of selling a line of organically grown fruit? Fruit that doesn’t have all those toxins sprayed on it? Connie thinks it’s a wonderful idea.

Yeah, and Connie is a total airhead. Haven’t you ever seen what happens to an apple tree that’s not sprayed? Bug heaven.

Connie’s right. You have no imagination, Arnie. We’ve got to go back to basics. Develop trees that are insect resistant.

"Trees that are insect resistant: now why didn’t