Chapter Two - Continued Blog Date 050606

Cedar Rapids 18April05 - 1145

Melanie flipped her phone closed. She was just finishing dressing after her post-work out shower when the call had come in. "Talk about out of left field," she said to herself. Frank Calhoun had just called her and asked her to join him for a casual dinner at Norm's Place, a neighborhood saloon near Coe College. Not that she was opposed to spending a little more time with Calhoun. She had been throwing not-so-subtle hints at him for months. But he had always pleasantly, and somewhat professional she thought, ignored her innuendos. Now this. Hmmm.

Frank did come clean and say that he had asked Holly for her number. Which made sense as Holly had herself been playing Miss Matchmaker with little disguise. Since her land-line and cell numbers were unlisted, and since he had certainly never asked her directly for her number or email address, Melanie had been caught off-guard by the call. But on the other hand, Frank Calhoun seemed to have an awfully lot of information on his personal hard-drive and Melanie doubted that small impediments to common information like phone numbers would deter a man like Frank.

Maybe tonight he would shed some light on his work. It was public knowledge that he worked for the State of Iowa. The Criminal Investigation department, or something like that. But conversations never went very deep in to exactly what his job was. And Donovan and Holly seemed to understand that it was something that he couldn't or wouldn't talk about. So the conversations always drifted toward other people's work, gossip or to the various avocations of those in the discussion. Calhoun definitely had that teflon gene that could nettle inquiring minds.

She was supposed to meet him at Norm's at 6:30. Was it a date if she met him at the restaurant? He had said that he would be down in Iowa City until mid-afternoon, then wanted to get a ride in on his bike after he got home, and it just might be easier to meet the dinner reservation time if they drove separately. It was Saturday night and if they didn't make the 6:30 sitting, the alternative was a much later time, or Baja Taco's. This was all very logical, but Melanie's intuition barometer suggested that there was more to the story.

In any event, she was looking forward to some one-on-one time with Calhoun. Perhaps it was his slight appearance of disinterest in her that she found appealling. She had had several other men make major efforts to attract her attention since the divorce. The wealthy gray hairs. The nauveau riche technology crowd. The young studs from Gold's. And one incredibly handsome heir to a Greek shipping company whose villa on the French Riviera set a new standard for the phrase, "going to the beach." But Frank had assets too, and she didn't think that he had much interest in her money, which automatically set him apart from most of the others.

For the afternoon, Melanie needed to work on the plans for her new charitable focus, Senior Living in Iowa. She was determined to make the Cedar Rapids program a blueprint for cities throughout the country, using a combination of private and public funding to completely address the financing of medical and residential care for the elderly. She was convinced that for-profit companies needed to allocate more resources to the health and welfare of their employees and the communities in which they were located. Melanie knew that many companies went to extremes to minimize these kind of expenses that did not directly contribute to their bottom-line profits. She knew that was the case at Cyberware.

She had had one of Donovan's junior associates draw up the incorporation and tax exempt status paperwork for Senior Living in Iowa, Inc. Ten professionals from the area had agreed to sit on the voluteer Board of Directors. She was now in a search for a full-time, paid, Executive Director and an assitiant to begin active, daily operations. She had funded a bank account with $100,000, but her ideas included first-year needs of several times that figure. Anthony's email saying that the special dividend was going to be delayed meant that she may have to look at utilizinging some of the assets in the CAA account to keep the SLI initiative on track.

Melanie returned to the downstairs library and sat on the comfortable wingback chair which looked out the windows to the tree-lined back yard. She pulled the folder of SLI resumes from the drawer in the side table and began to read the first letter from a woman in Oklahoma.

Iowa City 18April05 - 1150

Frank sat back in his chair and tried to assess his situation. Melanie had been very gracious on the phone and had agreed to meet him at Norm's for dinner. But he knew that her mind had been running full-speed while thay talked trying to figure out why he had finally decided to call her. He had skillfully (he thought) deflected a brief question from her to that effect. He determined that she had a slightly higher interest in doing something with him than she did in knowing with certainty why he chose to act today. By structuring the evening in a way that had them both driving to the restaurant, he had kept a certain distance from an intimacy with Melaniee which he both feared and, perhaps, desired. He knew that with the on-going investigation of Carmondii and Cyberware, that bad results could occur if he got personally involved with Melanie while delicately prying her knowledge for leads on the case.

Shifting mental gears, Calhoun decided it was late enough to call Raymond Marshall in Chicago, even if it was Saturday. He needed to give Marshall a full up-to-date report on the Cyberware case. After that, he needed to grab some lunch, check downtown with his cousin Mary who ran the Finance Department in the Tippie School of Business at the university, and then head back north to get 40 miles in on the bike before his non-date with Melanie. Mary was doing a study on new initial public offerings (IPOs), and he wanted her to see if she had seen any anomalies in these events which could somehow apply to Cyberware.

He put on his hands-free broker's headset and punched in the number for Raymond Marshall.