Billy MacNeal was an OTO: a golden boy among those energetic, innovative Houstonites who owed their wealth to ventures Other Than Oil. As a kid he’d been called by two names: Billy Mac. When he grew up (in his mind becoming a millionaire in his twenties qualified him as a grown up) he decided to add the final note. Thereafter, most folks called him Billy MacNeal-emphasis on the “Mac.”
He was a handsome boy: tall, slim, blonde, Texas to the core. He had an engaging way about him. People just naturally loved Billy Mac. At twenty-three he started a company called First Houston Holding. Using practically no cash, he bought undeveloped land no one else seemed to want. His very first purchase included a commercial parcel that he sold to Wal-Mart forty-eight hours after buying it. That, as he enjoyed telling newly-met admirers, really got him started. In the following months he bought a small fishing fleet in the Gulf, two restaurants in Dallas, and a charter bus company connecting Houston, Oklahoma City, and Phoenix, Arizona. In the following year he bought a record company in New Orleans and five radio stations in Louisiana and Mississippi. He didn’t care what the company did as long as he could buy it cheap, find a way to inflate its numbers, and sell it for twice (more or less) what he paid.
While attending community college he took up with one of his teachers. They fell in love and got married. Billy Mac was twenty-two. She was thirty-one. She left him three and a half years later, taking their baby son and too much of First Houston Holding for Billy’s tastes. That’s when he started Second Houston Holding, which in less than eight years accumulated nineteen businesses, including golf courses in Florida, ski resorts in Colorado, a shipping company in the Philippines, textile producers in Central America, half a dozen television stations in the central plains, and several U.S. food processing concerns. The largest of Billy’s companies, Knowland amp; Sons, operated five meat packing plants in the Midwest and southeast.
It was Tom Maloney’s idea to make Billy MacNeal a billionaire. He and Wesley Pitts worked out the details with Billy Mac and his top man, Pat Grath. It took only ninety days to reach a substantive agreement, and Tom told Billy to expect a successful IPO within six months. They planned to take Second Houston public and structure the deal so that another, larger holding conglomerate, Alliance Inc., would act as the major buyer. Stein, Gelb, Hector amp; Wills Securities would sell Billy MacNeal’s company to Alliance and others for a total of $1.85 billion. Maloney’s meticulous plan allowed for Billy himself to bank four hundred million dollars while retaining a substantial stock position in Alliance Inc. Billy MacNeal’s net worth would then exceed a billion dollars.
Getting married again was Billy Mac’s idea. Carol Ann Cheetham stood five feet ten, with big tits, a small waist, a pretty face, and the longest, reddest hair you’d ever want to see. Her physical gifts pleased Billy almost as much as her gentle, accepting nature. She had not, in the two years they’d been seeing each other, refused him anything. Nor had she been the one to suggest that every billionaire should have a wife. That was entirely his idea. And so, at nineteen, she became his.
The wedding took place at his home just north of Houston, and for months conversations throughout the state focused on how much it cost. Did Willie Nelson really get a half million, or was it more?
There was no honeymoon. Billy Mac was a workaholic, as Carol Ann imagined most thirty-three-year-old billionaires must be. She sensibly considered her entire life a honeymoon, and waited only for Billy, in one of his many special ways, to grace the towering sundae of her good fortune with a fat, sweet cherry.
Aside from her, Billy’s only recreation was diving. Every morning without fail he’d brush his teeth, put on his Speedo, and head for the pool. He’d had it and its three-level diving board apparatus designed and built by the best he could find. The ladder was padded. Most days he’d stand at the midpoint of the second board, twelve feet above the water. He’d breathe as his high-school coach had taught him to not that many years ago: slow and calm to smooth the muscular fibers and settle the jelly in the brain. He’d take three measured steps, bend his right leg at the knee, extend his arms upward, step down, and spring. Once airborne, he’d flip, twist, lay out, and float until he hit the water-long legs straight, feet joined at the ankles, toes curled in. Then he’d swim in one easy stroke to the edge, haul himself out, and do it again and again. His mantra, Pat Grath called it.
Carol Ann liked sitting at poolside reading the paper, lifting her eyes to catch the moment when Billy Mac rose like a god, or an angel. On this particular morning she was looking at the new issue of Fortune and her eye caught a story she figured might interest him. Depending on the look in his eyes, the look that told her how much of a good time he was having, she might mention the story when he got out, or wait until he was done for the day.
When she lifted her eyes from the magazine to see him jump, she saw that Billy Mac lay on his side, along the length of the diving board, left leg dangling, something dripping into the water. She screamed, and as though the vibration launched a hideous wind that pushed him off, he rolled over and hit the water, making a sickening splash. Carol Ann fought to bring his leaden form to the side. Once she had him out of the water, white and floppy, on his back, she saw the walnut-sized hole in his chest and the rivulet of blood creeping across the smooth terra cotta surrounding the pool. The blood was coming from what proved to be a ragged crater beneath his left shoulder blade.
The last thing on Carol Ann’s mind as she yelled for the servants and fumbled at her cell phone was the name she’d heard Billy mention more than once before, or the unhappy fate of Christopher Hopman, whose story had caught her eye a scant ninety seconds before.