Chapter 2 - The Audit of Indulgence
The dining room still smelled of stale champagne, roasted lamb, and the cold, waxy grease of twenty-three half-eaten slices of lemon curd cake.
At seven-thirty in the morning, the light filtering through the leaded-glass casement windows was gray and flat, illuminating the white tablecloth that had been dragged half-off the mahogany table when I stumbled backward the night before. Near the corner of the Chinese Chippendale sideboard, a single lens from my reading glasses lay amidst the splinters of its tortoiseshell frame, catching a spear of morning light like a dead eye.
Daniel Reeves, our Chief Financial Officer for sixteen years, sat at the far end of the ruined table. He had not removed his overcoat. His laptop sat open before him, surrounded by manila file folders, bank disbursement sheets, and three empty cardboard espresso cups from the bakery down on Green Street.
"She didn't just initiate the account transfers, Margaret," Daniel said, not looking up from his screen. His fingers clattered across the mechanical keyboard with the rapid, rhythmic cadence of a telegraph operator sending news of a shipwreck. "She tried to sweep the entire primary operational reserve. Two point four million dollars from City National Bank to an unlisted entity called Apex Media Partners LLC."
I sat in my usual chair at the head of the table—the chair Valerie had claimed before the soup was served. My hands rested flat on the cool wood.
"Who owns Apex Media, Daniel?"
"Registered in Nevada forty-eight hours ago," Daniel replied, turning the screen slightly so Eleanor could inspect the corporate registration manifest. "The managing members are listed as Ethan Vance and Valerie Whitmore. The registered agent is a nominal filing service located in a strip mall in Henderson. If those funds had cleared at eight o'clock this morning, they would have been wired to an international clearing account in Grand Cayman by nine-fifteen. It wasn't an executive transition, Margaret. It was a planned liquidation. She was going to drain Whitmore House’s working capital to settle Ethan’s personal real estate margins before the board could even convene an emergency session."
"And the literary agency?" Eleanor asked, her pen hovering over a legal pad where she was drafting the formal civil complaint for conversion and fraud.
Daniel let out a dry, bitter sound that was half-cough, half-laugh. "The 'Valerie Whitmore Literary Agency' has never represented a single paying author. For three years, we have been paying forty-five hundred dollars a month for a corner suite on Wilshire Boulevard that Valerie used primarily as a personal dressing room and a photo studio for her lifestyle blog. The agency's books show three hundred and eighty thousand dollars in 'client development expenses.' I pulled the itemized receipts from the secondary American Express card at dawn."
He slid a sheaf of thermal paper across the table toward me.
I didn't need to put on my spare reading glasses to know what those charges were.
Bergdorf Goodman, Beverly Hills.
The Beverly Hills Hotel, Cabana Five.
Net-a-Porter, London.
Château Marmont, private dining room.
"Three hundred and eighty thousand dollars," I whispered. The words tasted like cold ash. "For three years, while our acquisitions editors were begging for five-thousand-dollar advances to sign young poets from the Midwest. While our production department was telling me we had to cut the paper weight on our historical biography line to save twenty cents a unit."
"You loved her, Margaret," Eleanor said gently, not looking up from her legal pad. "When a woman buries her only daughter at twenty-six, she does not perform forensic audits on the child that was pulled from the wreckage. You gave her what you thought Lucy would have wanted her to have: an absolute, frictionless existence."
"Frictionless," I repeated, looking down at the broken lens on the floor. "My grandmother used to say that when you remove all the friction from a child's road, they never develop the tread required to climb a hill. They just slide into the nearest ditch and blame the mountain for being steep."
"Well," Daniel said, tapping the enter key with a sharp, definitive click, "the ditch has arrived. The City National sweep has been permanently frozen under our fraud protocol. The board has been notified by encrypted courier that Valerie’s executive signature authority is terminated effective immediately. But we have a tactical problem, Margaret."
"The spring catalog," I said.
"The spring catalog," Daniel confirmed. "Valerie’s signature is on the exclusive publishing agreement for Julian Vance’s political memoir. The contract carries an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar guaranteed advance, with the first installment of four hundred thousand due this Friday. Julian Vance is Ethan’s father. The entire dinner party last night—the twenty-three guests who sat there and watched that girl strike you without lifting a finger—consisted of Julian’s private equity circle and their wives. They aren't investors in Whitmore House. They were there to celebrate the extraction of our reserves."
I stood up slowly, the dull ache in my hip reminding me that my seventy-year-old body had absorbed an impact it was never designed to take. I walked to the French doors that opened onto the formal rose garden.
Outside, the morning mist was burning off, revealing the dormant, pruned canes of the hybrid teas Lucy and I had planted the spring before she died. They looked like gray thorns sticking out of the black mulch—dead, barren, and severe. But I knew that six inches beneath the soil, the graft unions were hard, swollen, and alive, waiting for the cold to finish its work before pushing out the first crimson shoots of April.
"Julian Vance’s memoir," I said, turning back to the room, "was an unvetted vanity project commissioned to settle Ethan’s debts with his father’s partners. Have you read the manuscript, Daniel?"
"It’s two hundred pages of ghostwritten platitudes about deregulation and three chapters claiming credit for infrastructure projects he had no hand in," Daniel said flatly. "Our senior editorial director, Miriam, told me three weeks ago that if we put the Whitmore House imprint on it, we would lose every serious literary author on our backlist."
"Call Miriam," I instructed. "Tell her to report to my office at nine o'clock. Tell her to bring the contract, the manuscript evaluation, and the legal indemnity riders. And Eleanor?"
"Yes, Margaret?"
"Prepare a notice of termination under the factual veracity and character representation clauses of the standard Whitmore publishing agreement. If Julian Vance wants an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar monument to his own mediocrity, he can buy a printing press and staple the pages together in his garage. Whitmore House is no longer in the business of financing our executioners."
Eleanor smiled—a cold, terrifying expression that had terrified corporate raiders from Century City to Wall Street for forty years.
"With pleasure, Margaret. And what about the house in Pacific Palisades?"
"The deed is held by the trust, is it not?"
"It is," Eleanor confirmed. "Valerie and Ethan hold a ten-year occupancy lease that specifies the tenancy is contingent upon continuous, unblemished executive service to the Whitmore holdings, with an automatic thirty-day notice of forfeiture in the event of termination for cause."
I touched my bruised cheek with the tips of my fingers. The skin was hot, tight, and completely unforgiving.
"Thirty days is the statutory maximum under California property law, is it not, Eleanor?"
May you like
"It is."
"Then serve the notice at noon," I said. "And tell the property management firm to change the gate codes on the Palisades driveway by sunrise tomorrow. If they wish to sleep under a roof they did not earn, they can find one that doesn't belong to the woman they called dead weight."
