by Susan Wolfe
Maggie obviously didn’t think so, since her voice was polite but noncommittal. “Nice to meet you, Robert. So, you work with Holly?”
“Actually, I’m replacing Holly, who is no longer with the company.”
Immediate, ear-splitting silence in the cubicles.
“I wanted to introduce myself,” he went on, “and talk to you about how we’re going to get your bills caught up. May we go to a conference room?”
“Oh, we certainly may,” Maggie said with enthusiasm. “Let’s find one now.” The cubicles remained silent as Maggie’s animated voice and Robert’s deeper one grew fainter and then died out as they rounded a corner down the hall.
“Did that guy say ‘no longer with the company’?” Beatrice called hesitantly from her cube.
“That’s what he said,” a male voice confirmed. “Shouldn’t we tell Ken?”
A minute later Ken’s door flew open and he led the department in a round of applause. Seated in her cubicle where nobody could see her, Georgia acknowledged their gratitude with a solemn bow, even though they would never realize they were clapping for her.
CHAPTER 7
Ken’s jaw had just fallen open at Georgia’s news of the lost patent application when Maggie knocked and ushered in Glen Terkes. Ken stared blankly at Lumina’s head of worldwide sales for a moment, then stood, shook hands and invited him to be seated.
Did Glen always dress like a guy out of GQ, or had he dropped by on his way to some big customer meeting? His lightweight gray summer suit and pink dress shirt made Ken look downright drab in his neatly rolled white shirtsleeves, like a sparrow sitting on a lawn next to a peacock. Georgia was suddenly conscious of the smear on her shirt where she’d carefully rubbed away salad dressing in order to delay a trip to the laundromat.
“Okay,” Glen said with an impudent smile. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
He was worried about something.
“We’d like to talk to you about an employment matter in the Boston office.”
Glen’s shoulders relaxed. So Glen’s problem was somewhere else. “What about it? They’re my best sales office.”
“I know, they’re very good. We had a complaint about a sexual harassment issue there, no big deal. But in the course of investigating that, something potentially more serious came up.”
Glen raised his eyebrows. “Which would be . . . ?”
“We’ve had a complaint that Buck Gibbons has been ‘flipping’ the genitals of one of the male sales reps who reports to him. By that I mean putting his hand underneath the person’s genitals and trying to flip them up. I’m sure you understand, we need to investigate.”
“Don’t bother to investigate,” Glen replied, adjusting a French cuff. “I know it’s true.”
“I’m sorry?”
He looked slightly bored as he adjusted the other cuff. “I said it’s true. I was there.”
Ken squinted at Glen for several seconds, moving his head in little jerks. The sparrow was trying to bring the peacock into focus.
“You were present when Buck Gibbons touched the genitals of another male in the office?”
“Yeah. Ben Larkin.”
Ken stared at Glen, who was sporting a slight smirk, until Georgia coughed to fill the silence. Then he leaned forward, frowning with concentration, and said: “Glen, if you were there . . . did you say anything?”
“No.”
“Did you think Buck’s behavior was appropriate?”
Glen shrugged. “He’s just immature.”
Ken leaned even farther forward as if he doubted his hearing. “Really. You think we all did that when we were younger?”
“Ha ha. Look, he was just team-building. Not the best way to go about it. I’ll talk to him.”
Ken’s eyes grew wide as tennis balls as he sat back up, apparently convinced he’d heard correctly. “I don’t know if it was team-building, Glen. To a D.A. it might look more like sexual assault. I do know we have a complaint of offensive bodily contact here, corroborated by an executive who witnessed the behavior and did nothing. The company has to take this seriously and investigate. If he does it again . . .”
“He won’t do it again. I’ll tell him to stop.”
Ken’s elbow was now on the table, his chin resting on his thumb, his cheek against his extended forefinger as he scrutinized Glen. “If it’s that simple, Glen, why haven’t you have told him to stop already?”
“Look!” Glen stabbed the air toward Ken. When Ken didn’t blink or move, Glen let his hand drop back onto the table. “Hey, I told you I’ll deal with it. We’re heading into the last month of the quarter, and I can’t have the General Counsel screwing with Buck’s head, all right?”
“I don’t think it is all right, unfortunately. I have an immediate obligation to our other Boston employees.”
Glen looked mildly alarmed for the first time. “You cannot go to Buck about this before he closes the deal with Sinclair Electronics. Should be tomorrow. Are we agreed on that?”
Ken stood up. “I agree to wait until tomorrow. Check back with me toward the end of the day.” He escorted Glen from the office and leaned his back against the closed door.
“Georgia, are we or are we not losing our minds?”
Georgia clapped her palm against her mouth, and for an instant she managed to swallow a burgeoning laugh. But then in spite of herself, her smile widened into her slightly loony grin, and she began to laugh hard. “Sorry,” she wheezed. “I know it’s serious. You should’ve seen the look on your face . . .” She circled her fingers around her eyes and mimed them getting wider. “. . . the look when he . . .” She could feel tears welling up and she couldn’t get her sentence out. “. . . Team-building! . . .” she gasped.
Ken’s glare melted into amusement. “Exactly. What kind of a team . . . ?” And then he began to laugh, too, until they both had tears in their eyes. “Oh, God, Georgia,” he said after a moment, plunking a box of Kleenex onto the table between them. “Can you believe this? I’m in no shape to deal with this now. We’ll have to figure it out tomorrow. Right now we need to deal with our patent disaster.” With a final hiccup, he opened the door and asked Maggie to find Zack.
Within an hour they had retained Jim Prizine of the Banyon firm to re-create the patent file, physically escort the file through the PTO, and get the patent issued, all in twelve days. Was that even possible? She hoped they hadn’t embraced delusion as their chosen strategy.
And what was that other, unspoken thing that was worrying Glen, she wondered as she headed along the corridor back to her cube. (Remembering Ken’s astounded face, she let out a little laugh.) Glen didn’t seem like the worrying kind, exactly, so if something was bothering him, it was bound to be downright ugly. Just so it wasn’t ugly enough to threaten the whole company.
Problems seemed to sprout like dandelions in this company, didn’t they? But she had now managed to light one little candle in the darkness. Holly Foxx, deposed queen of Always Pigheaded, was off to paralyze somebody else’s company. Now the legal team could spend its time on more important things. Which wasn’t enough to prevent layoffs and guarantee her job, of course, but hey, it was a start.
That night she hunched under her scratchy wool blanket to conceal her Itty Bitty Book Light and tore open her latest letter from her father.
Dear Georgia,
Thank you for the heads up on Robbie. Someone was here last week asking about him as well. I hope you won’t let these harmless inquiries distract you from more important matters. I attended to all aspects of Robbie personally, and can assure you he won’t be making an appearance anytime soon.
Her blanket sure stank of alfalfa. And something else, something acrid that burned her nostrils. Good thing she had her sleeping bag. If she or Katie-Ann ever wanted to sleep under this thing, they’d have to get it dry cleaned to keep from smelling like hayseeds.
What I cannot forgive myself for is missing important clues to Robbie’s real character before things re
ached the point where drastic remedy was necessary. And I ended up here anyway, with our little enterprise scattered to the four winds. This wound to my professional pride will not heal easily. Perhaps it never should.
Poor Daddy. Being cooped up in that jail was bound to make him restless, but now he was starting to doubt himself. With several months still to go before his first parole hearing.
And so I repent at leisure. My brother thinks he’s so educated with his Bachelor of Superstition from Searcy Bible College, but he’s the only one in the whole family who might actually benefit from this sorry little prison library. I’m running a Spanish Prisoner scam to keep my spirits up, but there isn’t much challenge in it, and to tell you the truth I’m bored. I haven’t gone this long without a good challenge since Gramma Griffin and I sold the old dry goods store to Mr. Haney. I’ll just have to get my satisfaction vicariously by watching you rise through the ranks of Lumina Software.
Take care of yourself, Georgia. I’m proud that you are my daughter.
Your Daddy
He was being too hard on himself. How could he have predicted that Robbie would be fool enough to sneak back and try to reload their marks on his own? After all, who could possibly be more primed to run straight to the cops than a guy who’d already been scammed once? On the other hand, in her father’s line of business you didn’t always get the pick of the litter. So who knew, maybe he should have known Robbie was dumb enough to piss in his own boot.
Whatever. She snapped off her book light, threw off the smelly blanket and adjusted her pillow to protect her head from the armrest as she settled deeper into the back seat. If she could manage to get Katie-Ann through high school, her father could surely take care of himself. She’d do what she could, of course. Seek his advice, keep him informed of her progress. Send him a real book or two, maybe entertain him with the whole Holly Foxx escapade. Of course, the only thing that would really cheer her father up was a juicy new scam of his own.
With Jim Prizine, the new outside patent lawyer, on his single-minded mission to overcome Patent’s Terrible Obstacle, the legal team could turn its attention to the acquisition of the Seattle company called Futuresoft. The acquisition team (Ken, Quan and Georgia) held their initial meeting in Ken’s office.
“Okay, Georgia,” Ken began, “you know what due diligence is?”
She certainly hoped so. She knew exactly what her class notes and ten hours of Internet research could tell her. “I think it’s where you find the dirt and catch the crooks,” she stated with more conviction than she felt.
Quan and Ken barked a laugh. “Perfect,” Ken agreed, “though we wouldn’t want to say that to everybody.”
“It’s a real battle of wits,” Quan confirmed. “They desperately want to hide the dirt and the crooks, and we desperately need to find them.” Good. She was apparently both right and slightly clever.
With a quiet sigh of relief she asked, “And we start with a list of documents we want from them?”
“Here’s the list,” Ken confirmed, handing her a multipage document. “Your job is to keep ironclad track of every document Futuresoft provides, which you will do by taking ownership of our new basement diligence room.” He held up a key. “You’ll log the documents, and then be in the room whenever one of our employees is in there reviewing them.”
In the next several days, as Quan began negotiating the deal agreement and Ken conducted diligence interviews (two of which he invited her to attend!), Georgia dutifully spent her days down in the basement, cataloguing and labeling the documents contained in 37 white bankers’ boxes, and then hoisting the boxes into neat stacks along the wall. She spent her evenings and the wee hours of the morning reading the documents, and noting her questions and observations. After all, this could be her chance to make herself indispensable. She wanted to dazzle Ken by finding her very own Crook or Dirt.
They held their second meeting four days after the first, the three of them again huddled around Ken’s conference table, their three sets of hands absorbing heat from three Peet’s coffee cups. Georgia saw over Quan’s right shoulder that dawn had just finished bleaching the stars from the night sky and was staining the undersides of fat clouds with brilliant pink. Steam from the coffee released its rich fragrance into the air above their notepads and binders.
Quan led off with concern that the deal negotiations being led by Burt Plowfield were spiraling out of control. It seemed Blank Burt, the executive with the soporific voice, was caving immediately on every single concession requested by the other side.
“I was so horrified that I asked our outside lawyer, Jill, to attend the second meeting,” he said.
“And how did that work?” Ken asked.
Quan laughed. “He gave things away twice as fast.”
“Well, Burt’s a good person, but he isn’t very forceful, is he? He also gets a bonus whenever he closes a deal, so maybe he doesn’t care how much he gives away to get there. What’s he giving up?” While Ken and Quan discussed four or five things that Georgia didn’t fully follow, the clouds over the parking lot transformed from resplendent rose into plush, majestic white. As she watched the topmost sliver of sun appeared over the eucalyptus trees, something occurred to her.
“Are there any women on the other side?” she asked, turning her gaze away from the clouds toward Quan.
“Their outside lawyer is a woman, but I haven’t met her yet. Why?”
“Burt might refuse to give things away to a woman.”
“What makes you say that, Georgia?” Ken asked, looking up from his notes.
“The fact that he gave even more away with our outside lawyer there. Burt seems deferential, so you’d expect him to defer to our own expert. But weak people sometimes need to lord it over somebody weaker. And why would he think Jill was weaker, except that she’s a woman?” She shrugged. “Just a thought.”
“That might be quite insightful,” Quan responded, turning to Ken. “It isn’t just Jill he undermines. I’ve never seen him agree with Andrea about anything.”
“Gosh, I hate to think that could be a factor, but if we can get their lawyer in the room, why not? As for the diligence reviews, I’d say I’m pretty much done. The only thing . . .” He tapped his notes with his pen. “Their CEO sure seems proud of the way he stole business from their European distributor. He bragged to me that Futuresoft ended up with all the salespeople and customers, and the distributor ended up with all the obligations.”
“How did they manage that?” Quan laughed. “Sounds too good to be true.”
“Was the distributor named Norditch?” Georgia asked.
Ken stopped tapping and looked up from his notes. “Yes. Why? You’ve heard of them?”
“I found the distribution agreement between Norditch and Futuresoft in the diligence materials. I also found an agreement for Norditch to sell their whole company to Futuresoft, but it wasn’t signed.”
He raised his eyebrows and smiled at her. “Really!” Her document reading was paying off. “So Futuresoft did their own diligence review of Norditch’s confidential information as if they were going to buy them, and then never completed the sale.” He considered a moment. “Do you suppose they misused Norditch’s confidential information to steal their customers? It’s just suspicious that the CEO is so proud of screwing them over.” One decisive thump of his pen. “In fact, I’m going to fly up to meet him. Unless his answers put my mind at ease, we might have to focus on Crooks and Dirt related to Norditch.”
Stark, Georgia decided. The word for Sally’s office was ‘stark.’ While Zack talked about copies of the Board’s annual self-evaluations, she allowed her eye to wander from a sickly rubber plant in the corner, to the top of a credenza packed with leaded glass and acrylic business mementos, to a single, colorful, framed photo of Sally standing in front of a thatched hut with black children wearing bright African fabrics.Mounted on the wall next to the photo were what appeared to be two shrunken heads. Which couldn’t be right, of cours
e. Probably some HR joke, or else she’d been sleeping worse than she’d realized. She rubbed her eye and looked again, but the heads were still there.
“So,” Zack was saying to Sally, who remained seated behind her expansive mahogany desk. “Your admin was just over asking Georgia for copies of board evaluations.”
Sally lifted her eyes wearily to look at him, her pen still poised above the notepad. “And that required interrupting me because . . . ?”
“Well, first because there’s nothing to copy. I thought maybe if you explained what you wanted them for, I could help.”
Sally rolled her eyes and made a notation. “Roy has asked me to prepare for the next board evaluation, and I wanted to see what’s been done in the past. Obviously, nothing very sophisticated.”
Zack cocked his head to one side. “I guess I’m a little confused. The legal department manages the board evaluations. Maybe Roy doesn’t know that.”
“I think, Zack, you do well to assume the confusion is yours.” A yellow-brown leaf separated from the rubber plant and dropped limply onto the carpet. Maybe those really were shrunken heads. “If you’ll excuse me . . .”
“Impressive,” Zack muttered as they headed back down the hall. “Sally has managed to know less than nothing. I’m afraid we have to ask Ken to intervene.”
“Too bad. Zack, did you see those . . .” but then they found Ken at his oval table, making his way gamely through a tall stack of documents. He invited them to sit, and rubbed his hand over his stubble of hair while he listened.
“Did you explain to Sally that she can’t be involved, because she’ll destroy the confidentiality of the process?”
“No point, Ken. She was deeply committed to our department’s being stupid.”
“She and Roy are probably thinking up ways to give Sally more interaction with the board after the board members barred her from the strategy session. They’ll just have to think up something else, though. I’ll deal with it.” Why exactly did Roy care whether Sally had more interaction with the board? She thought about asking, but Ken said, “While I have you both here, can we talk about the Ben Larkin complaint?”