by Susan Wolfe
Georgia propped her head on both fists and stared at the screen. “Standard.” Side deals were so common there was a “standard”? She could never whisper a hint of this to Ken. As an officer, he’d be obligated to resume the investigation, and now it would be the whole company. But how likely was Terkes to stop this, even temporarily? Could he stop it? Wouldn’t sales for the quarter plummet without side deals?
And now she knew about the kiddie porn. Georgia was no crusader, but how could somebody just hand those pictures of real children around like Pokemon cards? And she had those images stuck in her brain. This job had more hazards than a hog had spots.
Who was B. Rotkin, anyway? How did these perverts find each other? Had he returned the favor, sending stuff to Terkes? She went back to Terkes’ incoming email and sorted for Rotkin. Four messages appeared in a list. One had a subject “Right here in Tulsa.” She opened it:
Hey, look what I found in a chat room right here in Tulsa. Sent me this herself, though she thinks she sent it to‘Timmy’ the high school track star. Ha! Time for another one of your field trips? This one wants it bad. ;-)
Attached was a photo of a blond girl, naked from the waist up and looking boldly into the camera. Katie-Ann?? Georgia gasped, looked again, and saw that the girl was a complete stranger. She looked even younger than Katie-Ann, thirteen, maybe fourteen. Georgia checked the date. The email was already more than four months old. Too late, but then maybe it had just been pointless bravado, or maybe the girl had escaped on her own.
Georgia sat with her hands tented over her nose and open mouth, closed her eyes in a long blink, and exhaled. What was she going to do about this? Seemed like an FBI thing. But how could she go to the FBI without having a cast of thousands pawing through the side deal email? She fought off a memory of a filthy undershirt, the stench of tobacco-stained teeth. The terror that remained long after Gramma Griffin appeared in the barn and called her name in the nick of time . . . She bolted for the bathroom and heaved what was left of the lasagna into the toilet.
Well. If Georgia knew anything from her colorful past, she knew the value of recovering her wits promptly. Ten minutes later she was in her pajamas, teeth brushed, in the lotus position on her round cushion, visualizing the most beautiful mountain she could think of. Whenever a porno image floated into her head, she noted its presence, and then watched the beautiful mountain reappear. Gradually her breathing slowed, and her shoulders relaxed. Glen Terkes required some analysis. This problem required a right perspective. And Georgia required a good night’s sleep.
It was 6:30 p.m., and Georgia was in her cube, finishing up paperwork for the new subsidiary in Belize. Katie-Ann had promised to make ground beef with mushroom soup over rice for dinner, and Georgia wanted to be home in time to make a salad to go with it. As she worked, she tried to shut out worries about Glen Terkes, along with the pleasant murmur of Quan’s voice drifting over the top of her cube from down the hall. Quan sounded like he was in Joe’s doorway, and they were talking with Angela and Miles, two of the contracts admins.
“Hey, Georgia,” Quan called over the tops of the cubes. “Want to go to lunch with us a week from Monday?”
“Sounds great,” she called back. Not like Quan to be a social secretary. Was something up? The hell with it. Belize could happen tomorrow. She shut down her computer and strolled over to where they were gathered around Joe. “So what’s the occasion?”
“The occasion is the annual sales kick-off,” Joe responded. He was one of the lawyers who negotiated license agreements, so Georgia didn’t work with him much. At the age of thirty, he was the sole support of a wife and four children, but instead of seeming burdened he radiated that wholesome, slightly lacquered optimism she was learning to recognize as Mormon. “All the salespeople are busy partying and doing things the legal department probably shouldn’t know about,” he explained, “so they don’t have time to call us with their many demands. So our whole licensing team gets three days with no phones ringing, and that makes us so happy that we want to party, too. So we’re gonna have lunch.”
“Which just proves happiness is contagious,” Quan laughed.
“Too bad it’s only three days,” Angela said, turning to Georgia. “The second it’s over they start calling us like crazy again.”
“And then there’s actually extra work for the legal team,” Quan added. “Especially Zack.”
“How so?” Georgia asked.
“Well, the sales team’s idea of good times sometimes gets them into trouble.” Joe’s tone was carefully nonjudgmental. “Or threatens to get the company in trouble. And then Zack or Ken have to step in to clean it up.”
“Yeah,” Angela said, “remember last year? It was the whores in the hot tub.”
“Angela!” Miles said with mock disapproval. “Those weren’t whores. They were exotic dancers. Very talented, I believe. One of them was John Linden’s fiancée.”
“Yeah, for about three hours,” Angela scoffed. “That’s what he said to get her past security in the hotel. But then it turned out he’d met her at a strip club the night before. She and her friends took all their clothes off in the hot tub, and the other hotel guests got totally offended.”
Joe the Mormon chuckled stiffly along with them. “Actually, those weren’t just any old hotel guests who got upset, they were customers, and it was actually a user conference.”
“You know what, that’s right,” Angela confirmed, wagging a finger near her temple. “So what happened at the kick-off?”
“Wasn’t there a guy from Phoenix who complained that his boss made everybody chip in to pay for a stripper?” Miles asked.
“That is accurate,” Quan confirmed. “I dealt with that one myself. I called the guy up and he said yes, he did ask for contributions for a stripper. And when I asked why, he said he thought it would be wrong to expense it.” Loud laughter.
“That was Reebuck’s guy, remember?” Joe added. The story was gathering steam. “And then it turned out Charlie and Glen were both there, and didn’t stop it.”
“Their defense was probably that they’d paid good money like everybody else,” Miles said, and they laughed again.
“Well, in fairness,” Quan clarified, “they didn’t seem to know how she was being paid for.”
“So what happened to the manager?” Georgia asked Quan.
“I told him he was halfway to paradise. I congratulated him for recognizing that it would have been wrong to expense it, and the next time he just needed to figure out it was also wrong to hire the stripper in the first place. Then I put a warning letter in his file.”
Angela shrugged, unimpressed. “Big deal. The real punishment is this year he might have to pay for the stripper himself.” They laughed again, but this time Georgia barely heard it. She was suddenly visualizing a map to buried treasure.
She realized Joe was calling her name, and reluctantly returned from her reverie. “What? Oh, sorry. What was that?”
“You okay?” Angela scrutinized Georgia’s face. “We didn’t gross you out with our raunchy stories, did we?”
“Oh.” She held her palms up. “Not at all. Just visiting a distant planet. When is kick-off?”
“Starts a week from Monday,” Joe said. “Can we count you in for lunch?”
“Absolutely. Lunch sounds great. I sort of have to go now.”
A week from Monday. Wasn’t much time. Was Charlie Reebuck even around this week? She was pretty sure there was a drug dealer at the church dinners she could use to score some coke. Incredibly expensive, unless she could get him to just lease it to her for a day or two, which seemed like a long shot. The whole scheme seemed like a long shot, but then so was landing a man on the moon. As Ken said, how would you know what’s possible unless you tried?
As luck would have it, Charlie Reebuck showed up for a visit from the San Francisco office two days later. Georgia slowed down as she neared the open visitor’s office door, making sure she’d correctly identified that glib, st
accato voice, then hurried back to her office to prepare a little midmorning playacting.
She was zooming past the visitor’s office an hour later when a little brown medicine container shot from a manila envelope she was carrying and rolled to a stop at the toe of Charlie’s glossy, chestnut-brown lace-up.
“Oh!” she said, and stopped just outside his open door, her gaze traveling from the medicine container up to his startled, hyper-alert face.
He bent over and picked it up. He held it up to the light and shook the loose powder thoughtfully. He opened it and sniffed. She used both hands to squeeze the manila envelope open, inviting him to drop it back in.
“Good thing this wasn’t glass,” he commented as he walked to where she stood in the doorway and dropped it in. “Could’ve lost a whole party down in the carpet.”
“Thanks!” She smiled at him. “Didn’t mean to assault you in there.”
“What’s the rush? Free beer?”
“Nothing that fun, unfortunately. One of our executives needed a refill on his medicine, and now we want to get it to him before he heads out for a client dinner.”
“His medicine,” he said slowly, savoring the phrase. “Works for me. Whose ‘medicine’ is it?”
“Mr. Terkes’.”
“No way. Glen? How would I not have known this?” He studied her face for a moment. One con artist seeking to recognize another? She made her face deliberately blank. “Tell you what, I’ll be at the dinner with him tonight. Why don’t I just take it to him?”
“That would be great.” She held the envelope out to him. “Oh, you know what, though?” She pulled it back again. “I promised Mary I’d take it. Better stick to what I’m told.”
He shrugged. “Suit yourself. Seems like a waste of time. Wait, aren’t you the person from the legal department?”
“Oh yes, Mr. Reebuck, I’m Georgia. I was taking notes in that interview. Sorry it was sort of uncomfortable.”
He searched her face again, considering, then waved his hand dismissively. “Hey, that was nothin’. You oughtta see some of my sales calls. Well, at least you’re doing something important for a change, instead of getting all wound up about stuff nobody cares about.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. It’s not like filing those 10-Qs is gonna pay our salaries, now, is it?”
He lifted his palms expansively. “I’m sure it’s all very important. You’re probably keeping us out of trouble in ways I wouldn’t begin to understand.”
Georgia shrugged. “Sometimes. I guess with sales, it’s always pretty exciting.
“Exciting like going to your own hanging, but yeah, it’s exciting.”
“You always seem pretty upbeat about things.”
“Well, we party now and then to blow off a little steam. We work hard, why not play hard when we get the chance?” He was waxing philosophical, half-sitting on the front of his desk, his shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal his skinny forearms and a gigantic gold watch.
“Absolutely,” she said. “I’ve heard about your parties. Are you planning anything for sales kick-off?”
“Sunday night. Big tradition. Sort of an ice-breaker to kick off the kick-off.”
She smiled a little wistfully. “Must be great, to just let go and be wild.”
He appraised her body. “It is great. You should join us sometime. Bring Nikki.”
“Could I really? Wouldn’t want to interfere with the fun. What if I see something you wouldn’t want me to see?”
“What’s to see, assuming you don’t object to a little ‘medicine’ or a couple of friendly girls?”
“Oh no, not at all. It’s just that maybe if I’m from ‘legal’ ”—she rolled her eyes and made air quotes—“I could sort of put a damper on things.”
“Maybe you should join a department that doesn’t interfere with your social life.”
Georgia laughed. “You could definitely be right about that one. Speaking of which, I better get going now. Nice to see you again.”
“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” he said with a wink. What could that even be, she wondered as she headed back to her cube.
The board was fifteen minutes into their 8 a.m. meeting, and Georgia was actually bored for once, relying on the pungent steam spiraling up from her purple-stamped Peets cup to keep herself warm and awake. She hoped Eddie would be at the backlog meeting again this afternoon. “Nice to see you again, Georgia,” he’d say with the frank, slightly eager look she found so attractive. She was wearing her shirt that matched her dark blue eyes, just in case.
Roy didn’t appear to be listening to Ken’s presentation at all. He was focused on something across the room, and she followed his gaze to an apparently oblivious Sally, who was confidently sporting braided, purple epaulets on the shoulders of her brick red suit. Funny. You’d expect Roy’s scowl to soften when he looked at his most ardent butt-smooch, but this was just the opposite. Roy’s typical run-of-the-mill glare had hardened into one of downright hatred. Must be looking at her and thinking of something else, unless she’d finally managed to puncture his fashion oblivion.
“I’m certainly not surprised that there is no basis to this claim of dual books,” Jean-Claude was saying. “I would have felt some shock if you had reached a different conclusion. But can you explain a bit about how this completely baseless claim got the attention of the SEC?” Now this was less boring. She sat up straighter and leaned forward to hear Ken’s answer.
“Usually you have to speculate about these things,” Ken responded, “but in this case we actually know. The accusation was filed by an employee in our Boston office who had complained of sexual harassment, and didn’t like the way the company handled the investigation.”
Jean-Claude raised his stiff, white eyebrows. “So she just said some lies to the SEC, as a kind of revenge for the way we treated her?”
“Him,” Ken corrected. “Employee’s a man. And we don’t know whether he knew the allegation was false, or whether he believed it was true because he saw something that confused him. We do know that he didn’t go to the SEC until after he saw the outcome of his harassment complaint.”
“Can you say what this harassment claim was regarding?” Jean-Claude continued with a frown.
“Gentlemen,” Roy interrupted, holding up the palm of his hand and glaring a warning to Ken. “We’re lost in the weeds here. Basically, we investigated this guy’s claim and handled it responsibly. You can’t control or predict what an individual will do sometimes. This particular employee evidently wanted an excuse for not doing his job, and became irate when we didn’t give him one.
“The point is, this whole mess has no basis, and the SEC doesn’t want to waste their time on it any more than we do. In fact, my only concern is that the SEC investigation will get out of control, exactly the way the side deal audit did. To prevent that, I’ve asked Sally to work closely with Ken and Cliff, to provide some much-needed perspective.”
Ken and Cliff jerked in unison, exchanging glances to confirm each other’s astonishment. How could Georgia possibly have thought any board meeting could be boring? Sooner or later, she always became an eyewitness to history.
“I share Roy’s optimism that we can convince the SEC we don’t keep dual books,” Ken said. “I think we should be very careful, though, about trying to shortcut the SEC’s inquiry. If they get the slightest idea we’re trying to rush them, they have the ability to cost us a lot of time and money.”
“I want to second that,” Cliff added. “The SEC will become extremely disruptive if we give them the slightest motive for doing so. We want to convince them we’re a respectful, transparent and honest company, and that could take patience. We can’t allow an inexperienced person to get within a million miles of them.”
“You and Ken will handle the relationship with the SEC, of course,” Larry said. “In fact, I’m a bit surprised that we need to involve Sally at all, but if you guys are convinced it’s useful . . .” Which “guys” were those, exac
tly? Ken and Cliff were practically pantomiming horror at the very thought.
“I will personally ensure that the team works smoothly,” Roy said quickly. “I’m confident this is the right mix to get the job done thoroughly, and with a minimum of waste. I notice we’re coming to the end of our hour. Any questions before we close?” he asked, shaking his head from side to side.
“I do have one question,” Paul Holder called through the speakerphone. “Where did we ever come out on the employee part of the side deal investigation?”
“We concluded that nine people should be terminated,” Ken reported, “and that is being done this week.”
“Anybody senior?”
“The most senior person is Wilt Devans, the head of the San Francisco office. The head of the Western Region, Charlie Reebuck, is being given a warning.”
“But how can this be,” Jean-Claude asked, “when his famous $1.2 million deal contained a side agreement? And didn’t these disti deals come from his offices as well?”
“Let me comment on that,” Roy interjected. “We looked at Charlie very closely, but decided that these lower-level characters were fully responsible for their own actions. We’ve warned Charlie about being more vigilant, and I’m confident he’ll heed those warnings.”
‘Ugh!’ Georgia wrote in a text to Ken, but then decided not to distract him and deleted it.
“But the $1.2 million deal?” Paul’s voice persisted through the speakerphone. “Who was responsible for that?”
“That was just a misunderstanding,” Roy reassured him. “Apparently Charlie thought the buyback was in the main agreement.”
Text to Ken: ‘Rbuck sd tht?’ But Ken was focused on the board.
“Well,” Jean-Claude said, “I am a bit surprised by that conclusion, but I guess it’s a good one for the company. Anything else? Okay, then the meeting is adjourned.”
“Did Reebuck really say he thought the buyback was in the main agreement?” Georgia whispered to Ken as they headed back to his office.