The Keychain

Chapter 9: Three Percent

"Boss. J. got played."

Rob said it the way you say a thing you've been holding in for an hour. His face was still red from the stairs.

"The project he signed," he said. "It was set up from the start. Fifty million of her money, gone. Just handed over and gone."

Two more of them came down the hall behind him, phone already out. Somebody played the video without asking.

Same hallway as before. Glass wall, blinds down. J. on his knees on the carpet in a suit, both hands flat on the floor, papers fanned out around him. Through the phone speaker his voice came out thin and wet and repeated the same word over and over, and the office door behind him did not open.

"She's been in there since this morning," the one holding the phone said. "Nobody's been in. Nobody's come out."

I watched it to the end and gave the phone back.

They were all looking at me. I knew the look.

"You think I'm going to feel something," I said.

"Boss, we didn't—"

"You think I'm going to walk over there."

Nobody said anything.

"It's not my fire," I said. "I told her. That's all I did and that's all I'm going to do."

Somebody let out a breath.

"You have time to stand here and watch a man cry," I said, "you have time to find out what the firm out of Chicago likes. I want it by end of day. Not a summary. Names, and what they drink."

They scattered.

I went back into my office and pulled the door shut and sat down and opened the file I'd been working on. The dead project was one folder over on the drive. I'd looked at it twice since the new job started. Both times I'd closed it without opening anything.

I looked at it now. Then I closed it again and went back to work.

The number had gone around the room once and nobody had said it again. Fifty million. Two million had been a number she'd stood in front of me and defended. Two hundred thousand had been the number she'd kept me on the carpet over for a month.

I finished the file and sent it and went home.

---

It came back to me through them. I didn't ask.

We were at the restaurant the night we closed the quarter, off the back of the deal I'd walked the client to the elevator for the week before. Somebody had ordered too much food. Somebody else was telling the story of the pitch wrong on purpose to make the client sound worse.

"She pulled him," Rob said, out of nowhere, to the table.

"Pulled him how."

"Took the title back. He's not running the division." He speared something off the plate. "They've got a req up for it. External. Listed it yesterday."

"Already?"

"She stuck it on the site last night. I saw it."

One of the others laughed, short and mean. "Now she wants to know. Now."

"It's not like he was ever—"

"He couldn't carry J.'s water. Everybody on that floor knew it. She's the only one who didn't."

The table had that warm, loose feel by then, the third round in, everyone a little too loud. I ate and let them talk. A year ago a piece of news like that would have gone through me like a hook. It went past me and landed in the plate and stayed there.

I said something to the waiter about the check and somebody argued with me about it and I let them win.

I got home around eleven. I was pulling my shirt off when the phone lit up on the dresser.

Her name.

I stood there with the shirt in my hand and let it ring twice before I picked it up.

"Hi." Her voice was wet and low, the way it got after a fight when she'd decided she wanted something. "I know it's late."

"It's late."

"I've been thinking about what I said. All of it. I shouldn't have said those things to you."

"Which things."

"At the restaurant. The things I said. I didn't mean any of it." A breath. "I'm asking you to come back."

I didn't say anything.

"Not like that," she said. "Not like before. I'll make it whatever you want it to be. You can have whatever you want. The title, the division, the equity, whatever. Just tell me what you want and I'll do it."

"Adam."

"Please. Just listen to me for one minute."

"I'm listening."

A breath on the other end, the sound of somebody steeling herself.

"I fired him," she said.

Something crossed my chest, small and fast, gone before I could name it.

"What?"

"I fired him." Her voice cracked on it. "I found out. I went through the books myself, I sat there for two days, and I found out what he was doing. He was writing entries. He was moving money out and putting paper over it and I didn't see it. It was all through the accounts, it's—" She stopped and pulled in a breath. "It's gone. A lot of it's gone. The books don't balance. The projects he touched are all coming apart, every one of them. The clients are already filing. Two of them sent letters this week. They want double. They're saying breach and they want double."

The line was quiet for a second.

"There are four demand letters on my desk," she said. "I don't know if there are more coming."

I stood in the middle of my bedroom in the dark with the phone against my ear.

"Adam." She said it again, quieter. "Adam, I should have listened to you. When you told me about his record, when you said. I should have listened. I thought you were—I thought you were being hard on him. I thought—" She broke off. "I gave him everything and he used it. He used my—he used the way I felt about him and he took it. All of it."

"You made a call," I said.

"I know."

"You made it over and over. I stood in front of you and told you what he was and you called me jealous."

"I know."

"Nobody did this to you."

Silence.

"Come back," she said. "Please, Adam. I don't have anyone else. Everyone's leaving. The board called me twice today. I don't have—you're the only one I have. You know how to fix this. You're the only one who ever knew how."

"You have a piece of this too," she said, and her voice tightened, going somewhere colder. "You built that division. Your name is on the filings. If the company goes down, you go down with it. However this ends, you're in it with me. You have to see that."

"How much do I have."

"What?"

"My stake. How much of it do I actually hold."

She was quiet.

"Three percent," she said.

"Three percent," I said.

"It's still yours. You built—"

"I'll survive three percent."

"Adam—"

I let it sit.

"Don't," I said.

"Don't what?"

"Call me that."

"I don't—"

"You've been doing it all night. Every time you want something." I kept my voice flat, the way you'd tell somebody which exit to take. "We're divorced. It's filed. Use my whole name, or don't call me anything."

She took another breath. Down the line I heard a cabinet close. When she spoke again she was crying, the real kind, the kind that came after the bargaining was over.

"You're not hearing me. I don't care about the money, I don't care about the company, I just—don't hang up on me. Don't do this to me. I'm standing in my kitchen by myself and I don't—"

"Goodnight," I said.

I hung up.

I put the phone face down on the dresser and stood there for a minute doing nothing. Then I went and brushed my teeth and set the alarm and got into bed.

I slept fine.

The rest of it I got secondhand, and I didn't go looking for it.

Three days later she was outside the office.

I came down the front of the building and there she was, standing off to the side near the planters with her hands in her coat, hair done, looking the way she looked when she was about to walk into a pitch. She didn't say anything when she saw me. She just stood there.

I walked past her to the car.

She was there the next morning too. And the morning after.

Rob saw her on the fourth day. "You want me to—"

"No."

"You sure?"

"I'm sure."

They went out to her on the fifth day, a couple of them, on their lunch break, and I heard about it after. Whatever they said to her, I didn't ask, and they didn't volunteer it. She wasn't there on the sixth morning. Or the seventh. That was the last of it.

I went back to work.

---

The rest came in on the regular channels. Rob heard it from somebody who still had friends on her floor, and it showed up in the trade press before the month was out, in the small, boring way these things do: enforcement, judgments, a schedule of payments, liens.

She lost the house.

The judgment came down and the payment schedule was set and the schedule was not something the company could meet, and the assets went up to cover it.

Then the accounting, and the accounting took longer, because there was more of it than anyone had known. Half of what was in her name was gone. Not spent. Moved. There were papers in her desk drawer that looked like title on properties she had never owned, and there were three more of them in a safe deposit box, and none of them were real. The car was gone too. The one he'd been driving. Sold, out of state, to a buyer who'd never heard of either of them.

She sat on the front steps of the house and cried most of a night. Somebody who lived two doors down saw her. That somebody told somebody, and it got to Rob, and Rob told me in the elevator, plainly. I said, "Huh." Rob said, "Yeah." Then the doors opened and we went to the meeting.

That month we closed the second deal.

Not a big one. Bigger than the first. The client had been with a firm that got into trouble and needed somewhere to land, and one of our people had sat in their lobby three times before anybody would take a meeting, and on the fourth time they took it, and we landed them. Small margin. Good logo. The kind of thing you keep on the wall.

I put the contract in the folder and the folder in the drawer and stood at the window for a minute looking at the parking lot.

The team had done that. Not me. I'd been in the room for the last meeting and said four things. The rest had been them. Six months ago I couldn't have gotten them a meeting with a firm like that. Now they were walking into lobbies and sitting there until somebody came out.

---

The celebration was at a place up the street. Not the restaurant. Somebody had picked it because the bar had a patio.

By the second round the story had gotten to the part where Rob did the client's voice, and then to the part where he did my voice, which was worse, and then the plates came and for a while nobody said anything much.

Somewhere in there somebody mentioned her.

"Nobody's seen her," one of them said. "Not since the house. My cousin works in the building next door and she says she hasn't been in for weeks. Somebody's running it out of the CFO's office now."

"Running what," somebody said.

"What's left."

There was a pause, and then somebody said something about the third deal we were lining up and the table moved on, and the plates went around again.

The waitress came and I ordered another drink and paid the tab when nobody was looking.

We spilled out onto the sidewalk at eleven. People said goodnight and went off in twos and threes toward the lot. Rob was the last one, telling me some long thing about his sister's wedding while he waited for his ride, and I listened to it and made the right noises until the car came, and then I watched him get in and waved once and stood there for a second when the street was empty.

Then I walked to my car.

I had the next deal in mind already. A firm out of Denver had come in through the website two weeks ago and the name had rung a bell, and on the drive home I got to thinking about who at the firm might have a connection to them, and whether we had enough runway to front the travel, and what it would take to get a second meeting.

By the time I pulled into my building I had three of it worked out and one piece left.

I parked and sat in the dark for a minute running the last piece.

Then I went upstairs and turned on the light and opened my laptop.