Echoes of Titanic (30 page)

Three or four years ago, the procedure had been for Kelsey to take her team's findings to Gloria, who would then make the final decisions about the investment, based on the team's information and her own experience, instincts, and other factors. But for the past year Kelsey had been making final recommendations herself. She had done quite well thus far, bringing in good money for the firm. The
Q
on her lapel attested to that.

Her hope tonight was that she could use her team's investigative skills to solve the issues that had risen up this week and were threatening to destroy both a company and a legacy. She would present them with the information she had managed to collect thus far—about Gloria, Rupert, and Queen's Fleet Management Group—and then they could run with it, using their knowledge and resources to come up with some answers or at least a solid theory or two.

Kelsey glanced at her phone to see that it was 6:02 p.m. They should be arriving any minute, so as she continued to wait, she pulled from her purse the questions she'd written up on the train. She skimmed through the whole list, starting with,
Why was Gloria trying to reach Rhonda the day she died?
, and then she jotted down a few more, ending with,
What were the terms of the takeover offer and how did the board respond?

It was a start. Some of the questions were closely connected, and she was sure the answers would overlap. There was just so much she needed to know. Thank goodness they had agreed to help her!

After a while, Kelsey checked her phone again and was startled to see that it was nearly six fifteen. Where was everyone? They were usually a prompt bunch. Time was money in their business, after all. Frowning, she was about to call Sharon and ask what was holding them up when the restaurant door opened and in stepped Walter Hallerman. Kelsey's breath caught in her throat, and for some strange reason she almost felt guilty, as if she'd been trying to get away with something bad and had been caught red-handed.

Walter spotted her and began winding his way between the tables to her place in the corner. She sat there watching him come, her pulse surging. His face was grim, and she knew she was about to be reprimanded. She could just feel it.

When he reached the table, he stood there stiffly, glaring down at her.

“Your team isn't coming, Kelsey.”

She took a deep breath and told herself to remain calm.

“And why not?”

He shook his head. “I already told you that your access to the company has to be limited. That includes not using B & T resources to run your own maverick agenda.”

With that he turned and walked away.

Furious, Kelsey sat there steaming for a long moment. But then as the door swung shut behind him, she grabbed her things, tossed a ten on the table, and got up. She ran after him.

“Walter!” she called, once she was outside on the sidewalk. He turned to face her. “What are you keeping me away from? What are you trying to hide?”

His eyes darkened. “I've already explained this to you. We have to disassociate B & T from you and these allegations of fraud against your great-grandmother.”

“My great-grandmother wasn't a fraud!” she hissed, her back straight and her chin high. She'd never thought she would see this day—when a member of the Tate family would have to fight for the company and the integrity of the Tate name.

“Can you prove it?” he said in a lower tone. “Because if you can, great. We could take things public and try to repair the damage done by your cousin. But I doubt that you can, and right now I don't see any other way around this. I'm sorry, Kelsey, but I spoke at length with Rupert Brennan yesterday. He may be a little eccentric, but he's not crazy and he's not giving up the fight. I'd move carefully on this if I were you.”

Kelsey wanted to scream. Walter, who should have been her strongest ally, was now her adversary. She wished Great-Grandma Adele were here with her—or her father or someone else she could trust. Someone who would back her up and give her the freedom to do what she needed to do. A week ago she would have turned to Gloria. Tonight, she had been counting on her team. But there was no team, no Gloria, no Nolan, no Adele.

There was just her, and she was alone.

Swallowing the painful lump in her throat, Kelsey told herself to calm down, that she couldn't blame Walter for this. He was only trying to do the best he could to ensure the company would ride out the storm.

“Talk to me, Walter,” she said in a more reasonable tone. “We both want this horrible mess to go away. I'm doing what I can from the outside, but there's still a lot I need to know. I deserve some information.”

He stood there for a long moment, as if hovering between coming and going. Then he sighed heavily and looked at his watch. “All right. I can give you fifteen minutes.”

Together they returned to the restaurant and to her table in the back corner, though when the waitress came to get Walter's drink order, Kelsey apologized, saying that her group wouldn't be coming after all and that they would be happy to move to a smaller one.

“No prob,” the woman said. “We don't usually get much of a crowd on Thursday nights anyway.”

Once she walked away, Kelsey turned to Walter and asked him to start by explaining to her about the takeover. He gave her a brief summary of events, saying that on Monday afternoon he'd been contacted by Pamela Greeley of Queen's Fleet Management Group, who made him an offer for Brennan & Tate.

“Trust me, that offer was
not
in our best interest. I took it to the board, and of course they rejected it.”

Kelsey pondered that. “Were you surprised when the offer came in?”

“Of course. I had no idea it was in the works. And I'm very unhappy about this whole thing, but we're in it now, and I'm doing the best I can—for B & T and for you, Kelsey, whether it feels that way or not.”

Deep down, she wanted to take his words at face value, but it was hard. Could she really trust him? How did she know what he was really doing while she was banned from the office and her usual sources of information?

“What did Gloria think about the offer?” she asked. She didn't want to rat out Ephraim and the secret he'd shared with her about the argument he'd overheard on Monday between Gloria and Walter, so instead she left it to Walter himself to tell her. If he answered honestly, it would be a good sign that he was on the up-and-up.

“Gloria was all for it, much to my surprise,” he said. “We had words. It didn't go well. The day she died, she was still so angry about it that she wouldn't even speak to me. I figured she would cool down eventually and
then we could talk like rational adults. Instead, she killed herself, leaving me to wonder why she'd taken such an absurd stance against the company she loved more than life itself.”

The waitress approached the table with the mug of hot tea Walter had ordered and a fresh cup of decaf for Kelsey. Then she asked if she could take their order.

“We're not staying,” Walter said to her, and again Kelsey was reminded of how differently this evening was playing out than she had expected. At this point she should have been surrounded by her EA and her top-notch team, fighting over slices of pizza and hashing out the mystery that was quickly consuming her life. Instead, she was here sipping coffee, stomach growling, with the man who had kicked her out of her own family company.

“You say you had words. When was that?”

“Monday afternoon, downstairs in the auditorium.”

“And did you call her at home later that night? Around ten thirty?”

Walter looked startled. “No, why would I do that?”

She studied his eyes, trying to decide if he was telling the truth or not. “Vern said someone called her at home Monday night at about ten thirty, and after that she was upset and went back to the office and stayed there till dawn.”

A noisy group of diners came in the front door, distracting them both. Once the people were settled at a front table and had quieted down a bit, they resumed their conversation.

“This is the first I've heard of this,” Walter said earnestly. “I can't imagine what would have brought Gloria back out at that hour, much less kept her out for that long.”

They were both quiet for a moment as Kelsey tried to decide how much to tell him.

“To be honest, Walter,” she said finally, “Gloria did several things recently that have me questioning her motives. Things you may not be aware of.”

“Oh?”

She nodded. “For starters, did Rupert tell you about the letter he got inviting him to the ceremony?”

“The anonymous one? With the invitation and the cash? Yes, he did. What about it?”

She hesitated, hoping she was right to trust Walter with the secrets she had thus far unearthed. “That letter came from Gloria.”

Walter's head jerked back, as if he'd been slapped. “Don't be ridiculous.”

Without another word, she reached into her purse and pulled out the printed copy. “I figured out her password and found this yesterday. I brought it up to your office and was about to show it to you when you had me escorted from the building.”

He took the letter from her and read it through, several times, his face growing ashen as he did.

“I don't understand,” he said finally, handing it back. “Gloria was the one charged with squelching this issue the last time it came up. Why would she turn around now and undo all of her own hard work?”

Kelsey let that question sit there between them as she folded up the letter and tucked it back into her purse. “I don't know, but you might have someone poke around a bit more in her files. Who knows what else you'll find in there? I came across this in less than half an hour, and I had barely scratched the surface.”

The poor man actually looked as though he might be sick. “But why?” he whispered, more to himself than to her. “Why would Gloria turn on us this way?”

Kelsey sipped her coffee, studying his face. “I have a theory if you'd like to hear it.”

“Please. Something. Anything.”

Settling back in her chair, Kelsey told him that she thought it had to do with the situation five years before, when he was first brought in to run the company and Lou and Gloria were both passed over for promotion. She said that Gloria had been extremely hurt by the whole thing and had been harboring resentment ever since.

“Why did my father do that anyway, Walter?” she asked. “No offense, but why did he need you when he already had two outstanding candidates in-house? Both Lou and Gloria were competent enough to step into the positions of CEO and COO. Did my father not trust them in some way?”

Walter shook his head. “No, lack of trust had nothing to do with it. I think in Gloria's case she was
so
competent in the position she already held that Nolan wanted to keep her there forever. His long-range plan for her was to continue to develop her department so that it would eventually become its own division.”

“So she never would have risen to COO or CEO?”

Walter shook his head. “Not under Nolan's long-term plan, no. As for Lou, your father had great respect for the man, but at that time he felt he was
too immature, too impulsive to become CEO just then. That's one reason I was Nolan's first choice for the job, because I'm not exactly a spring chicken. He told me straight out that he expected me to serve at the helm for ten years and then retire. At that point, his hope was that Lou would have matured enough to step up and take my place.”

Walter sipped his tea as Kelsey thought about that. She didn't see Lou as impulsive, just aggressive, which wasn't necessarily a bad quality to have in this business. If she was honest, she had a feeling her father's stance had had more to do with Lou's nouveau riche mentality than his “immaturity.” The man wore thousand-dollar shoes and lived in Trump Tower, but every once in a while he'd let slip a “youse guys” and reveal his humble Brooklyn roots. And while her father wasn't exactly a snob, he'd been raised in a far more refined environment. Someone like Lou at the helm of the family company would have been distasteful at best, embarrassing at worst. Nolan had probably hoped that another ten years would serve to file away the rougher edges and make Lou a more suitable representative for the Tate family. She wasn't proud of that thought, but she had a feeling she was right.

“Unfortunately,” Walter continued, “while your father's plan was a sound one, he didn't do a good job of communicating it to Lou or to Gloria. In response, Gloria was very upset, from what I understand, but at least she sucked it up and got on with things. Lou, on the other hand, did not. True to his nature, he left B & T in a pique and went to start his own company.”

“Which he's been quite successful with, by the way.”

“Oh, I know. No one doubted his talents, Kelsey. It was just a question of his readiness for the position at that time.”

“But when Lou left B & T, that would have opened up the COO position after all, right?”

“Correct.”

“So, once again, Gloria must have expected a promotion into the spot left vacant by Lou's departure.”