IF YOU WANTED THE MOON (18 page)

feet. The way they looked, getting fired may be the least of her problems.

“We wanted to let you know, Miss Douglas,” Grier began, “that we won the Multiplex bid.”

That only added to Tori’s confusion. “Okay. I mean, I’m glad to hear that.”

“Are you?” Ethan suddenly said, looking at her with a look that made her skin crawl.

“Yes. Of course I’m glad. Why would you even suggest otherwise?”

“We won the bid,” Grier went on, “for 2.9 milion dolars.”

“Again, I’m very happy that. . . 2.9? I thought we were bidding 3.2. Al of my cost projections were for 3.2.”

“We didn’t use your cost projections,” Ethan spat out. “Not on my life.”

Tori frowned. “What? Why wouldn’t you use my cost. . . Ethan, what is going on here?”

“Mr. Chandler,” Grier said, as if to remind her to whom she was speaking, “gave you a false bid on purpose, Miss Douglas. It was al a part of the plan.”

“The plan?” Tori asked, beyond confused. “What plan?”

“The plan to entrap you, Miss Douglas,” Grier said and Tori could hardly contain her shock.

“To entrap
me
? To entrap me in what?”

“You thought we were bidding 3.2 mil,” Grier said and Tori shook her head.

“Of course I thought it. That’s what I was told.”

“Wel apparently that was what Drummond was also told.”

“Drummond?”

“Oh, come now, Miss Douglas! You know that Drummond was our biggest competitor on this project.”

“How would I know that?”

“Because you do your homework. They’re always among our biggest competitors.”

“But I didn’t. . .” Tori rubbed her forehead. This was going into twilight zone area for her.

“Drummond bid 3.15 on the project,” Grier said, “believing our bid would be 3.2. Our bid, as I’ve told you, was 2.9. Which was the lowest bid, and we won the contract.”

Tori looked from Grier to Ethan and then back to Grier.

“What does any of this have to do with me?” she asked, her voice now exhausted.

“We staked out your apartment, Miss Douglas. And everybody who came and went. We were expecting Bobby Rogers to—”

“Bobby Rogers?” Tori asked, stunned anew. “What does Bobby have to do with this?”

“We were expecting Bobby Rogers to show up,” Grier continued, “and get the info from you directly. The way he did the last time.”

“What last time?” Tori asked frowningly.

“But he didn’t show. So we had men folowing the two people who did show up at your house the night after the staff meeting. A Dr. Sheila Montgomery and a Macy Kravitz. Kravitz didn’t turn up

anything. She left your place and went out partying, acting wild, but nothing, apparently, unusual for her. Nothing was unusual about what Dr. Montgomery did, either. She stopped by the hospital to apparently check on one of her patients, and then she went home. However, forty minutes after she made it home, she received a visit. From Bobby Rogers.”

“Bobby? Visiting Sheila?”

“The lights of her home went out, so we assume they did their thing—”

“Bobby and Sheila? There must be some mistake. There has to be. She knows that I was—”

“Stil dating him?” Ethan attempted to finish for her. Tori looked at him.

“Dating him? I’m not dating him! But Sheila knew that I used to.”

“So?”

“So she wouldn’t be fooling around with him.” But even Tori wasn’t sure of her words anymore.

“As I was stating,” Grier continued, “the lights went out in the house and then, some two, two and half hours later, Bobby Rogers leaves the doctor’s house. So we tail him, too. And guess where he ends up, Miss Douglas?”

ends up, Miss Douglas?”

Tori looked at Grier. She had no idea. How would she know anything about what Bobby was up to? “Where?” she asked.

“At Fred Morton’s place.”

Tori continued to stare at Grier. “I don’t understand. I thought Fred was stil in Cedar Key.”

“No. He came back to town a few hours after the staff meeting. On orders of Mr. Chandler, of course. We, after al, needed al of the parties in place.”

“Al of what parties? What are you talking about? I don’t understand what this is about.”

Tori looked to Ethan for answers, but al he was doing was staring at her as if she had a monkey on her head. He seemed to be in disbelief.

“The next day,” Grier continued, “Fred Morton met up with a representative from none other than the Drummond corporation. And money was exchanged. At least an envelope was. From the Drummond rep to Morton.”

“Again,” Tori said, her patience wearing thin, “what does any of this have to do with me?”

“We have al the pieces of the puzzle now, Miss Douglas,” Grier said, seemingly ignoring Tori’s question. “You, by virtue of your job here at CDI, get the false bid offer. You then invite our doctor friend over and give that information to her.”

Tori was beyond stunned. “
What
?” she said, flabbergasted. “You think that I, that I gave company secrets to
Sheila
?”

“Sheila, as you cal your doctor friend, then passed this information on to your boyfriend, her boyfriend, whomever’s boyfriend Bobby Rogers is. Bobby, then, passed the information on to Fred Morton, and Fred was the liaison to the companies vying to bring Chandler down. Morton, that slimebal, has already admitted his part, but he won’t implicate anybody else. Rogers has fled town. So that leaves only you, Miss Douglas.”

Tori looked at Grier as if he had just spoken a foreign language. Then she looked at Ethan. Ethan looked about as devastated as she did, but he held onto his resolve.

“You’re fired, Miss Douglas,” he said. Tori stared at him, stared as if those words were floating in midair between them, and then she stood and took her leave.

***

Sheila completed her morning rounds within the NIC-U at Children’s Hospital and was about to head over to the cafeteria for coffee, when she saw her two friends standing near the information desk.

Surprised to see them on her turf, she hurried over to them.

“What on earth are you two doing here?” she asked, looking from Macy to Tori. Tori, however, just stared at her. It didn’t take a genius to see the hurt al over Tori’s pretty face. And the way she looked at Sheila, as if she were looking through her, made Sheila want to run. But she didn’t. Tori didn’t give her that satisfaction. Tori, instead, simply backed away from her and then left the hospital.

Macy, however, wasn’t so magnanimous. She slapped Sheila hard across the face and then moved up toward her ear, causing Sheila not only to rub her cheek in shock, but to recoil at Macy’s sudden

closeness. “You and your phone cals from the hospital. You and your need to have al of that privacy while you took those cals. Going into Tori’s bedroom where her work was. Your thievin’ behind was going through that girl’s stuff, getting al of the information you needed to pass on to your slimy boyfriend Bobby!” Then Macy took a breath, to calm herself down, although her words remained bitter. “Al I got to say to you, Sheila, is that you better not be caught alone. Not ever. Because every aley you walk down just might have my face in it. And it ain’t gonna be a pretty sight. You best believe that.”

Then she added, “Heifer!” and hurried out of the hospital to catch up with Tori. Sheila looked around, at al of the people who were now staring at her, and then she hurried embarrassingly for the exit doors too.

Over the next weeks, Ethan was unable to get on with his life as he absolutely expected he would have little trouble doing. Instead, he kept obsessing about Tori, about what she had done, about how he stil couldn’t quite come to believe it al. He’d never been that wrong about anybody in al of his life. Tori, seling secrets to the enemy? That didn’t seem plausible to him. And for what? A little more money? He knew she was stretched thin. He knew her parents were depending on her to keep up the payments on their hefty mortgage. But to sel bid projections seemed beyond the pale to Ethan. It just didn’t seem possible that Tori would do such a thing.

But she had. It said so in black and white. He sat on the balcony of his penthouse apartment, glass of wine in hand, and stared at it. Stared at that infamous report Marc Grier had given to him. No matter how hard he tried to deny it, how many times he tried to excuse it, al leads, every one, led back to Tori. Victoria D. Douglas. VD Douglas. The only woman he ever truly loved.

He angrily took his glass of wine and flung it against the balcony rail, it’s red contents spiling out, it’s glass bursting on impact. Why did it have to be Tori, he wanted to scream. Why her! She was so kind, so beautiful, so wonderful, was it al a ruse? His face looked tormented, his heart kept ramming. He stil couldn’t believe it. After al these weeks, he stil couldn’t believe it.

He grabbed his cel phone and dialed Tori’s number. He knew it by heart now. Every now and then he’d tried to phone her, to see if he could get some clarification as to why, why did she do it. Or, when he was in one of his more fanciful moods, he’d wondered if maybe she didn’t do it. That was what he wanted to ask her. He wanted her to admit it, or, God be praised, deny it. She didn’t do either on the day that he fired her. She wouldn’t. But she would never answer his phone cals.

He pressed her number again. This time, however, a recording came on and stated that the number had been disconnected. Ethan closed his eyes, placed his phone to his temple. It seemed as if he

would never know the reason why. Only he had to know it. It burned in him louder than his heartbeat. He had to know why!

Then, without thinking about it, without talking himself out of what was obviously an impulsiveness he was not accustomed to, he jumped up, grabbed his bomber’s jacket, and hurried out of his apartment.

He drove his Saab straight to the address he had memorized: Tori’s apartment. It was a smal complex, lower middle class if not working class, like a different world from the one Ethan lived in. But he got out of his car, walked deliberately up the back stairs to her apartment, and was about to knock. But the sign in the window stopped him short.
For Rent
, it said, and it was clearly empty as the window had no curtain and revealed an apartment devoid of habitation.

Ethan leaned against the bannister and stared at the apartment. Not only did he need to know why, but he had to see her. And now. But how could he, he wondered, when he didn’t even know where

she was. Did she lose her apartment because he fired her? Was her financial situation that tenuous? He was now almost frantic with worry, as he knocked on neighbors’ doors and asked if they knew where Tori had went. Not to his surprise, most did not even know who she was.

He left. But instead of going back home to continue what was becoming his obsession with Tori, he drove across town to the hospital. In search of Dr. Sheila Montgomery, one of the links in the chain of crooks defrauding his company.

She was in the hospital’s cafeteria, sipping coffee as the charge nurse had told him. Since the surveilance photos had given him an idea of what she looked like, a tal, beautiful black woman, he knew her when he saw her. And walked up to her table.

She also seemed to know him, too, as her entire body tensed at his arrival. “May I help you?” she asked.

“Helo, Dr. Montgomery.”

“Look,” she said, her voice at first rising and then, as she looked around, lowering, “as I told your investigators, I didn’t break any laws. I was just passing along information. I didn’t get any money out of anything and none of this has anything to do with me.”

“This isn’t about that,” Ethan said as he took a seat at her table.

“I didn’t invite you to sit down,” Sheila said.

“I invited myself,” Ethan replied. “Listen, Miss—”

“Dr. Montgomery,” Sheila corrected him.

“Doctor,” Ethan said, “I don’t care about your involvement or lack thereof. What I care about is Tori.” Ethan swalowed hard after making this confession. “I need to know why.”

Sheila sighed. “I wasn’t trying to hurt Tori,” she said. “This had nothing to do with her. It wasn’t about money or anything like that. I was trying to. . . I was trying to win Bobby’s heart.”

“Tori’s boyfriend?”

“Tori’s ex-boyfriend, okay? They haven’t been together since she dropped that zero. Why I picked him back up is a mystery to me. Wel, actualy, I didn’t pick him up. He picked me up, sucker that I am, now that I think about it. He searched me out. Did al of his sweet talking. Made me a believer. Then he started asking me if Tori was stil bringing work home from her job, the way she used to do at Fitzgerald-Waterhouse. I told him that she was, and that was the beginning. Excuse myself, he told me. Go where she works, which we both knew was her bedroom, and just start looking around. Which I did. And good ol’ reliable Tori didn’t let us down. There was her work for al the noisy, backstabbing friends like me to see.”

Ethan frowned. “Wait a minute. Are you saying that, are you teling me that Tori didn’t know you were getting this information?”

“Of course she didn’t know! I wasn’t that stupid. Tori would die before she told company secrets, you’ve got to know that much about her.”

Ethan’s heart soured. He did, but he alowed his foolish pride to not believe it. “Where is she, Dr. Montgomery?”

“At work, I guess, how would I know?”

“How would you. . . You and she aren’t talking anymore?”

Sheila shook her head. “I don’t believe it. You thought she was involved in this, didn’t you? Because if you didn’t, then you wouldn’t have thought for a second that she would stil be talking to me.”

Then Sheila smiled. “I guess what Macy said was right. You don’t want Tori because of her race.”

“Her race?” Ethan asked, astonished. “Whatever would give you that idea?”

“That’s what Tori told another friend of ours. And that’s probably why you were so quick to believe that a black woman would betray you. If it’s black it must be bad. Right, Mr. Chandler?”