Silent Partner (13 page)

In the middle of the block Angela stopped and turned around, convinced someone on the other side of the street was pacing her. She peered into the darkness but saw nothing except an unbroken string of snow-covered cars on both sides of the narrow lane. She began walking again, checking over her shoulder every few steps as she headed toward the next avenue, the Fan’s next spoke. There she stopped again, expecting someone to appear on the other side of the street. But no one did. She hurried a few more paces, reached the next avenue and the next tavern, walked into the crowded establishment, and moved directly to the back of the smoky room. She’d been to this place several times and knew there was a back door she could slip out of.

When she reached the narrow hall outside the restrooms, she glanced back through the crowd at the front door. Again she saw nothing suspicious, no lone wolf with a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes and probably a pistol beneath his coat. She sighed at her paranoia as she sidestepped a young man coming out of the men’s room. Then she exited the tavern through the back door and headed down the alley toward Tortelli’s, an Italian restaurant a few blocks away, where she was meeting Liv Jefferson for dinner.

At the restaurant door she hesitated, moving back a few steps after touching the handle. Maybe she needed to back off on her friendship with Liv Jefferson, she thought. At least for a while. Or perhaps not be so obvious about it. Ken Booker had warned her about speaking to the press. Even Jake Lawrence had accused her of being Liv’s source for the negative articles about Sumter. How could he have known that?

She’d chosen Tortelli’s because it was off the beaten track. It was not a place any of Sumter’s senior executives were likely to frequent. But maybe at this point she needed to worry less about chance encounters, and more about other possibilities. She glanced around the area in front of the restaurant, then up and down the avenue. She shook her head. What had happened in Wyoming was affecting her. And screw the bank’s policy about talking to the press. Liv had been a loyal friend for years. They couldn’t tell her whom to talk to, much less whom to be friends with. She reached for the handle, pulled the door open, and stepped inside.

Liv Jefferson sat at a table in the back of the quiet restaurant. There was only one other occupied table in the place, and the couple seated at it appeared too young to be served alcohol. Neither of them bothered to look up when Angela entered.

“Hello, there,” Liv called, waving as Angela handed her coat and briefcase to a white-aproned waiter.

“Hi.” Angela sat down across the red and white checked tablecloth and smiled. Liv was mercurial. Elated or irate, but never mellow. “How are you?”

“A little put off,” Liv said.

“What’s wrong? Man trouble again?” Angela asked. Liv had cycled through three husbands in the last fifteen years. Fortunately, as she often said, none of them had stuck around long enough to get her pregnant. “Is that it?”

“Honey, I don’t let men be trouble for me anymore,” she answered, shaking her head emphatically and wagging a finger. “I’ve become trouble for them. You know that. Mmm, mmm, mmm. They see this fine body and they just have to have it.”

Angela recognized a glint in the other woman’s eye. There was a nugget of wisdom on the way.

“Want to hear my new motto?” Liv asked.

Angela rolled her eyes good-naturedly. “I can’t wait.”

“I
tease
but I do not
please
.”

Angela laughed loudly. Typical Liv. In the years since they’d met, Liv had become the older sister Angela had never had. She often sought Liv’s advice on difficult issues, both personal and work related. And Liv always made a point of inviting Angela to dinner on those Sunday nights when she had to drop Hunter off at the Reese estate after her paltry forty-eight hours a month had expired. Somehow Liv could always raise her spirits when she was down. Or calm her when her world seemed to be falling apart.

She glanced across the table, thinking back on Jake Lawrence’s reference to Sally Chambers. Liv was a lot like Sally: self-assured and confident. A lot like Sally should have been.

“What is it then?” Angela asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Well, I was irritated that you walked right past me this morning in front of the Sumter Tower,” Liv explained, picking up an open bottle of Merlot standing on one corner of the table and pouring each of them a glass. “That wasn’t very nice.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No way to treat someone who’s—”

“I said I was sorry,” Angela repeated, glancing around at the couple a few tables away. They were holding hands and gazing into one another’s eyes, oblivious to what was going on around them. “Lord.”

“Well, what’s the matter? First you don’t return my calls, then you ignore me on the street this morning.”

“I told you. I was away a day longer on business than I anticipated, and, besides, I didn’t
ignore
you.”

“Pretty close.”

“I was late for a meeting,” Angela explained lamely.

“Isn’t that convenient?” Liv asked sarcastically, her expression turning serious. “Are they starting to get to you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Have the senior executives at the bank started telling you to stay away from me?”

“Why do you ask?”

“It’s happened before. A company’s senior management not wanting employees to talk to me after I write something negative about them or their firm. As long as I’m saying good things, everybody’s my best friend. But as soon as I say something nasty, as soon as I write the truth, they all—”

“And that comes as a surprise to you after being a reporter for twenty years?” Angela interrupted. “Less than two weeks ago you might as well have called Sumter Bank’s most senior executive the grand imperial wizard of the KKK.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The article you wrote about him. The one accusing him of shutting down branches in black areas of the city. About him arbitrarily denying mortgages to blacks. ‘A carefully planned strategy to keep blacks imprisoned in undesirable areas of the city, to keep them out of traditionally white neighborhoods that offer safe streets and good schools.’ Wasn’t that what you wrote? ‘An atrocious sixties-style strategy formulated and carried out by the highest levels of Sumter Bank management.’ Do you really expect Bob Dudley to encourage employees to speak freely with you after reading that?”

A satisfied smile spread across Liv’s round face. “No, but he could nominate me for a Pulitzer. That was one of the best pieces of my career.”

“Uh-huh. But you made some assumptions you shouldn’t have.”

“I just wish I could have been there the first time Dudley read that column,” Liv said, ignoring Angela’s rebuke, “when that ass-kissing Carter Hill brought the morning newspaper to Dudley like the yapping little lapdog he is. I’d have paid a lot of money to see Dudley’s reaction.”

Angela hesitated, wondering once more if she should have come tonight. “You’d better watch out,” she warned. “You’d better keep your eyes open and your head down.”

Liv waved as if she wasn’t afraid. “I’m not worried about Bob Dudley. We’ve hated each other for a while. I told you that story, right?”

Six months ago, Angela remembered Liv telling her, the University of Richmond business school had convened a panel of important local business leaders—including, as the most senior business reporter in Richmond, Liv Jefferson—to discuss the effects of the Internet on the Richmond economy. The program had turned out to be so popular that the university’s auditorium was filled to capacity an hour before it was to start. At one point Liv had stated that the Internet’s positive effect had been less pronounced on low-income families because they needed to spend what little money they had on essentials—as opposed to computers and Internet access. That, in effect, the Internet was actually broadening the divide between rich and poor.

Dudley had quickly remarked that low-income people needed to work harder and not constantly seek handouts from those who were successful. The exchange had turned heated, and quickly intensified until the program’s moderator had imposed a ten-minute, unscheduled intermission. After the break Dudley had not reappeared on stage due to a “sudden pressing engagement.”

“Yes, you did,” Angela answered.

“Did I tell you that he called the owners of the
Trib
and tried to have me fired for writing the article?”

Angela looked up. “No.”

“He tried, but it didn’t work. The owners know what kind of man he really is.” Liv took a large swallow of Merlot. “Of course, I wouldn’t have been able to print that story without a copy of the memo,” she added, her voice low. “Thanks again.”

Angela gazed across the table. She’d thought long and hard about giving the memo she’d found behind the shredder in Ken Booker’s office to Liv. It had been late one night a month ago—past ten and she’d been the only one left on the floor. She’d been looking for a client file Booker had taken from her workstation earlier in the day, a file she needed to process a time-sensitive loan she was trying to get through the bank’s credit committee. Angela had stood there in Booker’s office, shaking as she read the memo. It had come from “The Chairman” to Booker, Russ Thompson, senior managing director for all Sumter funding and security trading activity, and Glenn Abbott, senior managing director in charge of all Sumter retail banking activity. Booker, Thompson, and Abbott comprised Sumter’s executive committee, or ExecCom, as it was nicknamed. They were the men who ran the bank on a day-to-day basis.

The strange thing about the memo was that it had been sent directly from Bob Dudley to the members of ExecCom. But ExecCom reported to Carter Hill, not Dudley, as Booker had pointed out to Angela this morning. Dudley had announced the reporting change to all employees with an e-mail. The e-mail had cited Dudley’s need to focus on external matters—primarily new acquisitions—as his reason for handing over ExecCom reporting responsibility to Hill. But Hill’s name hadn’t been anywhere on the memo Angela had stumbled on in Booker’s office.

The chairman’s recommendation in the memo had been clear. Sumter needed to make it as difficult as possible for people in low-income areas to get loans, whether the loans be in the form of mortgages, credit cards, or small business loans. And mortgage applications needed to be carefully scrutinized to stop “certain” people from moving into “certain” areas of the city.

She’d hustled back to her desk with the evidence tucked into a pocket of her blazer, aware that she had unearthed a stick of dynamite and, perhaps, the tip of an iceberg. Aware that she would have been fired immediately if anyone found out that she had passed the memo on to Liv. But she’d been so damn insulted that a man as important as Bob Dudley would use his influence to manipulate the poor, too damn insulted just to let it go in order to protect her career. It made her furious that Dudley’s kind still existed in what was supposed to be an enlightened society, and so she’d handed the memo over to Liv.

“You went too far in your article, Liv.”

“How?”

“You shouldn’t have turned the article into a race issue.”

“Why not?” Liv snapped indignantly. “That’s what it was.”

“The memo I gave you didn’t mention race.”

“Not specifically, but we both know what was really going on there. Low-income areas in this city are populated by blacks and Hispanics. ‘Certain’ people mean minorities to Bob Dudley. You know it. I know it. You’re sounding naive, and I know you aren’t. You know the deal.”

Liv was right. That was the deal. “Still, I—”

“Look, what are you worried about anyway? It’s my neck on the line. No one will ever find out you were the one who gave me the memo.”

Angela played with her napkin nervously, regretting what she had done for the first time. Jake Lawrence had scared her. The article Liv had written might make the big New York and West Coast banks think twice about acquiring Sumter. Maybe keep anyone from making a high-priced acquisition offer for the bank. Then Lawrence would lose out on hundreds of millions, maybe even billions, in profits. Maybe even
lose
money, which could easily cause his interest in helping her win back Hunter to wane. “I hope not.”

“Angela, they could jam toothpicks under my fingernails and I still wouldn’t tell them how I got the memo. I’m good for my word.”

“I know,” Angela said slowly, thinking how so many dollars might actually cause people to resort to torture. Worried Liv’s giving her word could come back to haunt her friend.

“It makes me so mad that my article didn’t get more attention,” Liv continued. “And I’m not talking about personal attention.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The fact that Bob Dudley still has his job. He still sits on top of Sumter Bank.”

“He denied your accusations. He pointed to all of the charities he’s involved with that help minorities.”

“Bob Dudley is a racist.”

“Maybe, but most of Richmond considers him a pillar of the community. People don’t believe he would ever endorse anything like what your article accused the bank of. Other than that incident with you at that business forum, he’s never had any problems in public.” Angela took a sip of wine. “And from what I read, the spin from the forum was that you were trying to bait him. That you came off as the aggressor.”

“A spin crafted by the white contingent of reporters in town who constantly kiss Dudley’s ass.” Liv shook her head. “Sometimes I want to tear my hair out it makes me so mad. That article should have turned people’s heads, but it didn’t. How can people not even care? Not even notice?”

“People noticed,” Angela murmured. Jake Lawrence might have termed the forty-million-dollar paper loss on his Sumter Bank investment “small,” but it had been important enough for him to mention the article, and to mention that the
Wall Street Journal
was thinking about picking up on it. Angela considered telling Liv that but didn’t. Once again she couldn’t be sure if Lawrence was telling the truth, or trying to manipulate her. “You organized that protest outside the bank’s entrance this morning, right?”