Winner Takes All (29 page)

“Ms. Butler”—God, she was getting so tired of the way they said Ms. Butler in that supercilious tone!—“do you know Ethan Wyndham?”

“Yes,” she answered.

“Is that yes, you know him personally or you know him like you know Ardmore Cartwright or Tom Cruise?”

“I know him personally,” she said, fighting back the anger. What right did they have to treat her like this? She hadn’t done anything wrong.

“Very good. And what can you tell us about
this
letter?”

Eva almost did not have the energy to take the document. She knew what was happening now. It was obvious. A terrible crime had been perpetrated in her name, and now she was going to take the fall for it. She didn’t know why someone would set her up like this, and she couldn’t conceive who would. As far as she was aware, she didn’t have enemies. Sure, there were people in the office with whom she didn’t get along—Devorah, for instance—but nobody hated her like this. Nobody wanted to ruin her life. But that was only as far as she knew. Obviously, there were lots of things she didn’t know.

She took the letter from Murray and read it. According to this document, she proposed the price-fixing scheme to Ethan two months after his tenure at Wyndham’s began. She told him she’d made contact with Davidge’s and Brooks’s and knew they were interested. All she needed was the go-ahead from Wyndham’s top people. Of course, the whole thing was my idea
,
she thought with a curl of her lip.

“This document is a fake. All these documents are fake,” she said. “I don’t know where you got them from, gentlemen, but someone is leading you around like bears on leashes. I have nothing to do with fixing commissions. I hadn’t even heard of anything about it before you showed me these emails.”

But Jeffers and Murray were unimpressed with Eva’s protestations of innocence and provided example upon example of her perfidy. After a while the entire experience started to seem unreal. The colors of the room, originally dull to her, took on an unusual brightness, like the set of a children’s television show. Murray and Jeffers began to seem like puppets. Their movements were jerky, and they were unable to veer from the script. They asked their questions and nodded at her answers and never once indicated whether or not they believed her.

As the interrogation stretched on, Eva pieced together a rough idea of what had happened. The Justice Department, suspecting for various reasons the three auction houses of collusion, had been poking around for almost six months. With little evidence to support their suspicions, it’d offered conditional amnesty to anyone who came forward. One week ago, Ardmore Cartwright did and secured amnesty for himself and his employees by ensuring the Justice Department of their complete and total cooperation. With the information provided by Davidge’s, Jeffers and Murray and two of their colleagues spent two days questioning the Wyndhams, both Elliot and Ethan. The elder Mr. Wyndham had been no help, displaying nothing but shock, outrage and finally sadness at discovering the truth. However, the younger Mr. Wyndham had been a fountain of information, reluctantly confirming what Cartwright and Nathaniel Livingstone, the CEO of Brooks’s, had claimed: that it was indeed Wyndham’s own Eva Butler who had proposed and implemented the scheme.

Eva could scarcely figure out how they could believe such an outlandish story. That her name was on a few emails was damning, sure, but what would it take for someone to hack her account and send them? She knew they needed more evidence than this to go on and she answered their questions in hope they would see the ludicrousness of the proposition, but she was still terrified. Cartwright, Livingstone and Ethan had all told the same story, and each had gotten something in exchange for their testimony. Only the CEO of Davidge’s would get off entirely, but the other two were promised suspended sentences and minimal probation. More than anything else, the Justice Department wanted the mastermind behind the scheme to make an example of her to other clever underlings who thought they could connive their way to power and success.

She, a mastermind! It would have been funny if it weren’t so terrifying.

What am I going to do? she wondered as Murray handed her a fresh cup of coffee. This had been their only courtesy: providing her with enough caffeine to have the energy to answer their repetitive questions. They were trying to catch her out, she knew that. They were convinced that this pack of lies would unravel with enough examination and reexamination and re-reexamination. But it wouldn’t, Eva knew. The truth would hold up.

When Murray showed her an email supposedly from her to Ethan detailing the relevant anti-trust statutes in the United States and the European community for the fourth time, she shot out of her chair and started pacing again. “
Why?
Why
would I do this? Think about it. There’s no payoff for me. I’m a lowly associate. Why in God’s name would I risk everything—my reputation, my freedom, my self-respect—for a price-fixing scheme that doesn’t benefit me in any way?”

Calmly, Jeffers asked her to sit down again. He had to repeat the request twice, and when she finally complied, he slid another sheet of paper across the table to her. It was a bank statement with her name on it. A bank statement with a balance of $300,000.

Her eyes blurred as she processed the implication. They thought she’d done it for money. Save the auction houses hundreds of thousands of dollars in commissions and route some of that extra cash her way. Her heart started to beat erratically as she realized whoever had framed her had done a thorough job.

“And you didn’t just get money out of it, Ms. Butler, as you very well know, you got prestige and respect,” Jeffers explained. “We have the email from you detailing your demand for a promotion, which you got several months ago. Mr. Wyndham was wary—given your lack of experience, he feared the rest of the junior staff might mutiny—but he decided the fixed commission was worth the cost.”

Jeffers continued in the same vein for several minutes, but Eva no longer heard him. Her misery was now complete. Even her promotion, of which she’d been so proud, was a scam.

Was nothing real?

Exhausted and broken, although not the kind of broken the men from the Justice Department hoped for, she asked for a lawyer.

Jeffers didn’t respond. He just blinked at her across the table.

“I said I want a lawyer.” She crossed her arms and stood firm. “I will answer no more questions until I see a lawyer.”

Murray asked her why she needed representation if she had nothing to hide, and Eva’s patience snapped. She’d come in voluntarily to answer questions, and she’d watched enough television shows to know that they couldn’t keep her indefinitely. They either had to book her with something or let her go. She was ready to go. She stood up. “It’s been a pleasure, gentlemen,” she said facetiously, “but I’m leaving now.”

It was already five o’clock and she was exhausted. She was supposed to meet Cole at his office in two hours for dinner, but she had no desire to eat. All she wanted to do was go home and hide under the covers. She knew she couldn’t do that. She had to deal with this problem—find a lawyer, prove her innocence, save her life—or she’d spend ten years in prison, which was, according to Murray, the prescribed time for a crime of this nature. Crime! she thought. My only crime is being too stupid to realize someone was framing me for months.

Murray and Jeffers let her leave without an argument. They told her they’d be in touch—
I bet you will!
—and not to leave New York. Eva had no plans to skip town, although running away was very appealing at the moment. But no, she’d done nothing wrong and she’d stay and fight.

Not right now, however. Right now, she wanted to climb into her bed and pull the blankets over her head.

With little trouble, she flagged down a cab at the corner of Lexington and Forty-sixth, rested her head against the seat and closed her eyes, grateful for the respite.

“And now a New York minute,” the TV—oh, God, those damn, obnoxious TVs some dumbass had installed in all taxis—announced far too loudly. Eva leaned forward to turn off the screen when she suddenly saw her own face flash across it. “The New York auction world was rocked today when it was revealed that the three top houses colluded to fix commission rates. The woman alleged to be behind the scheme is Eva Butler, a senior associate at Wyndham’s, which was implicated along with Davidge’s and Brooks’s.”

Oh, my God.

Her hands shaking, she pulled up the home page of the
New York Times
on her phone and there she was again—front and center, smiling in the gown from Marcel Maribou at the Fashion Ball. She looked happy, privileged and slightly nefarious in her jewels.

Before she could scan the story, her phone began to ring, and seeing the unfamiliar number, she hit
IGNORE
. A moment later, it chirped again, and although the caller was Ruth, she hit
IGNORE
a second time. With a deep breath, she turned her attention to the story, which, she quickly realized, contained very little that she didn’t already know. It outlined the price-fixing arrangement and explained how she’d put it together, approaching both Davidge’s and Brooks’s with the idea before taking it to her boss. No arrests had been made or charges pressed, but the Justice Department was handing out subpoenas and executing search warrants. Although the article contained no quotes from either Ethan or Elliot or anyone at Wyndham’s, the auction house had issued a statement through its lawyers lamenting her complicity and deceit. Every single word of it implicated her further and surely marked her as guilty in the court of public opinion.

Eva read on, sickened by the personal information the articles included, mentioning that she’d been seen recently in Cole Hammond’s company and suggesting that she’d won the Hammond collection commission through underhanded means. She was astonished to see the paper of record dragging him into the mess—it wasn’t as if she were reading the
Post
or
Daily News
—and yet she knew she shouldn’t be shocked. She was news now, sure, but Cole had always been news. His name had been selling papers for years, and what editor wouldn’t toss a billionaire playboy into a dry auction house story if he could?

Not surprisingly, other media outlets played up the Cole connection as well, insinuating with sly knowingness that she’d used sex to get what she wanted. Gawker even upped the ante with an interview with David Taverner in which he said there had been rampant office speculation about the nature of her relationship with Ethan Wyndham.

Rampant office speculation!

He was the only one who’d speculated.

How dare he?

The anger she felt, righteous and sharp, made sitting in the cab calmly impossible and her knee began to bounce impatiently. As the cab zipped by the last few blocks to her apartment, she thought of various ways to revenge herself on David, some Medieval such as hanging him by his thumbs and some more up to date like calling in a bomb threat from his cell phone. She knew it was useless, of course, as David wasn’t the problem, only a symptom, and she didn’t doubt that other symptoms would emerge: maybe the waiter who served Ethan and her that night at Le Bernardin. Perhaps he would come forward to say he saw the two of them having a romantic dinner. Or maybe it would be Devorah, who would say that she’d seen one of the price-fixing emails on her computer. Under these circumstances, the truth didn’t stand a chance.
And neither do I.

Finally, the cab stopped in front of her building, and she handed the driver a twenty and left without waiting for change. At least one good thing has come out of the debacle, she thought ironically as she slammed the car door. This cab driver got a very nice tip.

Thoroughly disheartened, she climbed the sixty-two steps to her apartment and let herself in. She could muster enough energy to fight this battle—she really had no other choice—but victory was uncertain and she refused to bring anyone down with her. She had seen enough Senate confirmation hearings and political sex scandals to realize that nobody escaped untarnished. The Hammonds, both mother and son, had treated her well. They deserved better than to be dragged through the mud on her coattails.

Closing the door behind her, she knew what she had to do: break up with Cole. It was better this way. He probably wouldn’t have believed in her innocence anyway.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The phone was
ringing when Eva stepped into the apartment, and she let it ring as she took off her wool suit jacket and pumps. She threw herself on the couch as the machine picked up, vaguely surprised that Ruth still had the number for her land line squirreled away somewhere.

“Eva, honey, it’s me again. I know I keep calling, but we’re worried about you. Please give Mark and me a call as soon as you get in.” A heavy sigh and then click. Ruth hung up.

The light on the answering machine was blinking furiously and Eva leaned over to see how many people had called: thirty-two. She didn’t even know thirty-two people. Most of them were probably from Ruth and her mother. At least one would be from her father or her father’s secretary. There were dozens more on her cell.

Knowing there was most likely a message from Cole she didn’t want to hear, she lay back on the couch, closed her eyes and tried to calm down. What a god-awful, terrible day. What a miserable, painful turn her life had taken and all in the space of a few minutes. That was how it was: You went from dizzying heights to desperate lows within a blink of an eye.

I should call Cole now and get it over with.

Eva had always been the type of person to get the hard stuff over with first, so she got up and fetched the phone from its cradle. Her heart was beating erratically as she dialed the number to his office. As the phone rang, she found herself wishing at once that he would be there and not be there. Having gathered her resolve once to make this call, she wasn't sure she could do it again and yet she couldn’t break up with his voicemail. That was too shoddy, wasn’t it?