Bad Business

51

K energy provided us what they called a liaison executive, a slightly overweight, currently blond woman in a dark blue suit named Edith, and put us all into a vacant office. I knew how it came to be vacant. It was Gavin's. Marty had brought two helpers with him. The helpers were women, and good-looking. In the years I'd known Marty, all his helpers had been women, and all of them had been good-looking. It made me wonder sometimes about the nature of the hiring interview.

Marty commandeered the desk that used to be Gavin's. The helpers set up their laptops on a conference table that had been moved in. Marty suggested Adele pull a chair up to the desk and join him. She did. Vinnie headed for the outer office.

"No," Adele said. "Please, Vinnie. If you could stay."

V innir said "Sure" and sat at the end of the conference table and looked at nothing. Marty smiled at Adele. She smiled back.

"Tell me what you know," Marty said.

Since my job was simply to ensure compliance, I decided to take a break from the complexities of accounting and went and sat in the outer office at one of the empty secretarial desks. I was a bit big for the armless secretarial chair I was in, but there weren't any others. I put my feet up on the secretarial desk and made do.

I was still there with my feet up and my hands laced comfortably across my stomach about ten minutes later, when Bernie Eisen came in with a couple of other suits he didn't identify.

"What the hell is going on here," Eisen said to me.

"Audit," I said.

"Audit?" Bernie said. "An audit? Whose audit? Who's auditing us."

"Me."

"You? You? You can't audit us."

I didn't hear a question there, so I didn't answer it. Eisen looked past me to the inner office.

"Who the hell is he?"

"Marty Siegel," I said. "World's greatest CPA."

"Adele and Edith are both in there," he said.

"True," I said.

"For God's sake, what is Adele doing in there?"

"Talking to the world's greatest CPA," I said.

"Get her out of there," he said to the two suits. The two suits looked puzzled.

O ne of them, a sturdy-looking curly-haired guy who reeked of health club, said, "Get her out?"

"Get her out," Eisen said. "If she won't come, goddamnit, drag her."

The suits looked even more uncertain.

The health-club guy said, "Bernie, we can't just drag somebody."

The other suit was balding and tall and looked more like cycling and tennis than health club. He shook his head and kept shaking it.

"God knows what she's telling him," Bernie said. "I'm getting her out of there."

"Bernie," I said. "See the guy at the end of the conference table? The one sort of half asleep looking at the ceiling?"

"What about him?"

"I fear that if you touch her he will shoot you."

"Shoot?"

"Vinnie is very short-tempered," I said.

Bernie stared at me for a moment.

Then he said to the health-club suit, "Get security up here."

"I think you should consult first with your CEO," I said.

"Coop?"

"The very one."

Bernie stared at me, then he nodded the cycle/tennis guy toward a phone on the desk beside my crossed ankles.

"Call Coop," Bernie said. The suit dialed a number.

"Bernie Eisen," he said after a moment. "For Bob Cooper."

He handed the phone to Bernie.

"Coop?" Bernie said after a moment's wait. "Goddamnit, Coop, you got any idea what's going on down here in Gavin's old office?"

Bernie listened silently for a moment.

"Well, I think you need to get down here," Bernie said. He listened again.

"No, Coop. Listen to me. You need to come down." He listened.

"Okay," he said and hung up.

I smiled at him. He turned away from me. The two suits stood without purpose near him.

"You guys may as well go back to work," Bernie said. "Coop and I will deal with this."

"You want security up here, Bernie?"

"No. Just go ahead back to work."

Bernie stood and stared in at Adele as if he could somehow impale her on his gaze. We were quiet until Coop swept in. "Spenser, great to see you," he said and stuck out his hand. After I shook it, Coop turned to Bernie and put a hand on his shoulder.

"Bernz," he said, "I'm sorry. I understand your concern and it's my bad that I didn't give you a heads-up on this."

"You see Adele in there?" Bernie said.

"Adele is fine. We have nothing to hide here, Bernie, that I know about."

"Coop," Bernie said. "That's not the point. We have nothing to gain from this. There's no good in it for us to have some quite possibly hostile entity rummaging around in the way we conduct our business."

"Oh, come on, Bernzie. Don't get your knickers all twisted. I welcome any inquiry into any aspect of Kinergy's operations. I believe that the inquiry will simply underscore the fact that we run one of the great companies. And, however unlikely, if there is something amiss, no one wants to know it more than I do."

"Coop . . ."

"Bernie," Cooper said, and his tone became a little harder. "I have authorized this audit."

E isen took a breath and held it and let it out slowly. Then he turned without a word and walked out. Cooper grinned at me.

"Don't mind Bernie," he said. "He cares a lot about this company."

"He cares a lot about something," I said.

Coop grinned harder.

"Anything you need," he said, "you just let Edith know. And if there's any problems, send them straight to me."

"Right," I said.

Coop was so enthusiastic it was easy to forget that he was being blackmailed into this.