“It was a fraud by the finance division.”
The junior suit was piping up again. Eager to explain in mostly words of one syllable. “Bad accounting. Debt off the books. It created a false market in our shares.”
“Fraud?” Paulie ignored Javits’s death stare at his employee. That was something he
did
understand. “We hid debt? You mean my workers . . . the pension fund . . .”
“It’s bankrupt, Paulie. In fact it’s looking to me like the entire company is going belly up.We’ll need to show you are an innocent party.You didn’t sign off on the accounts personally. Don’t speak to anyone. I’ll contact the authorities myself . . . you say, ‘On the advice of counsel I assert my fifth amendment rights not to incriminate myself . . .’ ”
Paulie Lassiter felt needles in his left arm, then a huge stabbing pain in his chest. He couldn’t breathe.
“Ugggh,” he groaned, and struggled to his feet. A glass-topped coffee table crashed to the ground.
“Paulie!” Lionel Javits shrieked.“My God! He’s having a heart attack!”
“Call 911!”
“Aspirin—it’s in the cupboard—
get
it,” the lawyer screamed.
But it was too late. Paulie, clutching ineffectually at his chest, gasped and tumbled forward, the blocked blood rushing to his face. Two lawyers dived on him and attempted to roll him over, start CPR.
“Leave it,” Javits said. He found he had tears in his eyes. That was a massive coronary—you didn’t need to be a doc to see it.
Paulie Lassiter was very dead.
And Lionel Javits knew what was coming—for Lassiter Corporation and for Paulie’s family. Ruin—lawsuits—total humiliation—ostracism.
He liked Paulie. Paulie was dead now. And Javits thought he was better off that way.
Paulie Lassiter’s heart attack was big news.
But the bigger news was the collapse of the company.
Jane watched, horrified, on her TV, as the squad cars proceeded to Green Gables; as a black-clad, half-fainting Mona was taken into police custody, accompanied by her lawyer; as Sally, a blanket thrown over her head to protect her from the paparazzi, joined her.
She’d called—of course. But the phone had been disconnected. Sally eventually called Jane, too distraught to speak much; her bubbly vivacity, her lightness, her optimism—everything Jane loved about her—was extinguished, just gone.
Jane almost envied her her agony. Sally was mourning a beloved, kind, attentive father—her grief, welling up from the depths of her soul, reflected real love. Real family. And at least Sally still had a mother.
But there was no doubt her best friend was facing trouble. Very serious trouble.
“The feds are taking everything,” Sally confessed to her, once she’d stopped sobbing.
“What do you mean, everything?”
“We’re bankrupt. They froze Dad’s accounts . . . it all belongs to the creditors.”
“But what are they leaving you to live on?”
“The auditors gave us a payment of twelve thousand dollars for the year.”
Jane gasped. “A thousand a month?”
Damn—that wouldn’t even cover rent on a one-bed in their old neighborhood.
“And they took the cars, the artwork—everything. Mom’s still under investigation, but they think she’ll likely get off with innocent spouse defense.”
“You sound angry.”
“Innocent spouse? Makes my dad seem guilty. And he wasn’t a crook.” Sally sobbed. “Do you know what Julie Manners said to me today?”
A tear rolled down Jane’s own cheek, and she fiercely brushed it away. “Don’t . . . just don’t.You can’t go back there. . . .”
“Without you and Helen . . . no way.”
And without the cash that had always protected her.
There was a pause.Then Sally said timidly, “Jane, Mom wants to leave town. But I wanted to know if you’d be okay.”
Jane made an instantaneous decision, as she heard Sally grieve, and shoved her own mourning aside.
“Sal, I’ll be absolutely fine. I decided to move to Washington after all,” Jane said. It wasn’t true, but she didn’t want Sally to worry about her. And she had to figure out her future. Now Sally wouldn’t be able to help, Jane had to deal with this. On her own.
“Yeah.” Sally sounded so dull, so depressed.“We have to leave, too. Mom’s friends—her
so-called
friends—they’ve all vanished. Ever notice that in this town they treat failure like a disease? One that might be catching?”
A grim smile. “Yes, I have.”
“Lucille Wasserman and Kimberley DuPont won’t even return Momma’s calls, Jane. They’re supposed to be her best friends. I told her she needs to get out of Dodge. We got family in Texas we can go to.”
“You’ll like Texas, right? That’s home.” Jane desperately tried to put a positive spin on things.
“Was once.” Sally sighed. “I think it’s better, away from the press.They live in a small town. I’ll write you with our new address, okay?”
“Okay,” Jane agreed.
“I’ll send it care of the embassy.”
“Sure.That works.”
There was a long, wretched pause. Neither of them wanted to leave the other. But they both knew they had to. Sally needed to take care of her mother, and Jane had to find a future.
“Take care of yourself, hon.”
“And you, Sally.” Jane was unused to the emotion that washed through her now. First Helen, now Sally. She was losing everything. “Be kind to yourself,” she said. Her voice cracked a little, and she hurriedly replaced the receiver.
“Who is it?”
Jane had the door on the chain.
“Repo!”
The man’s voice was gruff. She put her head to the fish-eye lens in the door. Yeah—they were repossession guys, uniforms, van, everything.
Jane swallowed hard and opened the door.
“Hi, there!” She gave them a bright smile. “Come on in.You guys want coffee?”
The guy entered with three other men.
“No, thanks.” He couldn’t meet her eye. “Which way is the living room?”
“Right in there. I unplugged everything. It was mostly too big to move by myself, though, I’m sorry.”
“That’s fine.” Now he looked at her. “You work here . . .you the maid?”
Well, you could hardly call it living here. “Sort of,” Jane agreed.
“Let’s start with the TV.”
The men moved into her living room and got to work.They moved fast—probably used to doing it while under attack. The big-screen TV, the stereo system, the furniture, the statues and antiques—just like house movers, they took everything. Efficient as ants at a picnic.
Jane withdrew into the kitchen and put the kettle on; they had already removed the cappuccino machine.
“Sure you won’t take that coffee?”
“No, thanks. We got to get to West Hollywood.” The leader sighed and wiped away some sweat. “At least they didn’t have the family here; that’s the worst. Crying and begging, you know? Like, have a little dignity. Not
my
fault you fucked your life up.”
“Right,” Jane agreed. “That’s so pathetic.”
“The bed . . .” He looked back into her room. “That’s not on my sheet—the inflatable bed.”
“Yeah, I think that belongs to the daughter. She picked it up after the dad bought the farm.” Jane smiled. “Maybe she knew you guys were coming!”
“Cool—we can leave that, I guess. And you can keep that kettle!” He grinned generously at her. “They won’t notice a sixteen-buck kettle in my office.”
“Thanks.You guys have a great day.”
Jane saw them to the door. She shut it, stood quietly with her head against the wood, and listened as the truck’s doors slammed and it drove away.
Finally, she was sure she was alone. She glanced around her empty house—not hers, anymore; the embassy had made it clear that the lease was up, end of the month. It was bare, stripped of everything down to the last framed print.There was nothing but the cheap single bed and the white goods in the kitchen.
Oh, and her coffee mug.
She went over to the bed and flopped down on it. And finally, she allowed the tears to come.
When she was done, she went and took a shower—at least the hot water was still on, and she had a towel and clothes in a suitcase. Sure, the embassy wanted to “look after” her—on
its
terms.
Jane was not into that. Stuck in some hideous Washington two-bit school, where everybody would know who she was? Laugh at her? Humiliate her?
Hell, no. School was a brutal exercise in social Darwinism. Jane Morgan had no room in her heart for further bruising. And what would she get out of it, with her grades disturbed and her college plans disrupted?
She stepped out of the shower, carefully brushed her teeth, and got dressed.Then she let herself out the back door with the key Consuela had left for her when she was fired.
“You’ll be okay,” her former nanny had told her. “I never saw anybody like you.”
Jane had bit her lip, to stop it from trembling; a rare moment of weakness. They’d never been close, but at least Consuela was familiar. And now she was gone, too.
Jane glanced at the driveway: empty now, like the house. She was so young . . . but . . . everything in her world had fallen apart.
Her father—useless, unloving, selfish. But
hers
. Deep down, she had hoped that one day they could forge a relationship.When he was retired, and she was grown up.
That chance had gone. Forever.
And her lifestyle. At least that had been great: independent, stylish, and rich. Her driver, her maid, her nanny, the beach house, the security guards . . .
Miss Milton’s, for heaven’s sake. Who’d have ever thought she’d appreciate her lousy, unacademic school?
But the money—she felt she could have done without that. In other circumstances. Because, at least, for some time now, there had been the girls.
Her best friends—no, her
family
.
And, like her father, like Consuela, like the money, her friends had gone. Just like that. One blink, and they’d evaporated....
Helen. Vanished the day after the party. And now, gone back to Egypt to get married.To a distant cousin.
To get
married
! She’d never spoken of the guy to them. Not a word. Nor of the fact she was thinking of leaving the country for good.The three girls were inseparable; how could Helen not tell them? She hadn’t left an address, a phone number—nothing. Just vanished.
Helen Yanna had left Jane’s life the same way she’d arrived—quietly; definitely.
And Sally—her older friend? Far different, and far worse. She ached to see Helen, to cry on her shoulder, but at least Jane knew Helen was happy—was doing okay, getting married. For Sally, life had exploded, in almost the same way it had done for her.
Now Jane sat in her still-neat garden, on the iron bench they hadn’t bothered to remove, and looked at the sea.The ocean was clear, blue, and immense. It crashed, and crashed, eternally, on the beach below her; mindless, soothing noise.
She had come out here to think.
The disasters, one of top of the other. No friends now. No money. No contacts. At the end of this month, no house.
She was entirely on her own.
Getting a lawyer would be the right start. Emancipation—Jane read about that in the library. A teen petitioning to be designated a legal adult. Usually due to marriage—she’d stay well away from that. If you got too close to anybody, you exposed yourself.They left—and your heart shattered.
Once she had the important pieces of paper, she’d be two things: an adult and an American. She could go anywhere she liked in the country, do whatever she wanted.
Her first change—no more bookworm.
Jane had learned a hard lesson, and learned it fast. Money counted in this world. When she’d had privileged access to it, Jane had despised money. She’d only sought prestige, position as a tenured professor somewhere.
Now, she wanted revenge. And that meant cash. The kind that Paulie Lassiter used to have—but legitimate, all hers. The kind that protected schoolgirls from taunts, that enabled people to fulfill their every whim.The kind that could help get her own back on Julie, and all those snobby bitches at school. That could help Sally deal with the rich friends who’d seen fit to dump a devastated and grieving widow.
Money was protection. Money was control.
Money was something
women
didn’t have.
Yes . . .
Jane watched the ocean and let that thought sink in. Plenty of rich girls in her orbit . . . except they weren’t, were they? It was always somebody else’s money. Sally had nothing of her own—it was all in Daddy’s accounts.When they were cut off, so was she.
HelenYanna—daughter of a wealthy middle-class man—now married, apparently, to another wealthy middle-class man. Passing from one comfortable lifestyle to the next, but not under her own steam. Jane worried about her. What happened if she fell out with her husband? What happened if her father cut her off? Helen, at school, had been bright, quiet, God-fearing, and shy.Yes, there was a core of determination—but still. The world didn’t prepare people like Helen—or Sally—for the moment the Jericho walls crashed into rubble.
What would Sally do now? Regroup . . . heal . . . then marry somebody? She still had those blonde Barbie looks, and right now it seemed she’d be reduced to trading on them.
Jane didn’t want that for herself. No way. She didn’t want to depend on some university board, either. She was here—by the ocean, in L.A. And she still had assets. Brains—thank God, for everything stemmed from that. Beauty—not like Sally’s, but she would never go back to her dowdy self.
Sally had once told her glamour was a weapon. It got you through the front door. After that, your brains had to take over.
It was time to grow up.
Jane saw things much more clearly now. She went inside, picked up the phone book now lying on the dusty floor of the living room, and called the DMV.
“Hi. I’d like to make an appointment for a driving test.”
“Then there’s the matter of my fee.”
The lawyer looked at Jane down his nose, expectantly.
She sighed. The office was filthy; there was a fat bluebottle buzzing lazily and hopelessly against the glass; the windows were dusty; and he had papers all across his desk.