already knew something was wrong. Or Rafferty had already told him a version of it first. I closed my laptop and picked up my phone and called Annelise. When she answered I said four words. “Get your documents notarized.”
CHAPTER 8: I’M NOT YOUR CLEANUP CREW
Thursday night I walked into Gerald Vance’s office at six forty-five with a black document folder under my arm and my paper logbook in my bag. The room already had five people in it. Gerald, at the head of the table. The general counsel, a woman named Marta Reyes, who I had worked with on two contract disputes and who I trusted more than anyone in that building. Rafferty, in the chair to Gerald’s right, in the gray suit I had bought him two Christmases ago. Annelise, in the corner with her own folder, looking like she had not slept either. And me. I set my folder down and I stayed standing. “Before anyone says anything,” I said, “I’d like to go first, and I’d like to go in order.”
Gerald nodded. I opened the folder. “Item one,” I said. “The transfer and promotion recommendation for Annelise Keane carries my name as the approver and it is backdated to last Tuesday, when I was in Cincinnati on a plant audit. I can prove I was in Cincinnati. Here is my badge log for that week, which shows no entry into this building, and here is the system record showing the approval was entered from Rafferty’s office laptop at eleven forty in the morning.”
I laid the pages on the table one at a time. Rafferty did not move. “Item two,” I said. “A negative performance memo about me was sent to you, Gerald, three weeks before my promotion was announced. The memo is a rewrite of my own private self-review.
I know that because I wrote the original and it never left my personal folder, which is password-protected on a home machine that Rafferty has access to.” Gerald’s face did not change but he picked up the memo and looked at the date. “Item three,” I said. “A calendar entry on Rafferty’s team calendar, titled VP Ops Succession, interim plan, with item one being my exit interview. Dated three weeks from now.” I slid that across too. Nobody spoke for a second. “Item four,” I said. I took a breath because this was the part that turned the night into something else. “Three vendor contracts routed through a company called Merrell Bay Services. The registered agent is Dennis Kroft, who was my husband’s college roommate and who was at our wedding.
Two of those three contracts were negotiated during the week I was out of state. All three invoices were approved from Rafferty’s login. And the total above market on those three jobs is two hundred and thirty thousand dollars.” I put the pricing sheets down last. Gerald looked at Rafferty. Rafferty did what he always does. He started with the affair. “This is because of Annelise,” he said. “Leontine found out about us and this is what it looks like when my wife is hurt and embarrassed.” Marta did not write anything down. Then he tried jealousy. “She’s been threatened by Annelise since the contract started,” he said. “This is a personal thing. This has nothing to do with company money.” Gerald told him to stop talking and think about what he was saying.
Then he tried the last door. “She’s misunderstanding all of this,” Rafferty said. “Leontine and I have had a hard year. She’s reading things into documents that don’t say what she thinks they say.” That was when Annelise stood up. “I would like to read something into the record,” she said. Marta told her to go ahead. Annelise read out the messages. Dates and all. Every message from my husband’s phone, in her voice, slow and clear, and she did not once look at him while she read. When she finished, Marta asked Rafferty for his laptop. He did not move. Marta asked again. He pushed it across the table like it was burning his hands. Then he turned and looked at me. “Leontine,” he said. “You know how to fix this. You always fix things. Just come outside with me for five minutes.” I stood there for a moment and I looked at my husband and I thought about eleven years of vendor contracts and two Christmases ago and a speech at a wedding and all the times in my life I had cleaned up something he broke. “I’m not your cleanup crew anymore,” I said. He was walked out at nine forty. At the elevator he turned around. “You’re going to regret this,” he said. Then the doors closed. Annelise sat back down and asked Marta if she could speak to her alone, and Marta said yes, and I picked up my folder and walked out into the hall. I stood by the window and watched the lights in the parking lot. Ten minutes later my phone rang. It was my mother-in-law, Ina. “Leontine,” she said, “what did you do to my son?”
