Chapter 4 - The Boardroom Audit
By nine o'clock Monday morning, the rain had cleared, leaving the Nashville streets bright and cold, the puddles in the gutters reflecting the gray stone of the financial district.
The conference room on the sixteenth floor of the First Tennessee building was forty feet long, dominated by a monolithic table made of black walnut that had been cut from a single log in the Great Smoky Mountains. There were no flowers on the table today. No silver trays of pastry or small crystal bowls of mints. There were only four laptops, three court reporters with their small, mechanical typing boxes, and six lawyers from the Carter Trust who wore the dark, heavy three-piece suits that meant the meeting was not an negotiation.
I sat at the head of the table, my walking stick resting against the arm of my leather chair. I had changed my clothes; I wore a gray wool suit that had been tailored for me in London twenty years ago, its silk lining still intact, its silver buttons bearing the small, stamped crest of the maritime registry.
George Mitchell sat at the far end of the room, his wife Patricia beside him.
Patricia was wearing a black veil that hung from the brim of her hat, obscuring her eyes, but her fingers were moving frantically against the leather strap of her handbag, the gold rings clicking together like teeth. Vanessa was not in the room. Her lawyer, a young man from a prominent family in Franklin whose grandfather had been a judge, sat two seats down from George, his briefcase unopened on the floor between his boots.
“We have reviewed the motion to accelerate the junior debt,” the young lawyer said, his voice carrying that smooth, practiced drawl that usually worked on the local circuit judges. “And we believe there is a clear case of tortious interference here. The Carter Trust is using a private family matter to disrupt a commercial contract that has already been approved by the municipal planning commission.”
Ethan sat to my right, his laptop open, his fingers moving across the keyboard with a regular, dry rhythm. He didn't look up when the lawyer spoke.
“The contract was contingent on the verification of the escrow reserves, Mr. Lewis,” Ethan said, his voice level and perfectly flat. “Under Section 14 of the master agreement, the Carter Trust retains the right to audit the primary ledger of the development group if the debt-to-equity ratio falls below two-to-one. Your client’s ledger was audited at midnight yesterday morning.”
He turned the laptop screen toward George.
The spreadsheet was a mass of red lines—long rows of numbers that showed the Mitchell Development Group had been using the deposit checks from the residential buyers to pay the interest on their commercial loans at the riverfront terminal. It was a classic pyramid, built out of timber and river mud, and it had just been sliced in half by a single keystroke from a terminal in Chicago.
“This is fraud, George,” Ethan said softly. “It’s not tortious interference. It’s three to five years at the state farm in Only, Tennessee, if the district attorney decides to present the escrow logs to the grand jury on Wednesday.”
George Mitchell didn't look at the screen. He looked at me, his mouth dry, his skin the color of an old newspaper that had been left out in the rain.
“Eleanor,” he rasped, his voice dropping all of its Belle Meade prefix. “We’ve known each other since the docks were made of wood. My father gave your husband his first office next to the coal yard. You can't do this to us over a garden hose.”
“It wasn't the hose, George,” I said, leaning forward and resting my chin on my hands above the silver head of my stick. “The hose was just the measurement. It told me how deep the water was in your house. If your daughter had given the old woman a cup of warm water and told her to sit on the porch until the boy was free, I would have signed the Riverside extension on Friday. I would have let you roll the interest for another twelve months.”
I tapped my thumb against the wood of the table.
“But you’ve raised a girl who thinks that because the dirt is expensive, the people who walk on it are cheap,” I continued. “And that means your family is a bad risk, George. A company that treats the server like trash will treat the sub-contractors like trash, and when the sub-contractors stop pouring the cement, the buildings fall down. I’m just cleaning the ledger before the winter comes.”
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Patricia Mitchell stood up, her hand ripping the black veil back from her face, her eyes red and wild beneath her cosmetics. “You’re a monster,” she shrieked, her voice bouncing against the glass partitions of the boardroom. “You’re a cruel, arrogant old woman who came into my garden to destroy my child’s life! She didn't do anything that any respectable girl wouldn't have done! You looked like a tramp!”
“I looked like a human being, Patricia,” I said quietly. “That was the part she couldn't identify.”
