“The G-string goes over the garter belt.”
“Over?”
“Think about it.”
Iris did. “Okay.”
“Get it?”
“I got it.”
Liz picked up a bottle of low-cal salad dressing and pulsed the pump top, spraying it on her salad. “What else did he send you from Victoria’s Secret?” She stabbed her fork into a clear plastic clamshell container, then shoveled a mountain of greens into her mouth.
“All sorts of things. The box was crammed with wonderful lacy nothings.”
“He’s courting you, lady.” Liz gazed dreamily out the window. “How romantic.”
Iris’s container of salad was on her desk. She drank a swig of diet peach Snapple from the bottle. “Definitely.”
Liz picked a radish from her salad and gingerly bit it in half, retracting her lips to avoid smudging her lipstick. “This market! Down again—eighty points.” She crunched the remaining radish half and shook her head with dismay. “I’m fighting clients all day long, advising them not to sell at the same time I’m grabbing as much McDonald’s, GM, and IBM as I can get.”
“Doesn’t bode well for my IPO.” Iris swirled a carrot stick through the gooey dressing that had coagulated at the bottom of the container.
“What’s up with that, anyway?”
“I’m having a cocktail party for some venture capital groups tonight at the Edward Club.” Iris peered out the door into the suite. “Garland used his membership to arrange for the room. I need to get funds into Pandora and fast. It’s hemorrhaging money.”
“What’s the party for? A sniff test?”
Iris nodded. “But three of the VC firms I invited canceled, giving flimsy excuses.”
Liz craned her neck, trying to see what Iris was looking at. Evan Finn was hanging his suit jacket in his cubicle.
“Top Gun is back from lunch,” Iris said, returning her attention to her salad. “His two-hour lunch.”
Liz shook her head. “That man is constantly and flagrantly violating your rule about being in the office during market hours.” She bit into a celery stick. “Pretty arrogant for a guy that’s only been on the job three days.”
“And he always puts on his jacket before he leaves. What’s that about? Tells me he’s not just going to the rest room.”
“He is a smoker,” Liz commented. “He carries a pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket, and I’ve seen him with a lovely Dunhill lighter. Think he has a drug problem?”
“He doesn’t look or act like it, but I’ve been fooled before. Something about this stinks.” Iris attacked the dressing at the bottom of her salad with a sesame seed breadstick. “I mean, Sam Eastman doing anything to help me? What was I thinking?”
“Sam boxed you into a corner. Besides, you said that Louise verified everything in Evan’s résumé. The man is P-oh-P.”
“Perfect on paper. Garland says he casually knows Yale Huxley, the managing partner of Huxley Investments where Evan worked for the past five years. He’s going to call Huxley and see if he can get any off-the-record skinny on Evan. Louise did find something odd with Evan’s degree. He graduated from Harvard six years ago, summa cum laude, but the alumni office’s records show that he passed away last year.”
“Hmmm. What about his licenses?”
“His series seven checked out, but I’ve heard of brokers who pay people to take the test for them.”
“He definitely has money. I know an expensive suit when I see one.” Liz closed the clamshell lid on her empty salad container and threw it in the trash. “And he drives a brand-new Range Rover.”
“How do you know that?”
“I happened to get out of the elevator on the same parking level as he did and made an excuse to follow him.”
“I know the building he lives in—a tony condominium tower on Wilshire in West L.A. I once had a client who lived there. Definitely high rent.” Iris downed the last of the Snapple and threw the garbage from her lunch into the trash on top of Liz’s.
Liz pulled a small mirrored case from her jacket pocket and repaired her lipstick. “Has he made any sales?”
Iris retrieved a tube of lipstick from her desk and smoothed on color between sentences. “Nothing to write home about. He’s on the phone a lot, but he’s not setting the place on fire. Certainly not earning enough to support his lifestyle. He was supposed to have brought a full client book with him.”
Liz peered into the tiny mirror on her lipstick case and shoved her thick, dark curls with her hand. “What kind of signing bonus did he get, if I may ask?”
“Five thousand dollars.”
Liz frowned as if she hadn’t heard correctly. “That’s nothing. An average bonus is twenty-five grand.”
“It’s not a sum that will throw up flags anywhere. Evan talked as if Sam had given him the moon.” Iris crossed her legs, dug one heel of her pump into the carpet, and swiveled her chair back and forth. “Sam said Ron Aldrich at Pierce Fenner Smith made Evan an offer. I wish I could find out if that were true.”
“I’ll have lunch with Ron and do some detective work,” Liz offered. “He’s still hoping there’s a chance I’ll come back to work for him, so he’s been very nice to me.”
“Ron Aldrich and Sam Eastman are as thick as thieves. It’s not a stretch to think that Ron would back up Sam’s story, whether it was true or not.” Iris’s chair squealed as she turned it.
“What does Garland think about Sam hiring Evan almost without your approval?”
“He says he’s never seen anything like it. There’s another thing that’s odd. Sam’s made himself scarce since Evan was hired. Usually, I can hardly turn around without stepping on the guy. It’s almost like he’s trying to disassociate himself from me.”
Louise poked her head through Iris’s doorway. “Excuse me for interrupting, but Redwood Equities canceled for your cocktail party tonight.”
“Not another one,” Iris said with dismay. “Venture capitalists should be flocking to invest in Pandora. Kip Cross’s a free man and back to work, and I’m seeing favorable P.R. about Pandora everywhere, thanks to the public relations firm I hired. So what’s spooking the investors?”
She answered her own question. “T. Duke couldn’t have that much influence. We’re talking venture capitalists. We’re talking money and the potential to make money.”
“T. Duke casts a long shadow,” Liz said.
Iris became glum. “Venture capitalists not wanting to have anything to do with Pandora. Threatening letters from shadowy organizations. A corporate raider who’s determined to acquire a small computer-games company. Mysterious brokers showing up at my office. What’s next?”
“Don’t let your mind go off the deep end, Iris. Sam probably hired Evan for the exact reasons he said. Evan Finn is no monster. He’s handsome, polished, and charming.”
“That he is. That and what else?”
At three, Iris left the office to check on preparations for her cocktail party. Just as she pushed open the suite’s glass doors, she spotted Evan getting into the elevator.
“Hold the elevator, please,” she called as she quickly walked toward it. He either ignored her or didn’t hear her because she had to thrust her hand between the closing doors. They again flew open.
“Hi, Evan,” she said pleasantly, despite the fact he hadn’t held the door for her.
He smiled with his lips closed and slightly tilted his head in her direction in the obsequious gesture he’d used the day they’d met.
She touched the heat-sensitive button for the lobby and noticed that the one for the ninth floor was illuminated. She searched her mind, trying to remember the offices that were located on the ninth floor. She recalled there were a couple of attorneys and a dentist. Maybe he had an appointment to take care of some personal business.
When the elevator doors opened on the ninth floor, Evan moved his feet as if he were going to exit, then hesitated.
“Isn’t this your floor?”
“Oh, right.” His surprise seemed feigned.
“See you tomorrow.”
He got out. “See you.”
The doors closed and the elevator descended. On impulse, Iris madly began patting the heat-sensitive buttons. The elevator finally stopped on the seventh floor. She got out, walked to the stairwell at the end of the corridor, and climbed back up to the ninth floor. On the landing, she carefully turned the doorknob, pulled the door open, and looked out. There was no sign of Evan.
She stealthily entered the corridor, walked toward the elevators, and peeked around the corner. Still no sign of him. Feeling foolish, she was about to press the elevator call button when she heard his voice.
She tiptoed over to the opposite corner of the elevator housing, flattened herself against the wall, and sneaked a quick glance down the corridor. There was Evan, speaking into his cellular telephone.
“Zentron is a great stock and it’s a good buy right now,” he was confidently saying. “I’ve put a lot of my clients into it. Any stock is going to be riskier than a treasury bill or a money market account. You have to evaluate your aversion to risk.”
It was a standard sales pitch. She knew the stock he was recommending and considered it a good pick. So why was he doing a deal in the ninth-floor hallway?
“You’ve made the right decision,” Evan said. “Make out a check for ten thousand dollars to Canterbury Investments. No, not to McKinney Alitzer. This is my private investment company. I charge lower fees than the big firms. I can certainly set you up with an account at McKinney if you want, but you’ll pay higher fees and the service won’t be any different. Yes, that’s right—Canterbury Investments. I’ll talk to you soon. Good—”
Iris sprinted past the elevators, down the corridor, threw open the stairwell door, and didn’t stop running until she reached the lobby.