So About the Money (30 page)

 
Holly approached the table. One of the women looked familiar, but she couldn’t place the other two. Tim’s wife wore wool slacks and a cashmere turtleneck, but under-eye shadows marred her usually flawless complexion.
 

Should she offer congratulations? Tim said they hadn’t told anyone yet about the pregnancy. If Nicole had previously confided in her, Holly would’ve mentioned it, but she didn’t feel close enough to the woman to bring it up.
 

Nicole didn’t bother to introduce the other women. Instead, she asked, “Are you seeing Walt Chambers? I thought you and Alex were exclusive.”

“Walt and I are discussing business.” Not that it was any of Nicole’s business.
 

“Ah, your parents’ divorce. How are you handling that?”

This conversation—even if Nicole were a friend, which she wasn’t—wasn’t one Holly would ever have at a restaurant in front of strangers. “It won’t affect business.”

“Wow. You need to stop obsessing about work.” Nicole smiled at her friends. A smile that added,
Can you believe this?
 

“When it’s something you enjoy, it hardly seems like an obsession.”
 

“Is that why you give your clients such…personal…attention?” Nicole again glanced at the other women. “Aren’t your husbands her clients?”
 

She turned back to Holly. “Do they get the same kind of ‘handling’ you give Tim?”

Bitch
.
 

Even Nicole’s friends looked startled. The brunette Holly sort of recognized gave her an appraising look.
 

Damn if she’d let Nicole run off business she’d worked so hard to bring in.

“My clients respect my business ability.” Holly walked away with her head held high, but the restroom mirror confirmed a deep blush colored her cheeks.
 

When she returned to the table, Walt asked, “What was that about?”

“I’m not entirely sure. Nicole seems to like rubbing my nose in the fact that I’m not married or part of the pampered crowd.”

Walt gave Nicole an assessing inspection. “She’ll be singing a different tune when she gets served.”

“Served with what? Wait, you mean divorce, er, dissolution papers?” Holly’s mouth dropped open. She turned and stared at Nicole before remembering she should be discreet. “Tim’s divorcing her? Are you allowed to tell me that?”
 

“Tim isn’t my client.” Walt shrugged. “Another attorney delivered the papers to the service at the same time I dropped off a notice. I don’t know if he’s served them yet.”

“If he has, Nicole has balls of steel. So does Tim, for that matter.” She glanced at the women’s table and found Nicole watching intently, as if trying to figure out what they were discussing. “They were doing their lovebird routine at Marcy’s wake.”

Walt shrugged. “Appearance and reality. Did you know your parents were having problems?”

She raised her hand, palm up. “I live in Seattle. Other than holidays, we talked on the phone.”

Walt shot another glance at Nicole. “She’s either taking it incredibly well or else she hasn’t been served.”

Holly picked at her calzone. “What if Tim changed his mind? Decided not to divorce her?”

“It happens. Counseling, whatever. People work things out. Sometimes it’s more convenient to stay together.”

She peeked at Nicole, rather disconcerted to find Nicole was
still
watching them.
 

What if Tim had decided to stay with Nicole because of the pregnancy?

But if he did, where had that left Marcy and
her
baby?
 

Chapter Twenty-nine

Tracey handed Holly a stack of pink message slips when she returned from lunch. “You had a visitor.”

Still wondering about Tim and Nicole, Holly flipped through the slips of paper. “And?”

“He was…intense.”

She shifted her attention to Tracey. “Client?”

“No. He wouldn’t leave his name, just said he’d be in touch.”

“He didn’t say what it was about? What did he look like?”

Tracey shuddered. “I’d say tall, dark, and handsome, but there was something about him that made me nervous.”

Holly lowered her hand, her fingers tightening around the message slips. She ran the Rolodex in her head. What scary guy did she know that Tracey didn’t? Creepy Security Guy? Frank? Lee Alders? “If he shows up again, call the police.”

Tracey blinked. “The police?”

Closing her eyes, Holly shook her head. “Okay, that sounded nuts. Or paranoid. Use your judgment. You read people well.”

Still clutching the messages, she wandered down the hall to her office. A messy stack of papers sat in the center of her desk. The attached message, written on Stevens Ventures letterhead, read, “I found these papers when I cleaned out Marcy’s desk. I didn’t know what to do with them.”

Holly gave the pile a disgruntled glare. What exactly was Tim paying this woman to do? Make her life miserable?
 

After tucking her purse—a vintage Gucci—into her desk, Holly went through the stack of papers, sorting them into company piles. Several documents concerned the four new LLCs, and others connected to yet another new company.
 

Why all the new companies?
 

She placed the operating company information aside for Sammy. Staring at the unknown entities, she tapped her nails against her desktop. She had some time before the meeting with Bruce Fairchild—assuming her mother showed up. Yesterday’s vague, “I got a phone call” didn’t begin to explain why her mother had ducked the Zhang meeting.

Holly crossed the atrium to Stevens Ventures. An attractive brunette, the woman she’d last seen cozying up to Phoua and the Shrimp, sat at the reception desk filing her nails. A new, triangular brass nameplate sat on the desk. It said, “Kaylin.”

“May I help you?” Kaylin asked.

Holly introduced herself. “I have a few questions, if you have a minute.”

“I’m so glad you’re here.” The woman dropped the nail file in the drawer. “I found another stack of financial stuff. Do you want to take it with you, or should I drop it off?”

Was she serious? “Usually the documents are more organized,” Holly hinted.

Kaylin held up crossed index fingers, as though warding off a fate worse than death. “Tim hired me for property management. He mentioned some bookkeeping, but I made sure he only meant records related to the actual property.” She waved a manicured hand. “Rents, regime fees, the usual. I don’t mind helping out. I mean, see? I’ll sit up here when Brea goes to lunch, but I don’t do bookkeeping.”

“I’m confused.” Holly propped a hand on her hip and wrinkled her brow. “Tim told me he’d hired someone to fill Marcy’s position.”

“Marcy? Was she the woman who died?” Kaylin quirked her mouth to the side. “Poor thing. Men sure used her.”

“Used? You mean, took advantage?” Men? Or did Kaylin mean Tim specifically? “I don’t understand.”
 

Kaylin leaned forward. Her voice dropped to a confidential level. “Tim dumped some project management responsibility on her for the retrofit in Yakima. I hate to say bad things about someone who died, but it’s clear she didn’t know what she was doing.”
 

“Really?” That was strange. Holly was surprised Tim let Marcy get in over her head.

Kaylin straightened, taking on an aggrieved expression. “Half the permitting and inspection requests got rejected because the paperwork was wrong.”

Surely, Tim wouldn’t knowingly jeopardize his buildings. Why would he let Marcy take on the remodeling project if she couldn’t handle it?

“I had to redo the PERT charts, figure out what should’ve been done, and rework what
was
done.”

Kaylin rattled off a litany of woes. Holly made sympathetic noises while her mind churned. Why was Tim burying Marcy in work? Could something be happening with the Yakima project a more experienced property manager would recognize? Or was he hoping to keep her so busy she wouldn’t have time to notice any financial discrepancies? And what about the new companies?

Marcy might not have picked up on weirdness with the Yakima project, but she definitely would’ve noticed the new companies.
 

And asked about them.

“Even if I was remotely interested in bookkeeping,” Kaylin continued, “I wouldn’t have time to touch it. God, I hope it isn’t as screwed up as
my
paperwork is.”

“It isn’t messed up. There’s just a lot to go through before I meet with Alex and Tim tomorrow.”
 

Think positive
. Maybe Tim wanted to help Marcy move into a new field.
 

Or maybe it was simply cover for all the trips she made to Yakima.
 

With a sinking heart, Holly wondered if Marcy actually handled the Yakima retrofit or if the trips were just an excuse to spend time with Tim.
 

“If you’ll pack up the papers you found, I’ll take them with me,” Holly said. “We can get the QuickBooks download and pull the trial balance, but I need a starting point for the new entities.”

“I know the financial stuff is important, but you might as well be speaking Chinese. I don’t have a clue what that means.”
 

A superb idea occurred to her. “How about I pull the records in Marcy’s, I mean,
your
office? I can get the information on the new companies and see what needs to be filed before the end of the year.”
There. Brilliant
.

Kaylin shrugged. “Sure. Let me set the phone to auto.” She mashed a few buttons on the console and rose to her feet.

Holly followed the woman through the familiar hallway. Developers started new entities all the time. Typically there was a separate corporation for each development project. Separate legal entities shielded the rest of the business if anything went wrong. Problems at one development didn’t create a liability for the others. Maybe Tim started the new companies, planning ahead to when pent-up demand for housing and office space returned with the improving economy.
 

With a lighter heart, Holly entered Marcy’s former office with Kaylin trailing behind. There wasn’t anything ominous about the messed-up paperwork or the volume of unfiled and disorganized documents. Marcy had simply been buried in learning a new job and got behind with the bookkeeping part.
 

Twenty minutes later, Holly closed the last file cabinet. “Nothing.”
 

Damn.

The metal drawers contained only the normal information related to the existing operating companies. “Tim started five new companies. Where’s the paperwork?” she asked the temp. “Not the current statements you sent over. The permanent files. Incorporation. Property. That stuff.”

She glanced at Lillian’s file cabinets but didn’t bother opening the payroll records. Drumming her fingers, Holly studied the desk Marcy had used. “Those papers you found, they were in the desk?”

“The envelopes were crammed in the top drawer. I guess she didn’t have time to file them.”

“Maybe Marcy planned to take the records to the satellite office. She used that office a lot.” Holly leaned against the file cabinet, thinking through the missing paperwork. Bits and pieces of misfiled paperwork she could understand, but entire files? For all the new companies? The part of her that used to dig into financial statements for the M&A team smelled something that stank as bad as a dead skunk in the middle of Columbia Parkway.

Holly stepped away from the cabinets, heading for the door. “It sorta makes sense that the files are at the other office.”
 

If Tim—and by proxy, Marcy—was hiding something, the small, unstaffed Yakima office offered a good starting point to discover what it was. “I have to go by there anyway. If you’ll give me Marcy’s keys, I can pick up everything while I’m there.”

Kaylin hesitated. “Tim didn’t say anything about that.”

Holly shrugged and kept walking, the other woman at her heels. “You can drive over there yourself if you want. You’ll have to go by the post office and then pull everything I need from the files.”