The Apartment (22 page)

When they gathered at the apartment on New Year's Day, everyone was hung over. Max brought leftovers from the restaurant. He didn't have the energy to cook dinner. Josh Katz joining them for dinner came as a surprise, but the biggest surprise of the night was when Abby told them at the end of the meal that she had agreed to work on Josh's next movie, and she would be leaving for L.A. in March. There was a moment of shocked silence when she said it, and then a sudden babble of questions. How long would she be gone? When was she coming back? When was she leaving? And Josh felt a pang of guilt as he saw the sadness on her roommates' faces. It suddenly dawned on all of them that Sasha would be moving out in June after the wedding, and now Abby was going to L.A. to make a movie. And there were tears in Abby's eyes when she said she'd be gone a year. But she promised to come back for visits. Suddenly half of the home team would be gone, and they could all figure out that if the movie was successful, she would probably stay in L.A. It cast a pall on the end of the evening. They were happy for her, but it was a shock to realize that in six months, only Claire and Morgan would be living in the apartment in Hell's Kitchen, which had been home to two of them for nine years, and all of them for the last five. It was going to be a big change.

“I think your friends are going to hate me,” Josh said quietly to Abby as he was leaving.

“They're happy for me. It's just going to be different.” But she was still sure she had made the right decision. And she was taking Charlie with her.

“See you in March,” Josh said when he hugged her goodbye. He was glad he had come to dinner and met her friends. He liked them all, they were good people.

The two plainclothes policemen assigned to Sasha had joined them for dinner too. It had been the usual noisy, friendly family dinner, although everyone was quiet after Josh left, at the thought of Abby leaving. With Sasha getting married, and Abby going to L.A. for a year, there was change in the air, which saddened them all. It was a bittersweet way to begin the year.

Morgan slept through her alarm the next morning, and rushed out the door before the others were up. It was their first day back after vacation, and she had a thousand things to do. But when she got to the office, two unfamiliar men opened the door, and when she walked in, there was pandemonium. Half a dozen FBI agents were removing boxes from their file room, and another five men were taking out their computers.

“What the hell is going on here?” she asked one of them, with a rising wave of panic. And then she saw two more agents walk out of George's office with him. He was in handcuffs, and he looked right through her as he walked past her, as though he'd never seen her in his life.

They used the conference room to interrogate the employees, while Morgan waited in her office. They had told them that no one could leave. Their cell phones had been taken from them, and they said they would be returned later, and people were standing around in clusters whispering all over the office. No one knew what was going on. And she didn't know much more after they interviewed her. There were two FBI agents taking notes, and a third one to interrogate her.

They asked her if she knew anything about their bookkeeping system, and the accounting, and precisely what her duties were. They wanted to know which clients she had seen with George, and on her own. She remembered the irregularity she'd seen recently and told them about it, and they wanted to know if she had reported it to anyone, or discussed it with George, and she said she hadn't. She said they had seemed strange to her, but even though the money was in different accounts than she expected it to be, nothing was missing, so she thought maybe it had been a mistake in accounting that had been corrected. And at the end of a two-hour interview, they told her that she was under investigation and could not leave the city. She asked them directly what George was being charged with, since he had been taken out in handcuffs, and they told her he was going to be indicted for running a well-concealed Ponzi scheme, similar to Bernie Madoff's, but on a much smaller scale. He had been cheating his investors, taking in money he didn't actually invest and was never going to return.

“That's impossible,” Morgan said in defense of her employer. “He's meticulous in his dealings.” And then she remembered the name on the list of directors that she had found disturbing since he had been indicted. But she still couldn't imagine George doing what they were accusing him of. It had to be some kind of mistake.

She was allowed to leave the office at six o'clock, and was told not to return. The entire staff was under investigation, and had been dismissed. The office was closed, and their accounts had been seized. They returned her cell phone when she left the office, and when she exited the building, she felt like she was in a state of shock. She took a cab back to Hell's Kitchen, and stopped to see Max at the restaurant. She desperately needed to see a friendly, familiar face. She burst into tears as soon as she saw him, and told him what had happened. He couldn't believe it either. But it was all over the Internet and TV that night. George Lewis was under investigation, and more than likely would be indicted by the grand jury for stealing millions from his investors. Bail had been posted at ten million dollars in a federal arraignment, and he was expected to get out of jail that day.

Claire was stunned when she heard about it too. She wondered if that had anything to do with why he had dumped her, but she suspected the two events were unrelated and that he was a criminal, or a pathological liar. The lone wolf was a crook. The next morning she and Morgan sat in the kitchen reading the papers, too shocked to know what to say.

“It looks like I'm out of a job too,” Morgan said to Claire. She was panicked about her future, and had said as much to Max the night before. “Nobody is ever going to hire me after this.” There would always be some question if she had been part of the Ponzi scheme, but she truly had no idea about what he'd done.

Federal agents came to see her at the apartment, and questioned her again. She had already told them all she knew, and said it all again. And they questioned Max at the restaurant too, wanting to know what she had said to him about her job. And he told them about her asking him what he thought of the irregularities she'd found, and he had told her that he thought they were accounting errors, and she had agreed. But neither of them had suspected something like this, the theft of millions from his investors. And he had done it cleverly and well.

She didn't know what to do with herself in the days after the office closed, and to keep her from losing her mind over it, and to keep her occupied, Max asked her if she would help him at the restaurant, and oversee his books. She was grateful for the distraction, and he offered to pay her a salary for doing it, which she wouldn't accept. But she went to work with him every day. It was a terrible time for her, and she clung to him like a rock in a storm.

Claire's mother arrived in the midst of the mess, and was shocked at what she read. He had sounded so perfect from Claire's description of him, and turned out to be a crook, on a major scale.

“Thank God you weren't still dating him when this happened,” she said to Claire. “Do you think he knew this was coming?”

“No, I don't. Apparently, they've been monitoring him for months through the bank. Morgan says he had no idea, and neither did she. It's been a terrible blow to her.” Morgan hadn't been able to sleep, and was losing her hair, which was apparently a reaction to the trauma she was going through. She still didn't know if they were going to indict her too. They had interviewed her several more times, and nothing was conclusive yet. And she couldn't look for another job until she was cleared, and absolved of any guilt. Claire was sure they would find her innocent of any knowledge of what he'd done, but in the meantime, Morgan's life was in limbo, her future uncertain.

Over coffee the morning after Sarah arrived, Claire asked her mother how her father had taken it when she left.

“He was shocked,” Sarah said quietly. “He never thought I'd do it. But I'm glad I did. It's up to him now to figure out his life, without me. I need to take care of myself.” Claire had never heard her mother speak that way, and she was proud of her for doing it. She was stronger than Claire had ever dreamed, and it proved to her that you could pick up the pieces and start again at any age. It had been weeks since the breakup with George, and Claire was still reverberating from it, but it had turned out to be a blessing, given everything that was happening to him. And then the two women got to work. They had a lot to do.

With Valentina in hiding from a murderer, her boyfriend assassinated, George being indicted for federal crimes, his startling breakup with Claire, and then Claire being fired by Walter, two plainclothes policemen protecting Sasha, and Abby's announcing she was leaving in March, and Sasha in June, the mood in the apartment was decidedly somber, despite Claire's elation about starting her business, Sasha's over her marriage, and Abby's film.

Claire showed her mother the sketches she'd been working on since Christmas, and Sarah thought they were very good.

“When are we going to Italy?” her mother asked her, looking excited, and Claire smiled. This was going to be fun.

“Maybe next month, when we have enough designs for our first line. If we go in February, we should have samples by April, in time to take them to a trade show, and take orders for fall.” She knew how it all worked, as she explained the various aspects of the business to her mother, and they made a timeline of what they had to do. It was going to be a lot of work. After they met with the factory, they could establish their price point. Claire wanted to try and keep their prices down, while offering a high-fashion look, and it was going to be a challenge. But she finally had a sense of freedom to do the kind of designs she wanted to do, after being stymied by Walter for years.

As the weeks went by, her portfolio took shape, and she made an appointment at the factory for mid-February. And the week before they left, Morgan was informed there was no evidence that she'd been involved in George's crimes, and she was free of any suspicion. It was an enormous relief. But they asked her to remain available for future meetings if they needed more information for the federal prosecutor's case against George.

“To put it bluntly,” Morgan said to Max after the grand jury had cleared her, “George is in deep shit.” She realized now that she had never really known him, or what he was capable of. No one had. He was a classic sociopath, with no conscience about the people he had hurt, just as he didn't care what he'd done to Claire, setting her up to trust him and believe him, while she lowered her defenses and became vulnerable to him, and then he walked away. Morgan found herself wondering now if he had planned it that way, just to hurt her, and Claire had thought of it too. If so, he was even sicker than they thought.

At the same time, Sasha was staying in touch with Lieutenant O'Rourke about her sister's situation, but there was no news. He said they were talking to every informant they had, but no one knew anything. At least her sister was safe. But Sasha was tired of looking like a freak, and having two plainclothes cops follow her everywhere.

She and Alex were working harder than ever, and by the time Sarah and Claire left for Italy, they still hadn't gone to Atlanta so Alex could meet her parents. They never got more than one day off at a time, but they were determined to get there before the wedding. And they hadn't found a wedding planner either. Sasha had no idea where to look, or who to ask. Oliver finally found one for them, through a client whose daughter had just gotten married, but the wedding had cost a fortune, and she didn't want to take advantage of her father unreasonably, no matter how nice he was about it.

“It's a shame Valentina can't find a decent guy. If you had a double wedding, maybe you could get a group rate,” Oliver teased her one night on the phone. She and Alex were going to meet with the wedding planner the next day. It was nice to be dealing with something pleasant for a change. All they talked about at the apartment now was George's indictment, and Morgan being cleared. She had decided to keep helping Max with his books at the restaurant, and Max said she was a genius at it. From looking at the spreadsheets, she had spotted that the bartender was skimming money off the top. Max had confronted him with the evidence, the man had admitted it, and Max replaced him immediately. She was still planning to look for a job, but she wanted to regain her balance and composure before going to a headhunter and searching for something on Wall Street. She didn't feel ready for that yet—what had happened was too shocking, and it was still in the media every day.

Valentina's boyfriend's murder, on the other hand, had disappeared without a trace. He was just another gangster who had been killed by his own kind. It had appeared in the paper the day after the murder, and not again. And the article had said that there had been a woman with him, but Valentina wasn't mentioned by name, by police request, for the benefit of her safety. Sasha still had no idea where she was and hadn't heard from her. There could be no communication between them, by police demand.

And she and Alex weren't sure whether to laugh or cry when they met the wedding planner. She was British, her name was Prunella, and she looked more like an undertaker than a wedding planner, in a severe black suit, with her dyed jet-black hair pulled tightly back in a bun. Oliver had said she'd been a ballerina in her youth, but she looked like a prison guard to Alex, and he whispered to Sasha, when the woman left the room briefly, that she scared him to death.

“Maybe she runs a tight ship,” Sasha said hopefully, and she didn't like her either. But they had no one else. The few they had heard about and checked out cost a fortune, and Prunella was only slightly cheaper. She asked them to describe their dream wedding, and they both agreed that small would be better, and said they wanted about a hundred guests.