Summer in the City

by Irene Vartanoff

***

  Although Susan was quiet as she moved around the apartment, Bev was not asleep. Bev lay on the cheap futon in the miserable little room Susan had allotted to her and thought about everything that was annoying her. Susan, to begin with, with her superior attitude and her barely concealed hostility. Bev knew why, but she didn’t care. She had a little surprise for dear Susan.

  Todd was being such an asshole. Trying to make Bev accept his bastard as her own child. No way.

  Her mother wasn’t much help, calling to complain about the girls every day. Shirley Gross had always been a complainer. She used to carry on about how much trouble and expense raising Bev was. It was understood that Bev had better find a new meal ticket during college, where all the best prospects were. Getting away from her mother’s nagging was a strong incentive to marry. So she did. Then, Shirley had the nerve to follow her down to Boca and continue her complaints. Bev had repaid her by demanding frequent babysitting. Shirley couldn’t claim that she never saw her grandchildren. She still complained about everything else.

  Bev missed the girls. They had been a team for a while now. She wanted to go home and buy them something nice to make it up to them that she’d taken off, but she had to hold out. Todd had to be brought to see reason. Todd was a big deal surgeon to the rest of the world, but to her he was just a man, and a cheater at that. That was the point. He cheated, so he had to pay. It couldn’t be any other way. With Uncle Sol so influential at the hospital, she was confident that Todd would pay and keep on paying. His precious career was too important to him. Right now he was being a total jerk, and she wasn’t about to go crawling back to him.

  ***

  Downstairs, Rona looked at her living room. Louis had laughed at her the other day, but in the past few weeks the piles and stacks of possessions that had weighed down her life had vanished. For years, she had added item after item, unwilling to let transient beauty escape her even though she had no room for constant additions. A leaf in a strange color, a smooth pebble, a shell picked up at a beach. Individually, they were innocent. As the years went by, they added up, and somehow she hadn’t felt able to part with them. She couldn’t imagine them in a new home. Now her shells and pebbles decorated the courtyard garden, adding a bit of whimsy here and there. The rest had been recycled to mulch the plants. Even the little vases, small pictures, pendants, inspirational sayings, and inherited odds and ends that had crowded every available table surface were mostly gone. Some she had kept. Others she had donated to charities or put outside by the sidewalk for passersby to take. Then the pictures, some of them valuable prints. After considering her space, and her space upstairs, and then a possible future home shared with Edward, she had donated certain of her prints to charities for auction.

  For the first time in years, she could look around her apartment and feel that it didn’t demand that she spend hours and hours cleaning and sorting and rearranging and organizing. Little of which she had done. Mostly, she had found new homes for her clutter.

  It probably was an unnecessary purge. Her tiny apartment was a far cry from the vastness and studied comfort in which Edward lived up on Park Avenue. Their disparity in income had never bothered her. She had spent little of her quite nice salary over the years except for travel. Money never had to be an issue between them. In a few years, she might retire, and she’d have an excellent university pension, too. She was a good enough match for Edward and all his wealth.

  At least she no longer had anything to be ashamed of in her apartment. She’d even taken to recycling her newspaper on the same day it came out, her greatest triumph.

  Was all this effort for nothing? Did Edward want to marry her? For that matter, did she want to marry him?

  She still loved him, although she now saw him more realistically than she had twenty-five years ago. He was far from perfect, but he still did something to her that no other man did. There was some connection, some feeling that zinged between them that was theirs alone. She had never found it with another man. She had tried. Edward didn’t seem interested in knowing how many men she had been through in their years apart. Good thing, because she probably didn’t remember them all. Some had been important for a while. Some had been for fun only. Some, like Louis, were keepers.

  Jack hadn’t been. Jack and she had been close to saying goodbye anyway, before Edward came back into her life. Jack was an okay man to have some fun with, but his view of the future was entirely selfish. She wasn’t playing that game, catering to a man who cared only for his own pleasure. She had no interest in changing her life for another man. Not even for Edward, for that matter.

  She planned to stay the head of the department at the university until she was ready to retire or until someone mounted a successful coup. She was ever watchful about the latter possibility, but it was remote. That was the value of being famous, of being a talking head. When a quote or an expert opinion was needed, she was a living advertisement for the university and herself. As long as she was able to keep it up, she doubted she could be touched.

  No, her career was in great shape. If Edward wanted to openly have a relationship with her, people would not leap to the conclusion that they’d been carrying on twenty-five years ago. More likely, people would think that she and Edward had met through politics and the media. She wasn’t so well-known that people stopped her for autographs—not that they would. This was New York—yet, she was a celebrity in her own way.

  Was she the woman for him? Had Edward come back to her because of guilt or love? The sex didn’t count. No man would turn it down. Did he love her? Of course he said he did, but men said that whether it was true or not. What were Edward’s intentions? Intentions were the proof of a man’s feelings.

  She started fiddling with a free newspaper she had picked up earlier. She didn’t want to read it now. She was too stressed. She’d put it aside for another time.

  Chapter 18

  Susan had spent all of Sunday thinking, not that it had gotten her anywhere. Her thoughts went around and around. Should she continue to see Michael? Was he the affair Rick wanted her to have? Was having sex with another man moral because her husband wanted her to do it? Especially because they were unofficially separated?

  Was sex the overriding attraction, or was the attraction something deeper? Should she back away from Michael now, before either of them got hurt? Was she contemplating an affair with Michael only to show Rick that she could? Or because she was genuinely deeply attracted to Michael? If that was the truth, then what kind of relationship could she and Michael have? What did she want?

  Or was she fooling herself? Did it even matter what her marital status was? Was Michael simply intent on sexual conquest? Would he be satisfied to have her for a while, and then lose interest? For that matter, would she lose interest after a short fling? She had never looked at men that way, sexually first. Her sexual history had been simple. She had married Rick as a virgin, despite all the sexual freedom of her generation. It had been a relief to be married to him and not pressured to date any more. All she had ever wanted was to find a man to love and marry and build a life with and have children if possible.

  During Kyle’s illness, their sex life had been next to nothing. After he died, there was no sex at all. This summer was forcing her to think about men differently. About sex, a topic she had been wincing away from for the past several years.

  ***

  Rona called Susan early Monday morning before she left for work. “Want to go out with Perry again?”

  “Not clubbing, I hope. The risk of heaving in a gutter again is too high.”

  “Spoilsport. No, I want to get Louis and Perry together, so I thought the four of us could have dinner.”

  Rona was matchmaking? “Why, if Louis isn’t really gay? Because Perry said he is very gay.”

  “Honey, Louis is more gay than straight. He hasn’t bothered to be serious about a woman in at least fifteen years.”

  She had seen the way Louis looked at Rona when she wasn’t n
oticing. He was still in love with her. No point in saying that to Rona, whose lifelong love was Edward. Which reminded her…

  “This may seem out of line, but if you’re back together with Edward, why aren’t we meeting him? Is he trying to keep your relationship a secret this time around, too?”

  “I’m not sure about anything right now. So, are you coming to dinner?” Rona brushed off further talk of Edward.

  Susan followed her lead. “You ought to take Bev out, not me. Then you can persuade her to go back to Florida.” How strange. Rona had left her adrift for days and days while immersed in her confusion over Edward trying to contact her, so Susan had found her own way. Now Michael was front and center in her life. She didn’t need the renewed socializing Rona was offering, although she desperately wanted her unwanted houseguest to leave before she lost her self-control and her dignity.

  “Okay, okay, you’ve made me feel guilty. I’ll call her.” Rona said goodbye, promising to call her back.

  She was on the subway by now, along with a press of commuters who had entered her train from Penn Station, in from the Jersey shore and other far-flung New York suburbs. The men were easy to identify because they mostly looked half-asleep from their naps on the long commute in. The women were more difficult to spot. Their makeup obscured their features. Probably makeup some of them had applied on the long train ride in.

  Another week was about to begin, and she had made zero headway with her boss. In fact, she had given up on Linda entirely. Now that Michael had entered her life, Susan had more important things to think about than one incredibly witchy woman.

  For the same reason, she no longer cared that she wasn’t best buddies with the editors. In fact, the only element of her job that interested her anymore was the surreptitious peeking into computer files she was doing. She had found financial discrepancies that puzzled her. One editor, Amanda Glyn, had a pat answer.

  “The departments have budgets, that’s all it is,” she said when Susan told her that the file showed that the book Amanda bought for the Coquette Cavalier line was charged much more for publicity than the book another senior editor bought for the same line.

  “A glitch in the computer program,” Amanda said vaguely. “Mine was the lead title that month. The program probably assigned the entire publicity cost for all six Cavalier books that month to it because it was first. That doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Thank you for explaining,” Susan had said, and left it at that. Amanda did not know what she was talking about. Computer programs weren’t that crude and inefficient. Not anymore. Amanda’s guess made no sense.

  She gave Michael a call, apologetically. “I know you’re busy. Any chance you can meet me for lunch to talk about a mathematical puzzle?”

  “Like how to make one and one equal one?”

  She choked. “I can’t believe you said that.”

  “I can be a wild man if I’m in the mood. I’m always in the mood with you,” he said whimsically.

  “Time out, Romeo, I want to talk dollars and cents, not romance,” she said, trying to sound discouraging but feeling her body go on alert from his words alone. Her nipples actually tingled. That had never happened to her before.

  Her office was near the financial district, so she walked over to Michael’s favorite Chinese place at noon. He was already waiting. It was a white tablecloth restaurant on the second floor, with a lobster tank. Michael managed a kiss on the cheek in greeting, but she frowned on anything more. After all, it was a business restaurant. Once they had ordered, she laid out the samples she had printed of the publicity costs.

  “Okay, here’s what’s confusing me.” She pointed to the information on one sheet that contradicted the information on another.

  Michael took a look, then raised an eyebrow.

  “Did Coquette know they were employing an intern who was a hacker?”

  “I’m not a hacker,” she denied. “I simply know how to find files.”

  “Looks to me like you hacked into several databases, and now you’ve correlated financials that the company spent considerable effort keeping separate.”

  “What does this mean?”

  “Tell me a little about the publisher. I know they do women’s books, but break it down some for me.”

  “Donna Warshevski, the beer heiress we met at the book launch party, founded the company based on her personal vision of publishing for women. The company is small and new, but it has taken the romance world by storm by launching an ambitious slate of twenty-four books a month.”

  “That’s unusual?”

  “It’s daring to start with so many books at once, going head-to-head against the big, established publishers. Coquette publishes four lines of category romances. ‘Category’ means the same type of story packaged the same way.”

  “These are sold at regular bookstores?”

  “Mostly to grocery and discount stores. The books in each line are a monthly group. The stores must order exactly the same number of copies of each.

  “There is no individual advertising that I know of,” she finished. “Which is why I’m confused. The statements on each book in a series should show exactly the same dollar amounts for publicity costs, but they don’t.”

  “There are no exceptions? No special author contracts that give more costly publicity to some?” Michael probed.

  “I guess there could be,” she replied, struck. “I’ll investigate that angle.” Coquette already had some star authors. Perhaps their contracts called for special budgets.

  “Can you access contracts?”

  “Probably.” Any contract these days would be in a computer file somewhere. If so, she could find it.

  “My little hacker,” Michael said softly.

  It was like a caress. She squirmed in her seat, trying not to preen at his admiration. Wanting desperately for him to touch her for real, even though minutes before, she had made it clear any personal touching was inappropriate in a restaurant at lunchtime. She fought to bring her body and her thoughts under control. To keep the conversation on the accounting mystery.

  “This one,” she pointed a lightly polished fingernail at a profit and loss statement on a book. “This one is the problem. It shows a thirty thousand dollar charge for advertising, the cost of a real ad that covers all six books that month. The prorated cost of the ad was actually five thousand dollars. All the other financials for the month say the ad cost five thousand per book.”

  Michael scanned the papers quickly. “Looks like a classic embezzlement ploy. The next step is a phony company that bills this book for twenty-five thousand dollars, separate from the invoice from the legitimate company, which would only present a bill for thirty thousand for all six books.” He pointed at the separate page on which, sure enough, there was a twenty-five thousand dollar invoice for advertising billed to that book only.

  “You’re amazing,” she said. Michael had made sense of it. She had assumed another instance of backward publishing recordkeeping, of adversarial departments. She told him about the separate databases.

  He said, “It’s not unusual for a company to keep departments from sharing information with each other. It’s a way for top management to retain power.”

  “Even in this new, forward-thinking company,” she sighed.

  “You’ve discovered the negative. The system allows an embezzler to operate right under the noses of the oblivious editors and other assorted managers.”

  “I guess so.”

  “It’s a crude scheme. It’ll get caught in the next audit,” Michael said, dismissively.

  “Someone is stealing a hundred thousand dollars a month,” she protested. “Shouldn’t I report it?”

  Their food arrived and she put away the papers. When she looked at him again, she saw that he had a grim look on his face.

  “Whoever is doing this might not like you wandering into their sweet deal. Think seriously if you want to proceed.”

  She was taken aback. “But it’s thef
t.”

  He shrugged, “White-collar crime. No one will go to jail for this. The company will hush it up.”

  “It’s wrong. It’s a betrayal of Donna Warshevski’s ideals.”

  “Why do you care?” he looked intrigued by her vehemence.

  She bit her lip. Yes, why exactly was she so passionate about Coquette Books? “Donna Warshevski is kind of an idol of mine. I admire her for taking tainted money and putting it to use creating happiness in the world.”

  “Nice sentiments, but the thief will inevitably get caught.”

  “But at a hundred thousand dollars a month, that person might be long gone before the regular audit occurs. I don’t know how many millions Donna Warshevski has to devote to this publishing venture, but the loss of even half a million might be enough to sink it.”

  She pleaded with him. “What do I do?”

  “The next step is to look for the dummy company that’s siphoning off the money. Then you find out who is behind the dummy company.” He frowned. “Which I don’t recommend you do. This isn’t safe. Until now, you’ve been blithely wandering through the databases, not putting two and two together. Someone smart enough to embezzle might be smart enough to know what you’ve been doing. Somebody might not want you to know all this.”

  “You’re kidding,” she said, taken aback.

  “Usually, embezzlers aren’t violent, but you don’t want to stumble onto the exception.”

  “But the employees are all women.”

  “So?” He raised an eyebrow.

  She shivered. “Maybe I should take my guesses to the publisher, Elizabeth Winsor. She has been very nice to me.”

  “What if she’s in on it? You don’t want to go blundering in with half the facts.”

  “Wouldn’t she be making enough money as the publisher?” she asked.

  “Some people never have enough money no matter what they earn,” Michael said. He said it calmly, as if it was a fact of life.

  When it was time to go back to her office, Michael warned her again, “Don’t make any waves with this. Make sure your visits to these databases can’t be traced back to your computer. Are the IT personnel keeping track of your keystrokes?”