Blanche still felt as if she was groping in the dark. Why would Rudy Balotti care about Sal’s wife knowing anything? What was he up to? But Victor was right. Rudy was giving her a chance to redeem herself. She didn’t understand why. The Rudy she used to know would have killed her ass and asked questions later. But she wasn’t about to look that gift horse in the mouth. She got out, and headed for the law firm’s entrance.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The meeting was held in the conference room of the law firm representing Sal’s accusers. All five accusers were there, all five in a jovial mood, as they were all expecting to hear a settlement proposal. Sal was supposed to show up with his own team of lawyers, but he arrived alone. With a stack of packets in his hand.
Marty Guggenheim, the accusers’ attorney, stood to his feet. “Where’s your counsel?” he asked.
“They couldn’t make it,” Sal said.
Marty was disappointed, and so were his clients. But they had to follow protocol. “Then we’ll need to reschedule,” he said.
“No, we won’t,” Sal said and began tossing packets in front of each accuser. Their names were on the outside of the letter-sized vanilla envelopes.
“What’s this about?” Marty asked as Sal tossed him one too.
“Take a look and see,” Sal said.
“If this is money, Mr. Gabrini,” Marty made clear, “we are not at liberty to accept it like this. We have to draw up a contract and agree to all terms before we accept any of your money.”
“Open the envelopes,” was all Sal would say.
Although Marty was still protesting, Sal’s accusers quickly opened their respective envelopes. But instead of being thrilled by the money amount, they were horrified. Not by the fact that no pile of money was found in the envelopes, but that a long dossier was inside. A dossier that chronicled each and every negative incident that they were ever a part of. Chapter and verse.
Marty, their attorney, opened his dossier hesitantly. And every bad act he ever committed was right before his eyes too. From nude pics to sordid affairs to real crimes such as money laundering and embezzlement allegations, everything was spelled out. It horrified even Marty, who had the worse dossier of them all. But they all had one consistent theme in their lives: enormous debt. They came together, not because of any discrimination, Sal had decided, but because of their common interest in eradicating their overwhelming debt. They looked at Sal.
Sal looked at Marty. “As you can see,” he said, “it’s clearly documented that you’re the one who got in touch with them first. You researched their background, followed the debt, and pulled an ambulance chase on them. You’re also the one who found that videotape and decided to release it just after they made their allegations. It was all planned out. We tried to find out who might have put you up to it, but we couldn’t find any footprints. But I suspect there are some.”
“Nobody put me up to anything,” Marty was quick to point out.
Too quick for Sal. He stared at the attorney. “Don’t worry,” he said. “If there’s some fool out there pulling your string, his ass will cross my path too. Then I’ll double back and cross yours.”
A chill ran through Marty’s spine when Sal spoke those words. “There’s nobody else,” he repeated.
“For your sake,” Sal said, “I hope you’re right.”
Marty became defensive. “Are you threatening me, sir?” he asked.
“Hell no,” Sal responded. “Who? Me? I don’t threaten people. I do, or I don’t do, but I don’t threaten.”
Then he looked at his accusers. They were all terrified now. “My suggestion is that you drop this sham of a lawsuit and resign your positions in my company. You admit to lying, and move on. But if not, if you prefer to see this joke to the bitter end, then fine. But here me clearly. If you go into that courtroom and lie on me, you’d better understand that I will go into that courtroom and tell the truth on you. I’ll tell all of that sordid truth in those cute little packets you have in front of you. And what the courts won’t allow me to tell, I’ll take it to the media. They’re print anything, as you already know.”
Sal was doing all he could to control his anger. He had to make himself clear. He didn’t have room for any further misunderstandings. “Racial discrimination goes on all over this country,” he continued. “It happens in more corporations than any of us in this room could ever imagine. But it wasn’t happening in mine. And I’ll be damned if I allow anybody to make that claim and get away with it. So go right ahead with your lawsuit. Hit me with your best shot. And then I’ll hit you lying motherfuckers with mine.”
Sal stared at them a moment longer, and then he left.
The room fell eerily silent as the reality of who they had the gall to try and swindle crashed upon them. A whisper would have been too loud.
Early that next morning, Gemma, in one of Sal’s big shirts, was studying case law in bed with her back against the headboard, when her cell phone buzzed. After finishing a paragraph, she picked up her phone and swiped it. It was breaking news. Since news had been breaking all last evening thanks to a hostage situation at a house in Spring Valley, she almost didn’t bother to read it. But when she read the headline, and then the ensuing story, her heart soared with joy. She dropped her phone on the bed, and hurried to the bathroom. Sal was in the shower.
“Sal!” she yelled as she threw open the shower stall door.
Sal had soap on his hands and was just about to lather his face. “What’s wrong?” he asked her.
“They dropped their lawsuit,” Gemma said. “All five accusers have dropped their lawsuit, Sal!”
Sal confidently nodded his head. “About damn time,” he said.
Gemma was still happy, but somehow his response was too muted. She looked at him askance. “You knew this was coming,” she said. “Didn’t you?”
“I wasn’t sure,” Sal said.
“What did you do, Sal?”
“I didn’t do anything! Did I show them the error of their ways? Hell yeah I showed them. And I guess they agreed.”
Gemma nodded. “Oh, did they. They even resigned. All five of them. They resigned, Sal. We could not have hoped for a better outcome.”
“Yeah, but they still smeared our name. Their asses still tried to fuck me up. But you’re right,” he said with a smile. “It’s over now.”
Gemma smiled too. “Yes, it is,” she said. “I’m just amazed at how quickly it happened.”
“Yeah, well,” Sal said as he looked down at the open front of the shirt she wore, “truth has a way of rising to the top.” He thought about what was beneath that shirt, namely nothing, and his penis suddenly came to life. “Truth always wins out.”
“Now that’s the truth,” Gemma said, grinning, and was about to turn away. But Sal grabbed her arm.
“What are you doing?” she asked as Sal pulled her into the shower with him.
“Sal!” she cried. “What about my shirt?”
“It’s my shirt,” Sal said with a grin, “and you won’t need it.” He pulled it over her head and tossed it onto the bathroom floor. Then he began kissing her, and then her breasts. And then he began pulling her naked form against his rock hard penis as his fingers massaged her pussy.
Gemma moved down, forcing his fingers out of her and her breast to slide from his tongue, until she was knelt down in front of him. She placed his penis into her mouth and began to give him the kind of head he craved. He let out an invigorating sigh, and leaned his head back in ecstasy. And she sucked and licked and took him all the way in. He was trembling as she did him.
She was so expert that he had to stop her before he came in her mouth.
He pulled her back up, guided his fully aroused cock to the tip of her vagina, and then pushed it in. And his rod began pleasuring both of them.
He fucked her long and hard. He couldn’t stop fucking her. He was so into her body, and so into the way she made him feel, that it was only as they both began to climax did he realized he
had not even closed the shower door.
CHAPTER NINE
“It’s going to be guilty, ladies,” Attorney Mark Price proclaimed. “I saw those jurors’ faces. They couldn’t wait to get in that jury room and throw the book at our client.”
“I say an acquittal,” said a second attorney. “I saw their faces too.”
But Mark couldn’t believe it. “Not guilty? Are you joking?”
“Where’s the evidence, Mark? The prosecutor didn’t present any evidence. Just a lot of innuendo.”
Mark ignored the second attorney. “What do you think, Gem?” he asked instead. “Guilty or not guilty?”
They were walking out of the courthouse after a trial that had just wrapped, and they were now on verdict watch. All three had been appointed by the judge to work the case, with Gemma being appointed chief counsel. But although she privately agreed with Mark’s assessment, she never speculated publicly. “We’ll see what the jurors say,” she said. “No sense in guessing now.”
“I’ll be shocked if they find that boy not guilty,” Mark said. “We didn’t have a good enough explanation for that gold chain evidence. But stranger things have happened.”
“Yeah,” the second attorney said, “like the three of us winning a case.”
All three of them laughed. They handled a lot of criminal cases. Which meant there was a lot of plea bargains and predetermined punishments. But their current client refused to cop a plea. Now they were in recess, waiting for the verdict to come in, and were walking to their cars. The judge promised to give them an hour’s notice when the verdict came in, which would give them plenty of time to get back provided they were no more than a half hour away. Gemma’s law firm was ten minutes away. She would rather wait there.
But as she and her colleagues stood in the parking lot and continued to talk about the case, and what went wrong and what went right, she saw something odd in her periphery. Although they were in a sea of cars, in a parking lot, one car stood out. It seemed to stop at the far end of the lane, directly in front of them. Sal had taught her how to be observant, so she turned her head and looked. As soon as she did, she saw what appeared to be a shotgun come out of the car’s window. And she didn’t hesitate.
“Get down!” she screamed frantically to her colleagues, and all three of them dropped to the ground as bullets whizzed past them. Then they heard the car burn rubber speeding away.
Gemma looked up. Both of her colleagues were fine. But she suddenly heard cries of pain behind her. When she looked back she quickly realized that another colleague, who had been walking behind them, wasn’t so fortunate. At least one of the bullets whizzed past them, but struck her. Gemma rushed to her aid.
The conference room was packed with Sal’s senior management staff. His all-white, all-male senior management staff. They were all department heads and there were twelve departments. Sal sat at the head of the table. He did not beat around the bush. It had been four days since those discrimination allegations. Although the lawsuit was ultimately dropped, the corporation, at least the Vegas headquarters that he was responsible for, was still reeling. Because that lawsuit, trumped up though it had been, exposed an unsettling truth. Diversity was non-existent in the Vegas office. And it was all Sal’s fault.
“There will be more expansion, as you already know,” he said to his senior staff. “That plan has been in the works since we opened this location. So there’s going to be room to hire new faces in that respect. But there’s going to be a reorganization of our current structure too. Some of you will retain your positions, some will be reassigned, and some will be demoted. It all depends on how well your respective departments have fared under your stewardship. And I’ll be honest with you. I wasn’t going to make this review until the end of the year. But that lawsuit, even though it was nothing but a pack of lies, did reveal a problem. It revealed our lack of diversity in the upper ranks. I’ve hired an all-white senior staff, and you’ve hired an all-white mid-management staff. There is not one minority manager in this building. Not one. We have minorities in front line positions. We have an excellent mix there. But we have no black managers here. At the higher levels. That has got to change.”
“The problem is,” one of his managers interjected, “is finding minorities with the kind of qualifications we need.”
“Bullshit,” Sal shot back. “And you know why I know it’s bullshit? Because it was the same bull I was telling myself. We couldn’t find qualified applicants because we weren’t looking for qualified applicants. A position comes available and it’s word of mouth about this guy or that guy and we hire based on what our friends tell us about them. We keep it all in the family and the family just so happens to look like us. But I’m serving notice today that that’s changing. There will be extremely qualified African Americans in the highest reaches of this organization. Some of them might even be your bosses. So get used to it. The old way is out. I’m only ashamed I didn’t toss it out long ago.”
“I never knew you to be reactionary, sir,” another one of his managers said.
Sal looked at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
The manager swallowed hard, but he did not back down. “It’s not just that lawsuit, is it, sir? Didn’t that video on YouTube have something to do with this sudden need for us to fix what isn’t broken?”
“Of course that’s not it!” a third manager proclaimed, and some of the others nodded their agreement as if their only focus was not about improving the company, but about staying in Sal’s good graces.
But Sal wasn’t going along as they had thought he would. “He makes a good point,” Sal admitted.
They glanced at each other, unsure where Sal was going with this. He wasn’t usually this open to criticism.
“That video is despicable and I’m ashamed to have harbored that kind of hatefulness,” Sal said. “But I was that person. I was awful. I was worse than even that video captured. It shamed me, but I had already realized, when that reporter asked me about my percentage of minority managers, that we had a problem. And I disagree with you. I’m not fixing what isn’t broken, because it is broken. We are not the best we can be if we have no diversity of opinion or experiences. This train is leaving the station with you or without you. But it’s leaving,” he made clear. “Are there any further questions?”
The room door opened as Sal waited for another question, and one of his assistants walked in. As one of his managers began to speak about whether or not demoted managers will be allowed to keep their same salaries, Sal’s assistant whispered in his ear.
“There’s been a shooting at the courthouse, sir,” she whispered.
Sal’s eyes stretched in shock and he looked at his assistant. “My wife?”
“She’s fine, sir. She called to tell you that she’s fine. But she was one of the ones in the line of fire.”
Sal immediately jumped up from the table while his manager was still asking his question. “This meeting’s adjourned,” he announced, and hurried out.
All of his staffers looked at each other. They didn’t quite know what to make of this new direction Sal was forcing them to take. Who was this guy? He was changing before their very eyes! They knew that lawsuit and video had something to do with this change in him, but they were willing to bet that that wife of his was the main culprit. She was driving this sudden need for diversity that wasn’t even an issue a week ago.
But some knew the writing was on the wall. They had to get onboard or, as Sal made clear, get left behind.
Others weren’t willing to stick around at all, and were making phone calls to other major corporations even as they were leaving the meeting. The writing was on the wall for them too. Their departments were underperforming and Sal’s reorganization review was going to bear that out. They decided to get out while they still had a senior management title to tout.
Still others were in a wait and see mode. Because Sal was changing. He was becoming more businesslike and less gangster with every pa
ssing day, and this meeting only confirmed it for them. He was different now. But only time would tell, they decided, if this differentness would last.
For their sakes, they hoped not.
Gemma was standing in the parking lot, near the cordoned-off crime scene, when Sal’s Porsche pulled up. Because Sal was well known around the courthouse as Gemma’s husband, he was able to get past the tape and over to her. When she saw him coming her way, she hurried to him. And they hugged vigorously.
Sal pulled back. “You didn’t get hurt?”
“I’m alright,” Gemma said. “Just a bruised elbow.”
Sal quickly looked at the elbow. He looked so serious that Gemma felt a need to reassure him. “It’s okay,” she added.
“What happened?” he asked.
“I saw this car pull up and somebody pointed a shotgun our way. I yelled for everybody to get down, and I got down too.”
“Did you get a look at the guy?” Sal asked.
Gemma shook her head. “I didn’t see him. I just saw the gun.”
“Did anybody get hurt?”
“One attorney did. But the paramedics said she should be okay.”
“And you’re okay?” he asked again. Gemma looked flustered to him.
But she continued to put on the brave front. “I’m fine, Sal. I promise you I am. I wasn’t the target.”
Sal frowned. “Says who?”
Gemma looked at him. “They didn’t hit me.”
“Because you saw it coming!”
Gemma stared at Sal. “This is a courthouse, Sal. There were plenty of attorneys around. They could have been targeting any one of us or all of us just because we were attorneys. The police seems to think it was the latter.”
“That they were targeting everybody?”
A courthouse public relations director came over to Gemma. “That’s their working theory,” she said.
Sal Gabrini: His House of Cards Page 7
