Private Politics (The Easy Part) (19 page)

Chapter Eighteen

It turned out there were a lot of questions Alyse wasn’t answering. She wasn’t answering Millie’s questions about why she’d shown up, luggage in tow, without her erstwhile boyfriend. She wasn’t answering her coworker Linda’s questions about when she’d feel good enough to come into work. And according to Bertie, she wasn’t answering many of Fred’s questions.

“When did you first suspect something irregular was occurring with YWR’s bookkeeping?” Fred had started.

“Well, I think—”

“No,” Bertie interrupted, “she won’t answer that.”

After Alyse had described the basic fundraising and documentation process for the auditors and IRS agents, one of Fred’s colleagues had asked about changes in their year-to-year lobbying expenditures, but again, Bertie had intervened.

“How did you discover the irregularities?” one of the IRS guys asked.

“In the process of obtaining the list of documents for Fred Hammond.” Alyse watched Bertie as she answered. This he allowed, but she could tell only barely.

“What struck you as suspicious about these letters?” Fred asked.

“They didn’t conform to my memory in terms of amounts, donor names, dates, and so on.” Alyse hurried to get the words out, desperate to try to help Fred and the other investigators before Bertie shut her up. She wasn’t a lawyer, but every time Bertie declined a question, she felt like it made her look suspicious. Surely he was correct, but she didn’t feel good about it.

“Can you tell us about how you obtained the multiple versions of documents?”

That was definitely too far for Bertie. “My client won’t be answering that question.”

As if to prove a point, he shot down several lines of questioning leaving her with nothing to do but smile apologetically. It had been a lovely day of avoidance all the way around.

Except that it wasn’t a lovely day. Even now, sitting in the conference room at Fred’s firm, the pale afternoon light filtering in through the window and her nails tapping on the glass table, she tried to blot out the sense that she was a rain cloud. She stole the happiness of others. She was a happiness stealer. She should come with warning signs. Maybe she could hire one of those town crier guys,
Make way:
this woman makes bad professional and personal decisions
.

Fred helpfully interrupted her daydream. “Can you at least tell me why you didn’t take up your concerns with the internal review structure?” He’d tried multiple versions of the question and Bertie had shot him down every time.

Speaking over Bertie’s spin about the Fifth Amendment, Alyse took a stand and finally answered a question. “Because I feared retaliation.”

Bertie rolled his eyes as if to say,
Well
,
if you’re going to
,
get on with it
.

She turned back to Fred. “Geri and Ryan appear to be involved in whatever this is. They have a lot of sway with the board. Then there was the threat.” Fred shuddered. When Bertie had shown the police report, he’d turned a whiter shade of pale and then had slammed an entire bottle of water. For Fred, that must be the equivalent of rending his garments.

She finished her explanation, “Taking this through the internal process or to the board didn’t seem appropriate.”

Fred nodded empathically. While he didn’t look substantially different from when she’d first met him, he seemed on edge. His nails had been chewed to nubs, recently too, based on the ragged edges. The knot of his tie hung to the side revealing a chipped button. His hair was tangled as if he’d run his hands through it. Stress radiated off him.

She wanted to apologize for whatever part she’d played in that, but Bertie would probably have had an aneurysm so she tried sending mind rays.

Nope, it didn’t seem to work.

“I knew,” Fred said, “about R. Cross and some of the others.” He attempted to spin his pen around in his hand. It flew across the table, between Bertie and her, and tumbled onto the floor with a clatter. “But all of this.” He swept his hand over the table to indicate the documents spread out on before them. “How did you get all of this?”

“As I said before, we aren’t discussing the provenance of the receipt letters.” Bertie answered this question in a tone that practically screamed
don’t mess with me
. Did they teach that in law school? That must be a good class. Maybe she should go to law school now that nonprofit stuff was out. Though the bar would probably have an issue with her whistleblower past.

Bertie had explained on the way over that one of the big questions with such cases was how the whistleblower had acquired proof of the corruption. If the proof had been stolen or improperly obtained, it didn’t matter if she was right. She could still face charges.

Alyse was on solid ground...probably. She’d had access to the documents in question. Hell, she’d been tasked with helping Fred with the audit. But Bertie had insisted that she should be vague just in case. As much as she wanted to give Fred all the answers he wanted, she was to toe Bertie’s line.

“Right.” Fred dismissed his objection with a swipe of his hand. “I’m trying to figure out whether I would have put this together without you. I never thought you were suspicious—”

“That’s because she’s not,” Bertie interjected.

“—I’m just not sure how I missed this.”

Alyse’s stomach clenched. It was something she’d thought eight hundred times in the past week. Some part of her brain was still devoted to playing it on repeat, along with other standards such,
How could I have been so stupid
and
I
really am a fraud
,
aren’t I.
That she’d made Fred think it was only saved from the worst thing she’d done all week because of the fight she’d had with Liam. It was too bad Donna Karan had never done any work in caution tape—inspired patterns.

“
We
missed it because they wanted us to,” she said. Surely Bertie couldn’t object to that.

Fred smiled. “That helps less than it should.”

Logically, Alyse knew other people were to blame—Geri, Ryan Scott, Marc Rynsburger—not to mention the system that enabled and then hid the whole thing, but wasn’t the whole point of being an empowered, twenty-first-century woman that you were supposed to somehow stop this stuff from happening? That by glaring at it you could halt in its tracks? Your back was never supposed to be up against the wall. Not like this.

Some people probably assumed that whistleblowing was a brave choice, but she’d never felt more like a coward. She’d done it because she simply didn’t have any other choices. And as crucial as it was for reasons both selfish and philanthropic, acting out of necessity sucked. Everything about this moment and how she’d arrived at it sucked. That was probably the technical lawyer term for it. She’d figure it out if she went to law school.

The rest of the meeting passed in a blur. Fred and his colleagues asked more questions, Bertie declined most of them, and she wanted to apologize fifty times but resisted. In the end, however, she was granted immunity and so Bertie’s tactics had worked. Surprise, surprise.

As she followed Bertie out, Fred offered a hand.

“Thanks.”

She took it and tipped her head to the side considering his gratitude. He seemed sincere. But what had she done other than made him feel like crap about himself?

Sensing her unvoiced question, he explained, “The integrity of the audit must be absolute.”

“That’s me. So much integrity it hurts,” she muttered, hurrying to catch up with Bertie.

They were silent in the ride down the elevator. If he were mad about her performance, he would have launched into a tirade immediately. She must have done fine, then. He remained quiet in the walk to where his black town car was waiting. Life in the fast lane came with perks. And also drivers.

“Shall I drop you at your apartment or at Liam’s?”

The question shattered the mood and forced her mind precisely where she didn’t want it to go. This day had so much to answer for.

“My place.”

For the space of two blocks, she’d thought she’d escaped. She couldn’t handle two interrogations in a row. In the first, she knew the answers but couldn’t give them. In this one, she wouldn’t have known the answers. Not even a little bit.

“He seemed like a nice young man.”

Damn, another illusion shattered.

“He is.”

The words and her tone were admirably measured. Liam was a nice young man. There was no disputing that, even if he ran stories about her life on his blog without consulting her. No, nice had been the least of their problems.

She made a noncommittal noise and prayed Bertie wouldn’t pursue the topic.

Luckily, he got lost in reading something on his phone and she stared out the window, watching Virginia office parks speed by in a blur as they headed back into the District and listening to the rumble of NPR in the front seat.

As they passed the Lincoln Memorial, Bertie glanced over at her. “By the by, I wouldn’t worry about that threat.”

“No?”

She wasn’t worried about it, not really. She was convinced it had been Ryan Scott’s work. He wouldn’t hurt her; he just wanted to frighten her.

“I think I’ve taken care of it,” Bertie said.

“How is that? Aren’t the police investigating?”

“I haven’t taken care of it in a criminal justice sense.” Bertie shrugged and began reading his phone again. “I think it’s unlikely you’ll be bothered again.”

It just so happened that she agreed, but as this conversation dragged on, Bertie’s nonchalance increasingly annoyed her. What if she were wrong about the identity of the threaten-er? What if Ryan Scott were really dangerous? The police had taken it seriously. So had Millie. So had Parker. So had Liam. Especially Liam.

Was it so beyond Bertie, who had known her all her life, to show a modicum of concern?

“How is that?”

With a sigh he set his phone down and turned toward her. He looked like a hippo deigning to roll over for spectators at the zoo.

In a quiet voice, he said, “Well, this morning I reached out to someone I know in Marc Rynsburger’s office. Not to tell them what you were up to, of course. Never anything like that. I just dropped that you were a client, a family friend, and Rynsburger called back within the hour.”

Only when she felt a little dizzy did Alyse remember she needed to inhale. He’d done what? He’d called the biggest wild card of all and outed her? She wanted to scream fifty different things at him, but first there was her curiosity.

“Did he apologize? Confess?”

“No, of course not. And you know it wasn’t him personally. He doesn’t pick up his own dry cleaning let alone...no, it was probably some overzealous intern, you know.”

She crossed her arms over her chest to hide the shaking in her hands. “No, I don’t know. And neither do you.”

He sighed again. “He’s an important man.”

That was it. That was the explanation. He was important, therefore...therefore he was entitled to do whatever he needed to do to make sure the message was received?

“That important man sent a staffer into my apartment with a, a, a threat!” she sputtered. “I can’t believe you’re being so nonchalant about this.”

Bertie who’d bounced her on his knee. Bertie who’d carried her on his shoulders. Bertie who didn’t seem all that concerned if she was threatened because, you know, he’s an important man.

Her jaw hung slackly open. She could hear her mother’s voice in her head telling her to shut it but she couldn’t be bothered, not now.

He shrugged but didn’t say anything. He stared at her pointedly, as if to draw attention to the fact she was being gauche and hysterical.

So she filled the space between them. “How do you know that you’ve made his feelings about...well,
me
better and not worse? I made things very bad for him today. Maybe he wasn’t sure and you just confirmed it. I really can’t believe you did this without asking me.”

Her hands felt suddenly tight, flush with her increased pulse and anger. This conversation was like déjà vu. It was like fucking déjà vu fucking all over again. Except now she knew how it looked when someone callously disregarded your feelings and it turned out, it didn’t look like Liam at all. Which only made her all the madder.

“I think that’s unlikely.” Bertie pouted a little. “He’s not pleased with you certainly, but I have a feeling he was very well insulated from those little contributions. He’s going to be fine.”

She had to stop herself from stomping her foot on the floor of the car because Marc Rynsburger really couldn’t get away this, this flouting of the law and manipulation of the system. It was such bullshit.

“But Geri and Ryan can implicate him, surely?” she demanded.

“Oh,
they
have something to worry about.” He agreed readily and seemed to think she was returning to reason. He pressed on. “But Rynsburger...men like him aren’t taken down by nonprofit giving scandals. Really, no one is. I understand why you’re so upset about everything that’s gone, but your idealism is so sweet. You’re going to be fine. You’re all going to be fine.”

She wanted to scream
I’m not idealistic or sweet
, but she knew there wouldn’t be any point. Bertie was right about Rynsburger, about how DC worked. He just wasn’t right about her.

She tossed her hair over her shoulder to form a curtain between them. After a few calming breaths, she shot a secretive glance at Bertie to ensure he was reading before she swiped at the moisture in her eyes.

Twice today men had disregarded what she wanted.

Okay, so Liam had perhaps been right to assume it was all right to move ahead with the story, but he still hadn’t done what she wanted. She’d wanted it to feel like a mutual decision. She’d wanted to sit with what she was doing for a few hours more. When she’d seen the headline on Poindexter this morning, it had suddenly felt so inevitable. So real.

If she hadn’t felt it while reading his blog, the realness would have come surely when she’d walked into the conference room to chat with the demoralized Fred. But it didn’t mean that she had to like it, whenever it happened.