Chapter 5 - The Glass Tower
By two o'clock that afternoon, the news had traveled four miles down Charlotte Avenue to the third-floor corporate suite of Ellis & Associates Strategy Group in the Gulch.
I drove there myself.
I did not take Sister Beatrice, and I did not take a lawyer. I took my blue binder, my black umbrella, and forty years of motherly authority that had finally found its true edge.
The building was made of green tinted glass and brushed aluminum. The lobby smelled of costly eucalyptus oil and smelled like money that hadn't had to work very hard to get there. A young man in a black vest sat behind a white marble desk, looking at three computer screens at once.
“Name?” he asked without looking up.
“Margaret Ellis,” I said.
The young man stopped typing. His head jerked up. He looked at my Dillard’s raincoat, my black rubber boots, and my blue binder.
“Mrs... Mrs. Ellis,” he stammered, his hand flying to the intercom button on his phone. “Mr. Ellis is... he’s in a private executive meeting right now with his legal team—”
“Which floor?” I asked.
“Third floor,” he said before he could stop himself. “Suite 302. But ma’am, you can’t just—”
I walked past his marble desk and stepped into the elevator before he could finish his sentence.
When the brass doors slid open on the third floor, the sound of raised voices was immediately audible down the carpeted hallway.
Suite 302 had glass walls with frosted film across the middle, but the film was not thick enough to block the shadows inside.
Brandon was standing behind a large glass desk, waving his arms wildly. Lauren was sitting in a white leather armchair, her head in her hands, her mother sitting beside her holding a bottle of sparkling water. Across the desk sat a man in a seven-hundred-dollar suit—a criminal defense attorney named Marcus Vance whom Brandon had hired three years ago when one of his board members was caught using foundation credit cards at a casino in Tunica.
I didn't knock. I pushed the heavy glass door open.
The door swung inward with a soft pneumatic hiss.
All four people in the room froze.
“Mom?” Brandon choked out. He looked exhausted. His tuxedo was gone, replaced by a wrinkled white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, but his eyes were wide with a wild, panicked energy. “Mom... what are you doing here? Marcus was just about to call you!”
The attorney, Marcus Vance, stood up quickly, buttoning his jacket. He was a smooth-looking man with silver hair at his temples and the sharp, hawkish nose of a man who spent his life looking for loopholes in contracts.
“Mrs. Ellis,” Vance said, extending his hand with practiced charm. “I’m Marcus Vance. I represent your son and the foundation. Please, sit down. We were just putting together a comprehensive settlement strategy that protects everyone’s interests—”
“Don't bother, Mr. Vance,” I said, setting my umbrella against the glass wall. I did not take the chair he offered. “I know what you’re putting together. You’re putting together a story where the confused old woman from Antioch signed a corporate guarantee because she didn't understand the financial terminology.”
Vance’s diplomatic smile faltered for just a fraction of a second. “Mrs. Ellis, nobody is saying you’re confused—”
“Lauren said it last night,” I noted, looking directly at my daughter-in-law.
Lauren didn't look up from her hands. Her mother gave me a cold, venomous glare. “You’re ruining his life, Margaret. His entire reputation in this town is being shredded because you couldn't handle being seated near the coat rack!”
I walked over to the glass desk. I did not look at Lauren’s mother. I looked at my son.
“Brandon,” I said. “Mr. Miller from the state oversight division has placed a legal freeze on all accounts connected to the foundation, your strategy firm, and your personal bank accounts at SunTrust.”
Brandon’s face went completely grey. “They... they frozen my personal account?”
“Every line,” I said. “Including the corporate card you used to buy the Audi, and the vendor clearing account Lauren used to pay her event management invoice last Tuesday.”
“Mom!” Brandon screamed, slamming both palms down onto the glass desk so hard a water glass rattled. “That’s illegal! They can’t freeze my private company’s accounts over a non-profit audit!”
“They can when the non-profit’s tax returns show two hundred and10 thousand dollars transferred directly into your strategy firm as 'consulting fees' without board approval, Brandon,” I said, pulling a folded paper from my binder pocket. “Mr. Miller spent two hours going through the 990 forms this morning. He called it self-dealing. I believe the district attorney calls it grand larceny.”
The room went so quiet that the faint hum of the air conditioner overhead sounded like a jet engine.
Attorney Vance slowly sat back down in his white leather chair. He took off his gold-rimmed glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“Brandon,” Vance said, his voice dropping all of its corporate polish and turning into cold, sharp legal reality. “Did you perform those transfers without a recorded board vote?”
Brandon looked at his lawyer. Then he looked at Lauren. Then he looked at the floor.
“The board didn't meet in Q3,” Brandon whispered. “It was just... it was just Lauren, her father, and me. We had a quorum.”
“A quorum of relatives isn't a board vote, Brandon,” Vance spat, his eyes narrowing. “My God. You didn't tell me the 990s were flagged for self-dealing.”
“It was going to be fixed!” Brandon sobbed, dropping into his executive chair and pressing his face into his arms. “The gala was supposed to raise three hundred thousand dollars! We were going to replace the funds before the annual filing in December! Everything was calculated!”
“Calculated,” I said, standing over him.
I reached out and pulled the gold-plated pen out of his shirt pocket—the pen I had bought him when he graduated from UT Knoxville twelve years ago with his degree in business administration.
“You calculated everything, Brandon,” I said softly. “You calculated the cost of the marble floors at the Ellington. You calculated the cost of Lauren’s management fees. You calculated how much your mother’s house was worth on the equity market.”
I set the pen down on the glass desk with a quiet click.
“The only thing you forgot to calculate,” I said, “was what happens when the bank account runs out of his father’s work, and you actually have to pay for your own life.”
I turned to Marcus Vance.
“Mr. Vance,” I said. “My attorney, Mr. Arthur Vance’s younger brother, Harold Vance—whom I hired at ten o'clock this morning—will be sending you a formal notice of civil fraud litigation by four o'clock today. If Brandon wishes to avoid a public trial that will put his name in the Tennessean every morning for six months, he will surrender his interest in the non-profit, assign all corporate assets to a court-appointed receiver, and sell that German car by Monday afternoon to pay back the credit union.”
Lauren jumped up from her chair. “He can’t sell the Audi! That’s our primary transport!”
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I looked at Lauren—really looked at her—for the last time in my life.
“The MTC bus runs every twenty minutes down Charlotte Avenue, Lauren,” I told her. “It costs two dollars and fifty cents. I took it for seven years after Arthur died. It gets you where you’re going just fine.”
