Chapter 46
ARI
“Just a water, please.”
“Not ordering something stronger? I thought we were celebrating.” Julie arrives at the empty bar I arranged to meet her at wearing a smile as smug as a pirate plundering treasure.
I need a clear head for this conversation. “Water is fine,” I reply.
“So if we’re ready to expose Hart Law, are we doing it this week or next?” she asks.
I play along. “I was thinking next week? Does that work for you?”
“Absolutely.” She motions to the bartender. “Martini with a twist.”
I drum my fingers against the wooden bar top, nervous of being seen with Julie in such a public setting, but it’s necessary. A means to an end.
“You look skinny,” Julie says bluntly. “It doesn’t suit you.”
“I’ve had a lot going on.”
“I hope you’re not changing your mind, Ari. Daniel Hart fucked your family over, remember?”
“Yeah. I know. I’m tired, that’s all,” I lie. “I haven’t changed my mind.”
“You sure you’re not pregnant? Fuck, that’s the last thing you want to give birth to. Satan’s spawn.” Her whole face screws up. “Although imagine the amount of child support you could squeeze out of the Hart family.”
My stomach twists like a nest of vipers curling round and round, making it feel like they are squeezing my heart. “I’m not pregnant.”
“Pity.” She shrugs dismissively. “You could have taken Nathan to the cleaners for child support.”
I would never do that. She’s disgusting.
“So,” I start, confidence filling my veins, “I was looking at the crash report and it’s fake.” Fuck her for thinking she could fool me once with telling me she would help me and my family, then twice for sending me a fake report.
Julie stops stirring her martini with her cocktail stick and side-eyes me. “No?”
She knows it is.
“Yes. The watermark is in the wrong place, the font is incorrect and the one you sent me in the post that you said was the original is not on government-issued paper.” And there was a spelling mistake in the word government in tiny letters along the footer.
I got ninety-six percent in English, and I’m the one everyone asks to proofread their reports in the office.
With the use of a magnifying glass, I caught Julie’s mistake easily.
I knew all of that before Nathan laid it all out for me in black and white in the boardroom.
I add, “My family’s car crash was an accident, Julie. I’ve read the case file.” At least a hundred times. I sit strong and stand my ground.
“Arianna?” She uses my full name as a question.
“Yes?”
“Do you trust me?”
“Yes,” I lie again.
“Then the report is real. Simple. I have a great contact, just don’t ask who that person is.” She taps the side of her nose. “I need to use the restroom.” Sliding off her barstool, she grabs her cell.
As soon as she’s around the corner I follow her, but I get the shock of my life when she’s not inside the restroom but standing facing the wall at the end of the corridor where the restrooms are, so I hide myself and listen in.
“She’s just told me she thinks the report is fake.” She whisper-shouts to whoever is on the other end of the call.
Who is she talking to?
I edge myself a little closer.
“Don’t talk to me like that. My contact did a great job to make it look real.”
No, they didn’t, it was a terrible job.
“Okay, okay, calm down, I didn’t blow it. That dumb bitch believed me when I told her it wasn’t. She’s still going through with the interview next week.”
She pauses for a beat as if letting the person talk.
Laughing manically to whatever the person responds with, she then says, “Once we get her interview we can create another dozen or so headlines and articles to back it up. She’ll humanize the story, give a bit of legitimacy, then the readers will believe the others.
Win win.” She nods her head. “Yeah. I agree. This was much harder than hacking phones. Let’s stick to that,” she says brightly as if it’s the most kosher thing in the world, when it’s not. It’s hideous.
They hack phones?
This is terrible and much more sinister than I realized. Julie is a snake and now I wish I had never met her. My hands are shaking, my mouth now completely dry.
“I’ll keep her sweet, we’ll get the story, and I’ll sell you lots of newspapers, Buzz.”
Bert, or Buzz as he’s widely known, is the editor of The Golden Telegraph .
Turns out he’s a snake too.
“I’m right, trust me. And I know it’s becoming harder and harder.
Fucking internet,” Julie replies, spitting venom.
“Since the invention of the fucking thing, I have struggled every day to get exclusive interviews and tell-alls. People share everything online first instead of selling their stories. It’s a fucking travesty.
Oh, hang on, I have an alert on my cell.
” Julie moves it away from her ear and must put it on speaker, though I can’t see with her back to me.
She continues talking. “It’s Lexi, she said she got him. ”
“Hacking phones of the rich and famous has never felt so good.” A masculine husky voice, which I am assuming is Buzz, fills the corridor, making me feel sick to my stomach.
Their morals are in the gutter.
“We’re clever, right?” Julie asks, chuckling away.
It’s horrible, evil, and downright wrong.
“It’s the only way to get the inside scoop these days and that’s why we do it all the time. Now, get your sweet ass back to my office and tell me all the ways you plan on ruining Daniel Hart and his firm’s reputation. Then draw up a plan for who is next in this boring-as-fuck city.”
“It’s a shame I never made a copy of that video I made to set Daniel up.” Julie kicks her foot against the wall in front of her.
“You’re a pro at this now. You just needed someone like me to show you how to play dirtier,” Buzz replies sinisterly.
Max showed me the video—the one she tried to use to extort his father and get back at Max with.
And Daniel? He never said anything remotely close to what she claims. In fact, the whole time in the video, he made it crystal clear to Julie that she was his son’s girlfriend, that he had never strayed from his wife, and that he wasn’t the least bit interested in some desperate, two-bit hussy.
Daniel’s words, not mine. I heard them on the video with my very own ears.
Daniel Hart is a loyal man. To his wife and his sons, and was dedicated to upholding the law.
“And that’s why I faked the crash report. I’ll finally get my revenge on the family for filing that injunction and getting me fired.”
Julie is not only twisted, she’s bitter, and while I wanted to seek the truth, she is willing to bend it into any way she wants to get her revenge.
“I lost everything, Buzz. He kicked me out of our apartment, did you know that?” she says, laying her forehead against the wall, sounding hurt.
“And that’s why we wrote those stories about them sharing a girlfriend. It was a good place to start,” Buzz says, confirming his part in helping Julie out.
Sounding smug as hell, she replies, “God, that was a good one, but my favorite was the one I made up about Max dating a supermodel who said his dick was tiny.” I can hear the smile in her voice.
“News flash. There was no supermodel. Now that I think about it, maybe it was the fake whistleblower story that was leaked.” She wraps air quotes around her last word with her fingers.
“About sexual harassment in Hart Law.” She sighs.
“If only that were true. Those fuckers are cleaner than a surgeon’s scalpel. ”
“It’s not your fault you and Max didn’t end well.” Buzz tries to justify her actions when in fact it couldn’t be further from the truth. She had already started writing fake stories when she was dating Max; now she works under Buzz, I think he’s even worse than her.
I don’t trust any of them and will never believe anything I read in the tabloids.
“I may have done some things to his car and apartment that ended up with him placing an injunction against me, Buzz,” she admits.
“It was just a little scratch on his car, I don’t know why he was so upset.
” She twirls a lock of her hair between her fingers.
I get the impression she believes her own lie.
I’ve seen the photos. She totaled his vintage car with a golf club.
“Well, we all do things we regret,” he replies, sounding genuinely sympathetic.
“Oh, I don’t regret any of it.” Julie shakes her head. “So, we’re still on for exposing Hart Law next week.” Changing the subject, she gets down to business.
“Yes. We’ll publish end of week, double-page spread and front-page exclusive. What about Kevin Taylor’s family? What do we have on him?”
“Nothing, but it doesn’t matter. The public will believe the headline because I’ve been planting seeds of doubt in the minds of our readers for years about Hart Law and their legitimacy.
This story will seal their fate and they’ll have the authorities all over their archive files, questioning procedures, and before you know it they’ll not have any clients because no one will trust them and they’ll fall out of favor with the public.
I guarantee they’ll fold before the year is out once we release this. ”
Julie hasn’t been plotting against them for a few months, it’s been years, and she’s using my story as the big finale.
What a bitch.
“I like your plan, Julie. You’ll get a raise for this.”
“It was nothing really. Arianna working at Williams and Jones was a gift. Inviting her out for a drink that night after work turned out perfectly for us, Buzz, especially when I discovered Daniel Hart was the one who represented the man she thought killed her family—that’s all the connection I needed.
She was my in, she trusted me, and I used that.
She made it easy for us to figure out a way to spin the story, to create that report, and together, we will build a stream of articles that will ruin him.
And Nathan Hart? That man has never let a woman into his life before her.
I bet he fell in love with her. We probably broke him too. Two birds, one stone.”
“Thank you, Ari.” Buzz’s slimy buoyant voice slices my heart open.
They used me.
I’ve been a pawn in their big game.
“Right, I gotta go, Buzz. See you back at the office. And I have an idea for who we target next. She’s a big celebrity.”
“Atta girl.”
I tiptoe quickly back to my seat and push the bile that I can feel rising in my throat back down.
Julie appears looking happy with herself while I die inside some more.
“Sorry, I need to get back to the office, Ari, but I’ll be in touch. We’ll do an interview, photos, the lot. Stay by your phone. Have my drink.” She points to the martini I wished the bartender had now laced with poison.
“Thanks.” I pull a fake smile, my fist itching to have a conversation with her face.
“Thanks for being a friend, Ari, you’re a trooper. I think it was fate that I met you.”
No, it wasn’t.
Admitting to Buzz on the call that she used me feels like she stabbed me with a knife I handed her myself. She’s vile. Dangerous. I feel like such a fool.
“We didn’t do this together, Julie. It was all you.” My stomach rolls in waves, my ears ringing, drowning out everything around me, and it takes a massive amount of effort to sound calm.
“Whatever, that’s a matter of perspective.” She dismisses me, looking smugger than the devil sealing the deal, then she leaves.
Waiting several minutes to make sure she’s gone, with trembling hands, I pull my phone out of the inside pocket of my coat, hit stop on the voice record button then pull up one of my contacts and call it.
Max picks up instantly. “We got her. We heard everything.”
“Thank God,” I reply, clutching my hand to my chest, nervousness flowing through my body like blood through my veins, and I look down at the secret microphone placed between my cleavage.
Max knows the guy behind the bar and had the place tapped within an inch of its life, ensuring we heard her regardless of where she was situated. The plan was to talk to her to get a confession; instead, she hung herself and played right into our hands.
I’m not the one who’s the dumb bitch.
“You heard everything?” I clarify.
“We got more. Phone-hacking is a serious offense, Arianna.”
“It’s the worst.”
“I’m sending you copies of the voice files by email and I’ll make another copy as a backup.”
“Okay.” I’d already thought about that.
“You got her, Ari.”
“ We got her, Max.” It was a team effort. Max and his brothers came up with the idea of luring her out and making her talk because she considered me a friend. She took the bait.
And what kind of friend would falsify information surrounding the death of an entire family? She is not my friend. She never was.
“Thank you for doing this for me.”
“I did it for all of you.” For Nathan.
“Are you okay?” he asks, his voice full of genuine concern.
“I need a stiff drink,” I admit, still feeling shaky. My legs are bouncing up and down with jitters.
But most of all, I need to see your brother’s face again. I miss him.
“I’ll buy you one when I see you next.”
That won’t be any time soon.