Chapter 4
ADRIANA
Burty Howarth’s office was on the fourth floor of a Brentwood building he owned outright, a detail he mentioned within the first five minutes of any meeting held there.
The space was designed to project the casual authority of old money: dark wood shelving lined with award statuettes, a leather sectional that could seat eight, and windows overlooking a courtyard garden that was maintained by a team of three and never used by anyone.
Adriana sat in one of the two armchairs positioned across from his desk and waited for him to stop talking.
Andrew was in the other armchair, legal pad on his knee, pen resting between his fingers with the still readiness of someone who was prepared to write but hadn’t yet been given anything worth recording.
He had been talking for eleven minutes. She knew because she had glanced at her watch twice, which was a habit she had trained herself out of in depositions but permitted in meetings where the other person was wasting her time.
“The point,” Burty said, leaning back in his chair with the practiced ease of a man who had spent decades arranging his body into shapes that suggested relaxation, “is that this Ramirez woman is nobody. Independent filmmaker, tiny production company, minimal distribution reach. She’s making noise because noise is how people like her get noticed. ”
His voice was warm, confident, laced with a dismissive charm that had kept boardrooms and press conferences in check for thirty years.
His silver hair was styled with professional care, and his suit, navy, bespoke, Italian, sat on him with the expensive looseness of clothes that had been tailored to suggest he hadn’t thought about them.
Burty’s smile was wider than the conversation warranted. His gestures were broader than necessary. Every casual lean back in his chair had the rehearsed quality of a man who had practiced relaxation until it became its own kind of effort.
“Burty.” She said his name without inflection, carrying an authority that made people stop and listen even when they didn’t want to.
“A documentary filmmaker approached me at the Creative Legacy gala and described your shell company structure in enough detail to suggest she has internal sourcing. This is not noise.”
“You know what I love about documentarians?” Burty said, the warmth in his voice turning fond and slightly condescending, the tone of a man telling a story he has told before and still enjoys.
“They’re romantic. They come in with a thesis, a villain, a third act.
Then they find footage and they cut it around the story they already decided to tell.
” He waved a hand, broad and unhurried. “I’ve had three of these in thirty years.
You know what they found? Enough to write a think-piece nobody read.
This one’s the same. She’s fishing. When you’ve been in this town as long as I have, you can tell the difference between someone who has the goods and someone who’s hoping you’ll hand them over. ”
Adriana smoothed one hand along the arm of the chair.
Burty was still performing the ease of a man with nothing to conceal.
For a moment that surprised her, her mind pulled toward Sienna Ramirez at the gala: the stillness of her, the absence of performance, how she had looked at Adriana as if she already knew what Adriana was going to say and had decided to wait her out anyway. Then Adriana returned to the room.
“She’s not a journalist. She’s a filmmaker whose last two projects ended careers and put a state senator in prison.
” She kept her voice level, each word placed with deliberate care.
She had spent the week since the gala studying everything Sienna Ramirez had ever produced, and the picture that emerged was not of a woman who made noise.
It was of a woman who built cases with the patience of a forensic accountant and then released them with the timing of someone who understood exactly how to make an industry pay attention.
“A state senator.” Burty’s smile was indulgent, the expression of a man offering a child a simpler explanation. “From Michigan. That’s hardly Hollywood.”
Andrew shifted in the chair beside Adriana.
The movement was slight, a readjustment of his weight and a straightening of his left cuff, but Adriana caught it.
She had spent nine years learning the vocabulary of Andrew’s small movements, and this one translated roughly as, He knows more than he’s saying, and I know more than I’m saying, and we should leave before one of us says it.
She did not leave. She had not come to Brentwood on a Tuesday afternoon, rearranging two client consultations and a mediation prep session, to leave without getting what she came for.
“Burty.” She uncrossed her legs and leaned forward, a posture she rarely used because it communicated engagement, which was a resource she rationed.
“I need you to tell me the truth about the financial structure Sienna Ramirez described. Shell companies, payment routing, awards manipulation.” She held his gaze and let the silence do the work that additional words would have undermined.
“I am your lawyer. I cannot protect you from an exposure I don’t understand.
If there is exposure, any exposure, any amount, I need to know the shape of it before she publishes it. ”
Burty responded to protection the way some people responded to flattery—it reminded him that he was important enough to require it.
Burty’s smile remained in place, but his eyes recalibrated. The shift was subtle, a man accustomed to owning rooms who had just encountered a question he could not wave away.
“Adriana, sweetheart.” The endearment was deliberate, a relic from an era when men like Burty used diminutives the way generals used rank, to remind everyone in the room of the hierarchy.
Adriana let it pass. “My financial operations are complex. All large production companies are. There are subsidiary entities, distribution arms, tax-efficient structures, none of which are unusual and all of which your firm has reviewed.”
“We reviewed what you gave us to review.”
Burty’s smile thinned by a fraction, and for a moment the warm, avuncular producer was gone, replaced by a cooler, more alert version of himself.
“Everything my legal team has is everything there is.”
“Is it?”
The two words dropped into the room like stones into still water.
Burty’s jaw moved, the smallest lateral shift, an unconscious tell that Adriana had learned to read in opposing counsel during her first year of trial practice.
He was reassessing. That much was visible.
What he was reassessing, Adriana could only guess.
“Adriana.” His tone shifted, no longer charming, not yet hostile, but carrying a new kind of gravity.
The authority of a man who was used to being the most powerful person in any room and was reminding her that the dynamic had not changed.
“I have been your client for nine years. In that time, I have never misrepresented my legal position to you. I’m not starting now. ”
The sentence had the shape of truth and the texture of rehearsal. Adriana had cross-examined enough witnesses to know the difference, and Burty Howarth would not have survived redirect.
She held his gaze for three seconds longer than was comfortable. He held it back, which cost him more than he probably realized. His right hand moved to the arm of his chair and his fingers pressed into the leather with enough force to whiten his knuckles.
Then Adriana stood. Andrew rose beside her with the fluid coordination of someone who had been waiting for exactly this signal.
“We’ll be in touch,” Adriana said.
Burty walked them to the elevator with the gracious ease of a host seeing off dinner guests.
In the corridor, framed photographs of Burty with actors, directors, and politicians lined the walls, a visual autobiography curated to project legitimacy and connection.
His hand rested lightly on the small of Adriana’s back as they walked, a gesture she had long ago filed under tolerate but do not encourage.
She didn’t step away because doing so would register as reaction, and Adriana did not give reactions she hadn’t chosen.
“Always a pleasure, Adriana. Andrew.” Burty’s smile was back at full wattage, warm and inclusive, as though the preceding twenty minutes had been a friendly chat about golf rather than a cross-examination that had produced nothing except confirmation that her client was concealing information.
The elevator doors opened, and she and Andrew stepped inside.
The doors closed. The elevator descended. The numbers ticked down in silence.
Andrew looked at her.
She looked at him.
The exchange lasted four seconds and required no words. Neither of them was surprised. Neither of them was looking forward to what came next.
“Well,” Andrew said as the numbers counted down. “That was a masterful performance of a man with nothing to hide.”
“Andrew.”
“The part where he called you sweetheart was my favorite. Very 1997.”
The elevator reached the lobby. They walked across the polished marble floor and through the glass doors into the Brentwood afternoon, where the sun was warm and the air smelled like jasmine from the building’s landscaped entrance.
“He’s lying,” Andrew said. He said it quietly, without emphasis, the way you state a fact that has been true for long enough that the stating of it feels redundant.
He slid his sunglasses on against the Brentwood glare and fell into step beside Adriana as they crossed the parking lot, the heat of the asphalt radiating through the soles of their shoes.
“Parts of it.”
“Which parts?”
The sun hit the windshield of a passing car and threw a blade of white light across Andrew’s face. He squinted and shifted his weight.