Chapter 4 #2
“The ones he rehearsed.” Adriana stopped beside her car, a black Mercedes sedan, maintained with the same discipline she applied to everything she owned.
She pressed the key fob and the doors unlocked with a soft chirp.
“The shell companies exist. That much we already knew from the tax filings. What Sienna Ramirez described was the layer beneath that, the payments to individuals, the awards manipulation, the systemic corruption. That’s what Burty says doesn’t exist.”
“And you don’t believe him.”
Adriana rested her hand on the car roof, the metal hot against her palm.
“I believe he believes he can manage the narrative. He’s been doing it for thirty years.
But a filmmaker who puts senators in prison is not the same as an entertainment journalist who needs access to his premieres.
” Adriana opened her car door and paused.
“I need you to find out how far along the documentary is. Quietly. Don’t use the firm’s name. ”
“What am I looking for?”
He pulled a pen from his jacket pocket and held it like a cigarette, an old habit.
“Sources. Distribution agreements. Anything that tells me whether this is months away or weeks.”
Andrew nodded. His dark eyes were calm, and the expression he wore was the one Adriana had come to think of as his professional face, blank, attentive, revealing nothing he didn’t choose to reveal. He was very good at it. She had taught him.
But beneath the professional face, a different expression was showing. Not disagreement, exactly, but the focused attention that Andrew brought to moments when he wanted to speak and was weighing whether it would help.
“Andrew.”
He turned back, one hand already on his car door.
“I was just going to say that monitoring a documentary filmmaker’s activities without a clear legal basis starts to look like surveillance. And if Sienna Ramirez is as thorough as her track record suggests, she’ll notice.”
“She won’t notice if you’re careful.”
“I’m always careful. I’m asking if you’re sure this is what you want to find.
” Andrew took his sunglasses off and met her eyes directly, which he only did when he meant what came next to land without any buffer.
“Because if I dig and the answer is that she’s close—that she has enough to publish, enough to make a federal case, then we’re not managing a reputation problem anymore.
We’re managing a liability. And the liability isn’t theoretical.
” He paused, long enough for the Brentwood afternoon to press its heat against them.
“It’s ours. Not just Burty’s. Every NDA we drafted, every settlement we structured, every financial vehicle we approved without seeing the full picture of what it was being used for.
If she publishes, all of that comes out, and ‘we relied on our client’s representations’ is not a defense that ages well in front of a federal judge. ”
Adriana’s jaw tightened.
“Find out,” she said. “And let me decide what we do with what you find.”
Andrew nodded once. He straightened his tie, unnecessary since it was always already straight, and walked to his own car without looking back. His stride was even, unhurried; he had said what needed saying and was comfortable with the silence that followed.
Adriana sat in the Mercedes for a moment before starting the engine.
The leather seat was warm from the afternoon sun, and through the windshield, the Brentwood street shimmered with the patient, expensive heat of a Los Angeles neighborhood that had been designed to make its residents feel insulated from consequences.
Burty Howarth was more exposed than he was admitting.
She had known this before walking into his office, and his performance this afternoon had confirmed it.
The charm, the dismissiveness, the strategic use of “sweetheart,” all of it was performance.
He could feel the walls closing in and was responding by pretending they were still exactly where he’d built them.
The threat to the firm was real. If Sienna’s investigation reached the financial layer that Burty was pretending didn’t exist, the documentation would inevitably lead back to legal structures that Lovett she was certain of that. But because the line between tax efficiency and concealment became uncomfortably thin when the underlying transactions were criminal.
Andrew knew this. She had seen it in the elevator, in those four seconds of silent conversation that had said more than an hour of discussion.
Andrew wouldn’t push the point today. He never did.
He would wait, because Andrew always waited, with the patient certainty of someone who understood that truths arrived on their own schedule and the best thing a good lawyer could do was clear the path.
And when the evidence arrived, when the full scope of what Burty had buried became visible, Andrew would present it without commentary and let Adriana reach the conclusion he had already reached.
He would not say I told you so. He would put a coffee on her desk and straighten his tie and wait for her to decide what to do.
The question that sat beneath all of it, the question Adriana was not yet willing to ask aloud, was simple: how much of what Sienna Ramirez had said at the gala was true?
And if it was all true, if the shell companies and the payment trails and the decades of corruption were real and documented and heading toward daylight, then what did that make Adriana?
Not complicit. She had not designed fraud.
But she had designed the structures that made the fraud invisible, and the distinction between those two things was getting narrower by the day.
She started the car and pulled into traffic.
Her phone lit on the passenger seat as she stopped at a red light.
A push notification: Sienna Ramirez’s name in the headline.
ACCLAIMED FILMMAKER PREVIEWS UPCOMING DOCUMENTARY: “TRUTH DOESN’T NEGOTIATE.
” Adriana looked at it for the duration of the light.
Then she turned the phone face down and drove.
The thought that surfaced was unwelcome and persistent. Sienna Ramirez approached me at a charity gala and accused my client of systemic fraud. I dismissed her. I warned her. I went back to my office and began planning how to stop her. And she was right.
Adriana’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. She loosened them one finger at a time, unwinding what her body had expressed before her mind authorized it.
She thought about Sienna’s face at the gala.
The dark curls. The eyes that had held Adriana’s with the unblinking directness of someone who was not afraid of what she found there.
She remembered the voice, too, low and unhurried in a room that had been full of performance all night, and the faint smile when Adriana had tried to dismiss her, not triumphant, not mocking, but the smile of someone who had expected exactly this response and was already planning what came next.
Adriana had not been looked at like that in a very long time. As though she was worth the effort of not looking away from.
She turned up the air conditioning and drove back to Century City, where her office waited on the thirty-second floor with its white orchid and its clean lines and its view of a city that looked, from that height, like a system she could manage.