Chapter Twenty-Three
I arrived Monday morning to an empty office. I still hadn’t heard from Charlie.
I drank three cups of coffee before heading to the forty-ninth floor for a required continuing legal education seminar for junior associates.
I spotted him come in ten minutes late and sit in the back row. I waited until the lunch break, then filed into the buffet line behind him.
“Good weekend?” I asked casually.
He smiled. “Nothing too crazy. I didn’t have to work, which was awesome. I finally got through that Yeats book I’ve been trying to finish for three months. Saturday night, I went out with Annabelle.”
“Is that the forty-eight-hour-date girl?”
He laughed. “I think we can call her by her name now that I’ve been on two separate dates with her.”
“Look at you. Two dates!”
“How was yours?”
I told him about going out with the girls on Saturday night.
“I actually met someone I thought you’d like. One of Caroline’s friends. But now that you’re properly dating Annabelle, I’ll try to think of another lucky guy to set her up with.”
“Two dates doesn’t mean we’re dating. It means I decided to see her a second time.”
“So does that mean you’d be up for meeting Caroline’s friend?”
“Depends. What kind of music does she listen to?”
“We didn’t get that far. All I know is where she works and that she lives in Brooklyn.”
“Are you borough-typing me?”
“One hundred percent. If the subways and bridges shut down, and your significant other lives in Manhattan, that could be the end of a relationship.”
We sat down as he cracked open a can of Mountain Dew and smeared the contents of a mustard packet on a catered club sandwich.
“Dating in New York is bleak enough without outer-borough discrimination, you know.”
“Where does Annabelle live?” I asked.
“Brooklyn.”
“There you go.”
“Is it just me, or do catered lunches have a certain satisfying quality?” he asked.
“I’m not there yet. So, can I introduce you to Margaret? Or do you want to see where things go with Annabelle first?”
“Sure. I have two tickets to this concert in Fort Greene a week from Thursday, if she wants to go.”
“Cool! I’ll text her.”
“It’s nice to know you think enough of me to set me up with someone in my borough.”
I tossed a purple grape onto his plate. “She seems great. And she’s apparently been going on dates with a lot of jerks. Maybe you can show her there are still good guys out there.”
“But only in Brooklyn.”
“Right.” I missed the easy banter. I wanted to get back to easy.
“Not totally off-topic, but I was also asked out on a date.”
He raised both eyebrows. “Not off-topic, but pretty big news. Who’s the lucky guy? Or girl,” he said quickly.
I laughed. “He works at the restaurant I went to on Saturday.”
Charlie clapped. “I’m proud of you, Sam. All the angst, and then you just made it happen.”
“I didn’t make anything happen. He asked for my number, and I wrote it down.”
He balled up the sandwich paper and shot it in the trash can across from us.
“Buckets.” He looked at his watch. “I have a call in ten minutes. You heading back to our office?”
It was our office again.
“So when’s the big date?” he asked as he held the elevator door for me to step in.
“There’s no date. He asked if I wanted to grab a drink sometime, but I haven’t responded.”
Charlie looked at me sideways.
I laughed. “What?”
“So you gave him your number, but you’re just gonna ghost?”
“I don’t know. He seemed nice. All the girls thought he was ‘super cute.’ I don’t know . . . I guess he read the specials eloquently enough?”
“Ouch.”
I shrugged. “I’ll text back today.”
We sat in our office working with earbuds on the rest of the day. It was pouring rain, and the clouds were so low you couldn’t see out the window.
“Looks like we both have dates Thursday,” I announced a few hours later.
“What’s that?” he asked, taking out an earbud.
“The waiter. He asked if I was free next Thursday, and I said yes.”
“Ah. Nice!” he said as he put the earbud back in.
I sat there and stared at my phone. I couldn’t tell if Charlie was on a deadline or just over talking about dates. I texted Caroline, who I could count on being more excited than I was that the date was actually happening.
She called my cell less than a minute after.
“Babe! This is huge. Do you want me to come over and help you pick out an outfit? Maybe help you do your eyes a little bit more than you usually do?”
I glanced over at Charlie and wondered if I should step out, but his headphones were still on, and he didn’t seem to notice I was on the phone.
“I only have mascara and concealer. I won’t respect myself if I buy more makeup for one date.”
She sighed. “Fine, your outfit can do all the talking. I’ll bring a few options.”
I hung up and started packing up my laptop to take the subway downtown to listen to oral arguments in the Texas Hold’em case.
“I’m the last guy to tell a woman what to do, but most guys don’t like a lot of makeup. Just do what you normally do,” he said as I threw a khaki trench over my suit.
I pretended to be distracted by my phone. “Good to know, thanks.”
On Wednesday morning, Leo’s name appeared on the New York office visitor list.
I hadn’t heard from him since I’d hurriedly left the gallery opening. The fact that he hadn’t reached out to let me know he was coming to the city somehow made me feel exposed. I wondered if he sensed my attraction and was keeping his distance.
I still had to plug the last few holes in the settlement strategy before I could present it to Leo.
I’d backed into the budgets for two of the movies, but I couldn’t find where the other two were shot or if tax credits even were involved.
I searched IMDb and scrolled through the cast and crew, looking for inspiration to hit.
I noticed the name Max Carlton listed as the “line producer” on both films and quickly typed an email to the firm’s dedicated “librarian”—a master researcher with a reputation of being able to dig up more dirt than a private investigator—to see if he could locate an email address or phone number.
Within minutes, the librarian responded with a Pennsylvania cell phone number.
Max Carlton picked up on the second ring. I introduced myself as an attorney from New York with a few questions about two films he’d recently line-produced.
“There’s a pretty tight confidentiality provision in my contract,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong though—if I wasn’t afraid of getting sued, I’d be happy to help you nail whoever it is you’re after. Those were two of the worst productions I’ve worked on in thirty years.”
“Worst how? If you don’t mind me asking,” I said, trying not to sound like a lawyer.
“Bad people. Cutting corners, safety hazards everywhere, antiunion shit. I won’t work for people like that anymore. Falls in the ‘life’s-too-short’ bucket.”
I explained I was trying to figure out if the budget of each movie was over $5 million.
He laughed in a way that told me he’d smoked every day of those thirty years.
“Let me just say this: You don’t pay an actor $3 million on a $5 million movie and have anything to show for it. As for the other one, we shot it in NOLA. You can look up Louisiana tax-credit filings online.”
“Thank you so much,” I said. I was already googling the Louisiana tax-credit portal.
It was almost too easy.
There was no way the budget for the NOLA film was less than $8 million, making the total for just three of the four movies $26 million. I wondered who else’s money they stole. That was someone else’s problem.
I sent Leo an email letting him know I had a possible settlement strategy to run by him, omitting that I knew he was working from New York.
He responded a few minutes later, saying he was in the city for the week and free to meet the next morning. His email was polite and professional. Maybe my sudden exit from the gallery opening had been a red flag, and he was dialing it back down. Or maybe I’d just imagined all of it.