Chapter 7 - The Desperate Blackmail
Desperation makes stupid men dangerous.
Three days after the boardroom coup, the rain had turned into the first wet, heavy snow of December. I was sitting in Julian’s private office on the forty-fourth floor of the Midtown tower, reviewing the final drafts of the divorce decree.
The terms were total, unconditional surrender.
Graham was walking away with nothing. No real estate, no trust income, no intellectual property, no corporate stock. Julian had even structured the settlement so that Graham was personally liable for the four point eight million dollars in legal fees and tax penalties resulting from his offshore accounts.
"He won't sign it willingly," Julian warned, refilling my coffee cup. "His criminal attorney is telling him to fight the divorce to keep some leverage for his plea negotiations with the Southern District. If he can force you to testify on his behalf regarding the trust authorizations, he might avoid federal prison."
"I would rather spend five years in a cell myself than say one kind word about that man under oath," I said evenly.
The intercom on Julian’s desk buzzed twice.
His executive assistant’s voice came through, tense and hesitant. "Mr. Thorne? There is a woman in the lobby. She doesn't have an appointment, but she says she has something you need to see regarding Mr. Alder."
Julian frowned, pressing the button. "Who is it, Sarah?"
"Celeste Vale."
Julian and I exchanged a long, silent look.
"Send her in," I said.
When Celeste walked into the office, she looked like a shadow of the girl who had sat in my front-row seat four nights ago.
Her champagne satin was gone, replaced by an oversized, thrifted black wool coat that was damp with melting slush. Her hair was pulled back into a messy bun, her face pale, devoid of makeup, her eyes red-rimmed and swollen. She looked younger, smaller, and entirely broken.
She didn't look at the art on the walls. She didn't look at Julian. She looked directly at me, her hands trembling as she clutched a battered designer handbag to her chest.
"I'm not here to fight," Celeste whispered, her voice barely louder than the hum of the ventilation.
"Then why are you here, Miss Vale?" Julian asked coldly, remaining standing behind his desk.
Celeste took a shallow, shaky breath. She unzipped her bag, reached inside, and pulled out an old, black external hard drive, setting it on the edge of Julian’s desk like an offering.
"What is that?" Julian asked.
"Graham came to my apartment two nights ago," Celeste said, tears welling in her eyes and spilling over her pale cheeks. "Before the marshals padlocked the door. He was drunk. He was insane, Evelyn. He was screaming that he was going to destroy you. He said if he was going down, he was going to make sure you were burned alive with him."
I didn't move. "Continue."
"He had that hard drive," she sobbed. "He told me it contained copies of your mother’s private medical records from 1998. The ones from the private psychiatric clinic in Zurich. He said he had emails showing that your grandfather’s will was altered while he had dementia, and that he was going to leak them to the press to prove the Pierce family fortune was built on fraud."
Julian’s face darkened, his jaw clenching with immediate, lethal fury. "That bastard."
"He told me to keep it," Celeste wept, her shoulders shaking. "He said if the feds arrested him, I was supposed to deliver it to a reporter at the *New York Post*. He promised that if I did it, his brother would give me fifty thousand dollars to get out of the country."
I leaned forward, looking at the little black plastic box on the mahogany desk.
"And why didn't you deliver it to the reporter, Celeste?" I asked, my voice soft, almost curious.
Celeste looked at me, her expression a mix of shame, terror, and absolute exhaustion.
"Because I realized something when I watched you on television," she whispered. "He lied to me about everything. He told me he loved me. He told me he was going to take care of me. And the second things fell apart, he tried to use me as a courier for his crimes. If I gave that to the press, I’d be an accessory to extortion. He didn't want to save me, Evelyn. He wanted to drag me into the grave with him so he wouldn't be lonely."
She dropped her head, her tears dripping onto the dark wood of the desk.
"I don't want his money," she cried. "I don't want his revenge. I just want my life back. The feds are threatening to indict me for the three million he put in my name. My lawyer says I’m looking at four years in federal prison. Please, Evelyn. You have the power to tell the prosecutor that I was just a pawn. Please don't let him send me to prison."
Julian didn't touch the drive. He looked at me, waiting for my judgment.
I stood up. I walked over to the desk, picked up the hard drive, and looked at it.
Twenty-nine years. Twenty-nine years of Graham collecting every private sorrow, every family tragedy, every delicate vulnerability I had ever shared with him in the dark, packing them into digital weapons to be detonated if I ever dared to step out of line.
He hadn't been a husband; he had been an archivist of my pain.
I looked at Celeste.
"Miss Vale," I said quietly.
She lifted her tear-streaked face, trembling like a leaf in a gale.
"Do you know what the difference between you and me is?" I asked.
She shook her head weakly.
"When Graham offered you a seat that wasn't yours, you took it without asking who paid for it," I said. "You thought power was something a man gave you in exchange for your youth."
"I know," she sobbed. "I was stupid. I was so stupid."
"Yes," I agreed. "You were. But you are twenty-six. And unlike Graham, you have finally realized that you are holding an empty hand."
I turned to Julian.
"Call the United States Attorney," I instructed. "Tell them Miss Vale has delivered evidence of interstate extortion and witness tampering. Tell them that if she provides full, unreserved deposition testimony against Graham Alder in the fraud trial, the Pierce Trust will not seek restitution for the three point two million dollars diverted to Vale Holdings."
Celeste let out a ragged, choking gasp and collapsed to her knees on Julian’s oriental rug, burying her face in her hands, weeping with the violent, hysterical relief of a prisoner whose death sentence had just been commuted.
"Thank you," she gasped over and over, her forehead pressed against the floor. "Thank you... thank you..."
"Get up, Miss Vale," I said, my voice sharp and firm.
She scrambled to her feet, wiping her face with her wet wool sleeves.
May you like
"You don't thank me," I said, looking her dead in the eyes. "You thank the fact that I am Aurelia Wren. And in my stories... I prefer to see the architect hang from his own gallows, not the servant he hired to carry the wood."
***
