It’s significant. Is your signature on any transfer authorizations for that account? No. Flat. Certain.
Not recently. Not in the last 8 months. Then someone authorized a transfer using your name.
He said nothing, which was its own kind of answer. Imani wrapped both hands around her coffee cup.
Who has access to your signature? Documents you’ve already signed. Contracts, letters, anything that could be used to extract a signature block and apply it to something new.
Callaway was quiet for a moment. Celestine has been involved in reviewing several property acquisition documents over the past 6 months.
I brought her in on two of them. She has a business background and at the time it seemed He stopped.
The sentence had somewhere it didn’t want to go. She would have handled the physical documents.
And Fletcher Voss. The name landed differently than she expected. His posture changed. Not much.
A degree or two of stillness entering his shoulders. And she registered that she’d struck something real.
How do you know that name? He said. I don’t, she said. Not yet. Phyllis mentioned he was here 3 weeks ago for a dinner that wasn’t on the official calendar.
And Deja, one of the housekeeping staff, said she overheard him and Celestine talking in the East Wing hallway.
She didn’t tell me what they said. But she remembered it because Celestine told her afterward not to mention the visit to anyone, including you.
Callaway set his coffee down. Fletcher Voss is my business partner, he said. Co-founder of Briggs Development.
He holds 40% of the company’s equity. A pause. And he’s been pushing for 6 months to restructure the IPO in a way that would dilute my controlling stake.
The Michigan Avenue traffic moved beyond the window. A double-decker tour bus. A delivery van with a Cubs logo.
The ordinary motion of a city that didn’t know it was providing backdrop. If someone transferred assets from the reserve fund before the IPO, Imani said carefully, what would that do to your controlling stake?
It would make the IPO numbers look different than they are, Callaway said. It would make my equity position look overvalued.
The SEC would flag it. Investors would pull back. And the restructuring that Fletcher has been pushing for would become He stopped again.
His jaw tightened. Necessary by default. Because you’d need new investment to cover the gap.
At terms that would require restructuring the equity split. Imani nodded it She was not a financial attorney.
She was a 25-year-old woman from the Southside who cleaned houses for a living. But she understood leverage.
