Inappropriate - Vi Keeland Page 0,3
over as president when my dad died eighteen months ago. Politics, propaganda, and bureaucracy weren’t my thing. Though I was president in name, I generally stuck to the financial side of Lexington Industries.
I dug out the first email I’d received from Ms. Saint James and reread it. While the newest one was certainly more appropriate, the first amused me more. She’d signed the letter with the closing, Bite me…which had actually made me chuckle. No one talked to me like that. Oddly, I found it a bit refreshing. I had the strangest urge to have a conversation with Ms. Richardson after a few drinks. She’d certainly piqued my curiosity. I pressed the button of the intercom on my phone again.
“Millie, could you call down to the Broadcast Media division—the morning news segment producer? I think it might be Harrison Bickman or Harold Milton…something along those lines.”
“Of course. Would you like me to set up a meeting for you?”
“No. Tell him I’d like to see the personnel file for one of his employees—Ireland Saint James. Her stage name is Ireland Richardson.”
“I’ll get it taken care of.”
“Thank you.”
My afternoon meeting only lasted fifteen minutes. Not only did the guy show up an hour and a half late, he was also completely unprepared. I had no patience for people who didn’t value my time, so I’d called it quits and walked out of the conference room after telling him to lose my number.
“Is everything okay?” Millie looked up at me as I strode past her desk. “Do you need something from your office for your meeting?”
“My meeting is over. Hang up on anyone who calls from Bayside Investments, if they ever call again.”
“Uh…yes, Mr. Lexington.” Millie got up and followed me into my office, holding a notepad. “Your grandmother called. She said to tell you they don’t need a security system and she sent the installer home.”
I rounded my desk and shook my head. “Great. Just great.”
“I retrieved Ms. Saint James’s file for you and printed it out. It’s on your desk in a folder. There’s also a video of some sort that was on file in Human Resources, which I emailed to you.”
“Thank you, Millie.” I sat down at my desk. “Would you mind closing the door on your way out?”
***
Jesus Christ. Now I remembered her. It was a long time ago, but her story wasn’t one you’d forget too easily. Back when Ireland Saint James was hired, my father was still running things. I’d been sitting in his office when Millie had brought him the file on her. He’d used her story as a teaching example—an example of decisions you sometimes have to make to protect the company image.
I leaned back in my chair. Every employee gets a background check—the extensiveness of it depends on the position. The more visibility someone has, the more their name and face can affect the brand of the company, so the deeper we delve. Human Resources and an outside investigation company usually do the vetting. When a person comes back clean, a manager does the hire with a signoff from the division’s director. For the most part, senior management isn’t involved—unless someone poses a possible threat to our name and a department head still wants to make an offer. Then the file gets sent up the flagpole.
Ireland Saint James. I rubbed at the stubble already forming on my chin. Her first name was a bit unusual, so that was probably what rang a bell. Though I blocked out a lot of shit from ten years ago.
I flipped through the pages of her personnel file—her background summary was barely a page. Yet the file had to be two inches thick.
UCLA undergraduate with a major in communications and minor in English. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism with a postgraduate fellowship in investigative reporting. Not too shabby. Never arrested, and only one parking ticket. We’d done an update to her background eighteen months ago, when she’d gotten the position she was in now. It seemed she was dating a lawyer. All in all, her investigation was unremarkable—she was an ideal employee and an upstanding citizen. But her father was a different story…
The next fifty pages were mostly about him. He’d been some sort of low-level security guard in an apartment complex here in the city—though it was the time after his departure that was the focus of all of the news articles. Flipping through, I scanned the pages, letting them fan slowly one at a time until I