one of the restaurant managers called to ask if he could fire a line cook after discovering that the man was a convicted murderer.
“Jeez. How’d you learn that?” Brooke had asked.
“He made a joke to one of the waiters about honing his cooking skills in prison. The waiter asked what he’d been serving time for, and he said, ‘Murder.’”
“I bet that put an end to the conversation real fast. And yes, you can fire him,” Brooke had said. “Obviously, he lied on his employment application.” All of Sterling’s employees, regardless of job position, were required to answer whether they’d ever been convicted of a crime involving “violence, deceit, or theft.” Pretty safe to say that murder qualified.
Ten minutes later, the manager had called her back.
“Um . . . what if he didn’t exactly lie? I just double-checked his application, and as it turns out, he did check the box for having been convicted of a crime.”
Brooke had paused at that. “And then the next question, where we ask what crime he’d been convicted for, what did he write?”
“Uh . . . ‘second-degree murder.’”
“I see. Just a crazy suggestion here, Cory, but you might want to start reading these applications a little more closely before making employment offers.”
“Please don’t fire me.”
Brooke had thunked her head against the desk, silently going all Jerry Maguire—Help me, help you—on the manager.
But she’d handled it, just like she would handle whatever it was that brought Keith from security into her office today.
“You sounded serious on the phone,” she said as he took a seat in one of the empty chairs in front of her desk. “Should I be nervous?”
“No. But I do think you’re going to be pissed. I sure am.”
Brooke didn’t like the sound of that intro. “Tell me.”
Keith crossed his legs, settling in. “The other day, I got a call from our account representative at Citibank, letting me know that there had been a breach in our employee purchasing card online database.”
Definitely off to a good start toward pissing her off. All corporate employees at Sterling, as well as the managers, assistant managers, chefs, sous-chefs, and wine sommeliers who worked at the various restaurants and sports arenas, were given a Citibank company purchasing card for business-related expenses. “Is someone charging extra expenses to that account?”
Keith shook his head. “It’s not a theft issue. It seems as though somebody has an ax to grind with Ian. Someone hacked into his account and altered the descriptions of some of his expenses.”
Brooke cocked her head, not following. “Just the descriptions? Why would anyone want to do that?”
Keith pulled a document out of his file folder and slid it across her desk. “Perhaps this will answer that.”
She picked up the pages, a spreadsheet she was familiar with. Whenever a Sterling employee charged something to his or her purchasing card, they were required to enter into the Citibank database a brief explanation of the business expense, such as “Dinner with the L.A. Arena lawyers.” Brooke skimmed through Ian’s May expenses, not seeing anything out of the ordinary until she got to the entries for a business trip he’d taken to Los Angeles to look at some potential restaurant space, a possible expansion for Sterling now that the company had a presence in L.A. via the sports and entertainment division.
Then there was no missing the changes.
Dinner in L.A. with some of my faggot friends.
Picked up a queer dude in tight pants and bought him drinks before bringing him back to my pansy-ass hotel suite.
Cab fare to “Sperm-Burpers Anonymous” meeting.
And so on.
It was safe to say that Brooke had moved beyond pissed at that point. “Pissed” was how she felt the time someone let their dog poop on the sidewalk in front of her building and she stepped in it while climbing into a cab wearing three-inch heels. But breaking into company records and writing homophobic slurs against her boss? That was whole different ball game.
She set the spreadsheet off to the side. “Do we know who did this?”
“No, although we at least know how he did it,” Keith said. “As soon as I saw this, I talked to the managers about all recent terminations, anyone who might have expressed anger at Ian or Sterling in general. There was nothing in particular that jumped out at anyone. But what occurred to us is that only Ian or his secretary should have had access to his online expense files.”
“I can’t believe Liz would’ve had anything to do with this,” Brooke said.