Monahan 02 Artificial Intentions (2 page)

“So. How’s it going with the great Ashley?” Her eyes were smiling at me.

“Wonderful,” I joked. “I’m thinking of naming my first born after her. She’s a peerless leader.”

Linda laughed. “Look, I’m sorry for having to put you in that group. We know your qualifications. The firm was thrilled to get someone of your experience and as I told you when I hired you, if something came up that was more suitable for you, we’d move you.” She paid me the compliment with sincerity.

“Just don’t tell me you’re promoting Ashley and you want me to take over her job.”

Linda shook her head. “God forbid. Ashley wouldn’t move out of that group. Tax is her life. So she tells me,” she said with a smirk.

“That’s a very telling statement, you know Linda.”

We both laughed.

“McCallum & Watts has just hired a senior corporate securities lawyer from one of the rival firms and he’s specifically asked for you. He’s coming in as a very senior partner and when he found out you were here, he almost made it a condition of his employment. Are you interested?”

She certainly had my attention now.

“Of course. If it’s corporate securities work, I’m there. And I’m flattered.”

I couldn’t imagine who it was but I did know most of the top guns in Toronto. I’d either worked with them, or against, them in the job I had at Scapelli, Marks & Wilson.

“Great. We consider it quite a coup that we’ve lured him away from Scapelli’s. John Clancy, our senior corporate partner is retiring next year and between you and me, I think they might have their eye on Mr. Johnston to replace him.”

When she said Mr. Johnston, my stomach sank so I waited for the sucker punch.

“Would Mr. Johnston have a first name?” I asked.

“Cleveland. Says everyone calls him Cleve.”

Well, Cleve had obviously forgiven me for my past sins or this was his way of making me pay for all those nasty things I’d said to him. My mind shot back to the last time I’d seen him and how I’d been an absolute, first-class, no doubt about it, bitch.

“Monday,” I heard Linda say and I jerked my attention back to her voice. “Come on and I’ll introduce you to your new workstation.”

I followed her meekly down the hall. Today was Friday. I had all weekend to figure out how to apologize.

chapter two

“Is this supposed to be good news or bad news?” I asked incredulously. My voice was raised a little and I made a conscious effort to lower it.

“Bad news for us. Good news for me,” he said meekly.

To say the least, I thought. Shit, fuck and damn. We were less than three months into our relationship and Jay was telling me he had to move. Cities. Not down the block.

“Sorry,” I told him. And I meant it. In my typically selfish style I was just thinking about myself. “The job. Tell me about the job. It sounds fantastic.”

“Well, that remains to be seen. But it’s something I can’t pass up. It’s only six months in New York and then I’ll be back in Toronto. Like I said, they want to train me there and if everything goes well, they’ll promote me back here.”

His hand rubbed my shoulder distractedly and we were both silent. Jay Harmon and I had known each other all our lives but we had only taken the relationship to an intimate level in the past three months. He told me he was head over heels in love with me and although I hadn’t admitted it out loud to him, I felt the same way. I was still having trouble with our age difference and the fact that I was six years older. We started out as best friends and even though the relationship had taken on a new twist in the last few months, we remained first and foremost, best friends.

As a friend, I was ecstatic for Jay because I knew how much his career meant to him. Like me, he had lost his job at TechniGroup Consulting. Jay had his MBA from Western and like all Western grads, he was a mover and a shaker. He had loads of potential, and I for one wasn’t about to hold him back. As much as I was going to miss him, it was only six months, I told myself.

“So, can I assume you’ll wait for me?” Jay said with a grin.

“You have to ask? I guess I’ll have to change my long distance carrier now.”

I heaved myself off the sofa where we’d been watching the ball game. “I’m going to make some coffee. Want some?”

“Any beer?”

“Sure,” I said as brightly as I could.

Jay had delivered the good news/bad news to me on Friday night and here I was on Sunday night, waving good-bye at Pearson Airport. The bad news had continued to get worse when he told me, after the ball game, that he had to leave Sunday.

I stood like a lost child beside the car as I watched Jay weave through the other passengers into the terminal. Air Canada was about to whisk away the only bright spot in my dreary life and I waved pathetically at Jay’s disappearing figure.

About seven years ago I had spent many Sunday nights in this same spot beside the curb, at Pearson Airport, under the yellow International Departures sign. Back then I’d been saying my farewells to my now ex-husband, on his way back to his business in Phoenix. We’d met at the law firm where I was working and he was a client. Our whirlwind romance turned into a tornado of lust that ended up in marriage. The plans were made for me to move to Phoenix, but I never got around to packing up my apartment. The team I was working with always had one more deal to close. Eventually my excuses wore thin.

Tommy and I are still good friends and he makes an effort to call me whenever he’s in town. I grimly told myself that, this time, I’d make an effort. My life had become comfortable with Jay, knowing that he was in the same city, in the same neighbourhood, always there to talk to. Comfortable was good. Comfortable was, well, comforting. I was thirty-four years old, which was practically a spinster by some standards. Not that my aim in life had ever been to catch me a man and marry him. Admittedly, my first stab at marriage had turned out pretty pathetically, but with Jay I felt that we might have a chance for a life together.

My reflection in the car window made me feel sick. Sick at the sight of my morbid face, looking like a dejected puppy. Suck it up girl, I mentally yelled at myself. Get on with it. Self-pity had never been one of my strong suits so I physically pulled myself together, and loaded myself into Jay’s jet-black Saab. Jay had generously offered me the use of his precious vehicle and I jumped at the chance to drive something that wasn’t on the verge of breaking down and that actually had door locks that worked.

Monday morning found me full of dread, if that’s still an expression used in the English language, sitting at my new desk. Cleveland Johnston was due to arrive any minute and I was still working on something cute and sassy to say to him.

Our histories together went way back and it seemed that I had known Cleve most of my professional life. He was a junior associate lawyer and I was a legal secretary at Scapelli’s when we first met. Over the years Cleve gained the experience to make partner and eventually head-up their securities practice. I remained a legal secretary/paralegal. Sure, I had the fancy moniker of corporate securities paralegal, but my job remained the same. Herding the lawyers, supervising the support staff, making things happen. I had a mid-life crisis in my late twenties and quit the law firm and worked temp until I landed at TechniGroup Consulting, a high-tech, public company.

Harold Didrickson, who was the Senior Vice-President, Legal at TGC had hired me to help him set up the legal department when the business was booming. He had retained Scapelli’s to do our corporate and securities work and Cleve Johnston headed up the team at Scapelli’s, so we had remained in contact.

The shit hit the fan at TechniGroup Consulting when my best friend Evelyn was murdered, and Jay was fired because the chief financial officer, Rick Cox, thought Jay had something to do with it. I was privy to certain information that pretty conclusively fingered Rick Cox and when he was eventually fired, the corporate bullshit press release said that he was
resigning
. Number one rule when dealing with the press: an executive is always allowed to maintain a certain decorum when murder and mayhem happen in the high tech world. In the meantime though the fact remained that Jay had lost his job. When I asked Cleve to help Jay keep his job because the board of directors knew Rick Cox was responsible, he played lawyer with me and stood by the company’s statement that Rick Cox was resigning to pursue other interests. Much yelling and breast-beating ensued, albeit one-sided. Cleve remained the consummate professional and listened calmly to my tirade but I ended up slamming down the phone on him. A few days later he had tried in a backhanded way to apologize but I cut him off, making some typically snide comment about friendship. My mother repeatedly tells me that my smart mouth will get me nowhere, but for some odd reason, I continue to ignore her.

Needless to say, the situation was about to become awkward. I had neither spoken to nor seen Cleve in several months and I believe some people would get great joy out of seeing the beads of sweat that had broken out all over my body.

“What goes around, comes around” was another of my mother’s favourite sayings and when I heard Cleve’s voice several offices down the hall, I knew that
it
was about to come around. I shook all thoughts of my mother from my head and put my head down and pretended to be busy.

“And this is your office and of course, you know your assistant, Kathleen Monahan,” I heard Linda saying. I sucked in a deep breath and pushed my steno chair away from the desk and stood up. Cleveland Johnston stood there, towering over Linda and grinning at me. Kind of a Cheshire cat grin. I stared up at all six feet, five inches of him and grinned back.

“I’ll leave you two then,” Linda said. “Kate’s been here long enough to be able to show you the ropes. Kate, call me if there’s anything you two need.”

Cleve silently gestured at the open door to his office, inviting me to lead the way. I heard the door close behind me and I turned around and looked up at him. The silence was deafening and the sweat on my upper lip was probably very visible. I surreptitiously wiped at it and said, “So, how many of the lawyers you met today were shocked to meet a white guy?”

He laughed. “All of the guys I’d met at the partners’ dinner the other night figured it out quickly enough but a few of the associates I was introduced to this morning were surprised to find out that the skin colour didn’t go with the name.” People were always surprised to find out that Cleveland Johnston was a very tall, white man. A very tall, handsome, some would say gorgeous, white man. But I was somewhat biased, having suffered a massive crush on him, way back when.

Cleve walked over to his desk, plunked his large legal briefcase down and snapped open the two locks. He reached inside and pulled out two champagne glasses that were wrapped in navy blue, linen napkins. His massive fingers gently unfurled the napkins and he placed the glasses gingerly on the desktop. He then flourished a champagne bottle and began working the cork, all the time staring at me with a stern look. When the cork blew out of the bottle and missed the side of my head by inches, he smiled widely and ceremoniously poured champagne into two glasses. He held one out to me and I took a few steps towards him to accept the glass.

“To new beginnings, Kate.” He held his glass up and toasted me.

“To new beginnings,” I repeated. I took a sip and knew that no apologies were going to be necessary.

chapter three

Our first week working together at McCallum & Watts was uneventful. Much time was spent doing up the paperwork for Cleve’s clients at Scapelli’s to have their files transferred to his new law firm. I think Cleve was proud of the fact that about three-quarters of his clients chose to follow him to McCallum & Watts. The twenty-five percent of his clients who refused to make the change were mostly those whose families had used the services of Scapelli’s since the birth of their great-grandfathers.

And of course, the one client’s name who popped out and slapped my heart was Phoenix Technologies, Inc. I had worked on the file at Scapelli’s when Phoenix first went public and I remembered the frantic pace at the time. We all worked long hours, especially when the prospectus for the initial public offering of their shares was being finalized. There were all-night sessions at the commercial printers, proofreading the document as changes were being made. I shook my head in amazement thinking about how
driven
we all were. There were several nights when we finished at the office around two in the morning and then went out to an all-night diner for something to eat. When we were finished there would be a string of limousines parked out front to chauffeur us home. Several times it was so late that I just had the driver wait while I showered and went straight back to the office. Being part of the excitement, part of the team, was what kept me going. And my desire to be around Tommy, the young president of Phoenix.

In between the time of filing the preliminary prospectus with the Ontario Securities Commission and the Securities & Exchange Commission in the U.S., and the countdown to filing the final prospectus, I went on the road with the executives from Phoenix and the underwriters while they sold the stock. I looked after the travel and meeting arrangements as they criss-crossed the country. The frenetic pace, and spending almost twenty-four hours a day with Tommy, led to the inevitable.

At the closing of the public issue, when the lawyers were manhandling all of the documents and the underwriters were breathlessly waiting to hand over their check, Tommy had sidled up to me and whispered a proposal in my ear. Our marriage lasted a couple of months but the friendship remained to this day. The last time I had heard from Tommy was a couple of months ago when my face was plastered all over the national news. He told me the picture of me being helped into an ambulance had sent waves of panic through him, but I had brushed off his concern. He had left me a couple of messages after that but I hadn’t returned his calls. In hindsight, I wished I had.