Chapter 3 - A Cold Bed in the Gold Coast
|
Back inside the Grand Ballroom of the Palmer House, the party had died within five minutes of Evelyn’s departure.
No one wanted to drink champagne around a crystal glass holding a discarded five-carat wedding ring. One by one, the syndicate captains, the union bosses, and the state senators offered stiff, awkward excuses and filed out the doors—leaving Arthur Sterling standing near the empty orchestra stage with Valerie clinging to his arm like a drowning cat.
For the first time in twenty years, Arthur felt a cold draft of unease beneath his tailored tuxedo.
He had expected Evelyn to be furious when the truth eventually came out—he had expected tears behind closed doors at the Lake Forest mansion, maybe a week of sleeping in the guest wing before he smoothed things over with an expensive bracelet and a promise to end the fling. He had never authorized Valerie to crash the anniversary gala, and he certainly hadn't expected Valerie to slap his wife in front of Julian, Damon, and Lucas.
"Let go of my arm, Valerie," Arthur snapped once the room was empty except for the banquet bussers clearing the tables. "What the hell possessed you to walk in here tonight and lay a hand on Evelyn?!"
Valerie’s lower lip jutted out, her dark eyes flashing with greedy impatience. "You kept saying 'after the holidays, after the Commission vote,' Arthur! Meanwhile I had to watch your pathetic old wife post pictures of the gala arrangements all week like she owns you! You promised me the Astor Street penthouse closes tomorrow morning—and tonight you finally had to choose in front of everyone! Look at it this way: she saved you the trouble of asking for a divorce!"
Arthur stared at the twenty-six-year-old woman beside him. Under the harsh overhead cleanup lights of the ballroom, the scarlet dress suddenly looked cheap, and her shrill voice grated against his temples like broken glass.
He thought of Evelyn’s quiet, lethal dignity as she dropped her ring into the champagne flute. For thirty-two years, Evelyn had never once raised her voice to him in public. Whenever crisis hit—when the feds indicted him in '04, when the Russians ambushed his convoy in '12—Evelyn had been the rock-solid fortress behind his back.
"Wait in the car," Arthur muttered darkly, walking over to the champagne table and fishing Evelyn’s emerald-cut diamond ring out of the flat champagne, sliding it into his pocket. "I’ll deal with Evelyn in the morning once she cools down."
When Arthur and Valerie walked down to the Palmer House valet ramp at midnight, the first crack in his empire appeared.
His personal armored Cadillac Escalade wasn't there. His two bodyguards—men who had stood outside his door for eight years—were gone. Even his driver was nowhere in sight.
"Where is Marko?" Arthur barked at the hotel valet captain, pulling out his phone to dial his security chief—and getting a disconnected number tone on the corporate dispatch line.
"Mr. Damon Sterling came through thirty minutes ago, sir," the valet captain said nervously, avoiding Arthur’s eyes. "He took the entire security fleet and the drivers back to the North Shore compound. He said... he said to tell you Uber runs until two a.m."
Valerie gasped in outrage. "Your own son took our car?!"
"Shut up," Arthur snarled, his face flushing dark crimson with humiliation as he was forced to hail a yellow street cab in the freezing snow with a woman in a slit evening gown.
They spent the night at the Four Seasons on Michigan Avenue—charged to Arthur’s personal wallet visa because his corporate black card mysteriously returned a TERMINAL ERROR at the front desk, which the night manager politely chalked up to a midnight system update.
At 9:30 the next morning, Valerie woke up giddy, throwing on a white fur coat over a designer dress to head four blocks north to the Gold Coast real estate brokerage on Rush Street for the ten-o’clock closing on her four-million-dollar Astor Street penthouse.
"Come on, baby!" Valerie purred, tugging on Arthur’s sleeve as he nursed a pounding scotch headache and tried for the fourth time to get Evelyn or Julian to answer their phones. "Once we sign the deed on Astor Street this morning, I have an interior decorator from Paris meeting us at eleven!"
Wanting to get the closing over with so he could drive up to Lake Forest and bring Evelyn and the boys back in line before the afternoon syndicate meeting, Arthur rode with Valerie to the sleek glass offices of Vance & Sotheby Luxury Realty.
Inside the glass conference room on the tenth floor, the listing broker—a haughty woman in Chanel named Victoria—was waiting beside a stack of closing documents, looking unusually pale.
"Right on time!" Valerie beamed, dropping into the leather chair at the head of the table and picking up a gold pen. "Give me the deed—I’ve been waiting a month for those terrace keys!"
Victoria didn't hand over the keys. Instead, she slid a printed red wire-rejection notice across the glass toward Arthur.
"I'm afraid there won't be a closing this morning, Mr. Sterling," Victoria said stiffly. "At eight o’clock sharp, Chicago Private Bank notified our escrow attorney that the three-point-five-million-dollar balance wire from Sterling Global Holdings was cancelled by the Chairman of the Board—and a legal clawback demand was placed on your five-hundred-thousand-dollar deposit as 'unauthorized misappropriation of marital trust assets.'"
Arthur froze in his chair. "Cancelled by the Chairman?! I am the Chairman!"
May you like
Before Victoria could reply, the conference room doors swung open, and Julian Sterling walked in wearing a razor-sharp $8,000 charcoal overcoat, flanked by two corporate attorneys and four of the very bodyguards who had vanished from Arthur’s detail the night before.
"Good morning, Dad," Julian said pleasantly, pulling out a chair across from a gaping Valerie and laying a thick, blue-bound corporate resolution on the table. "Actually, as of 8:01 AM, you’re a retired minority shareholder with zero signatory authority."
