Chapter 6 - The Anatomy of a Liquidation
The deposition took place on the fourteenth of January in a windowless hearing room on the eleventh floor of the John W. McCormack Post Office and Courthouse in Post Office Square.
The walls were that institutional, municipal green that seemed designed to remind the occupant that his personal dignity had been transferred to the custody of the United States government.
Cole sat across the laminate table.
He had lost fifteen pounds in twenty-one days. His skin had that dull, yellowish grey of men who live on institutional black coffee and pre-packaged sandwiches from the vending machines in the basement concourse. He wore a grey flannel suit that had belonged to his father in the late nineteen-eighties; the shoulders were three inches too broad, the lapels wide and dated, the cuffs frayed where the thread had caught on the metal arms of the waiting-room benches.
He did not have his platinum chronometer.
In its place was a thin white band of pale skin around his left wrist, looking like a surgical scar that had refused to tan.
Beside him sat his court-appointed attorney, a young woman named Miss Chen, who had three other detention hearings scheduled for two o'clock and kept her eye on the wall clock with nervous, twitching regularity.
Daniel Harris sat to my left, his black binder open, his fountain pen uncapped.
I sat in the center.
I was wearing a charcoal wool sweater, my hair pulled back into a simple tortoise clip, my hands resting open on the oak table. I wore no rings. Not my grandmother’s sapphire; not the small gold band Cole had placed on my finger in the church in Manchester.
"State your full name for the record," the court reporter said, her fingers poised over the grey keys of the Stenograph.
"Cole Alexander Sterling," he whispered.
"Louder, please," Miss Chen murmured, not looking at him.
"Cole Alexander Sterling."
Daniel turned the first page of the settlement schedule.
"Mr. Sterling," Daniel said, his voice flat, dry, and terrifyingly clear. "We are here to confirm the surrender of all claims against the Bennett Family Trust, the Highland Wharf Realty Trust, and the assets of Bennett-Sterling Capital Management."
Cole looked at me.
His eyes were bloodshot, the whites yellowed at the corners, his lower lip cracked by the winter radiator air of the YMCA on Huntington Avenue where he had been renting an eight-by-ten room since the second of January.
"Lauren," he said.
"Address your answers to counsel, Mr. Sterling," Miss Chen said instantly, her pen tapping the legal pad.
"Lauren, look at me," he choked out, his hands reaching two inches across the table before Miss Chen caught his elbow with a sharp, professional grip. "You can't let them take the grandfather’s house in Duxbury. That house has been in my family since nineteen-twenty-six. It has nothing to do with the firm. It’s six acres on the bay."
"The Duxbury property," Daniel said without looking up from his notes, "was pledged as secondary collateral on the seven-million-dollar credit line with State Street on October fourth. The mortgage was signed by you as sole guarantor. The bank took possession of the deed yesterday at noon."
"It was an escrow oversight!" Cole shouted, his voice cracking into that high, thin register that had frightened me for two years, but now sounded only like an old kettle whistling on an empty stove. "Julian promised he would substitute the municipal paper before the December audit! Ask Julian!"
"Mr. Vaughn," Daniel said, "is currently in federal custody at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, awaiting formal arraignment on twelve counts of interstate transportation of stolen securities. He is not currently available for consultations regarding real estate."
Cole’s head dropped.
His forehead touched the cold laminate of the table with a dull, hollow thump.
"I have nothing," he wept into the wood. "I have literally... I don't even have my winter boots, Lauren. The clerk at the storage unit wouldn't release my trunks without an eight-hundred-dollar handling fee. I’m wearing shoes I bought at the Goodwill on Harrison Avenue."
I looked at the top of his head.
I saw the small white scar near his crown where he had caught an oar handle during the Head of the Charles twenty years ago. I remembered how he had leaned over the kitchen island in our first apartment in Brookline, showing me that scar, telling me that he had rowed three miles with four broken ribs because an alderman from his home town had been watching from the bridge.
I had thought that was courage.
I had spent seven years learning that it was merely vanity with an athletic scholarship.
"Sign the documents, Cole," I said.
The sound of my voice made his shoulders jerk. He lifted his face, his cheeks wet, his nose red and running into the bristle of his four-day beard.
"If you sign," I said, "the estate will pay the arrears on your mother’s room at the assisted-living facility in Concord through the end of the fiscal year."
He blinked, his mouth working silently. "My mother?"
"She has eight hundred dollars left in her personal account, Cole," I told him, my voice as steady as the tide in the Essex marsh. "Her secondary health insurance was canceled on the first because the direct debit was linked to your corporate Centurion. If I don't sign the third-party guarantee this afternoon, the administrator will transfer her to the state wing at Tewksbury on Monday morning."
He stared at me with an expression that was no longer anger, no longer pride, but that pure, animal astonishment of a predator that has fallen into a stone pit and discovered that the sheep has brought the mortar.
"You’re paying for my mother?" he whispered.
"I am paying for her care," I said. "Because she is eighty-four years old, because she is blind in her right eye, and because she is not responsible for the fact that she raised a son who measures human life by the spread on a municipal yield."
I pushed the heavy gold pen across the table.
"Sign the surrender, Cole. And let the state have the rest."
He looked at the pen.
His hand shook so violently that the first two strokes of his signature were merely jagged, black lightning bolts across the red seal. But he signed.
Page four. Page eight. Page twelve.
When he reached the final sheet—the waiver of all parental rights and claims of custody regarding Noah and Lily Bennett—he hesitated for three seconds.
His thumb touched the line where my name had already been entered in black ink.
"Do they... do they ask for me?" he whispered.
"No, Cole," I said.
"They're only eight months old," he said, looking up with a pathetic, pleading hope that made my throat tighten with an ancient, dying pity. "They’ll remember the park. They’ll remember the pony at the farm."
"They will remember that they were safe," I told him. "And when they are old enough to read the public records in the courthouse, they will know that their mother didn't leave them in an empty house to freeze while she bought pearls on Newbury Street."
He dropped the pen.
It rolled across the table, fell over the edge, and clicked against the institutional linoleum floor.
May you like
Daniel picked it up, wiped the gold nib with his handkerchief, and closed his black binder with a final, leather-padded thud that echoed through the room like an iron door swinging shut in an old cellar.
"We’re done here, Miss Chen," Daniel said, standing up. "You can take your client back to the concourse."
