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An hour later, Trudy came in with my mail. “How’d your meeting go?”
“Huh? What meeting?” I asked, looking up from the reports I was reviewing.
“With the front desk girl.”
There was an undeniable smirk on her face.
“She had a question.” I took the stack of mail she’d opened. “Thanks for the mail, Trudy.”
She rolled her eyes and shut the door as she left.
A strange invoice caught my attention. On close examination, I saw it was a bill for fifteen thousand dollars from a law firm I’d never heard of called Levin, Ross. It said:
Services rendered for dissolution of HWE Enterprises
What?
Dissolution of HWE…?
The partnership of Harcourt, Wooten, and Evershire…?
My business partners were dissolving our partnership…?
What. The. Fuck.
I dialed the number on the invoice.
“Levin, Ross. Pam speaking. You’ve reached accounting.” A keyboard clicked in the background.
“Hello Pam. This is Brodie Harcourt from HWE Enterprises. I just received an invoice from your firm that I need some more information about.”
More typing.
“Certainly, Mr. Harcourt. Let me pull up your account right now. HWE Enterprises did you say? Here we go. Looks like you met with one our attorneys from our business law practice, about…here it is, a month ago.”
“Are you sure? Could you check?”
“Of course. Let me dig in deeper.”
More clicking on the keyboard. “Oh, I see what happened here. The meeting was with Mr. Steven Evershire and Mr. Hardy Wooten. I see your name is here on the partnership documents. I guess that’s why the invoice ended up with you. Should we have sent the bill to a different address, Mr. Harcourt?”
“No, not at all. I just, um, needed my memory jogged. Thank you for the info.”
Unbelievable.
Steve and Hardy had engaged a law firm. Without me. About the dissolution of our partnership. The one I busted my ass for, day in and day out.
The one I built the best hotel in New York for.
No wonder they wouldn’t talk to me about expanding to the West Coast.
They were trying to get rid of me.
* * *
I dialed my attorney, the one who’d represented me when everything went south with my father. His secretary knew me and sensed the urgency of my tone, and patched me right through.
“Brodie! Good to hear from you,” my attorney said.
“Joe, I need to ask you something,” I said.
“Sure, let me have it.”
I took a deep breath and described the invoice and my call to Levin, Ross.
“Well. Sounds like you stumbled into some shit. Here’s what it it looks like to me. If you each own thirty-three percent of the company, the other two owners can band together and either offer to buy you out or dissolve the company, and then immediately create a new one you are not part of. They can’t take away your shares, but they can take away your job.”
“Holy shit. Now that I’ve got the hotel on solid footing, the fuckers want me out,” I said.
It was true, my dad screwed these guys over royally. I wasn’t proud of it. But I’d been working my tail off to pay them back and then some.
“Brodie, do you want me to reach out to their attorney to see what’s going on?” he asked.
“Not yet, Joe. Not yet. I’m gonna think on this for now. Figure out my next move.”
He was silent for a moment. “All right, my friend. Keep me posted. And don’t do anything without speaking to me first. Please.”
