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CHAPTER thirty-three

  It was quiet in the legal department area when I got to my office. Everyone was probably still in traffic coming back from the funeral. So, I took the opportunity to check my voice mail. My friend, the voice mail lady, told me I had six new voice messages, one of which was urgent. Probably Harold, I thought. You could send someone a message and tag it urgent and the computer voice would intone, "Message Three is URGENT."

  Everything was urgent in Harold’s book. And then I remembered I hadn’t listened to my messages last night after Jay told me that Harold wanted me to. I scrolled through the messages and got the urgent one. As I suspected, it was from Harold.

  "Kate, this is Harold. We’ve received the list from the other side. I’ll leave it in my basket. I’d appreciate it if you could start getting the documents together that they want as soon as possible." Click.

  "Oh Harold," I said out loud into the receiver, "you forgot to say thank you."

  I got the keys to his office from my desk and retrieved the dreaded list. The letterhead was that of a well-established law firm who were renowned as the masters of the take-over bid. Scapelli’s often competed with them for business. As counsel to TechniGroup, Cleveland Johnson was probably rubbing his hands together, salivating at all the work about to come his way. Well, I thought, the miserable shit can rub his hands together all he wants. If we get taken-over, his firm will lose our business to the Bay Street firm who were representing the company about to bid on us. Put that one in your pipe and smoke it Cleve. Ah, what goes around, comes around, I chanted. I was still mad at Cleve and was being bitchy.

  The list of what they wanted to look at was a long one. The total document was ten pages long and Harold had marked all over it. Harold had put a check mark beside most items but others had NO WAY written in capital letters beside them. I guessed that the other firm was on a fishing expedition and until they made us an offer, we weren’t going to show them our panties until they showed us their's. The time to lift our kilts would be after we had a firm commitment of an offer in hand.

  I sighed as I sat down at my desk. It was eleven-thirty and I planned on being out of the office by five-thirty. I lit a cigarette and started going through the list. Most of the documents they wanted existed, but it was going to take some time getting it all together. I wondered how much time I had.

  I flipped to the last page of the document and saw that the lawyer who wrote the letter had indicated in the penultimate paragraph that he expected the documents by close of business next Monday. If that was going to pose a problem, blah, blah, blah. No problem, I thought. I’d gotten a good head start yesterday morning when Harold was decent enough to give me a head’s up.

  Some of the items would be trickier than others, though. The ones that stuck out immediately were the requests for information covering the last three years on stock option grants and the employee stock purchase plan. Not my responsibility, I thought. Harold had written "Finance" beside several of the items meaning that the finance department would be responsible for those items. Lists of customers. Accounts receivable. I wrote "Finance" beside the requests for information on the options and the stock purchase plan. They could whistle Dixie if they thought I was going to dig up all that shit. Evelyn, Jay and Rick were the keepers of that information. In a pinch and with the thumbscrews tightening, I could pull together the stock option stuff. But there was no way I could come up with the employee stock purchase plan information.

  I dug in the drawer of the file cabinet where I kept supplies and pulled out a new box of legal-size file folders. I marked 1(a) on the first one and inserted the copies of the annual reports I’d already retrieved the day before. I highlighted the item on the list with a yellow marker. I marked 1(b) on the next file folder and inserted the last five years’ proxy statements to shareholders. I checked that one off the list with the yellow highlighter.

  I continued going through the list and putting documents in files where I already had the information. I created several new documents on my computer for requests for things that didn’t already exist on paper. The lawyers wanted to know things like number of outstanding shares at certain dates, the names and dates of all companies we’d acquired over the last five years, the number of shares that had been paid to those companies as the purchase price. The list went on and on. By the time I was finished I had a pile of full file folders about a foot high on my desk. I went over the letter from the Bay Street lawyers again and saw that I was more than half way through.

  Jackie snuck her head around the door at that point and told me Harold wanted to see me.

  I stood at the open door to his office and waited while he talked into his Dictaphone. He finally noticed me standing there.

  "Kate, come in. " I gave him the marked up list from the lawyers.

  "Everything highlighted in yellow, I’ve done. I’ll need some input from you on the rest of things I’m responsible for. Whenever you’ve got a minute."

  "I’m impressed. Great job so far," he said. A rare compliment.

  He continued. "We’ll have to put that aside for a while though. The board meeting’s in the morning and his Royal Pain has finally focused on the agenda. Can you help me out here?" He handed me a stack of papers that had been lying in front of him. It was all the material for the director's meeting.

  "And, Kate. You do the books." We always put the director's materials in binders with tabs separating each item. "This stuff is really sensitive. And I’ll need them by five-thirty when I head over to the Toronto Club for the dinner. Oakes wants them to have the stuff to read overnight before the meeting in the morning."

  "They’ll be amazed. They’re actually going to see things before the meeting," I said. Harold grinned.

  "Maybe, just maybe, we’re finally getting things right after all these years," he said.

  "Let’s not hold our breath. Oakes hasn’t signed off on all of this yet." Chris always had to see the final product and nine times out of ten, he made more changes.

  "Not this time. He’s out at some meeting and said to let the stuff go. So. Go for it," Harold said.

  "No way," I laughed. "Three whole hours? I get three hours to do a proper job? Now I believe there is a God."

  I got up to leave and noticed that the location of the meeting had been changed from the last draft of the agenda that I had prepared. The original agenda had the office address as the location for the meeting but Harold had scratched that out and changed it to the Four Seasons Hotel.

  "Christ Harold. Could they have picked a location further from the office?" I asked him. "What’s wrong with our boardroom?"

  "Oakes is hiding. There’ve been press people hanging around since the news about the investigation into Evelyn’s death. He doesn’t want anyone to know about the board meeting. The Four Seasons is very hush-hush by the way."

  "I know, I know," I said over my shoulder.

  "And Kate. One more thing. As soon as you’re done with those books bring them in. I’ve got a meeting at four that I want you to participate in."

  I stopped and turned around. "With who?" I asked.

  "Detective Leech from the Police Department. He wants to talk to us about Evelyn."