I Take You by Eliza Kennedy Read Free Book Online

Philip. But do you think maybe you could clue me in a little bit, so that this deposition isn’t a complete disaster?”
    “Fine.” I hear his chair creak as he leans back. “Where do you want to start?”
    “Explain why the plaintiffs want to depose an accountant in a lawsuit about an oil spill.”
    “Oil spill,” Lyle repeats. “I’m not familiar with that term. Perhaps you’re referring to the alleged industrial accident on an offshore oil rig that allegedly caused the dispersal of certain quantities of unrefined petroleum into the Gulf of Mexico?”
    “Whatever, Lyle. The rig exploded, millions of barrels of oil spewed into the Gulf, and plaintiffs are suing EnerGreen on behalf of all the people whose lives were ruined by this colossal fuckup.”
    “Alleged colossal fuckup,” he says.
    “Where does the accounting come in?”
    I hear muffled voices. “No,” Lyle says. “I said double-sided. This isuseless to me. Do it over.” Back to me: “So, after the
alleged
incident, our client, EnerGreen Energy, took a big hit on its financial statements, based on losses it anticipated from the spill.”
    “Compensation to the victims, fines, et cetera, right? It was fifty billion or something insane like that.” I get up and carry the binder out onto the balcony, where I drop into a chair.
    “Right,” Lyle replies. “But according to the amended complaint filed last month, EnerGreen allegedly inflated that figure to hide losses suffered in another part of the company. The plaintiffs are now claiming that EnerGreen exploited a horrific environmental disaster to conceal unrelated wrongdoing.”
    I’d read those new allegations, but assumed it was all a bunch of empty rhetoric to make EnerGreen sound worse than it is. “Do they have any proof?”
    “Solid proof?” Lyle says. “No. But there are discrepancies in EnerGreen’s financial statements that seem to support the plaintiffs’ argument.”
    “What discrepancies?”
    “It’s some technical accounting thing,” he says dismissively. “Urs says the finance people can easily explain it. But it looks shady, which is all the plaintiffs care about.”
    I prop my feet up on the railing and look out at the water. There’s a fishing boat anchored close to shore, and a man standing in the bow casting for bait. With one long, graceful sweep of his arm, he sends the net spinning lightly onto the waves. Seagulls circle hungrily. Thirty yards out, the turquoise water turns darker where the ocean floor drops away.
    “So what’s Hoffman’s role in all this?” I ask.
    “He reviewed EnerGreen’s financial statements before they went to the outside auditors. He’s the person who would be responsible for catching any mistakes or shifty accounting tricks.” Lyle pauses. “‘Midlevel CPA nobody’ is his official title. But as you’ve seen, he also holds the unofficial post of immortal poet of the golden age of e-mail.”
    I open the binder and read Hoffman’s first e-mail out loud:
    From a financial reporting perspective, this oil spill is the best goddamn thing that ever happened to us.
    “Gives me shivers,” Lyle says. “Every time.”
    I turn to the second e-mail:
    I’ll give these loss estimates a good old scrub-a-dub before they go to Ernst & Young. It’s kind of a scam, but who’s going to notice?
    “It’s kind of a scam,” Lyle repeats dreamily. “Not a full-blown scam, not a big scam, or a little scam, but …
kind of
a scam. The ambiguity is thrilling.”
    “So are the plaintiffs right? Did EnerGreen commit fraud?”
    “Come on, Wilder,” he says impatiently. “You know how this works. Some idiot dashes off a terrible e-mail, and random plaintiffs take it completely out of context to show that the whole company is a massive criminal enterprise. Hoffman’s an idiot. A drudge. He doesn’t know anything.”
    “Good.”
    “But EnerGreen still doesn’t want him testifying about the e-mails. If there’s the slightest suspicion that