Chapter 18: The Pool Winner

The group named on the email stood in the middle of the lobby with their coats half on.

Nobody had told them to leave yet, so none of them had.

Imogen came down the staircase from the mezzanine in her camel coat, with a security guard on each side of her.

"Please collect your things and go quietly," she said. "I'm sorry. It's policy."

"Whose policy?" Vicki said.

"The company's."

"The company has a policy against being a witness to a woman telling the Tribune about her own coworker's marriage?"

A few people laughed, thinly.

Imogen kept smiling.

"Escort them out, please."

The guards took a step forward.

Then the man from floor nine who ran the pool stepped out of the crowd.

I knew him by sight, a thin man with a lanyard and an unlucky mustache.

He had put twenty dollars on the baby's father being a married man.

He was holding a folded slip of yellow paper in one hand and a bank envelope in the other.

"No," he said. "Before anybody goes anywhere, I have something to say."

"Please sit down," Imogen said.

"Three weeks ago she handed me five hundred dollars." He held up the envelope. "She said it was for a floor-nine morale fund."

The lobby had gone quiet again.

"Then she said it would be funnier if the pot was on who the baby's father was."

He swallowed.

"She said Avery had it coming, for climbing up the building in eight months."

"That's a lie," Imogen said.

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