I Cleaned Their Offices for 20 Years. At the Christmas Party, I Fired the CEO.

Part 3: What the Lawyers Wanted

The letter came on January 8th, on Halberd & Cross letterhead, which felt like a joke. Marcus Halberd was in a federal holding facility in Leavenworth, and someone at his old firm was still using the good stationery to threaten me.

The letter said I had violated the confidentiality agreement I signed in 2004, which I did not remember signing but presumably had. It said I had improperly removed proprietary documents. It said Halberd & Cross was considering a civil action against me for damages “commensurate with the harm caused to the firm’s reputation and standing.”

The number they floated was two point four million dollars.

I read the letter twice, folded it, and put it on the kitchen table. Then I called Emma.

Emma said don’t panic. Emma said this is a bluff. Emma said the firm was under receivership, the partners were fighting each other for scraps, and someone was trying to establish that I was a rogue actor so their insurance would cover more of the losses. Emma said we needed a lawyer, but not a scary one. A boring one.

The boring lawyer was named Peter Halston, sixty-eight years old, small office off Metcalf, referred by Emma’s friend from law school. He wore a cardigan to our first meeting. He read the letter, took his glasses off, and laughed once.

“They’re not going to sue you, Mrs. Kowalski.”

“Diane.”

“Diane. They’re not going to sue you. If they sue you, you get a deposition. If you get a deposition, you get to describe, under oath, every document you ever saw in that building for twenty years. They do not want that. This letter is theater. It’s for their insurance carrier.”

“So I don’t do anything.”

“You send a two-line response that says you decline the invitation to settle and refer them to counsel. Which is me.” He wrote his name on a card. “And then you go about your life.”

I went about my life.

Which was harder than it sounds.

The first three weeks of January, I did not have a job. I hadn’t formally quit and Halberd & Cross had not formally fired me, and the cleaning company that contracted me out, ServiClean, was in a state of institutional confusion about what to do with me because I’d been in the news, briefly, as “the janitor whose evidence brought down Halberd & Cross,” which the Kansas City Star had run on a Tuesday.

Sheila from facilities called me. Not from a Halberd number. From her cell.

“Diane. Honey. I don’t know what I’m supposed to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything.”

“I just wanted you to know that I never, I mean, I hope you know I never treated you like.”

She trailed off. I let her.

“I know, Sheila.”

“Are you okay for money.”

That was a real question. I appreciated it. Most people didn’t ask.

“I’m okay for now.”

“Okay. Okay, honey.”

She hung up. I sat at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee that had gone cold two hours ago, and I looked around my kitchen. Rick and I bought this house in 1988. The linoleum was original. The cabinets were original. The dishwasher was from 2003 and made a noise like a small animal.

I had thirty-one thousand dollars in savings. I had a paid-off house. I had Social Security starting in ten months, and a small pension from a job I’d had at a bank in the eighties before I had Emma. I was going to be fine. I was not going to be comfortable, but I was going to be fine.

Then the second letter came.

This one was from a firm in New York I had never heard of. It was on much better stationery than Halberd & Cross had ever used. It said it represented a coalition of former Halberd & Cross clients, a class of investors who had lost money in the funds Marcus had cooked, and it asked whether I would be willing to speak with them.

I called Peter Halston. Peter Halston said interesting.

Two days later he called me back.

“Diane. The lead plaintiff in that suit is a pension fund. Retired firefighters, mostly, from a district in Ohio. They lost forty-one million dollars in the Halberd Diversified Growth Fund. Their attorneys are asking if you would be a fact witness in the civil case. There’s a whistleblower provision under Dodd-Frank. If your evidence contributes to a recovery, and it will, there’s a statutory percentage.”

“A percentage of what.”

“Of what they recover.”

“How much is that.”

He paused. I could hear him tapping a pen.

“I don’t want to speculate. But the SEC has already frozen assets north of three hundred million. And that’s just the assets they can find. The civil recovery is going to be substantially larger. The whistleblower award on the SEC side alone is going to be, conservatively, seven figures.”

I didn’t say anything for a long time.

“Diane.”

“I’m here.”

“I know this is a lot.”

“Peter.”

“Yes.”

“I took a piece of paper out of a printer in 2019.”

“I know.”

“And now you’re telling me that piece of paper is worth a million dollars.”

“I’m telling you that piece of paper, and every other piece of paper you kept, and your willingness to testify to what you saw for twenty years, is worth a great deal. Yes.”

I hung up. I did not mean to hang up. My hand just did it.

Emma came over that Saturday. I told her. She sat at the kitchen table where I had spread out both letters, and the SEC subpoena from November, and a bank statement, and she read them all in order and then she looked at me.

“Mom.”

“I don’t want it.”

“What.”

“I don’t want the money.”

She was very quiet.

“Okay.”

“I want, I want them to give it to the firefighters.”

“Mom, the firefighters are the ones who are giving it to you. The whistleblower award is separate. It’s a percentage. It’s, it’s how the law works. It’s designed to.”

“I know how it’s designed.”

“Then.”

“I did not do this for money.”

“I know you didn’t.”

“I did it because he called me Marta.”

She looked at me and she did not say anything and after a minute her eyes filled up and she wiped them with the back of her hand the way she used to when she was nine and did not want me to see.

“Mom.”

“I know it sounds small.”

“It doesn’t sound small.”

“I don’t want a check with his name on it.”

She nodded. She kept nodding. She reached across the table and took my hand.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. But Mom. Take the check. And then decide what to do with it. Don’t decide before you have it.”

I did not agree. But I did not disagree either.

That night I couldn’t sleep. I got up at 2 a.m. and I stood in the kitchen in my bathrobe and I looked at the letter from New York on the table, and I thought about the third drawer of Vanessa in HR, the one that jams. I thought about Karen’s Tito’s behind the accordion files. I thought about the shredder on fourteen, and the page that got stuck behind the paper tray, and all the pages before it and after it that I had thrown away without reading.

I thought about a woman named Marta, whoever she was, who had presumably cleaned that office before I did. Marcus had gotten her name wrong too, most likely. Or maybe he had gotten it right and she was the only one he’d bothered to learn, and after she left he never bothered again.

I thought I should find her.

I didn’t know why. I just thought it.