I Cleaned Their Offices for 20 Years. At the Christmas Party, I Fired the CEO.
Part 2: The Yellow Paper
Three weeks earlier, at three in the morning, Hannah sat across from me at my kitchen table in her pajamas and a coat, holding the piece of yellow paper by the corner like it was a live wire.
“Mom.”
“I know.”
“Mom. Where did you get this.”
“His trash can.”
She closed her eyes. “You took something out of his trash.”
“It was on top. It wasn’t sealed. It wasn’t in a shredder. He threw it away.”
“That is not the point.”
“Hannah.”
She opened her eyes.
“Is it what I think it is.”
She looked at the paper again. She read it three times. I watched her mouth move.
“It might be,” she said finally. “Or it might be nothing. Or it might be him moving his own money for a completely legitimate reason and I don’t know enough about his business to say.”
“He has a client trust folder in a locked drawer with Marlene Voss’s name on it.”
“Mom.”
“What.”
“How do you know what’s in his locked drawer.”
I looked at her. She looked at me.
“He forgets to lock it,” I said.
“Oh my god.”
“I don’t take things. I’ve never taken anything. But sometimes I see.”
She put her head in her hands.
“Hannah, I know I shouldn’t have. I know. But I’ve been cleaning that office for twenty years and I have watched him get richer and I have watched his clients, who I have also cleaned up after, and some of them are old, Hannah, they are old people who trust him, and if he is doing what I think he’s doing.”
“Stop.”
I stopped.
She sat there for a long time. She read the paper again.
Then she said, “I need to make a phone call in the morning. Not from my firm. I have a friend from law school. She works for the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Northern District. I’m going to ask her a hypothetical.”
“Okay.”
“Mom.” She reached across the table and took my hand. “You have to promise me something. You have to keep going to work like nothing is different. You cannot let him see you looking at him differently. You cannot skip a single night. You cannot touch anything in that office that you don’t touch every other night. Do you understand me?”
“Yes.”
“If he even thinks you know, this whole thing goes away and he probably fires you and I don’t know what else.”
“I understand.”
She squeezed my hand.
“You did the right thing calling me,” she said. “But now you have to be the invisible woman for three more weeks. Can you do that?”
I laughed, actually laughed, for the first time in a while.
“Hannah,” I said. “I’ve been the invisible woman on the 34th floor for twenty years. Three more weeks is nothing.”
Hannah’s friend from law school was named Priya Ramaswamy. I met her once, at a coffee shop three days later. Hannah brought her. Priya was small and quick and looked at me like she was mapping the inside of my head.
“Mrs. Kowalski,” she said.
“Rina.”
“Rina. Hannah has told me what you saw. I need you to understand something. I cannot use anything you took from that office. If you took the paper out of the building, it is not evidence. It is worse than not evidence. It could poison the whole case.”
I nodded.
“But,” she said, “I can use what you know.”
“Okay.”
“Do you know where he keeps things. Not for me to take. For someone with a warrant to know where to look, on the night we serve it.”
“Yes.”
“Would you be willing to make a diagram.”
“Yes.”
“Would you also be willing,” she said, and here she paused and looked at Hannah, and Hannah nodded, and Priya looked back at me, “to keep your eyes and ears open, in the ordinary course of your job, for the next three weeks. Nothing you wouldn’t normally see. Nothing you wouldn’t normally hear. Just, don’t tune it out anymore.”
I thought about that.
For twenty years, I had trained myself to tune it out. To not hear the phone calls. To not read the papers on the desk. To not notice the folders in the drawers. Because if you notice, you have to decide what to do, and I had a daughter to raise and rent to pay and no husband, and the only thing I could afford to do was clean and go home.
“Yes,” I said. “I can do that.”
For the next three weeks, I heard everything.
I heard Daniel Prescott on the phone with a man he called Teddy, about wiring three million dollars through an entity called Prescott Legacy Partners. I heard him tell his CFO, a nervous man named Greg Halsted, that the December statements to the Voss family trust needed to show a balance that Greg said, out loud, “isn’t actually there anymore.”
I heard him laugh about an old woman named Eleanor Voss, Marlene’s mother-in-law, who was in a memory care facility in Shaker Heights and who had signed a power of attorney over to her son eight years ago. Marlene was married to the son. The son had died two years ago of a heart attack. Marlene had inherited the POA, or claimed she had, and now Marlene and Daniel Prescott were, as Daniel put it on a phone call I heard on a Wednesday night through the crack of his door, “sitting on top of a very generous old lady who doesn’t know what year it is.”
I wrote it all down when I got home. Times, dates, exact phrases. I gave the notes to Hannah. Hannah gave them to Priya.
Priya said, “Rina, you are a witness. You are going to be a very good witness.”
The night before the Christmas party, Priya called me.
“We’re going to serve the warrants tomorrow night,” she said. “At the party. In front of everyone.”
“Why in front of everyone.”
“Because he has a private jet. And a house in the Caymans. And if we serve him at his office on a Monday morning, he will be on that jet by lunch. But he cannot skip his own Christmas party. His entire client base is there. He has to smile and shake hands until at least ten p.m.”
“Okay.”
“Rina. You do not have to be there. You can stay home. This is going to happen with or without you in the room.”
I thought about that.
I thought about twenty years of walking past his desk. I thought about Eleanor Voss in a memory care facility. I thought about my husband, who had worked construction his whole life and who trusted his union pension to men in suits he never met, and who had died before he got to spend a dollar of it.
“Priya,” I said. “I want to be there.”
“Then be there.”
“Can I say something to him.”
There was a pause.
“Before we take him out?”
“Yes.”
Another pause.
“Rina,” she said, “I can’t stop you from attending a party you were technically scheduled to work. And I can’t stop you from speaking to a man in a public lobby. What I can do is make sure our agents don’t come through the door until you have said whatever it is you need to say.”
“Thank you.”
“Rina.”
“Yes.”
“What are you going to say to him.”
I looked at my reflection in the dark kitchen window. Fifty-one years old. A widow. A mother. A janitor.
“I don’t know yet,” I said. “I’ll know when I see him.”