Richard waited until Emma had finished checking the packaging before he asked if David could spare a few minutes upstairs. "I won't keep you long," he promised. "There are some things I need to understand, and I would rather ask you than make assumptions." David looked down at his watch and then at the bag in his hand. "Evelyn thinks I'm checking on an office," he replied. "You can have fifteen minutes before she starts wondering why the office requires this much secrecy."
They walked into the lobby together, passing Theo near the security desk. David stopped to thank him for handling the disturbance without using force or treating the manager's anger as proof that anyone was dangerous. Theo looked briefly uncomfortable with the praise. "I just asked what was happening, sir," he said. "It didn't seem right to take somebody out for trying to pay."
"You would be surprised how much good comes from asking one more question," David told him. He did not mention that the entire afternoon might have ended differently had the guard accepted Victor's story without looking at the facts. Theo simply nodded and returned to his post, but the conversation stayed with him long after David had gone upstairs.
On the elevator, Richard kept glancing at the shopping bag. "Is it for Evelyn?" he finally asked. David's face changed at once, the tension easing into something almost boyish. "Tomorrow makes forty years," he said. "I found something she's been missing longer than she'll admit. Or rather, something that reminds me of what I owe her."
Richard smiled. He had known Evelyn for more than twenty years and thought of her as the steady hand behind many of the company's best decisions. She had never been particularly impressed by Richard's job title, either. Once, when he showed her an elegant brochure about a new property acquisition, she asked how the night cleaning staff would get to work after the last bus stopped running, and the brochure suddenly seemed much less complete.
"She'll love it," Richard said. "Though she'll probably tell you it was too expensive." David chuckled. "I am counting on that. If she didn't complain about the price, I'd worry she'd been replaced by an impostor."
The warmth faded when Richard's office door closed behind them. His assistant offered coffee, which David declined, preferring to remain standing near a large window overlooking the avenue. He could see Bellweather's entrance far below, and several people were walking past it without any idea what had happened inside. The view reminded him how easy it was to mistake a good location and an elegant storefront for evidence that a business was well run.
"Tell me how Victor got to the point where he thought that was acceptable," David said. He did not ask it like an owner demanding immediate punishment. He asked it like a mechanic examining a failed piece of equipment, knowing that replacing one damaged part would not necessarily repair the cause of the failure. "What did he learn in our company that made him comfortable doing that?"