Work Text:
Things really start getting weird on the morning that Cynthia stalks into my office and slams the latest issue of Pink onto my desk.
“Did you see this?” she says, seething. I haven’t, as it happens, but she doesn’t wait for me to answer.
She pokes one fingernail at the cover. “Fucking Pendergrass and his nightmare nonprofit are being acknowledged for managing to drop their overhead to eight percent. Eight! It’s bad enough that their New York office has already leeched off at least seven small charities in the area that we know of, but to lie about it and use the exposure to find even more victims?”
I don’t get a chance to respond, because that’s when Justin barges in, waving a copy of the same magazine. “Have you seen this bullshit?”
It’s not even ten a.m. and the level of Angry Blond in the room is a little much for me right now, so I just nod at the copy that’s already on my desk. Justin looks at Cynthia and immediately launches into a tirade about the article that’s basically identical to the one she just gave me. He’s about halfway through, I estimate, when Brian walks through the door.
“The fuck is everyone yelling about?”
I pinch the bridge of my nose. My office is not big enough for this, and I didn’t even get any coffee this morning.
Justin and Cynthia point to their respective magazines. Brian curses and picks up the one on my desk.
“The fucker just won’t give up, will he?” he says, eyes flashing. Justin and Cynthia sort of project fury back at him in agreement. I make an attempt to go back to the nice quiet world of trend assessment.
Justin, of course, won't allow that. He turns to me. “How could a nonprofit manage to fake something like this?”
I shrug. “Hard to know. If they raise above a certain yearly threshold, which I’m sure they do, they’ll have had to file an annual form 990 with the IRS, which is publicly available. They could lie, but it’s not too hard to check, and from what you’ve said in the past, Pendergrass seems smarter than that.”
“So he’s just going to keep doing it?” Justin says, voice rising.
“We don’t actually know if he’s done anything wrong,” I say. “It’d be pretty hard to track down a specific inconsistency when we don’t have access to anything more than his organization’s public filings.”
Justin slumps against the wall, anger apparently drained. Then I notice Brian looking at him with this strange desperate admiration, and I start to get a very bad feeling about where this is going.
Brian looks at me. “You already did all the projections I asked for yesterday, right?”
Shit. “Yeah, but-”
“All right, then.” He smiles at Justin. Asshole. “Frances, I’m assigning you to comb all the 990 forms filed for Outrise and any other Pendergrass organization that you can access.”
Justin beams back at him. “I’ll help!”
I consider telling Justin that a) reading tax forms is the most boring thing on the planet, and that’s coming from someone who eagerly awaits new SEC filings, and b) as far as qualifications for this kind of thing go, he has half an art degree and no patience for boring shit. I don’t, because honestly I really just want to get as many people out of my office as I can in the shortest time possible. Justin actually follows Brian and Cynthia out into the hallway, and for a moment I hope that his “help” might consist of getting me a triple-shot hazelnut latte from the café on the third floor, but he comes back about five minutes later with very messy hair (resulting from, I’m assuming, some kind of intense gratitude-fueled hallway make-out session), a chair from someone else’s office, and a cheerful smile that sort of makes me want to punch him.
He rolls the chair over next to me, sits down, and props his sneakers on my desk. “Let’s catch this asshole.”
***
Four hours later, we have not caught this asshole. Outrise’s 990s are predictably tedious, with basically nothing notable in either the New York filings or the ones from previous headquarter locations. Justin, who stopped actually reading any of the forms more than two hours ago, is sulking while doodling on a notepad that I’m pretty sure he stole from the supply closet.
I put down the page I’m holding (Part VII: Compensation of Officers, Directors, Trustees, Key Employees, Highest Compensated Employees, and Independent Contractors). “Would you at least pretend to help?”
He shrugs. “What’s the point? It’s not like we’re going to find anything.” Proof, I guess, that the IRS can turn anyone into a nihilist.
I roll my eyes. “Get up.”
“What?”
“I said get up. We’re going to go get coffee, because I deserve that for having to deal with this today, and then we’re going to come back here and take another look at this huge pile of the most boring fucking paperwork in the universe.”
He snorts. “I sometimes think you and Brian are twins separated at birth, you know that?”
I neaten the papers before standing up. “You just haven’t spent time with any other recovered Irish Catholics.”
***
Coffee is a wonderful thing, I muse, as I sip my latte and wait for Justin to finish dumping about six packets of sugar into his. I look out the window and realize that I really do not want to go back to Paperwork Mountain yet, so when he comes back, I tell him that we’re going for a walk, and he doesn’t argue.
It’s a gloomy day, the kind I love in New York, with low, threatening clouds casting a diffuse grey light over everything. We walk for a few blocks, Justin talking rapidly about his newest project, before heading back. Just before we head back inside the building, I glance across the street and stop.
“Isn’t that Pendergrass’s secretary?”
Justin looks. “Cynthia’s been complaining that she keeps running into her. She says she’s ‘just stopping by the building.’ Brian thinks that Pendergrass is trying to have her befriend Cynthia behind his back, which won’t happen, obviously, but-”
I wait for him to keep talking, but he doesn’t.
“But what?”
Justin pulls out his Blackberry and starts flicking through photos. “I just remembered something. I’ll explain on the elevator.”
Back at my office, Justin finds the photos he wants and emails them to me, and I pull them up on my monitor.
I enlarge the first on my screen. “This is the directory from the building you saw that woman going into?”
He nods. “It’s probably nothing, but…”
“But you can’t resist sneaking around when you have the opportunity?”
He almost blushes. “Something like that, yeah.”
I start clicking through the images. “Any idea which company she was visiting?”
“She was already leaving by the time I saw her, and I didn’t think it was a good idea to ask.”
I go back to the beginning and start reading through the names again. “Okay. Dentist’s office - probably not. Credit union, ditto. Same for the family law office, eye doctor, clothing distributor, plastic surgery clinic. Wealth management?”
“Doubtful, but I guess that could be it.”
Then I stop. “Neveaux? Does that name look familiar to you?”
Justin shrugs. “Sounds like a skincare company or something.”
He’s thinking of Nivea, but I don’t say that, because I’m shuffling through the stack of papers on my desk. “I think I saw it somewhere. Buried in some big text dump - do you see anything that says ‘Schedule O’ on top?”
Justin helps me sort through the pages until I find the ones I want. We divide them, half for him, half for me. I find what I’m looking for on my second page.
“Here.” I point, then read. “‘The Creative Families Project: Outrise provides a friendly, open space free of charge where same-sex couples who work at our sponsors can bring their children for age-appropriate art and music lessons, with the opportunity for all to bond and build community. This program is provided in partnership with Neveaux Childhood Enrichment International.’ Well, it’s not my kind of thing, but I don’t think we can go after them for starting a free daycare.”
But Justin’s frowning. “That’s weird.”
“I mean, childcare in this city is criminally expensive, so I don’t think it’s strange for them to offer-”
“No, I mean it’s weird because I read almost exactly the same thing, like five minutes ago.”
I look at the page he’s holding up. “‘Kids, Art, Community?’”
“The description’s different, but it comes down to the same thing - family time, art and music lessons, ‘building community’. But there’s no mention of anything with the name ‘Neveaux’.”
I pull over my keyboard and start typing. “Looks like it’s a company, not a nonprofit. Private, though, so there won’t be any SEC filings or investor reports to look at. And we can’t see their taxes either.”
Justin groans. “So we’re stuck again?”
I pause. I’ve just had an idea, although the wisdom of actually carrying it out is definitely questionable, given that it’s almost certainly illegal.
That being said, I’ve never been able to quit on anything interesting, ever. “I may know of a way to find out more. Can you go get Sam?”