Chapter 4 - The Predator at Table Seven
Table seven did not sit in the center of the Meridian’s dining room.
It occupied a glass-walled cantilevered alcove that jutted twelve feet out from the fortieth floor, suspended over the freezing void of Michigan Avenue. From table seven, one could look straight down through two-inch-thick tempered glass to the ant-like crawl of yellow taxicabs four hundred feet below, or look east across the gray, ice-choked vastness of Lake Michigan.
It was known among the staff as *The Gallows*. It was where Augustine Vandermir met people he intended to ruin.
When Dela stepped out of the service vestibule, the dining room was completely empty. The morning sun was a cold, blinding slit on the horizon, cutting through the glass and casting long, razor-sharp shadows across the charcoal wool carpeting.
Augustine sat alone at the edge of the cantilever.
He wore a bespoke charcoal three-piece suit cut from heavy English flannel, without a tie. His white shirt was unbuttoned at the throat, revealing the faint edge of a dark, geometric tattoo that disappeared beneath his collarbone toward his ribs. At thirty-four, his face possessed the harsh, sculpted symmetry of a Roman bust—a straight, unbroken nose, high cheekbones, and eyes the color of a winter sea before a squall.
On the table in front of him sat a single bone-china cup, an antique silver pot of black coffee, and an unlit Romeo y Julieta cigar.
Beside the cup lay Dela’s worn, silver-taped shoe.
Dela stopped dead three paces from the table.
She looked down at her own feet. She was wearing her backup pair of black flats—thin, cheap canvas shoes she had bought from a discount bin two months ago, which offered no arch support and made her back scream with every step.
Her taped leather work shoe sat on the pristine damask tablecloth like an accusation.
“Sit down, Mrs. Hawthorne,” Augustine said.
His voice was low, resonant, and devoid of the nervous theatricality that men like Henderson or Arthur Sinclair possessed. It was the voice of a man whose commands were executed without being repeated.
Dela did not move. “Staff are not permitted to sit at guest tables, Mr. Vandermir. Company handbook, section four.”
A faint, humorless smile touched the corner of Augustine’s mouth. He didn't look up from his coffee.
“You graduated *summa cum laude* from Northwestern University School of Law, ranking first in a class of two hundred and eighty-four,” he said, his tone conversational, as if he were reading yesterday’s grain prices. “You were the senior notes editor of the Law Review. You turned down a federal clerkship with the Seventh Circuit because your husband took an appointment as chief compliance monitor for the Illinois Regional Transportation and Port District.”
He lifted his cup, took a measured sip, and set it down without a clatter.
“You spent seven years mastering the law, Delilah. Don't insult my intelligence by quoting a banquet handbook written by an illiterate HR consultant in Schaumburg.”
Dela felt the blood rise in her cheeks, but she kept her hands clasped firmly behind her back, her posture rigidly upright despite the leaden exhaustion pulling at her hips.
“If you know who I am, Mr. Vandermir, then you know Henderson should have fired me yesterday.”
“Margot wanted you fired,” Augustine corrected, finally raising his eyes to meet hers.
The gaze was crushing. There was no cruelty in it, which made it far more terrifying than Margot’s spite. It was the detached, analytical focus of an apex predator determining whether the creature before him was prey, competition, or a minor nuisance.
“Margot is insecure because she realizes that an eight-carat diamond is a financial transaction, not an emotional one,” Augustine said calmly. “She saw me look at your shoe yesterday. She assumed I was looking at a woman. She lacked the discernment to realize I was looking at a mistake.”
Dela’s eyes narrowed. “My shoe isn't a mistake. It’s an eight-dollar repair on an eighty-dollar budget.”
“Not the tape, Mrs. Hawthorne. The fact that you are here at all.” Augustine leaned back, folding his hands across his lap. “Your husband was murdered seven months ago on Interstate 90. The state police called it a collision with an unsecured gravel hauler whose driver fled the scene. A hit-and-run by an unknown party.”
“You know it wasn't a hit-and-run,” Dela said, her voice dropping all pretense of deferential servitude. The air between them sharpened, the chill from the glass walls seeming to seep into the marrow of her bones. “The hauler’s brakes were disengaged by an external hydraulic bypass valve. Elias’s steering linkage was severed before he entered the ramp. He was executed.”
“Yes,” Augustine said simply. “He was.”
The bluntness of the admission struck Dela like an open palm across the face. She stepped forward, her hands coming around to grip the back of the empty chair opposite him.
“You did it.”
Augustine didn't blink. “If I had wanted Elias dead, Mrs. Hawthorne, his car would not have been found on an interstate. He would have vanished from a manifest between Gary and Milwaukee, and his body would have rested in four hundred feet of freshwater beneath an ore barge. You would never have received an insurance settlement. You would never have received his effects. And you certainly would not have been permitted to work on my fortieth floor for seven months without my men noticing the belly under your jacket.”
Dela’s breath caught. “You sent the envelope.”
“I authorized it,” Augustine said. “I wanted to see if the top mind of Northwestern Law had been reduced to a weeping widow, or if she still possessed the teeth required to survive what is coming to this city.”
He reached inside his breast pocket, pulled out a gold Montblanc pen, and laid it beside the shoe.
“Tonight, Arthur Sinclair and his maritime board will sign an agreement merging their terminal operations with Vandermir Holdings. It is a forty-page contract. Forty pages of cross-collateralization, asset shielding, and indemnification waivers.”
Augustine leaned forward, his gray eyes locking onto hers with terrifying intensity.
“Margot has arranged a small entertainment for the guests tonight. She intends to bring you into the private room, offer you a six-thousand-dollar tip to settle your overdue hospital deposit, and make you read a clause from that contract aloud to the room—to demonstrate the intellectual superiority of the Sinclair bloodline over the serving class.”
A bitter, cold fury ignited behind Dela’s ribs, burning away the exhaustion, the pain, the fear.
“And what do you intend to do, Mr. Vandermir?”
“I intend to sit at the head of the table and watch,” Augustine said softly. “Because hidden within those forty pages is the specific corporate resolution that paid for the mechanic who cut Elias’s steering line. Arthur Sinclair thinks he buried it under nine layers of Delaware shell companies. He thinks I am too eager for his shipping berths to read the fine print.”
Augustine tapped the glass table.
“You want six thousand dollars to keep your child out of a county ward, Mrs. Hawthorne. I want the Sinclair empire dismantled without firing a single bullet in Cook County. If you still have the mind that wrote the lead thesis on offshore indemnity fraud... you will have your six thousand dollars. And Arthur Sinclair will have a federal indictment.”
Dela looked from the gold pen to her taped shoe.
“And what do you get out of this, Augustine?”
Augustine picked up his cigar, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger.
May you like
“A business partner who doesn't bore me,” he said. “Now go downstairs. Let Teddy make you something with protein. You look like a ghost, and I don't sign contracts with corpses.”
***
