Chapter 11
The Bench
On the second Friday in October, the week before the valuation committee first met, Maggie asked Andy to come along to her office at four. Esther Ryu was already there when he reached the landing, sitting very straight in the chair by the window with three steno pads in her lap, held together by a rubber band.
Maggie had two stacks on her desk, side by side. One was the August package the way Esther had always built it, every manager’s report rekeyed by hand into the firm’s columns. The other was the same month as the agent had built it from the same reports, overnight, in the one shape Owen had put them in. Since July Maggie had kept Esther rekeying every report alongside the agent so the two could be laid next to each other at the end of each month. Owen sat on the corner of the credenza with his laptop open on his knee.
“In July they disagreed on most of a page,” Maggie said. “This is August.” She laid a single sheet across both stacks. Three lines were highlighted, and beside each one Esther had already written something in pencil. “Tell him.”
Esther looked at Andy and then at the sheet. “The first manager bills the water and sewer back to the residents and nets it against the utility bill,” she said. “So utilities look low at their buildings, and other income looks low by the same amount. If you gross it back up, they match. The second one posts the laundry company’s share of the machines a month after the check comes in, so every quarter’s laundry income is really the quarter before. And the third runs the two phases at the Chattanooga property as if they were one building. It splits the on-site payroll between them by units, all except the maintenance supervisor. They put all of him on phase one.”
“Where is that written down?” Andy said.
“Here.” She lifted the pads an inch. “I called their accountants my first year, one at a time. They didn’t think any of it was strange. It’s just how they do it.”
“None of it’s in their manuals,” Owen said. “I’ve read all three.”
“It wouldn’t be,” Esther said.
Andy had watched her do this work from his office for longer than he liked to think about. He had never once asked how she knew which numbers to move.
“August was the last month you key them by hand,” Maggie said.
Esther nodded slowly. Her thumb found the rubber band and stayed on it.
“I figured it was coming,” she said. “Since about August.” She took a breath. “I’d rather hear it from you than find out from the pile.”
“There’s no pile,” Maggie said. “That’s the point I’m getting to.” She tapped the highlighted sheet. “Owen wants those.”
“Every line in them,” Owen said. “Typed in as written, with your initials and the date you found it. From October the agent maps the reports by them. When it gets one wrong, I want to know which line it ignored.”
“And before Tom ties anything to the ledgers,” Maggie said, “you check what the agent did against your pads. Every month, every manager. Anything it got wrong goes back to Owen with your note, and onto his record.”
Esther looked down at the pads. “What if it’s one I haven’t found yet?”
“Then you’ve found another one,” Owen said. “It goes in the pad first and the agent second.”
Esther slid the rubber band off the pads and held them out, and Owen took them. He opened the first one at the beginning. The early pages were in a rounder, careful hand, and the later ones in a faster one, with dates down the margin and a few lines crossed out and written again underneath.
At six, on his way out, Andy saw the two of them at Owen’s desk beside Tom’s. Owen was typing. Esther had pulled a chair over and was reading the lines to him from the second pad, one at a time.
The last of the managers’ September reports came in on Monday. That afternoon, on his way back from Maggie’s office, Andy stopped at the corner by the printer.
Esther had the agent’s version of one manager’s month on her left screen and the manager’s report, as it had arrived, on her right. The first pad lay open on the desk between the keyboard and the screens, at a page Owen had already typed in, and she was going down the agent’s lines one at a time with the end of a capped pen, checking each against the report it came from and against the pad. Where a line was right she went on. At one building the agent had netted the water and sewer the way the manager did, and left it netted. She stopped there, wrote the building and the line on a sheet beside the keyboard, and went on to the next. She did not look up, and he did not interrupt her. When he came out of his office at five the sheet had gone from her desk, and Owen was reading it at his own, with the agent’s log for the night open beside it.
Dana Tran came into Andy’s office on Thursday morning at a quarter to eight and sat down at the round table without taking the lid off her coffee. She set a printout in front of him.
It was the insurance line for every building the funds owned, for the third quarter, recoded by the agent from the three managers’ reports and tied to the broker’s allocation. The last column was headed Difference. One line in it had a pencil mark beside it and the initials E.R.
“I came in at six to do mine the old way, to see if they’d match,” Dana said. “I always do it the week the reports come. It’s two days if nobody calls me.”
“Esther checked it?”
“Yesterday afternoon.” Dana turned the page over and back again, as if the other side might have the work on it. “She found one building it had got wrong and sent it back. Owen’s record shows it fixed by four.”
She pushed the lid off the coffee with her thumb and drank some.
“Sixteen hours a quarter,” she said. “Four quarters. Three years. So what do I do with my time now?”
Andy thought about what he could say to that. Most of what came to mind was the kind of thing he would have said a year ago, and he left it alone.
“I don’t know yet,” he said.
Dana looked at him. “That’s honest, anyway.”
She had met very few of the people who worked at the properties.
She took the printout back, folded it in half and tucked it into the notebook she carried. Then she went down the floor to her desk. By the time he had finished his own coffee she was writing dates on a pad, one under another, with the name of a property beside each.
On the Monday before Christmas, Maggie brought the 2028 budget to Andy’s round table on her laptop and turned it so he could read the headcount page.
Every seat was on it, with its loaded cost and its start date, Owen’s at the bottom, and one line in April headed Assistant Controller with no name beside it. Andy went down it slowly. The plan he had approved the January before had carried two more lines at the bottom, each headed Analyst, with a start date in June and nobody’s name. This one did not.
“We took them out on the thirteenth of October,” Maggie said. “The afternoon the valuation committee first met. I wanted you to see it again before we sign the year. We held them first because of the raise. Then because of Owen.” She scrolled up to a page of her own, a column of months. “Then because the work they were for never showed up. Fund IV bought buildings all year. The packages got built overnight. The managers’ reports came in one shape, and Esther checked them. We’ve closed every report since July without those two seats, with more buildings than we had when we budgeted them.” She put a finger on the figure at the bottom of the column. “About three hundred ten thousand a year, for the two of them, loaded. It’s not in next year’s number, and it’s not in the year after.”
Andy looked at the two missing lines for some time. The firm had hired one or two most years, in June, out of UT. They came in new shoes and spent their first weeks at the long table downstairs learning the model, and some of them left for a larger sponsor after a couple of years and some of them stayed. Esther had come in that way. So, more or less, had he. His first job, at an apartment developer in Houston, had been mostly this work: rent rolls keyed by hand from a manager’s printouts, at a desk beside a copier, for most of a year. He did not know where that year would come from now for whoever would have sat in those two seats, and he did not pretend to Maggie that he did.
She waited. She had worked with him long enough to know when he had gone somewhere and would come back.
“Leave them out,” he said. “I’ll sign it after Christmas.” Then he reached under the legal pad for the three pages Anika had given him on Friday and laid them beside her laptop. “There’s one more thing for this budget. I’d like to name you President. On the third.”
Maggie did not pick the pages up right away. She looked at him, and then at the pages, and then back at him.
He had thought about Scott for most of a weekend in November. Scott had fifteen years in the business and the chair at the investment committee, and the pension’s people trusted his trace. Andy wanted him in that chair, deciding what the firm bought, for as long as Scott would sit in it. Maggie voted at that committee too, and since October she had chaired the one that decided what the buildings were worth. She had priced the firm before anybody asked her to, and every page of the last year had crossed her desk on its way to his. Neither of them had ever called any of that a plan.
“Who knows?”
“Anika. She wrote those.”
“You had it typed before you asked me.”
“I wanted you to have something on paper you could say no to.”
“Then I’d like to read it before I say anything.”
She read them with her pencil in her hand. The first page set out the seats as they would stand from the third of January: who held each one, what each holder decided without asking anybody, and what still went to a committee. The other two named her as the person who would take Andy’s seat on the first day he could not sit in it, said what she would sign from that day and listed what would wait. She read it twice, the second time with the pencil moving.
“It says who takes your seat,” she said. “It doesn’t say who takes mine.”
“Tom, for the books.”
“And for the rest of it?”
Andy had not thought that far.
“Tom,” Maggie said. “All of it, from April, when there’s an assistant controller to take the books off him. Keep the April line in the budget.” She wrote Second: T. Langford beside her own seat. “And every other seat on this page gets a second name before the third.” She wrote Second: in small letters beside each of the others, down the margin of the first page, and left a blank after each one.
“Is that a yes?”
“It’s a yes.” She closed the laptop and picked up all three pages. “I’ll take these to Anika. She’ll want the blanks filled by Thursday.”
On Tuesday morning Andy went downstairs at eight and found Scott alone at the long table, reading the package for the next week’s committee with his jacket over the chair beside him.
Andy sat halfway down the side, where he sat on committee days, and told him. Scott heard him out without putting the package down.
“Did you think I’d want it?” he said.
“I thought you’d say so if you did.”
“I’d have said so in July.” He turned a page. “What changes?”
“The title. And Anika’s page says what you decide without coming to me.”
“I haven’t come to you since July.”
Scott turned another page. “Maggie wants a second name.”
“By Thursday.”
“Wyatt,” Scott said, without looking up. “He’ll chair it worse than I do for a year. After that he’ll be better at it than I am.” He made a mark in the margin of the package. “I told him in October I’d be asking him one day. He’s been reading every package to the last page since.”
Beth Ann was at her desk at four with a family’s page open on one screen. She heard him out the same way, and then took a few seconds.
“Thank you,” she said. “Maggie’s asked me for a second.”
“I know. What are you going to give her?”
She looked at the page on the screen. “I don’t have a name for her. Nobody here but you and me has ever raised a fund. I’ve written down everything every investor wants from us, and I’ll keep writing it. I can’t write down the lunches.” She took a sticky note from the pad by her keyboard. “Give her a date. The end of March. And put my name beside the date, so it’s mine to fix.”
She wrote it out and handed it to him. Andy carried it along the floor to Anika’s office, and she typed it onto the page beside Beth Ann’s seat exactly as it was written, To be named by 31 March. Owner: B. Sorensen., and handed him back the note.
The bank’s annual review of the Fund III loans ran from ten until a little after noon on the Thursday before Christmas, in a bank tower on Congress Avenue. Arturo did most of the talking, building by building, with a binder closed in front of him that he did not open once. Andy sat beside him and answered two questions, both about the next fund.
They rode the elevator down to the garage without speaking. Arturo’s truck was on the third level, nose to a concrete pillar with a painted number on it. He opened the locks from a few steps away, then stood by the driver’s door with the keys in his hand and did not get in.
“I’ve given Maggie my second name,” he said. “Dana.”
“Have you told her?”
“Last night. She asked for the night. She was at my door at seven this morning to ask whether she could still go out and walk the buildings with the managers.” The corner of his mouth moved. “She’s read every line of every manager’s report for three years. I told her yes.”
Andy nodded. A car went past them down the ramp, slowly, looking for a space.
“You never opened the binder,” he said.
“I read it last night.” Arturo looked at the pillar. Since the summer he had been dictating a few minutes of notes in the truck after every building he walked, mostly so that he would stop losing them by Friday. From the middle of November an agent had read them along with the managers’ reports, and the pages in the binder had been built from both. “The Chattanooga page had the drainage behind the second phase in it. What I told the manager’s regional man in August, and what he told me back. I’d forgotten I ever said it. It hadn’t.” He was quiet for a moment. “I kept waiting for it to replace me. All it did was remember what I’d told it.”
He got into the truck. Andy went around to the other side and climbed in, and Arturo backed out from the pillar and took them up the ramp, one level at a time, toward the light at the top. At the gate he fed the ticket into the machine and waited for the arm to lift, and then he turned out onto Congress and headed for the river.
On Monday the third of January, Andy parked in the back lot at a quarter past seven, took the stairs and found the page waiting for him.
Maggie had sent it at seven. Owen had built it in the last week of November, on a page Anika had signed and dated, so that one agent could read the minute books, the covenant calendar, Beth Ann’s investor pages and the decisions each seat logged during the week, and leave a single page in a single folder on Sunday night. Maggie read it each Monday before seven and sent it to the senior people herself. This one covered the holiday week, so it ran a little long.
Investment committee, Wednesday 29 December. Raleigh, garden, Fund IV: passed, line 4. Chair: S. Engel. Minutes filed.
Asset management, Tuesday 28 December. Nashville: replace two boilers, three bids, lowest taken. Within the limit on Anika’s schedule. Approved: A. Ybarra. Bids filed.
Valuation committee, Thursday 30 December. First-quarter appraisal list confirmed. M. Holt, A. Reeves, T. Langford.
Capital raising, Monday 27 December. A Fund III family’s report by asset from the first quarter: agreed, B. Sorensen. Page updated.
Open. Covenant test thirty days out, a Fund II loan in Dallas. Passes on November’s numbers. Owner: A. Ybarra. T. Langford to confirm on December’s when the reports arrive.
Under each line was where its record lived. Andy read the page from the top and then read it again, slower, looking for his own name. It was not on it.
He looked at the boilers a while longer. The bids had come in on the Monday after Christmas, and Arturo had approved them on Tuesday morning at ten, with all three open on his screen. A year ago they would have come to Andy, and he would have answered them from his phone the evening they arrived, in a parking lot or at a red light, because they were in front of him and he wanted them gone.
At eight he wrote the email to the firm himself. It took him longer than it should have, and in the end it was short.
Starting today, Maggie Holt is President of Service Capital. I remain CEO. Scott Engel is our Chief Investment Officer and continues to chair the investment committee. Beth Ann Sorensen is Head of Capital Raising. Arturo Ybarra continues as Head of Asset Management, with Dana Tran as his deputy. Tom Langford is second to the President. Anika’s page, attached, says what each seat decides and who sits in it when its holder is out.
He attached the page and sent it. Every Second Maggie had pencilled down the margin before Christmas had a name beside it now, except Beth Ann’s, which had a date.
From his desk he could see the floor read it. Wyatt read it at the front window, standing, and then sat down and went back to whatever he had been doing. Nadia read it and looked up toward Maggie’s office. Esther, in the back corner, read it with a finger still on the line of the pad she had been checking. Nobody came to his door. Maggie’s door, off the landing, stayed shut for most of an hour, and then she came out and went downstairs.
Beth Ann came at ten with the letter to the investors. It was one paragraph: Maggie’s new title, the date, a sentence on her years with the firm since 2019, and a line saying that every investor’s contact at the firm stayed as it was. She stood at the round table while he read it, and when he had signed it she picked it up.
“I’ll call the pension before lunch,” she said. “I’d rather she heard it from me than read it.”
At eleven Anika brought two stapled pages and a third, loose. The stapled pages were the succession plan from Renata’s list, typed clean from the pages Maggie had read in December, with Andy’s signature line at the bottom and the date already filled in. He signed it. The loose page was the Key Personnel section of the firm’s standing answers to investors’ questionnaires, as it would read in the data room from that afternoon.
Every answer on it had a seat and a name, and a second name under that. The answer on acquisitions named the committee, its chair and how it voted. Andy’s own name came up twice, once as CEO and once as one of the committee’s four votes.
He read it to the bottom and handed it back. Anika put it on top of the plan and took the three pages along the landing to her office.
Andy picked up his cup, found it empty and went downstairs for the second coffee. The conference room door was half open on his way past the kitchen. Maggie sat halfway down the side of the long table with the budget open in front of her and Tom beside her, and she was turning a page when he went by. He filled his cup and carried it back up the stairs.