Page 96 of Sexy as Sin
“I started with the event you did for me,” he said. “That was the easiest, because I was more familiar with what we ate and used. There’s a line item here for Quality Linens, for two hundred dollars. But we didn’t get linens. I drove down the hill for paper replacements instead. Would that be something you used in the kitchen?”
“Uh...” Willow had three fingers pressed to her forehead. “I don’t recognize that. It could be weekly linen service. You go through heaps of aprons and towels.”
“That’d be overhead,” Brett said, “but the item was coded to this event. There’s also an item from Gold Coast Restaurant Supply for propane heaters and fuel. Three hundred there, including delivery and pickup. It was warm, though, and I don’t remember propane heaters.”
“I haven’t heard of the vendor.” She felt stupid. “But I don’t usually order that type of thing. I do the food and the on-site supervision. Could they have been ordered just in case, then cancelled, and it was non-refundable?”
“Could be,” he said, “though you’d ask for better terms from a supplier than that. Or it could be sloppiness, coding it to the wrong event—and charging us for it. I’m going to read you the list of the food and beverage vendors. You tell me if there’s anything off.”
There were two names on the list she didn’t recognize: Arcadia Wines and Spirits, for thirty-six bottles of sparkling wine, cost seven hundred dollars, and Osiris Organic Dairy, for ninety-five. She hadn’t been the one to order the wine, though, so again, she couldn’t say for sure.
“When I get there,” Brett said, “I’d like you to run through the entire list of vendors listed for the past six months, and see if any are unfamiliar. I looked up the restaurant supply and the linen place, and their websites aren’t as robust as I’d have expected. A price list and a couple photos, though that doesn’t mean as much as it might. They’d be dealing with repeat customers, presumably. But we need to dig a little deeper. My nose is twitching again, and it’s twitching harder. Even if it’s only five hundred dollars extra, we were billed for a hundred fifteen guests at ninety-five dollars per person. Eleven thousand dollars. If you subtract even that five hundred, you get ninety-one dollars a head, which is more in line with some of your other events.”
“The PR said that at the time,” Willow said. “Ninety-five dollars per person. That was why I first asked Amanda about costs, because I thought it was high.” The sinking feeling in her gut was more like a lead weight now.
“If it’s a scam,” Brett said, “it’s not a big one. Five hundred dollars? Even fifteen hundred? And possibly not on every event? That isn’t much to risk your business for. The variance in per-head price could be due to the menus, I realize. I don’t know what I’m looking at there, except that I’d assume a sit-down dinner with meat would be more. But how much more? Also, is Amanda possibly skimming from you now, because she can, or has she been overcharging her clients, or some of her clients, all along? You said she’d been running it as a smaller-scale local outfit. It’d be easier to scam bigger functions where you could bury the details, especially if they’re private parties with nobody taking a hard look at invoices. A good-sized company is more likely to have somebody checking, but the person isn’t going to know how many tablecloths got used. And now, of course, Amanda is sharing the profits with you, which makes a big difference.”
“People care about price, though.” This, Willow could seize hold of. “They care more when the event is smaller, because they don’t have the budget for anything else. If Amanda wanted to raise her prices, she’d just raise her prices. You can’t spring an extra thousand dollars on the client after you’ve agreed on a price. I don’t know enough about the business side of things, but I do know that. And shedoesshare. I get twenty-five percent of the profits. What would be the point?”
“The skim comes off the top,” Brett said. “Just like an old-fashioned bottle of milk. You invent a few vendors, and when you have a big event where you think you can slip it by, you estimate five hundred, a thousand, fifteen hundred more than it would really be, and you ‘pay’ those expenses to yourself, through a sham company you’ve created. A lot of your vendors use PayPal, it looks like. Nothing easier than to set up a PayPal connected to an email address you control. She pours twenty-five percent of what’s left after the skim into your bottle, while she gets seventy-five,pluswhat she’s taken off the top.”
The logic of it was making Willow’s head hurt, but Brett knew so much more about business than she did. On the other hand, thinking she couldn’t understand was what had landed her here, so she’d bloody well better start trying harder. “Could you give me another example?” she asked. “A dead simple one?”
“Say you have ten people,” Brett said, shifting gears as smoothly as he did everything else. “And you charge a hundred dollars each. How much is that?”
“A thousand dollars. Thanks. That’s how simple I need it to be.”
“And say your profit margin is twenty percent. Which is two hundred dollars, so your costs are eight hundred. Amanda gets seventy-five percent of the two hundred dollars, and you get twenty-five. How much does each of you get?”
“Uh...” Willow was rubbing her forehead again. “Seventy-five times two. A hundred fifty. And, uh, fifty dollars.”
“Right. But if the cost wasactuallyseven hundred dollars, because one of the vendors was fake, and she sent the extra hundred to a PayPal account she’d set up? How much does she get now?”
“Sorry.” Try as she might, Willow was getting fuzzy. “I forgot what I said.”
“She got a hundred fifty on the books,” Brett said. “Seventy-five percent of the two hundred dollars profit, plus her extra hundred, which gives her two hundred fifty, while you still get fifty. She also only pays taxes on the first hundred fifty, because the rest has gone to another bank account, offshore. Australian tax rates are high, but I’d still be hard pressed to see how she’d take in more than ten or twenty thousand dollars a year that way, and it’s a lot of risk for such a small amount of money. Unless she’s looking to divorce her husband and is hiding assets.”
“I don’t think so,” Willow said. “She’s mad about him, and Amanda’s not good at hiding her feelings. Plus—hiding ten thousand dollars a year? She’s not moving to the tropics on that. And what if the mushrooms are tied in to this? It doesn’t make sense. If she’s skimming money nowbecauseI’m bringing more in, why would she want me to bring inless,while she has to work more? Why wouldn’t she just say she’d made a mistake and buy me out again? She’s at least half wishing I hadn’t signed on at all. She likes having me to do the work, and she doesn’t like sharing the power.”
“Because she doesn’t have it,” Brett said. “That one’s easy. She spent your investment. It could be the husband, too. Again, though, not much money. Ten thousand dollars a year? What does that get you?”
“I don’t know. He makes even less sense, as far as the mushrooms. Why would he want to get rid of me, if he were able to skim off more with me here?” It was all crashing down, and she had a palm against her temple now, trying to shut out the headache. “Are you sure about this?”
Tea,she remembered.Tea would be good.She had a mug at her elbow.
“No,” he said. “The amounts I’m seeing aren’t big enough, and the evidence isn’t clear enough. It could be carelessness in coding expenses to events, and you just need to hire a bookkeeper. Which would cut into your profits some, of course, and in any case—I wouldn’t want a business partner who treated me with this kind of disrespect. I’ll know more, though, when you run down the list of vendors with me, and I do some digging. Make some calls, see who answers and what they say. But there’s another option, too. Would you consider just letting me get you out of it?”
Her tea was cold. Her hand stopped with her mug halfway back to the table, and she set it down again. Carefully, hearing the dulltingof it striking the table, then taking her hand off it and tracing her finger over the rose she’d painted. “What do you mean?”
Still patient. “You won’t have lost much value yet. I’ve got a firm of corporate lawyers on retainer down there. I can get you out with what you put in.”
Right,she thought and didn’t say.You mean you’ll pay for it.“I... I need to think about that. It’s... I’ve had so many ideas for it. For Nourish. I’d need to know for sure that something was wrong. And this booking... I’ve been cooking all day. Having ideas of what to ask. What to say.” She had her head in her hand now, tugging at her hair, and all she wanted was to lie down and pull the duvet over her head. Or, possibly, to cry, except that she didn’t do that. Try as she might, her brain was shutting down.
“Right,” he said. “How tired are you?”
“Oh, you know.” She tried to laugh. “A bit. But—mate. It’s only seven-thirty in the evening here. What time is it there?”
“Ah... one-thirty.”
