Read Online Shot Through Velvet by Ellen Byerrum - Free Book Online Page B

met. But I never would of thought of killing him. Dyeing him like a piece of velvet.”
    Inez glared at Lacey. “We can’t all be reporters with a cushy job in Washington, D.C., at our Claudia Darnell’s little paper.”
    It was Lacey’s turn on the hot seat. The factory workers would be lining up at the unemployment office in the morning, Lacey thought. These days nobody’s job was safe. It might only be a matter of weeks before I join them.
    Vic gave her a smile and squeezed her hand under the table.
    “It’s not as cushy as you might think.” Lacey looked around for the waitress. “I’ve got a job today, but it doesn’t guarantee I’ll have it this time next year. Or next month. Newspapers are in trouble. Major newspapers are folding. One of my hometown papers is gone. The Rocky Mountain News had been there for a hundred and fifty years. Ad revenues are way down, and even The Washington Post has been laying off people.”
    “What about The Eye Street Observer ?” Inez demanded.
    “There are rumblings about cutbacks. Layoffs.” It was something Lacey didn’t really want to think about.
    “You mean Claudia Darnell is going to destroy her paper like she ruined the factory? She’s killing more jobs?” Hank leaned forward into Lacey’s face. Sykes too. Lacey felt a little cornered and she moved closer to Vic.
    “I didn’t say that. We have our own version of Rod Gibbs. If anyone’s going to destroy The Eye , it’s our Walt Pojack.” Or as Lacey thought of him, Pojack the Destroyer. He’d spent some time as a PR flack for politicians, lobbyists, and developers before landing at The Eye . He had been an inadequate managing editor with no discernable skills for management, so he was shoved upstairs and somehow landed a spot on the newspaper’s board of directors. His title was chief of operations.
    “Who’s that?” Blythe asked.
    “Paper’s resident snake. No one important.” I hope. “Anyway, let me point out, Claudia Darnell didn’t close the factory single-handedly. Did she?”
    “No, she had partners in crime.” Sykes knocked back the rest of his margarita. “The first one is dead.”
    Lacey and Vic’s tablemates were several margaritas ahead of them, and tongues were loosening. What they said could be useful, or it could dissolve into useless barroom bluster. They might regret their words in the morning, and Lacey tried to remember that. But her ear was still cocked for a good quote.
    “How many partners are there in the company? I thought it was owned by a family in New England.”
    “Massachusetts. That’s where the factory started, the Connecticut River Valley in the late 1800s, where it was known as Symington Textiles,” Kira said. “The Symington family moved operations here in the Eighties. Changed the name. They figured with cheaper labor costs and lower taxes they could save the velvet factory. It worked for a while.”
    “It was a union shop in Massachusetts, wasn’t it?” Lacey asked.
    “Until they moved the plant to Virginia. The union would have been better for all of us,” Sykes said. “A union protects you.”
    But even the union couldn’t keep the company from moving, Lacey reflected.
    “The family still owns part of it, but they took on partners down here to help carry the load.” Kira had access to all the records and she had absorbed the company history.
    “How many partners are there, besides the family?” Lacey wondered how Claudia had become involved with the company.
    “Three. Twenty percent interest apiece.”
    “So together, the outside partners have a controlling interest,” Vic said. “If they vote as a bloc.”
    “That’s right.” Kira grabbed another tortilla chip from the basket and crumbled it with her thin fingers. “That way, when it came to the final vote to keep or close the factory, the absentee owners didn’t have to look like the villains.”
    “Who is the third partner?” Lacey asked.
    “That would be one Tazewell