If you walk out of Apex Media to play live-in nurse to that washed-up recluse, you are dead to this family and blacklisted from Hollywood, my uncle Victor Cross told me five years ago.
The email arrived from an anonymous address, its subject line simply “Meeting.” The body contained a time, a cross street near the Rose Bowl, and the name “Julia.” Julia Montgomery. Victor’s ex-wife, co-founder of Apex Media, and a name I hadn’t heard in years.
I arrived at the specified location, a small, unassuming coffee shop tucked away from the main streets. Julia was already there, nursing a herbal tea, her face lined but still carrying the sharp intelligence I remembered. She looked nervous, glancing around frequently.
“Thanks for meeting me, Leo,” she said, her voice a low murmur. “I know this is… unusual.”
“It is,” I agreed, sitting opposite her. “Why now, Julia? We haven’t spoken since the divorce.”
She pushed a small, battered leather briefcase across the table towards me. “I heard what Victor’s been doing. To your film. To Eleanor’s estate.” Her eyes, usually so guarded, held a flicker of something akin to shame. “I also heard about you. Five years. Taking care of her, without pay. It’s not something Victor would ever understand.”
I looked down at the briefcase. It felt heavy, old.
“Victor told everyone Eleanor was a distant, senile relative. A liability,” she continued, her gaze fixed on the steam rising from her tea. “I knew that wasn’t the whole truth. Not the way he told it.”
She looked up, meeting my eyes directly. “Victor and I started Apex together. I was there in the beginning. And I saw things. Heard things.” She took a deep breath. “When Bartholomew, Victor’s father, ‘acquired’ Westwood Pictures, it was always murky. He always told me it was a clean deal, a rightful transfer.”
“It wasn’t,” I said, my voice flat. “He defrauded Eleanor while she was in the hospital.”
Julia flinched, a visible tremor in her hands. “I know. Because Victor showed me the real paperwork. He was so proud, so arrogant, thinking he’d pulled off a masterpiece.”
She tapped the briefcase. “These are his private corporate ledgers from 1974. His personal records. The ones he kept hidden, even from the SEC auditors, when we officially merged Apex and Westwood years later. They show the truth.”
“What truth?”
“They show Victor knew the acquisition was fraudulent. He knew about Eleanor’s surviving trust, the one that guaranteed her controlling interest. He explicitly instructed our original accounting team to ‘bury’ those liabilities, to ‘cleanse’ the books for future audits.” Julia’s voice was barely a whisper. “He actively hid Eleanor’s true ownership from everyone. Including me, for a long time. It’s all in there. His own handwriting.”
I picked up the briefcase. It felt like holding a smoking gun. Julia had just handed me irrefutable proof, not just of the original fraud, but of Victor’s lifelong, deliberate cover-up. The weight of her guilt, it seemed, was finally too much for her to carry.
More Stories
+ There are no comments
Add yours