Chapter 8 - The Deposition of Richard Hart
The deposition took place on the twenty-second floor of the Johnston Building, in the central conference room of Keller, Vance & Montgomery.
Through the tall, polarized glass windows, the late afternoon sun cast long, golden rectangles across the forty-foot mahogany conference table. A certified court reporter sat at the head of the table, her fingers poised over the keys of her steno machine. A high-definition video camera mounted on a tripod stood three feet away, its small red recording light glowing like an unblinking eye.
Richard sat on the far side of the table, flanked by Donald Sterling and a junior associate who spent the entire afternoon sweating through his Oxford shirt while organizing bank statements.
Richard had taken off his suit jacket. His silk tie was unknotted, his collar unbuttoned, revealing the mottled, graying skin of his throat. He looked haggard, trapped, and visibly shaken. The bravado he had displayed in the courthouse corridor had evaporated the moment Donald Sterling had spent thirty minutes in a private room reviewing Arthur Hart’s *Fiduciary Poison Pill*.
Martin Keller sat directly opposite them, his hands folded neatly over a yellow legal pad. Cameron and I sat to his right.
“We are on the record,” Martin said, his voice quiet, measured, and terrifyingly precise. “This is the continuation of the evidentiary deposition in the matter of *Hart v. Hart*, Mecklenburg County Superior Court, Business Division, Docket Number 24-CVS-8812. The witness is Richard Arthur Hart, appearing under subpoena duces tecum.”
Martin looked across the table, his spectacles reflecting the amber light from the window.
“Richard, I direct your attention to Exhibit 42. This is a copy of a wire transfer authorization dated October 14, 2021, in the amount of $112,000, drawn on the Arthur Hart Trust brokerage reserve at Wells Fargo, payable to *Apex Capital Partners LLC* in Atlanta, Georgia.”
Martin leaned forward.
“Did you authorize that transfer?”
Richard looked at Donald Sterling. Sterling sat with his lips pressed together in a tight, grim line, his eyes fixed on the mahogany table. He gave a barely perceptible shake of his head.
“On the advice of counsel,” Richard muttered, his voice raspy, “I invoke my Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination.”
“The Fifth Amendment,” Martin noted calmly for the record. “Very well. I direct your attention to Exhibit 43. This is an internal memorandum from the management committee of *Piedmont Logistics Group*, dated January 12, 2022, rejecting your formal request to convert Joselyn Hart’s non-voting corporate equity into voting common stock.”
Martin turned a page.
“In this memorandum, the corporate secretary notes that you presented a document purporting to bear the signature of Arthur Hart, dated two weeks prior to his death, authorizing you to exercise full voting proxies over all trust equity. Did you draft that document, Richard?”
Richard’s hands curled into tight fists against his thighs. “Arthur intended for me to have voting control. He told me so verbally on dozens of occasions. The board was being run by a bunch of insubordinate warehouse managers who didn't understand the broader strategic value of the company.”
“Did you draft that document yourself, Richard?” Martin repeated, his voice rising half an octave, sharp as a surgeon's blade. “And did you sign Arthur Hart’s name to that document three days after his hospice physician noted in his medical charts that he was in a state of non-responsive hepatic coma?”
“Objection!” Sterling barked, though there was zero conviction in his voice. “The question is argumentative and lacks foundation.”
“I’m not asking for an argument, Donald,” Martin snapped. “I have the forensic handwriting analysis from the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation Crime Laboratory, certified at 1:00 p.m. today. The document is an absolute forgery. The ink was manufactured in 2018—seven years after Arthur Hart passed away.”
Richard flinched as if he had been slapped. His skin turned a sickly, translucent white. He looked across the table, his bloodshot eyes locking onto me.
“Joselyn,” Richard whispered, his voice cracking with a desperate, pathetic pleading. “Joselyn, look at me. You’re my daughter. You’re my firstborn. I held you in the delivery room at Presbyterian Hospital. I walked you to your first day of kindergarten at Myers Park Traditional.”
Cameron shifted forward, his jaw tight, but I placed my hand gently on his forearm, holding him back.
I didn't look away from my father. I looked at him with the cold, clear, unburdened gaze of a woman who had finally stepped out of the shadow of a lifelong ghost.
“You held me in the delivery room, Dad,” I said, my voice echoing softly in the large, quiet room. “And twenty-five years later, you forged my name to steal one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars while I was sleeping in the next room.”
“I was trying to keep us together!” he cried, slamming both palms down onto the mahogany table. The water glasses rattled; the court reporter’s fingers flew across the steno keys. “Everything I did, I did to preserve the stature of this family! You think people respect a family that falls apart? You think the people at the country club would have invited you to their boardrooms if they knew the Hart family was broke? If they knew Arthur left everything to a child because he hated his own son?”
“Arthur didn't hate you, Richard,” Martin said softly.
The attorney reached into his briefcase and pulled out a single, unsealed white envelope. The paper was crisp, bearing my grandfather’s distinctive, bold cursive scrawl on the front: *To My Son, Richard, on the Day the Ledger Closes.*
Richard froze. His breathing caught in his throat.
“What is that?” Richard whispered.
“Your father left this in my custody in August of 2011,” Martin said. “He gave me explicit instructions. If you executed your duties as trustee with honesty and integrity until Joselyn turned thirty-five, I was to hand you this letter alongside a separate, private bequest of one million dollars that has been sitting in an escrow account at Bank of America for twelve years.”
Richard’s mouth opened. He looked like a man who had been struck by lightning.
“A… a million dollars?” he choked out.
“Arthur wanted you to succeed, Richard,” Martin said, his voice thick with a profound, tragic sadness. “He wanted so desperately to be wrong about you. He told me, ‘Martin, if Richard can manage his daughter’s future without stealing from her for ten years, it means he has finally become a man. And if he becomes a man, he deserves his share.’”
Martin slowly turned the letter over and laid it in the center of the table.
“You didn't make it to ten years, Richard. You didn't make it to ten months.”
Richard stared at the white envelope.
The silence in the conference room stretched for ten seconds, fifteen seconds, twenty seconds. The only sound was the low, steady hum of the air conditioner and the muffled horns of the Charlotte traffic twenty-two stories below.
Then, slowly, the realization of what he had destroyed broke through the final, brittle walls of Richard Hart’s narcissistic reality.
He didn't scream. He didn't roar.
He slumped forward, his forehead coming to rest against the edge of the mahogany table, his shoulders shaking with silent, dry, wretched heaves. The bespoke suit, the silver hair, the aristocratic posture—it all collapsed into a pathetic, broken pile of cloth and bone.
Donald Sterling let out a long, heavy sigh. He closed his briefcase with two definitive clicks.
“Martin,” Sterling said, his voice quiet, defeated, entirely professional. “We’ll take the settlement. We’ll sign the confession of judgment for twelve point six million. We’ll consent to the immediate turnover of the Myers Park real property, the liquidation of the law firm partnership equity, and the complete revocation of all trustee authority.”
Sterling looked at Richard, then back to Martin.
“Just… give us forty-eight hours to vacate the house before the sheriff posts the eviction notice.”
Martin looked at me.
I looked at the white envelope on the table. I looked at the man who had struck me across the face at my own wedding reception, who had tried to steal my future, who had turned my sister into an accomplice and my mother into an exile.
May you like
“Thirty-six hours, Mr. Sterling,” I said, rising from the table, my hand finding Cameron’s fingers. “And tell him to leave Grandfather’s desk in the study. It doesn't belong to him.”
***
