Nicholas grinned. “I’m young and looking for ways to make easy money. But it didn’t take me long to figure out it’s a little bit like casinos, even though they want you to think it’s a sure thing. The house always wins. It’s just that nobody is quite sure who the house is.”
“Why do you think your grandfather might have been trying to give himself a crash course?”
“Maybe he heard some of the boys talking about it at the club.”
Paradise Country Club. Charlie had been a member for more than fifty years, which meant when a civil servant himself didn’t have to rob Bank of America as a way of coming up with the money, real money, to join.
“Any of the old boys in particular?”
“Any of them or all of them,” Nicholas said. “You really think this is important?”
“To be determined.”
Hillary More was behind Jesse then.
“What’s to be determined? Our first date, Chief Stone?”
“Morning, boss,” Nicholas said. “Jesse and I are trying to figure out why my grandfather had taken an interest in cryptocurrency before he died.”
Hillary sat down on the edge of Nicholas’s desk. She was wearing a short leather skirt, which, to Jesse’s trained policeman’s eyes, went very well with long, tanned legs. He knew the thought police would come after him if they found out he was still thinking thoughts like these. But sometimes he couldn’t help himself.
“If Charlie figured out how it all works,” she said, “I wish he’d explained it to me.”
She smiled at Jesse. He smiled back. It was a good smile. Went with the rest of her.
“Might this be something that helps you find out who did this awful thing to Charlie?” she asked.
“Ever hopeful.”
“One thing about my Gramps,” Nicholas said. “He generally didn’t spend a lot of time cruising the Net. He used to say he wasn’t going to take up a whole hell of a lot of the time he had left on this earth staring at a little screen. So whatever he was doing, there was a purpose behind it.”
“To make easy money himself?” Jesse said.
Nicholas shook his head. “He thought easy money was an oxymoron.”
Jesse knew that Nicholas had begun to take care of Charlie’s finances the past few years. He asked him now to check all of his accounts, checking and savings and IRA, just to make sure that Charlie hadn’t made any odd transactions lately on his own. Nicholas said he’d get right on it, but first he needed to be wheels-up for some coffee.
“Where you off to next?” Nicholas said.
“To see Miss Emma, and ask her about her boyfriend.”
When Nicholas was gone, Hillary said, “At least Miss Emma had a boyfriend.”
“Be careful what you wish for,” Jesse said to her.
“I’m never careful, Jesse,” she said.
He had no snappy response to that, so he left her and her legs sitting there.
Twenty-Six
Emma Cleary said she’d never been in a police station in her life, not one single time. So she asked Jesse if they could meet for lunch at the Gull.
“You would be the prettiest lunch date I’ve had in a long time,” Jesse said.
“Shut it,” Miss Emma said.
Jesse knew she lived with her daughter, Maryanne, an English teacher at Paradise High, over on the west side of town, maybe four or five blocks from Charlie’s house. Before he ended the call, he asked if Miss Emma needed him to pick her up.
“I’ll be walking, thank you.”
“All the way to the Gull?”
“I’m a senior citizen, young man, not a goddamn invalid.”
She was waiting for Jesse at the Gull when he arrived, the lunch crowd there as loud and brisk and busy as usual. She gave him a wave from the window table. Jesse didn’t know her well, but well enough, from the times he’d run into Charlie and Miss Emma — he had difficulty thinking of her any other way — around town. She reminded him a little of Betty White, not that he was going to share that observation with her, especially not after Betty White had passed away the previous year at the age of ninety-nine.
Fluffy white hair, bright blue eyes, not much more than five feet tall by now, if that, shrinking the way old people did. She stood to greet him and he saw that she was wearing khaki pants, a pink sweater, shoes to match the sweater. Jesse noticed that she slipped easily out of her booth when she rose to greet him. He recalled Charlie telling him that Miss Emma still rocked yoga classes a couple days a week. He should have known better than to offer her a ride. Something else Charlie had told him. She liked to walk everywhere, even though she still drove herself when she needed to in a Jetta of her own.
Jesse waited until after they ordered their salads to say, “I’m truly sorry for your loss, Emma.”
“Shouldn’t that be my line, too?” was her reply.
She had hearing aids, both ears. It appeared to be her only concession to her age, which was the same as Charlie’s; they’d graduated Paradise High the same year. She married her high school sweetheart and Charlie married Maisie. Then after both high school sweethearts were gone, they somehow found their way back to each other.
And were supposed to live happily ever after.
“How are you doing?” Jesse asked.
“I’m pissed off, is how I’m doing. I wasn’t supposed to fall in love again. Neither was he. But we did. Now he’s gone and I’m still here, and I’m just going to have to call bullshit on that.”
The blue eyes were flashing now. I could put them on top of one of our patrol cars, Jesse thought.
“So just what am I supposed to do about bullshit like that, Jesse?”
He grinned. “Have lunch with me.”
“I want you to promise me you’re going to find who did this to my Charlie.”
“I don’t make promises I’m not sure I can keep,” Jesse said. “But my plan is to catch him.”
“The fucker.”
Jesse tried not to smile. He knew from Charlie that the petite old lady across from him could swear like Samuel L. Jackson.
“You’ll really do that for me?” she said.
“All due respect?” Jesse said. “I’ll be doing it for me.”
He told her then about what he’d found on Charlie’s laptop, asked if he had mentioned anything at all to her about a sudden interest in cryptocurrency or Bitcoin or anything like that. Emma Cleary said that he was more likely to have been discussing kryptonite. All she knew, she said, was that his hair had been on fire over the past month about the scam calls. She kept telling Charlie to let them go. But he’d gotten more and more fixed on them.
“Dog with a bone,” she said. “Old dog.”
“Tell me about it.”
“It was like he’d decided that he was, by God, going to crack one more case. I’m sure he told you that I lost a fair amount of money I really couldn’t afford to lose a while back and felt like an old fool after I did. Gave somebody my Medicare ID number during COVID, and paid a heavy price for it.” She gave a vigorous shake to her head. “Don’t want to talk about it.”
“Agree to disagree on the old fool part, Emma. Calls like those cleaned out people of all ages to the tune of about thirty billion dollars last year. Billion with a b. Pretty sure all of that money didn’t come from your age grouping.”
“I still felt like a dumb shit afterward. It’s why I was cheering him on while he tried to find out who was at least behind some of these goddamned calls.”
She drank some water, her hand shaking, put her glass back down. Jesse noticed that she had barely touched her salad. But he hadn’t done much better. Nothing about this felt social.