Jesse asked with whom he’d been drinking.
“Max.”
“Who’s Max.”
“Bartender. I used to play football with him.”
Jesse nodded. Of course. Sometimes he got the idea that Suit had played ball at one time or another with everybody except Tom Brady.
“I hope you Ubered here.”
“Walked.”
“From the Swap? You know how far that is on foot?”
“Do now.”
He went into Jesse’s bathroom and took a shower. Jesse left some sweatpants that were too long for him but probably would fit Suit just fine, and an old hoodie that had robbery homicide on the front, one Jenn had given him as a birthday present when they were still married.
Suit still looked wobbly when he came out of the bedroom. Like he had been tagged a few times tonight.
But closer, incrementally, to being Suit.
“I finally knew enough to get out of there,” he said. “Drunk as I was, I knew that if somebody made me for being shit-faced in public, you’d fire me.”
His hair was still wet. Eyes bloodshot. Jesse nodded at the kitchen, sat him down at the table, handed him a mug of coffee. Suit’s hand was shaking as he brought it to his lips. Jesse knew this feeling. He knew Suit’s face, he’d seen it often enough in the old days staring back at him from the mirror. Jesse had ended up like this at Molly’s house more than a few times when he didn’t know where else to go. When he didn’t want to be alone as drunk as he was.
Even though she still called him the alonest man she’d ever met in her life.
“Nobody ever fired me when I was like this,” Jesse said, “at least not once I got here.”
Somehow Suit managed to build a small smile. “But they sure tried.”
“And nearly succeeded a few times.”
“What you really needed was a boss like you.”
“Got one,” Jesse said. “Name of Molly Crane. Maybe you’ve heard of her.”
Jesse asked if he wanted to try to eat something. Slightly bigger smile from him. “Maybe next month.”
“Was gonna have you stay here,” Jesse said. “But I should take you home.”
“Face the music?”
“You know that’s not your bride.”
“And tonight’s not me.”
“Aware.”
“It just hurts so bad, Jesse.”
“I feel the same way about Charlie.”
“You didn’t go to the bar.”
“No longer an option for me,” Jesse said. “At least not so far today.”
They sat in silence at the kitchen table, the only sound the ticking of an old Seth Thomas clock that had belonged to Jesse’s mom, and had survived the cross-country ride when he’d left Los Angeles. In the hoodie, Suit looked like a kid again. Just one who’d had a very bad night, in the middle of a far worse time for him.
“I don’t know how to do this!” Suit said, the words coming out hot.
“Nobody does, Suit. Till they have to.”
“I know I’m supposed to be strong for my sister,” Suit said. “The problem is, I don’t feel strong.” He ran a big hand through his wet hair. “I feel like I’m the one who’s falling.”
Jesse asked if he wanted more coffee. Suit shook his head. Jesse took his mug and put it in the sink. Past one by now. Suit wasn’t the only one who needed sleep. Jesse wanted to get with Nicholas first thing in the morning, see if he had an explanation for what Jesse had found on Charlie’s computer. Then pay a visit to Miss Emma. He’d talked to her already, on the phone earlier. He wanted to see if she could remember in better detail her last few phone conversations with Charlie. And to learn more about how she’d been ripped off.
“Jack didn’t kill himself,” Suit said, staring down at the tabletop. “I know that boy.” He paused. “Knew that boy. He would never do something like that, not with everything ahead of him.”
“Suit. Look at me.”
Suit did.
“Every teenage kid who ever did something to themselves had it all in front of them.”
“No!”
All of the hurt in his voice now.
Jesse said, “I’m not saying he did. But at this point in our investigation, we can’t rule it out. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“But what I know for sure is that you’re no good to Jack like this. Or your sister. Or me. We clear on that?”
Suit nodded.
“Gonna take you home to Elena now,” Jesse said.
And did.
Twenty-Five
Jesse had never been inside More Chocolate before. But his first reaction, seeing the big space on the ground floor, was that it had been designed to make the staff feel as if they were just hanging out, and not working, like this was the student union.
But even at nine in the morning, there was enough energy in the place to power the whole town if the grid went down.
There were four-desk pods scattered around the room. Pastel colors dominated. Track lighting, soft. Jazz music playing softly. Nicholas Farrell’s wheelchair, Jesse saw, wasn’t the only one at More Chocolate. He saw a young woman with a prosthetic leg. A ping-pong table at the far end from where you entered. A regulation basketball hoop, a small hard court in front of it, that included a free-throw line. To Jesse’s right was a coffee station, and a menu board above it that seemed to have more options than Starbucks.
“This looks like camp,” Jesse said to Nicholas.
Nicholas grinned. He was in a black Metallica T-shirt today. Black jeans. Broken-in biker boots. Jesse idly wondered if he’d been wearing the same boots the night of the accident on his Harley.
“I gave Gramps a tour here one time,” Nicholas said, “and he said pretty much the same thing. Except he called it a playdate.”
Nicholas pulled over a chair for Jesse from the empty desk next to his.
“You said you found something,” he said.
Jesse told him about the crypto sites that his grandfather had accessed recently.
“Was he into that stuff?” Jesse asked.
Nicholas laughed.
“My Gramps? The only currency that interested him was at Bank of America. Or maybe under his bed, for all I know.”
“So why was your grandfather, at his age, suddenly so interested in learning about cryptocurrency?”
“Do you know what it really is?” Nicholas asked.
Jesse looked over his shoulder. “Wait, you were asking me that?”
Jesse tried to follow then as Nicholas gave him a crash course on digital assets, even though Nicholas predicted that there was a crypto crash coming, even on the legitimate market. Then he was on to Bitcoin and secure trading and ownership.
When Nicholas got around to talking about public blockchains, Jesse held up a hand.
“But is it real money?”
“It is and it isn’t,” Nicholas said.
“So why are people so hot for it?”
“Why? Because there’s no real central authority overseeing it, no bank or government agency acting like the crypto chief of police, if you want to think of it that way. But it’s much more mainstream recently.”
“Sounds to me like a different way to launder money.”
“Not for everybody,” Nicholas Farrell said. “Some of it is completely legit. And maybe most of it, far as I can tell. But money laundering does come up a lot when people are talking about crypto crime-ing. Guys on the wrong side of the law generally try to use the currency to launder dough from other crimes, cybercrimes a lot of the time.”
Jesse said, “You seem to know a lot about it. Why didn’t Charlie just go to you instead of the Internet?”