Page 51 of My Bossy Billionaire Attorney

“I’m sorry. My friend here got scammed out of a lot of money, and he thinks getting a fancy watch will make the people at the bank think he’s good enough for a loan.”

“I,” Peter stretches out his hand to reveal a watch I gifted him, “I would like to sell this, please. How much can I get for it?”

The woman takes a look at it, asks him to remove it, and then offers a ridiculously lower price than what I bought it for. I clamp my tongue between my teeth to keep from speaking.

“Okay. Uhm…can you make it any higher? This is the most valuable thing I have,” Peter says, looking helpless and scratching his head. “I would have given it to Eric, I heard that he comes to sell stuff here, so I decided to come myself.”

The woman’s eyes widened a fraction at the mention of Eric, confirming that our tip was right. I bring out a couple of hundred-dollar bills from my pocket and toss them on the counter.

“Is this good enough to get information from you?” I say.

She looks at it and looks back at me.

“No,” she says flatly.

I add another bill. And another. And another. It gets to five hundred dollars, and then she nods.

“You want to know about Eric. This tall—” She gestures and goes on about his looks. “Yeah, he comes here.”

“Does he sell you anything out of the ordinary? Goods that are stolen?”

She clams up, and I fork out some more hundred-dollar bills to get her talking again.

“Well, we don’t take stolen items. But sometimes it is difficult to tell what items are stolen. He brings us a lot of merchandise so we are not going to turn items down if we are not sure, we have a business to run,” she admits.

I stroke my chin.

“So there is no way to tell if he stole the items or bought them from someone, is that what I understand?” I try to clarify.

She smiles and her teeth are covered with a diamond and gold grill. “What do YOU think?”

Peter recoils, and I almost burst out in laughter. I might be quick to anger, but the times when Peter cannot hide what he thinks are hilarious to me.

“Okay. So, he stole them. Did he come with anyone? At all? Or do you know if he had a partner? Anyone he might have had a falling out with?”

She shrugs. “I try to stay out of everyone else’s business if it doesn’t involve me. I stay out of trouble. We don’t want any trouble, no cops?”

Bingo.

I lean forward until we are eye-to-eye.

“Do you want the cops to come here with a warrant? Go through the whole shop and find things that you don’t want found.”

She goes pale immediately, contrasting with her diamond and gold grill.

“Are you the cops?”

I shake my head. “Luckily for you, we aren’t. But we can get the cops, so you’d better tell us what you know.”

I don’t tell her that telling us will not change anything.

“Yes,” she says, a bit of a tremble in her voice. “Yeah. He did. I heard him argue with a man on the phone a couple of times while he was here.”

They talked about money, some shipment, and then,” she scratches her head, “I think a wedding. He said that he couldn’t send the friend money for his wedding because he told him not to get married.”

My mind finds the information interesting, and I try to remember where I’ve heard something that might place the piece to the puzzle. Then it hits me.

Savannah mentioned that Brandon asked her to give him the engagement ring back because he lost his job and needed the money to pay his rent.

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