Page 25 of The Suit

I held my hands up before another potential fight broke out. “Okay, well we’re not disagreeing with you on that point, but how much do you know about what’s happening?”

“Everything. We know what happened yesterday and we know he’s trying to get out of paying our mom.”

“It’s not about the money you know, she doesn’t even want it. She just wants him to pay,” Brandon added.

He was clearly the diplomatic middle child, not wanting to take sides but knowing his mom was hurting and wanting to protect her but struggling with not hating his dad like Bryan clearly did.

I smiled again, hoping to reassure him somewhat. “Yeah, I know, don’t worry. We’ll make it happen.”

Bryan’s shoulders dropped slightly with relief. He’d clearly taken the divorce the hardest; for him it was simple. His mom was hurting, his dad was the cause, and he wanted to make it stop.

I waited for them to take a seat at the breakfast counter, attention fully tuned in. “So you know the current offer on the table, and that we believe he’s hiding money?”

They both nodded.

“Our next job is to find where he’s hiding it, but the problem is it’s being kept in untraceable accounts that he’s created to hide assets. You understand what I mean by that?”

“Yeah.” They nodded in sync.

“Good. Now, when people create these bank accounts, they usually use something that’s familiar to them, something they can remember it by. Is there anything you can think of, or you’ve seen that’s important to your father? That might give us any idea of where he’s keeping the money. It could be a name of a place he goes, or a drink he likes… Anything at all. Doesn’t matter how insignificant it seems.”

They sat there, thinking, stiller than two teenage boys had ever been in their lives

“Anything?” Brandon broke the silence.

“Yeah, anything.”

He took a deep breath and turned to his brother.

“Bry, remember that time a couple of years ago when dad was home and we were heading out to the game?”

Bryan’s brow creased in concentration as he tried to remember, then his eyes lit up. “Yeah! Yeah!” He turned to Diego and me. “We were going to the gameand the phone was ringing as we walked past dad’s study. The door was usually shut so we never went in it, but we did this time to answer the phone and it was one of one mom’s friends, and she needed us to give her a message. I grabbed a pen and wrote it down on the nearest piece of paper. As I was writing it our dad walks in and goes fucking ballistic…”

“Yeah, he was so angry,” interrupted Brandon. “Like we’d never seen him…”

“Yeah, so angry, and he has a temper. But what he was mad at was the paper I was holding and snatched it back. He smoothed it out and then put it in a folder that had been sitting on his desk. It was so fucking weird. Then he marched the two of us back out of the room and locked the door behind him.”

They sat back, arms crossed over their chest, delighted with themselves, like they’d just solved the mysteries of the Pyramids. And it might have been a great story, but I had no idea how it was going to help us, which Brandon must have realized after taking in our confusion.

“Oh yeah, sorry, the point of that… When we got back from the game I knew that I wanted to find out what was so important, and I made Bryan watch out while I picked the lock.”

He was too busy on his roll to notice my look of impressed surprise.

“The file was still sitting there on his desk, because he would never have dreamed anyone would break into his office. The paper with my mom’s message was on the top of it, but when I looked I realized it was some kind of invoice for a yacht. It was a forty-million-dollar deposit.”

Diego let out a slow whistle.

“What was the yacht called?”

“Dainty Lady. I remember because I had to look up what ‘dainty’ meant,” he said with utter seriousness.

I grinned. “Where was it moored?”

“Cayman. But we have a place there so I didn’t think anything of it, plus we had a yacht so I just assumed my dad was upgrading as a surprise. But the yacht never materialized.”

Diego was already on the phone to Cody before I could tell him to get onto the phone to Cody.

“Anyway, that’s something I remember. Hope it’s helpful.” The excitement that had been present in his voice had dropped slightly, to be replaced by something resembling guilt.

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