Page 32 of The Trust We Broke
Dad grins. “Don’t be. I’d do it for my club. But doing it for my son as president would be an honor.”
8
LUCY
The door to my father’s law office creaks open like it resents me just as much as my father does. Or maybe it knows I’m an interloper, not on my father’s side.
After all, it’s the reason I’m creeping around in here on Saturday morning, in the hope I’ll be left alone to investigate exactly what is in my father’s hidden drawer.
It’s been on my mind since last night, wondering what secrets are waiting in that false bottom and on that phone.
Now I’m in, the office is deserted, and I can get the files out of there.
The office smells like my father. Expensive cologne, stale coffee, and the seedy fragrance of misused power linger in the air. The desk is exactly as I left it yesterday evening.
After locking the door behind me, I walk to the chair, wondering what it must feel like for this to be the sum total of your ambition. One that lacks morality and gravitates around dollars and cents. Someone once said that, at the end of the day, when it’s just you in your bathroom, brushing your teeth before bed, you need to look in the mirror and feel proud of whatyou accomplished. And I don’t know how a man like my father manages to do that.
It takes less than five minutes to pull everything out onto his desk. With the phone plugged in to charge again, I turn it on. But, as I expected, it is password protected. The screen flickers to life, asking for a passcode. Six digits.
I try 112259…his date of birth. No luck.
I try mine and my mother’s.
Still nothing.
I know if I try too many times, I might get locked out permanently.
I slam the phone down, my frustration rising.
I don’t know what I thought would happen this morning. I’m not even sure why I hadn’t thought about the password.
My father is an intelligent man. For all I know, the password date could be the year the Supreme Court was founded or President Nixon resigned.
There are about ten brown manilla folders and two black notebooks.
I open the first notebook. Its corners are tattered; its pages so well flicked through that they curl.
Inside are dates. Dollar amounts. Initials.
RD - 15K, cash envelope - July.
WG - 5K, crypto transfer - August.
My pulse jumps.
It’s a ledger.
And if there is one thing I love more than the law, it’s a good puzzle. The initials in the book remain consistent for a period of time, changing only every four or five years.
If I can convert the initials into names, I might be able to cross reference them with organizations or businesses. And if I can convert them into businesses, I might be able to then match those with Dad’s client base or connections to other cases.
It hasn’t even occurred to me, for a moment, that they might be legitimate transactions. Because if they were, they’d surely be on the company system, on a laptop, kept in digital format, and connected to annual company filings.
The second notebook is formatted differently. There’s a sticky note jammed inside.
MRMC - Q4. Understood.
A second page saysRebels.
