Robert B. Parker’s Fallout

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?”

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.