Edge

coward.” He grabbed another napkin and wiped his nose. “I couldn’t tell Father I didn’t want to go back to college this fall. I’m afraid of him, Mom’s afraid of him. Everybody’s afraid of him. He was always saying things like, ‘You’re not going to be my third daughter, are you?’ I had to try out for the football team. I weigh a hundred and fifty-two pounds. Me on the football team? But he kept on me all the time. ‘Be a man. Do me proud. Follow in my footsteps.’ I couldn’t say no.”
    “So you forged the check so he couldn’t pay tuition?”
    “How pathetic is that?”
    “You had Jimmy pick up the gold coins you bought.”
    Stu nodded. “He didn’t do anything bad. Swear to God. He just helped me out. He’s got family inNew Jersey. He’s there a lot. So we figured we’d have the coins shipped there, not to D.C.”
    “And your father found out and withdrew the complaint.”
    He nodded. “Oh, man, yeah, he found out.”
    I imagined that had been one pyrotechnic confrontation.
    “What’d you do with the money?”
    “It wasn’t about the money.”
    “I understand but I want to know what you did with it.”
    “We kept a little, the rest we gave to an AIDS research fund and to Amnesty International. I hate it that my father makes weapons for a living. That’s what he does for the Pentagon. He’s so proud of it. So smug. I wanted his money to do something good.”
    I said, “Give me the name of somebody at Amnesty who can confirm it.”
    Stu looked through his BlackBerry and recited a name and number.
    “Got that?” I asked.
    He blinked again, frowning.
    I said, “I’m not talking to you.”
    In my earpiece Claire duBois said, “I’m calling now.”
    I said to Stu, “We wait a minute.”
    The man slumped, blew his nose again. He looked around the coffee shop and gave a faint laugh. “We come here all the time? Jimmy and me?”
    I said nothing.
    “You know what he was telling me just the other day?”
    “What?”
    “Korea, right, you’d think it was tea, tea, tea. Like China and Japan. But the last emperor of Korea, his name was Sunjong, the nineteen twenties, he loved the West and always had coffee at the palace. He and his father would sit around drinking coffee and talking about world affairs. Word got around and the citizens began to drink coffee. They liked to do what their emperor does. There’re more coffee drinkers in Korea than any other Asian country. They even have coffee shop hookers. Dabang girls, they’re called.”
    He fell silent. I’d rarely seen anyone looking more miserable.
    Tears running again. “Please,” he begged. “Call the FBI. Tell them Jimmy’s not dangerous!”
    Then I heard duBois’s voice: “Corte. It checks out. They gave Amnesty International thirty-one thousand.”
    “Okay.” Then I said to her, “Tell the troops to stand down.”
    “What?” she asked, confused.
    “I’ll call you in a minute.” I cut off the com device.
    Under other circumstances I might have let Stu spin in the wind a little but I couldn’t forget Graham’s arrogance and his insulting duBois. I said, “I don’t think we need to pursue this any further. I’ll hold off the investigation for now, provided there’s no recurrence.”
    “No, sir. No! I promise.”
    I rose and started for the door. I turned back. “Next year, your dad could get more money. Or he could get a loan for your tuition. I’m just curious. What’re you going to do then?”
    The young man turned his red eyes toward me. His jaw was set. “I’m going to tell him to go to hell.”
    I believed him. I couldn’t help but respond, “Good.”
    I left the coffee shop.
    Well, I had the answer about one of Ryan Kessler’s cases. I called duBois.
    “You were right,” she said.
    The theory had presented itself in Eric Graham’s den, when I’d looked over the decor and photographs and had studied his reaction when duBois had laid out our theory as to why Loving had been hired. I’d decided he was telling the partial truth—nobody was blackmailing him. DuBois’s computer analysis of his expressions and body language bore this out. On the wall were pictures of the young man I’d deduced was his son, along with a man about the same age of Asian extraction, who closely resembled the suspect on the security video, involved in the forgery scam. Backed up by the ORC computer analysis, she’d run credit cards, DMV information, face recognition analysis, blog and social networking