Page 76 of Blame it on the Bet
“You deaf? I told you I’m not your secretary. Come out and ask him yourself.”
I get up and follow King out. Sure enough, there is a weasely-looking guy there. Jonathan Pettit, the trustee. I motion for him to come back and close the door behind him when he enters my office.
“Mr. Pettit,” I say cautiously. “What brings you back up here to Mayhem?”
“I’m just going to cut to the chase here,” he says without an ounce of friendliness. “My job, as the trustee, is to hold the mortgage loan as a neutral third party. But, in the end, I have a fiduciary responsibility to the bank and—I like to think, anyway—a moral duty to the property owners.”
“Okay…”
I have no idea what this guy’s getting at.
“I told you when we met a couple of weeks back that you looked familiar to me.”
“Yeah…”
Oh crap. Maybe I do have an idea.
“I don’t forget faces easily, you see. And I’m a voracious consumer of the financial news…”
Crap.
Crap, crap, crap, crap.
“It took me a bit,” he continues, “but then I realized. I realized who you are and what it is that you’re doing here. In Mayhem. With Hennessy O’Halloran.”
“Mr. Pettit, I don’t know what you think you’ve stumbled on?—”
“Oh, but I think you do know. Don’t you, Mr. Broadmore?”
I knew there’d come a time.
Somewhere, someday, at some point, someone was going to put two and two together, and that bit of math was going to add up to a very ugly scene in at least one of my business dealings. But not this one. For God’s sake…not this one. Please.
“I can explain…”
They’re the three most pathetic words you can string together in the English language, and they’re tantamount to “I’m guilty.” I know it. Jonathan Pettit knows it. And he’s sneering at me across my desk.
“No explanation needed, Mr. Broadmore,” he says, putting extra emphasis on my name. My real name. It makes me wince to have someone call me that again.
“What is it that you want?” He snorts.
“What do I want? You mean, like a bribe? Oh please, Mr. Broadmore. Don’t insult me. I’m not like you. Or your father. You people make me sick. And now you’re here, carrying on the family legacy, I assume. What is it this time? Looking for new investors in your latest ‘can’t lose’ proposition before you skip town with a cool mil or two in your pocket?”
“Stop it,” I say quietly, but he doesn’t listen.
“Did you think the good people of this town would make good patsies for you? Did you research them and jump on the O’Halloran property when it came up? Is that it, Mr. Broadmore?”
“Stop it!”
I didn’t mean to yell, but I did. And I slammed my fist down on the desk. Now this small, small man is looking at me with something like triumph gleaming in his beady little eyes. A great big “I told you so.”
“If that’s true,” I begin, my voice shaking with barely controlled rage, “if you really followed the story, then you know how it ended.”
“I do know how it ended. But that doesn’t mean you’re innocent. All it means is you found a way to save your worthless hide from spending the rest of your life in prison. You’ll never have the property,” he informs me icily. “I’ll see to that.”
I take a deep breath, close my eyes for a few seconds, and force myself back into professional, cool, calm, detached Bryan Truitt mode.
“I really don’t think that’s in your control, Mr. Pettit. Miss O’Halloran and I have an arrangement, and either way it turns out, the deal will be done before it ever reaches your control.”
