If none of the other detectives had been able to find him using a money trail, she figured she wouldn’t be able to either. But the fact remained that following the money was still one of the best ways to find what someone was up to. And for whatever reason, she could not stop digging into Max Benton’s life even though she was no longer getting paid to do so.
Max still hadn’t announced a marriage to fulfill Cole’s demands to release his trust money. So maybe, she’d speculated, he had found another source of funding for his hotel. He was friends with, if not the richest men in the world, many of their sons and daughters. Including Sorley Greer, whom Pru had also looked into as a possible financier for Max’s hotel.
However, according to her research, Sorley wouldn’t go for a project this small. He tended toward big investments based on predictions only he seemed to be able to make. To the point that quite a few other big-time investors had accused him of insider trading, only to have to back down from their claims when Sorley’s lawyers sent them strongly worded letters that made generous use of words such as defamation and libel. In any case, as good as Max’s hotel idea was, it didn’t exactly fit in with the rest of Sorley’s portfolio.
But that didn’t mean that Max hadn’t found another way to get the money, which was why she’d asked her friend at NevadaStar to look into his account. The nice thing about having been involved in a stage show that aged most of its pretty participants out at thirty was that she now had contacts working in post–Benton Revue jobs in nearly every institution in Las Vegas. Very lucky for her, since the truth was that having contacts in the right places was critical to working cases as a private investigator.
But this particular lead didn’t pan out. According to her friend, Max hadn’t received a single noninterest cent since Cole cut him off. From the Benton Group or anyone else. And the interest on his account was seriously measured in cents now, since he currently had only a three-figure number left in it.
“I guess stunting like he used to ain’t cheap,” her friend observed with a whistle over the youngest Benton heir’s low amount of available funds. “Either he’s going to have to get in back good with his family, or get a real job.”
Try as she might, Pru just didn’t see Max getting a regular job. Building a splashy new hotel with his trust money? Yes. That was the type of big gamble that a guy like Max would go for. Actually using his marketing degree from the Boston Institute of Technology in order to earn a paycheck that wasn’t a thinly disguised version of his original allowance? She doubted it.
But maybe he’d just been blustering about starting his own line of boutique hotels, she thought after finding nary a mention of Max during her latest internet search. She’d met guys like Max before back when she’d been into the Vegas lifestyle. Guys who’d been all talk and no play. Guys who thought they had what it took to make a big vision come to life but crapped out before even rolling their dice.
Pru frowned, wishing her fingers weren’t itching to call up her friend at NevadaStar and ask her to go even deeper with her search. Maybe send over his year-to-date transactions report. Her friend had said most of the money in his account had gone toward paying credit-card bills. But maybe there was something she’d missed, something she hadn’t seen.
“Pru?” a voice said behind her.
She turned from the list of Nevada’s revised statutes and limitations that she was supposed to be studying to see her brother, Jakey, standing in the doorway to her room. He’d had yet another growth spurt over the summer and now stood a good five inches taller than her. He’d also been working out in an effort to relieve the summer boredom, so he’d also gotten wider over the past two months. The front of the T-shirt he wore seemed to be crying out for mercy as it strained against his newly formed muscles, and his old jogging pants might as well have issued their own flood warning, they were in such high-water territory.
She screwed up her mouth. “We’re going to have to hit the mall before you leave for your camp next week. Get you some new clothes.”
More money that would have to be spent now that she’d retired from the Benton Revue and was living off her savings. Luckily, the money Cole had paid her for hunting Max down had nicely cushioned her account. She had enough to not only tide her through until October but also to pay for Jakey’s books when he started at UNLV in the fall on a full scholarship.
Buying Jake some more clothes for camp and also a fall wardrobe for college shouldn’t be a problem. But still, she worried. She and Jake had been forced to live frugally in the years since their parents’ deaths in order to pay rent on an apartment in one of Nevada’s best school districts and make ends meet. After Jake got his full scholarship, Pru had thought long and hard before quitting the line in order to pursue what she’d begun to think of as a calling. But she couldn’t be sure how soon she’d be able to acquire more work after she got her license. Cases like the one Cole had thrown her didn’t come along every day. Plus there would be the costs of renting an office and advertising her services around town.
She needed to watch every penny, she thought. But not at her brother’s expense. It wasn’t his fault that he kept growing and growing, or that his new health kick upped their weekly grocery bill, or that his going to college came with extra expenses that even having Jakey continue to live at home wouldn’t alleviate.
“You know what, let’s go to the mall now,” she said, glancing at the clock on her bedroom wall. “Maybe we can get some lunch while we’re out.”
She grabbed her wallet and phone off the desk, slipped them into the back pockets of her bell-bottom jeans and was all set to go. Back in the day before she became Jakey’s guardian, she wouldn’t have dreamed of leaving the apartment she used to share with her best friend, Sunny, in anything less than full makeup. Back then, even her most casual looks were chosen more to accentuate her assets than for comfort.
But now that she’d retired from the Benton Revue, she’d pretty much stuck to a wardrobe of her mother’s old seventies-era clothing throughout the summer. Her mother had been a seamstress along with Sunny’s grandmother for the Revue, and she’d taken excellent care of even her most casual clothes. True, seventies and early eighties vintage wasn’t the most glamorous look, but wearing these clothes made Pru feel closer to her mother, even though she was no longer here.
“Actually,” said Jake with an apologetic wince, “I was hoping maybe we could go down to the storage unit and do some upkeep on Dad’s car.”
“Oh...sure,” Pru said, quickly resetting.
About twenty minutes later, they were pulling the cover off their dad’s black ’55 Thunderbird.
Back when they’d been forced to downsize in order to keep Jakey in his school district, Pru had paid for storage space and an additional garage unit for their dad’s Thunderbird. He’d inherited the car from his own father, and Pru had grown to highly value it. Not just because it was a much sought-after collectible, but also because it was Jakey’s unspoken inheritance. Their happy and healthy parents hadn’t been prescient enough to take out a life insurance policy, but her father had left this car behind. And that was why Pru had remained diligent about its upkeep all these years. She made sure that she and Jakey did the necessary work to guarantee the car would stay in good enough shape for Jakey to drive it someday.
However, this particular trip wasn’t really about their father’s Thunderbird. Asking her if they could go down to the garage unit to do some upkeep on their dad’s car was Jakey’s way of telling her he needed to talk. Over the years she’d been his guardian, she’d guided him through first dates, first breakups, major disappointments and lost friendships over the hood of that car.
“So
