They Paid the Freeloader Son-in-Law to Leave, Then His Grandfather's Will Was Read novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Fourteenth Floor

Brett learns who Nate is across the loan table and has to say please, and Nate saves the family company on one condition, while his uncle puts the favor in the minutes.

Brett laughed and followed Nate across the marble to the elevators.

"Your uncle," he said. "Your uncle works here? What is he, the night janitor?"

The elevator doors stood open.

Richard Imbrie waited inside with his hands in his pockets.

He looked past Nate at Brett and smiled.

"Mr. Shearer. You're here for the loan committee, I think. Ride up with us."

Brett stepped in, still smiling, and the doors closed.

Nobody spoke for fourteen floors.

Brett kept looking from Richard to Nate and back, and once he started to say something and didn't.

The loan committee met in a glass room on the fourteenth floor.

Five officers sat along one side of a long table, and a secretary sat at the end with a laptop.

Through the glass walls, half the floor had stopped working to watch.

A few of them knew Nate.

He had worked the loan desk on this floor for two years.

A gray-haired officer at the table gave him a small nod.

Richard took the chair at the head of the table.

"Before we start," he said, "this is my nephew, Nate Mazur."

"My father's grandson and, under his will, his heir."

"He'll sit in as a courtesy, without a vote, until the board confirms him."

The officers stood up.

All five of them stood, and the secretary half rose from her chair.

Brett stayed in his seat with his folder in his lap.

His mouth had come a little open.

"Sit, please," Nate said, and they sat.

He took the chair across from Brett.

"Go ahead, Mr. Shearer," Richard said. "Hausler Homes."

Brett opened his folder and looked at it.

"We're asking for, uh, a ninety-day extension. On the river lots in Sharpsburg."

He cleared his throat.

"Two payments came in late. The project's sound. It's forty townhouses on the Allegheny. We'll be selling by spring."

He had given the speech before, Nate could tell, but not with his voice shaking.

Richard let the silence sit.

Then he turned to Nate.

"You know, it's your wife's family," Richard said pleasantly. "I think my father's heir should decide his own family's loan."

"I'll sign whatever he says."

The gray-haired officer looked down at the table.

Nate understood exactly what his uncle was doing.

Whatever he decided, Richard would have it in writing with his name on it.

He held out his hand for the file.

The officer slid it across, and Nate read it the way he used to read them at this table, fast, from the back page first.

"Your roofs aren't on," he said.

Brett blinked. "What?"

"Your draw sheet says the roofs went on in August. They didn't. Leah's crew starts roofing next week."

"How would you know that?"

"I live with your superintendent."

One of the officers wrote something down.

"You can't sell a townhouse without a roof," Nate said. "So you asked for ninety days, and ninety is about right."

Brett let out his breath.

"So we're good?"

"I haven't said yes."

Brett looked at Richard.

Richard looked back at him with polite interest and said nothing.

Brett turned to Nate again.

His face was going red from the collar up.

Through the glass, the people on the floor were watching him.

He had told half the lobby that Nate was here for a night job.

"Can we have the extension," he said.

"Is that how you ask a bank?" Nate said.

Brett's jaw worked.

"Please," he said. "Can Hausler Homes please have ninety days."

"Yes," Nate said. "On one condition."

He closed the file.

"Frank Hausler sleeps in his own house. Not the county home. Not anywhere else."

"As long as this extension stands, Frank stays home."

Brett stared at him.

"That's not a bank thing. You can't put that in a loan."

"You can put anything in a loan," Nate said. "It's the bank's money."

The gray-haired officer turned a laugh into a cough.

Richard took one hand out of his pocket and gestured at the glass door.

"You'd better call Mrs. Hausler, Mr. Shearer. We'll wait."

Brett went out and stood by the glass wall with his back to them and his phone at his ear.

They could all hear him through the door.

"He's the grandson. Of the Imbrie. Yes. Yes, Barbara, that Imbrie."

There was a long gap.

"I'm not making it up. They stood up when he came in."

Another gap.

Brett came back in and sat down without looking at anybody.

"She says fine."

"I'd like to hear her say it," Nate said.

Brett put the phone on the table on speaker.

For a moment there was only breathing.

Then Barbara's voice came out of it, flat and small.

"Fine. He stays."

"Thank you, Barbara," Nate said. "Cancel the van."

She hung up.

Brett picked up his phone and his folder and left so fast he forgot to sign out of the meeting.

Through the glass, Nate watched him walk the length of the floor with forty people turning to watch him go.

The officers gathered their files.

Nate stood up to leave.

Richard didn't move from the head of the table.

He spoke to the secretary in the same pleasant voice he'd used all morning.

"Put it in the minutes, please."

"The chairman-designate's first act was nine million dollars for his wife's family."

The secretary's fingers stopped over her keys.

Then she typed it.

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