"I'm very serious. This has your bank's letterhead, branch number, and routing information on it." "Then it's forged or outdated or someone in data entry made a mistake 3 months ago. Look at her, officer." Gerald extended his arm toward Sylvia like a prosecutor presenting evidence.
"Does she look like she has $28 million?" The question hung in the air like cigarette smoke. Every person in that lobby heard it. Every person understood what it really meant. Daniels' jaw tightened.
"What someone looks like isn't my concern, Mr. Crawford. What they can document is." Gerald's composure cracked. Not a lot, just a hairline fracture running through his smile.
He stepped closer to Daniels, lowering his voice to a register meant to convey power and intimacy at the same time.
"Officer, let me be frank with you, man to man. If you don't remove these people from my branch, I'm going to call your precinct commander directly. I know Captain Wallace personally. We golf at Druid Hills every other Saturday."
"His daughter's wedding? I was there. Table six. Do you understand what I'm telling you?"
Daniels' expression didn't change, but something rearranged itself behind his eyes. The calculation that happens when authority presses against authority and a career gets placed on one side of a scale. "Ma'am," Daniels said, turning back to Sylvia. His voice was quieter now.
"I'm going to need you to step outside while we sort this out with the bank." "I've been waiting my whole life, officer. I can wait a little longer, but I'm not leaving this building." Gerald threw both hands up.
"This is trespassing, plain and simple. She was asked to leave. She came back. That's textbook. Arrest her."
"Nobody is getting arrested right now," Mitchell said from behind his notebook. It was the first full sentence he had spoken. Gerald whipped around to face him. "I wasn't talking to you, junior." Mitchell held his gaze for a beat.
Then he looked down and kept writing. But the line of his jaw said he was recording more than notes. The lobby was a pressure cooker. Amanda gripped the edge of her counter with both hands, knuckles white. Rick Tanner stood near the side corridor, arms at his sides, feet apart, watching Gerald the way a man watches a bridge he knows is about to buckle.
Victoria Lane had picked up her phone again, but this time the camera was aimed at Sylvia, not at Instagram. She was recording. So was a man at the far desk who had been pretending to read a brochure for the last 10 minutes. A customer near the front door, a man in his 60s with silver hair and a golf tan, stood up, grabbed his leather briefcase, and walked out without a word. He didn't want his face in whatever this was becoming.
Gerald pointed at Elijah's phone. "And you, turn that off. That's a violation of our customer privacy policy, section 12, paragraph..."
"We're in a public-facing commercial establishment," Elijah said. "There's no reasonable expectation of privacy in a bank lobby under Georgia law. OCGA section 16-11-62. Would you like me to cite the full statute?" Gerald's left eye twitched.
A vein surfaced on his neck, thin and blue. "Political science major," Elijah added, "pre-law minor, Morehouse College." "I don't care if you're pre-med at Harvard. Turn it off."