Municipal Blondes
25
Wash it all away
I DIDN’T WANT TO GET OUT OF BED. It was a comfortable bed and I felt like I hadn’t slept well in a month. I woke up during the night, cried some more, and went back to sleep. Dag died believing he killed Simon but Simon was just hiding out. I’m trying to be rational about it and it just isn’t working. I don’t trust him.
Coffee
I don’t know what Dag saw in Simon. It has to be more than just being college friends. Look at all the crap Simon pulled on him. He slept with his wife and then married her after Dag divorced her. He can’t be clean. There’s too much money involved. Dag moved two billion dollars in assets to charities over Thanksgiving weekend. But Simon isn’t hurting for cash. He blew up his own plane and was able to get from Cuba to Croatia with new ID and no financial hardship. Angel owns this villa—read that ‘mansion’—and I’m sure she’s got a couple of million stashed away for retirement.
I finally hauled my ass out of bed about eight-thirty. I considered calling Cinnamon but either she is in bed or thinking about who she’s going to get there. I took a shower and stood wrapped in a towel looking out at the sea. I can see the ferry dock from here. A ferry came in while I was watching and I could see people getting off.
My mind kept playing tricks on me. I kept thinking I could see people I knew. I saw a guy with a cane and a limp and thought Jordan was there. I’d have sworn I saw Cinnamon, Geoff Gilliam, Brenda, Bradley, Oksamma, Ray, and one time even Dag. I suppose I’ll be seeing ghosts till the day I die and join them.
Coffee wasn’t bad at all. When I got downstairs and found the kitchen, Angel was the only one there. Simon was staying on the third floor and decided it was best to stay out of sight for a while. Apparently, my warning was being considered. What he could do about it, though, I really didn’t know. I had no intention of getting between him and whoever Brenda was sending after him. I figured it was no one I knew, so what good was I really. If I’d had Angel’s phone number, I could have saved myself a trip and a lot of sleepless hours.
How could I have been so stupid as to think because I managed to hide out in the Condo a few days, Brenda and her executive groupies would consider me any kind of threat? I assessed the sum of what I knew and what I figured they knew about me.
They knew Angel gave the thumb drive to Dag and I probably had it. They’d ransacked my office when I disappeared. They didn’t find it or me.
They knew James Whitcomb camped out at the Condo a few days. I’d dumped Davy in the hot tub when I left but I was pretty sure no one knew Deb Riley was James Whitcomb.
Someone knew James Whitcomb had done business with Angel and then disappeared a few days later.
Finally, they knew Angel had this property in Croatia.
Unless they had something else, it wasn’t much to go on. I’d given Jordan more information than that. As far as I could figure, none of the Committee knew anything about me or that I was with Angel now or that I was James Whitcomb.
I’d book a flight home and send the original thumb drive to Brenda’s address. My name would be wiped off their list of naughty and nice. They’d never know I’d sent all the data to Jordan.
After Angel greeted me, she had coffee ready in a flash. She had this great machine you punch a button on, it grinds the coffee, and brews a beautiful cup of rich black joe. I gotta get me one of those. She said in the US they cost about $1,500!
Maybe I’ll just hire Jackie, the barista at Tovoni’s to hand deliver a cup every day!
“So, what are you going to do, Angel?” I asked. She started to whimper and I saw a tear in her eye.
“We were up half the night. We should run but Simon thinks he did the wrong thing coming here. If they come here, we stand a chance. This place is pretty defensible. If we run… well, it wouldn’t be hard to spot a five-nine man with a six-foot blonde. I don’t know. I’m scared but I don’t want to leave him.”
I could sympathize a little. Simon had eight powerful enemies and probably more knowledge about what was happening in their world than anyone else. I bet Jordan wished he had Simon on the witness stand instead of just having a disk full of names and accounts.
Barbarian at the gate
“Angel,” I said out of the blue as we were having toast, “I want to know more about your business. You had FinCEN and the FBI hanging around your shop before you left. They were watching everybody who came in or out. What is it you really do?”
“Financial Crimes Enforcement? They’re always hanging around. They’ve been trying to pin a money laundering scheme on me for months. I’m not worried about them unless they send in the VICE squad. Now that would be embarrassing.”
“But you are, aren’t you?” I asked.
“Laundering money? No. I don’t think so. There’s nothing illegal about hiding your money. You can hide it under your mattress if you want to. I convert it to instruments that can be hidden more easily. Any cash transaction of more than $5,000, I dutifully report on my little form. They know I can’t possibly handle the kind of cash they want to investigate.”
“What about these?” I asked, tossing one of my cash cards on the table in front of her.
“How did you get one of these?” she asked picking it up. “It’s just a cash card. You can buy them at the bank. If you don’t put more than $5,000 on it in a cash transaction, there’s nothing stopping you from buying it and using it anyplace in the world. Now, come on. Which shop did you get this one in? It’s from our network.”
“Yours.” I pulled out the other card from my wallet. “You charge a pretty hefty commission to fill one up.”
Angel looked at me strangely and closely. I stared her straight in the eye. She slowly began to grin.
“The little gay college professor? You?” I nodded. “I can’t believe it. You said you could disguise yourself so we’d never recognize you. That was incredible! Have you done Cinnamon and Teri yet?” I nodded.
“Let’s get back to the question,” I said. “You ran this as two different transactions and took a twenty percent commission on the deal. That totaled $12,000. But you didn’t report it. Isn’t that a little contrary to the law?”
“If you were picky enough, maybe. But it still isn’t money laundering.”
“It sure isn’t a service offered by most travel agents.”
“I handled about $1.5 million a year,” angel said. Simon got me the business and introduced me to people a long time ago. But there isn’t anything illegal about what I do.”
“It’s still too shady,” Simon said from the doorway. “I never should have gotten you into this. They all know you helped them hide money from their wives. They’ll all be afraid of you.” He looked pretty worn this morning and Angel jumped up to kiss him. She made coffee and had him at the table with us in seconds. So domestic. “What you have there, Miss Riley, is the contemporary equivalent of a bearer bond. You can’t get those in the US anymore. You can in some countries, but if you’re caught transporting them into the US, the government will confiscate it if you don’t declare it and tax it if you do. Detecting a few extra credit cards is much harder to do. There are a lot of men and a few women who have no difficulty withdrawing a few thousand dollars in miscellaneous funds from joint checking accounts. Their spouses don’t even notice it, probably because they are also withdrawing similar amounts. They’re insurance money, paid in advance. They convert little stashes of cash to gift cards. That’s also completely legal. You can even put more on the same card later. It’s instant cash, anyplace in the world. So, a business executive on a trip for two weeks in Asia with no wife and fear of a sexual harassment suit from his secretary, can’t even approach someone on the street because he could be recognized. But he can go online and pick his favorite escort, have him or her at his room for the night and gone before he meets his coworkers for breakfast. The escort is paid with untraceable funds that he pulled from the local ATM on the way back to his hotel. There’s no personal information contained on that card. If you have the card and the PIN, you have the money. He paid for his night with an A-class model with money he stuck in his pocket months ago. It’s the closest thing we have to fully anonymous banking.”
“You can’t tell me Angel brings in $1.5 million a year in money executives spend on hookers,” I spat. Sorry, Angel, but let’s call it what it is.
“Lots of reasons to hide money. Divorce in your future? Want to ride a spaceship? Need to pay off a gambling debt? Want to move your assets to a nice safe Swiss bank account where your children will be able to get it after you die without paying estate taxes on it? Carry a hundred thou in cash on each of your trips to Europe and you’ll raise a flag. Carry five $20,000 cash cards and no one will ever know.”
“So, the difference between this and money laundering is what?” I asked. “Step one is convert the funds into a negotiable instrument. Taking fifty $20s and having them give you back ten $100s. Yeah that’s small potatoes. But you’re taking fifty $100s and giving them one little plastic $5,000 bill. It’s the same thing.”
“If it weren’t so profitable, we’d have gotten out of the business a long time ago. Twenty percent commission on the sale. All declared. Taxes paid. For every $100,000 you manage to hide, we get $20,000. Better than the stock market and we move everything into our own foreign accounts. Right now, all we’re trying to do is retire. There are money launderers out there who work two orders of magnitude above the business we do. Those are the guys FinCEN is interested in. It just happens FinCEN is mad at me because I didn’t give them the data I promised. I gave it to Dag instead and you broke into it and decided to become a vigilante—go after them yourself. You’re way out of your league on this one, babe. I just need to stay holed up until that cop I cut the deal with cools off and uses the data on that disk you cracked. Please tell me you gave it to Dag’s friend, Jordan Grant.”
“You know Jordan?”
“He’s the cop I cut the deal with months ago. I promised to give him evidence of a massive fraud collaborated on by Seattle’s top execs.”
“WTF!” I grabbed my phone and sent a one-hand text message to Jordan: ‘What do you want me to do with Simon Barnett?’ I didn’t expect an answer very soon. It was two o’clock in the morning in Seattle. “So how did you discover this massive fraud?” I asked.
“My wife and I have been spying on each other for years. That was what led to the ugly affair that broke up Dag’s marriage and saddled me with mine,” Simon said. She was already brokering deals with local businessmen and politicians, way back then. I bought her the Condo years ago, when they first started renovating that area. It became the place she used to bring the players to the table.”
“No one could see them come or go and no surveillance was allowed,” I said. “I watched it in action.”
“She always had a supply of hostesses who were happy to dress nicely and work for ‘tips.’ When I realized she was pushing the limits close to having an operating brothel in Seattle, I stepped in and started enforcing standards on behavior and conduct. I won’t say sex never takes place at the Condo, but I used it more as an employment agency. I found beautiful intelligent young women and put them in a place where they could be discovered. They had one-on-one chats with men they would never get to talk to, even if they worked for the same company. Those men, in turn, used their influence to get the women jobs in their companies. Those jobs were always equivalent to what any man with the same education and experience could have gotten by walking in off the street.”
“How altruistic.”
“It was one of the things the men agreed to. Sponsor a woman in the Condo and set her up with a good employer. Never mess with an employee. Find good women. The mentor was responsible for seeing the woman learned how to get the most they could from a job. The men in the Condo got to spend time with beautiful young women.
“So, you want me to believe the condo is just a place where a few lucky young women are given a better chance at good jobs and isn’t a place where rich men go to get laid.”
“That’s a little harsh, Deb,” Angel broke in. “You can’t judge all the girls at the Condo by me. I’m a professional girlfriend—or I was until Simon came along.”
“You didn’t become an amateur, baby,” Simon said, giving her a squeeze. I thought back to my experiences at the Condo. I’d been a recruit, a hostage, and a manager. I had to admit, even Cinnamon was happy with what she was doing. I was going to have some long talks with that girl when I got back to town. She couldn’t work for me and work at the Condo.
My cellphone vibrated and I walked into the next room to look at it. I had a message from Jordan. That was fast! ‘Protect him if you can but don’t risk yourself. We’re pulling them in and I have a warrant for BB. Be careful!’
I shoved the phone in my pocket as I looked out the living room window. Down at the front gate I could see a man looking up at the house. This time I wasn’t imagining everyone I knew getting off the ferry. This time I was sure. Geoff Gilliam was in Croatia.
It took about ten minutes to convince Angel and Simon things were serious. When I told them who it was, Simon was convinced he had to move. Geoff Gilliam had a reputation as a sadist at the Condo. In my experience, his presence just meant there were thugs around. Both Cinnamon and Teri had confirmed he was all talk and no action in private. But I’d seen the kind of people around him, including that bitch bodyguard, Savon. If Brenda was picking his travel companions, none of us were safe.
My counterplot was hatched over dinner. I needed hair dye. Why was I not surprised that Simon just happened to have a men’s hair color product on hand? As black as his hair was, I was surprised there was any left.
I got Simon to give me the passport he’d used to get into the country and graciously supplied him with James Whitcomb’s in trade. Then I went to work. I gave my short red wig to Angel and had her dye it black and blow it dry. Damn! I liked that wig but Riley Finn was a dead alias. It would take me months to build a new one. I pulled together the remnants of the beard and eyebrows I used for James Whitcomb and used the fringe of hair to create a full closely cropped beard like Simon’s. I pulled out my man-suit and padded the old chest again. Then I restyled the now-black wig into a more manly cut. I dressed and looked in the mirror. I glanced at the passport picture. I’d pass.
When I went downstairs, Simon’s reaction was completely different. He didn’t care about the hair and beard but complained that he wasn’t that fat and my suit looked like I got it out of a secondhand shop. Which was true. He disappeared and returned with a different set of clothes from his own wardrobe. He might say he wasn’t that fat but the clothes fit. Designer label clothes with his initials embroidered on the cuffs. Tailored clothes for sailing. What a prick.
I have to say, once that I put it on, I really liked it. I might want to keep wearing it for a while. Cinnamon would love this.
I’ve repacked, lightly. I keep buying clothes and leaving them behind. All I needed were the essentials it would take for me to change back to Deb Riley. It’s time to flee another country. How routine is this becoming? I didn’t even have a chance to decide if I like Croatia.
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