Cashed Out

by Michael Rubin

  Big, extra-thick contractor-size black plastic bags that I had bought months ago, for yard work I never got around to, did the trick. I loaded everything into two of them, hauled them back up through the open ceiling panel, and covered them with insulation.

  As I was putting the panel back into place, I figured out what to do next.

  Chapter 10

  That’s how I ended up, late that Wednesday afternoon, sitting in Washington Eby’s aluminum bateau floating down Bayou Grosse Noir.

  Even though I hadn’t been much of a neighbor, Washington had readily agreed to lend me his boat and trailer.

  Washington and Durnella were as proud of that flat-bottomed boat as if it had been a yacht. Washington, who knew all about oil paint and Japan drier and how to clean a paintbrush so that it looked like new and would last for years, but who never finished the third grade, and Durnella, who had worked for fifty years as a maid in a starched uniform in the uptown neighborhoods at a time when being a “domestic” was a way out of poverty, kept all their hard-won acquisitions meticulously clean and in repair, in contrast to me, who couldn’t keep my life in any kind of order.

  I had come up with a scheme to legally get my hands on all of G.G. Guidry’s cash.

  G.G. had said that the suitcase was his and it was his corporation’s, but as I thought about it, that didn’t really make any sense. It couldn’t be both. What shenanigans would involve so much cash?

  So, I figured that if I didn’t have G.G. as my client, the money was going to be my client. I would create a duty to find out whose cash it was, minus, of course, the amounts – and those could be large amounts – that I would take from time to time to cover my “expenses.”

  If the money turned out to belong to Camellia Industries, then I would be more than halfway to being the company’s lawyer. Or, at least, I’d get a hefty finder’s fee. The owners couldn’t help but be pleased that I’d return the cash. And if the money was G.G.’s personally, his heirs surely would want to retain me to handle the succession and advise them. After all, hadn’t G.G. come to me?

  So, the logical place to start was at Camellia Industries down in St. Bonaventure Parish.

  I’d put on jeans and a T-shirt, trying to look like a good ol’ boy, intending to go first to Camellia Industries and then use Washington’s bateau to look at the St. Bonaventure property G.G. had talked about buying. The maps in the abstract had shown them to be near the Camellia Industries plant, and the best way to view the first big tract, which had no road frontage, was from the bayou.

  In case anyone asked what I was doing in the bayou, I brought fishing gear. I’d appear to be just another guy trying to catch his limit.

  It seemed like a good plan, but it didn’t work.

  Chapter 11

  When I drove up to the Camellia Industries gate, the armed guard wouldn’t talk to me. G.G. had been right when he said that people in St. Bonaventure Parish would suspect I wasn’t a local, which is why he wanted Spider and not me assembling the abstracts from the St. Bonaventure public records. Despite the jeans and the fishing gear, I still looked out of place.

  I hadn’t said two sentences when the guard summoned a bear of a man. His jeans were held up by bright red suspenders, taut against his hairy chest. With his wild gaze, wild hair, and even wilder beard, he had the look of someone who had recently emerged from the swamps after successfully wrestling an alligator.

  Shotgun in hand, he waved me away, warning in a thick Cajun accent, “Ya’ damn well better stop wit da’ questions, ‘coz no one gonna tell ya’ a damn t’ing anyway.”

  It was tough understanding his accent, but there was no mistaking his meaning. I wasn’t going to get to see the plant that way.

  So, I drove over to the boat landing, launched the bateau, and slowly motored down the bayou at trolling speed. I headed toward what I figured were the boundaries of the Caitelleau tract. What had seemed so clear from the maps in the abstract, however, turned out to be a convoluted string of entwined marsh waterways.

  As the afternoon waned, the mosquitoes came in swarms, dipping almost to the water’s surface and then rising again, looking for blood. As each buzzing fog approached, I swatted away, but to no avail. Got bitten more than twenty times. I was stinging and itching as round after round of mosquitoes kept swooping in.

  It was time to go. A completely wasted trip.

  To get back to the landing, I had to travel back along the bayou by the edge of Camellia Industries. As I passed the plant, I cut off the engine and let the bateau drift. Just one more look.

  Nothing had changed since I had boated past the facility an hour earlier.

  All I could see over the tall marsh grass was the back end of the plant several hundred yards away. No activity.

  Now that the bateau was almost stationary, the mosquitoes pounced again. Had to get moving.

  But, just as I reached back to pull on the starter cord, I saw something to the right of one of the huge buildings. Some type of vehicle was lumbering along.

  I had a pair of binoculars hidden in the ice chest. I pulled them out, but they were of no great help. From this low angle, everything important was blocked from my view.

  I needed a higher perch.

  I tried to stand up, but the narrow bateau rocked precariously.

  There was a sycamore limb extending out over the bayou that I could just about reach, if only I stretched a bit more. I used it to steady myself as I stood up in the bateau, one hand on the sycamore and the other holding the binoculars.

  The vehicle had stopped.

  From this angle, I could see a hood, a driver’s cab, and a cylindrical container maybe twenty feet high or more. It looked like an oversized garbage truck. There were four men in caps moving around it. They were operating in pairs, two at a time lifting something down over the rear bumper.

  Whatever they were moving was heavy and ungainly. Perhaps fifty-five gallon drums, but I couldn’t be sure in the dimming light

  I felt steady now and, releasing my grasp of the sycamore, held the binoculars with both hands and scanned the area around the truck. I finally spotted, maybe a hundred feet behind it, something I couldn’t have seen from my seated position – the roof of a dark car peeking up over the marsh. Standing behind the car’s hood was a man. No cap. He seemed to be wearing a suit. I could make out a white shirt and what appeared to be a tie.

  I squinted, trying to see what he was doing. The man was holding something.

  He was pointing a rifle at me!

  Startled, I took one step back, forgetting that I was standing in the bateau.

  It shifted under my weight.

  I reached backward, grabbing for the sycamore, but as my hand encircled it, the branch moved.

  What I felt in my grip was not rough bark, damp with lichens and moss. It was smooth and dry. And pulsing slowly. What I had grabbed was a large snake drooping from the tree.

  I panicked and pulled my hand back as fast as I could, which threw me completely off balance and out of the bateau.

  The muddy water was chest-deep.

  The snake looked at me curiously and then slowly curled all five feet of itself back up onto the branch, where it lay motionless.

  I waded back to the bateau and managed to get in. Soaking wet and coated with mud, I started the trolling motor and made my way to the landing, grateful that there hadn’t been a gator coasting through the bayou where I had fallen in.

  By the time I got the bateau back onto the trailer and got everything hitched up, it was dark. A night sky without stars. The thick Louisiana summer air had become even heavier than before. More dense. A low rumble of thunder came from the far horizon.

  I had barely turned out of the landing area when the rain came. Lightning bayoneted the clouds. The wipers, even at their highest speed, did little to clear away the river of thick drops pelting down, distorting everything. For more than forty minutes, I maneuvered, white-knuckled, through the thunderstorm while the trailer holding the
bateau lurched and pitched behind my car, threatening to pull me off the narrow, curving road and into the adjacent ditches coursing with water.

  It was not until I saw, high above the sugar cane fields, blue-tinged lights floating in the distance that I realized the intensity of the rain had finally diminished and I was at last approaching the St. Bonaventure bridge connecting the west bank of the Mississippi to the east.

  I had been concentrating so intently during my drive through the rainstorm that I never noticed the dark car, its headlights off, that had been following me ever since I left the boat landing. I didn’t find out about that car until it was too late.

  Chapter 12

  It was past nine when I turned into my driveway. I was halfway up the steps before I realized that someone was sitting on the porch swing in the dark. “Hypolite!” I knew that voice.

  “SCHEX!”

  No avoiding it. I flipped on the porch light.

  It was Taylor.

  She looked perfect, as always. Hair shimmering and desirable. Lipstick glistening. A model’s features and skin. Expensive, high-fashion jeans. A silk blouse that must have set her back a couple of hundred. Four-strand pearl necklace and matching bracelet. Designer shoes with four-inch heels that she could drive through your heart if you crossed her.

  “Where is it?”

  “Taylor, it’s been years. Now you show up?”

  “WHERE IS IT? Don’t screw around. I’m in no mood. Just tell me where it is and I’ll be out of your life again.” I ignored her.

  She followed me inside. Uninvited and definitely unwanted.

  “Give it to me Schex! It’s mine!”

  “I’m too tired to argue, Taylor. Stay or leave. I don’t care.”

  I headed for the bathroom, and, closing the door behind me, pulled off my mud- soaked shirt and jeans and turned on the shower.

  “Hurry up,” Taylor yelled. “G.G. took it. He had no right. It was as much mine as

  his.”

  I didn’t bother to respond. It was always like this. Taylor whining and grousing.

  I was soaping up again when the water turned ice cold. Wiping the suds from my eyes, I saw Taylor standing there, her hand on the hot water tap. “You don’t need a shower to tell me where the money is.”

  I yanked the curtain shut. “How about a little privacy?”

  “Dry off and let’s talk. Be quick!” Taylor walked out, her stiletto heels clicking on the bathroom tiles.

  I emerged, wrapped in a towel, to find Taylor sitting on the edge of my bed, arms crossed.

  “How do you think G.G. got to you anyway?”

  I really wasn’t in the mood for this. I grabbed some clothes and went back into the bathroom, but her voice carried clearly through the door. “G.G. needed someone who would do as he was told, without questions. Someone who would take whatever shit work and money that G.G. can . . . could offer. Someone whose name would arouse no suspicion if the public records were checked. I’m the reason you got the business at all. Now give me what’s mine. G.G. may have been Chairman of the Camellia Industries board, but I’m President, and now I guess I’m everything else as well. Hello in there!

  ARE YOU LISTENING?”

  “I heard.” I emerged, barefoot and clothed in old khaki slacks and a worn polo shirt. I needed a beer.

  Taylor stalked into the kitchen after me. “I found out what he did. When I got a call from the bank Monday around noon that a check had bounced, well, I knew that couldn’t be right. There was supposed to be over $1.6 million in the operating accounts.”

  I turned away from her, pulled a bottle of Abita from the refrigerator, and, with my back to her, rummaged around the shelves for something to eat. I didn’t want Taylor to see my surprise at hearing her talk about $1.6 million. G.G. had left over four million in the suitcase. Why was Taylor mentioning only $1.6 million? Was she really ignorant of how much G.G. had amassed? And if she didn’t know about it all, what was its source?

  “Schex,” she said, settling into one of the scratched metal chairs at the dented kitchen table, “G.G. used to keep all his papers in the study of our house, not at the plant. But the important stuff hasn’t been there for more than a week.”

  I noticed that she had said ‘our house,’ but I didn’t respond. I grabbed the leftover half po-boy from the back of the refrigerator. The bread was hard and stale, the interior soggy, but it was edible, especially with enough beer. I sat at the counter, expressionless, and chewed slowly as she talked.

  “After I got that call, I checked the study. The corporate books were still there, but the checkbooks, cancelled checks, and all the ledgers were gone. That little shit must have removed them sometime over the weekend. Once I found out, I knew what to do. I had signature rights on the accounts. I went downtown to see the branch manager of the bank only to learn that G.G. had cleaned everything out, a little at a time. $5000 in cash here, $2,500 in cash there. Checks to himself. Checks to companies whose names I didn’t recognize, but which had to be more of his shell corporations. Checks to that skank,

  Millie Sue.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Oh, I see it in your eyes,” she said. “You think that by remaining silent you can hide from me? I’ve read you like a book for years, Schex. You haven’t changed. When I mentioned Millie Sue, you didn’t ask who she was. So, you know all about her! Figures. You know about G.G. and Millie Sue. You must also know about the money. It’s all gone. One-point-six-million-plus-something damn dollars! All the money in the accounts! I could have killed him. Hell, I would have killed him if he hadn’t kicked it anyway. Serves him right.”

  I concentrated on the po-boy.

  “Go ahead. Stuff your face. I know he must have told you something. G.G. might let Millie Sue get her hands on his crotch, but he’d never let her get her paws on his wallet. I suspected something was up the minute he hired Millie Sue as his ‘secretary’ at the plant. But was I going to say something? No way. Find out what he’s up to first, I thought. Watched him like a hawk. Sweet as I could be, I went with him to that stupid fundraiser cotillion the other night like nothing was going on, but there was that bitch at the sign-in table! Millie Sue, at the cotillion, as if she belonged there! And G.G. wasn’t acting right from the moment we walked in. I saw the way he looked at her and she looked at him. Right then I knew who he must have brought in on his little scheme.” God, how Taylor could chatter!

  “I had it out with G.G. in the parking lot. Ruined my silk ball gown sweating out there in the heat, arguing with him. Well, that’s the last thing he’ll ruin.”

  “Why G.G., Taylor? I can see,” I said, gesturing at her outfit, “what G.G. saw in you, but what did you ever see in G.G.? Catch, I could almost understand. But G.G.?”

  “Just tell me where my $1.6 million is.”

  I didn’t have to tell her squat. Not about ‘her’ $1.6 million or the rest of the millions I had found in the suitcase. “Taylor, you know better. What G.G. may have told me – and I’m not saying whether he told me anything – was and is privileged.”

  “Crap! You’re loaded with it. Privilege? What’s a stupid privilege? The damn corporation was half mine, and now it’s all mine. The money’s mine too. I’ve thought about it, and the only person who might know is you, ‘cause G.G. wouldn’t have told Millie Sue anything. He would have been trying to do something clever with the funds. So, he’s got to have put them in some other bank or stuck them away with a broker. And to set up the shell companies to do that, he’s got to have someone he could take advantage of, and you certainly fit that bill. Hell, that’s why I sent him to you in the first place, thinking he wanted those shell corporations for tax purposes, and I’m all in favor of finding some way around paying taxes. But, oh, you know something all right. You’ve confirmed it, not asking about Millie Sue and hiding behind words like ‘privilege.’ Well, fuck you. Fuck G.G. Fuck privilege and all your legal rules. I’ll bring you the legal fucking proof you need. I want my money. I des
erve it, and I expect you to help me get it.”

  She stormed out. I heard the front door slam and her car accelerating down the street.

  I started on my third beer.

  Taylor being involved with G.G. didn’t make sense. And it didn’t make sense that Taylor was talking about accounts totaling $1.6 million. Why was she concerned about that amount instead of the more than four million G.G. had stuffed in the suitcase?

  And why had there been loose bills for more than $1.6 million while the rest had been in banded packs?

  What had G.G. been up to anyway?

  I couldn’t figure any of it out. Maybe it was because I needed some rest. Maybe it was because of the beer. Maybe it was because of those damn mosquito bites that were now itching like crazy. I knew I had some Calamine lotion in the cabinet next to the shower.

  I headed through the dark house, not bothering to turn on the lights.

  But I never reached the bathroom. As soon as I entered my bedroom, someone grabbed me from behind.

  Chapter 13

  I let out a yell and tried to spin around, but the intruder had a grip that would not loosen.

  I jammed my elbows into his gut, but it was like punching solid oak. He didn’t flinch but merely tightened his hold on me, lifting me off the ground.

  I have runner’s thighs and calves, however, so I flung my legs up in front of me to get momentum and then snapped them back down, jamming my right heel as hard as I could into his balls.

  His grip relaxed momentarily.

  I wriggled free and headed for the front door at a dead run, but as I crossed the threshold someone on the porch smashed one of my metal chairs over my head.

  As I fell, the man who had attacked me inside slammed down on my back, heavy as a cement armoire. I could smell his fetid breath and felt his thick fingers closing around my throat. I tried to get my hands free to fight him off, but to no avail. He had me pinned.