The Alex Shanahan Series

by Lynne Heitman

  “Why do you need security?”

  “I like to invest in emerging markets, which means I travel a great deal. My work takes me to Russia, Eastern Europe, Central and South America. It is not uncommon for someone with my net worth to seek protection in those countries. Domestically, Arturo is my driver. Globally, he is my security staff.”

  “A staff of one?”

  “He’s all I need.”

  “Has he been in any trouble since you hired him?”

  “Absolutely not. It’s a condition of his employment. And he is very well paid.”

  I looked over at Arturo. He was like a cat in a window watching everything that moved until he could no longer see it, and then picking up the next target. “May I speak with Arturo?”

  “That would be difficult, unless you speak Spanish.”

  “I’m certain we can find an interpreter. Perhaps at the police station.”

  “You would like his alibi. Is that correct? For the night of the murder?”

  “Yes, I would.”

  “I’ll save you the time and me the trouble. We were both in the same place.” She reached her hand out. Arturo pushed himself up, lumbered over, and handed her a business card. “Arturo was with me on the night of March fifth. We were on the island.”

  “The island?”

  “A private island in the Caribbean. I have a small compound there.” She offered me the card. “This is the telephone number of my caretaker. He can tell you what you need to know.”

  I took the card, but didn’t feel good about it. The whole situation felt so handled. I felt handled by her. “How did you get to and from the island?”

  “On my G-IV, of course.”

  Of course. Why wouldn’t I have guessed she had her own Gulfstream to fly back and forth to her small compound on the private island? I handed back the business card. “Can I have the phone number of the pilot who flew you over there?”

  She seemed to consider that question for a long time. Arturo had gone back to his table. Vanessa spoke to him, eventually, in Spanish with more than a little impatience. Whether her impatience was with me or with him, I wasn’t sure, but one thing was clear. Whatever possibility there had been for a convivial mood between us, contrived or otherwise, was long gone. I could feel her defense shield almost as clearly as I could see her dark glasses.

  Arturo pulled out a Palm Pilot and maneuvered around the small screen with his large fingers. He found what he was looking for and started to rise from his chair to rumble across the deck again. She cut him off and must have told him to simply read out the digits, which he did. I wrote them down.

  “So you do understand Spanish,” she said.

  “I don’t believe I said otherwise. When did you return from the island?”

  “I was back in Miami for a meeting on Tuesday morning. And I’m afraid I’m late for a meeting right now.” She started to reach for the big hat.

  “I have a few more questions. Please, Vanessa. It won’t take long.”

  She didn’t respond, but she didn’t leave. She picked up the glass of lemonade instead of the hat.

  “Do you know a man named Jimmy Zacharias?”

  “No.”

  “Bobby Avidor?”

  “No.”

  “Ottavio Quevedo?”

  “Of course. I know who he is and what he does. We’re not personally acquainted, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Have you ever worked in Panama? For Thierry Eckard & Dunn?”

  “Yes, I was assigned to that office. And if you know that, you must know that I was arrested, along with everyone else in the office, and indicted on a money laundering charge. Which means you also know the government dropped their case. Was that your question?”

  She so enjoyed asking all my questions for me, and then answering them. “I’m wondering how far your tolerance for risk extends.”

  “That, perhaps, is a conversation for another day.” This time when she reached for her hat, she didn’t stop. She picked it up and settled it on her coif.

  “Vanessa, have you changed your name?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Is Cray your married name? Or perhaps you’ve had a legal name change?”

  She looked surprised, then burst into a musical, ringing laugh. “No. I have never changed my name. I rather like my name. And as long as my fund continues to do well, it is a valuable asset, indeed.”

  The waiter appeared with the check when she stood. He was not sure who to give it to. Arturo handled it.

  “This was fun,” she said brightly as she turned to go. With the glasses on and the hat pulled low, I couldn’t tell if she was joking. “Perhaps we can chat again after you’ve found your murderer.”

  She boarded The Crayfish and disappeared below. Arturo followed. The waiter cast off the line. I stood on the deck, watching them go and hoping the sick, feverish feeling would leave with Vanessa. It didn’t.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  ​Jack’s office was an afterthought of a space, a geometric impossibility that must have been what was left over after all the surrounding spaces had been designed. It would have been eight by ten if there had been four straight walls, but there were more corners than feet of wall space. A large window above the desk was the only saving grace. The property manager must have slapped in a door, thrown down some carpet, and put it on the market just to see if anyone would bite.

  We’d stopped by to check the mail. From the size of the stack and from the stuffy feeling in the office, he hadn’t been to his office in a while. He opened a window, which helped immediately, and sat down with the pile at his desk. It was arranged so that he could look out the window as he worked, which left me staring at the back of his head. Or looking out the window and across the alley into the offices of the people who worked in the high-rise next door. They were doing what normal people did at work on Wednesdays, and I realized how relieved I was not to be one of them.

  The only other thing in the office to stare at was a picture hanging on the wall in a dime store frame of a younger, happier looking Jack with a boy who looked to be six or seven years old. The boy was blonder than Jack, but they shared the same deep brown eyes and long lashes. With their faces side by side, the resemblance was strong.

  “Is this your son?”

  “Yeah. Better days.”

  “Are you in touch with him?”

  “As much as I can be. I call him five times and he calls me once. That sort of thing. I keep trying to work the ratio down.” His chair squealed as he leaned back in it and turned to look at the picture. The high-backed, dark blue leather chair looked, like most of the furniture in his office, as if it too had seen better days. “I thought you wanted to learn about money laundering.”

  “I do.”

  “Then come over here and sit down. I can’t concentrate with you roaming around behind me.” Given the size of the space, “roaming” was a generous term. I pulled a chair up next to the desk so he could go through the mail and talk to me at the same time.

  “A good laundering scheme,” he said, “is designed to be so complicated it makes your head explode, which is the reason it works.”

  “Do you understand the basic principles?” I asked.

  “As much as I need to.”

  “Then explain them to me. I want to understand. I want to know what Vanessa was doing.”

  “What she was accused of doing. Pull that trash can over here, would you, please?”

  I found the standard gray wastepaper basket and pulled it around so it was between us. “Whatever.”

  “All right. You’re a successful Colombian drug dealer. You’ve sold a hundred million dollars worth of drugs on the streets of the U.S. But you, señorita Shanahan, have a problem. The hundred million is in ten-and twenty-dollar bills in the suitcases of couriers all over the country. Your goal is to convert that money into a form that you can spend.”

  “I can spend cash.”

  “Only a little at a tim
e.” He handed me a stack of flyers, coupons, and credit card offers. “You’re in charge of trash.”

  I dropped the stack. It fell into the bottom of the can with a soft thud.

  “You don’t want to be paying for your 360,000 dollar Rolls-Royce Corniche convertible with tens and twenties. And you can’t take your boatload of cash down to the bank and open an account because there are banking laws designed to detect people like you doing things like that.”

  “This is the ten thousand dollar rule?”

  He nodded. “Any cash deposit over ten thousand dollars is going to raise the red flag, and the banker is going to call me, law enforcement, who is going to start asking you a lot of pointed questions about where that money came from. Eventually, because I am a good agent, I’m going to track it back to the predicate act, which was the sale of illegal drugs, and then I’m going to bust you.”

  “Okay, so I have couriers sitting around with suitcases full of my dirty money. All dressed up and no place to go.”

  “But you do have a place to go. What you need is to disguise the true ownership of the proceeds and the source, and change the cash into travelers checks, money orders, CDs, or a bank account that you can draw checks on so you’re not carting around bricks of cash. All the while, you have to maintain control over your money. The person who can do all that for you is the professional money launderer.”

  “Let’s call her Vanessa,” I said, receiving another pile of trash. “For lack of a better name.”

  “Okay. Vanessa the money laundress is going to take that money and legitimize it for you, and for her troubles, she’s going to take anywhere from ten to twenty percent off the top.”

  “She’s going to make ten to twenty million off this transaction?”

  “She is, but you don’t complain because this service is absolutely essential to your business. What good is the money if you can’t spend it? Besides, you have plenty left.”

  “Okay, so she’s rich, but I’m richer. I’m happy.”

  “You’re especially happy if she’s professional, never steals from you, accounts for every penny, and generally does a good job.”

  “How do I know how much money I’m starting with?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Who counts the money in the suitcases before it gets laundered?”

  He turned in his squeaking chair to smile at me. “Now you’re starting to think like a crook. It gets counted and audited all the way up the ladder. Drug empires are like corporations. Their systems of checks and balances and controls would make IBM proud. However, the penalties for noncompliance are pretty severe.”

  “How do I get the money to Vanessa?”

  “You have your couriers contact her. She gives them the name of a bank where they can take their suitcases and deposit the money, as much as they need to, no questions asked. Someplace she’s already scoped out. Paraguay works. Also Mexico—”

  “We’ll say Panama,” I said.

  “Panama’s a good one. Getting the money into a bank is a big step because there are no laws governing bank-to-bank transfers. You can move as much as you want in transactions as large as you want without being questioned. That’s how she gets the money out of the country and as far away from its source as possible, most typically to Europe.”

  “Why Europe?”

  “Credibility. Banks in Europe are more tightly controlled than those in the southern hemisphere. She would open up a bunch of accounts in different banks in different countries with balances as small as she could reasonably make them. The goal is to take these massive chunks of cash and spread them around.”

  “These banks would take these deposits, knowing they came from Panama?”

  “If she’s been in the business for a while, Vanessa knows the banking laws in Europe. She knows, for instance, that Switzerland and Luxembourg are good places for her kind of business. Like any good businesswoman, she’s established relationships, so she knows which banks will take the money without probing too much.”

  “She’s got her own banking network.”

  “Something like that.”

  “What’s the next step?”

  “Colombian surnames—Hispanic surnames are a red flag all by themselves all around the world, so the safest thing to do would be to move the money again, this time to accounts with fake names, like Kornhauser, or Lautrec. Or she could deposit it into brokerage accounts. The point is to move the money all around to as many places as you can, to create so many layers of confusing transactions that it’s impossible to trace it back to its origins, and yet still maintain control over the accounts, and the funds. That, of course, is key.”

  “All right. So now Vanessa has all of my hundred million dollars, less her cut, in far-flung places around the world. How do I get it back?”

  “That’s the last step. You set up corporations where Mr. Kornhauser and Ms. Lautrec can invest their money.”

  “Real companies?”

  “Real ones or fronts. They provide a way to prove that the money was earned legally.”

  “Where are these businesses?”

  “Colombia, Europe, the U.S…”

  “Miami?”

  “Anywhere. By this point the money is washed so clean no one would ever know to look at it, and if they did, they wouldn’t be able to trace it back to you. And that’s how it works. Here you go.”

  He handed me the last of the junk mail, which left a thin stack of what looked like bills. The sun was starting to go down, so it wasn’t quite so stuffy in the office. In the building across the street, people were packing up in their offices to go home.

  “What kinds of businesses make for good laundering?”

  “Any business that is cash intensive. You’ll find a lot of restaurants and bars down here in South Florida that won’t take credit cards for that very reason. I hear the video rental business is catching on as a sink.”

  “Sink?”

  “That’s the place where you wash the money.”

  Naturally. “What about a hedge fund. Would that work?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know enough about that business to understand how it could.”

  “Vanessa Cray travels all over the world with a bodyguard. She speaks six or seven different languages. Doesn’t that sound like the perfect profile for a launderer?”

  “It sounds like a reasonable theory,” he said. “But what if she is? What does that have to do with John’s murder?”

  “I don’t know. But her car was in the hotel lot the night he died. And we know we have some kind of a drug connection going on here.”

  He stood up and stretched and let out an enthusiastic yawn. “Want to go to dinner?”

  “Let me check my messages first and see if Felix has come up with anything.”

  I dialed the hotel first and found that no one had called except George Speath. When I dialed into my cell phone box, he had called there, too. Nothing from Felix, but there was something from Dan up in Boston.

  The message came out in his rat-a-tat staccato rhythm. “So I drove up to that bar you gave me and had a beer and I asked around and it turns out one of the waitresses is Avidor’s mother only she had a different name because she got remarried and I ask her about Johnny’s phone call to that bar and she admits she knows him. She says he and Bobby grew up together and I told her who I was and that Johnny used to work for me and that you’re down there doing what you’re doing and she starts crying, which I hate. I hate when women cry. But long story short, Shanahan, Avidor sent her the logbook and the ring. He wanted her to keep it for him. She gave it to Johnny because she didn’t want it in her house. Something about evil spirits or some shit like that. Are you happy now? Don’t ask for any more favors. And one more thing, Shanahan. That was a long fucking drive. You owe me.”

  Jack saw me smiling. I replayed the message and let him listen. It made him smile, too.

  “Forget dinner,” he said, looking rejuvenated. “It’s time to go and see Mr. A
vidor.”

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Mr. Avidor had not been home. He had not gone to work that day and, according to Bic, had been out sick for two days. I’d come back to the hotel to messages three and four from George, all inquiring in the most polite way after the results of my audit. When Bic woke me up early the next morning and suggested in the least polite way that I get Speath Aviation off his back, I decided I had to go and see George. The problem was, I didn’t have anything to tell him.

  The last I’d heard from Felix, he was still trying to scale the firewall George had erected. Scale it, bypass it, blow it up, go through it, under it, or around it. George’s firewall had left Felix and his hacker friends alternately frustrated and in awe. It had left me with a problem. George claimed to have given me full access to his computer files. As far as he knew, I had no reason to suspect he hadn’t. And we’d found nothing suspicious in the data he had made available. Nothing to even hint that he was buying or selling bogus parts. But why does someone build a data vault if he has nothing to put in it? I had to talk to Felix.

  I tried him from my hotel room. I tried him from my cell phone on the way over to George’s. I tried him as I sat in George’s parking lot. I called him at home, at the office, and at his temporary headquarters in room 484 at The Suites. If I’d had his parent’s number, I would have tried him there. I hung up, cursing the fact that he didn’t have a cell phone. I was going to have to make something up. That was my plan, at least before I walked through the door at Speath Aviation and saw the welcome sign. This time the magnetic letters were arranged in a greeting to FELIX MELENDEZ, SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS.

  Dammit, Felix. Apparently he had hit upon a new approach for getting around that wall.

  Margie’s desk was empty, as usual. A radio was playing somewhere. Salsa music. And I could hear the normal banging and whirring and grinding from the other side of the heavy door that led to the hangar. I went down the back hall to George’s office. The door was open and the lights were on, but no one was home. I came back out and followed the sound of the music, checking rooms along the way. The break room was empty. The bathroom was silent. I found the source of the music when I went into the stockroom. It came from a cheap radio playing on a worktable. No George. No Margie. No Felix.