The Alex Shanahan Series

by Lynne Heitman

  “Ask him if he’s ever heard of Jimmy Zacharias.”

  Never.

  “Does he know if George is also laundering dirty parts?”

  No again, which blew up the elegant theory I was concocting in my head. Too bad; it made a lot of things make sense that didn’t seem to make sense. But then Julio kept talking and something came out about the “effay-bee-ee.” The FBI.

  “What did he say, Felix?”

  “Hold on.”

  I strained to try to understand, but it was all too fast for me. I had to be patient and wait. Finally, Felix turned my way. He was shaking his head.

  “What? What, Felix? What?”

  “He said that a bunch of parts had come through recently that Mr. Speath had suspected were bad. Bad paperwork. No traceability. They looked used and were supposed to be new.”

  “Yeah. What did he do?”

  “He gave them to the FBI.”

  “The FBI? George is a money launderer and he called in the FBI?”

  “Julio said that Mr. Speath couldn’t stand the idea of someone trying to sell substandard parts.” It made no sense, but in a way, it did. I thought back on George’s face as he’d gazed up at that beautiful Electra out on the tarmac. He was capable of money laundering, apparently, but drew the line at washing dirty parts. George loved airplanes too much.

  “Ask him… Felix, ask him if he knows who at the FBI George has been working with.”

  Julio listened to the question, hesitated, then pulled out his wallet, a red nylon fold-over with a Velcro closing, and dug deep to find a business card, which he held in his palm, hidden like a playing card.

  Felix translated. “He said he and Margie and Mr. Speath are the only ones who know about the bad parts, and that Mr. Speath had asked him not to say anything to anyone because he was afraid if you found out, you would give them a bad audit and they wouldn’t get the business from Majestic.”

  Julio handed me the card. I read it, handed it back, and thanked him very much. I didn’t need to keep it. I already had one from Agent Damon Hollander.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  ​Jack put his glasses on and sat down on the couch, deftly avoiding the empty pizza box that had been lying fallow for several hours. Felix and I had been through many meals in room 484 as we’d tried and finally succeeded in using Julio’s information to crack George’s data vault. Actually, Felix had done all the cracking. I’d done the analysis of what was in there.

  “How am I supposed to read all those tiny numbers?” Jack held the page I’d handed him under the lamp.

  He was right. Felix had reduced the large spreadsheets so much the numbers looked like black pepper sprinkled across a white tablecloth. He took off his glasses and held it at arm’s length. “What would I be looking at if I could see?”

  “I’ll summarize for you,” I said. “I told you about how Julio the Whistle-blower came to see me and told us that George has been using his business to launder money.”

  “Right.”

  “For Ottavio Quevedo, famous drug lord.”

  “I got that part, too.”

  “That’s what was in the data vault. George keeps records in there of how much money he’s laundered and through what accounts. We spent all night going through it and we think we understand how he’s doing it. And Felix found a pretty handy link in there, too.”

  “What kind of link?”

  “It was a way for me to get into the accountant’s mainframe computer, Mr. D. I didn’t think I could at first.” Felix was starting to rev up. “But then I found some code I could use and I—”

  Jack smiled and gently cut him off. “George’s accountant?”

  “When George started laundering,” I said, “he picked up a new outside accountant. It turns out this accountant has a bunch of other aviation repair stations as clients.”

  “Maybe that’s his specialty. He has a particular expertise. It’s not that unusual. Word of mouth… that sort of thing. These aviation people all talk to one another.”

  “That’s not this accountant’s particular expertise. Give me the list, Felix.”

  Felix dug around in the pile around his computer until he found the page I wanted and gave it to me. I passed it over to Jack. “This is the list of the stations, all using the same accountant, remember. Do any of them ring a bell?”

  Jack put on his glasses and glanced over the names. “Dirty parts. These are Jimmy’s places. Many of them anyway. They’re all suspected of moving bogus parts.”

  I pointed to the list. “Every one of those stations has cash coming in on a regular basis in some form or another from Panamanian registered corporations that do their banking in the Cayman Islands.”

  He looked again at the list. “Money laundering? These rinky-dink places?”

  “Yep. Jimmy’s stations are multipurpose laundering facilities. You can get your dirty parts washed there, or your drug money. Take your pick.” Felix started to giggle. We were both a little bit loopy.

  “Hold on.” Jack wasn’t loopy. “Are you saying Jimmy is a money launderer? That can’t be. Jimmy is a compulsive gambler. He’d be dead within a week if he had access to that kind of money.”

  “No. I don’t think he’s the launderer and maybe he doesn’t have access to the money. But he might have access to the records. Incriminating records, such as the ones we found tonight in George’s vault. It’s good stuff. Any up and coming FBI agent would die to get his hands on what we found.”

  Jack set the page of names on the coffee table at his knees and stared at it. He let his head tip back and forth, as if to look at the idea from all sides. Then he looked up at me with that deep crevice over the bridge of his nose and started nodding, and I knew he was putting the information together the same way we had.

  “What you two found,” he said, “is what Damon has been after.”

  “Yes. This is Ottavio’s drug money, Jack. The same repair stations Jimmy uses to wash parts are also used by Ottavio to launder his drug proceeds. It’s the only scenario that makes everything work. And it explains all the connections.”

  “How?”

  I looked around for my notepad. I’d been writing down bits and pieces all night. “Felix, where is my notebook?”

  “I think I saw it in the bathroom.”

  It was there, next to the sink. I retrieved it, sat down on the couch next to Jack, and turned to the page labeled “Jimmy and Ottavio.”

  “You were wondering, Jack, about how Jimmy and Ottavio were linked in this Sentinel parts deal. I think Jimmy knew Ottavio to begin with, because he was letting Ottavio use his stations to launder money. It was a preexisting relationship. When the crash happened, Jimmy had someone to call down there.”

  “Someone with a lot of juice,” he said. “Someone with access to a C130 transport.”

  “Exactly. Ottavio used his ties to whatever guerrilla or paramilitary group he’s aligned with on the drug side of his business.” I turned over to Vanessa’s page. “As for Vanessa, being the only one with laundering experience on her résumé and a stint in Panama, I nominate her for Ottavio’s launderer. Although we still don’t know who she really is.”

  “That makes her Jimmy’s partner.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “And she claimed she’d never heard of him.”

  Jack stood up and started moving around. It wasn’t easy. The suite was covered over almost completely in spreadsheets and hamburger bags and printouts, but he made a path. He went to the window and opened the curtains. Felix and I both cowered like a couple of bats. It was light out there in the central atrium. The sun was up. What time was it, anyway?

  Jack stared through the window. “Jimmy loans his repair stations out to Ottavio,” he said, “for money laundering, probably for a fee, knowing him. Damon finds out. The next time Jimmy gets hauled in and charged with something, Damon is there waiting to offer him a stay-out-of-jail pass. All he has to do is sneak Ottavio’s laundering information out the back door. D
ocumentation of a money laundering operation. Damon would definitely be interested in that.” He turned to me, grinning. “One sink, two laundering operations. Very synergistic. Isn’t that what you would say?”

  I smiled back. I liked when he teased me. “Synergistic indeed. I’ll bet that was Vanessa’s idea, being the 4.0 Stanford Business School grad that she is. But synergy works the other way, too. Jimmy, Ottavio and Vanessa, even Damon—they’re all connected through the stations so that if Jimmy goes down, say for the Ecuador parts deal, he takes the stations down with him. And if the stations go down, the money laundering operation folds, Vanessa is out of business or in jail, and—”

  “Ottavio loses his laundering operation, and a large pile of his drug profits gets confiscated.” Jack finished the thought for me and added his own. “And Damon Hollander loses his big bust.”

  “That” I said, “makes a lot of people interested in maintaining the status quo.” I shoved the pizza box onto the floor so I could spread out more on the couch. It had been a long way and taken a long time, but we were finally at the bottom line. “Which is why John is dead. When he came down and threatened Bobby, he threatened to knock down the house of cards. Someone killed him for it.”

  Everyone was quiet for a few minutes. I lounged on the couch with my head back and my eyes closed. They burned from hours of staring at the computer screen in the dark and a sea of tiny numbers. Jack was back at the window studying The Harmony House Suites atrium. Felix was busy disassembling a balky printer that had given us trouble all night. He was on the floor with the parts spread out around him in a sunburst pattern.

  I heard Jack take a deep breath. I opened my eyes and he had turned back into the room. “Okay,” he said. “Part two. Everyone in this twisted scheme has something to lose, which gives everyone a motive for murder. The only person we know who didn’t commit the crime, at least not that crime, is Bobby Avidor because he has a solid alibi.”

  “You didn’t find him?”

  “He’s nowhere.”

  I sat up and looked at my wrist. No watch. I’d taken it off at the same time we’d unplugged the electric clock radios in the suite. Looking at the time had proved a distraction we didn’t need. “What time is it, anyway?”

  “It’s one-thirty in the afternoon.”

  “Felix, it’s one-thirty in the afternoon. Have we been… we must have—”

  “We were here all day yesterday,” he said, “all night, and all of this morning. Yes, ma’am.”

  “Don’t you have to go to work or something?”

  “I took a comp day.” He felt around on the carpet for a screwdriver. “I’ve got about three weeks worth in the bank.”

  Felix looked the same as he always did—ready to go out and run a sack race at the company picnic. I felt like crap. My legs ached. The throbbing in my ankle, which had almost gone away, was back with a vengeance and had dispatched companion aches to all my other limbs along with my neck, my back, and my shoulders. We had to get this over with before my brain shut down.

  “I’m going to give Damon the benefit of the doubt,” I said, “and assume he’s not a murderer.”

  “That’s a good assumption,” Jack said. “Damon would have plenty of options short of murder to move John out of the way if he had to. What about your friend Vanessa?”

  That was a trickier and more complex thought process. I had to rub my head some more. “Vanessa might have had a motive, but only if she knew that John was in town and that he posed a risk to her operation. How would she find out? I doubt seriously that Bobby has any lines of communication open to Vanessa Cray.”

  “No,” Jack said. “Avidor would have told Jimmy. If he’s not already dead, he can verify that.”

  I filed that away, the idea that Bobby was dead, for later processing. Right now I was still on Vanessa. “I don’t think Jimmy would have told her.”

  Felix piped up. “Why not?”

  “Why bring her in? If he’s got a good deal going, why tell her something that might encourage her to take her business elsewhere? If he is working with the Feds to build a case against Ottavio, then he needs her to be in business with him. What do you think, Jack? Do you see Jimmy bringing her in?”

  “Jimmy doesn’t take unnecessary risks. Vanessa also has an alibi. Didn’t you check that, Alex?”

  “I did. She and Arturo both, although I still think it’s suspect. The people who provided the alibi work for her.” I stared down at my notebook. I really wanted some orange juice. I found the phone and dialed room service. “Is any of this making any sense?”

  “It makes a lot of sense,” Jack said, “and it brings us to the last man standing.”

  “Jimmy.” I was on hold. “He didn’t want to lose his stay-out-of-jail card. Would that be motive enough, Jack?”

  “Jimmy would kill himself before he went to jail. And he’d kill John McTavish before he killed himself.”

  The room service operator came on and I ordered a large, fresh-squeezed orange juice. I was, after all, in Florida.

  “There’s still a piece of this thing that doesn’t really fit,” I said, after I’d hung up, “and that’s the Sentinel parts. Felix and I have been trying to figure that out and we can’t.”

  “What about them?”

  “If Jimmy was interested enough in the status quo to kill John, why would he risk everything by stealing that airplane?”

  “Yeah,” Felix said. “It’s, like, a way bigger chance to take.” He thought about that. “I mean, it sort of is. Killing someone is worse than stealing an airplane, but… I don’t know how to say it—”

  “It’s the magnitude,” I said. “Jimmy could have killed John all by himself, although it would have been quite a fight. But stealing a jet from the side of a mountain, schlepping it to Florida, and hiring a bunch of mechanics to break it down… how many people must have been involved in an operation like that? I would classify that as an unnecessary risk.”

  “Not for Jimmy. For him it’s a calculated risk. Jimmy’s a gambler. And he’s an old soldier. He loved everything about the military. This would have been a chance for him to throw on his cammies and his war paint and go play Delta Force. For him, it would have been worth the risk just to see if he could pull it off. Killing a man is easy. Stealing an airplane, that’s a risk worth going to jail for. That’s the way he thinks.”

  “I’m guessing he didn’t confer with his FBI handlers before he went down there.”

  Jack smiled. “Damon must have been pissed as hell.”

  I leaned back against the couch and rested my eyes again. “I think we’ve got it. The question is what do we do with it?”

  “That’s easy,” he said. “We’re going to take inventory and see how much leverage we have. Are you up for it, Felix?”

  Felix sprang straight up off the floor. “What do you need, Mr. D.?”

  “I want to find out everything we can about Vanessa Cray. If she’s going down with Ottavio, then she has just as good a reason as we do to get Jimmy. I want to know who she really is.”

  Felix was already at work, booting up the computer and cracking his knuckles.

  Jack looked at me. “As for you, I think it’s time we had a talk with our prime suspect. Do you think you can stay awake long enough to take a ride out and see Jimmy?”

  Chapter Thirty-five

  I had been chased by his dog. I had heard his voice. At long last, I was about to lay eyes on the man himself.

  From a distance, Jimmy Zacharias looked tall and lanky, but as we came down the drive to his house, I saw that he was the whittled-away kind of skinny, the kind that suggested there had been more to him at some point, and needed to be more now. His lips were so thin they seemed to have been drawn on his narrow face with a sharp pencil. His eyes were dark behind the squint, and his face desperately pockmarked. He wore his silver hair parted straight down the middle of his scalp and pulled back into a ponytail. He looked like an Indian warrior who had been doing heroin, lounging in
the doorway of his house, shirtless, forearm braced against the jamb above his head.

  The sight of Jack induced in him a dark laugh that turned into a deep wet cough. “What do you want, asshole?” He managed to spit the words out between sticky, sucking eruptions. “I thought they kicked you out of the FBI.”

  “You were misinformed.” Jack climbed the steps to the porch and stood alarmingly close to Jimmy, close enough to get coughed on. “I’m retired.”

  “Then what the fuck are you doing here?”

  “I think you know.”

  Jimmy was only slightly taller than Jack, which meant when they stood nose to nose, they were staring directly into each other’s eyes. They seemed comfortable doing it.

  “Where’s Bull?”

  Jimmy smiled. “Hey, Bull!”

  I heard him, snorting and growling. The adrenaline spread through my body like grasping tentacles, twisted around my heart and squeezed. I prepared for the sight of that big ball of muscle with teeth to come flying toward me, but he never showed up. The sound of his barking never got any closer.

  Jimmy enjoyed my anxiety. “He’s in the back. Should I get him for you?” He stepped into the shadows. The next thing I saw was the front door wheeling toward us, which must have been the very reason Jack had pushed in so close. He caught the door before it slammed. “Thanks for asking us in,” he said.

  The feeling inside the house was dim and cramped. Thin mustard-colored draperies that looked like big dish towels hung on the windows. Helped by the aluminum awnings that hung outside, they kept out the direct sunlight. But that didn’t mean it was cool. The air was hot and stale and smelled of cigarettes, garlic, and something like Lysol. I was glad for the floor fan and the open door.

  “Stay here,” Jack said. “I’m going to see about that dog.” He disappeared into what looked like the kitchen. Jimmy had disappeared, too, and I soon heard where he had gone. The bathroom must have been nearby.

  Alone in Jimmy’s lair, I took a look around. Besides an ugly brown couch shoved up against the wall, the major piece of furniture in the front room was a console stereo, the kind with the lid that opens to reveal the turntable. My parents used to have one. On top was a small trophy, the cheap kind that gets handed out every summer by the tens of thousands to little league and high school teams all over the country. The inscription read Jimmy Zacharias—Winning Pitcher—1967 City Champs—Everglades City, FL. Next to it was a picture of him in army fatigues, down on one knee and leaning on a rifle. His hair was dark and chopped short, but the shape of his face and the warrior squint were undeniably his. I looked at it and wondered what Jack had looked like back then. Next to the stereo on the floor were a bunch of magazines piled into a fire hazard. I reached down to flip through the stack. Aviation Daily, Aviation Week & Space Technology, a big fat pile of yellow newsprint called Trade-A-Plane, and something that looked like a military weapons digest. Mixed in were copies of Hustler, Screw magazine, and a local TV Guide from three months ago.