“No,” Mary said, looking sheepish. “I guess I should go tell them now. But I don't want to have too much to do with the cops. They make me nervous.”
“Because you’ve nicked things from here and there before,” Nanna said sagely. “You probably keep moving around from one apartment to another before you get caught.”
Mary's eyes flicked over to Nanna, but she ignored the comment and looked back at us. “I'd forgotten that Brad had defended Chris to Charlene once. That's a bit strange, since Brad adored Charlene—I suppose it means that Chris really was important to him.”
I nodded. “Yes, whatever it is, we'd better look into it. Is there anything else you can remember about Chris and Brad, or anything about Charlene?”
She shook her head. “No, I've told you everything I can think of.”
We stayed there a few more minutes, hoping that Mary would remember something more, but she didn't, and told us that this time, she’d really told us everything she knew.
Finally, the three of us left her apartment, and headed back to my car. I looked over my shoulder both ways, but I couldn’t see anyone watching us.
When we were all in the car, Ian said, “I believe Mary. I think she’s told us everything she knows, and I don't think she's lying this time.”
“Me neither,” Nanna said. “It's a good thing she remembered about Chris and Brad.”
I nodded. “I'm not sure how useful this information is, but maybe we can try to talk to Chris and Brad again. Funny how their names always seem to come up together—maybe they'll change their minds and decide to talk to us.”
“Where do they live?” Nanna said. “Maybe we can break into their apartment, too.”
“They live in separate apartments,” I said. “I looked up their addresses. And no, we're not breaking in to any more places.”
“We'll see about that,” Nanna said. “And don't even think about telling Wes what we've been up to.”
“I wouldn't dream of it,” I said with a laugh. “Wes would tell Mom and Dad, and then I'd be the one in who’s in trouble for letting you get into all this.”
“At least you’ve learned something new,” Nanna said. “And probably this is something important. We should definitely break into Chris’s place, too.”
Chapter 14
Nanna, Ian and I argued during the short drive home, and all through our lunch of reheated frozen pizza. The argument didn’t stop even after the pizza disappeared, and we kept going round in circles.
Nanna was insistent that Brad and Chris wouldn't want to talk to us, and that we definitely needed to break in to their apartments. Ian was undecided, but I was worried that Nanna was getting some kind of “break-in fever.”
“I'm not going to let you do it again,” I kept saying. “Just because you’ve gotten away with this once today doesn't mean you will again.”
“But Brad and Chris have already refused to tell you anything,” Nanna said. “We need to be sneaky.”
“But I don't want to do anything like breaking in again.”
“Ian knows I'm right,” Nanna said, turning to Ian. “Right, Ian?”
Ian shrugged, and then his face brightened. “I know! We don't have to break-in. But Nanna's right, I don't think they're going to want to talk to us. How about if we just do some surveillance, without actually talking to them?”
“We did get useful information from doing surveillance on Mary,” I agreed. “Maybe being sneaky and surveilling them is the way to go.”
Nanna let out a disappointed grunt. “But I'm not going to be around when you guys do your surveillance! I need to get home soon, and I know that Ian wants to do surveillance at night while you're off at your shift. And I can't sit in a car all day; I need to go to the bathroom more often these days.”
“We can do some surveillance now,” I suggested.
“Even better!” Ian said. “How about we go to the laundromat, and hang out there?”
“But they’ll recognize us,” Nanna said. “Of course, they've never seen me before.”
“Tiffany and I can wear disguises,” Ian told Nanna. “You don't need to wear one, because you're right, they didn’t see you earlier.”
Nanna crossed her arms over her chest. “If you two are wearing disguises, I’ll be wearing one, too!”
Ian looked at me, and we smiled at each other. At least Nanna had given up her idea of breaking into Brad or Chris's apartment.
“I'll head into my apartment and get the disguises,” Ian said.
“Why don’t we just go over to your place and put on wigs and stuff in there?” Nanna said.
Ian and I exchanged a panicked look.
“Uh…” I said.
Ian was quicker with the excuse than me. “Snowflake's trashed the place,” he said. “And she's getting into an excitable mood these days. I think if we had visitors, she wouldn't even let us get dressed, and we really need to get going soon, if we want to see them at the laundromat. I don't know how long they'll be working there.”
“But Snowflake always seems so gentle,” Nanna protested.
“It’s something to do with hormones,” Ian said. “The vet said to just give her a few days to calm down.”
Nanna seemed satisfied by that explanation, and a few minutes later, Ian was back with wigs, glasses, and scarves.
I pulled a blond wig over my brown hair, and picked a pair of thick-rimmed glasses that made me look like a nerdy computer programmer. Ian went with a bald wig that he'd worn before—I joked that it made him look like a fat Bruce Willis, but he was insistent that it made him look handsome. Nanna decided to go with a scarf wrapped around her head, something that I thought didn't make her look too different, but I didn't say so aloud.
Once we were suitably dressed, I grabbed a bag of dirty laundry, and we headed over to the laundromat.
It was early afternoon by the time we drove up to Sunset Laundry, and the laundromat looked empty. One lonely clothes dryer was running. I read the instructions and tossed my clothes into a washing machine.
Chris was sitting at the table today, and I couldn't see Brad anywhere.
Once the wash cycle had started, Ian, Nanna and I all went over to the bench to wait.
“There’s a bar next door,” Chris said helpfully. He didn't seem to like us sitting there, and he went on, “There's also a Mexican place, and a café a few blocks down that serves fantastic coffee. It’ll take a couple of hours for your clothes to all be done. You can come back in an hour to shift it to the dryer.”
“Let's go to the bar,” Nanna said, just as Ian said, “Let's go to the Mexican place!”
I glanced from Ian to Nanna. And then, I looked at Chris, who was watching us suspiciously.
“We can't wait in here,” I said out loud, trying to allay Chris’s suspicions. “Let's go outside and have a chat about where we should go.”
The three of us headed out, and then we stood on the sidewalk in front of the window, and pretended to talk animatedly.
“The bar!” Nanna said, pointing her finger at the bar.
Ian shook his head vigorously. “No, the Mexican place that!”
“We need to keep an eye on this place,” I said in a low voice. “If we go somewhere, we won't be able to do that. How about, we get into my car, and I'll go for a one-minute drive, and then we can come back and park here? Chris will think we've gone off to run some errands or something like that.”
The others agreed that it was a good idea, and we did just that. I wondered if anything would come of the surveillance—if we learned nothing new, Nanna would be trying to convince us to break into Brad or Chris's apartment again.
But I had just finished parking my car again, when we saw a short, stocky man with tattoos up both arms walking into the laundromat carrying a duffel bag.
“I wonder if I could go out and see if the man's just here to do laundry,” Ian said. “I could pretend to be checking on the washing.”
“Ian’s right—if we don’t go in, we'
ll never know what's happening,” Nanna said. “We could pretend we’re paranoid about our clothes.”
There was a brief disagreement over who would get to go and check on the laundry, and in the end, the three of us all trooped back to the laundromat. But when we were at the door, I peered in through the window, and there were no signs of Chris or the other man. The three of us stood outside hesitantly for a few seconds.
“I’ll sneak in alone,” I said. “I noticed a door the other day, and I guess it leads to an office. If neither of them are in the laundromat, they’re probably having a conversation in there.”
I knew Ian and Nanna both wanted to come with me, but for once, they were actually logical, and understood that three people would make more noise than one.
I crept inside, trying to be as silent as I could. The door I'd seen earlier was closed, and I slowly made my way over, and wrapped my fingers around the door knob.
I paused for a second, and took a deep breath.
If I opened the door, it might creak loudly. I pressed my ear against the door, but I couldn't hear anything—they must've been talking in very low voices. Crossing my fingers, I turned the knob very, very slowly. So far, no sound.
I pushed the door open a crack, and waited.
“Fifty thousand,” a man's voice was saying. I’d never heard that voice before, so I assumed it was the man we'd seen walking in.
I waited for a few seconds, wondering if either of them had noticed the door opening. But neither of them commented on it, so I simply froze in place and hoped they wouldn’t sense my presence.
There were a few long seconds of silence, and then Chris’s voice said, “Yep, that's all of it.”
The other voice growled, “You know what to do. The usual.”
“Don't worry,” Chris said, “tell your boss it’ll all be done as soon as I can. I’ll make the deposit, and then after we’ve spent a bit, we'll do the transfer.”
The other man grunted, and muttered something I couldn’t hear. “I'll see you again soon,” I heard Chris say, and I took that as my cue to leave.
I snuck outside as silently as I'd come in. Once I was standing in the parking lot in the bright sunlight, I let my breath out in a loud whoosh. I hadn't even realized I'd stopped breathing.
Ian and Nanna came over eagerly to join me, and we all stood outside near where I’d parked my car, until we saw the tattooed man get into a white Prius and drive off.
“What happened?” Ian said.
My hands felt sweaty, and I looked around. I couldn’t see Chris anywhere, but I felt as though I was being watched.
“Do you see anyone?” I asked. “I feel like someone’s watching us”
“I certainly feel like I’m being watched,” Nanna declared. “But maybe it's that other guy, Brad. The one who's Charlene’s brother.”
Ian and I exchanged a glance.
“I don't think so,” I said cautiously. “It might be someone else.”
“Who else?”
But I didn't feel like telling her about Eli or Billy, so instead, I said, “Let's head back to my apartment and I can tell you what I’ve learned.”
“But what about the clothes?”
“You're right,” I said with a sigh. “They should be done in a few minutes—we can transfer them to the dryer, and when that's done, we can wait in my car, and I can tell you what I heard.”
Once the clothes were in the dryer and the three of us had gotten back in my car, I filled Ian and Nanna in on the conversation I’d overheard.
“It sounds like money laundering to me,” Nanna said, once I'd finished telling them what I'd heard. “The man with the duffel must've been carrying a lot of cash on himself.”
“I think it's money laundering too,” Ian said. “I once saw a movie that featured a mafia dude laundering money, and after that, I looked up how to do it. Not that I would ever do it myself. Of course, now I’ve forgotten how exactly you get it to work. How does it work?” he asked, turning to Nanna.
“You need an illegal source of money first,” Nanna said. “That's why money laundering is so bad—it's only criminals who do it.”
“But why wouldn’t you just spend the money you've got? Why launder it?”
“Sometimes criminals want to legalize their money, so they can do legitimate things with it—like open a legitimate business, or buy a house, or get a loan from the bank. So they can't just go around with cash all the time. They need to show a source of income.”
“So that's where gambling or a laundromat comes in?”
“Exactly. Once you've got the cash, you need some way to make it legal.”
“So let's say I am a criminal,” Ian said. “And I've got one million dollars I want to want launder. What do I do?”
“I'll tell you what I think the laundromat is doing,” Nanna said. “They're taking cash from someone, and then they'll pretend that they earned that money through the laundromat. It's a cash business, so all they have to do is deposit into the bank and say they earned it from the laundromat. If they’re doing this on someone else’s behalf, then they probably take a cut for themselves, and transfer the money to the guy who’s laundering.”
“I noticed another name when I was looking up the laundromat,” I said. “It was some kind of corporation. I didn't pay it much attention, because I just assumed that Chris and Brad had started the laundromat as partners, but then they'd later decided to limit their liability and put it under a corporation as well. Maybe I should go and have a look—maybe the corporation isn't just about the two of them.”
“Maybe not,” Nanna said. “You can't launder money unless you’re in the business, or a part of the business, that you’re laundering money from. If there’s someone else involved in the corporation, then that person must be the one who’s doing the laundering. And chances are, this person isn’t some kind of honest businessmen—they've got a criminal enterprise that they're trying to hide.”
“And if they are a criminal,” Ian said slowly, “they're more likely to be involved in things like murders. Maybe this other person knows something about Charlene's death.”
Chapter 15
We dropped Nanna home, and then Ian and I headed back to my apartment to research the laundromat. I fired up my private investigator's database, and then I went over to a website that researched businesses, and then back to my database. Cross-referencing different kinds of information finally gave me what I was looking for.
The laundromat was owned by Brad, Chris, and the Brad and Chris Corporation.
I'd assumed that the Brad and Chris Corporation was just some corporation that the two men had set up for themselves, but when I dug into it, I found that it was owned by another company, which in turn was owned by someone else, which was partially owned by another entity. The final owner turned out to be a man named George Dragovich.
Unfortunately, there was very little publicly available information about him.
A combination of news articles, and information from my database turned up that George was known by his friends as “Drago,” and was a terrible, horrible, no good scoundrel.
George—or Drago—was involved in all manner of illegal activities, and had been investigated by the police a few times, but with no luck on the authorities’ part. He was involved in a complex operation that kept him protected, the way a mafia godfather was protected by his complicated “organizational” structure and his loyal, terrified minions. The rumors I’d uncovered implicated Drago’s involvement in everything from racketeering to prostitution to drugs.
It took us a few hours to dig up all the information, and by then, it was time for my shift.
“This isn't what I expected to find out,” I told Ian. “If Chris and Brad were involved with Drago, then maybe Charlene was involved as well.”
“It doesn't sound like Charlene had anything to do with the laundromat,” Ian said. “Do you think she even knew they were involved in laundering money for Drago?”
“I'm n
ot sure, but then again, I never expected to find a hardcore criminal involved in this murder. I'd thought that it would be a rather open and shut case—that maybe she'd been killed by a boyfriend, or a former boyfriend had gotten jealous of Andrew. If this man Drago is involved…”
“This is too big for us. We need to go to the police with our information, and maybe they can help us out.”
I nodded. “I can't do anything more tonight, because I have to head in to work, but first thing tomorrow morning, we'll go see Ryan. Maybe he can tell us something, or he can go investigate Drago himself. I'm sure the cops will be interested to know that a criminal organization could be involved with Charlene's death.”
Chapter 16
My shift passed rather quickly. I was more distracted than usual, but I still appreciated being in the pit after a long day of investigating people who had turned out to be criminals. Investigating is rewarding, since my investigations often help people uncover the truth, but it doesn't pay all that well, and work can be irregular and unpredictable. Working in the pit is the opposite of working as an investigator.
The casino pit is like a familiar second home to me—I've gotten used to the bright lights and noises of the gambling area, just like people get used to living in a particular neighborhood. There was a time when I'd hoped to quit my job. But when I'd actually been forced to make a choice, I'd come to appreciate everything that this job provides me—a steady paycheck, and a chance to unwind.
Sure, there are seedy elements to every casino—but nothing like the dangerous criminal we'd uncovered during this investigation. Drago was rumored to have been involved in the gruesome death of a drug kingpin who was trying to encroach on his territory; I tried to push the details of what I'd read out of my mind, but it was clear that Drago was cruel and sadistic and had intended to send a message to his criminal competition with that death.
I was certain that Drago was involved in Charlene's death in one way or another.
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