Wicked Is the Whiskey: A Sean McClanahan Mystery (Sean McClanahan Mysteries Book 1)

by T. J. Purcell

  “A small number, to be sure,” I said. “But how does this relate to Victoria Hall?”

  “Well, he told me he was going to meet with her and tell her he was resigning. That was the last time I saw him. He never came home. He was found in the river a few days later.”

  “How did he get into business with Hall? Did he ever tell you?”

  Erin laughed.

  “John was a lot of things, but attentive businessman was not among them. He cared about helping people and never cared about the money. He told me that in the process of helping others, he spent more than he brought in and had to file bankruptcy. Hall was a turnaround specialist with a proven record. She invested in the business. Business boomed soon after she became his partner, but in time he became suspicious of her.”

  “Suspicious of what?”

  “He was traveling a lot, but Rosie told him about the cars coming and going from the building by the river Hall had leased to one of her businesses,” said Erin. “Then Rosie gave him a Xerox of the coded ledger Hall was keeping. He suspected she was keeping double books, but he couldn’t make sense of the code. John planned to turn them over to the authorities once he resigned.”

  “Did he tell Hall he had the ledger?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” said Erin.

  “Do you know where he put the ledger?” I said.

  “That is the million dollar question. All John told me was that he hid it in a safe place and that he’d get it in the right hands. But I have no idea where he might have put it.”

  “Well, it wasn’t in your house. They tore the place apart and didn’t find what they were looking for. What about John’s mother? Might he have stored it there?

  “It’s possible,” said Erin. “He was confident that nobody knew about her.”

  “Maybe I’ll pay his mother a visit while you get back on your feet. Elizabeth said John planned a press conference?”

  “Yes, he did,” she continued. “The plan was for John to meet Hall and formally resign, lunch with Elizabeth and tell her everything, then conduct his press conference and tell the world the truth. I helped him draft the press release he was going to pass out to the press.”

  “You have the press release?”

  “Yes, it is on the leather key chain that was at my house — the one I had you to take from our home.”

  Chapter #39

  The key chain contained a USB drive hidden inside a leather strap. I pulled out the drive and plugged it into the USB port in Maureen’s laptop. The screen displayed the only file on the drive: “AboutJohnMiller.doc”

  I opened the file.

  Here is what it said:

  The Truth

  By John Miller

  (A hand-out for the media.)

  Dear ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank you for attending this press conference today. In a world full of woes, what I have to say is of small importance. But I need to tell you the truth about who I really am.

  My name is not John Preston, nor has it ever been. My name is John Miller.

  I was born into near poverty in a small mining town near Wheeling, West Virginia. My father frequently spent his coal miner’s wages at the bar, then came home and smacked around my mother. Unlike me, he was a big man, strong and broad, and he was cruel when he drank.

  When I was 10, he came home one night in a drunken rage and fought with my mother. The fight turned violent. He began to hit her, as he had so many times before. I told him to stop and he did not. He hit me and I flew into the corner. And while I lay there, he beat my mother — he was beating her bloody. I ran to the shed, got out a 12 gauge shotgun and, while he stood over her kicking her and screaming at her, I shouted at him to stop. He turned and saw me holding the gun and laughed. He resumed beating my mother. I shouted again for him to stop. He turned to me. Enraged, now, he charged me and I shot him in the chest — shot him dead.

  I was not let out of detention until I was 18 years old. I was in because, while defending my mother from a brutal beating by my abusive father, I’d shot him dead.

  At first, I bounced around the country working odd jobs. I bounced around for years, not making any headway. But then I decided to reinvent myself.

  I assumed the name of my Uncle John Preston, rest his soul, who died when I was 18. He was a good man who taught me many lessons in life and I sought to emulate him. It was my intent to honor my uncle's name by making something of myself. By doing some good for the world.

  It was for this reason I was drawn at first to the field of human psychology and later to helping so many people who had mastered the principles of solid, happy relationships, something I studied with great intensity just as a scientist might examine the world to find out what makes it work.

  I found my way into the University of Pittsburgh. I truly wanted to understand men and women, truly wanted to master my subject so I could help couples know greater happiness and satisfaction on this planet than my mother was ever able to imagine.

  It was during my studies that I met Elizabeth. She was an associate professor at the school. Though she was nearly a decade older than I she became my mentor, my partner and my best friend. I could never have known any of the success I enjoyed without her support and encouragement.

  It took a good long while, but as my star rose — as my speeches gained notice — and my audiences grew in size, I thought I could do no wrong. I thought I was a god, in a manner, and I thought my ideas were the right ideas.

  Among my ideas was a hatred for my father, a hatred that shaped my views of men, and made me feel that men, as a rule, were the problem, and that men indeed were in need of repair.

  And then I met Adam Clive. This fellow had been a Pulitzer Winner, a poet who marched and supported the feminist movement, but over time came to see that while women had made tremendous strides, it was men who fell behind. He made me see this and know this firsthand, and we had many mighty debates on what it is to be a man.

  Throughout this period, I will admit, I was not the happily married man I portrayed myself to be. Though Elizabeth and I never said that we were a married couple, we portrayed ourselves as one. The truth is, we never were married. And though ours was partly a romantic relationship early on, in later years it become strictly friendship and business.

  And, for a time, I went off the rails. For a time, I led a double life in which I had gone wildly out of control — booze, drugs, women, all of it. It was during this period, too, that I lost control of my company. I was a bad businessman and did not know it — as we grew, I lost money. The company fell into a spiral of debt and I had no choice but to turn, unfortunately, to a third-party, a specialist who turns failing companies around.

  Her name is Victoria Hall and I had thought she was my business partner. She was not. I will address Ms. Hall and what I think she has done to my company with the authorities immediately after today's press conference. My knowledge of her wrongdoing is partial at this time. But I want it to be clear that I had no knowledge, until very recently, of illegal activities that may have been taking place within my company, and neither did I profit from them.

  The important message for today is one of apology. I want to come clean with the people who have come to rely on me and believe in my message — the people who have applied my principles to good effect and now enjoy better relationships and marriages and greater happiness. Please do not let my failure as a human being in any way affect what you have accomplished on your own. Please do not let my failure affect your own wellbeing.

  The truth is I have only recently learned what love really is. I learned this through a wonderful human being, a woman whose name is Erin, a woman who is now my legal wife, married to me under my real name, John Miller.

  Erin helped me to see the light. She helped me to see what is beautiful and what is grotesque and the way I'd been living — the long lie that my life had been — she helped me to escape.

  I am willing to lose all the worldly possessions I have gained, because
these things mean nothing to me, while Erin means everything to me. I am willing to give up my expensive suits — this one I wear today is the last time you will see me in it — and retire to a modest life, a mild life, a life in which you will never hear from me again.

  Lastly, I am at this time, following this press conference, turning myself over to the police and will cooperate fully to help them get to the bottom of the mess of what my company has become. More details will be forthcoming soon as they unfold. I want to be clear that if any illegalities have taken place within my company, they are not of my doing.

  Again, I apologize to all the wonderful people who have supported me over the years, who have believed that I can help them and who have benefited from my words and thoughts, as imperfect and human as they have been.

  I am truly sorry.

  Thank you.

  John Miller

  “He didn’t know Hall was running a heroin operation right under his nose,” I said to Erin. “But he did have a copy of her ledger and he probably told her he was going to the authorities.”

  “I know where you can look for the ledger,” said Erin.

  And so she told me.

  Chapter #40

  “Gertrude, I’m looking for a ledger that John had in his possession,” I said.

  “Well, let’s look in Johnny’s room,” she said.

  I followed her down the hallway into a bedroom in the back of the house. It was a simple room with a single bed, modest chair and a roll-up desk.

  “Sonny, why don’t you roll up the desk there and see if it is in there,” Mrs. Miller said to me.

  I rolled up the desk. Inside was a picture of Erin and Preston, kissing each other, some pens and pencils, some paperclips and other office materials, but nothing more.

  I opened the drawers but they were empty.

  I looked in the closet and found some of Preston’s clothes, but no ledger. I looked under the bed and in between the mattress and the box spring, but found nothing.

  I searched the entire house — the basement, the attic, the closets — but could not find the copied ledger anywhere.

  “Is there a special place John would spend time at inside or outside of your house?” I said.

  “Well, Sonny, Johnny said the whole house was special because he had it built to keep me warm and happy,” she said laughing.

  I doubled back to every place in the house where John may have hid that ledger — inconspicuous places in the attic or basement or a hidden cover in the wall, as well as anyplace he may have set it in his bedroom or the other rooms in the house.

  I spent five hours looking for it without any luck.

  “When Erin is well, I’ll bring her here,” I said. “Maybe she’ll have better luck than I.”

  “You’re welcome anytime, Sonny. You go find those bad people who took my Johnny away.”

  Chapter #41

  The next day I visited Lou Geraldi, a special agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration and long-time friend.

  “Lou, I have something you’ll be most interested in,” I said.

  I set an envelope on his desk that contained the white powder I’d got from Hall’s couriers. He opened the envelope and scooped out a small amount of the drug.

  “Well, what have we here,” he said, smiling.

  He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a small plastic tube. He placed the powder in the tube, then put a lid on it and shook it. The contents inside turned purple.

  “Pure heroin,” he said. “We’re aware of a lot of increasing heroin activity in the tristate region, but this is the first I’ve heard of any activity in Maryville.”

  “I imagine business conditions are changing quickly in that racket,” I said.

  “You got that right. Heroin distributors are popping up everywhere. Last year we had more than 350 heroin overdose deaths in Pittsburgh and its surrounding suburbs. Twenty years ago we had fewer than 30 a year.”

  “Why such a rapid increase in usage?” I said.

  “Prescription pain medication is the primary driver. Americans are popping pain pills in record numbers. Do you know that America doctors wrote more than 250 million prescriptions for opioids in the past year alone?”

  “Opioids as in opium?”

  “Opioids refer to a broad category of drugs derived from opium or morphine,” said Lou. “They include prescription drugs, such as Percocet, Vicodin and Fentanyl. Their chemical is very similar to heroin.”

  “And patients are getting hooked?” I said.

  Lou nodded.

  “In the past, heroin addicts tended to be street users who stood on corners in impoverished areas. Today, addicts include soccer moms, business executives, high school kids with money to spend and people from every walk of life, who got hooked after they had knee or back surgery. They started with prescription meds.”

  “But why?”

  “Because Opioids used to be reserved for the worst cases, typically to ease the pain of terminal cancer patients. That changed in the 1990s when big companies began marketing them as ‘safe’ medications to ease post-surgical pains.”

  “I still don’t understand how people with prescriptions to pain pills transition to heroin,” I said.

  “For some, their prescription runs out. Others do so because of the expense. Street heroin is about 10 percent the cost of prescription medication — and incredibly easy to find.”

  “If Hall has established a big distribution center in Maryville,” I said, “how is she getting the heroin into the country?”

  “There are a variety of ways they do it. Recently, you may have seen in the news that a submarine went ‘aground’ carrying eight tons of cocaine. Drugs, both cocaine and opium, have been shipped into the country by private airplanes, inside containers marked as food, cement/concrete, artifacts… you name it.”

  I told Lou everything I knew about Victoria Hall — including my concern that Chief Sarafino was on Hall’s payroll.

  “That might explain why we know so little about what is going on in Maryanne,” said Lou. “When drugs are a problem within a community, the local police are usually eager to bring in county, state and federal authorities to establish a task force. But they are also in a position to keep up us.”

  “I don’t understand why would Victoria Hall want to take over Preston’s company if she merely wanted to distribute heroin?” I said. “

  “My guess would be money laundering,” said Lou. “Heroin distributors can produce a lot of cash, but if they can’t find a way to launder it, they cannot enjoy it. We’ve been seeing increasingly sophisticated schemes to launder funds — particularly when millions of dollars are involved.”

  “Any examples?” I said.

  “International drug cartels have been working elaborate schemes with the world’s largest banks. The bankers profit handsomely by disguising wire transfers in such a way that they are almost impossible to trace.”

  “How would they go about doing this?” I said.

  “The cartels buy their own banks in South American countries,” said Lou. “The Caymans is a fine place to own a bank. They transport their illicit cash to their bank, deposit it, then wire it into the legal banking system and eventually recapture the funds as legal revenue, so they can begin living like millionaires.”

  “I have only one more question for you today,” I said. “Victoria Hall has been keeping a handwritten ledger and she is keeping it in code.”

  Lou smiled.

  “That’s an old organized crime trick,” he said. “You can’t run a big operation by yourself. You have to send payments to many people. So they use an elaborate code system to conceal numbers and names.”

  “Preston had a Xerox copy of Hall’s ledger,” I said. “But we don’t know where he put it.”

  “If you want to bring down Hall, you need to find it,” said Lou. “We need to know how she’s getting drugs into that old building, how she’s getting the money out and how she’s likely laundering it through
Preston’s company. If you can help me prove that, I can get a task force together to go in there whether Chief Sarafino wants us to or not.”

  “No big order, that,” I said, smiling.

  “I’ll make some calls and see what I can do, but we’ll need more hard evidence to go in there without the chief’s blessing,” said Lou.

  “Then I’ll get you hard evidence,” I said.

  Lou gave me his personal cell number.

  “You need any help any time of the day, you call me and I will be there,” he said.

  “Will do,” I said, “and I think I know someone who can provide insights into how Hall is using Preston’s company to front a massive heroin operation.”

  Chapter #42

  Nobody would expect that Vinny Talenti was a multimillionaire, but he was. A retired Carnegie Mellon University professor, he was one of the world’s first ethical hackers. Though he was in his 70’s, he kept himself busy helping the world’s largest private and government organizations secure their data systems.

  “I have a difficult money laundering project for Mr. Vincent Talenti,” I said as I walked into his office and shook his hand.

  “Goody,” he said. “So what do you got?”

  I told him everything I’d learned about Victoria Hall and her heroin operation.

  “You know as well as anyone that a private company like this can be clever about concealing its finances,” I said. “I need you to uncover what is really going on.”

  “I like money laundering projects.” he shouted, his eyes bright. “I haven’t sunk my teeth into a good money laundering case in more than a year. So let me be clear. You want me to learn all I can about Preston’s company and what Victoria Hall may really be up to?”