Tahoe Payback (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller Book 15)

by Todd Borg

“Her key ring was either in her pocket or her purse.”

  “Does the office have windows?”

  “Just one. Like the guest bedroom.” Kyle went back to the bedroom to show me. I looked at the guest bedroom’s window. It was made of oak, very difficult to compromise from the outside without breaking the glass.

  “Did Dory keep her office window closed?”

  “When she’s gone, yes.”

  “Where is Dory’s bedroom?”

  “Back upstairs. I’ll show you.”

  As Kyle led me back to the stairway, I saw a framed poster in the hallway that I hadn’t noticed before. It was a large graphic of the Solar system. It showed the Sun, and four small dots representing the four inner-most planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. I knew that beyond the small inner planets were the huge gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, and so forth. But those planets weren’t depicted on this graphic.

  At the top of the poster were the words, “Earth/Sun Lagrangian Points.”

  I pointed at the framed piece. “Was Dory into astronomy or astrology?”

  Kyle made a little chuckle. “No, not at all. But she kept this print around because her former partner was into this thing called Lagrangian points, and he considered them, like, a guide for certain business decisions. I guess there are Lagrangian groups online.”

  “Finding meaning in the position of stars and such?” I said.

  Kyle shrugged. “I don’t know. Dory said that Lagrangian points are places where there’s balance. Like, if you put something at a Lagrangian Point, it pretty much stays there. It won’t go flying off into space. Or into the Sun. Or whatever happens to stuff out in space.”

  “What do you put there?”

  “I have no idea. I think it was more of an idea concept. Like if you have a big customer, you want that person to be in a balance point. Then you just tweak things now and then to keep the customer comfortable. If so, you’ll keep making money. She’s got a book on it. Something about going big with the Lagrangian model for business.”

  It sounded like nonsense to me. I took another look at the poster, and we headed up the stairs.

  Kyle took me to the upper bedrooms, all modest in size but with private bathrooms. All had the spectacular views. Dory’s was the end one. It contained no business-related items. I glanced in her closet and drawers. There was nothing worth noting.

  “You said you made the bank deposits,” I said. “If you don’t have access to the sales records, how did you do it?”

  “I just fill out the deposit slips.”

  “So you have access to the deposit books. Where are they?”

  “At the kitchen desk. I’ll show you.”

  He walked back into the kitchen, opened a drawer near a small desk area, and pulled out a long, narrow, booklet and handed it to me. It had printed, self-carboning pages, the kind where one writes on the white copy and it transfers to the yellow copy underneath.

  About half of the slips had been filled out. The top, white copies had been torn out and submitted to the bank with the checks. The yellow, carbon copies were filled with names and dollar amounts. I scanned down them. The dollar amounts were mostly under $50, with the most common figure being $23.43.

  “Why this unusual amount?” I asked, pointing to the slip.

  “Dory’s mailer has this page with little boxes next to amounts. Donors can check one of the boxes to show how many children they want to save. Dory put the twenty-three, forty-three amount because the specific unusual amount makes the idea of saving a child more real than just a general twenty or thirty-dollar figure. She says there’s psychological studies on how that works. But I can say from experience that when she started printing the unusual amount on the form, the response rate went up.”

  Kyle handed me a mailer.

  It was a large format envelope. On the front was a picture of a young girl about two years old with large, sad, brown eyes. She stood barefoot on a dirt street. In the background was a rusted garbage can tipped on its side, garbage strewn about. A rat scavenged near a fast-food container. Next to the garbage can lay a homeless woman, unconscious, dressed in rags. Near the child’s feet were two dirty syringes. On her face was a look of fear.

  Printed on the envelope near where the address would go were the words, ‘Official Business. It is a Federal Crime to interfere with mail delivery. This mail is only for the recipient listed.’

  In the lower left corner of the envelope, below the picture of the little girl, it said, ‘You can save this child’s life with just $23.43.’

  On the top of the envelope was a message in script, printed in metallic gold. It said, ‘Find Your Thank You Gift Inside!’

  Inside the envelope was a brochure with more pictures of children. There was also a slip of paper with another photo, this one of a young boy in tattered clothes looking up at an American flag. The caption said, ‘Even the poorest children have dreams. You can make those dreams happen with your help today! Just $23.43 can save a life!’

  There was also a 3 X 5 piece of cardstock. Attached to it was a refrigerator magnet printed with an American flag. Hanging from the magnet was a little woven ring like a Native American dreamcatcher. Looking close, I could see that it was cleverly made, stamped out of plastic in such a way that it would look handmade to someone with poor eyesight. Attached to the dreamcatcher were three tiny roses. On the card it said, ‘Your Gift...This dreamcatcher collects good spirits just for you, 24/7. It is a gift to you from the children saved by the Red Roses of Hope.’

  On the back side of the brochure was yet another picture of a child, a little boy of about five with sandy blond hair and brilliant blue eyes. He wore dirty jeans and a T-shirt and was without shoes, his brown socks showing multiple holes. From his dirt-caked fingers dangled a necklace like the one Spot found on Fannette Island.

  Underneath the photo, the copy said, ‘Damien dreams of one day learning to play the piano. You can make that dream possible by sending $116.16, the cost of 6 month’s worth of piano lessons at the orphanage where Damien lives. In return, Damien will send you a genuine, limited edition, Red Roses of Hope necklace. Save a child’s life today!’

  “This is obviously an effective direct mailer. But what about the electronic donations? Dory has a way for people to contribute online, right?”

  “Yes. She has a website, and people can contribute in a number of ways. Paypal is the most popular. See on the brochure?” Kyle pointed to the corner where it had the website address.

  “But as Dory always pointed out, a lot of charitable giving comes from older people. She didn’t like that because depositing checks is work compared to online payments. She would always say, ‘Never forget that FMOs like to write checks.’” Kyle suddenly stopped himself. He looked uncomfortable and embarrassed.

  “What was that you said?”

  Kyle’s voice was very low. “She called the check writers FMOs.”

  “What does FMO mean?”

  “It stands for feeble-minded oldsters.”

  “The people who gave the most money,” I said.

  Kyle nodded. His face was pink.

  “Why did Dory think they were feeble minded?”

  Kyle’s discomfort had blossomed to full, red-faced embarrassment.

  I waited.

  Eventually, he spoke in a small voice. “Because they succumbed to her mailer. Because her psychological approach worked on them.”

  “You’re saying she had contempt for the very people who gave her the most money.”

  Kyle made an almost imperceptible nod.

  “Kyle, you seem like a reasonable person, someone with a conscience. Did you ever express concern or regret over this phony charity?”

  “Yes. Increasingly, as I got older. When I was fourteen years old and Dory inherited the business, I just thought, what a clever way to make money. But in the last couple of years, I began to see what it really was, a corrupt scam.”

  “Did you ever say anything to Dory about it?”


  “Yeah. I made little comments here and there. And a month ago, I told her that it was all wrong. That she was a crook.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said that charitable giving in the U.S. is three hundred and sixty billion dollars a year. That works out to a billion dollars a day. She put real emphasis on that. Then she said that she was just trying to achieve the American Dream of getting ahead through hard work. I think she justified it by believing it was good that all of the money she collects gets put to use in other ways.”

  “A bank robber could think the same thing.”

  “Yeah, I thought of that, too.”

  I picked up the deposit book and flipped through it. Each slip had lines for about 30 checks. The names were written with the jerky printing of a teenaged boy, each with a first initial and a last name. To the right were the check amounts. A few were for $10, and an occasional check had been made for $50 or even $100. But as Kyle had said, the most common figure was $23.43. Flipping through the slips, I saw that some slips were comprised entirely of checks for $23.43.

  At the bottom of each slip was a box for the total. The totals on most of the slips were in the $700 to $900 range. I counted the number of slips for each date.

  “The dates on the slips show that most days produce about twelve slips,” I said. “Does that seem right?”

  “Yes,” Kyle said. “Twelve is the average.”

  “Twelve times an average of eight hundred dollars is close to ten thousand dollars a day. I’m not a wizard with numbers, but I don’t think that would add up to your estimate of six million a year that the Red Roses of Hope brings in.”

  Kyle shook his head. “No. It’s only about three and a half million. The other two and a half million mostly comes from the online donations and from the occasional checks for much more.”

  I gestured with the deposit book. “Do those occasional checks end up in these deposit books?”

  “Yeah, all the checks get written up on these deposit slips.” Kyle took one of the books and flipped through. He stopped on one of the pages. “Here. A thousand dollars. We get one of those every few weeks.”

  “A rich Feeble-Minded Oldster?” I said, unable to keep a sneer out of my voice.

  Kyle looked down. “Yes.”

  I looked at other names on the deposit slips. None of them looked familiar to me. But something seemed to repeat now and then. “This name. F Hanover. I’ve seen it a few times.”

  “Oh yeah. Frances Hanover,” Kyle said. “She sends a check every week. I’ve noticed that the checks are dated on Mondays. It’s like that’s how she begins her week.”

  “Twenty-three, forty-three. Fifty-two times a year. She thinks she’s saving the lives of fifty-two children a year. That would be over a thousand dollars a year. Are there other people who send in checks on a regular basis?”

  “Yeah. Some do it weekly, and some do it every month. One I remember is named Betty Rodriguez. She does it at the beginning of each month.” He looked through the pages and showed one to me.

  “This check is for one hundred dollars. Is that her regular amount?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Twelve hundred per year,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Probably pays part of the expense to heat the swimming pool,” I said.

  Kyle didn’t respond.

  “Do you have a way to look up their addresses?”

  “Like I said, I photocopy them all for Dory before I deposit them. But I remember Betty’s checks because they’re pink with red flowers on them. She lives in Roseville.”

  “I want you to look through the photocopy sheets and find the names you recognize as regular donors. I’m interested in the ones that are closest to Sacramento. Tahoe, too, if there are any.”

  “Should I write down the names?” Kyle asked.

  “Yes. Names and their regular donation amounts and their physical addresses. You can skip the ones that only show a post office box.”

  He reached into a drawer, pulled out a yellow pad and a stack of photocopies, and began going through the photocopies. He paused to write multiple names.

  “I notice that all the names on the sheets are people who live in California,” I said. “Any idea why there aren’t any names from anywhere else?”

  “I think the man who started Red Roses built his original mailing list from local sources. Dory talked about how her mailing list was local. She said that if she could expand to the entire country, the financial possibilities would be ten times as great.”

  “Her fraud could grow from six million a year to sixty million,” I said.

  Kyle took a breath, then went back to his photocopies. When he was done, he said, “These are all the sheets I have since she left. The ones before that are locked in her office.” He handed me the pad. “I don’t know about the amounts that come in from the online donations. Dory doesn’t talk about the details. But I know it is a lot, and she loves it because she doesn’t have to do anything. Paypal just puts the money in the bank account.”

  I looked at the names and addresses he’d written, all frequent contributors, all living in or close to the Sacramento area like Betty Rodriguez in Roseville, and one in Tahoe, a woman named Elena Turwin in Tahoe City.

  I used my cell phone to Google the non-emergency number for the Marin County Sheriff’s Office. There was a landline phone at Dory’s kitchen desk. I picked it up and dialed the number that was on my screen. Kyle scowled. I don’t think it was because I was calling the sheriff. I think it was because I didn’t know how to call the number on my screen directly from my cell phone.

  A man answered, “Marin County Sheriff’s Office.”

  I began explaining what I’d learned, telling him much of what I’d previously said to Sergeant Bains of El Dorado County.

  The man said they’d send someone over.

  “In the meantime,” I said to the man on the phone, “I have a recording of Kyle Spatt’s statement. If you tell me the appropriate email address, I’ll send it along.”

  The man on the phone gave me the address. I wrote it down on the pad. I thanked him and hung up.

  TWENTY-TWO

  I turned to Kyle.

  “You saw that I recorded your statement. Can you tell me how to email it?”

  Kyle’s eyes got a little wider. “You know how to record on your phone and Google phone numbers, but you don’t know how to email?”

  “We learn to walk by taking baby steps first.”

  Kyle’s alarmed look wasn’t what he’d show if, say, his house was sliding down the hill in an earthquake. But it was alarm, nonetheless. He reached for my phone.

  I pulled it away from him. “Nope. Just talk me through it.” I didn’t want him hitting delete on the recording.

  So he explained, in halting steps, thinking his way through a process he had probably never verbalized.

  I got the audio file attached and sent to the Marin County Sheriff’s Office.

  There was a chime from deep in the house.

  “Doorbell?” I said.

  Kyle nodded.

  “Come with me.” I took him to the front door and opened it. Two Marin County Sheriff’s deputies stood there.

  “Good evening, gentlemen. I’m Owen McKenna, and this is Kyle Spatt. Come on in. We have a lot to talk about.”

  After I left Kyle Spatt in the care of the Marin County uniforms, I hiked back down to Sausalito, calling Street while I walked.

  “Everything okay?” I said.

  “Yeah. Blondie and Spot are both sleeping. They’ve exhausted themselves playing. I haven’t had any creepy sensations. Maybe that’s because my father is lying low. Or maybe I’m just oblivious with the commotion of two dogs. But don’t worry. I won’t let down my guard. For a moment, I was tempted to run out to my car to get the book I’m reading, and I didn’t want to wake the dogs to take them with me. I decided it could wait until morning.”

  “Thanks. Times of comfort are when vigilance is mo
st needed.”

  “Is that, like, a thing?”

  “Yeah, it’s the McKenna comfort/vigilance thing,” I said.

  “Are you making any progress?” she asked.

  “Yes. The address on Market Street was a maildrop. I followed the guy who picked up the Red Roses mail onto the ferry to Sausalito and found charity fraud headquarters. The Red Roses of Hope was owned and run by the woman who died on Fannette Island.”

  “Isadore?” Street said.

  “Yup. Real name of Dory Spatt. She was taking in six million a year and using various accounting practices to transfer much of the money into a for-profit fundraising company that she also happens to own. Her errand boy was her brother Kyle, who acknowledges the scope of the fraud.”

  I was now down to the ferry dock. The outgoing boat was loading. I got in line.

  “Wait,” Street said. “If she was using legal accounting practices, then is it still fraud?”

  “Maybe not technically. But ethically, yes. At this point, I don’t have a clear answer to the legal question. Her brother said that, while Dory kept a lot of the details private, she openly admitted that virtually none of the incoming money went to children in need. Her brother also explained that she was in contact with other people in the charity business and that they too were running what they acknowledge among themselves are scams. He said they ‘talk shop’ about how to game the system and keep the vast majority of the money they raise, and, in cases like the Red Roses charity, give virtually none of it to the needy people they claim to help. Yes, the laws are set up in such a way that they have a lot of cover. It really looks like some of these charity people are human maggots eating off the good intentions of others who send off money thinking it goes to good causes. Even for a guy like me who’s seen a lot of underbelly over the years, it’s shocking.”

  “What are you going to do?” Street asked.

  “I’ve got her brother currently engaged in a tell-all with the Marin SO. He’s hoping, based on what I said to him, that the more he blabbers, the less likely he is to go to prison.”

  “Is that true?”

  “In some ways, yes. But, as always, a good law firm could bury the authorities with paperwork obstruction and maybe shut off any investigation. Fortunately, it seems like brother Kyle doesn’t currently have access to the charity funds. Maybe Dory Spatt had a will giving her world to Kyle. Maybe not. But as long as some smart lawyer doesn’t find a way to get Kyle access to the company funds, there won’t be an easy way for him to hire legal firepower.”