by Ed McBain
“She was ’ere a great deal,” he said, looking surprised, and handed the card to Carella. He and Meyer looked at it together. “We’ll need a copy of this, please,” Meyer said.
“Mais, oui, certainement,”Prouteau said.
“Let’s take a look in the box,” Carella said.
What they found in the box was $96,000 in hundred-dollar bills.
There was also a sheet of paper with a lot of figures on it.
They asked Prouteau for a copy of that as well.
THEY KNEW THE LADY had been smurfing even before they checked the figures against her two checkbooks and her passbook.
The handwritten notes in her safe deposit box looked like this:
“Missed a day,” Meyer said.
“Thanksgiving,” Carella said.
The next deposit was made almost two weeks later.
“According to her calendar, she came East on the eighth of December,” Carella said.
On the identical dates she had listed for withdrawals from the safe deposit box, there were corresponding deposits in either of her two checking accounts or her savings account. Each deposit was for a sum of money less than $10,000, the maximum cash deposit allowed under a federal law that had gone into effect almost three decades ago. Anything more than that sum had to be reported to the Internal Revenue Service on a so-called CTR, the acronym for Currency Transaction Report. Cassandra Jean Ridley, it would appear, had been engaged in money laundering, albeit on a relatively minor scale. Smurfing, as it was called in the trade.
In order to be charged with laundering, a person had to disguise the origin or ownership of illegally gained funds to make them appear legitimate. Hiding legitimately acquired money to avoid taxation also qualified as money laundering. The U.S. Treasury Department cautiously accepted a State Department Fact Sheet estimating that as much as four hundred billion dollars was laundered worldwide annually. Of this, fifty to a hundred billion was said to have come from drug profits in the United States alone.
If Cassandra Jean Ridley’s transfers of cash were indeed necessitated because the money came from drugs, she was small potatoes indeed. According to the evidence they now possessed, she had introduced a mere $200,000 into the banking system, and had then separated it from its possible criminal origins by passing it through several financial transactions. In police jargon, this was called “placement” and “layering.” But street sales of drugs were usually transacted in five- or ten-dollar bills, and the $96,000 they found in her safe deposit box was in hundreds. It seemed certain she hadn’t been running around the street selling dime bags of coke to teenagers.
Her checkbooks showed somewhat substantial amounts written to department stores all over the city in the weeks before her murder. The lady had been moving money around and spending it profligately. The only sum they could not account for was the $8,000 in $100 bills they’d found nestling in the top right hand drawer of her desk—presumably currency suspected in a kidnapping that had drawn the attention of the Secret Service.
They knew several other things about Cassandra Jean Ridley.
She had been a pilot in the U.S. Army.
She had lived in Eagle Branch, Texas.
This last bit of information might not later have proved significant if Ollie Weeks wasn’t at that very moment speaking to Jerome Hoskins’ sales manager in the publishing offices of Wadsworth and Dodds.
KAREN ANDERSEN was a tall brunette wearing a charcoal black business suit with wide lapels and white pin stripes. Her handshake was firm and her smile was welcoming. Ollie wondered at once if she was wearing black thong panties and a garter belt under the tailored slacks. Halloway filled her in on the reason for Ollie’s visit—
She seemed equally appalled by the news of Hoskins’ murder.
—and then left them alone in his office while he attended a meeting in the firm’s conference room. Karen asked Ollie if he’d care for a cup of coffee. It was close to twelve noon; he was beginning to get hungry. He wondered if the offer included a croissant, a donut, or at least a slice of toast. He accepted it nonetheless, watching Karen’s ass as she walked to a folding door that opened to reveal a small kitchen unit. A coffee maker was already prepared for brewing. She hit a button. A red light went on. Karen walked to a chair facing him. She crossed her long legs. He wished she was wearing a skirt. She tented her hands. Long narrow fingers, the nails painted a red to match her lipstick. The savory aroma of perking coffee set Ollie’s salivary glands flowing.
“So,” she said, “what is it you want to know?”
“What was he doing in Diamondback?” Ollie asked.
“Selling books, I’d expect.”
“At oneA.M . on Christmas Eve?”
Karen looked at him.
“That’s the ME’s estimated post mortem interval. The time of his death. The time someone fired a nine-millimeter pistol into the base of his neck.”
“I can’t evenimagine what he was doing up there at that hour.”
“How many bookstores was he selling to?” Ollie asked. “In Diamondback?”
“Four. We’re trying to expand our market there.”
“What sort of books do you sell?”
“Mostly non-fiction. We have a small fiction list, but nothing significant.”
“Books that would appeal to a Negro audience?”
“To a what?”
“A Negro audience.”
“You said Negro.”
“Yes.”
“Some of them.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, any number of our titles.”
“Was Hoskins having any kind of trouble with his accounts?”
“Trouble?”
“Deadbeats. Slow payers. Whatever. Personality differences?”
“No problems that I know of. We’re an easy firm to deal with. As I said, we’re trying to expand our markets. Not only in Diamond-back, but all over the United States. Coffee’s ready,” she said, and uncrossed her legs. She rose, walked to the kitchenette, poured coffee for both of them. “Sugar?” she asked. “Cream?”
“Both,” he said.
He was hoping she’d offer him something to eat. His eyes whipped the counter top, saw nothing but an open box of granulated sugar. She knelt to open a mini-fridge under the counter, took from it a container of skim milk. She spooned sugar into his cup …
“Two, please,” he said.
… added milk, carried it to where he sat. She smelled of expensive perfume. He wondered what the hell she was doing selling books for a rinky-dink firm like Wadsworth and Dodds.
“Five salesmen,” Ollie said. “Was what Mr. Halloway told me. Charmaine’s supposed to be getting me their names and phone numbers.”
“Why?” Karen said.
“I want to talk to them. See what they can tell me about him.”
“I doubt if any of them knew him that well. Aside from sales conferences, their paths wouldn’t have crossed all that often.”
“Worth a few phone calls,” Ollie said, and shrugged.
“I’ll see how she’s doing,” Karen said.
She lifted the phone on Halloway’s desk, stabbed at a button on the face of the cradle. “Hi,” she said, “it’s Karen. Have you got that information for Detective Weeks?” She listened, hung up, nodded, said, “She’s bringing it in,” and then folded her arms across her chest, and looked across the room at Ollie.
“Would you guys be interested in a book by a bona fide police officer?” he asked.
Karen looked surprised.
“Would you?” he asked.
“What kind of a book?”
“You know, make-believe.”
“Fiction?”
“Sure, fiction. But by somebody who reallyknows police work, never mind these faggots who make it all up.”
“Who’d you have in mind?” Karen asked.
“Me,” Ollie said.
“I didn’t know you were a writer.”
“You probably didn�
�t know I play piano, either.”
“I confess I didn’t.”
“Do you like ‘Night and Day’? I can play that for you sometime.”
“It was never one of my favorites.”
“I can even play it with a Latin beat, if you like.”
“I don’t think so, thanks. Why? Do I look Latin?”
“Well, the dark hair and eyes.”
“Actually, my parents were Swedish.”
“So would you be interested?”
“In what?”
“A fictious book about police work? I’ve had lots of experience.”
“Would it have a Latin beat?” Karen asked, and smiled.
“I had more of an American cop in mind.”
“We sell lots of books in the Southwest.”
“What’s that got to do with the price of fish?”
“Large Latino audience,” Karen said, and shrugged.
“I could throw in a few wetbacks, I suppose,” Ollie said dubiously. “But it might ruin the subtle mix.”
“Oh, you already have a mix in mind, is that it?”
“No, but I thought if I could talk to somebody up here, one of your editors …”
“I see.”
“… he could maybe fill me in on your needs, and I could prepare an outline or something. I have to explain something to you, Miss Andersen …”
“Yes, what’s that?”
“If a person is creative in one way, he’s usually creative in another. That’s been my experience, anyway. Take Picasso, you ever heard of Pancho Picasso?”
“Does he write police novels?”
“Come on, he was a famous painter, you heard of him. The point is, he also made pots.”
“I see.”
“What I’m saying is, if you’re creative in one way, you’re creative in another. My piano teacher says there’s no limits to where I can go.”
“Maybe you’ll even play at Clarendon Hall one day.”
“Who knows? So have you got an editor up here I can talk to? Give your company an exclusive look at the book?”
“I’m not sure any of our editors are free just now,” Karen said. “But we may have something you can look at.”
“What do you meanlook at?”
“Something one of our editors may have prepared. Defining our needs. As I said, we don’t publish much fiction …”
“Always room for a bestseller, though, am I right?”
“Always room.”
“You had more bestsellers, maybe your salesmen wouldn’t end up in garbage cans with bullet holes in their heads.”
“Maybe not.”
“Was he doing drugs?” Ollie asked.
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Did he have a black girlfriend up there?”
“He was married.”
“Did he have a black girlfriend up there?” Ollie asked again.
“He washappily married.”
Dainty Charmaine came in with the names and addresses of Hoskins’ customers in Diamondback, and the names and addresses of his fellow sales reps in the United States.
One of them lived in Eagle Branch, Texas.
WALTER WIGGINS had grown up to believe that beating the system was the only way to cope with the system. The way he looked at it, the system was stacked against the black man, and any man of color would be foolish to try living within the rules white men had established to control and punish the black man.
Wiggy committed his first theft—a two-dollar water pistol from a variety store on Hayley Avenue, the wide thoroughfare that skewered Diamondback north to south—when he was six years old. His mother forced him to take the toy pistol back to the owner, which Wiggy did after much wailing and protesting. Two days later, he went back to the store again—without his mother this time—and stole the water pistol all over again.
The owner of the store was white, but Wiggy didn’t feel he was striking a blow for black power—which words were all the rage then—or anything else. He merely felt he was getting a water pistol for free, fuck his mother. He kept committing petty thefts until the time he was thirteen and joined a street gang named Orion, after which his life became a merry round of rumbling, doing drugs, dealing drugs, and eventually master-minding (he thought of it as such) the ring (he called it a posse, in the Colombian style) that now supported him in the life style to which he had become accustomed. It would never have occurred to Wiggy that living within the system was a possible alternative to the life he’d chosen. Wiggy the Lid was a big man in this part of the city. He even fancied himself to be famous outside of the six square-blocks he controlled in Diamond-back.
It annoyed him enormously that he’d had to pay for cocaine being peddled by a man he thought of as an amateur. It annoyed him even further that he’d had to hand over the money to a pair of white chicks holding guns bigger than they were. This guy Frank Holt—if that was his name, which Wiggy doubted—had come recommended by a cousin of Wiggy’s in Mobile, Alabama, who said he’d met him with a man named Randolph Biggs in Dallas, Texas, when the three of them were setting up a run from Mexico, this was four years ago. Apparently this Frank Holt person—who’d later found himself stuffed feet first in a garbage can with a bullet hole at the back of his head, courtesy of Wiggy the Lid himself—had recently purchased some very good shit in Guenerando, Mexico, and through various levels of subterfuge had smuggled it into the metropolitan area where he was peddling a hundred keys for a million-nine. One look at the guy, you knew he was new at the trade, however long ago Wiggy’s cousin had worked with him. Patted him down, found him carrying an ancient piece out ofCasablanca, trusted Tigo and him alone to test the shit while he sat outside with a brother named Thomas who could’ve broke him in half with his bare hands. Beating the system was what this was all about. Why pay a white man a mill-nine when you could shoot him in the head and take the booty home free? Like the water pistol.
Not that there wasn’t profit enough in the trade even if Wiggy had played it by the book. Pay Frank Holt—or whatever his name was—the money he wanted for his hundred keys of truly very good shit, and then take it from there. In the long run, because Wiggy’d been careless or stupid or both, he’d had to fork over $19,000 a key to the two blondes in the Lincoln Town Car, who’d driven him back to his so-called office on Decatur and watched while he’d opened the safe, the one named Toni—which he was sure wasn’ther goddamn name, either—sitting there with the AK-47 leveled at his head while he twirled the combination dial, a smile on her face, her splendid white-cunt legs crossed.
Wiggy had failed to beat the system.
Oh yes, he knew he’d be selling off his newly acquired ten-key lots for twenty-three grand a key, a twenty-one percent profit on each key, for a virtual overnight gain of $400,000 on his $1,900,000 investment. Yes, he knew that, and that wasn’t bad for a kid who’d stolen his first water pistol at the age of six. He knew, too, that there’d be profits for everyone down the line, but he didn’t give a shit about anyone but himself. His one-kilo buyers would step on the drug by a third, diluting it to produce 1,333 grams or some 47 ounces of cocaine. This would be sold for about $800 an ounce, the profit margin rising the closer the drug came to the street. What had started in Mexico for $1,700,000 would end up on the streets of Diamondback at a retail price of close to $9,000,000. From door to door, all anybody made was money, money, money, but Wiggy was in this for Numero Uno alone. It did not disturb him to know that some of the kids buying highly diluted shit from sad-assed street dealers were scarcely older than he himself had been when he swiped that water gun.
What bothered him was that he’d allowed two titty blondes to cold-cock him and deprive him of an even greater profit. He would have to get that money back somehow.
What he didn’t know was that his $1,900,000 had already been wire-transferred to Iran—where it would buy even more money at a huge discount.
THE REDHEADED PILOT had told them the man’s name was Randolph Biggs and had said he l
ived in Eagle Branch, Texas. She’d given them a fairly good description, too: a tall, broad-shouldered man with thick black hair and a black mustache. She had told them he was a Texas Ranger, but they couldn’t go ask aboutthat, eh,amigo? And besides they felt she was either lying or had been lied to. How could a Texas Ranger be involved in a scheme flying dope out of Guenerando, Mexico?
Eagle Branch was just across the Rio Grande from Piedras Rosas, Mexico—where, legend held, a former U.S. Marine had broken an American drug-prisoner out of jail there, oh, twenty, thirty years ago. Legends die hard. The people in Eagle Branch still talked about the daring escape. To them, it had become almost mythic. They insisted that the escaped prisoner’s girlfriend had lived and taught school right there in Eagle Branch. Who knew? It could be true. The people in Piedras Rosas were indifferent to the story. They wouldn’t have cared if a whole Marinebattalion had freed the entire prison population. They were of a mind to believe that the corrupt guards at the local jail, if paid enoughmordida, would let everybody go free, anyway. Most of the people in Piedras Rosas were more intent on crossing the river and making their way north, where Wiggy the Lid was selling cocaine to dealers lower down the chain of command who would eventually step on the drug and sell it to Mexican immigrants without green cards living in shitty neighborhoods where they pined for the good old days in Piedras Rosas.