by Stuart Woods
“I didn’t say that. You should know that the funds in this account are stolen. Not simply illegally earned, not borrowed, not laundered to prevent payment of taxes. These funds were stolen outright. I should think that would make some difference to you.”
“Of course, this bank would never knowingly receive stolen funds,” Rouré said, spreading his hands. “Why didn’t you say so to begin with?” He picked up a telephone and tapped in a number. “Bring me the file on account number…” He read the number from the sheet of paper, then put the phone down and smiled at Norris.
“Of course, I am willing to cooperate with you, if you can substantiate what you have just said to me.”
Norris took a thick sheaf of papers from his briefcase, walked around the desk, and placed them before the banker. “These are brokerage account records substantiating the ownership of these funds,” he said, turning pages and pointing at figures. “As you follow through the paper trail, you can see how the woman of the house initiated purchases of shares for her husband’s account. Finally, you see how she ordered all three accounts to be liquidated and the funds transferred to her checking account. Then you see, here, how she wire-transferred the funds to the account in this office.”
“Yes, yes, I see,” Rouré said. “A substantial amount of money.”
“A very large theft,” Norris said. He knew Rouré was relieved to find that the amount in question was only three million six instead of a hundred times that, and that the account holder was a California housewife instead of a Colombian drug lord; he would have had second thoughts about revealing confidential information about a client who might put a bomb in his car.
A young man entered the office and placed a thin file folder before Rouré, then said something in Spanish.
“Wait a minute,” Norris said. “Let’s stick to English, here.”
“My colleague has told me that we have just received coded instructions to wire-transfer nearly the entire balance in the account to a bank in Mexico City,” Rouré said.
“Just now?”
“Only a few minutes ago. He was on his way to my office for approval.”
“I don’t think we need detain your colleague further,” Norris said. When the young man had left, he walked around Rouré’s desk, rummaged in the man’s humidor, chose a Romeo y Juliet, and sat down.
Rouré leaned across the desk and lit the cigar with a gold lighter.
“Señor Rouré,” Russell Norris said, puffing on the cigar, “I believe I may have a solution to your problem.”
“Problem?” Rouré asked, raising his eyebrows. “I have a problem?”
“Of course you do,” Norris replied, smiling. “For the past three minutes or so, you have been dealing in stolen funds.” He raised a hand to stave off the banker’s protestations. “Ever since I told you they were stolen. But if you follow my instructions exactly, you can forget about it. The matter will never arise again.”
Senor Rouré looked interested. Norris began telling the banker how he could save himself an awful lot of trouble.
CHAPTER
42
Cupie Dalton parked as close as he could to Venice Beach, then walked the rest of the way. It was a warm day for January in L.A., and the sun had brought the Venetian insects out of their holes. The muscle freaks were lifting away in the weights area, pausing only to rub oil onto their bodies and flex for the gawking passersby; small-time pushers were selling dope by the joint; T-shirts and cheap sunglasses were the sale items of the day; and every third creep seemed to be on roller skates.
Cupie found the Don Dunn Studio of Artistic Photography with no trouble; the owner had opened his front doors wide to admit the warm air and hot prospects. Dunn himself was bent over a contact sheet with a large loupe pressed to the pictures.
“Hang on a sec,” he said, squinting through the magnifier. He made a mark with a grease pencil, then stood up. “Good day to you,” he said.
Cupie thought him surprisingly formal for a skinny man with shoulder-length hair and a scraggly beard, dressed in a tie-dyed T-shirt and greasy dirty jeans. He was like a wraith from the sixties.
“And good day to you,” Cupie said. He’d hated hippies in the sixties, and he hated them now, although this one, at least, seemed to be working for a living. It was for this reason that Cupie didn’t hit him right away. “Doc Don, I presume.”
Dunn’s eyes narrowed. “We have a mutual friend, do we?”
“Yeah, but I think he’d rather I didn’t use his name. I’m not here to get my picture took, you see; I’m here to find out about somebody whose picture you took.”
“I’m in the photography business, pal,” Dunn said, “not the information business.”
“That ain’t the only business you’re in,” Cupie said, smiling. “You’re a purveyor of funny paper, pal, and you and me have some talking to do.”
“Take a hike, mister. I got a business to run.”
Cupie produced the photograph that Ed Eagle had sent with the money. “This guy came in here at the end of October and placed an order, maybe even had his picture taken.”
Dunn barely glanced at the photograph. “Never saw him before,” he said. “Good day to you.”
Cupie glanced at the swinging doors behind the photographer; the angle was good. “And good day to you,” he said, shooting a swift right to the man’s solar plexus.
Document Don Dunn left his feet and flew backward through the doors, leaving them flapping.
Cupie followed him at a more leisurely pace. He produced a hundred-dollar bill and waved it before Dunn’s eyes, which were tightly closed as he sucked in air. “Now, just so you won’t think I’m not polite, I’m going to offer you this for your assistance.”
“Go fuck yourself,” Dunn said, struggling to his feet. He pushed off the wall behind him and launched a backhanded chop toward Cupie’s throat.
Cupie had not been expecting this, and he barely got a forearm up in time to block it. Having done so, he got hold of Dunn’s skinny wrist and twisted his arm up high behind his back. Dunn was a lithe fellow, and the hand went right up to the nape of his neck before he complained.
“Let me explain something to you,” Cupie said, pushing the man hard against a wall and pinning him there. “You’re in a business like this, every once in a while somebody like me is going to wander in here and want to know something about somebody. The way to handle that is to charge for it and send the guy on his way happy; that way you don’t get an arm broken.” He jerked up on Dunn’s wrist for emphasis. “If you get my meaning.”
“I get it, I get it,” Dunn said.
“I think you do,” Cupie said, “but before I let go of you, I want to be real sure. Y’see, I could just beat the shit out of you, then destroy this place looking for what I want, and that’s what I’m going to do if you give me the least bit of trouble when I let go of you. Do we understand each other?”
“We understand each other,” Dunn gasped.
Cupie let go of the man’s arm and stepped back, just in case Dunn didn’t really understand.
Dunn grasped his shoulder with a free hand and whimpered.
Cupie pulled his jacket back to reveal the automatic pistol on his belt. “And just in case you think you can go for a shooter or something, I want you to forget about that, too.”
“Okay, okay,” Dunn said. “What do you want?”
Cupie held up the photograph again. “He was in here around late October.”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“What’s his name?”
“People don’t tell me their names,” Dunn said. Cupie was drawing back to swing again when Dunn started talking faster. “I mean, not their real names.”
“Of course not,” Cupie said. “What was the name he wanted on whatever he ordered from you?”
“Look, mister, that was three, four months ago, you know?”
“Listen to me, Doc. This guy came in here for genuine paper; that means you had to produce a real birth
certificate. What was the name on the certificate?”
“I’ll have to look it up.”
“Look it up where?”
Dunn nodded toward a big filing cabinet. “There.”
“All right,” Cupie said. “You walk over there and open the file drawer, and when your hand comes out of it, there better not be anything but a file in it, you hear me?”
“Listen, pal, all I want to do is give you what you want and get you out of here.”
“Fine,” Cupie said. “Give me what I want.”
Dunn went to the filing cabinet, produced a clump of keys from his pocket, and opened the top drawer. He rummaged through the files and came up with a manila folder. “I remember something now; this guy wanted a passport in his own name, the name he came in here with: Daniel O’Hara. I called a guy I know in Boston, where there’s lots of Irish, and he got it for me.”
Cupie opened the file and looked at the top sheet of paper. There was a Polaroid passport photo clipped to a photocopy of an American passport, open to the page containing O’Hara’s personal information. There was a second sheet of paper in the file as well. “Who’s the lady?” he asked, pointing at a photocopy of another passport.
“She was with O’Hara,” Dunn replied. “A real looker, too. Dynamite.”
“Frances B. Kennerly,” Cupie read from the document. “Was that a special-order name, too?”
“Yeah,” Dunn replied, “but I couldn’t come up with the first name she wanted, so I matched the last name she asked for, and she was happy with Frances B., because the middle initial was the same as her first name.”
“What was the first name she wanted?” Cupie asked.
“Uh…” Dunn thought hard. “Betty—no…ah, Barbara. That was it, Barbara Kennerly.”
Cupie looked at the addresses; they were the same. “Stone Canyon, in Bel Air,” he read aloud. “Pretty fancy address.”
“Yeah. ’Course, it might not be a real address,” Dunn said, “but they were a pretty slick couple.”
“What else did you get for these people besides passports?”
“The works: driver’s licenses, social security cards, voter registration cards.”
“What address did you send them to?”
“They picked up the paper here.”
“You say these people were slick; tell me some more about them.”
Dunn shrugged. “Not much to tell.”
Cupie frowned. “You want to help me out, don’t you, Doc?”
“Oh, sure, sure. Let me see, well, they were slick, like I said; the guy was wearing a blue blazer that looked custom-made. The girl was wearing a low-cut black dress with a short skirt. Like I said, she was a real looker.”
“Any identifying marks?” Cupie said. It was a cop’s question, and Dunn looked at him sharply.
“Just one,” the photographer said. “The girl had a flower tattooed on one of her tits. I remember that; I couldn’t take my eyes off it.”
“Gimme something else,” Cupie said. He thought the photographer was dry, but it was worth trying.
“That’s all I can remember about them,” Dunn said. “I swear it.”
Cupie tucked the file folder under his arm and fished out the hundred-dollar bill. “Here you go, Doc,” he said. “You earned it.”
On the way home, Cupie considered trying to milk a little more money out of Ed Eagle, but he put the thought out of his mind. Eagle wasn’t his best customer, but he’d paid well and up-front. He stopped at a Federal Express office and overnighted the folder to Eagle.
CHAPTER
43
Ed Eagle opened the Fed Ex package and removed the file. The face of James Grafton was becoming familiar now, and he read quickly through Cupie’s report, written in a surprisingly clear hand.
Eagle came to some conclusions: Grafton hadn’t planned to run—not unless he was forced to. The passport was for just in case; the driver’s license and social security card were for respectability and safety. It wouldn’t have done for Grafton to get stopped by the police for, say, running a stop sign, and not have a license; that way led back to a New York state prison. Something else: Grafton had ordered the documents in the name of Daniel O’Hara, the name he had been using in Los Angeles, so they were to support that identity instead of supplying a new one to run with.
Eagle looked at the second photocopy—the one of the woman’s passport—and his heart stopped. He looked at the photograph more closely, got a magnifying glass from a desk drawer, and examined it minutely. It looked for all the world like Barbara with a blond wig, but Barbara had been in prison in late October, when Grafton and the woman had turned up at the photographer’s. It had to be Julia, but what about the name? Julia had specified the name and had nearly gotten what she asked for, and it was Barbara’s new name. His impulse was to go over to Santacafé, take Barbara by the throat, and shake some answers out of her. But did she have any answers? The phone rang.
“A Mr. Russell Norris for you, Mr. Eagle.”
“Hello, Russell?”
“Hi, Ed. I just got back. I would have called you from the airport, but there was a big rush to make the plane, and it was late when I got home.”
“That’s all right. What did you find out?”
“The Cayman account was in the name of a Frances B. Kennerly.”
“That fits with some other information I have. How much was in the account?”
“Three million six and change, but if I’d been a few minutes later, there would have been nothing.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that while I was sitting in the bank president’s office, a coded instruction came in to wire-transfer virtually the whole amount to a bank in Mexico City.”
“What?”
“Why does that surprise you, Ed? When people steal money they like to cover their tracks.”
“But Frances B. Kennerly, as she wanted to be known, is dead.”
“Then she gave somebody her account code—a friend, maybe.”
“A friend or a relative,” Eagle muttered.
“What was that?”
“Nothing. How was the account opened?”
“Through a proxy corporation set up in the Caymans. I didn’t dig into that, since you only hired me for the day, and anyway, it would have been extremely complicated and expensive. I don’t have quite the same influence with Cayman lawyers as with bankers.”
“What can we do about this account, Russell?”
“Everything we can do is already done,” Norris replied. He explained in detail his conversation with the banker.
Eagle slapped his desk in glee. “That’s wonderful, Russell, wonderful!”
“Well, don’t count on it until it actually happens; there’s still a lot that can go wrong. I wouldn’t tell your client about it yet, either—not until we know for sure.”
“Russell, I can’t thank you enough, but if this comes off, I’ll double your fee.”
“That would be much appreciated, Ed.”
“Were you able to find out anything more about the account holder?”
“No. If she had opened the account personally, they might have had a photograph, but as I said, it was done through a proxy corporation. All the bank had was a signature sample; I’ll fax that along to you, along with the coded wire-transfer order.”
“I’d appreciate that,” Eagle said. “It might help at some later date.” He thanked Norris again, then hung up.
Eagle waited by the fax machine until the signature sample and the wire-transfer order came in, glanced at them, then put them into his briefcase and left the office. “I’ll be back in an hour,” he said. He drove up to Wilderness Gate.
Wolf opened the door before he could ring the bell. “Hello, Ed. You look as though you might have some news.”
“Not as much news as I’d like, Wolf, but let’s sit down for a minute.”
Wolf indicated a chair at the kitchen table. “Would you like some coffee?”
; “No, thanks. I want to show you what I’ve got here.”
“I’m anxious to see it.”
Eagle spread out the two photocopies on the kitchen table. “Is that a photograph of Julia?” he asked.
Wolf looked closely at the picture. “The photocopy’s a little fuzzy, but yes, that seems to be Julia. Who is Frances Kennerly?”
“I’ll get to that in a moment,” Eagle said. “First let me take you through what we know so far.”
“I’m all ears.”
“When Grafton broke out of jail, he headed straight for L.A., and he looked up an old prison pal there. The pal sent him to a man who can arrange for passports and other I.D. Around the end of October, Grafton and a woman turned up at this guy’s place of business, had their pictures taken, and paid for some documents. Grafton picked them up a couple of weeks later. That would have been a week or so before Thanksgiving.”
Wolf interrupted. “Meantime, Julia was rifling my brokerage account and wiring the money to the Cayman account.”
“Exactly, and the Cayman account was in the name of Frances B. Kennerly.”
“Kennerly is the name that Julia’s sister is using, isn’t it?”
“That’s right; Barbara Kennerly. Which is the name Julia wanted on the passport, but Frances B. was as close as the guy could come.”
“So she’s in on this?”
“I don’t see how she could be; she was in prison at the time. I met with her there, remember?”
“That lets her out, I guess.”
“It would seem so, except for one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Somebody, using the account code that Julia had established, sent an order to the Cayman bank to transfer the funds to an account in Mexico City. And that happened yesterday.” He handed Wolf the signature sample and the wire-transfer order.
Wolf seemed too stunned to look at them. “Yesterday? That means that somebody else is in this, doesn’t it?”