by Joe Ide
“He wasn’t involved in drugs. I’d know.”
“Forgive me, I did not mean to offend.”
“You can’t offend me.”
That smile again. “You are bright and tenacious, Isaiah. I think you will do well in the world assuming your rudeness is held in check. But I’m afraid your argument rests on the assumption that your brother was unaware the contraband was in the backpack. Perhaps he placed it there himself for reasons he chose not to confide.”
“If Marcus knew that stuff was in his backpack he wouldn’t have left it on a bench while we were playing basketball.”
“If I may ask,” Seb said, “where was your brother the day before he allegedly worked for me?”
“The day before?”
“Yes. According to you, he was unaware that the money and heroin were in the backpack, and if that is true, then the items might well have been placed there the day before your basketball game or two days before or a week before. How is one to know?”
Isaiah hesitated. This was new to him; a mind as agile as his own.
Seb went on. “Surely, others have come in contact with the backpack, perhaps while it was left on the bench while you and your brother were playing basketball. No, I’m sorry, Isaiah, but I’m afraid your logic leaves much to be desired.” A note of amused contempt had crept into his voice. “Now, I have enjoyed our little discussion, but I’m afraid I have other matters I must attend to. Please stop by anytime. Perhaps we can talk about subjects more pleasant and productive.”
Isaiah drove home, thinking about what happened in the bar. What Seb and Laquez were talking about was a money-laundering technique called smurfing. Cash was taken to the bank and loaded onto debit cards, the amounts always under ten thousand dollars. More than that and the IRS would get involved. The card money was now effectively clean, no paper trail, and you could use the cards to go shopping, pay a debt, or withdraw the money in cash, Seb taking his fee off the top. But did the money-laundering have anything to do with Marcus’s murder? Too soon to say. But Seb was hiding something. He said he had gout but that didn’t prevent him from going after Laquez, and as soon as he saw Isaiah he leaned more heavily on his cane and his limp got worse. Why pretend you were more handicapped than you actually were? Ask him a direct question and he rambled on about aging and Robert Frost, trying to get your eye off the ball. Those leisurely sips of tea, squeezing the lemon, the asides to Gahigi about cigarettes were delaying tactics; give him time to think, come up with his next move.
Seb also claimed his memory was bad but he quoted a poem from his college days, knew the dollar amounts for the seven debit cards and the face of the Tutsi man who had cut his leg off when he was a kid, bleeding profusely and screaming in pain. No, Seb had a very good memory. Isaiah resisted the urge to equate deception with guilt. The genocide in Rwanda would make anyone wary of revealing themselves. And Seb had a point. It was possible for someone else to have put the contraband into Marcus’s backpack, and Seb had no apparent motive to kill him.
Isaiah got online and ran a background check on Seb. Eight years ago, he was living in a seedy building on Seminole. He was there for three years and moved to a rented condo in El Segundo. That part of his story held together. Neither was the kind of place you’d remodel at your own expense.
Seb’s office was a small storefront wedged in between a shoe repair shop and a dry cleaner’s. There was a CLOSED sign in the window, the sill a graveyard for flies and moths, the blinds clamped shut. Dust had accumulated on the top edges of the inset door panels and on the doorknob. If Seb went in and out it wasn’t through this door.
Isaiah went around to the back. The doorknob was dust-free, the keyhole worn from use. The dead bolt was an ordinary Schlage. Not a lot of security for a money launderer. Isaiah bought a blank at the locksmith’s, went home, and made a bump key. That night he came back and let himself in.
The smell of Lysol permeated the place. A calculator was set on a cheap fiberboard desk along with a gooseneck lamp, a container of hand sanitizer and a couple of unused gold foil ashtrays. There was nothing in the desk drawers, not even dust or cobwebs. A brown vinyl couch was polished to a high shine, no footprints on the gray linoleum floor. A floor-to-ceiling bookshelf was set against one wall, dog-eared tax code manuals on the shelves. The wastebasket was empty and clean. The file cabinet was empty too. Nothing on the walls but a Tusker calendar from 2006. A cupboard held Styrofoam cups, tea bags, plastic spoons, spare toilet paper, and an electric kettle. The bathroom was spotless, a bar of soap and a roll of paper towels on the sink. Isaiah checked every inch of the place and concluded that no remodeling work had been done before or since eight years ago. Marcus hadn’t worked here.
Isaiah wondered why Seb kept an office with no office supplies, landline, or internet connection. Meetings, he decided. Seb didn’t want them at his condo, his hangout, or anyplace he couldn’t control.
The next night, Isaiah came back and set up a spy cam. It was motion-activated and recorded sound as well as color video. He hid it above the line of sight in a narrow space between two tax manuals. The cam’s receiver was the size of a flip phone. Isaiah hid it on the same shelf. The odds the camera would capture something important were low, like photographing a snow leopard, but you couldn’t follow Seb around all day and night. Like with most things, you’d need a little luck.
Chapter Five
Red Poles
Ken Van talked on the phone with Liko about the three new arrivals, two from Fujian, one from Guangdong. The Guangdong girl was sick and had to be tended to. A doctor with a suspended license was on the payroll, but the girls only trusted Chinese medicine. He’d have to bring in an herbalist and the massage parlor would stink of wolfberry and dang gui for a week.
He thought about Janine and wondered why she turned out the way she did. He’d given her every advantage. Private school, music school, piano lessons, her own horse, trips to Europe and Asia. It was depressing. All that time and money had no effect. He had no effect. Love a kid to death, and all she wants to do is throw her life away. He remembered that terrible night when she told him she wanted to be a DJ.
They were in his office. She’d come to borrow money, saying she needed to invest in DJ equipment.
“You want to be a DJ? Like on the radio?” he said, knowing that wasn’t what she meant.
“No, not that kind of DJ,” Janine said. “It’s more like—remember Kerri’s wedding, there was a guy there playing records?”
“That’s what you want to do?”
“No, it’s on a much bigger scale, Pop. DJing is really huge now. Have you heard of Tiësto?” She kept talking before he could give her a look. “He’s a really famous DJ. I mean he fills up whole fucking—sorry, whole arenas. Thousands of people come to see him, and you know how much he makes? Two hundred and fifty grand a set, that’s over sixty thousand dollars an hour, Pop!”
Ken had his elbows on the desk, rubbing his temples with both hands. A migraine was coming on. You could almost see it, like you were the head pin and the bowling ball was coming straight down the lane. So much bullshit to deal with, so much self-loathing, so much impatience to get away from Vegas and now this. “A fantasy, Janine,” he said. “The whole idea is ridiculous.”
“No it’s not, Pop. It’s totally legit. Hip-hop is like a whole culture.”
“Wearing your cap backwards, and listening to rap music is not a culture, Janine. Once and for all, you’re not doing this.”
She looked at him like she was stopping herself from saying Fuck you. “Try to understand, okay?” she said. “I have to. It’s the only thing I’m good at—it’s my passion.”
“So what?” Ken said. “Who gets to live their passion? You need a real career, Janine. Something to be proud of, not this silliness.”
“You mean like Sarita?”
“Yes, like Sarita.” Ken felt the migraine taking over. His hands and feet were cold, a pounding in his left temple was getting louder. “There are
things I could have done—accomplished, but there were practical considerations.”
“I don’t get it,” she said. “Your dreams get smashed so mine have to get smashed too?”
“Janine, you’re not going to do this,” he said.
“Dad, I’m going to be a DJ,” she said, getting flip. “You might as well get used to it.”
Ken stood up and felt his body swell. He felt like a wolf, defending the last shreds of flesh on a rotting carcass. “I paid for the best private schools,” he said. “I paid for tennis lessons and art lessons and piano lessons. You were playing Beethoven when you were eleven years old. We went to concerts and museums. I took you to London and Paris and all over the world. You’ve seen the Forbidden Palace and the Ganges and the goddamn pyramids and do you want to know why?”
“So I could be more like my sister?”
“Do you want to know why?” he shouted. He was shaking, the pounding bashing through his eardrums.
“Sure,” Janine said. She looked frightened and thrilled, her aloof, self-contained father going ballistic.
“So you’ll never have to face the fact that you’ve wasted your life and there’s nothing you can do about it. One day you’ll wake up and realize you’re fifty-six years old and all you’ve done is…nothing.”
“What are you talking about, Pop? You’re doing really great.”
“Be silent, Janine. For once in your life be silent!” Ken screamed. He came toward her, his trigger finger pointed right between her eyes. He wanted to hit her, beat her, exorcise his helplessness. “You will not do this, do you understand? You will not throw your life away! You will stop your gambling and you will forget this DJ nonsense as of now, this minute!”
“I can’t, Pop,” she said.
“YOU CAN AND YOU WILL! I’M YOUR FATHER AND YOU WILL DO AS I SAY OR GET OUT OF THIS HOUSE!”
Ten minutes later, she had a suitcase and a duffel bag packed, and he heard her get in her car and drive away.
Ken called the herbalist to attend to the sick girl from Guangdong. Then he went to the wet bar and poured himself a baijiu, a habit he’d picked up playing fan-tan and mah jong in one of Tommy Lau’s gambling dens. The drink was made from sorghum fermented in mud pits and aged in earthenware jugs for a year or two or thirty. People thought it was wine, like sake, but it was fifty to sixty percent alcohol, smelled like a hamper on laundry day, and would knock you on your behind if you weren’t used to it.
Ken had been a heavy gambler when he was younger. He wondered if it was genetic, Janine’s habit driven by some errant chromosome. She’d borrowed a small fortune from him, telling him lie after lie. Tuition was going up, her car broke down, her bag got stolen, her friend was in trouble, she needed a new computer and a bunch of other ones he couldn’t remember. If anybody else had even thought about scamming him he’d have known immediately, but not his daughters. They had him wrapped around their fingers, wrists, arms.
Ken never thought he could love Sarita, a product of an affair with a hooker named Angela who was half black and half Hispanic. It went on for a year until he got tired of her wanting things and the smell of marijuana in the house. He gave her two thousand dollars and told her it was over. A few weeks later she showed up at the house, pregnant. She told him how she’d set him up and stopped taking her birth control pills and showed him the test and said she’d soak him for child support, reminding him that it would go on until the kid was eighteen years old. Wouldn’t it be better to make a onetime payment now?
Ken said no, leaving the twenty-two-year-old airhead who liked to party, get high, wear expensive clothes, and swim naked with her friends in Lake Powell, with the prospect of getting an abortion or being a mom. Even if she carried the pregnancy to term and wanted child support she’d still be stuck with the baby. No, she’d get an abortion, he was sure of it.
Ten months went by and one Sunday morning Ken came home from his golf game and the housekeeper showed him a cardboard box. A baby was nestled inside, wrapped in a towel. She told him somebody had rung the bell and left it on the front porch. There was a note that said Leaving Vegas. By the way, my real name isn’t Angela. The baby’s name is Sarita. Fuck you. But Angela or whatever her name was must have had a branch of superior DNA growing on her family tree because Sarita was a dream child. Smart, motivated, loving. Ken was glad when she went away to college. It was getting harder and harder to shield her from the business. If Sarita found out it would crush her, and he’d hate himself more than he already did.
Ken’s phone buzzed. An email alert. Tommy Lau. There was no one else on their private network. What’s the greedy old bastard want now? If Tommy owned every dollar in the world, he’d send Ken to Mars to steal some from the Martians. Ken opened up his laptop and typed his username and twelve-digit password. Everything going in or out was encrypted with 256-bit SSL software, the same kind the banks used. In the unlikely event he was hacked, the hacker couldn’t decrypt the data unless he had a couple of supercomputers and a century or two to spend. The password was the only way to read the files.
Tommy’s message said he was coming to Vegas and to pick him up at McCarran at 8:15, an hour from now. That was unusual. Why was he coming on such short notice? Why was he coming here at all? What couldn’t be said in an encrypted phone call or email? Ken poured himself another shot of baijiu. Did Tommy know he was quitting? That he’d finally had enough and was walking away, the consequences be damned? Whatever the case, Tommy wasn’t coming to Vegas because he was happy. He only came to town when there was trouble.
Benny would no doubt be gambling so Janine took Isaiah and Dodson to his favorite casinos. The Palm for dollar slots. The Four Queens for the five-dollar minimum Let It Ride, the Mirage for single-zero roulette, the Casino Royale for the hundred-times odds at the crap table.
“You bet a dollar, you win a hundred?” Dodson said.
“No. Tourists make that mistake all the time,” Janine said. “A hundred times odds means that after the rollout, you can put up a hundred times whatever you put on the pass line. Bet on the pass line by itself and the house has about a percent and a half edge. On an odds bet, the edge is about two tenths of a percent.”
“Damn, you know your shit, girl.”
“Yeah, I guess. But if the dice are cold, the dice are cold.”
Isaiah interrupted. “Did you make me a copy of the records?”
“Yeah,” Janine said. “I emailed them to you.”
“Delete your copy. We don’t want anybody finding them on your computer.”
As they drove, Isaiah thought about the girls in the photo galleries. They looked like college students or factory workers or food sellers at an outdoor market or straight off the rice farm. Most of the photos were bleak as mug shots, taken against a wall with cracks in the plaster. Others were probably shot for a marriage site, the girls hoping a nice man would take them away to anyplace but here. Some posed like girlie photos from the fifties; hair lacquered with hair spray, too much makeup and a vamped-up look that was supposed to be seductive. You could almost hear them batting their eyelashes. Others smiled brightly with a fish market or a canal in the background. One girl was standing demurely in a field of flowers wearing a traditional embroidered Chinese dress. Isaiah imagined the kind of men who would be attracted to them; resentful, unable to control their wives or girlfriends, telling themselves American women were spoiled and too demanding and had abandoned traditional values; fantasizing about a submissive Asian wife who would see them as a savior and be grateful and let herself be bossed around and not talk back and fuck whenever they wanted. Isaiah’s throat tightened. These were ordinary girls, naïve and hopeful, trapped in poverty or abuse and wishing for a decent life. Not a luxurious life or even a happy one. Just decent. Their only mistake was trusting someone and now they were locked in a dirty windowless room reeking of semen, their pies in the sky turned to horror and degradation.
“Keep calling him, Janine,” Isaiah said, “let him hear your
voice.”
“Tell him how worried you are,” Dodson said. “Put some tears in your voice. The boy’ll break down sooner or later.”
Janine had already left a dozen plaintive messages, telling Benny she was sick with worry and begging him to call. “I already called all his friends,” she said. “No one’s heard from him.”
They stopped for coffee and looked at Benny’s Facebook page. No recent posts; lots of photos of his motocross races and shots of Janine in a bikini, a micro-mini, or short-shorts, or in some other way semi-naked.
“I look good, huh?” she said.
“Yes, you do,” Dodson said.
There were other pictures of Janine and Benny in casinos, standing next to a slot machine where they’d won a jackpot or at a craps table raking in a big stack of chips.
“Are any of these places unfamiliar to you?” Isaiah said.
“No, I know them all,” Janine said.
“Who’s his best friend?” Dodson said.
“Me.”
“Would he hide out with his motocross buddies?” Isaiah said.
“No, they don’t gamble.”
“What about his parents?” Dodson said.
“They live in Pennsylvania.”
“How is Benny getting around?”
“His bike,” Janine said.
“Well, it’s gonna be harder for us or anybody else to catch up with him.”
Dodson was trying to take over the case. They looked at each other, Isaiah incredulous, Dodson with an expression that said It’s game on, son.