The Man Who Risked His Partner

  Pounding hard, I started for the parking lot.

  Long legs help. And I’m fast for my size. In what felt like no more than half an hour, maximum, I reached the fire.

  A couple of valets were there ahead of me. Yelling, they pointed me at their friend.

  The whole Buick was burning now, but the blast had blown him clear. He lay beside the next car. Fire ate at his clothes. He wasn’t moving.

  The heat scorched my face, but I didn’t think about it. He was only three steps away, three steps with flame whipping in all directions. The important thing was not to breathe. I ripped off my coat and ran to him. With the coat, I tried to smother his clothes. Then I picked him up and carried him out of the heat. Even though I knew it was too late.

  His friends took him from me. Someone said the manager had called the fire department, the cops, everyone. With a piece of fire still burning inside me, I walked back to the club.

  Haskell met me on the steps. “I called a cab,” he said. “It should be here in a few minutes.”

  He couldn’t help himself. He was grinning like a little boy after a successful raid on the cookie jar.

  9

  In an ideal world, I would’ve taken his head off for him, just on general principles. But he was still the client. And a second murder in less than three minutes was bound to attract a little attention, even though most of the people waiting in front of the club had gone to get a closer look at the fire. The few lazy, timid, or reasonable individuals who hadn’t moved were staring in that direction. Somehow I kept all that in mind. Instead of hitting him, I knotted my fists in his fine camel’s hair coat and practically carried him around behind one of the columns.

  We weren’t exactly invisible, but the pillar and the fire hid us pretty well. Holding him up on the tips of his toes with his back against the column, I snarled, “You called a cab? That was quick thinking. We can just go home like none of this ever happened. What the hell are you trying to get away with?”

  He wasn’t smiling anymore. He may even have been a little afraid of me. But he didn’t flinch or look away. He watched me like an expert, measuring me. Through the bunched collar of his coat, he breathed, “I don’t want to talk to the police.”

  “What makes you think you can get out of it?” The Buick was starting to burn down, but I wasn’t. “That car’s rented in my name. I’m not exactly hard to recognize, and you’re known here. As soon as the cops trace the car, they’ll start asking questions. They’ll be sitting in your office by noon tomorrow at the latest.”

  Haskell shrugged inside his coat. “Maybe—” The cold turned his breath to puffs of steam. “Maybe by then I can persuade you to cover for me.”

  “Cover for you?” I was so mad I lifted him all the way off the ground. “Cover for you?”

  “You can tell them this el Senor has a grudge against you. We can make up a reason why we’re together. Maybe I hired you to work on a security problem at the bank. Or maybe”—he flicked up a smile, dropped it again—“you just like to play bridge. I don’t want them investigating me.”

  “Fat chance,” I snarled. “You’re breaking the law. If I cover for you, I’ll go to jail. Ginny will go out of business.” I was too mad to think, but I didn’t need astrophysics to figure out some of what was going on. “That car wasn’t blown up by someone who wants to break your legs. It was blown up by someone who wants you dead. I won’t tell any lies for you. You’ve been lying to us from the beginning.”

  “Of course, I’ve been lying to you,” he wheezed. I’d made it a little hard for him to breathe. “Don’t you understand? I had to.”

  I glared at him for a minute. In the lights of the club, he’d started to look slightly purple. Slowly I eased him down onto his feet. But I didn’t stop leaning on him against the pillar. “All right, Mr. Haskell.” Axbrewder dripping sarcasm. “Just for kicks, why don’t you try explaining it to me?”

  He took a couple of deep breaths and straightened his coat. “Do you have any idea how many investigators I called before I called you?” He tried to sound indignant instead of defensive, but his eyes gave him away. They weren’t either one. They were still measuring me. “I tried telling them the truth. They refused to help me. When you and Ms. Fistoulari walked into my office, I knew you were going to walk right out again if I told you what was really going on. So I made something up.”

  “Damn straight,” I growled. “That whole phony story about El Machismo. Including Reston Cole.” Ginny was going to be charmed.

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Take your time,” I went on. “I’m in no hurry. Maybe you’d like to bet on whether your cab will get here before the cops. If the cops get here first, they’ll talk to the valets. They’ll find out about the big crazy guy who pulled the kid out of the fire. May take them all of two minutes to come up here looking for us.”

  I had to admire his nerves. I still couldn’t fluster him. “Axbrewder,” he said evenly, “I told you I play people. It’s the only way to win. And I’m good at it. I saw that you and your partner wouldn’t touch the truth. I had to bet that you aren’t quitters. That you don’t drop things once you get involved in them. I had to hope that you would help me. Then I could tell you the truth.”

  I hated that. It was too much like the way he played bridge. But we could both hear sirens in the distance. And because of the way I held him, I could see something he couldn’t—a Jiffy Cab pulling up to the portico. I had him where I wanted him, and I wasn’t about to let him go.

  “You like to take chances,” I commented sourly. “Don’t stop now. Tell me the truth. See what happens.”

  For a few seconds longer, he studied me and didn’t say anything. Then he sighed. “This is complicated. How much do you know about laundering money?”

  Laundering money. By damn. I gave him a grin full of teeth and malice. “Not a thing.”

  I could tell that he didn’t believe me. But he bowed to the inevitable, as they say.

  “Suppose you have ten thousand dollars,” he began, “but it’s in marked bills. Or it’s counterfeit. Or it came from a source you want to keep secret, like a bribe. What do you do? You can’t spend it. You can’t deposit it in your account and write checks. You can’t afford to admit that you ever saw or touched that money. So you need to launder it. In essence, you need to exchange your money for other money that can’t be traced.

  “There are usually two steps. First you dispose of the physical evidence, the physical money. You deposit it somewhere, change it into numbers on a ledger or in a computer. That helps, but it doesn’t disguise your connection to the money. The second thing you do is confuse the numbers. Typically you put the money into a dummy account of some kind, and then transfer the numbers back to yourself through as many different stages as you can arrange—stock certificates, bearer bonds, selling your own products or belongings to yourself, whatever.

  “There are many different variations, none foolproof. Often the safest thing is to work through foreign banks. But even foreign banks keep records. And they let investigators look at their records occasionally. With enough ingenuity and sweat, any laundry can be traced.”

  I didn’t want him to stop—he still hadn’t gotten to the good part—but I was running out of time. An ambulance and two prowl cars had pulled into the Jousters parking lot. I could see a fire truck coming up the road. And the cab driver was getting restless. Any minute now, he would start calling for Haskell. Or he might get out of his cab and come up the steps to talk to one of the bouncers. Soon I would have to do some gambling of my own.

  But not yet. Haskell’s explanation wasn’t done.

  “What commonly protects most money laundries is the sheer complexity of the records involved. In retrospect, knowing what a given laundry does, the trail looks clear, even if it would be difficult to prove in court. But when you don’t know that the connection exists, and can only imagine the ramifications, you could use a dozen accountants and spend thousands of hours of
computer time without finding it.”

  Past the edge of the column, I saw the cab driver get out of his hack. I was starting to feel the cold. Swearing to myself, I tightened my grip on Haskell. “That’s marvelous,” I growled. “I could listen to you sing and dance all night. Get to the point.”

  With perfect timing, the driver yelled, “Haskell? Mr. Haskell?”

  Haskell jerked his head to the side, tried to respond. I kept him quiet by thumping him against the stone. “The cops will be here in just about a minute,” I whispered down at him. Which was true. Two uniforms had already started across the parking lot in our direction. “Get to the point.”

  I would’ve given my left arm to make him lose his self-possession. But it didn’t happen. He sounded almost avuncular, as if I were a half-witted kid he couldn’t help being fond of anyway, as he said, “I know how el Senor launders some of his money.”

  Well, I expected something like that. I may be a moth-eaten old drunk with no license and less good sense, but I can smell something rotten when you stuff. my head in a sack of dead fish. Nevertheless it rocked me back on my heels. Now I had the whole picture, I knew why Smithsonian had given us a recommendation and then laughed about it. No wonder no other investigator wanted this case. Haskell couldn’t be protected. Not without going right to the source and putting el Senor himself out of business.

  As Ginny kept telling me, she and I weren’t equipped for the job.

  And yet I only needed about two seconds to reach a decision.

  I had an alternative. I could turn Haskell over to the cops.

  I shifted my grip from his coat to his arm. “Come on,” I muttered. “We don’t want to keep your cab waiting.”

  Haskell actually laughed. Excitement danced in his eyes again. But he was pretty smart—for a lunatic, anyway. He didn’t say, I knew you wouldn’t let me down. If he had, I probably would’ve broken his arm.

  Two cops came toward the club. They weren’t more than twenty yards away. By rights they should’ve stopped us. They don’t like it when people leave the scene of a crime. But they were human—and back in the parking lot the fire truck started to hose down what was left of the Buick. They turned to watch.

  Haskell told the driver who he was, and we got into the back of the cab. He mentioned an address I didn’t quite catch—I only heard it well enough to know that it wasn’t Cactus Blossom Court. But I let that pass for the time being. Instead of asking questions, I held my breath until we were out of the cops’ range.

  After that I went back to work. I wasn’t getting noticeably more patient with age. And every time I closed my eyes, I saw the Buick go up in flames again. I saw that poor kid lying beside the next car, his clothes on fire and him not moving at all. The cab driver could probably hear everything we said, but at the moment I didn’t care.

  “Dozens of accountants and thousands of hours of computer time”—not making any effort to sound calm—“and you just happen to know how el Senor launders his money. What do you do in your spare time, walk on water?”

  Now that he thought he was safe, Haskell seemed to twinkle like an elf. “It was an accident. Somebody told me about El Machismo. It was Reston Cole, actually. He didn’t say he’d ever been there. But we were having a drink, and he happened to mention that he’d heard there was an illegal gambling club in town. A few days later, I stumbled across the name again. El Machismo uses the Old Town branch of my bank.”

  He mused for a minute, then said slowly, “Axbrewder, being an accountant can be painfully boring. Every once in a while, I get so desperate for some excitement that I play little games with it.” He paused briefly. “I don’t want to go back to being as dead as I was a few years ago.” The way he said it made it sound genuine. “When I saw that El Machismo had an account with my bank, I decided to play investigator.

  “That’s how I learned about laundering money.” He grinned. “On-the-job training. My research took several months. But when I saw where the profits from that account went, I knew I’d found something.

  “I learned that El Machismo is a wholly owned subsidiary of a corporation that doesn’t exist. The profits go to an investment portfolio managed by our trust department. Those returns are distributed to the four people who hold all the stock in the nonexistent corporation. They also don’t exist. Nevertheless two of them invest heavily in a mortgage exchange. One employs a large brokerage firm here. One backs a small private lending company. And all four of those investments feed back into another portfolio managed by our trust department.”

  He glanced at me. Then he said, “The owner of that account does exist. It’s el Senor.”

  I couldn’t see him very well in the back seat of the cab, but he looked almighty proud of himself.

  The hack had wandered into a part of the Heights I wasn’t familiar with. We definitely weren’t on our way back to Haskell’s house. The reasonable part of my mind wondered what new game he was playing. However, the reasonable part of my mind was pretty far away at the moment. The rest of me seethed.

  Old cauldron-of-emotions Axbrewder. Being sober didn’t make me calm, just bitter. I would’ve given a couple of fingers and any number of toes for the ability to muster the kind of information Haskell was talking about. Even Ginny would’ve gone way out on a limb for it. For the chance to drive at least one nail into el Senor’s coffin.

  But while the stars still burned and the planet still rolled, we would never, ever have told him what we were doing.

  “Clever you,” I rasped at Haskell. “For a smart man, you’ve got more stupid in you than any other three people I know.” Only the cab driver’s presence restrained me from yelling at him. “What’s the matter with you? You’ve got some kind of death wish?”

  At least he had the decency to look insulted. “What are you talking about?”

  “You found out how he launders his money,” I snapped. “Then what did you do? Go to the cops? The DA? The FBI? Not you. Not Reg Haskell, boy investigator.” I could see the whole thing. “What blind insanity made you think trying to blackmail el Senor was a good idea?”

  I was so sure I was right that I would’ve been surprised if he’d tried to deny it. But he didn’t. He only frowned at me because he didn’t like my attitude.

  “Two reasons.” His voice held a hint of iron, something he usually kept hidden. “First, I can’t prove any of it. I can’t prove there’s anything illegal about El Machismo’s money. And I certainly can’t prove that those four people really don’t exist.

  “Second—” He shrugged. In the faint glow of the dash lights, his face looked hard and maybe even a little bit fanatical. “I needed the money.”

  “He needed the money,” I explained to the window beside me. “I love it.” We were riding into an area of apartment complexes and condos, some of which looked inexpensive. Apparently not everyone needed money badly enough to be as well off as Haskell. “It’s going to look great on my tombstone.”

  Abruptly Haskell told the driver to stop. We pulled over to the curb in front of a place called the Territorial Apartments. Haskell got out and nearly slammed the door on me.

  I told the driver to wait and went after my client.

  The cold seemed to soak into my clothes like water. Without a coat, my jacket wasn’t much protection. “So what’re we doing here?”

  He stood in the exterior lights of an ersatz chalet-style structure, probably affordable, and glared up at me. If nothing else, he was letting me see the side of him that his wife feared. “What do you care?” he snapped. “A friend of mine lives here. I’ll be safe for the night.”

  I made a real effort to keep myself from boiling over. “Listen to me, Haskell. It’s just luck you and I aren’t dead already. El Senor won’t let any of us get away with this. He can’t afford to. He’ll send an army after you if he has to. He’ll blow up your house, murder your wife, dance on your grave. Your only chance is to go to the police.” They wouldn’t exactly be amused when they heard his story—but t
hey’d want his information. “They might be able to protect you.”

  He didn’t flinch or hesitate. He didn’t even blink. “It’s my life,” he said. “I’ll take my chances. Just tell me whether you’re in or out. Fish or cut bait, Axbrewder.”

  I stared at him. For a minute there, I almost told him to blow the whole thing out his ass. Would’ve given me no end of satisfaction. But the plain fact was that as opportunities went he was too good to miss. Ginny might hate me for it, but I did it anyway.

  “Since you ask so nicely,” I retorted, “I’ll fish. Ginny and I don’t drop clients when things get tough.” Then I stepped closer to him and pointed a finger at the front of his coat, just to remind him that I could throw him across the street if I wanted to. “But we don’t like being lied to. If you aren’t telling the truth this time, I’ll take you apart piece by piece until I find it.”

  “Fine.” Unflappable as all hell. You’d think he ate being threatened with bodily harm for breakfast. “I have to be at work by eight thirty. Pick me up here at eight fifteen.”

  Just like that, he turned and walked away. The Territorial Apartments didn’t have a security gate. He strode through the entryway out of sight like he’d been here a lot and knew exactly what he was doing.

  For a while I stood where I was, puffing vapor in the cold and thinking, He needed the money. The same man who just made four thousand dollars playing bridge.

  10

  Maybe I was losing my mind. Maybe the car that got blown up wasn’t really my rented Buick. The night was too cold to hold all that fire. Maybe Haskell actually did know what he was doing. Maybe I hadn’t just agreed to go on protecting a man who seemed determined to get himself killed.

  And maybe Ginny would have a fit when she heard about it.

  But I couldn’t just stand there and let my blood freeze. I still had to function. I still had to do what I could. Feeling dissociated and crazy, I went back to the cab, got in, and told the driver to find a phone booth.