Movie Palace Cozy Mystery Boxed Set: Books 1-3

by Margaret Dumas

Who indeed?

  Chapter 24

  “We need to talk.”

  The smile that Monica had initially greeted me with vanished as she registered my tone of voice. It was replaced with a look I now recognized.

  Fear.

  I’d gone straight to the Potent Flower from the theater. Well, not straight there. I’d taken the back stairs and slipped out the basement door into the alley, checking to make sure cousin Gabriela wasn’t parked out back.

  If there even was a cousin Gabriela.

  I went up a few blocks before cutting over toward Divisadero, stopping in doorways to check behind myself, no doubt looking like every guilty hoodlum in every B movie Peter Lorre ever made, trying to be sure I wasn’t followed.

  Now, from behind the counter of her busy shop, Monica nodded. Without a word, she led me through to the lounge where I’d had my mini breakdown the day before. There were a handful of people in the lounge, and Monica walked through the space without slowing. She used a touchscreen to unlock a door at the far end of the room. She must have understood we’d need privacy for this conversation.

  We entered a short hallway with three doors, each of which had a touchscreen lock. She punched in a code at the farthest door to unlock a windowless room that was painted in warm saffron and orange tones and furnished simply with a desk and two guest chairs. Beyond the desk area, a golden Buddha head was mounted on the wall, gazing serenely at a colorful pile of floor pillows. The room seemed equal parts office and meditation nook. Under other circumstances I would have found it soothing. But under other circumstances I wouldn’t have been asking Monica about money laundering and murder.

  “What can I do for you, Nora?” Monica asked when the door closed behind us. She lifted her chin with something like defiance but gripped the back of a chair with white knuckles.

  “You can tell me how long Kate had been laundering money for you.”

  I hadn’t been sure of it, not completely, until I saw Monica react. She swallowed, the attempt at defiance leaving her body as she slumped in resignation, or maybe in relief. She sat, shakily, on one of the guest chairs.

  “I need you to tell me everything,” I said, sitting opposite. “When did it start? How exactly did it work?”

  She nodded, looking blankly into space, as if gathering her thoughts. When she eventually looked at me again I got the sense that she was glad, in some part, to finally be telling someone.

  “It just…happened,” she said. “You know that banks won’t accept money from cannabis businesses, right?”

  “I know.” Because Hector had explained it to me. Even though running a licensed pot shop was legal in California, selling cannabis was still illegal under federal law, so the federally-regulated banks couldn’t take their deposits.

  She nodded. “I was always moaning about how much trouble it was to have to deal with everything in cash. You have no idea. I knew other people were making regular trips to casinos or all kinds of crazy things, doing whatever they could to launder their profits, but that just seemed so underhanded, behaving like we were criminals.” The look she gave me begged for understanding. “But I was in the same bind as everyone else. I had to do something.”

  Something to get her money clean. Something at the Palace. “Who’s idea was it?” I asked.

  Monica looked away. “I don’t even remember. Kate and I talked about it. We were always wondering about what would make a good front. A business that takes in most of their earnings in cash, so you could just pad their books with extra income. Nice legal income that you could deposit. I was thinking of buying a yogurt shop, just to funnel the money through it. And there Kate was, with the theater barely scraping by…”

  “But for it to work you had to own at least a piece of the Palace,” I reasoned. “How did you convince one of the co-owners to sell?”

  “I didn’t have to,” she said. “One of the partners told Kate he was thinking of selling. He thought she might want to buy in. He figured she did all the work, so she should have some equity. Which was true.”

  “But you bought it instead.”

  “It just seemed so perfect,” she said. “Like it was meant to be. The whole thing just sort of…blossomed.”

  She made it sound so natural. Organic. But two people were dead.

  “I want to make one thing clear,” Monica said. “I am scrupulously honest about my bookkeeping for this shop. I have never fudged one dime about my reported sales or expenditures and I’m in total compliance with every single state regulation. You would not believe the kind of scrutiny a cannabis business gets and I’ve never so much as bent one single rule.” She’d straightened her spine as she told me this, but having made her point, she sort of wilted. “It’s just the damn banks that are the problem.”

  I nodded. “So you bought into the Palace and Kate started over-reporting ticket sales.”

  “And concessions,” Monica nodded. “How she expected anyone to believe there was that much popcorn in the world…” A smile flickered briefly before fading.

  “What about the equipment?” I asked.

  “That came later,” Monica said. “There was so much money. She couldn’t realistically account for it all in sales, so she’d buy equipment with cash and then sell it to other theaters as second-hand, recording the income. That worked with less expensive things, but then she spent a fortune on a fancy projector, and nobody she knew could buy something that expensive.”

  “So it’s still sitting on a shelf in the projection booth,” I said. At least that was one mystery solved.

  “Nora, I’m so sorry.” Monica reached for my hand and held it with both of hers. “After Kate died I didn’t want the theater to get in any legal trouble. I thought, if I just stopped, and left things alone, maybe nobody would ever have to know.”

  “And Kate handled the Palace finances on her own,” I worked it out. “So when she sent the owners their quarterly checks, yours was just bigger than the rest.”

  “And I could finally deposit it in a bank,” Monica affirmed.

  “Did she keep two sets of books?” I asked. “And use some of your money to make it look like the theater was more profitable that it was?”

  She nodded, biting her lip. “She kept twenty percent of the cash that went through the theater.”

  Albert had told me on my first day that Kate had kept the Palace solvent “by hook or by crook.” He didn’t know how right he was. Unless…“Did anybody else at the theater know about it?”

  She shook her head. “No. Kate used her share to keep the lights on and the salaries paid, but she didn’t tell anyone. She didn’t want anyone else to be compromised, legally, if it ever came out.”

  Right. But Robbie was feeling more than a little compromised at the moment.

  “Well, somebody knew.” I looked at her closely. “Raul Acosta knew.”

  I said this as a fact, but I was really just trying to see if my guess was right—Raul Acosta had found out what Kate was doing for Monica and he wanted in on the scheme.

  Monica nodded, biting her bottom lip. “And now he’s dead, and Kate’s dead, and it’s all my fault.”

  No, it wasn’t. At least not all of it. “Monica,” I said. “I have to tell you something. Raul Acosta is part of a Columbian crime family. He must have—”

  She straightened, blinking and shaking her head as she wiped her eyes. “Oh, no, I mean, yes, he used to be, but he wasn’t anymore.”

  Now I shook my head. “He might have told you he was going legitimate, just like his brother told me, but—”

  “But he was!” Monica protested. “He’d been working with a whole collective of cannabis business owners. He had a team of lawyers and lobbyists working in Sacramento.”

  “I’m sure he said—” I started patiently.

  “No, really,” she insisted. “He was trying to get the state to appro
ve a bank for us,” she said, “That wasn’t just some story, it was real. I went to one of the hearings at the state legislature.”

  I sat back, stunned. If what she was saying was true, everything that had made sense earlier was suddenly thrown into confusion again. Had Hector been telling me the truth after all? That thought caused a warm rush of emotions that I didn’t even attempt to identify, but the very appeal of it made me reject it.

  “That can’t be,” I told Monica. “Raul was trying to intimidate Kate into laundering the Acosta family money—”

  “No,” she insisted. “He was trying to help her straighten out the books so nobody would ever know what she’d been doing.”

  “Well, then…” My mind seemed to be incapable of sifting through the changing facts one more time. “How…?” I shook my head. “Who…?” Yes, that was the question: Who?

  “Then who killed Kate and Raul?” I asked Monica.

  This caused her eyes to fill again. “I never should have let her keep the money,” she said. “I knew it was dangerous, but she said she had it all figured out.”

  “What money? You mean her twenty percent?”

  “No, the rest of it.”

  “What rest of it? There was more?”

  “There was so much!” Monica wailed. “All of the cash that had piled up before we started using the Palace for the day-to-day proceeds. By the time we started that I already had months of cash that needed to be cleaned. Way too much to be accounted for by ticket sales or equipment deals. She couldn’t move that until the remodel.”

  “What remodel?”

  Monica put her hands up, as if physically warding off my questions.

  I gave her a moment, telling myself that I would figure this out. When I spoke again it was with a massive attempt at composure. “Tell me about the remodel.”

  She nodded and gave me a relatively steady look. “Kate was going to remodel the theater.”

  “I know,” I said. I’d seen the plans. Now I knew how she planned to pay for it. But I still didn’t get how that would benefit Monica.

  “She was going to hire painters and plumbers and electricians and designers and dozens and dozens of workers to do it.”

  “Sure.” That seemed obvious.

  “And most of them would do the work,” Monica explained. “But some of them wouldn’t. Because some of them wouldn’t actually be real.” She blinked, looking at me through wet lashes. “Some of them would just exist on paper, working for MC Design, which is a company that I’m in the process of incorporating.”

  I stared at her.

  “Instead of a yogurt shop,” she said.

  My jaw dropped.

  “So let me get this straight,” I felt like it was about the hundredth time that day that I thought I understood. “Kate was going to get the work done using your pile of cash to pay both the real contractors and your nonexistent ones.”

  Monica nodded hesitantly. “That was the plan. We figured there would be so many bills nobody would ever look at who actually did what. We’d be able to move the rest of the money that way. MC Design would invoice, the Palace would pay, nobody would ask where the Palace got the money to pay, and all of the stored-up cash from the Potent Flower would turn into perfectly legal profits for MC Design.”

  I thought it through. It made sense. It was, in fact, kind of brilliant. But it had to be illegal, right?

  “Hang on,” I said, trying to put the rest of it together. “The remodel hadn’t started yet. So where’s your great big pile of cash?”

  Monica wiped her nose and nodded. “Oh, Nora. Don’t you see? That’s what got Kate killed.”

  Chapter 25

  I stared at Monica. “How much money are we talking about?”

  “Well…” she said. “It’s a little hard to say, but I think, probably, what was left was…” She hesitated, her voice growing smaller. “Somewhere around seven million dollars.”

  That number took a moment to register. Seven million dollars. There was seven million dollars hidden somewhere in the Palace. Seven million dollars that had gotten Kate and Raul killed.

  “Where—” My voice squeaked, so I cleared it and tried again. “Where did she hide it?”

  Monica shook her head. “I don’t know, but—”

  “You don’t know?” I demanded. “It was your money. How—”

  “It doesn’t matter!” Monica cut me off. “Don’t you see? It doesn’t matter where Kate hid it, or what she bought, because somebody must have found out! Somebody must have found out and—” She stopped abruptly, shuddering. “Whoever killed Kate and Raul has it now. That’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  I couldn’t sit a minute longer. I got up and started pacing as well as I could, given the size of the room. I thought Monica was probably right, up to a point. But I didn’t think the killer had gotten what he’d come for. Because after everything I’d learned that day I had two candidates for the killer: Todd Randall and Hector Acosta. And both of them were still hanging around the theater. Todd had been looking for something in Kate’s office, and he wouldn’t have been looking if he’d already found it. And just because Raul was going straight didn’t necessarily mean Hector was. I had only Hector’s word that he’d been keeping the theater under observation to find his brother’s killer. Maybe he was his brother’s killer. Maybe he, too, was after the money.

  I stopped. Something Monica said had just caught up with me. “What did you mean when you said, ‘what she bought?’”

  Monica blinked. “What?”

  “Just now, you said Kate hid the money or ‘what she bought.’ What does that mean?”

  She blew out a breath. “Nora, do you have any idea how much space seven million dollars in cash would take up?”

  I could honestly say I didn’t.

  “Think about a bank vault,” she said. “What do you picture? Nice neat stacks of cash? Tidy bundles of hundred-dollar bills? That would be so easy. A ten-thousand-dollar bundle of crisp new hundreds isn’t much bigger than your cell phone. But I don’t take in crisp new hundreds. I mostly take in crumpled tens and twenties, small bills and lots of them. With the kind of bills I take in, seven million dollars, however neatly you bundled it, would be about the size of that desk.”

  I looked at the desk. It wasn’t small.

  “Wait. Are you saying there’s a safe big enough to hold that hidden somewhere in the Palace?” I asked.

  “No. I’m saying that Kate bought something. Something that was much easier to hide.”

  Oh. Of course. I was back to the MacGuffin.

  Monica leaned forward in her chair. “We knew it wasn’t safe or practical to keep that much cash around, so we had to do something with the money until I got the new company together, which was taking a lot longer than either of us thought it would. But Kate figured out something she could buy. She said it was so simple she could have kicked herself for not seeing it earlier. What she bought was easier to store than cash, and she could hide it in plain sight, no gigantic safe required. She said when the time came to sell it we might even make a profit.”

  Finally. I was just about ready to jump out of my skin. “What was it?”

  “I…” Monica looked to the serene Buddha head on the wall behind where I stood. “I don’t know.”

  “What?” I yelled. “How is that possible?”

  She shrugged, a bit of her earlier defiance returning. “She said it was safer that way. If I knew what it was, or where it was, I’d look at it differently. I’d draw attention to it every time I walked past, whether I meant to or not. So I just…left it to her.”

  I stared at her. “Seriously?”

  Monica lifted her chin again. “She was my best friend.”

  And now she was dead.

  What could you buy for seven million dollars in cash, hide in plain sight, and be abl
e to easily sell when the time came? That was the question I asked myself as I walked around the city after leaving Monica.

  I had to think, and I’ve always been better at thinking while moving. When I was a TV writer I’d always paced the writers’ room. Robbie had once told me that just watching me work had been exhausting. And when I wrote now it was usually in furious bursts after coming in from a long walk, where I’d already figured out what I wanted to say. So now, with a thousand questions sloshing around in my mind, I walked. And I thought. And I sent the occasional text.

  To Hector:

  Change of plans. Don’t bring Gabriela over. I’ve figured out something else. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.

  What I’d figured out was that he might have killed Kate and his brother. He replied immediately but I didn’t look at it. I’d gotten good at ignoring texts lately, what with all the practice I’d had with my husband and the lawyers. I kept walking.

  The October days were short, and it was getting dark and chilly. I had a brief moment of missing Hector’s warm leather jacket, which I’d left in the office, then I stepped into the next open clothing shop I saw and bought the thickest warmest sweater they had. I didn’t need Hector.

  Hector. Suppose he was still the head of a crime family. What if he’d tolerated his brother trying to go straight, but when Raul had mentioned the lengths his future customers went to in order to process their earnings, Hector had gotten an idea. What if he’d wanted in on the money laundering scheme at the Palace? Could he have gone to the theater that night? Maybe lied to Raul, telling him that he’d decided to go straight too? That he wanted to meet Kate? And then what? Had there been a fight? Maybe Raul had resisted, maybe Kate had tried to run? Maybe, maybe, maybe.

  I sent a text to Detective Jackson:

  Have you verified Hector Acosta’s whereabouts on the day of the murders?

  I doubted the detective would tell me, but it was worth a shot. And I’d never used the word “whereabouts” before in my life, but I used it deliberately here. I hoped it would sound official and police-like. Maybe Jackson got so many texts that he’d answer without realizing it was me that asked. Maybe.