The Labyrinth Of Dreams

by Jack L. Chalker

  Something Big was actually a skunk everybody called Little Jimmy Nkrumah. He was actually built like a fullback for the Eagles and had a face that looked like it’d played one too many games. I’m not sure about the Jimmy, but the Nkrumah wasn’t the truth, either. He wasn’t a Muslim—he wasn’t anything, I don’t think—but he’d changed his name to something African sounding because it helped his image and his business.

  Little Jimmy was a loan shark, or at least that was the part of him everybody knew about. He ran the Star of Africa Finance Company, a little hole-in-the-wall that made legitimate loans—few—by financing some of the little black-owned furniture and appliance stores in Camden, but his real business was with the folks who couldn’t get credit on a bet. When those folks borrowed from friendly and understanding Little Jimmy, they got a rate around ten percent per month and the collateral was their legs, arms, eyes, spouses, and children. We knew that he was connected up with organized crime—even loan sharking in this part of town didn’t get you a fifty-thousand-dollar Mercedes sports car and a house in the exclusive suburb where he lived—and probably was into more, but we didn’t have much to do with him. Brandy knew that it was Little Jimmy who’d suggested her dad to the Reverend Billy.

  Little Jimmy dressed fairly conservatively, but the suits were hand tailored and only of the best material, I think he had three people on the staff just to get rid of scuffs on his shoes. His voice was abnormally high and silky, but very cultured, sort of as if Stepin Fetchit had gone to Harvard. We just stared at him, surprised he’d even walk into a dump like the office without sending ahead a squad of cleaners and shampooers.

  “I hear you’re closing down,” he oozed, sounding for all the world like a black Don Corleone. “Too bad. I mean, the little lady’s daddy’s last legacy and all that.”

  “Yeah, well thanks for the sympathy, Nkrumah,” she responded, bitterness now in her tone. “You sure tried to help things along.”

  “If you’re referring to the unfortunate outcome of your father’s case, I can only say, as I always said, that I was really trying to do him a favor. I owed him one, but that’s another story. I was truly distressed at how it all came out, but who would have thought that anybody could be that much of a straight arrow? Meaning no disrespect, but your daddy was handed a golden opportunity late in life on a silver platter. All he had to do was take it, and money, fame, and political connections would be his.”

  “He was too good for the con,” Brandy shot back. “He really believed in the Reverend Billy.”

  “To be so naive at his age and experience was the cause of his downfall. I offered him the golden platter; he chose his own fate. It was no doing of mine that he did so.”

  Brandy was losing her temper fast. “Some folks would rather be dead than turn into house niggers like you!”

  The insult stung, but only briefly. Little Jimmy wasn’t paying a social call.

  “What do you want here, Nkrumah?” I asked him. “If you’re gonna offer to bankroll us to keep us afloat, forget it. You got your own boys to do your dirty work, and we couldn’t afford your interest.”

  “It isn’t the interest I’m worried about, it’s the principles,” the loan shark replied. “Are you like your daddy, or are you interested in some real gold, no strings attached, if you don’t mind getting a little dirty in the process.”

  I looked at Brandy and she looked back at me, and both of us had identical frowns and shrugs. “Go on,” she said to him. “It don’t cost nothin’ to listen.”

  Little Jimmy smiled, which was not a reassuring gesture. When Little Jimmy smiled, you felt like the worm just about to be dropped in the river.

  “Would the potential of two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars and no con job like the one they pulled on your daddy make you interested?”

  It was my turn to gulp. Considering the pay at Ocean Estates, he was talking fifteen years’ wages at least. “Keep going. You can kill half of Camden and part of Philadelphia with that kind of money, even now,” I noted.

  “Someone has absconded with two and a quarter million dollars of money that I was responsible for,” Little Jimmy told us. “The finder’s fee on the money is ten percent.”

  I sat down on the floor and found Brandy already there.

  “How’d you get that much bread?” she asked him suspiciously.

  He sighed. “What I tell you is death to repeat,” he warned. “Still, I said I’d tell it all, and I see I do have your interest and maybe your principles, too. Money’s like that, sometimes. The money is not mine. It belongs to a large multinational corporation that often makes the papers and is devoted to supplying the public with all the goods and services that people want but which they like to pretend are evil and so outlaw them. You know the company, I’m sure.”

  We did. It used to be a mostly Italian holding company with some Jewish members, but now it was strictly equal opportunity.

  “The narcotics business in this area runs to billions a year,” Nkrumah continued. “There’s a heavy demand to meet. The dealings with the suppliers are strictly cash, now that even Switzerland and the Bahamas aren’t totally safe anymore, and sometimes that amount is very large. Many big banks are involved, of course, but lately there’s been a lot of heat on. A bunch of banks have been exposed, and it has been very costly. Lately we’ve gone to a system of small and intermediate suppliers, middlemen, between the big and small banks. This time it was my turn to help out with confusing the source and the destination, as it were. I took out a business loan for expansion at a major bank, and I was to invest the money, as it were, in a number of places. The loan would later be repaid, with interest—all aboveboard. Never mind where it went from me; you know what it came back as, and where the interest came from.”

  Yeah. Maybe a thousand percent interest over a short period from everybody from suburban middle-class junkies to Johnny Redlegs’s girls. It was a pretty clear picture, and told us for the first time just where all that money Little Jimmy made really came from. It was kind of clever. Everybody, including the cops, knew Little Jimmy was a shark, but a little shark. Using a little crime to cover a big deal was subtle. It was probably worked out by computers or something.

  The plan was deceptively simple. Little Jimmy was small potatoes, but he really could deal in millions without raising any red flags. Even a little outfit like his had several million in capital. He would take the loan for “investment” purposes and invest it, ostensibly in real estate and other ventures that looked solid but were actually fronts. They, in turn, would pay the suppliers through other dummy companies, and by paying large sums to companies for, say, excavations or engineering work that never actually was done or needed to be done. In return, the junk would come on up—or over or wherever it came from—and hit the streets in a movement that would be totally unconnected to Little Jimmy. The profits would be paid back through a totally different network that reached the same dummy sources, which would then repay Little Jimmy’s investments with interest, and he’d repay the bank. In the meantime, the dummy companies would go on the block and be absorbed or bought out by holding companies, getting the rest of the money in the process, all neatly laundered and pressed and even on the tax books, although with that kind of money you could always find enough breaks to avoid the bulk of the taxes.

  The weakness was that if you knew both ends, you might intercept things. This was known, but, considering the risks involved in bilking that corporation out of fifty bucks, let alone millions, it was considered acceptable, just as the loans Little Jimmy took out were really paid back since otherwise he’d be out of the loan-shark business in a hurry.

  The loan had come in, from Tri-State Savings Fund, one of the bigger banks in the region and one of the first to get into interstate banking in a big way when they dropped the barriers to it, and Little Jimmy had then made his “investments,” prudently investing no more than ten percent in any one firm on a list of up-and-coming small companies. The trouble was, th
e list was given to him by the loan officer at Tri-State; it turned out to be a very different list than the one Little Jimmy was supposed to get. When the real companies started contacting him about not getting their investments, Little Jimmy hit the roof and quickly discovered what had happened. His next problem was to keep his own bosses from finding this out; they would take a dim view of his blind obedience to the system and his failure to verify everything. He quickly advanced two and a quarter million of his own money, but he was only really worth about three million—only!—and much of that wasn’t really liquid.

  In other words, Little Jimmy had to take out a real loan to cover the loan. By tax time, there would be much interest in why he’d borrowed five million—partly by mortgaging his house, his cars, and his business—all to sink into speculative companies with short lifespans.

  Of course, when his share came back he’d still have to repay the bank, and that would leave him up to his eyeballs in hock. His godfather or chief corporate officer or whatever might very well not give him more than a scolding since the deal went through anyway; but Little Jimmy knew a lot of names and routings and the like, and would be in a very tight squeeze later on, a squeeze his bosses might just expect him to get out of by making a deal. Little Jimmy remembered what was the ultimate fate of the Reverend Billy. He decided that it might be best if this . . . mistake . . . was not reported or revealed to anyone else, and to see if he could get at least some of his money back, not to mention the fellow who was behind all those other dummy companies. He had, of course, put the word out that this fellow was no longer “reliable,” but he wanted some of his own working on this. He couldn’t trust his own people with the real story—somebody would blab across the river just for brownie points—and so he came to us. Not us alone, almost certainly, but here we were.

  “So what’s the name of this guy?” I asked him. “And why can’t you find him?”

  Little Jimmy sighed. “His name is Martin J. Whitlock the Fourth, and he is—was—chief operating officer at Tri-State. We’re pretty certain that the business-loan officer who set me up was innocent. Just following the boss’s orders. He didn’t even know it wasn’t a straightforward deal. Since then, Whitlock has disappeared, and nobody but me even seems to have noticed.”

  Brandy was still suspicious. “Why us? You got resources. You probably got all sorts of folks on this all over.”

  “It is a contest, I grant you that, but there’s more to it. I think I owe you a shot at it simply because of our unfortunate past associations. Also, Whitlock has certain unsavory avocations in low sections where you two operate so well. And, of course, there’s the fact that your cousin, Minnie Slusher, is the Whitlocks’ live-in housekeeper.”

  “Ten to one he’s not even in the country by now,” I noted. “This is a cold trail from the start.”

  “Indeed, yes, it is somewhat cold, although all this has happened in just the last few days. The moment I learned of it was but three days ago, and Whitlock went to work that morning and did not return that evening. Trace him. Track him down. I don’t care if he’s in Brazil. You don’t even personally have to recover the money. Just give me where he is, and we will do the recovering and you will get your finder’s fee. Ten percent of everything we get back.”

  “A banker can really hide that kind of stuff easily,” Brandy noted. “He’s an expert at it, and that’s small change to a dude like him.”

  “True, but a banker can also tell me where he hid it and how. Just give him to me.”

  “This will take real money to get anywhere,” I noted. “You know how much we have.”

  “Yes, you must have a retainer,” Little Jimmy agreed, and reached into his coat pocket. He brought out a wallet so overstuffed he lost ten pounds just taking it out, and he opened it and counted out a wad. “Five thousand dollars,” he told us. “A retainer. Not a loan. All cash, no taxes, no reporting unless you want to. That—and these.” He pulled out, so help me, two MasterCards and handed them over. One had my name on it, one had Brandy’s. We kind of stared at them in wonder. Both were on the Tri-State Savings Fund.

  “They’re real, and they’ll work,” assured Nkrumah. “They are billed to a business I own. They’re not approved for cash advances—you already have that—but they’re good for purchases such as clothes and airline tickets. At a hundred dollars a day, I’ve hired you for the next fifty days. If you bring me a name sooner, the cards will be invalidated, but the retainer is yours. Naturally, though, the retainer and whatever is charged will come out of your percentage of whatever is recovered.”

  I stared at the money and the cards. “Yeah, but what if we don’t turn him up? Or what if you don’t recover before he croaks? What if one of the big boys finds him first? What happens then?”

  “Then you cover the charges with whatever is left of the retainer and you keep the rest, if any. If there is a deficit, the balance still will not go below zero. You’ll have nothing, but that’s exactly what you have now.”

  He had a point, but the trail was growing colder by the hour.

  “We have to talk this over,” Brandy told him. “Leave this. If we take the case, time will be important. If we don’t, we’ll drop them by your office today.”

  Little Jimmy smiled again. “Oh, I know you will,” he responded. “Good day.” And, with that, he walked out, leaving that pile of bills and those two cards that were better than bills sitting on a box in front of us.

  I looked at Brandy. “Well?”

  “You think we really got a crack at this Whitlock dude?”

  “No, but we’d always wonder if we didn’t try. Ocean Estates isn’t open yet; Joe was just doing us a favor. I can call him and tell him we’ll be down later. That’d give us a month. I can’t see any reason not to take it. Why? What’s bothering you?”

  “This. All this. Nobody with his underworld connections just waltzes in and hands over this kind of bread to two washed-up dicks on their way to the poorhouse. Remember, that same bad dude set up my father with a twisted scheme.”

  “You think he’s using us in a setup, too? I dunno. This isn’t the same kind of case. This is ‘find a man.’ Classic P.I. work. I don’t know if his story is true or not, but the odds are Whitlock’s into him or somebody anyway and skipped just ahead of them. What they do to him, or why, or even if there’s no pot of gold at the end of this rainbow, it could make for a real challenging thirty days.”

  “Yeah, maybe, but Daddy thought his was a safe Something Big, too. If we’re gonna go with this, you call Joe, but I’m gonna at least run down and unhock Daddy’s gun.”

  A lot could be determined just on the phone, which hadn’t yet been disconnected. Whitlock, Martin J., IV. Age: forty-seven. One of the blue bloods of Philadelphia society. Ancestors came on Penn’s boat. Inherited a couple of million bucks. Harvard Business School, MBA, all the right clubs. Married Roberta Armbruster, of the came-over-on-the-Mayflower Armbrusters, added another million. Two kids: a son, Martin the Fifth, now in his freshman year at Harvard, and a daughter, Virginia, now at an exclusive prep school for future wives of aristocratic millionaires. The right blood, the right clubs, and several million in his own right. Why the hell would a guy like that stiff Little Jimmy in a con for two-plus million and split?

  More to the point, why would a guy like that be a chief launderer for the hard-drug division of organized crime?

  Part of the answer came in a listing of his holdings. It’s amazing what you can do on a phone if you know what you’re doing and have a decent acting voice. Give me four hours and somebody’s name and address, and I’ll tell you what perfume his wife wears, where he buys his clothes, who holds his mortgage, and his favorite restaurants—just for openers. It’s incredible to me how porous the credit-card listings, check records, and credit-bureau files are to anybody who knows the right language and the right approach.

  The motive for stiffing Little Jimmy was simple enough. When you think of the very rich, you think of them rolling in do
ugh and lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills. The truth is, most of the very rich don’t have enough spare change for a Big Mac at McDonald’s. The magic word is liquidity. His money was invested in stocks, bonds, certificates, real estate, you name it. His money didn’t even go to him; he had a money-management firm that collected his interest and clipped his coupons and paid all his bills for him. The only real liquid asset he had was a Super NOW checking account with about ten grand in it for petty cash. The rich have the most valuable thing for living rich while their money works: almost unlimited credit. They just charge everything and the bills are sent to the business or the money managers or whatever. Must be nice.

  He must not have figured on Little Jimmy wising up so fast. He did have reservations on a flight to San Francisco for next Sunday, but he hadn’t even picked up the tickets yet. So now he’s got over two million bucks in very liquid cash and convertibles, but he wasn’t able to make good on his planned getaway. He couldn’t use credit cards; that’s the easiest way to be traced. This guy wasn’t used to paying real cash, let alone using money to hide out from the mob. Still, he wasn’t dumb. Even the richest don’t get nearly straight A’s at Harvard, they just use their money and connections to get hired over the poor slobs that do. But this guy was smart, real smart.

  A check with the Philadelphia courthouse showed that he was real popular, too. One of my old contacts who still worked there told me that there were a bunch of federal examiners and marshals in town, and that Tri-State was already getting a going-over. That explained even more. If he thought the connection with the mob was about to be exposed and himself implicated, he’d have vanished right off. In fact, that may have saved him, although it made my life more complicated. The odds were that he might not know Little Jimmy was onto him yet; he might just have smelled the feds and bolted early. That saved his life, but it meant that the feds, at least, were looking for him right now. Worse, he was still an amateur at disappearing acts, and he’d had to panic, bolt, and run. That meant it would be messy and leave trails even an idiot or a fed could follow, and they had the lead.