‘Oh dear, Sarah’s talking to herself again,’ Leo said from her doorway. ‘Come on, didn’t you hear Delaney say to meet in his office?’
‘No. I was on the phone taking abuse from another source.’
‘Poor, poor Sarah. You never got the memo warning that a detective’s life is not an easy one?’
‘Sure. But I thought they were talking about simple stuff like knife fights and gunfire.’
‘Ah. So you were unprepared for something really terrifying like bullying by phone. Who’s on your case?’
‘Gloria Jackson.’
‘Oh, that. Be patient with Gloria; she’s fighting with her boyfriend.’
‘Is that what it is? Leo, you mustn’t retire. You’re the only one who knows the really useful stuff.’
They all crammed into Delaney’s office, dragging chairs.
‘OK, the Fed lady’s not very impressed by our boxes. It doesn’t sound like she’s going to be much help. So what’s next?’
‘I think somebody in a car with tinted windows has searched Calvin Springer’s house at least once since we put the crime-scene lock on it,’ Sarah said.
‘What? Why do you say that?’
‘I suspected it the day Ollie and I went back and found the records. A couple of drawers were out of the dresser that I was pretty sure we put back the day of the murder. So I asked Martina if anybody else had been at the house since we were there. She said she saw a “car with blackened windows.” She took it for granted it was one of ours because the driver had a key.’
‘Shit.’ Delaney brooded a minute. ‘But you and Ollie found all the good stuff, right?’
‘We hope we got it all. Who can say?’
‘Yeah. Damn. It kind of stands to reason they might be afraid he left some evidence around, though, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes. And I suppose they’re still looking for more money. I think we should wait a while to turn that house over to the cleaners.’
‘Agreed. Anybody else got any thoughts?’
‘We haven’t talked to anybody in the new part of Menlo Park,’ Ollie said. ‘The parade formed up in the parking lot in front of the El Rio health center, across the street from the Mercado and all that posh housing in the part they call the Convento district. Somebody in that section must have seen the clown, maybe with his mask off.’
‘OK, canvass the new housing under Signal Mountain. Good idea.’
‘That little credit union branch where the funnel account is,’ Leo said. ‘We haven’t dug all the way to the bottom of that yet, have we?’
‘No, and it’s certainly time we did.’ Delaney was making a list with handwritten bullet points.
‘Lois kept saying this is just the tip of the iceberg – there has to be more,’ Sarah said. ‘But we haven’t found any more, and I’ve been thinking … Wouldn’t the underside of a Ford pickup be a good place to hide something secret that you wanted to keep handy?’
‘Like a key or a number or … yeah.’ Delaney was writing fast.
‘And don’t we have a homicide detective sitting right here who can find something hidden in a six-year-old Ford chassis about as fast as anybody in Tucson?’ Sarah said and watched the light come up in Oscar Cifuentes’ eyes.
‘They don’t have a hoist in that impound yard,’ Jason said. His eyes were shining too. ‘Remember, buddy? You’ll need the creeper.’
Jason and Oscar were not normally buddies but he had helped Oscar dismantle a vintage Jaguar in that yard a couple of years ago and had entertained his buds for weeks with the pictures they took as the auto was reduced to heaps of parts. He did not intend to let anybody else get to be the designated helper on this job.
‘Yes,’ Oscar said. ‘And I’ll need my coveralls and my good wrench set and the best flashlight we own, with plenty of batteries. Will you ask the proprietor to have the vehicle moved out onto the cement slab by tomorrow morning, please, boss?’
‘Well now, wait a minute,’ Delaney said. ‘Let’s use our brains here a minute and save some brawn. If Springer kept a hidden key it would be to something he’d want to be able to access quickly, right? So he’d keep it where he could get at it easy.’
‘I guess,’ Oscar said. He had been looking forward to reducing a Ford pickup to its constituent parts and the dream died hard. But he had begun to enjoy some signs of favorable regard from Delaney and he would not risk that. ‘You’re right, come to think of it,’ he said. ‘He’s not going to dismantle his Ford whenever he wants his stash, is he?’
‘No. So just get under that pickup with a good light and bring back whatever you can find in a reasonable search. If that’s nothing, it’s nothing.’
They split into teams, Jason with Oscar to search the Ford and Ray and Ollie on the canvass in the Rio Nuevo-developed section of Menlo Park. Delaney called the president of the First Southwest Credit Union and made sure Sarah and Leo were cleared to talk to everybody who’d ever handled the Springer account.
They drove together to the credit union Tuesday morning at nine. The staff were pleasant and wanted to be helpful. But they were so shocked by the news of Springer’s murder that they found it hard to move on from their indignation. The women, particularly, complained bitterly and repeatedly, as if they thought they might get Springer’s death canceled if they lodged a loud enough protest.
‘One of my favorite customers,’ Mattie Entwhistle said. ‘A nice, polite man, never a bit of trouble, always asked about my grandchildren. I feel so outraged.’
Maria Lopez was actually crying. ‘He sent Christmas cards to all the tellers,’ she said, ‘every year, with a nice little bonus check. What kind of beast would kill such a man?’
Frank Entwhistle, Mattie’s husband, was the vice president who had handled most of Calvin’s wire transfers. He was less emotional and a lot more defensive, determined to head off any notions the detectives might be getting about causing trouble for the bank.
‘You seem to think we should have been asking more questions,’ he said, ‘but hell, doing business this close to the border, we handle a lot of money transfers, all across Mexico, all the time.’
‘We’re not here looking to hang anything on First Southwest, Mr Entwhistle,’ Sarah said. ‘But we’ve got a homicide to figure out so we have to ask questions of everyone who knew him. That’s our job, you see?’
‘Of course I see that – I’m not stupid,’ he said. ‘I just want to be sure you see what I’m pointing out: whatever else Calvin Springer was doing he wasn’t doing anything illegal in this credit union. The politicians these days all want to make Mexico into the boogie man but the growth of cross-border traffic in goods and services is rapidly becoming the lifeblood of this area, as anybody in business can tell you. We were very glad to have his account, and pleased about how it was growing.’
They took a deposition from Lyle White, the bank president, a much cheerier fellow. He got his secretary to run off a history of the account since its beginnings twelve years earlier. Lyle was proud of how smoothly the account had been managed. ‘We were all a little nervous about it at first. Seemed pretty complicated, all those deposits coming from different places, but once we got the hang of it, it was never any trouble.’
Leo interviewed Archie Simplot, another vice president who had helped Calvin get the exchange rate figured out for the China orders. ‘Kind of a learning experience,’ Archie said. ‘But the information’s all there if you dig for it. I don’t know how he found the manufacturers he was working with but that was Calvin for you – a quiet older guy, didn’t look like anybody much but very enterprising. Always looking for new ways to make a buck.’
They spent two days listening to stories like that.
‘Once again,’ Sarah said as they headed back under the highway on Wednesday afternoon, ‘we come back with Big Nada. Calvin Springer was just a prince of a guy who somehow got himself killed by some ruffian – probably all a mistake.’
‘Maybe our comrades did better,’ Leo said. Every d
ay now brought him closer to his last day at work, so he was mellow and easy to please.
But Ray and Ollie, after two days of talking to the well-off tenants of the new homes around the Mercado, declared they had never found a less observant group.
‘Going around with their heads up their ass, jeez,’ Ollie said. ‘All they care about is their foot-thick walls and their stupid balconies with the pots of trailing ivy – who lives in a dream world like that?’
‘Attorneys and insurance brokers. Affluent realtors with no small children,’ Sarah said. ‘So you didn’t get anything either?’
‘One: parades are a noisy nuisance. Two: why don’t we put the money into something useful like another golf course?’ Ray ticked off responses on his fingers. ‘Three: I try not to waste my time on anything worth less than a million dollars. Four: was there a parade? I was at an Open House in Oro Valley.’
Ollie said, ‘Well, come on, guys, who’s got the next bright idea we can fling at Delaney in the morning?’
‘Not me,’ Sarah said. ‘I’m tapped out.’
Their mood was not improved when Oscar and Jason stepped out of the elevator covered in greasy dust, showing evidence of spider bites and, on Jason’s left arm, a long, painful welt from a wire gate that swung shut on him.
When he saw he had everybody’s attention, Oscar took his hands out of the pockets of his coveralls and held them up, empty.
He said, ‘Tell me again. Why are we so sure there’s another stash?’
‘Lois says there has to be,’ Sarah said. ‘Lois works for ICE and she knows things like that.’
‘Well then,’ Oscar said, ‘looks like Lois will have to find it. Because there is nothing in the Ford pickup except the standard equipment.’
‘I was half right,’ Lois said. Constant travel seemed to agree with her; she looked energetic and focused in a fresh blouse and skirt, taupe over charcoal, with a single string of silver beads. Delaney had offered her coffee and water but she waved it all away; she had, as usual, a plane to catch. ‘There is more to the Calvin Springer iceberg but it turned out to be less than I expected.’
‘You’ve found more bank records?’ Sarah said. They were meeting, as Lois had predicted, on Friday morning. Delaney was still concerned about the budget, though, so it was just the three of them in his office.
‘Yes. The slips from your coffee cans were all for First Southwest Credit Union. That’s the funnel account; it gets deposits from a dozen branches more or less in a row across New Mexico and Texas. Looks like the yield from one mid-size distributor, making deliveries on a regular schedule. His dealers are moving the product and making the deposits. It appears to have been a stable little organization for some time – years, in fact. They sent the money to Calvin and he got it back to Mexico in all the ways you described to me, based on what you saw in those boxes.
‘We’ve requisitioned a history on all these accounts, of course, and my people tell me the traffic has followed the classic money trails. There’s less gambling involved now than formerly because they have more manufacturers in China to order from and more assembly plants in Mexico where merchandise can be sent. The house-flipping fad went the same way for drug dealers that it did for everybody else – very popular in the early part of the century and a market bust starting in early two thousand and eight.
‘Here’s one thing you ought to know: Calvin Springer’s social is bogus. Lifted off a grocer in Douglas who died in nineteen fifty-three. Did you find any Medicare records for him?’
‘No. We really dug through his house, because at his age—’
‘I know. But we can’t find any either. Whatever he did to stay so healthy he must have done it on his own dime. He’s a slippery one – we haven’t been able to establish a bio for him before he appeared in Tucson eighteen years ago. He bought the house you found him in, paid cash for it and established a checking account at the credit union which he still had at his death. He evidently conducted his money laundering in cash and postal money orders for the first few years he lived here. Twelve years ago he set up the funnel account called Argos Inc. that was still going strong when he was killed. He must have had help with that – it doesn’t fit with the plain and old-fashioned way he did everything else – but whoever it was stayed out of sight. Calvin fronted the operation from first to last.’
Sarah said, ‘We haven’t been able to match his prints on any crime database and I couldn’t find any service records. Have you looked for him in Canada?’
‘Not yet. I’ll let you know when we find him. All the other depositors, in New Mexico and Texas, check out. All American citizens with social security numbers and driver’s licenses. We’re moving to establish the sources of the money they’ve deposited. We’ve not established any indictable offenses as yet, and we probably won’t now, since all traffic has ceased and the accounts are closed. We’ve tried to interview some of these people and we will in the end, but so far they all seem to be out of town and a couple have already closed out and moved away.’
‘Is it always this difficult?’
‘Yes. These people have years of experience and good lawyers. But there’s one thing that happened to the account in Benson that’s unique, and maybe since you’re here you can follow up on this. The name of the original depositor was Clifford Mays. He kept the account going for eight years before he died. We found funeral and burial records, and an obit praising him as a vet and local merchant and so on – nothing fishy about his death.’
‘Or about his life? I mean, if he was laundering drug money, isn’t it likely he was into other kinds of corruption?’
‘Not necessarily. This part of the industry is often performed by small merchants, bar owners and dry cleaners and so on, people who deal in a lot of cash and can easily hide some more from the IRS. They get paid a percentage and can usually skim a little more without getting caught by the cartel, so they cheat a little all around and they see it as a convenient boost that helps out in the hard years. Small-town merchants see all years as hard years.’
‘Maybe because they are,’ Delaney said. His father had managed the feed store and grain elevator in a small town in Kansas. Delaney still sometimes heard the rant about taxes and regulations in his dreams.
‘Maybe so. Anyway, Clifford Mays was replaced on this account by a man named William F. McGinty. And what we noticed is that while almost all the other deposits to this funnel account grew quite substantially in the next couple of years, McGinty’s stayed just about steady.’
‘So you think McGinty was skimming a little extra?’
‘Looks that way. There’s something else interesting about him. He’s kind of like the flip side of Calvin Springer.’
‘You mean he also appears somewhat fictional?’
‘No, he’s real enough – or at least he used to be.’
‘What?’
‘William F. McGinty is the name of a real person who lived in LA and then Phoenix until eighteen years ago. That William McGinty had the same date of birth as this one. Sold real estate, had a couple of fender benders and a DUI, had an address, driver’s license – and the same social security number this one uses. He surfaces briefly as the buyer of a forty-two foot catamaran in San Diego harbor shortly after he sold his house in Phoenix, jointly with his wife, Pauline. After that he disappears from the records nationwide. Doesn’t have an obit or a burial record, didn’t go to prison. Didn’t buy a house or a car. But now he, or somebody using his stats, is making deposits to this account in Benson.’
‘So he went to some other country to live and now he’s back,’ Delaney said. ‘Why is that so mysterious?’
‘Because he’s not back all the way. I’ve had my people looking for what else William F. McGinty does in Benson and so far they can’t find a thing.’
Sarah said, ‘No address? Phone? TV service?’ Lois kept shaking her head. ‘How does he live?’
‘Probably the same as all the rest of us but he does it someplace else.’ She wat
ched them both for a few seconds. ‘You haven’t run across this name before?’
‘No,’ Sarah said, and looked at Delaney, who shook his head.
‘Well, we’re still looking. To me it seems reasonable to suppose that he’s a member of the cartel, probably a watchdog planted by them. If that’s the case he probably lives across the border and he may be the one who fingered Calvin and got him killed.’
‘But wait a minute, what about the funnel account? If he’s a member of the cartel he wouldn’t be skimming it, would he?’
‘Sure, they all steal from each other all the time. So here’s what I want you to know: this account had not been closed by McGinty and in the end we decided not to close it either. William F. McGinty is a little past due on his next deposit, but just in case, if he comes back, the bank will call the police at once and then call you, Captain Delaney. If he’s been out of the country he might not have heard the news, and then you’ll get him there.’
‘Wouldn’t that be sweet?’ Delaney said.
Sarah said, ‘Can we back up a little? You’re pretty sure Calvin had his fingers in the till too?’
‘Yes. My team set up a spreadsheet to tally the total deposits in the funnel account against the totals getting sent to the cartel. It’s never going to come out exactly right since it passes through all this buying and selling, but over a year or so it should be close.
‘And Calvin’s deposits were pretty close, for years after he got set up here. I did tell you, didn’t I, that in the early days he actually sent postal money orders? And about once a year cartons of guns from Brazil and Colombia.’
‘You told me about the money orders. Not about cartons of guns.’
‘OK, forgive my rambling … it just sticks in my mind, how recently things were a lot simpler – grab and go, shoot and run. Now they’ve got all this incredibly sophisticated … Ah, well. It is what it is. Since they set up the funnel account and the deals got bigger and more complicated, Calvin stuck with mostly shipments of merchandise and wire transfers through the bank. And my team showed plainly that, in the course of a year, if you added up the money and the merchandise he was coming up short – anywhere from fifty to a hundred thousand dollars a year.
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