Dead Anyway (35 page)

“Yeah. And add a new one. Yours.”

Then he hung up.

I flushed the phone down the toilet, then dug out the one I used to talk to Evelyn. She’d also called recently. I called her back.

“Oh, Arthur,” she said. “What happened?”

“The men killed today were the ones responsible for Florencia’s death. Elliot Brandt was also known as Austin Ott, the Third, street name Three Sticks. Also not his real name, but that’s irrelevant now. He hired the other guy, Bela Chalupnik, street name Pally Buttons, to kill us both. It was Chalupnik who took care of Three Sticks today. An associate of ours disposed of Chalupnik. That’s it in a nutshell.”

“Why would this man Chalupnik kill his employer?”

“He had a thing about rats,” I said. “I sent a message through his sons that he could pay a call on the biggest rat in town.”

“Rats?”

“It a long story. I’ll explain later,” I told her, knowing I probably wouldn’t.

“But why would anyone want to kill Florencia?” she asked.

“She’d been running what’s called a skimming and lapping embezzlement scheme for years, siphoning off a modest, yet steady stream of premium money and sending it to a shell company, then into a lockbox, and finally a numbered account in the Caymans. She likely could have kept it going indefinitely, except for the bad luck of hiring Damien Brandt as her new comptroller, who unknown to her was the son of the region’s most notorious gangster. Somehow Damien stumbled on the scam—probably by discovering the shell, which was on the agency’s books as a legitimate insurance carrier. He dug a little deeper, and realized he’d discovered a pot of gold. He shared the news with his father, who hired Pally to get the codes for the numbered account, and then kill Florencia, thus taking control of both the stolen premiums, and ultimately, the agency itself.

“After buying the place, Damien allowed what he thought was a safe amount of time to go by, then re-launched the old scam. I have a feeling he hadn’t asked Dad’s permission, but that’s sort of irrelevant at this point.”

“Now what happens to the agency?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “The lawyers are going to have a field day. You need to get a good one. We sold a business that had been running a massive fraud. Of course, the buyers were criminals, who knew about the fraud, yet failed to report it, and in fact, kept it going after acquiring the business. I have to think this would destroy their standing as an injured party, but I’m not a lawyer.”

“So what are you going to do now?” she asked.

“I’m done with the people who killed Florencia, but not with the reason they killed her. I need to know why she was stealing from her own company.”

“So you’re not coming home.”

“Not yet. There’s a chance a retired FBI agent named Shelly Gross has my fingerprints and DNA, which could lead him to Arthur Cathcart. Though I’ve never been arrested, or tested, or fingerprinted for any reason, so I can’t be in their database. Though he’s good. And determined. And he’s really mad at me right now.”

I told her I was shutting down our email account, and to destroy the cell phone she’d been using to talk to me.

“Stand by,” I said. “I’ll make new communications links when the time is right.”

“I don’t know whether to be happy or disappointed,” she said.

“Try being cautious, but hopeful. That seems to work for me.”

I
KNEW
there were plenty of loose ends that needed to be tied off, though nothing that couldn’t be handled remotely. There was little reason to stick around New York any longer than it took to steal a new crop of Social Security numbers, from which we acquired driver’s licenses—leading to the establishment of a series of new bank accounts and credit cards. And lastly, with a fair amount of tricky work—some involving interaction with less than entirely legal enterprises—two new passports.

Throughout, Natsumi maintained a trusting and thus not terribly inquisitive attitude, though something about holding that fresh, new, dark blue American passport triggered a renewed curiosity.

“So, Alex, or Arthur, or whatever your name is, where the hell are we going?”

“When I finally cracked into Florencia’s numbered account in Grand Cayman, I was able to download the account’s history. Capturing deposits
and
withdrawals.”

“Withdrawals?” she asked,

“Lots of them. I don’t know what the money was for, but I know where it went.”

“And?”

“Better buy some sunscreen,” I said. “The sun can get pretty bright down there in Chile.”