Popped Off (19 page)
Authors: Jeffrey Allen
49
“You have caused me quite a few headaches,” I said.
“I’m sure,” Moe said, leaning back in the passenger seat. “I’m sorry.”
I’d put the top up on Victor’s Miata and unstrapped the blocks from the pedals, but I could still hear him screaming at me from the other side of the house.
I almost felt bad.
Moe and I were on the highway, headed north of Dallas, and he still hadn’t given me the exact location of where we were going yet. I was trying to be patient and engage him in conversation to pass the time.
“How did all this start?” I asked.
He laughed an empty laugh. “Probably a football pool when I was a kid. I could pick winners every week. I’d play against my dad, and I’d win ten bucks each week. I liked it.”
I didn’t intend for him to give me his life history, but now that he was talking, I didn’t want to stop him, either.
“So . . . since then,” he said, shrugging, “I’ve learned more, figured out how to do it smartly, figured out which games gave me good odds, learned lots of the tricks, and . . .” He shrugged again. “I don’t know. It just grew.”
“How did you hook up with the sorority?” I asked.
“Anybody who lays money in Dallas knows about them,” he said. “It’s not a secret. They were easy to find. And weird as it sounds, they have a good rep. They play fair.” He glanced at me. “This really is all my fault.”
“How so?”
“I gambled money I didn’t have,” he said. “Cardinal sin. Don’t lay money you don’t have. But I got cocky and thought I had sure things going.”
“But you didn’t.”
He shook his head and shifted in the seat. “I couldn’t win a thing. Dry spell to end all dry spells. Everything I touched turned to crap. I just kept thinking it was going to turn. And I kept betting bigger to cover the losses.”
“And the losses just grew.”
Moe nodded. “Yep. Like a snowball in a hurry. I finally had to tell them I couldn’t cover.”
“How’d that go?”
“They gave me some time to cover, but it was too much,” he said. “I knew it was too much, and they probably did, too, but I think they were trying to give me an out to come up with something. Then I panicked and stole the money from the soccer association.”
“Did they threaten you?” I asked, switching lanes. “Is that why you panicked?”
“Not really,” he said. “I’d just never been under like that, and I freaked out. I just made it worse.”
That was an understatement.
“So I stole the money, but it wasn’t enough,” he continued. “Elliott knew I was in over my head. He said he’d help if I’d quit gambling. I promised him I would.”
“You mean it?”
He glanced at me. “Absolutely. But then I felt guilty that he took the money from his casino. I’d just made it worse for him, too.”
I didn’t say anything.
“But I was still short,” he said. “I gave them what I had, but I was still short. So they offered me the Viagra deal. Seemed easy enough, and it was. But then, when I was coming back, I just felt bad for my cousin. I got mad, frustrated, whatever. I didn’t want him to suffer for my screwup. So I came up with the idea to have them pay him back what he’d stolen for me.”
It literally made no sense, but I assumed the anxiety and fear made it all perfectly clear to him at the time. Every time Moe dug a hole, he kept digging a bigger one to bury himself in.
“They obviously didn’t like that,” he said, frowning. “So here we are.”
“Okay, here’s what I don’t get,” I said, trying to add everything up. “You took the soccer money and your cousin’s money and the church’s money. How was that not enough?”
“Church money?” he asked.
“I talked to Haygood,” I said. “He told me you took money from them, as well.”
I sensed a change in his body language and demeanor but couldn’t figure out exactly what it meant.
“I didn’t steal from the church,” he finally said.
“He says you did, and it was a pretty hefty chunk of change.”
“I didn’t steal from the church,” he said a little louder, agitated. “If I had, I wouldn’t have needed to do the Viagra run. I would’ve had enough to pay them what I owed them.”
“Then why did he tell me you took their money?” I asked.
He shifted in the seat again, and the sad sack that I’d seen for the last couple hours was gone. Moises Huber was now one irritated dude.
“Because Haygood is the biggest liar alive.”
50
Moe directed me off the freeway when we got north of the suburbs and pointed me in the direction of Applegate Lake.
“Okay,” I said. “You’re gonna need to explain that statement about Haygood.”
I glanced over at him, and his face was tight with anger.
“If that guy told me the sky was blue, I wouldn’t believe it,” he said. “He’s incredible. He says I took the money?”
I recounted my conversation with the pastor.
He shook his head. “I don’t know why I’m surprised.” He stared at the window for a moment. “Look, I know I’m an easy target to blame things on. I don’t think my . . . issues . . . are any secret. But I’ve never taken a penny from that church. Not a single cent.”
He seemed genuine, but I wasn’t exactly batting a thousand with my perceptive senses. “Then why does he say you took it?”
“Because, like I said, I’m an easy target,” he said. “He took it.”
“Haygood?”
He nodded. “Ever since I’ve been there, he’s been shady with money. Because it’s a religious institution and gets all sorts of tax breaks, there isn’t a lot of oversight outside of the church.” He paused. “Know where he lives?”
“No.”
“Out on the lake west of Rose Petal,” he said. “House is about seven thousand square feet. Probably worth about five million.”
I couldn’t hide my surprise. “Wow.”
He chuckled and shook his head. “Right? Drives this ridiculous Mercedes every day. Wife drives a bright orange Hummer. And everything that guy spends comes out of the church coffers. Everything.”
“How is that possible?”
“No oversight,” Moe said. “Except in house. Us. And he tells us how to handle it all. He travels in private jets, stays only in five-star hotels, shops at the most expensive stores. And all of that is funded by the donations of the people who roll into the church every weekend. All of it. He doesn’t pay himself a salary. He just takes what he wants.”
I wasn’t exactly sure what I thought a church pastor should earn, but I certainly didn’t think it was a salary that could afford all those things that Moe was telling me about. And I really didn’t think the money that went into the basket during services should be used to fund his closet. That seemed . . . not good.
“Okay,” I said. “So he’s playing with the money. And I don’t know the rules regarding church and spending. But then why would he need to steal and blame it on you if he’s already essentially living on the money that comes into the church?”
Moe shook his head. “You’ll see. Take a right up here.”
I turned where he instructed. “I’ll see?”
He nodded but didn’t say anything else.
The road was barren at first, just a path through empty fields and forgotten fences. But then properties started showing up. Small houses on oversize lots first, then the houses grew in stature the closer we got to the lake, as did the lot size. Mansions started showing up on rolling acres, new money trying to pretend like they were people of the country.
He directed me through a maze of roads, then told me to pull over in what looked like the middle of nowhere.
“We should walk from here,” he said. “I’m not sure if anyone’s out here. Probably not, but we should be careful.”
“Careful of what?”
“Careful that Haygood’s not here.”
“We’re at Haygood’s house?”
He smiled. “One of them, yeah.”
I shook my head and got out.
We walked up the road, following a carefully constructed and maintained split rail fence painted white. It looked like a massive horse property. After a couple hundred yards, we came to a gate and Moe threw himself over it.
“We aren’t gonna get shot, are we?” I asked.
He shook his head. “He doesn’t believe in guns. And I doubt he’s here. He’s almost never here.”
I hesitated, reminded myself that I needed to quit this job, then jumped over the fence.
“He sent me out here one time,” Moe said as we walked along a gravel path. “Needed me to pick something up from the house. He told me not to tell anyone about it. Because he didn’t want anyone getting jealous.” He shook his head. “In reality, he just doesn’t want anyone to know what he does with the money he takes.”
“So did he take the money to pay for this?” I asked, still not getting it.
He shook his head. “Oh, no. This is paid for. I saw the deed. Free and clear.”
Maybe I needed to move from private investigating to church pastoring.
“So then why did he take it?” I asked.
“You’ll see,” he said again.
I was getting a bit exasperated but tried to remind myself that we were getting closer to the end of all this crap. Or at least I hoped so.
Another hundred yards and what I at first thought was a house started to emerge from behind a rolling, grassy hillside. As we got closer, though, I realized it was a barn. A barn the size of a mansion.
“He doesn’t even keep horses,” Moe said. “He just wanted some massive, oversize property.”
“The maintenance alone must be killer,” I said.
“About a hundred grand a month,” he said, without missing a beat. He glanced at me. “I pay the bill.”
“He’s really that brazen?”
“There isn’t a single person working in the financial department at the church that doesn’t know this is how he lives and operates,” he said. “They may not know about every single thing. Like I’m not sure who knows about this place. But I’m sure there are things I don’t know about. He’s smart. He spreads it around so it looks like less.”
I nodded.
The barn was about three stories high, painted a light beige with white trim. There was a bank of windows on the top level and massive doors at the front, big enough to drive a motor home through.
Or a twenty-five-foot U-Haul.
There was a combo lock on the doors, and Moe took it in his hands and spun the dial back and forth. It popped open.
“He never uses this,” he said. “He doesn’t even know the combo. I bought the lock.”
He unclasped the lock and pulled hard on one of the doors, which was twice his size. He backpedaled as he pulled it open. He got it flush against the side of the barn and attached it to a metal loop so it would stay open.
I stepped into the dark interior, and it took my eyes a moment to adjust to the dark. When they did, I saw a massive U-Haul.
And a Porsche.
“The U-Haul is mine,” he said. “Trophies are in the back.” He paused. “The Porsche is hers.”
“Hers?”
“Yeah. Hers. His mistress.”
51
“I’m not sure anyone else knows about her,” Moe said. “And I think he told me only because he felt like he had leverage on me.”
“Leverage?” I asked.
“My gambling,” he said, and he seemed to physically shrink again when he said it. It might have been his addiction, but he clearly wasn’t proud of it. “He’d made it clear he knew that I had a problem.”
“How did he know?”
“Again, most everyone knows I gamble. But I always got the sense that he knew more. Who knows?” He shrugged. “The guy’s a weasel.”
Clearly.
“So he would make these sort of veiled threats that if I ever opened my mouth, he’d somehow use it against me,” he said. “I’m not exactly sure how he could, but I’ve been so nervous about the money I owed, I wasn’t thinking clearly. I just let him bully me.”
I didn’t want to feel badly for Moe. And most of me didn’t. Most of what he was tied up in was his own doing, and there was nothing that could convince me that stealing would ever be okay.
But there was a sincerity to his remorse that made me think he really was sorry. And the picture he was painting of Haygood made me dislike Haygood far more than Moe. Maybe that wasn’t fair, but that was the way it was shaping up for me.
“Anyway,” Moe continued, messing with the lock on the back of the U-Haul. “He got stuck in a meeting, and she needed a ride from the airport. I was working late in my office. He told me to go pick her up and to not tell anyone and we’d talk about it the next day. So I did.”
I leaned against the Porsche, listening.
“She’s real nice,” he said. “Very friendly, pretty. Not sure how they met. I didn’t ask a lot of questions. She asked me to bring her here, and I guess she lives here most of the time.”
He popped the lock on the back of the truck and set it on the bumper. “That was the first time I’d ever been here. I dropped her here and then went back to the office. He was waiting for me. He didn’t try to spin who she was. He was pretty clear about it. And he was also clear that I wasn’t to say anything, or I’d lose my job, and again, he made some veiled threats about my gambling.” He frowned. “And I just went along with it.”
“When was this?”
“About six months ago,” he said. “So then, after I knew, I guess he decided he could use me. So I pick her up at the airport when she’s in town, help her out if she needs anything, that kind of thing. He can keep his distance from her.” He smiled. “Except when he doesn’t.”
“So does he just tell you when to go get her?”
He shook his head. “Nah. We set up away to send messages. On Facebook.”
I thought back to when Victor suggested I check out his account. “MacDonald.”
Surprise rose in his face. “Yeah. How’d you know?”
“I just took a look at your page. It was the one thing that stuck out to me before you disappeared. I didn’t know who it was, though. Just one of those loose end things.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Man, he’d freak if he thought anyone picked up on anything. He lives in fear of his wife finding out.”
“I’ll bet.”
“So after I decided to hang on to the trophies, this was the one place I knew I could hide them.” His mouth twisted sourly. “She’s out of town, he rarely comes out here, it’s big enough, and no one knows about it. I knew it would be safe.”
I nodded. It was a pretty good hiding place. If you needed to hide kids soccer trophies filled with Viagra.
He swung the door to the truck open. Stacks of rectangular boxes filled nearly the entire interior.
“Took me ninety minutes to load the truck,” he said. “In the middle of the night.”
“Belinda said that’s probably when you did it.”
He sighed loudly and slumped on the truck’s bumper. “She must hate me.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Everyone must hate me,” he said. “I hate me. I’m so stupid. This whole thing is so stupid. I’m gonna lose my job, probably go to jail.”
I felt sorry for him. I didn’t want to, but I did.
“I know a lawyer,” I said. “She can help you.”
“Who’s gonna wanna help me? Why would they?”
I thought of his gambling problem and the addiction and the fact that he hadn’t harmed anyone. And that he was fessing up. I hoped that Julianne would be able to do something with that.
“She will help you if she can,” I told him. “She’s good. The best.”
“I can’t pay her.”
“We’ll figure it out.” I motioned at the truck. “Let’s get this thing back out so we can get back and get your cousin and my partner.”
“Not so fast,” a voice said behind me.
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