The Disciple of Las Vegas (5 page)

It was almost 9 a.m. by the time Ava got to the airport and began the slow, torturous process of getting to the boarding gate. She had planned to go to the first-class lounge before her flight, but by the time she got through security there was only fifteen minutes before departure, so she went directly to her gate. She turned on her cellphone to call Uncle and saw that he had left two messages. She chastised herself for not calling him earlier.

“Uncle, I'm sorry,” she said when he answered his phone. “I left the hotel early this morning and I didn't want to wake you.”

“You worried me,” he said softly. “Where are you?”

“At the airport. I've located Jim Cousins. I'm on my way to talk to him.”

Even over the phone she could hear his breathing change, his spirits rise. “Good God, so soon. Even for you, Ava, this is fast.”

“I was lucky, and if my luck holds he'll be exactly where I think he is.”

“Where?”

“In an apartment in San Francisco.”

“How did you do it?”

“That doesn't matter. You can tell Chang if you want, but it might be wise to wait until I actually get there and confront him.”

“I think he should know.”

“No promises, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just because I've located Cousins doesn't mean he'll be there. And even if he is, it doesn't mean we're any closer to recovering the money. So be careful about what you say. Don't let them draw the wrong conclusion.”

“Where is the money?”

“I have no idea,” she half-lied.

She could sense his doubt — he knew she wasn't telling him everything. “When you find out, call me in Hong Kong. I am going to fly back today after meeting with Chang and Ordonez,” he said.

“I will,” she promised. The call for first-class passengers to board the plane came over the PA. Ava was guided to her seat by a series of flight attendants. When she had settled in with a cup of coffee in hand, she reviewed her notes, trying to make sense of the information Johnny Yan had given her. Aside from the fact that all the money had gone to Costa Rica, the amounts and the recipients and the banks seemed to be almost completely random. The same wasn't true for the three and a half percent that had found its way into Jim Cousins' bank account. It was obviously for services rendered, but what services?

She sat up straight and gingerly stretched her arms. Her shoulder still ached, and a combination of wine, Tylenol, and the comfort of the Peninsula's bed hadn't blunted the pain. She tried to distract herself by focusing on the documents Chang had sent early that morning. The detectives' report was long on verbiage and short on substance.
Maybe they're getting paid by the word
, she thought. Most of it focused on Cousins. They had come up dry at the bank and had run into a brick wall with the lawyer, who wouldn't breach his trust.

She shorthanded the information on Cousins into her notebook. Calgary born, educated at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology. Worked in the Alberta oil fields, Saskatchewan oil fields, Texas oil fields, and Indonesian oil fields, then back to the northern Alberta tar sands. No wife. No kids. No mention of Kelowna until just over six months ago. He had arrived there out of nowhere, and then he was gone.

The people in Kelowna who met him had thought he was a cowboy and a gentleman. Cousins didn't seem to have a job but he paid his rent on time, and most nights he dropped a couple of hundred dollars at the local casino without getting bent out of shape. He didn't drink, do drugs, or do women. He paid his taxes and had no criminal record. He also had no credit cards, which must have complicated the detectives' work no end, since credit card usage was their favourite trail. They had included a copy of his passport and several photos with the report. She took them out and slipped them into the back of her notebook. The rest of their work went into the garbage.

Ava turned to the file on Kelowna Valley Developments. The company had been incorporated in British Columbia just before Jim Cousins arrived in Kelowna. He was listed as president. The work had been done by the law firm of McDougal, Fraser, and Ling. The registered owner was a B.C. numbered company and the shares in the numbered company were held in trust by Edward Ling. The law firm's offices were in the Pacific Tower in downtown Vancouver. Edward Ling was listed as a senior and founding partner.

Ava put her notebook away and reclined her seat. She needed to take a break. She searched for a movie to watch and found Wong Kar Wai's classic
In the Mood for Love
. It was a slow and introspective story about unrequited love, starring two of Hong Kong's most famous actors, Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung. Ava wasn't accustomed to seeing Leung in anything but action movies, but he held her interest, although not as much as Cheung, who, long and languid and dressed in the most exquisite cheongsams, stole every scene she was in.

Ava fell asleep as Leung and Cheung misconnected for the last time. When she woke, the plane was less than an hour outside San Francisco, where, she hoped, she would find her next target.

She had been to San Francisco twice before, once on a job and the second time with a lover who wanted her to see the gay scene's Mecca. Unfortunately Mecca was too out there for Ava, and the trip went badly. She flew home early, and alone.

It was a grey, dismal day, promising rain. Driving a silver Audi A6 she had rented at the airport, Ava exited the highway and started to work her way through Japantown and the Fillmore area to Lower Pacific Heights. She was impressed by how attractive the city looked, even in such gloomy weather. The twisting, climbing streets were lined with trees; colourful, quirky storefronts; and rows of red-brick Victorian-style houses.

She turned onto Post Street, which was mostly apartment buildings, and parked the car at the end of the road. She looked at herself in the rear-view mirror and realized she was a bit dishevelled from the flight. She brushed her hair back and fixed it with the ivory chignon pin, retouched her makeup, and smoothed out the front of her shirt, tucking it into her slacks.
Presentable, professional
, she thought.

The doorman smiled at her when she was still twenty paces away. He was positively beaming by the time she reached the entrance. “Hello, my name is Ava Lee. I called yesterday about viewing one of the apartments. Could you ask the rental office if they have time to show me a unit?”

He called inside on his walkie-talkie. Ava heard a woman's voice answer that she was in a meeting and hoped Ms. Lee wouldn't mind waiting. The doorman looked at Ava, his eyebrows raised.

“I have a colleague staying here — Jim Cousins. I could visit with him for a while. Could you ask if that's okay?” she said.

“Certainly,” the woman said. “Mr. Cousins is in apartment 306. Tell Ms. Lee to come by my office on the ground floor when she's ready.”

This is too easy
, Ava thought as she walked through the door and into the building.

She felt a touch of nerves as she approached apartment 306. This was the time when expectations gave way to reality. If he was home she hoped he would be reasonable, if not accommodating. But she was prepared for just about anything. Over the years she had experienced everything — shouting, cursing, crying, threats, even physical attacks.

She knocked on the door and waited. Nothing. She knocked again and counted to twenty. She was about to turn and leave when the door opened. Jim Cousins stood in front of her, his hair tousled and pillow creases stamped on his cheek. He was taller than she had expected, definitely over six feet, and more handsome. He wore jeans and a white T-shirt that failed to hide his strong, lean physique. “Can I help you?” he said, not unkindly.

“Mr. Cousins, my name is Ava Lee.”

“I'm sorry, am I supposed to know you?”

“No, but I know you. I've been sent by the Ordonez organization to have a chat with you about the Kelowna Valley Developments project.”

She braced herself, preparing for her body to be slammed against the wall, for a fist to be thrust at her face, for a kick to be aimed at her groin, all accompanied by a shower of obscenities. This was when it always happened.

He shrugged. “Sure. C'mon in.”

Ava blinked in surprise and walked past Cousins into the living room. There were boxes everywhere. “I haven't finished unpacking,” he said, closing the front door. “You want coffee or anything?”

“Instant is fine,” she said, still unsettled by his casual manner.

“We'll sit in the kitchen,” he said.

Ava followed Cousins into the kitchen and sat at a small round table with two chairs. She pulled out her Moleskine notebook while he fussed with two mugs. “I just take it black,” she said.

He put a mug in front of her and then sat down. “Could you tell me your name again, and do you have any ID?”

“My name is Ava Lee and I'm an accountant. Here's my business card.”

“An accountant, eh? You aren't what I was expecting.”

“You were expecting someone?”

“Yeah, but not someone like you, and not this soon.”

“They hired detectives when they couldn't find you on their own.”

“I borrowed a buddy's car, drove to Saskatchewan, then crossed the border into North Dakota. They just wave you through there if you look like a local. I also don't use credit cards or debit cards. That's just my lifestyle — nothing sinister. I figured I'd be hard to track.”

“But why would you want to be so evasive in the first place?”

He smiled. His eyes caught hers and she saw no fear, no hesitation in them. “Philip asked me to stall for him, give him some time to get things sorted.”

“Philip Chew?”

“Who else?”

There were times when Ava wished her instincts were wrong. “I expected as much,” she said.

“Really? I'm surprised.”

“You don't exactly have the background of a scam artist, and on first impression I don't think you're a good enough liar to get Philip Chew to buy in to some bogus land deal.”

“Why, thank you.”

They sat silently, drinking their coffee. “Could I have another?” she asked.

“How did you find me?” he asked, his back turned as he poured water into her mug.

“Through the Jersey bank,” she said.

“Shit. I told Philip I didn't want to jump through hoops and loops, but he told me if I moved my money directly from Canada to the U.S. it would be caught in no time. So he sent me to this Jersey bank as a kind of halfway house. Some of my money actually just got here yesterday.”

“Your two million or so?”

“I was paid $2,030,000,” he said.

She opened her notebook. “Do you mind if I write this down?”

“Be my guest.”

“You're an oil-field worker, I understand.”

“I was an oil-field worker. A technician, but still working outside,” he said. “I've worked all over the place. The last job was in bloody Fort McMurray — northern Alberta — those horrendous tar sands. I put in six months without a break, built myself a very nice bankroll, and decided to treat myself to an extended holiday in Las Vegas. That's where I met Philip.”

Ava's heart sank. There was no worse combination in the world than Las Vegas and a Chinese gambler.

“I play poker for relatively high stakes — ten- to twenty-dollar no-limit hold'em. I started off at the Bellagio but there's a real pecking order there. If you're not a high roller or a professional player you get treated like shit. So I moved my action to the Venetian and got in with an okay crowd. We played in a private room just to the side of the main area. Philip was one of the regulars. He and I played together for six or seven consecutive days.

“Everybody thinks poker is cutthroat but, you know, you can only play so many hands, and when you're not playing a hand or you're between hands, there's a lot of chit-chat. It actually gets kind of social. That's when Philip and I got to know each other.”

“What kind of poker player is he?”

“Not bad, not bad at all. He tended to play a little too tight and that worked against him, especially in Vegas, where they pick up on your tendencies really quickly. But it didn't kill him. When he drank, well, that was another story. The more he downed, the looser he got and the more money he lost. He didn't drink that often, though. I figure he was down maybe thirty or forty thousand for the week we played together. Not that he gave a shit. He never lost his cool.”

“How did you do?”

“I was up two thousand. It should have been more, but I lost a couple of monster pots the last two days I was there.”

“So you and Phillip played poker together.”

“And we talked. He told me about his business, about his big-time brother. I told him about my rather crappy existence. Despite the difference in our lifestyles, we hit it off. On my fourth day at the table, Philip asked me to join him for dinner. We ate at the Chinese restaurant in the Venetian, comped, of course, and he opened up a bit more. We did the same the next night and the night after that. On the sixth night he asked me if I wanted to do some business with him. I told him I wasn't a businessman. He said not to worry, that he would look after all the details. All I had to do was follow his lead and act like I owned a company.

“I told him I needed to know exactly what I was getting myself into. He told me that he hadn't finalized his plans yet and said he would like to contact me in a week or two if that was okay by me. I had no reason to say no. I wasn't back in Fort McMurray more than a week before he called. He asked me to fly to Kelowna to meet him. And I did.”

“He had set up Kelowna Valley Developments by then?”

“Yep.”

“Why Kelowna?”

“He said it was far enough from Vancouver to discourage casual visits.”

“From whom?”

“His wife.”

“His wife?”

“Yep, that's why he was doing all this shit. He had money he needed to move out of the country into some investments, and she was all over him. He said she wouldn't care if he was putting money into land in Kelowna.”

“And he wanted you to be the middle man. That's all, right?”

“That's all.”

“And you leapt at the chance?”

He looked at her as if she were crazy. “Have you ever been to Fort McMurray?”

“No.”

“Have you ever spent an entire winter working outdoors in minus-twenty-degree weather?”

“No.”

“Well, you're goddamn right I leapt at the chance.”

“So you became president of Kelowna Valley Developments.”

“I did. He brought the articles of incorporation with him and gave me a cheque for ten thousand dollars to open a bank account.”

“And then how did it work?”

“Philip would send me all the paperwork I needed. I just turned around and sent it back to his office. They'd cut me a cheque, I'd deposit it, then Philip would tell me where to wire it. It was real simple.”

“And you kept three and a half percent.”

“That was the deal.”

“Didn't you think that was a lot of money for simply shuffling paper around?”

“The wife sounds pretty fierce,” he said, with a slightly sheepish grin.

“That's bull,” she said.

He averted his eyes.

“You knew what you were doing was probably highly illegal.”

“But I didn't know for sure.”

“You're no idiot. You could have guessed.”

Cousins tapped his fingers on the table, his attention wandering. “Wait here,” he said.

She watched him as he walked towards what she guessed was his bedroom. She wondered if the cooperative phase was over.

When he came back into the kitchen he was carrying a large brown envelope. “Let me finish the story, and then I'll show you this,” he said.

“Go ahead.”

“Everything went smoothly for about five months, and then two weeks ago Philip called me in a fucking panic. He said his wife's auditors were all over the deal and that it might be best for me to get out of Kelowna. I told him I wasn't scared of his wife or her auditors, because as far as I was concerned I hadn't done anything wrong. That's when he told me that it was company money I'd been sending to Costa Rica.

“He told me he needed to go to Manila to sort things out, and that if I just laid low for a few weeks everything would be fine. He told me to take my money with me. I told him I still had an account with one of the big U.S. banks from my days working in Texas. He said that would be too easy to track, and gave me the name of the bank in Jersey.”

“Did he tell you to come to San Francisco as well?”

“Hell, no, that was my decision. I'm gay.” Her surprise must have registered on her face, because he asked, “Do you have a problem with that?”

“Hardly,” Ava said. “Let's get back to Philip. How was his mood during this period?”

“Progressively wackier.”

“When was the last time you spoke to him?”

“I called him after I crossed the border.”

“And?”

“He told me not to worry.”

“Strange advice, given the circumstances.”

“I don't see why,” he said.

She was impressed again by his calmness and then moved to roil it. “You know you're going to have to give that money back, don't you?”

His face was impassive. “I'm not giving anything back,” he said. “I earned it. I'm keeping it.”

“Philip Chew stole it.”

“Not that I knew.”

“You knew, but you just didn't want to admit it. Why do you think the money was sent to all those individuals if he was investing in a business? What sense does that make?”

“He said that was the way they wanted it done.”

“And you actually believed that?”

Cousins looked away and shifted uncomfortably in his chair.
He had wanted to believe it
, she thought,
but he knew
. He opened the envelope and took out a document. “Here, this is a contract I had a lawyer draw up with Philip,” he said, slipping it across the table to her. “I'm not a total fool. It outlines exactly what I was to do and why I was to do it. There's an affidavit at the back signed by Philip that swears the money is his to do with as he wishes. He's specific about investing money in Costa Rica. My lawyer put in a paragraph that absolves me of any responsibility for the project. I was simply an employee, performing a task based on Philip's sworn and notarized statement that everything was completely legal and above board.”

She read the document, aghast at how dumb — or desperate — Philip Chew must have been to sign the contract. Jim Cousins' lawyer had done a very good job.

“Can I keep this copy?” she asked.

“Sure, I have others.”

“What a mess this is,” she said to herself.

“Go and talk to Philip.”

“I'm not sure they'll leave you alone, you know, the guys in Manila. They're capable of deciding that, contract or no contract, you have their money. It could get ugly.”