CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
The documents were spread over my kitchen table. They held rows of figures and names, indicating checks written from the account and to whom they were written. The names of the recipients were written in the Vietnamese writing system known as quoc-ngu. The English equivalent of each name was typed in an adjacent column. One U.S. dollar was equal to ten thousand Vietnamese dong, which made the amounts in dong dispersed from the account seem huge. Fortunately, the U.S. equivalent was also typed in an adjacent column. I assumed the translations were part of the computer program the agency used when deciphering foreign documents.
Each year, in April, two hundred thousand dollars was deposited in the account, except for this year. There was no deposit in April, but a three hundred thousand dollar one was made in July. The deposits came from the Evermore Foundation and were the only deposits ever made to the account.
“I wonder what these checks were for,” said J.D. “There seem to be a lot of smaller checks to different people, a lot of them companies. The same people and companies appear over and over.”
I looked at the list of payees. “Most of the ones to individuals are for the same amount and are paid each month.”
Jock riffled through a stack of documents. “We have copies of the checks, but they don’t say what they were written in payment of.”
“Wouldn’t our Internal Revenue Service want to make sure that the money going out of Evermore was for a charitable purpose?” I asked. “Wouldn’t Evermore have to provide proof to the government that it wasn’t just laundering money somehow?”
“I’d think so,” said J.D.
“They seem pretty lax about charitable organizations,” said Jock. “I can probably get the IRS records, but it’ll be the first of the week. Not much is going to get done by our agency geeks on the weekend unless it’s an emergency. Even when we get the records, there probably won’t be much in them.”
“Maybe the best thing to do,” I said, “is to talk face-to-face with Chaz Desmond.”
“You going to Atlanta?” asked J.D.
“No. I’d like to have him come here. I’d also like to have our old first sergeant Jimbo Merryman with me. He’s a good judge of men and maybe if it’s just three old soldiers talking, Chaz will come clean.”
“Can you do that this weekend?”
“Jimbo’s out in the woods killing Yankees. I can probably get him to come here on Monday, and that’ll give Doc time to get here as well. Plus, I want to look through these documents some more.”
“Sounds like a plan,” said Jock.
I called Chaz Desmond early in the afternoon. “Doc, I need to see you. Can you come to Longboat on Monday?”
“What’s up, Matt? Have you got some leads?”
“Yeah. We’ve learned quite a bit, but I don’t want to talk about it on the phone. We need to meet.”
“I’ll be there. What time?”
“Can you make it to my house by late morning, say eleven o’clock?”
“See you then.”
I called Molly Merryman, Jimbo’s wife, and asked her to have Jimbo call me when he got in on Sunday afternoon. She’d explained to me the first time I’d called that Confederate soldiers didn’t carry cell phones. They did have one for emergencies, but it was considered less than authentic to use it for anything short of a life-threatening event.
We spent the rest of the day pouring through the bank documents. Nothing really jumped out at us, but we did get a list of the regular recipients of checks out of the account and a time line for the disbursal of the money. All the checks were payable to names we’d never heard, except for the ones that the accountant Tuan Nguyen wrote to himself each month for an amount equal to about a thousand dollars.
J.D., Jock, and I drove to the Sandbar Restaurant on the north end of Anna Maria Island, sat on the deck overlooking the beach, and ate a late dinner and watched the sunset. A bright and beautiful display as always. It was almost as eye-catching as the detective sitting across the table from me.
Sunday was a quiet day, a time to catch up with the energy expended over the past two weeks, to contemplate the next few days, and wonder if my buddy Doc was mixed up in some dark scheme that had somehow led to the murder of his son and two strangers on a dinner boat.
I was convinced that the deaths on Dulcimer were tied to Jim Desmond’s murder, but I didn’t understand why. What was the connection between Jim on the one hand and the dead people on Dulcimer on the other? There had to be one, but what was it? And was there a connection between the lawyer Garrison and the Hooters waitress Katherine Brewster? Was one of them just collateral damage?
I was beginning to suspect that Katherine was the target, and somehow Peter Garrison got in the way. Maybe he tried to protect Katherine. If Garrison had been the target, I doubted that Katherine would have intervened, and if she had, the murderer could probably have overpowered her without killing her.
We now knew that Katherine’s boyfriend was not the killer and we were pretty sure that her stalker wasn’t either. That left us with the Asians. The only connection to them was Doc’s annual payments to a guy in Ho Chi Minh City. But that left us without an explanation for Katherine’s death. It was a conundrum and it gave me a headache.
It was almost noon. Jock had curled up on the sofa with a book and fallen asleep. I didn’t bother him. I was hungry and decided to drive down to St. Armands Circle for lunch at Lynches Pub and Grub. The sisters who owned the place had been friends of mine since I first came to the island. In those days they’d owned a popular bar and restaurant at mid-key on Longboat. The building was now gone to the wrecker’s ball, and the Lynch girls were in business on St. Armands.
I called J.D. to see if she wanted to join me. She declined. Said she was catching up on some stuff, reviewing the paper work in our file, enjoying a down day. She’d see me on Monday.
The day was clear and hot and humid. The cerulean sky was devoid of even a wisp of cloud. The Gulf lay flat and still, its aqua color soothing. Far out, near the horizon, a boat cruised south, its sails full, catching the wind and moving at a good clip. A day like this chased away the dark concerns about murder and Asian assassins and other hobgoblins of the mind.
Our island was a lush tropical paradise. The condo complexes and mansions that lined the key’s main road were hidden behind flowering plants and shrubs. The commercial areas were rare and well maintained. Yet the island was changing. A number of the bars and restaurants had died because they could not survive the summer doldrums when tourists didn’t visit. There just weren’t enough year-rounders to keep them in business.
People died or ran out of money and moved back North or tired of the island’s lack of excitement and moved to the mainland. It was a continuous loss to those of us who would live nowhere else, but new people moved in and new friends were made and the cycle began all over again. I think most communities are this way. We mourn the loss of what we had once been while looking forward to what we will become. The human condition. It always amazes me.
Lunch was quick, chicken wings and French fries washed down by Miller Lite. I stopped at the Chinese restaurant next door and got several kinds of take-out for Jock. The owners were always glad to see him and Logan come in. They never could make up their minds about what to eat, so they ordered one of everything. The proprietors loved it and always asked me about my friends when I came in alone.
Jimbo Merryman called me late in the afternoon. I told him what we’d found in the documents, and that I was going to confront Doc about the Evermore Foundation. I thought it would go a lot easier if Jimbo were part of the conversation. He said he’d be at my place before eleven the next morning.