Monday morning, Hana Kim—aka Kimberly Huang—poked her dark head into my office. “Morgan Walker nudged me back. We’re meeting at Chili’s in Addison on Thursday at six.”
“Good. I’ll see about getting you some backup.”
A blond head poked itself in next to Hana’s. Josh. “I can do backup.”
While Josh was our go-to guy for tech support, with his small stature and tendency to nearly wet himself when facing danger he didn’t exactly have a reputation for bravery. But if he wanted to prove himself, who was I to stand in his way? Especially since Hana gave me an almost imperceptible nod, letting me know she’d be okay with it. Like me, Hana was a woman who could take care of business.
“Thanks, Josh,” I said. “That would be great.”
“Can I bring Kira along?” he asked, referencing his Web designer girlfriend. “And charge the meal to your investigation?”
Sheesh. Maybe Josh wasn’t looking so much for an opportunity to prove himself as a chance to snag a free meal on my expense account. The tight-asses in Internal Accounting might balk at reimbursing Kira’s dinner, but if they did I’d cover it myself. I wanted to take Jack Smirnoff, or Morgan Walker, or whoever the hell he was to the mat. Not only for Julia, Nataya, and Leslie but for his other victims, too. It was bad enough to dupe people out of their money, but to take advantage of women who were merely looking for romance and companionship seemed especially cruel. I considered myself very lucky to have found Nick, and I hadn’t yet forgotten all the slimy, wart-covered frogs I’d had to kiss to get here. I wasn’t merely fighting for justice. I was fighting for love.
“Sure,” I told Josh. “Bring Kira.”
The matter settled, the three of us went back to work.
Later that morning, I drove to the KCSH studio, timing my arrival to coincide with the end of Flo Cash’s Cash Flow Show. That woman owed me an explanation. And an apology. Eating takeout in her front yard wasn’t exactly how Nick and I had planned to spend our Friday night. We’d planned to eat takeout at his place and fall asleep on his couch halfway though a movie on Netflix. Okay, maybe that doesn’t sound much better, but we worked hard all week and when Friday finally came around we were tired.
As I pulled into the parking lot, Flo’s voice came across the airwaves. “Gotta tell you folks. If you’re looking for a luxury vehicle, I can’t recommend Ledbetter Cadillac highly enough. Great cars, great service. Next time you’re in the market for a new car, head on over to Ledbetter Cadillac and tell them Flo Cash sent you.”
Oddly, though, Flo’s blue Cadillac was nowhere to be seen. She was here at the station, wasn’t she? She had to be, right? I mean, her show was on the air. Of course it could be a repeat of a previously recorded show, but it didn’t seem to be. After all, she’d commented on the cloudy weather and today’s skies were gray and overcast.
I parked and climbed out of my vehicle, striding to the front door of KCSH in my cherry-red steel-toed Doc Martens. The shoes might be a little funny looking, but they were great for kicking ass, crunching nuts, and serving as door stops when a tax evader attempted to slam a door closed on me. The soles also provided perfect traction should a foot pursuit become necessary. The only way to improve upon them would be to add some sort of rocket boosters.
I pulled the door open and went inside, stepping up to the receptionist’s desk. “I need to see Flo Cash as soon as possible.”
The young woman gestured up to the speaker, which was spouting Flo’s voice. “She’s finishing up her show. But as soon as she’s done I’ll let her know you’re here.”
Good. The woman’s words meant Flo was on the premises and not hiding out elsewhere again like a lying, cheating coward.
I took a seat and perused a financial magazine, though my attention was much more focused on the show coming out of the speakers than the words on the pages. As soon as Flo signed off with her signature line—“Make your money make money for you!”—I was on my feet and standing again at the receptionist’s desk. “The show’s over. Get Flo.”
The young woman cast me a narrow-eyed look that said she clearly didn’t like being bossed around by someone who wasn’t her boss, but the fact that she stood and headed through the door that led to the sound booth told me she was smart enough to realize that pissing off an IRS agent wasn’t a wise move.
A moment later, she returned. “Miss Cash can see you now.”
“Thanks.”
I walked the few steps back to Flo’s booth and found her sitting inside, her feet propped up on the console. She was drinking fruit-flavored tea from her oversized TUNE IN TO THE FLO CASH CASH FLOW SHOW! mug. The scent of lemon hung in the air.
“Hello there,” she said, setting her oversized mug down. “To what do I owe this pleasure?” She jabbed a sound-effect button and a speaker on her desk emitted a hearty, “Yee-ha!”
So she was going to play dumb, huh? “You were supposed to meet me at your house at six o’clock Friday evening.”
“I was indeed,” she replied, pushing the clock sound effect. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. “Unfortunately, my car had other plans.” She pressed a series of buttons and the speaker spewed the ahoogah of an old-timey car horn followed by a sque-e-e of squealing of tires and a crash!
Flo was getting on my last nerve, but clearly that was precisely what she was trying to do. I wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction of knowing she was getting to me, even if I’d like nothing more at the moment than to yank my GLOCK from the holster at my waist and put a few rounds in her sound board. Bang-bang! “What do you mean, your car ‘had other plans’?”
“It futzed out on me on the freeway. Had to get it towed.” She reached over, grabbed a piece of paper from a plastic bin, and held it out to me. “See for yourself.”
I took the paper from her. It was a receipt from a towing service indicating that her car had been picked up at 6:42 Friday evening and towed to Ledbetter Cadillac. I handed the paper back to her. “That explains why you weren’t at your house. But it doesn’t explain why you didn’t call me to tell me you’d be late.”
“You never gave me your card.”
Hadn’t I? It felt like I passed the things out willy-nilly, but perhaps I had forgotten to give one to Flo. I couldn’t be certain. “My contact information appears at the end of my e-mails. I sent you one several days ago to verify our initial appointment here.”
She shrugged. “Didn’t think to check my e-mails.”
I pulled a stack of business cards from my wallet and placed them on the console. “Here you go. That’s enough cards that you can put one in your purse, keep one here at the office, and take another home.” Hell, there were enough she could wipe her ass with them if she wanted.
She reached out, picked up the cards, and set two on their sides at odd angles, building a house of business cards. It was an ironic gesture, one that told me she was playing with me, that this investigation was nothing but a game to her. Well, it was much more than a game to me, and I wasn’t playing around.
“What time did you get home?” Presumably she had no idea how long Nick and I had waited at her house. Maybe I could catch her in a lie.
“Didn’t,” she said. “Not Friday night, anyway. I called a friend to pick me up and then I spent the night at her place.”
“You could’ve had your friend drive you to your house.”
“Didn’t see the point. By the time she showed up it was well after seven. I figured you’d have been long gone by then. You government employees aren’t exactly know for your hard work and dedication, you know.”
She chuckled, her words and her laughter rankling me. Government employees were no lazier than employees in the private sector. Lu wouldn’t tolerate any of her agents giving less than 100 percent, either.
“Besides,” Flo continued, “my friend had Rangers tickets and it wouldn’t have been right to make her miss the game.” She jabbed another button, this one playing the organ refrain from the “Charge” song commonly played at baseball games.
“So you went to the game with her?”
“Had to. It was the only polite thing to do.”
Polite, my ass.
“Weird thing, though,” she continued, eyeing me intently. “When I got home on Saturday morning, there were gardenia petals all over my lawn. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”
I ignored her question. Mostly because I wasn’t sure if one of her neighbors had seen me playing “he loves me, he loves me not” with Flo’s flowers, and didn’t want to get caught in a lie myself. “You’ve been quite uncooperative, Miss Cash,” I said, cutting to the chase. “You realize I can issue an assessment based on the average of income for a radio station like this and it would be up to you to prove the numbers wrong in court. You could lose this station, put an end to everything your family worked so hard to build. Is that what you want?”
She snorted. “No need for all this drama. You want to take a field trip to my house, let’s do it right now.”
I extended an arm toward her door. “After you.”
The house she’d built with my business cards toppled over as she stood and left her booth. She stepped across the hall, opened the door to the glass-enclosed room where her two tech guys were sitting, and gestured for them to remove their headphones. Both slid one side off, leaving the other ear covered.
Once they could hear, Flo said, “I’m leaving the station for a bit. You two keep things up and running.”
Both young men were apparently used to silently communicating with Flo so as not to be overheard on her show. Each of them gave a quiet thumbs-up in response.
I followed Flo out to the parking lot, where she climbed into a plain white Chevy Impala that, like her Cadillac, bore a license plate frame with the Ledbetter Cadillac motto. Apparently the Impala was the dealership’s loaner car.
I followed Flo out of the lot and onto the surface streets. Being the uncooperative pain in the ass that she was, she took advantage of the drive to stop by a dry cleaner to drop off a couple of blouses, fill her tank up with gas, and make a run through a burger joint drive-thru to pick up lunch. Finally, we turned onto her street. This time, rather than parking at the curb, I pulled into her driveway. My G-ride had a minor oil leak. Why not repay Flo’s hospitality by leaving a greasy stain in her driveway?
Carrying her soft drink and bag of food, Flo headed to her front door. I followed on her heels as she unlocked the door and stepped inside.
Whoa.
The outside of the house was grand, but the inside was even more opulent. My eyes scanned the space, taking it all in. A chandelier sporting more crystals than a meth dealer hung in the foyer. A wide, circular staircase swept upward to the second floor. Thick Persian rugs graced the marble floors in the living and dining rooms flanking the foyer, while oversized antique china cabinets and bookcases soared toward the twelve-foot ceilings. Rather than sporting the same color throughout the house, the walls were painted in varying shades of red, ranging from a light rose in the entryway to a deeper burgundy in the adjacent rooms.
Flo carried her food with her, the scent of onions and pickles and French fries trailing the woman as she led me up the staircase. She opened a French door and entered a nicely appointed study with hardwood floors, heavy cherrywood furniture, and walls the color of merlot. She dropped her bag of food on an end table but carried her drink with her. “Safe’s in here,” she said, walking over to a narrow closet and pulling the slatted door open.
At the bottom of the space was a large black safe with a combination lock. She crouched down and took a noisy sip of her drink—sluuuurp!—while twirling the combination lock with the fingertips of her right hand. Flo stopped the lock and, with a click, it released. She swung the door open, stood, and stepped back, jerking the straw up and down inside the plastic lid. Squeaky-squeak. “Have at it, Miss Holiday. I’ll just take a seat here and keep an eye on you, make sure you don’t pocket any of my funds.” With that, she flopped backward into an upholstered armchair, retrieved her bag of food from the table, and shoved her hand inside. Crinkle-crinkle.
Her insinuation that I might steal from her incensed me so bad it was a wonder my hair didn’t explode in flame. Keep cool, Tara. Don’t let this bitch get to you. I knelt down and peered into the safe. Inside sat stack after stack of bills held together by red rubber bands. Most of the bills appeared to be twenties, but there were also stacks of tens, fives, and ones.
It took several trips for me to carry the stacks over to the desk. Once I finished, I spent the next twenty minutes counting out the bills, attaching a sticky note to the top of each pile to denote the total. Flo continued to tug on her straw throughout my count. Squeak-squeak. Squeak-squeak. She also attempted to derail my mental counting by calling out random numbers. “Twenty-three!”
Eighteen, nineteen, twenty—
“Sixty-five!” she hollered with a laugh.
Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three—
“Ninety-seven!”
Ninety-eight, ninety-nine—
Shit. I grabbed a tissue from the box on the desk, tore two strips from it, and shoved them in my ears to drown her out.
One, two, three …
Once the bills were sorted and counted, I pulled out my pocket calculator to add up the total and pulled the makeshift plugs from my ears. “Twelve thousand three hundred eighty-nine dollars.”
“If you say so.” She slurped the last of her drink. Sluuuurp. Obviously her mother hadn’t sent her to Miss Cecily’s Charm School like my mother had.
I jotted the amount down. “Where’s the rest of your cash?”
“That’s all of it.”
I eyed the bills. While it was an impressive pile, twelve grand represented a paltry accumulation for someone like Flo, who’d earned a good living for many years before she’d reduced her salary to the pittance it now was. I returned my gaze to Flo. “You’re telling me that this twelve thousand dollars—”
“Twelve thousand three hundred and eighty-nine dollars,” she corrected with a smirk I was tempted to slap off her face.
I took a breath to calm myself. “This cash represents all of your assets other than your house, your car, and the radio station?”
“Yes,” Flo replied. “That’s what I’m telling you.”
“So you spent all the savings you had from back when your father paid you a good salary?”
“Sure did,” she said. “I like to travel and eat out and have a good time. You only live once. Might as well enjoy it.”
“Everything, other than the cash on this desk, is gone, then?”
She released a long huff of air. “I can say the same thing fifty different ways if you like, but that’s all of my cash holdings. I don’t own any stock, any bonds, any mutual funds, any other real estate, any checking account, any savings account, or any offshore accounts. I’ve got one credit card I use for shopping, but I pay it off each month via money orders.”
She seemed to have her story down pat. But I still didn’t believe it.
I gestured to the stacks. “What are you going to do when this runs out?”
She shrugged. “I’ll figure something out.”
I stared the woman down for a long moment. “What aren’t you telling me, Miss Cash?”
She returned the stare before responding. “Well, for starters,” she said, “I’m not telling you what I think about the federal government invading my private home and sticking its fingers in my pockets. And I’m not telling you what I think about those shoes you’re wearing.” Her nose scrunched in distaste.
Frankly, I didn’t give a rat’s ass what this woman thought about the IRS or my shoes. Her failure to pay her fair share of taxes didn’t only impact the government; it also affected everyone else who had to pick up the slack for deadbeats like her. I wondered what her neighbors would think if they realized Flo had left them to foot the bill for defense, highways, and national parks and willfully failed to pay her part. They might not be so eager to look out for her best interests and report the federal agent who’d tampered with her gardenias.
I cocked my head and gave Flo a pointed look. “What do you think your listeners and neighbors and staff would say if they knew you weren’t paying your taxes? That the woman who claimed to be a financial expert was flouting her debts? Violating federal law?”
She sent me a pointed look right back. “They’d wonder why a federal agent had also violated the law by leaking confidential information about a taxpayer.”
She had me there. Still … “You realize that if the IRS has to file a lawsuit against you the petition will be in the public record, don’t you? Reporters routinely check the filings for potential news stories. When they see a local celebrity like you has been sued, they’ll have a field day. Your name will be plastered all over the newspaper headlines. It could put an end to your career and your family’s radio station.” I let that sink in for a moment before giving her one last chance. Softly, I said, “Look, Miss Cash. It gives me no pleasure to ruin someone. But I have a job to do. If you come clean, give us the information we need, and pay up, you can avoid a scandal and jail time. If you don’t, all bets are off. What do you say?”
She looked at me for a long moment, and somewhere, deep behind her eyes I saw the first sign that she was wavering. But a moment later her eyes gleamed with fresh resolve.
She leaned toward me. “I say, ‘It’s on,’ Agent Holloway.”
* * *
I fumed the entire drive back to my office. Oh, it’s on, all right! It’s on like Donkey Kong! Flo Cash had met her match; she just hadn’t realized it yet. If she thought being obstinate and uncooperative would cause me to relent in frustration, she didn’t know Tara Holloway.
Back at my desk, I stared at the wall and pondered how to proceed. Hm-m … It couldn’t hurt to call Ledbetter Cadillac, right? To verify Flo’s story? After all, for all I knew she’d faked the invoice from the towing company.
I looked up the phone number for Ledbetter Cadillac online and called their service department. Realizing that they weren’t likely to give information to a third party and realizing I couldn’t impersonate a taxpayer, I simply said, “Good afternoon. I’m calling to check on a car and wondering what all you’ve done and when it might be ready. The name in your paperwork will be Flo Cash.”
Hey, it’s all about plausible deniability. After all, I hadn’t actually claimed to be Flo, right?
“Just a moment,” the man said. He returned to the line thirty seconds later. “We’ve finished the routine maintenance and oil change. The only thing left to do is rotate the tires. We’ll have that done here shortly if you want to pick the car up today.”
Routine maintenance? Oil change? Tire rotation? “What about the engine problem?”
The man paused for a second or two, probably scanning the work order. “I don’t see anything here about an engine problem. Only that you requested the fifty-thousand-mile recommended maintenance, an oil change, and the tire rotation.”
The bitch lied about having trouble under her hood. I’ve been hoodwinked! “How much will the work run me?”
“Says here that per the general manager there’s to be no charge.”
“Fantastic,” I said. “Can’t beat that price with a stick.”
If I hadn’t been sure before, I was now convinced more than ever that Flo was trading airtime for cars and food and services, including automobile maintenance.
Now I just had to prove it.