Twenty-Three
They were well out over the Atlantic when Rachel was finally ready to ask about the day’s events. “Well, how’d you do it and where’d you get the scratch to pay for the first class seats? I’m kind of blitzed—I’ll believe practically anything you tell me.”
“My real name is Bruce Wayne and I’m worth billions.”
“Except that.”
“It really troubled me that Murray, a man who was in such trouble, was in such a hurry a to sign on the dotted line.”
“He was looking for windfall profits, wasn’t he? Wasn’t that what he needed?”
“Sure, but the payoff was years down the road, far too late to help him out with Vegas and the mob. At first I thought he was planning to offload his shares to someone else early on, payoff Atwater’s advance, and score an early profit without waiting for the actual diamond strike.”
“Could he have done that?”
“Yes, his shares were transferable, but finding another investor to take them off his hands might not be so easy to find.”
“What then?”
“Well, I figured if Murray was in deep with Vegas and the mob…”
Rachel grinned. “You figured he owed other people as well. Who?”
“Sam.”
“You?”
He laughed. “You really are drunk. No, not me, Uncle Sam. I did a little digging and I was right. He’s being investigated for tax evasion. And what’s worse than owing the mob?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. What? A heart attack? A gun to the head?”
“You’re close. Owing the mob and being locked up in the federal penitentiary where you’ve got a zero chance of making the money you need to pay them back and nowhere to run when they send in one of their torpedoes to shank you in the shower. That’s a pretty bitter end for a man of privilege like Murray to grapple with.”
She shook her head in disbelief. “What? I need another friggin’ drink. How the hell did that help us?”
“Using Wilcox’s influence we were able to structure a deal that helped both us and Murray.”
She called for the flight attendant. “Hit me again will you? Thanks.” She waited in silence for her fresh drink before speaking. “Okay, go on.”
“Over the last decade Murray has paid back millions in vigorish to the mob—one mobster in particular, Tony Bolla. He gave the feds everything they needed to put Bolla away for a very long time. The FBI and the IRS both made out—loan sharking, tax evasion, seizure of assets. That’s why Hender’s boss was so quick to sign the submission agreement. We made a deal that made everyone look good.”
“Everyone except Hender.” She smiled. “I’m not unhappy about that. But Murray signed his own death warrant. You know the crooked noses are going to come after him for testifying against Bolla.”
“Executive witness protection, hon. He’ll live high on the hog and on the government’s dime. Probably somewhere in or around where I grew up in Iowa where they have more hogs than people.”
Her eyes grew large. “Executive witness protection? That’s a thing?”
“Apparently it is when Millard Wilcox is involved.”
“And how exactly did you come by Millard Wilcox, the legal trade’s answer to Superman?”
“It was all there in front of us—the files we downloaded from Alton Wrent’s computer. It was like a Who’s Who of the rich, powerful, and influential. Milliard Wilcox is every gazillionaire’s criminal defense attorney. I paid him handsomely and he dropped everything to help us.”
“Except that we’re broke. By the way, how did you manage to send off snarly Joseph O’Rourke with such a big smile on his face? Our diamond deal went belly up.”
“No it didn’t.”
She gasped. “We got the whole five—”
He muzzled her with an open hand. “Shhh.” He leaned in and whispered in her ear. “No. The wire transfer was bogus. No funds were ever sent from Atwater’s account.”
“Explain,” she insisted.
He took the thumb drive out of his pocket and held it up for her to see. “Wrent pays all the bills for a lot of very wealthy people. The cash accounts he oversees contain more than two hundred million dollars. I took a total of six hundred thousand, evenly withdrawn from more than three hundred separate accounts—a meager two K from each. It’ll hardly be noticed—just enough to pay O’Rourke a quarter mil—which was not a bad consolation prize considering he was about to go up the river one moment and jetting off to Cancun the next. There was a fast one hundred K for Wilcox, which left two-fifty for us. It’s not the big four million score we were hoping for but it’ll give us plenty of time to lie low and figure out where we go from here.”
“Hmmm. I thought we were going to Fiji,” she said with disappointment.
“That’s our end game strategy, babe. But I think we’ll need to give our Hollywood angle a try, if we’re going to make that kind of money.”
She wrinkled her nose. “We’re flying the wrong way, then.”
Sam grinned. “We have a little business in Switzerland first. Besides I haven’t gone skiing in ages and I need a new watch.”
“You already have a watch.”
“I want a genuine Swiss timepiece.” He looked at his wristwatch. “This piece of junk is a knockoff.”
She giggled, a boozy drunken giggle. “All this alcohol is getting to me, and knowing that I’m not getting thrown into a federal jail…I feel like the weight of the world has been lifted from my shoulders.” She smiled naughtily. “Follow me into the first class lavatory and I’ll give you a piece to knock off.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “There isn’t a hell of a lot of room in the lavatory.”
“Or I could throw you out the window at thirty thousand feet.”
“You win,” he said, his grin spreading ear to ear as he quickly unbuckled his seatbelt.