couldn’t pull it off, but it might just be enough to scare you off, Matt. He apparently doesn’t know Jock is in the picture, so he points Bates at you, and Bates screws it up, and you’ve gotten the word that you should back off of whatever you’re doing or a real hitman might just be coming your way.”
“That has a certain logic to it,” said Jock.
“Yeah,” I said, “but the guy with the knife made a real effort. He wasn’t fooling around.”
“Are there any Asian gangs operating in this area?” Jock asked.
“No,” said Sims. “We’ve got Mexican gangs, Russian gangs, a number of others, but no Asian gangs that I know of.”
“Then,” I said, “who the hell are these people?”
“Let me know if you find out,” said Sims.
We were crossing the Cortez Bridge when Jock’s cell phone beeped. He pulled it out of his pocket, opened it, and said, “Text from the director. The information on Desmond was just e-mailed to my computer.”
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