Chapter 4: Gone Fishing—With $ for Bait

THERE’S AN OLD ADAGE in detective work: follow the money. Riley’s question about where the money goes got me thinking, and it kept gnawing at me all night. In that odd way that the mind works, I found myself in a very hot dream with an unidentified model-quality date. But at every “important” point in the dream, my date would vanish and a sign would pop up that said “please deposit fifty cents more.” Most of the dream was occupied with trying to get fifty cents to deposit.

When I woke up, it was crystal clear to me that I had been looking for the wrong kind of clues on Simon’s computer. I resolved to start checking bank and financial records and find out where the money was going.

Riley had Friday off to meet with Lars on her thesis, so I had the day to myself in the office. I gave her time for her thesis work and didn’t require her to make it up. It was part of our agreement. Nonetheless, I knew that she would drive me to my appointments on Saturday even without asking.

I’d told Brenda that with the computer in my possession I would have access to all the personal information that was on it. That was only partly true. In order to get into bank records, I needed not only the computer’s password, but the bank password. That could have been a real problem unless the user had stored the password on the computer, like Simon did. It was a pretty common mistake people made with their computers. They entered a user name and password and the operating system popped up a window that asked if they’d like to remember the password. Well, who wouldn’t? Remembering passwords was a pain in the ass. Creating and remembering secure passwords was even harder.

Of course, when they selected the option to remember their password they got a little warning that anyone using this computer might be able to access the information they were saving. But who ever thought of anyone else using their personal computer in their home. Of course no one else had access to their computer—unless their spouse brought it to a computer forensics geek and told him to have a go at it. Getting into Simon’s bank accounts was as easy as looking up his Web history of places visited and revisiting them. Auto-sign-in and remembered passwords took care of the rest.

I didn’t know what I expected to find, but it wasn’t this. His bank account was a model of accounting perfection. It showed regular paychecks from the firm, normal utilities, and a mortgage payment. Groceries were bought. In general, it indicated a couple living within their generous but not extravagant means. There was a satisfactory balance in the account and the check Brenda wrote to me was already posted. I scanned the checks that had been paid and noted that most of them were signed by Brenda. Simon didn’t seem to do much with this family account.

The bank account led to credit cards and these, too, seemed in perfect order. But they showed a lot of different locations. Simon and Brenda traveled a lot. Dinner in New York, shopping, theater in DC. The next day, a hotel in Vegas. Did they ever stay home?

One account led to another and I discovered that there were often charges made in geographically different locations on the same day. A hotel in Orlando on the same night that one was paid in Acapulco. They traveled a lot, but not necessarily together. Finally, I came across the first of what I’d call Simon’s personal accounts. This account showed mainly cash deposits and cash withdrawals. Normally, if there aren’t checks you don’t know where the money goes, but with ATM records, you can tell the route it went to get there. It was obvious that Simon had some favorite spots to get money. That could only mean that he visited those places regularly. And that he used a lot of cash.

As I continued to investigate the accounts that the laptop was revealing to me, it was like finding little piles of virtual cash stuck in nooks and crannies all over the house. The diversity in business that Riley had spotted yesterday seemed to be reflected in the diversity of Simon’s accounts as well.

I found myself having pulled on a pair of surgical gloves that I wore when pulling apart a computer. But I wasn’t doing more than reading the private accounts of a one-time friend. It was like handling his dirty underwear. I didn’t really want to touch any of it.

It was still drizzling in Seattle, a gray, cold, wetness that felt like it had settled in for the season. It gets down into my bones and I decided there was no remedy but a bowl of Phó from a Vietnamese shop up at the Market. Maizie and I wound our way through the maze of tunnels and elevators that would get us from the Waterfront up to the Market and I ordered at the outdoor counter. At least they had an awning over the street so customers who sat on the outdoor stools were sheltered. Unfortunately, I couldn’t go inside with Maizie.

I sat there eating the hot soup and stirring bean sprouts and hot sauce into it, still caught up in the puzzle of Simon’s accounts. One of the cash machines that he frequented was located right here near Pike and First. I looked around, trying to picture him coming down from his penthouse office a few blocks away to get cash, lots of cash, near the Market. What kind of business was around here that he would want cash for? He certainly didn’t buy that many groceries.

The lights changed and, in the fashion peculiar to that intersection in Seattle, all traffic stopped and pedestrians crossed from every corner at once, some straight across the street and some diagonally between the corners. That was when I realized that one of those corners was still occupied by one of the older strip clubs in town. A block away was another.

Suddenly I wished I was still wearing those latex gloves. Was that where Simon’s money was going? I couldn’t imagine Simon going into a strip club—too many people might recognize him—but he’d always had an appetite for women. He had to be sating it somewhere.

They say that the only people who understand the national debt are billionaire entrepreneurs and mathematicians. Billionaires because sums of money in the billions and trillions are real to them. Mathematicians because a billion is as real a number as a hundred. I fell into the latter group. I could theoretically spend thousands of dollars a week, but I had no idea how Simon would do it. And his ATM withdrawals mysteriously stopped about ten months ago. Didn’t he use cash anymore?

I decided to start tracking down the major vices to see if there was one that might have gotten Simon hooked: women, gambling, and drugs.

Back at the office, I kept sifting through the files on Simon’s computer, but this time with a purpose. I plotted his cash transactions back for over two years. In addition to the ATM transactions near the market, there were two other locations that came up repeatedly early on, then suddenly stopped appearing in the records about ten months earlier. I looked up the addresses and found my first big clue. The two addresses were for Indian casinos within thirty miles of Seattle. This was something I knew a little bit about.

I’ve always liked games, even though I’ve never been a big gambler. Still, I knew both of the casinos that were on the list. Several months ago, I was called by the operations manager of the Sammamish Casino and Bingo Hall. His records had undergone a tribal audit and came up short over half a million dollars. He called me in to sift through his computer system for the leak. Finding the leak and getting a conviction on the embezzler saved Frank Deep Water Johnson his job. He always felt he owed me and was careful to be sure I earned complimentary meals and show tickets at the casino slightly faster than my play level merited. I called Frank to see if he could help me.

“Dag Hamar!” he exclaimed when he picked up the phone. “You must come out this weekend and I will get you a ticket to see Serendipity. In fact, bring your lovely assistant and I will get two tickets.”

“Frank, it sounds like a great idea,” I responded. “I wanted to come out this evening anyway to ask a couple of questions. I need a little deep information about a player.”

“Dag, you know that player information is confidential. I have to be careful,” he answered.

“I’m going to try not to put you on the spot,” I reassured him. “I’m on a missing person case and my records show that up until about ten months ago he was a regular out there. I was hoping you could tell me where he moved his action to.”

“Oh, that shouldn’t be a problem. If he is no longer a customer, then I’m not so picky about keeping information from you,” he laughed. “Are you suspecting foul play?”

“Not yet,” I answered. “I’m just looking for a place where a very rich man could drop a few thousand dollars and not be conspicuous. Maybe because he was playing with other very rich men like himself.”

“Dag,” he lowered his voice, “forgive me, but the game you want isn’t in your league. Technically, it doesn’t exist. This is Washington State, remember.”

“I understand, Frank,” I said. “Let’s just say that a businessman from the East is coming into town tonight and he wants to play where someone might be interested in a company he is selling.”

“I see,” Frank said. “What would this businessman’s name be?” I took a moment to do a mental inventory of identities that I could use and not get in trouble. Back at Gumshoe U under Lars, each of us were taught the fine art of creating a false identity that looked real enough to get us through a credit check. I seldom pulled a set of identity papers out of my safe except to keep them up to date, but I had some good ones.

“Sorry,” I said after a moment. “I was lost in thought for a moment. The businessman’s name is Jeremy Brett. He’s a business broker from New York representing a high tech startup in Minnesota looking for venture capital or outright sale. Funny, but he looks a lot like me.”

“Yes, well, I’ll be watching for Mr. Brett when he comes in this evening at, oh, about 9:00. I’ll have a couple of tickets available for him in your honor, but he should come alone,” Frank continued. “And he should bring money. There’s a thousand dollar minimum buy-in for the game he wants to play.”

“I’ll let him know,” I said. “I’ll… I mean, he’ll see you tonight.”

So, there was a high stakes poker game at the Sammamish Casino. Strictly speaking, that wasn’t legal. Poker tables were typically $25 or $100 limit. Frank was alluding to a no-limit game. Well, I figured Brenda could afford to front me a thousand dollars to find out information on Simon. I’d bill her for it.

I printed business cards that looked official enough and stopped by a local phone store to pick up a new cell phone and activate service in Jeremy Brett’s name. Maizie and I then caught a cab for home.

Friday night is Maizie’s sleep-over with Mrs. Prior, my landlady. I swear those two were made for each other and I was barely tolerated at times. We live in the top half of a duplex on lower Queen Anne. In her part, Mrs. Prior lives with an assortment of animals—birds, rabbits, and even a snake. She says that Maizie loves all the animals, but I think Maizie would love to eat all the animals. She absolutely drips saliva when I ask her if she wants to see Mrs. Prior.

Mrs. Prior was a pet psychic—excuse me—communicator. That portion of her day that was not taken up in caring for her own animals was spent caring for or communicating with others. She greeted us at the door and carried on a conversation with Maizie that completely excluded me. Finally, Mrs. Prior turned to me and said, “Maizie says she worries about you because you aren’t eating right. She says you need to have more fish in your diet and less red meat. And you should sleep more.” A large pink feather stuck through the back of Mrs. Prior’s tied up gray hair bobbed up and down with each sentence like a huge exclamation point. I told her that I would definitely have fish for dinner and not to worry. “Salmon,” Mrs. Prior called after me as I mounted the stairs to my unit.