“Busted up but they?ll live. Lost two of the horses.”
He whistled through his teeth, but that seemed to be the extent of his interest.
“And how are things at the bank?”
“I thought you?d never ask,” Stick answered with a smile. “I tumbled on to how they?re using the
bank to wash their money. The bad news is, as far as I know, what they?re doing is legal.”
“Impossible!” I snapped.
“Well, to some extent it?s legal,” he said, amending his original comment. “The account Cohen uses is
in the name of the Abaca Corporation. According to Charlie One Ear, Abaca owns Thunder Point
Marina, Bronicata?s restaurant, the Porthole, the Jalisco Shrimp Company, etcetera. I checked the
account and there are daily deposits, but never more than a couple thousand dollars.”
“That?s inconsistent with what Lark told you.”
“Hang on,” he said, “I?m not through yet. I only had that one account number, so I decided to check
the daily tape. That?s a chronological list of all the deposits made at the bank each day. Lo and
behold, there?re ten deposits for ten grand each, all within seconds of each other.” He made a grand
gesture with his hands and smiled. “Pyramids,” he said.
“Pyramids?”
“Cohen has this thing for pyramids.”
“I don?t understand.”
“It?s simple, once you tumble on to it. Cohen puts a hundred C?s in, Abaca shows a deposit of only
ten grand. It only gets complex when you start trying to decipher the whole system.”
“Well, try, „cause you?ve lost me,” I said.
“First, let?s assume that Seaborn is in collusion with Cohen. Cohen is using the bank as a washing
machine. The whole point is to move a lot of cash through the bank without making the IRS
suspicious, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“That?s where the pyramids come in. What happens, let?s say Cohen makes his daily deposit. . . ten
grand, for the sake of discussion. The deposit goes into the Abaca Corporation. That?s the base
company, okay? But the computer is programmed to immediately dispense that money, by
percentage, into several other accounts. It never appears as a ten-grand deposit because the computer
spreads it over ten other accounts before making the deposit.”
“Does it always go into the same accounts?” I asked.
He shook his head. “There?s a code designation on the account number that tells the computer what
set of accounts the money goes into and what percentage goes into each. Then each of those accounts
