“Tell me what you’re looking for.”
“Well,” Ollie said, “I guess I want to know what a book salesman was doing with types who’ll shoot a man at the back of his head and drop him in a garbage can.”
“Good Lord!” Halloway said.
Ollie didn’t know there was anyone still left on the planet who said, “Good Lord!” He had the feeling all over again that Richard Halloway was faking surprise and sorrow.
“Most of the gangs in Diamondback are dealing drugs,” he said, and watched Halloway’s eyes. Nothing flickered there. “Hoskins wasn’t doing dope, was he?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Whowouldknow?” Ollie asked.
“Pardon?”
“If he was doing drugs. Or dealing drugs. Or involved in any way with controlled substances.”
“I can’t possibly imagine Jerry …”
“Whocouldpossibly imagine it, Mr. Halloway?”
“I suppose our sales manager would have known him better than anyone else in the firm.”
“What’s his name?”
“She’s a woman.”
“Okay,” Ollie said.
“I’ll ask her to come in.”
CARELLA AND MEYER went to the Banque Francaise at ten that morning of the twenty-sixth with a court order to open Cassandra Jean Ridley’s safe deposit box. The manager of the bank was a Frenchman from Lyon. His name was Pascal Prouteau. In a charming accent, he said he had read about Mademoiselle “Reed-ley’s” death in the newspapers and was very sorry. “She was a lovely person,” he said. “It is a shame what ’appen.”
“When did she first open the box, can you tell us?” Meyer asked.
“Oui, messieurs,I ’ave her records here,” Prouteau said. “It was on the sixteenth of November.”
“How many times has she been in that box since?”
Prouteau consulted the signature card.
“She was ’ere a great deal,” he said, looking surprised, and handed the card to Carella. He and Meyer looked at it together. “We’ll need a copy of this, please,” Meyer said.
“Mais, oui, certainement,”Prouteau said.
“Let’s take a look in the box,” Carella said.
What they found in the box was $96,000 in hundred-dollar bills.
There was also a sheet of paper with a lot of figures on it.
They asked Prouteau for a copy of that as well.
THEY KNEW THE LADY had been smurfing even before they checked the figures against her two checkbooks and her passbook.
The handwritten notes in her safe deposit box looked like this:
“Missed a day,” Meyer said.
“Thanksgiving,” Carella said.
The next deposit was made almost two weeks later.
“According to her calendar, she came East on the eighth of December,” Carella said.
On the identical dates she had listed for withdrawals from the safe deposit box, there were corresponding deposits in either of her two checking accounts or her savings account. Each deposit was for a sum of money less than $10,000, the maximum cash deposit allowed under a federal law that had gone into effect almost three decades ago. Anything more than that sum had to be reported to the Internal Revenue Service on a so-called CTR, the acronym for Currency Transaction Report. Cassandra Jean Ridley, it would appear, had been engaged in money laundering, albeit on a relatively minor scale. Smurfing, as it was called in the trade.
In order to be charged with laundering, a person had to disguise the origin or ownership of illegally gained funds to make them appear legitimate. Hiding legitimately acquired money to avoid taxation also qualified as money laundering. The U.S. Treasury Department cautiously accepted a State Department Fact Sheet estimating that as much as four hundred billion dollars was laundered worldwide annually. Of this, fifty to a hundred billion was said to have come from drug profits in the United States alone.
If Cassandra Jean Ridley’s transfers of cash were indeed necessitated because the money came from drugs, she was small potatoes indeed. According to the evidence they now possessed, she had introduced a mere $200,000 into the banking system, and had then separated it from its possible criminal origins by passing it through several financial transactions. In police jargon, this was called “placement” and “layering.” But street sales of drugs were usually transacted in five- or ten-dollar bills, and the $96,000 they found in her safe deposit box was in hundreds. It seemed certain she hadn’t been running around the street selling dime bags of coke to teenagers.
Her checkbooks showed somewhat substantial amounts written to department stores all over the city in the weeks before her murder. The lady had been moving money around and spending it profligately. The only sum they could not account for was the $8,000 in $100 bills they’d found nestling in the top right hand drawer of her desk—presumably currency suspected in a kidnapping that had drawn the attention of the Secret Service.
