Lawrence Block - The Devil Knows You’re Dead

“Maybe there was some insurance money.”

“Surprise me if there was, but anything like that would have been long gone. Didn’t I say Glenn’s mother died about the time he started college?”

“I guess you did.”

He said, “Raises a question, doesn’t it? Where’d he get the money?”

“I don’t know. How did the IRS know to come after Al Benziger?”

“My Lord,” he said.

“Who knew about the second set of books?”

“An hour ago I’da said nobody knew. Perry Preiss didn’t, I know that for a fact. I didn’t know about it. I’da said Al and Marie and nobody else.”

“And now?”

“Now I’d have to wonder if maybe Glenn knew,” he said. “My Lord, my Lord.”

“He was a snitch,” I told Drew. “A career informant, working free-lance. He got his start in Altoona selling cars for his uncle Al.”

“Uncle Al in Altoona.”

“He managed to find out that his aunt and uncle were evading taxes in high style. Two sets of books, secret bank accounts. I gather the uncle was a hard man to work for, so Glenn went to work for himself.”

“He ratted them out to the IRS?”

“You can make money that way,” I said. “I always knew that, but I never knew what a popular cottage industry it was. They’ve got an 800 number just for snitches. I called it yesterday and spoke with a woman who told me how the program worked. I asked her a lot of questions, and I didn’t get the feeling she was hearing any of them for the first time. She must sit there all day long, chatting with the greedy and the resentful.”

“Plenty of those to go around.”

“I would think so. Your compensation is a percentage of the take in back taxes and penalties, and the percentage varies with the quality of the material you supply. If you bring in a set of books and make their whole case for them, that’s worth more than if you just point the finger and tell them where to look.”

“Only fair.”

“You can stay anonymous, too, and I’m sure Glenn did. His uncle may have figured out who jobbed him, but maybe not. He had to step lively to stay out of Leavenworth. Sold everything he owned and left town in disgrace. I don’t know how much he settled for, but Glenn’s piece of the action was enough to put him through law school.”

“Did he have to pay taxes on it?”

“You know,” I said, “I asked her about that. She said they like to collect it in advance, like withholding tax.”

“They would,” he said.

We were in the Docket, on Joralemon Street around the corner from Brooklyn’s Borough Hall. It’s a nice room, high-ceilinged, the decor running to oak and brass and red leather. As the name would suggest, the patrons are lawyers for the most part, although the place is also popular with cops. Lunch hour is the busy time. They sell a lot of overstuffed sandwiches, pour a lot of drinks.

“Gorgeous day,” Drew said.

“Beautiful,” I said. “Last time I ate here it was like this. It was in the spring and I had lunch with a cop from Brooklyn Homicide. John Kelly, I saw him at the bar just now when I came in. It was such a nice day that I walked out of here and kept on walking clear out to Bay Ridge. I don’t think I’ll do that today. You know something? If yesterday had been warm and sunny I’d still be wondering where Glenn Holtzmann’s money came from.”

“The weather kept you home.”

“And so I spent the whole day on the phone, and that turned out to be the right way to do it. Once I caught on to how he got his start, it wasn’t hard to figure out who to call next and what to look for. When he passed the bar exam he went to work at a law firm in White Plains. Shortly after he left them the firm fell apart. The partner I talked to suggested idly that maybe Holtzmann had seen the handwriting on the wall.”

“I bet he wrote it himself.”

“And didn’t sign his name. I called Jespesson back, that’s the lawyer’s name, to ask what had happened to the firm. The question must have caught him off base, because he didn’t even ask why I wanted to know. It seems one of the other partners represented a couple of drug traffickers.”

“And the lawyer got paid in drug money and didn’t report it and they sank his boat for it. You don’t know how much I hate stories like this, Matt.”

“That’s not quite how it went. The firm didn’t do any criminal work, they represented these clients in other matters. And they got paid by check, or if any cash changed hands nobody knew about it. But this one partner developed a taste for cocaine.”

“Oh, don’t tell me.”

“He funded his habit by doing a little dealing on his own. Then his partner in one of his deals turned out to be the DEA. They gave him a chance to roll over on his dealer clients, but I guess he figured a federal prison was better than an unmarked grave. By the time it was over it developed that he’d been stealing from clients, too. Jespesson gave me the impression that dissolving the firm was a cinch, that there wasn’t much left to dissolve.”

“I’m assuming Holtzmann put the DEA onto the partner.”

“I’m assuming the same thing,” I said. “I can’t call them up and ask. But I think it’s a safe assumption.”

“I gather the DEA pays informants.”

“I did call and ask them that. They weren’t as forthcoming as the nice lady at the tax office, but yes, they pay a bounty on drug dealers and a percentage on whatever they confiscate. I learned more about how it works from a fellow I know who knows a lot about information and its value in the open market.” Danny Boy, and I’d called him at home; the weather had kept him indoors last night, too. “The zero-tolerance policy may not be winning the war on drugs,” I said, “but it’s starting to make the battles cost-effective. The first thing you do when you make a drug bust is confiscate everything within arm’s reach. Vehicles, boats. Drugs, of course, but also the cash if the people you arrested came to buy. If any meetings took place in their houses, or if they stored product there, then you attach that. With so much property up for grabs, you’ve suddenly got a big budget for compensating informants.”

“The apartment,” Drew said.

“It’s suddenly obvious, isn’t it? Some Europeans or South Americans bought it for cash under the shield of a Cayman Islands corporation. There’s a dozen other things that could be besides drug money, but it’s certainly up there on the list. And governmental seizure would explain how MultiCircle Productions lost the apartment when there was no mortgage for anybody to foreclose on. And then there’s the US Asset Reduction Corp. I couldn’t find a trace of them because they probably don’t exist outside of a file folder in some government agency or other. They must be some sort of corporate shell for the liquidation of seized assets.”

“I thought they liked to get a lot of publicity with their seizures. Show the taxpayers how they’re really socking it to the dope peddlers.”

“Not always,” I said. “Sometimes they’d just as soon keep it quiet. So nobody in Congress starts noticing how much money’s passing through their hands.”

“Maybe some of it sticks to the occasional palm.”

“Not absolutely out of the question, is it?”

“And Holtzmann? What did he do to get the apartment, and who’d he do it to?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “My first thought was that he helped make a case against somebody in MultiCircle. But that would leave him with his cock on the block. If any of the people he screwed knew him, and then he’s living in their apartment—”

“How else would he get it? It had to be compensation for some sort of informing he did.”