Ian Hamilton - The disciple of Las Vegas

“Your two million or so?”

“I was paid $2,030,000,” he said.

She opened her notebook. “Do you mind if I write this down?”

“Be my guest.”

“You’re an oil-field worker, I understand.”

“I was an oil-field worker. A technician, but still working outside,” he said. “I’ve worked all over the place. The last job was in bloody Fort McMurray — northern Alberta — those horrendous tar sands. I put in six months without a break, built myself a very nice bankroll, and decided to treat myself to an extended holiday in Las Vegas. That’s where I met Philip.”

Ava’s heart sank. There was no worse combination in the world than Las Vegas and a Chinese gambler.

“I play poker for relatively high stakes — ten- to twenty-dollar no-limit hold’em. I started off at the Bellagio but there’s a real pecking order there. If you’re not a high roller or a professional player you get treated like shit. So I moved my action to the Venetian and got in with an okay crowd. We played in a private room just to the side of the main area. Philip was one of the regulars. He and I played together for six or seven consecutive days.

“Everybody thinks poker is cutthroat but, you know, you can only play so many hands, and when you’re not playing a hand or you’re between hands, there’s a lot of chit-chat. It actually gets kind of social. That’s when Philip and I got to know each other.”

“What kind of poker player is he?”

“Not bad, not bad at all. He tended to play a little too tight and that worked against him, especially in Vegas, where they pick up on your tendencies really quickly. But it didn’t kill him. When he drank, well, that was another story. The more he downed, the looser he got and the more money he lost. He didn’t drink that often, though. I figure he was down maybe thirty or forty thousand for the week we played together. Not that he gave a shit. He never lost his cool.”

“How did you do?”

“I was up two thousand. It should have been more, but I lost a couple of monster pots the last two days I was there.”

“So you and Phillip played poker together.”

“And we talked. He told me about his business, about his big-time brother. I told him about my rather crappy existence. Despite the difference in our lifestyles, we hit it off. On my fourth day at the table, Philip asked me to join him for dinner. We ate at the Chinese restaurant in the Venetian, comped, of course, and he opened up a bit more. We did the same the next night and the night after that. On the sixth night he asked me if I wanted to do some business with him. I told him I wasn’t a businessman. He said not to worry, that he would look after all the details. All I had to do was follow his lead and act like I owned a company.

“I told him I needed to know exactly what I was getting myself into. He told me that he hadn’t finalized his plans yet and said he would like to contact me in a week or two if that was okay by me. I had no reason to say no. I wasn’t back in Fort McMurray more than a week before he called. He asked me to fly to Kelowna to meet him. And I did.”

“He had set up Kelowna Valley Developments by then?”

“Yep.”

“Why Kelowna?”

“He said it was far enough from Vancouver to discourage casual visits.”

“From whom?”

“His wife.”

“His wife?”

“Yep, that’s why he was doing all this shit. He had money he needed to move out of the country into some investments, and she was all over him. He said she wouldn’t care if he was putting money into land in Kelowna.”

“And he wanted you to be the middle man. That’s all, right?”

“That’s all.”

“And you leapt at the chance?”

He looked at her as if she were crazy. “Have you ever been to Fort McMurray?”

“No.”

“Have you ever spent an entire winter working outdoors in minus-twenty-degree weather?”

“No.”

“Well, you’re goddamn right I leapt at the chance.”

“So you became president of Kelowna Valley Developments.”

“I did. He brought the articles of incorporation with him and gave me a cheque for ten thousand dollars to open a bank account.”

“And then how did it work?”

“Philip would send me all the paperwork I needed. I just turned around and sent it back to his office. They’d cut me a cheque, I’d deposit it, then Philip would tell me where to wire it. It was real simple.”

“And you kept three and a half percent.”

“That was the deal.”

“Didn’t you think that was a lot of money for simply shuffling paper around?”

“The wife sounds pretty fierce,” he said, with a slightly sheepish grin.

“That’s bull,” she said.

He averted his eyes.

“You knew what you were doing was probably highly illegal.”

“But I didn’t know for sure.”

“You’re no idiot. You could have guessed.”

Cousins tapped his fingers on the table, his attention wandering. “Wait here,” he said.

She watched him as he walked towards what she guessed was his bedroom. She wondered if the cooperative phase was over.

When he came back into the kitchen he was carrying a large brown envelope. “Let me finish the story, and then I’ll show you this,” he said.

“Go ahead.”

“Everything went smoothly for about five months, and then two weeks ago Philip called me in a fucking panic. He said his wife’s auditors were all over the deal and that it might be best for me to get out of Kelowna. I told him I wasn’t scared of his wife or her auditors, because as far as I was concerned I hadn’t done anything wrong. That’s when he told me that it was company money I’d been sending to Costa Rica.

“He told me he needed to go to Manila to sort things out, and that if I just laid low for a few weeks everything would be fine. He told me to take my money with me. I told him I still had an account with one of the big U.S. banks from my days working in Texas. He said that would be too easy to track, and gave me the name of the bank in Jersey.”

“Did he tell you to come to San Francisco as well?”

“Hell, no, that was my decision. I’m gay.” Her surprise must have registered on her face, because he asked, “Do you have a problem with that?”

“Hardly,” Ava said. “Let’s get back to Philip. How was his mood during this period?”

“Progressively wackier.”

“When was the last time you spoke to him?”

“I called him after I crossed the border.”

“And?”

“He told me not to worry.”

“Strange advice, given the circumstances.”

“I don’t see why,” he said.

She was impressed again by his calmness and then moved to roil it. “You know you’re going to have to give that money back, don’t you?”

His face was impassive. “I’m not giving anything back,” he said. “I earned it. I’m keeping it.”

“Philip Chew stole it.”

“Not that I knew.”

“You knew, but you just didn’t want to admit it. Why do you think the money was sent to all those individuals if he was investing in a business? What sense does that make?”

“He said that was the way they wanted it done.”

“And you actually believed that?”

Cousins looked away and shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He had wanted to believe it, she thought, but he knew. He opened the envelope and took out a document. “Here, this is a contract I had a lawyer draw up with Philip,” he said, slipping it across the table to her. “I’m not a total fool. It outlines exactly what I was to do and why I was to do it. There’s an affidavit at the back signed by Philip that swears the money is his to do with as he wishes. He’s specific about investing money in Costa Rica. My lawyer put in a paragraph that absolves me of any responsibility for the project. I was simply an employee, performing a task based on Philip’s sworn and notarized statement that everything was completely legal and above board.”