Thomas Perry - Blood Money

By the time she had gone down the list of corporate foundations, Rita was up and working beside her, chewing bubble gum and popping it every few minutes. Jane worked eight hours, then showered and went out to buy another carload of supplies in Albuquerque. This time she went to different stores, but the extra time it took her to find them was bought back by the fact that she knew precisely what she needed. She used credit cards in three different names to pay for them, returned to the house at four with take-out dinners, then worked from five until eleven.

The next day, Jane wrote more letters and filled out checks to universities. Some were donations from corporations, some from foundations, and some from imaginary people with common surnames that allowed Jane to imply a connection without specifying whether they were alumni or parents or grandparents of students.

On the day after that, Jane gave money to tribal councils on Indian reservations. There was a secret pleasure to this day’s work. She had always tried to keep her ancestry to herself while she was working. The only exceptions had been two occasions when she’d had no place to hide a runner except on a reservation and the single admission to Celia Fulham, the social worker in Florida. The secrecy was one of a thousand precautions that she had practiced until they were habitual. If one of her enemies considered her an American woman of unknown ethnicity, he would have to find her among a hundred and fifty million others. If he knew she was on a tribal enrollment list, he could eliminate about a hundred and forty-nine million. As Jane wrote the letters, she found herself straining to make the numbers as large as she could, and three or four times she caught herself making them too large. The reason for big checks was that reservations were starved for money. But the reason she couldn’t make the checks even bigger was that reservations were starved for money. Huge donations of suspicious provenance would shriek for attention.

For the next two days, Jane devoted her time to grants for homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and relief organizations that helped the poor and hungry in cities. The day after that went to training and rehabilitation facilities for the handicapped, the undereducated, and the displaced.

A whole day and night were devoted to hospitals. There were thousands of them, and dozens seemed to have identical names. But hospitals were relatively safe recipients for the odd bits—money that cleared the accounts of an individual or foundation—because they were used to receiving donations of all sizes. Her fund-raising for Carey’s hospital had taught her exactly how the letters should look.

Jane awoke each morning before dawn wondering whether this would be the final day, but each time she would find the insomniac Henry Ziegler up, printing out the lists of imaginary people who were going to be that day’s donors. In the evening, Bernie would hand Ziegler his latest spiral notebook, and Ziegler would leaf through twenty or thirty pages at dinner, all of them crammed with new accounts and locations that had spilled from Bernie’s prodigious memory. Each time the contents of a notebook had been transferred into the computers, Jane would take the pages to the fireplace and burn them.

There was a whole day and night of scholarships. Any organization listed in the Foundation Directory that gave scholarships got a large donation earmarked for its permanent endowment. There were two days of donations to institutions that cared for orphans and unwanted children. Jane was astounded at how many there were. She spent two days on nonprofit homes and relief agencies for the elderly, and there was even a half day for animals.

Jane had begun the work with a cold, composed determination, but as the days went by, she began to feel a dreamlike disorientation. She had tried to keep up with Ziegler, but the lack of sleep was wearing down her certainty, and she began to work from habit. The walls of the garage and the bedrooms upstairs were now lined with boxes of bundled and sealed envelopes, and the living room closets were filling up with the overflow.

One morning when she joined Ziegler in the dining room, he was typing in a series of Web addresses. He would complete one, then wait a few seconds, then nod to himself happily.

“What’s that?” asked Jane.

“I’m looking over our shoulder,” he answered. “Before any check gets into the mail, I want to be sure the money got into the account first. If a check bounces, we’re not going to be around to cover it. Mr. Hagedorn and Mrs. Fuller aren’t going to answer their mail.”

“How does it look so far?”

“No mistakes, no problems with any of the big stuff: the hundred and ninety-two foundations, the fifty-six corporations, and the big trust accounts we set up are all solvent. Now all we’ve got to do is make payday before all these checks get stale and each of these accounts grows too much.”

“Oh, that’s right,” said Jane. “I’ve been so busy I haven’t thought about that lately. What can we do about the profits that keep coming in?”

“Zilch,” he answered. “There’s no way to clear off a billion without leaving a few million in uncredited interest that will come in later. It might be what saves us. It takes a bit of time before the federal and state governments realize we’re not going to file tax returns, and the clock doesn’t start until next April. Foundations owe a one percent federal excise tax. The government wants it, but if the account still exists, they don’t get too alarmed. These crumbs and leftovers will probably buy us a year or two after that before the feds start looking for us in any way that matters. After five years, it becomes an unclaimed account. The state confiscates it, pays the feds off, and keeps the rest.”

“It’s like leaving an unfinished drink on the table,” said Jane. “The waiter thinks you’re coming back.”

“Right,” said Ziegler. “I hope giving it to them doesn’t bother you.”

“I’m not a big fan of governments,” said Jane. “But I like them better than gangsters. Wait. If we run out of charities, can we just slip some to governments?”

“Don’t even say it,” said Ziegler. “We’ve got to do everything the way people expect us to. Governments don’t like gifts. They like to snatch the money away from you.”

“Then let them,” she said. “What’s for today?”

“Problem assets.”

“What does that mean?”

“Bernie has been giving us clean, easy money as fast as we could spend it. But there are other things. He bought some land.”

“What’s the problem?”

“By definition, land is not something you can move from place to place, and you certainly can’t disguise it as something else. Converting it to cash isn’t easy. We can’t advertise it. Even if we found buyers in some yet-to-be invented quiet way, we can’t hang around for sixty-day escrows to close on a hundred and twenty pieces of property all over the country. And of course, the original deeds and papers are not at Bernie’s fingertips.”

“That shouldn’t matter. The sales must be recorded in county courthouses. He remembers the names, doesn’t he?”

“He’s Bernie the Elephant. He remembers the dates, prices, and map numbers.”

“Maybe we could put the land in the wills of dead people.”

Henry Ziegler squinted for a moment. “Not bad. We can leave it to organizations that can use it or sell it themselves.”

“What are the other problem assets?”

“He bought foreign bonds and stocks in foreign identities. It’s taken me a few hours to work my way through all of them, but I think I’m finished. I put in sell orders, with direct deposit to local banks. Then I requested that taxes be withheld by the banks before the money is sent to accounts in the U.S. That should take care of it. Then there’s the art.”