Chapter 56

Avram was organized. All the important records were at his townhouse in one place: the den. He sat in his desk chair and fed them into the cross-cut shredder, a few at a time. He’d planned carefully for this, for years. The Feds would try to charge him, in absentia, with money laundering.

Well, he wasn’t going to make it easy for them.

Fortunately, Silvio Tambini had more places to wash his money these days, and he spread it around. Avram never really wanted to do it; he didn’t need the heat. There was a limit on how much money could be run through a car operation, even a large one.

Avram had been careful. Solomon Chrysler’s new car business was legitimate, and Avram had been downright meticulous about taxes, so there was never any undue interest from the IRS.

It had all been creative bookkeeping in the used car and service side. Essentially, Silvio Tambini gave Avram dirty money from the drug business. Avram, in turn, regularly sent large checks to dummy companies owned by the obscure friends and relatives of the Tambini family…payments for nonexistent cars, parts, paint jobs, storage, service contracts…whatever Avram could dream up and pump up.

Silvio got his own money back, cleaned, and Avram got a cut.

Over the years, it had added up. But the real money was the rent…rent for Castle Cay, and then for the warehouse in Waltham and the closed service station next to the Boston store.

Castle Cay, in particular, had been a gold mine for Avram. But now he hated the place! Even more than that, he had hated his brother, Marc, who had painted the far side of Castle Cay just before Avram took over managing it. Two paintings showed the east coast of the island behind the ridge as it was…before it had a seawall, an airstrip and two cement block buildings to accommodate drug smuggling.

The canvases were dramatic. Dark and different from his other ones, they drew attention…and Marc had painted the date on them.

That fag bastard…why did he have to date them!

Avram had become obsessed with acquiring the paintings ever since he saw them at Marc’s art show in Boston.

He shook his head, as if to shake their image out of his mind.

They don’t matter anymore. The game is over. I win, anyway.

Avram had a foolproof plan to simply disappear.

He thought about his bank. They’d find nothing incriminating there, because he’d never kept anything of real importance in the bank. He sneered.

I’ve got my own “lock-box”…

It was a new car, changed out yearly, sitting amongst a sea of other cars, on the Waltham storage lot. This special car’s invoice and computer record would be lost for a whole year, until Avram found it at the year-end inventory audit. He would simply drive out there one night a year and replace it with a new model whose record would be lost for another year.

Avram was the only one with the keys to the car…this car with no record, which was hidden in plain sight…that had a black bag in the trunk with his new identity…a driver’s license, passport and a sizeable amount of cash.

His plan was to act calmly, as if tomorrow was just another day. If he was right, they were watching his townhouse, too. He would go to the dealership, as usual, parking his Jag in the usual spot. He’d close the blinds in his office, squinting at the bright sun, just in case they were watching. Then he’d look up a new car in the back lot, the same model with dark tinted windows, and get the keys.

A couple minutes on the computer would transfer the vehicle identification number of the car he was taking to the Waltham storage lot. He’d slip on his rain jacket and cap, put the dealer plate in the back window and drive off. In no time, he’d be in Waltham, switching the cars. They’d never know he was gone…with luck, maybe not until the store closed. By then, he’d be on an international flight out of Manchester, New Hampshire.

He smiled at his own brilliance.

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