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“You never thought about blackmailing him?” Virgil asked.
“Thought about it, never did anything. The problem is, you blackmail somebody like Noah, who has influence, and you might have a couple of crooked cops coming around to talk to you,” Hinton said. “If they got my fingerprints, I was toast. I couldn’t risk getting sideways with the cops.”
“Pretend we believe that,” Lucas said. “How much was Heath going to steal? I mean, from Home Streets?”
Hinton closed one eye and tipped his head to the side, thinking. “That’s... flexible. When it’s all said and done, he might get ten percent. He’d overpay the architect and general contractor and they’d kick the money back.”
“And how much would the project cost?” Lucas asked.
“However much we could raise,” Hinton said, as though that were obvious. “The deal is, you can get money for street-people housing from the governments—state, federal, some from the city—but most of it comes from do-gooder foundations. The foundations want a local charitable buy-in, maybe ten percent. Noah thinks if weget the ball rolling downhill, with big shots like Sand buying in and recruiting new money, we can raise a million. That might be a ten-million-dollar project. If he raises eight hundred thousand, it’ll be an eight-million-dollar project. And so on.”
Virgil whistled. “He’d take out a million? How would he get it clean?”
“He plays poker in Vegas. He wins. I mean, not really. He doesn’t actually play. He buys the chips with cash, takes back checks when he cashes out, so he has the checks from the casinos to prove his so-called winnings. Declares it on his income tax. Not all of it, but a pretty big chunk. He spreads that over two or three years.”
“What about the rest? The undeclared cash?” Lucas asked.
Hinton spread his hands: “Look at his checkbook and credit cards. He doesn’t spend anything on food and clothing or gas or travel or any of that, because he uses cash whenever he can. He’s probably the last guy to use a travel agent, because he gives his travel agent cash, and they buy all his tickets for him, pre-pay for hotels. He has a place somewhere down in the Caribbean, on... Arugula? Something like that. He bought an Arugula passport back a while ago, he goes down there in the winter. Might have a boat of some kind. I don’t know, I’m not invited. Probably pays cash on a mortgage down there, if he didn’t buy it outright. I understand cash is welcome in the Islands. That’s where he’d probably take a big payout from Home Streets.”
“Nice,” Lucas said.
“How many of the harelip...” Virgil began.
Lucas interrupted: “Cleft palate...”
“...cleft palate surgeons are real?”
“Not sure, because I issue checks, I don’t recruit the surgeons.Noah does that. But, I believe at least three are phony, and maybe five, all from Cuba. Cubans who supposedly work in Central America. Hard to track down. We pay five Cuban surgeons and five surgical nurses, plus travel and supplies, and it comes to between three hundred and fifty and four hundred thousand a year.”
“Jesus, if the guy wasn’t rich, he’s getting that way,” Virgil said.
Hinton nodded: “It’s a good gig. Not something I could have pulled off. You had to have some status in the community to do it. You need a Noah Heath, and they’re not that easy to find. He has the big house, used to have the hot wife until she died... Oh. Hey.”
Lucas looked at Virgil, then back to Hinton and asked, “How’d she die?”
“Fell down the stairs and broke her neck. Noah was supposedly at some kind of dinner when it happened,” Hinton said. He pointed at the photo of the blond woman and the dog. “That’s her. He had that alibi, but... I mean... I’m not sure anybody figured out exactly how long she’d been dead when he got home and found her...”
Lucas said, “Yeah.”
Virgil: “Do you think he might have murdered her?”
Again, Hinton closed an eye and tipped his head, then his mouth turned down at the corners and he said, “I hate to disappoint you, but I don’t think so. He’s kind of a pussy. What if he’d pushed her down the stairs and shehadn’tbroken her neck? Then he’d either have had to club her to death, or... make up some kind of excuse for pushing her. Like he stumbled, and who’s going to believe that? Not her. She was one mean woman. She would have put his ass in jail and sold the house and moved to Miami.”
Virgil: “So...”
“He’s too smart and too much of a pussy to have murdered her. Ithink he got lucky because the marriage was in bad shape,” Hinton said. “She’d figured out he wasn’t as rich as she thought, when they hooked up.”
“You had to think about it—whether he’d murdered her,” Lucas observed.
“Yeah, I did. Noah... Noah’s been running big rip-offs for years and years. Years! I mean, I gotta admire the guy. The best I ever did was like being a porch pirate, stealing computers and TV sets and reselling them. Amazon shit. Heart/Twin Cities sponsors a Monte Carlo Night at a hotel over in Minneapolis. Tickets are two hundred and fifty bucks each, you get two hundred and fifty chips. Noah gets one of the Indian casinos to bring in craps tables and roulette wheels and blackjack. You know—all that real casino stuff, and for free. Then he gets local businesses to donate prizes. Can’t be money, but anything else—TVs, vacation trips, whatever. If people pay and lose, they can buy more chips right on the floor. Anyway, the last one of these he did, there were three hundred people there. Three hundred times two-fifty per ticket, what is that?”
Virgil rolled his eyes up. “Seventy-five thousand.”
“Right. He probably had ten thousand in overhead. So he clears sixty-five. Guess how much of that got to the harelips.”
“Cleft palates,” Lucas said.
They talked for a while longer, got Heath’s wife’s name, and an approximate date of death.
