Beyond Suspicion

“Where’s Cyprus?” asked the Latina girl. She had the habit of ru

“It’s an island in the eastern Mediterranean,” Sasha said.

“A suburb of Moscow,” said Vladimir.

She licked her teeth and kept dancing, having no way of knowing what Vladimir really meant. Cypriot bankers laundered so much money for the Russian mob that the city of Limasol might as well have been a suburb of Moscow.

A topless barmaid with a gold ring through her left nipple brought them a bottle of ice-cold vodka and poured three shots. The bottle was gone in short order, and halfway through the second Vladimir steered the conversation toward business, speaking in Russian.

“You like my club?” he asked.

His guests couldn’t take their eyes off the girl in the long, red wig swinging naked on the pole.

Vladimir said, “I have to run this joint seven days a week for an entire month to clean the amount of cash I can wash in a single viatical settlement.”

Leonid from Brighton Beach shot him a steely look. “We didn’t come here to talk viatical settlements. That’s off the table.”

“I just don’t understand why.”

The banker raised his hands, as if refereeing. “Let’s not go down that road. The fact is that Brighton Beach was pla

He sipped his vodka. “The blood bank is coming along.”

“Ha!” said the wrestler. “What a joke.”

“It’s not a joke. It’s on the verge of taking off.”

“Will never work. You can’t possibly do enough volume to wash ten million dollars a month.”

“How would you know?”

“The best money-laundering operations have some amount of legitimate business. You have two stinking vans. You can’t even draw enough blood off the street to fill the handful of orders you get each week.”

“We’ve filled every single order.”

“Yeah. And you had to take blood from cadavers to do it.”

The banker grimaced. “You took blood from cadavers?”

Vladimir was smoldering.

“Tell him,” said the wrestler.

“It’s not important.”

“Then I’ll tell him. We had a woman in Georgia with a two-million-dollar viatical settlement. AIDS patient. Should have been dead three years ago, so the order went out to expedite her expiration. Vladimir farmed out the job to some joker who injected her with a bizarre virus, which is a whole problem by itself. But to make matters worse, he took three liters of blood from her.”

“Is that true, Vladimir?”

He belted back the last of his vodka, then poured himself a refill. “Who would have thought they’d notice?”

“Ever heard of an autopsy, you idiot?” said the wrestler.

“It was an honest mistake. Why leave perfectly good AIDS-infected blood in a dead body when you can sell it for good profit?”

“It’s that kind of small-time, foolish greed that makes it impossible for us to do business with you people in Miami.”

“So this is why Brighton Beach canceled the viatical contract?” said Vladimir.

“Your man shot her up with a virus so rare that the National Center for Disease Control has her blood under the microscope. And then he took three liters of her blood with him. Why not just paint a big red ‘M’ on your chest that stands for ‘murderer’? You’re going to get us all caught.”

“So you admit it. One mistake in the whole arrangement, and the hot shots in Brighton Beach think they can just walk away from our deal.”

“We don’t have to explain ourselves to you people. The decision was made, and it was blessed at a high level. End of story.”

“It’s not the end of it,” Vladimir said as he pounded the table with his fist. “We put a lot of time into this viatical deal. Things are in place. And you just think you can pull the plug, see ya later?”

“We have good reasons.”

“None that I’ve heard.”

“I’ve said all I’m going to say.”

“Then fuck you!” said Vladimir as he threw a glass of vodka in his guest’s face.

The wrestler lunged across the table. Dancers screamed and ran for it as the banker ducked to the floor. Three huge bouncers were all over the wrestler before he could get a hand on Vladimir.

The wrestler was red-faced, eyes bulging. But the bouncers had both his arms pi

“This is the way you treat your guests?” he said, huffing. “I was invited here.”

“And now you’re invited to leave.” Vladimir jerked his head, a signal to his boys. “Throw his ass out.”

The wrestler cursed nonstop in Russian and at the top of his lungs as the bouncers put the strong-arm on him and dragged him away.

The banker peered out from under the table.

“You too, Sasha. Beat it.”

The little man scurried away like a frightened rabbit.

The barmaid immediately replaced the spilled bottle of vodka. Vladimir refilled his drink, and with a snap of his fingers the dancers resumed their posts at the brass poles, backs arched, breasts out, hair flying. The music had never stopped, and the scuffle was over.

Or maybe it had just begun.

Either way, the girls kept right on dancing.

48

•

Jack watched the six-o’clock evening news from the couch in his living room. Cindy was right beside him, their fingers interlaced. She was squeezing so hard it almost hurt, and Jack wasn’t sure if it was a sign of support or anger.

Rumors of an impending indictment had been flying all afternoon, and in a competitive news market where a story just wasn’t a story unless “You heard it here first,” the media was all over it.

A silver-haired anchorman looked straight at him as the obligatory graphic of the scales of justice appeared behind him on the screen. “A former girlfriend is dead, and a questionable million-and-a-half-dollar deal is under scrutiny by a Florida grand jury. Jack Swyteck, son of Florida’s former governor Harold Swyteck, may be in trouble with the law again.”

“Why do they have to do that?” said Cindy.

“They always have.” His entire life, any time he’d gotten into trouble, he was always “Jack Swyteck, son of Harold Swyteck.”

Trumpets blared and drums beat, the usual fanfare for the Action News opening.

“Good evening,” the newsman continued. “We first brought you this exclusive story several weeks ago, when the body of thirty-one-year-old Jessie Merrill was found dead in the home of prominent Miami attorney Jack Swyteck. At first blush her death appeared to be suicide, but now prosecutors aren’t so sure. Action News reporter Heather Brown is live outside the Metro-Dade Justice Center. Heather, what’s the latest?”

The screen flashed to a perfectly put-together young woman standing in a parking lot at dusk. The Justice Center was visible in the distant background, and a half-dozen teenage boys wearing bulky gang clothing, thick gold chains, and backward Nike caps, were gyrating behind her, as if that added credibility to her live report. Long strands of black hair slapped at her face like a bullwhip. She’d obviously committed the cardinal rookie mistake of positioning her roving camera crew downwind.

“Steve, sources close to this investigation have told Action News that a grand jury has been looking into the death of Jessie Merrill for some time now. Information obtained exclusively by Action News indicates that Miami-Dade prosecutor Be