I had never made so many phone calls in my life. I paced back-and-forth in his kitchen, dialing lawyers, friends, former coworkers, family members, accountants, etc. Access to his bank statements became increasingly easy to come by, as tax season was approaching quickly.
More and more frequently, I would see clients and colleagues pull up to the house and stay for hours at a time. More and more, too, would I get texts from Noël, who lurked around while the men were working, occasionally sending me discreet photos of documents or a brief synopsis of what they heard.
I had been examining a hastily-taken photo of some scanned checks. Obvious tax write offs: a couple thousand dollars to a community arts center, 20 grand in property taxes, fifteen hundred for some travel expenses, $40,000 to The City, and another eight grand bank fees.
Wait.
Forty thousand? Hadn't my mother said ten? Maybe I was just misremembering.
True to form, there was a screen recording on file for me find out. I played it back three times over. Ten, she definitely said ten. I zoomed in on the photo. The checks were shuffled haphazardly together on the table, but even at the awkward angle I could see the writing very clearly. Forty thousand dollars and 0/100 cents, paid to the order of the City.
I thought for a moment. Were there two donations? No doubt my mother would've called me and laid it on thick with an amount that size. Maybe he wrote out two checks with different amounts and gave one to each side? That seemed too conspicuous, legally.
Or maybe my mother was lying about the amount? That didn't make much sense either. Something was definitely fishy here.
I tapped my pen on the pad of notes I was taking. It was one I had stolen from his office all those months ago. A ballpoint one with a rubbery top used for writing on touch screens. The plastic was very firm though, I figured it probably wouldn't do much good on a tablet except to scratch it up.
I took another look at my notes, then flipped my pen so the ink was facing up. I scraped the hard plastic across my words. They vanished.
I laughed. He was using erasable pens. I kind of liked the simplicity of it. His coworkers were probably jumping through hoops and stabbing people's backs in the pursuit of tax fraud, but he just used pens.
I wasn't sure how deep this went though. How many times he done it, for how much, and in how many ways. He was just one dimwitted cog in a massively corrupt machine, now profiting off of my community's perceived need for alcohol.
These were just crumbs to the cake that I would have and eat too.
