“Huh. You’re right. I never think of schools as being much . . . but they are, aren’t they? Not from here, though, not from Buchanan County. Maybe across the river, in Wisconsin or something. Can’t tell from this.”
“Where do you get that?”
“Clarice said she thought some of it might be diesel fuel, and I think she’s right—but the costs are too high. They’re paying close to retail. With an operation this big, and with no gas taxes, I mean, they should be paying fifty cents a gallon less than this shows.”
“Really.”
“Really.”
Virgil rubbed his nose. “If it was the local school district, and they were paying too much for gas, how would anybody know?”
Johnson said, “Well, they could be doing it two ways. They could be buying fuel from a dealer, paying too much, and getting a kickback. Fifty cents a gallon . . . I mean, holy buckets, Batman! Give me your pen.”
He scribbled on some paper for a moment, adding up numbers, and when he was done, said, “I had to make some guesses, here. We got six elementary schools in the county system, a middle school, and a high school, and they all use buses. I’d guess . . . maybe fifty buses. I’d guess maybe fifteen gallons a day per bus, for two trips, one morning, one afternoon . . . say two hundred days a year . . .”
“I don’t think it’s that many days—”
“Not too much less, though, plus they use the buses for extracurricular activities. Virgil, if they were somehow clipping money off the fuel, that’d be . . . maybe seventy thousand dollars a year.”
“If they were taking kickbacks, that means I’d have to find out who was selling diesel to them, and put that guy’s ass in a crack.”
“Who wouldn’t want to talk about it, ’cause he’d go to jail,” Johnson said.
“I could fix it so he wouldn’t go to jail, but everybody else would,” Virgil said. And after a few seconds, “You said there were two ways they could be doing it.”
“Sure. They just cook the books. They take a bid from the diesel dealer straight up, for, say, $2.80 a gallon, then they write down in the books that they paid $3.30. That way, there’s no kickback, and no outsider to know about it. You’d have to see their books to figure it out. You’d have to have an audit and so on—somebody to talk to the diesel dealer, get his records, and match them against the district’s.”
“Okay. Listen, Johnson, we could be on to something here,” Virgil said. “This could be Conley’s big story. I want you to put on your thinking pants and figure out other ways you could clip the district.”
“Don’t know it’s the district, for sure. Not yet, anyway,” Johnson said. “I’ll tell you what you could do, though . . . you got all these numbers. Get somebody to look at the school budget—it’s public, it’s probably online—and see if you can make any of the expenditures line up. They can’t be clipping everything.”
“I got somebody who can do that,” Virgil said.
And Johnson said, “I’ll think about it: but I’ll tell you, just from reading the newspaper, the big money wouldn’t be in clipping the diesel. It’d be figuring out a way to clip the teachers’ salaries and maybe the state’s pupil payments. Both of those gotta be in the millions of dollars a year. Suppose they had five ghost employees . . .”
“Bless me,” Virgil said. “If that’s the case, there’d have to be several people in on it.”
“Yes, there would. You know ol’ Buster Gedney? His wife’s on the school board.”