The creak of the floorboards announced her return before her perfect body slipped back through the doorway. She was still naked, and her thick blonde hair still tumbled down around her shoulders, languishing over her back. I stared at her perky pink nipples and her round breasts. She smiled at me as she pulled her shorts and panties back on and slipped her shirt back over her head. I wanted so badly to get up behind her, squeeze her tits and bite her ear, but we had work to do. We’d had enough distraction for one night.
“Still want to know what this shit is?” I asked her.
She blinked at me, like she was surprised that I was going to tell her.
“Yeah, I do.”
I nodded toward the box. “Papers, obviously.”
She made a face. “Don’t do that.”
I grinned. “Just a little joke.” I paused, trying to figure out how to explain it. “Like you said, it’s financial stuff, bank statements and transactions and checks and shit like that.”
“Whose is it?”
“The Mob’s, or at least it used to be.”
“You guys keep your money in the bank?”
I laughed. “Of course we do. Did you think we put it all in gold and buried it?”
She shook her head. “It’s just, how do you hide it all? I mean, from the IRS and stuff like that.”
“That’s called money laundering. That’s why we have restaurants and dry cleaners and all sorts of businesses all over the city. When we make some money illegally, we slip it into the revenue stream of those businesses, fudge the books, and boom, it’s legal, taxable cash.”
“Okay, that makes sense.”
“There’s a lot more to it, but that’s the quick and dirty version.”
“So what does that have to do with us?”
She walked over and crouched down in front of the box, leafing through the papers gingerly.
“Three years ago, I took over dealing with some of the money stuff the old boss didn’t feel like doing anymore. We have a pretty complicated system for moving money around between accounts.”
I shuffled over to the box and began to sift through it until I found what I was looking for. I held the paper out and Ellie took it, looking at the rows of figures and transaction statements.
“See, that’s a bank statement from a particular account held by one of the minor bosses. Shows what he had, where it went, stuff like that. Each boss takes some of his income and gives it as tribute to the main boss. In return, the main boss supports people when they need it with muscle or legal help or whatever.”
She nodded, looking over the paper. Her face was all screwed up, obviously thinking about what I was saying, and I wanted to kiss her pouting lips so badly. I clenched my jaw and concentrated.
“It was my job to make sure the other bosses weren’t trying to bullshit anyone. And, frankly, I didn’t find shit. But then the old boss was ousted, and Colm suddenly started hiring huge amounts of muscle, all these expensive dudes from all over the place. That got me thinking: how the fuck could Colm afford all of that? He was bribing cops and city officials like crazy, too. I’m talking millions of dollars in those first weeks. My territory was bigger than his, I brought in more cash than he did, but even I didn’t have that kind of money lying around, nobody did. But there was Colm, shelling out lots of cash like it was no big deal.
“So that got me thinking. My initial idea was, Colm had the backing of a more established boss. But as time went by, that became less and less likely. Really, Colm was making enemies of every single old boss. It made no sense that one of them was backing him, and anyway, there were only one or two that could have afforded it. Those two guys both fucking hate Colm.”
She looked up at me and something clicked in her expression.
“The only other explanation is that he’s been stealing all these years, right under our noses. Colm is a clever fuck, so I wouldn’t put it passed him, which is why I got all these records out of storage and began combing through them.”
“And?” she asked me.
“And, well, there are a lot of shady transactions.”
Her expression dropped. “What do you mean?”
“Little things, a few dollars here and there, but always to some random bank account. This goes back a while, back to when he first started in the Mob.”
“Is that enough?”
I shook my head. “No, but it’s a start. He was stealing, I’m beyond positive about that, but I need a little more. I need the definitive proof, and it’s somewhere in that box.”
She looked down at it. “Okay, so you’re telling me that this master plan of yours hinges totally on some sort of paperwork miracle?”