“Sure thing, brotha.”
I go back to the laptop and flip back and forth between the pictures again, trying to make some sense of them. Beni is family and should be trusted before others, but there is definitely something off here. If the pictures are indeed of the same guy, and Beni is meeting with him, it’s not good.
I try to think of a reasonable explanation, but nothing comes to mind. Another thought strikes me though.
“Does this laptop get me into the accounting files?”
“Sure,” Jonathan replies. “Just get to the desktop. There’s a picture of a pig on the right side, near the bottom.”
“A pig?”
“Piggy bank!” He grins wildly, and I shake my head at him.
“You’re not right.”
“Never claimed to be.”
I open up a couple of files before I find the right one. It’s the same one Rinaldo showed me the other day—the one with the discrepancies. I’m not looking for anything going to Beni’s accounts though. Instead, I pull out my phone and check my notes.
It only takes a couple minutes of digging to find the right reference.
Some of the missing money is going straight into the account Rinaldo set up for Felisa. Some, but not all of it. He’s skimming his own profits and telling me not to look into it. I wonder what he told Becca about it.
Where is the rest going?
I scroll back to the year before when Justin was still looking after the books. As I’m trolling through the lines of numbers, a couple of them stand out. The name on the entries is Marshall Miller—a code name I’ve used in the past—and the lines should match up to what I was paid for my hits last year, but they don’t.
The numbers are way off, or I might not have noticed. This isn’t a little bit of a discrepancy, but tens of thousands of dollars for each line compared to the cash I had actually received. I start to search for a corresponding entry to make up the difference, but Jonathan calls over to me before I can find anything.
“Could he be doin’ his own investigatin’?” Jonathan asks as he finishes the cigarette and dumps the butt into his mostly empty bottle of water.
It takes me a second to realize Jonathan’s talking about Beni. I close out the accounting file and flip back to the photographs as he moves closer. I’m not ready to share the information related to Felisa.
“Possibly, but I seriously doubt it. He thinks he’s above that kind of work.”
“We need to show these to Rinaldo.” Jonathan sits back down on the couch and pulls the laptop closer to the edge of the coffee table.
“No,” I say as I shake my head, “not yet. Keep it between us for now. If Beni is involved in some way, he may not be on his own. I don’t want any speculation out just yet, or we could alert the wrong person.”
“Whatever you say.”
“Someone’s been pulling money from the business, too,” I tell him. “If Beni’s involved in that, he has to have help. I want all the evidence together before we take it to Rinaldo.”
“Don’t Becca keep track of that shit?”
“Yeah, she does.”
“Maybe she knows more about it?”
“I’m not sure,” I say. “If she’s anywhere near as good at bookkeeping as Rinaldo thinks she is, she ought to be able to account for every penny. If she can’t, well, maybe we need to check her out mor
e closely, too.”
“I gotta get the warehouse security shit in order,” Jonathan tells me. “That’s gonna take a couple of days.”
“I think we have time.”
“I gotcha, brotha.” Jonathan closes the laptop and shoves it back in its bag. “I’ll let ya know what I find out.”