Swimming to Catalina (Stone Barrington 4)

“How many in all?”

“Nearly a hundred, I should think. It’s a big yacht.”

“I wonder if Arrington’s aboard that yacht?” he asked.

“I wouldn’t think he would hide Arrington on the yacht, then invite a hundred people aboard, would you?”

“No, I guess not.”

“Why are you so interested in the yacht, then?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Stone said.

45

Stone didn’t make it back to his hotel suite until the following morning, the reunion with Betty having kept him at her place all night. When he arrived the message light was blinking on his telephone, and he called for his voice mail.

“Stone, it’s Hank Cable; you might want to call me.”

Stone returned the call immediately. “Sorry I wasn’t in when you called. What’s up?”

“We got the tap into Barone Financial, and it’s paying off already.”

“What did you hear?”

“A lot of the phone conversations are conducted in a kind of code, which, of course, makes us even more suspicious. Our people say a lot of the conversations are to do with deliveries, maybe drugs.”

“You don’t need forty telephone lines to arrange drug deliveries,” Stone said.

“Good point.”

“I think it’s money.”

“There is some wire transferring going on, but not at such a heavy rate to be suspicious.”

“Then maybe they’re not transferring it by wire. Maybe they’re shipping cash.”

“Money laundries, when they ship cash, ship it out of the country. Our people think the shipments are coming this way. Why would they ship money into the States?”

“To buy things,” Stone ventured.

“Well, of course, but what could they do with raw, unlaundered cash?”

“Launder it.”

“Obviously, but we’re talking about major quantities, is my guess.”

“So they’re buying big things, like businesses; big businesses.”

“You don’t understand, Stone; you can’t go buy a business with, say, a hundred million dollars and bring cash to the closing. The money has to be laundered, to appear legitimate, to appear to be after-taxes. It has to be in a bank and then wire transferred to another bank, or be put into a negotiable instrument, like a cashier’s check.”

“Ippolito has a bank at his disposal, doesn’t he?”

“He does, but I’ve checked with Treasury and the state examiners, and Safe Harbor has always been squeaky clean.”

“Then he must be using it in some way we don’t know about. I think people like Ippolito are too greedy to be happy with the income from a legitimate business; they want more. They want it all, too; they don’t want to share it with stockholders or the IRS.”

“Well, it’s early days; I expect we’ll come up with more as time passes.”