"P. N. Elrod - Vampire Files 09 - Lady Crymsyn" - читать интересную книгу автора (Elrod P N)

A few months back, while flattening out a few wrinkles with a local mob, I discovered a hoard of their
cash that they didn't know about. Though someone else walked off with the lion's share, the sixty-eight
grand I'd stuffed into my coat pockets like a greedy kid in a candy store seemed more than enough to get
me set up for good if I went about it the right way. I'd wasted one life; I wasn't going to repeat the
mistake.

First I had to clean the money. Flashing around undeclared fistfuls of dough is a fast way to get the
attention of the tax man. Capone himself got tossed in the clink on that little detail, but I could avoid
landing in the next cell over by playing smart. The government doesn't seem to carehow you make your
money, so long as it gets its cut. Not much different from the mob, only there's usually less gunplay and
more paperwork.

Presently, I was Charles Escott's nominal employee in his private detective business. (He preferred the
more genteel title of "private agent.") Whenever we shared a case we split the payment fifty-fifty, but the
huge amount I'd collected could not be declared as income from the Escott Agency without putting him in
a bad spot. Uncle Sam would want to know what sort of work Escott did to justify such a generous
payout to his staff, and, oh, by the way, we'd like to checkyour earnings as wellтАж

Sure, I could sit on the dough and declare it a little at a time as cash earnings over the years. Escott was
doing just that with his half of a ten-grand windfall we'd once gotten hold of by accident, but I was in too
much of a hurry to wait. So with the help of a mobster who owed me a few favors I took advantage of a
means to make my good fortune safely innocent. All I needed was a racing form and directions to the
nearest line of bookies. Hell, all I needed to do was stand still, and they'd come to me. This town had
them thicker than grass.

For a month I hung out in such company, going to various joints as soon as the sun was down in
Chicago to put bets on horses about to run in California, where it still shone. Not big bets, but lots of
them, to show or place, never to win, since that was more of a risk and could drive down the odds.

My mob advisor told me which horses I should play and which bookies to bet with. Not every race was
rigged, but there were enough to slowly turn about half my fortune into legitimate-seeming wins. Only I
wasn't really winning money so much as breaking even. For every ten dollars I bet, I'd get back
twentyтАФbut the bookie would get a twenty from me, not a ten. It was all numbers in a book.

Count the actual cash and you'd tumble to the game, but no cop or treasury agent ever interfered.

The bookies were all in on the scam and took their cut for cleaning services when I purposely lost every
fourth or fifth bet to make things look legit. In this way they took between five and ten percent. I could
spare it, figuring it to be a fair commission and much better than me trying to explain the real source of the
cash to a nosy government accountant.
 Duly entering every last dollar in a ledger, I kept careful records of my wins and losses. Declared cash
all squeaky clean and financial records square enough for Euclid, I was free to get down to the real
business of making my dream of a swank nightclub into a reality.

Location is everything. I soon found a former speakeasy on the North Side once run by a mug named
Welsh Lennet. It closed years ago when thugs tossed a couple of grenades through the front doors as
part of an ongoing territorial dispute. Lennet and a few others in his group were killed, with no one to
take over for him. When Repeal went into effect, there didn't seem much point in trying to rebuild, so the
gutted remains of his speak were left to gently rot.