Don't Take Any Wooden Nickels (27 page)

“How ya doin’?” I called as I paddled closer. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?”

The man smiled and nodded, and at that point I realized that he was Asian.

“Not much bitin’ out here,” I said. “I’m about ready to call it a day.”

He smiled and nodded again, and I wondered if he spoke English. I knew a little Japanese, and I tried that instead.

“Anata wa nihon-jin desu ka?”
I asked.
(Are you Japanese?)

Excitedly, he began nodding and replied, in Japanese, that he was. I told him, also in Japanese, that I knew just a little bit of the language. I said I had a friend who was Japanese, and she had taught me.

I didn’t add that I had studied two years of the language in college in preparation for what I thought was going to be a career in international law. It was a tough language to learn, and I would’ve given up entirely if I hadn’t made friends with a foreign student who lived down the hall in my dorm. She tutored me through both years of study, and though I had never gotten very good with reading and writing, I wasn’t half bad at conversation.

Now, this man was smiling and telling me, in Japanese, that he was fairly new to the country and that he hadn’t yet learned to speak English. Then another man appeared from the trees. With a chill, I suddenly remembered Dewey and Murdock talking about
Kenji and Shin Tanigawa, the Japanese brothers Eddie Ray had tangled with the week before he died.

“Can I help you?” the second man asked brusquely in perfect English.

“Just doin’ some fishin’,” I said. “Thought I’d say hi.”

“He doesn’t speak English.”

“I know. He’s very friendly, though.”

Both men looked at me, the one in the chair still smoking and smiling, the other with two hands on his hips, obviously anxious for me to be on my way.

“I didn’t realize anybody lived out here on these islands,” I said. “I thought they were deserted.”

He was quiet for a long moment, and then he spoke.

“We have a little processing plant out here. Oysters. Clams. Crabs. Nothing elaborate.”

“Do you ferry the workers in? I didn’t know there was a ferry that came—”

“We have a dormitory. This is private property. I suggest you be on your way.”

“Oh, sure,” I said, my heart pounding. “Before I go, though, do you suppose I could use your bathroom? I really need to go.”

The man looked angry and irritated, but he didn’t say no. Instead, he gestured with one hand toward a small green port-a-potty I hadn’t noticed before, not far up the path from where he stood.

I paddled up to the muddy bank, climbed out of the canoe, and pulled it a little way onto the grass.

“
Daijyoubu,
” the smiling man said, helping me.
(I’ve got it.)

I left the boat with him and walked past the other fellow to the bathroom. It was a standard-issue fiberglass portable toilet with a hole on a bench inside. I pulled the door shut, and waited, disappointed that the bathroom was so close by and wouldn’t afford me the chance to look around on the island. But then I glanced up and realized that there was a small vent near the ceiling. Gingerly, I climbed up onto the bench and peered out of the three parallel slats.

I couldn’t see much. There was a little inlet of water on the other side of the bathroom, and there was a boat there, hidden among the pickerelweed. I couldn’t make out the boat’s name, but I could see the registration numbers that were painted on the side. I memorized them, climbed back down, and headed out.

Something told me not to fool around here anymore, and so I thanked both men, climbed back into my boat, and paddled slowly away. Once I was around the curve and out of sight, I dug in and began paddling furiously, my mind racing as I went. It felt as if I had just taken a very stupid risk, though what that risk was and what it had to do with Eddie Ray’s death, I just wasn’t sure.

Yet.

Thirty

By the time I got home, the adrenaline rush had passed and I was exhausted. After the lack of sleep last night and the activity of the morning, I decided to check my machine, make any necessary calls, and then take a nap. I needed to be rested for tonight, because I had full intentions of returning to the area around the island, this time for a more discreet surveillance.

There were two messages from Kirby, apparently just to chat. There was also a call from the receptionist at my dentist’s office, reminding me it was time to schedule my six-month checkup.

“Oh,” her message continued, “and a little birdie told me that you’ve been seen about town with Kirby Collins. I’ve got to say, Callie, he’s quite a catch!”

Rolling my eyes, I deleted her message. Sometimes small-town life could be a real pain in the neck.

Three more nonprofits had responded to my request for a reference for CNA, so I called them back. Two of them were in the Midwest, both affiliated with CNA’s Small Agencies Division, and both of them painted a picture that was a bit different than the mostly favorable responses I’d been hearing thus far. One agency was about to cancel their association with CNA entirely, and the other had already done so last week.

“I don’t know why I was on your list as a reference,” the woman told me. “I haven’t been pleased with those people since day one.”

I didn’t tell her that I wasn’t really working from a list of supplied references but merely from the roster of affiliated agencies.

“What don’t you like about them?” I asked.

“Well, for one thing, Maureen Burnham is a nightmare to work with. She’s rude and opinionated and almost impossible to reach on the phone.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, especially when you have some kind of problem. It’s like, if we were such a burden to her, why did she sign us up in the first place?”

Why, indeed,
I thought.

I listened as this woman described an absentee agency more interested in recruitment than in the actual execution of the services they had contracted for. I took ample notes, thinking this certainly threw a monkey wrench into the mix. Yes, she said, CNA had signed on to take over the fund-raising, agreeing to handle all of those duties in exchange for a reasonable percentage of the moneys raised. Thus far, however, CNA hadn’t raised nearly enough. Now this woman’s organization was in a budget crunch, forced to cut services just to cover the deficit.

“What about local donors?” I asked. “From what I understand, sometimes CNA lines up local companies with charities and gets support that way.”

“Maybe elsewhere, but not here,” she replied. “The most they’ve done for us was to send out a mailing which netted almost zero response. I’ve never been more frustrated.”

The third call, to an agency in New York City, had a far more disturbing report.

“Yeah, they lined up local donor support,” the man told me. “It was a sweet deal, for sure.”

“Then what was the problem?”

“I got a look at the hard numbers,” he said. “I mean, most people, if the donations are rollin’ in, will simply take those checks and smile all the way to the bank. I’m not like that. Ours is a faith-based operation, and I want it to be fiscally impeccable. When I insisted that Maureen show me her entire fund-raising data for our agency, I hit the roof. It was unacceptable.”

I sat forward, listening.

“They spent twenty-three thousand dollars,” he said, “in order to raise twenty-six thousand. Another month, it was thirty-five thousand to raise thirty-eight!”

“Could she explain why the costs were so high?”

“Yeah, she did, and it didn’t sit well with me at all. She used a ‘donor broker,’ she said, a place that matched donating companies with local charities. Most of the money went to them, as commission.”

The little warning bells in my brain turned into out-and-out sirens.

“Did you get the name of the broker?” I asked.

“No, I didn’t. And they wouldn’t give me the names of the ‘anonymous donors’ either. I terminated our association with CNA that very day.”

“I don’t blame you.”

We talked a bit longer and then concluded the call, leaving me to consider all that he had said. I had heard of donor brokers, of course, but never ones with that kind of commission rate. Though
percentages like that were legal, they certainly weren’t ethical. Since CNA had good rankings with the watchdog groups, I could only assume this wasn’t a company-wide way of doing business but was limited to the Small Agencies Division. Perhaps once the figures were blended together on the CNA tax returns, everything appeared to be aboveboard across the board.

I picked up the phone and dialed Verlene.

“Hey,” I said when she picked up the phone, “is Maureen Burnham the name of the woman you’ve been dealing with at CNA?”

“Yes,” she replied. “It is. Why?”

“Tell me again what she promised you. She said if you signed up with CNA, they would cover the cost of the expansion? They would use local donors?”

“Exactly. She said they already had places lined up to donate and that it was just a matter of us signing on with CNA. That’s why I’m hoping your investigation is going well. I so want this to work out.”

“All right, Verlene, here’s what I want you to do. Give Maureen a call and tell her you’re still considering her proposal, but you need to know two things.”

“Okay.”

“One, who are the local donors she’ll be connecting you with, and two, who is the donor broker?”

“The donor broker?”

“Yes, just ask her that. Then get back to me and let me know what she says.”

Verlene agreed but then inquired as to how the investigation was going thus far. I put her off, saying only that I was “making progress.” Eventually, I would give her a full report, but not yet. We chatted for a few minutes before concluding our call.

A wave of exhaustion swept over me as I put down the phone, so I pushed the button on my machine and listened to the final message, which was from Max Nealson, Shayna’s attorney.

Max’s message said that because Shayna’s fingerprints were on the tire iron, it would be good if I could dig up evidence of that flat tire she’d said she had a few weeks ago.

“I don’t have much information on it,” he said, “but if you could find me a corroborating witness, that would be great.”

I saved his message and decided to call him back in the morning. The flat tire issue was one I had already considered, but my hope was that soon this complicated case would be unraveled, and then Shayna wouldn’t have to prove anything.

There was one more thing I needed to do before I laid down for my nap. First, I retrieved the navigational chart Kirby and I had used to find the general vicinity of the GPS club capsule. I unrolled it across the counter now, leaned over it, and studied the terrain, tracing my finger down the road to Carson Point, the spot where Kirby and I had driven. The string of islands dotted out from the mainland there like a series of tiny ovals. The island I was interested in was the third one out. According to this map, it was called “Manno Island,” and it was small, maybe ten or 20 acres total.

Stifling a yawn, I looked up the number of the local coast guard office. My call was answered by a friendly young enlisted man. I told him my name and said I was calling about a navigational matter.

“Well, I’ll sure help you if I can,” he replied brightly.

I described the island and its location, trying to be as nonchalant as possible. Then I asked if he knew whether the island was inhabited and, specifically, if there was a seafood processing plant there. He didn’t seem surprised or suspicious of my question, though he did put the phone down for a minute while he discussed the matter with the other people in the office.

Yes, he told me finally, they knew which island I was talking about, and they were fairly certain there was some kind of business out there, though they didn’t know any of the particulars.

“But if it were seafood processing,” I persisted, “wouldn’t there be a lot of fishing boats coming in and out of there? Wouldn’t the coast guard have to be aware of something like that?”

“Oh, not necessarily,” he said. “If it’s something as simple as a crab-picking house, they might only process a couple bushels of crabs a day. That’s how it is around the Chesapeake. Crab pickers’ll set up shop wherever they need to, long as the state health inspectors give it the go-ahead.”

I thanked him for his help and hung up the phone. The thought came to me that I could probably get more information from my old fishermen buddies Dewey and Murdock down at the Kawshek General Store.

Still, it wouldn’t hurt to investigate the legal paper trail as well. I dialed Harriet at the office, knowing she was just the gal for the job.

It wasn’t hard to talk her into it. She was nearly caught up on her work, and she said she would welcome the diversion.

“I’m off to Chincoteague tonight for the competition,” she said. “But I’ll do what I can in the meantime. I’ve still got a few hours before I have to head home and pack.”

“Thank you, Harriet. You’re the best.”

“Yeah. So what kinda things do you want me to check out?” she asked.

“Start with the state health department,” I replied. “Then from there just do the usual. Tax records, workers’ comp, unemployment. You know the drill. We need the lowdown on this business.”