Santa Fe Edge

59

Tip Hanks stood in front of the cameras and received his silver cup and a dummy check for nine hundred eighty-nine thousand dollars. The amount would automatically be wired to his account.

During the past few days he had set a course record and won the tournament by four strokes. He gave an interview to a television journalist, then returned to the clubhouse, showered and changed, and gave another, longer interview to a woman from The Golf Channel.

That night he had a steak dinner, watched TV, then turned in early. He slept late the following morning, and it was noon before he got to the airport. He drove up to his Santa Fe home at four thirty that afternoon, noticing that Dolly’s car was not parked out front. She must be running an errand, he thought.

He walked into his home, unpacked his clothes, put the dirty things into a laundry hamper, then walked to his study next door. The room seemed oddly messy. He looked into Dolly’s office and found drawers pulled out and papers scattered around the room. His first thought was a burglary, and he went back into his study to phone the police, but he found a pink message slip stuck to the phone.

Bye-bye, sweetie. It’s been fun.

He was still puzzling over that when the phone rang, and he picked it up. “Hello?”

“Tip, it’s George Herron.” Herron was his accountant.

“Hello, George. Did you see I won the tournament yesterday?”

“Yes, I did, and congratulations. I’m afraid I have some troubling news, though.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I looked through your accounts online today for some tax information, and I saw that your prize money had been wired into your account this morning.”

“That is as it should be, George.”

“The problem was that it was wired out of your account only a few minutes later to an account in Singapore, as were another seven hundred thousand dollars from a bond fund in your brokerage account. Do you have a bank account in Singapore, Tip? Because if you do we haven’t been reporting that to the IRS, as the law requires.”

“No, George, I don’t have an account in Singapore, and I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Who else is a signatory on your accounts?”

“Well, my assistant, Dolly…” Tip stopped and looked at the pink message slip. “Oh, shit,” he said.

CUPIE ANSWERED THE TELEPHONE.

“Cupie, it’s Dave Santiago.”

“Hey, Dave. How are you?”

“Not so good.”

“Did you pick up Barbara?”

“No, I didn’t. The D.A. wouldn’t sign the warrant. Not enough evidence and too much money.”

Cupie’s face dropped. “I saw the newspaper piece. He was scared off by the money?”

“Of course, he was,” Santiago replied. “Think about it. If you were the D.A. would you issue a warrant on a woman with that much money, without a murder weapon or physical evidence? You’d be looking at another O.J. trial against the best lawyers in the country. It would cost the county millions.”

“I see your point,” Cupie said. “Thanks for trying, Dave.”

He hung up and turned to Vittorio.

“No warrant, huh?” Vittorio asked.

“No warrant.”

“I guess you’ll be going back to L.A., huh, Cupie?”

“I guess,” Cupie replied woodenly.

“It doesn’t have to be over,” Vittorio said. “She’ll do something outrageous again, and maybe we’ll be in on the takedown.”

“Yeah,” Cupie said, brightening. “She’ll do that, and we’ll do that.”