Tahoe Payback Read online

  At the downhill side of the red rose man’s house was a sprawling deck. Because of the slope of the ground, one edge of the deck was supported by eight-foot-tall posts. The center of the deck seemed to sit on a dome of concrete. The side of the deck closest to me was lit by light coming from inside the house.

  I crept around and under the deck, head bent to avoid beams. I moved slowly, peering hard at the dark ground to try to discern any objects that might make noise should I stumble into them. Except for a collection of yard tools leaning against a wall, my path to the other side of the deck was clear.

  On the other side of the deck, the landscape was again dense with plants. I pushed through bushes. The top of the deck was easy to grasp. There was a notch in a small tree into which I wedged my foot. I found a branch to provide some support for my other foot, but I put most of my effort into pulling myself up with my arms so that I minimized the likelihood of breaking off the branch with my foot and making a loud snap.

  With a fast movement, I let go of the deck with one arm and quickly grabbed the railing above. Moving my foot up to the deck, it was easy to swing my leg up and over the railing. I paused in the growing darkness to look at my surroundings.

  The deck had a grand view across the bay, a spectacular collection of a million lights interrupted by large areas of black water. Ferries and ships and pleasure craft twinkled as they crawled across the bay. The multiple lights of the Bay Bridge support cables made shimmering arcs through the night. Beneath them crawled the endless line of vehicles, trucks keeping The City supplied with everything from caviar to gasoline, cars filled with vacationing families from across the heartland, their jaws open with wonder at the sight of San Francisco at night, limousines bringing people to and from the theaters and jazz clubs and dance stages, the occasional ex-hippy in his split-windshield VW microbus with flowers painted on the side coming back to relive memories from his days in the Haight during the ’60s.

  I turned back to the house and saw that it was a large spread done in 1950’s Modern. The entire outer wall was floor-to-ceiling glass. It had a dramatic, overhanging roof. Inside the closest windows was a large room with a shiny maple floor, lit by recessed ceiling cans. The overhead lights also shone on a black grand piano. To one side was a heavy glass table and in its center, a glass vase with three red roses.

  In the center of the deck was a swimming pool, glowing blue from soft underwater lighting. It was one of those infinity pools, with the fall-away side where the water appears to flow off the disappearing edge.

  The entire picture of a grand house and deck and pool and even grander view didn’t make sense. Charity work was about collecting donations of money or other goods and distributing them to the poor or otherwise needy. Charity spoke of used clothing and warehouse storage facilities and dedicated people driving old cargo vans. Charities were effective at motivating even frugal people living on fixed incomes to give small amounts to help people who were worse off. Yet, I’d watched a well-dressed man collect charity mail and followed him to an abode more appropriate to that of a tech billionaire.

  I stepped closer to see better through the window wall and saw that the roses in the vase had wilted.

  If I hadn’t moved close to the window, I might not have seen the reflection that showed movement to my side. I turned as a shovel arced through the night toward my head, its sharp blade about to slice through my neck.

  EIGHTEEN

  I let my legs collapse and dropped to the deck. I shot my arm up, fingers extended. My palm hit the handle of the shovel as it came down, but I was unable to grab it. My hand deflected the shovel blade just enough to miss my face. The man spun around to swing at me again. I rolled toward him and grabbed his legs. It’s the simplest takedown when someone isn’t prepared to leap away.

  I locked my arms around his lower legs and pulled them to me hard. He couldn’t kick and he couldn’t catch his balance. He began to fall backward. He tried to catch himself by stabbing the shovel back onto the deck behind him. It hit a big ceramic planter and slipped to the side, and the man went down hard enough to break his tailbone as he hit the deck. He put his elbow out to break the fall and to keep his head from bouncing off the deck boards. I heard him grunt with pain.

  The fall stunned him. I scrambled up, rolled him over onto his stomach and pulled his arms behind his back, his wrists crossed over each other. He’d taken off the suit coat and put on a sweater. I put a knee on his arms to hold them in place.

  “You’re breaking my arms!” he cried with a garbled voice as his face was mashed onto the deck boards. Unlike when I had vaguely overheard him talking on the phone, this time he sounded not so much like a young man as like a kid.

  “What’s your name?”

  He didn’t respond. I pulled up on his arms. He moaned.

  “Kyle!”

  “Last name?”

  “Spatt. Kyle Spatt.”

  “How old are you, Kyle?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “Whose house is this?” I asked.

  “My sister’s. Dory Spatt. My arms are killing me!”

  “Who else is home?”

  “No one.”

  I eased off the pressure but kept my knee on his back, holding his arms in place. “Who do you work for?”

  “Dory.”

  “Does Dory have a tattoo of three roses on her ankle?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who does Dory work for?”

  “Herself. She’s self employed.”

  “What kind of business?”

  The kid paused. “Different stuff. Investments.”

  “Like this house,” I said.

  Another pause. “Yeah.”

  “Where does the investment money come from?”

  He didn’t answer. I jerked up with my knee, bending his arms enough that his elbows would be under severe stress.

  “Okay! Okay! I’ll tell you.”

  I backed off with my knee. “I’m waiting.”

  “She runs a charity. She invests the charity’s money.”

  “Did Dory start the Red Roses of Hope charity?”

  “How did you know… No. She worked for the owner. But the owner died.”

  “How?”

  “They were out sailing on the bay. On the owner’s boat. The owner got his leg caught in a line and fell overboard. He was dragged along. Dory tried to free him, but couldn’t.”

  “And Dory took over the charity,” I said.

  “Yeah. Dory said the owner had made her a partner.”

  “Right,” I said. “And then Dory took on the name Isadore and upped his charity game to a new level.”

  Kyle paused. “She thought that name made her seem sophisticated.”

  “How long ago did Dory take over the charity?”

  “I think it was four years ago. When the man died. I started working for her two years ago.”

  “When did Dory buy this house?”

  “About the same time she hired me.”

  “Two years after she started acquiring money like it was shooting out of a firehose,” I said in an effort to be provocative.

  The kid didn’t respond.

  “The Red Roses of Hope charity is a fake, right?” I said.

  Still no response.

  “Answer me!”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Probably. But Dory is a good person at heart. I really think that someday she’s going to give lots to the poor. I mean children. Children in need.” Kyle Spatt squirmed underneath me. “You’re breaking my arms. Let me up. Please. I won’t do anything. I promise.”

  I patted the kid down, from ankles to neck. I found his ring of keys, his wallet, and his phone. I stuffed them in my pocket. I held his right arm behind his back as he stood, lifting up on it until he squirmed and moaned.

  “Open the door. We’re going inside.”

  “I don’t have to. You are a trespasser. I have a right to defend myself and my house. This is a home invasion. I could call the cops. You’ll go
to jail.”

  “Great idea. Let’s go inside and call the cops.”

  I walked him over to a slider. He slid open the door. We walked into the room with the grand piano.

  “Where do you keep tape?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Packing tape or duct tape. To tie you up. You make it easy, I won’t hurt you. You make it hard, I’ll break your arm.”

  “In the kitchen.”

  I walked him into a large kitchen with appliances so modern I didn’t even know what some of them did, a center island larger than my entire kitchen nook, black granite counters, glossy red cupboards, stone floor, all glowing under ceiling can lights. Over on one counter was the leather shoulder bag, still bulging with envelopes containing the mail, which probably meant money.

  “Where?”

  “The drawers next to the wine cooler. Second one down.”

  I walked him over but held him away from the drawers. I didn’t want him trying to grab a knife.

  There was a roll of black duct tape where he said. I sat him on a barstool at the center island, taped his hands behind his back and his feet to the legs of the stool, positioning his legs so his feet were below the footrest. But they didn’t reach the floor.

  “That hurts,” Kyle said. “This is a really uncomfortable position with my legs just hanging.”

  “And the stool is tall and narrow. Easy to tip over,” I said. “You’d smack your head onto stone tile.”

  “This is like torture. It’s a crime to tie me up.”

  “Right up there with taking money from donors under the guise of telling them it was for feeding children and then using the money to heat the swimming pool.”

  “I could scream,” he said.

  “Sure. And I could pick up the phone, dial nine one one, and report that I have captured one of the principles behind the Red Rose charity scam, guilty of bilking innocent donors. I could explain that the two principals in the business were siblings who had animosity between them and that I believed that Kyle, murdered his older sister Dory.”

  “What? Oh my God, what are you saying?! Dory was murdered? Was it you? Did you kill Dory?!”

  “No, I’m investigating her murder. And you are my prime suspect.”

  Kyle was moaning again, rocking on the stool. “She wasn’t returning my calls. I thought she was blowing me off, again. I can’t believe this!”

  “So you are going to answer my questions. If I think you’re fudging your answers, I call the cops.” I pulled out my phone and set it to record.

  “State your full name.”

  He hesitated, staring at my phone as if it were a poisonous snake.

  “Kyle C. Spatt.”

  I made Spatt give a full statement. He answered my questions as if he were on the witness stand, and he gave me all of the sordid details of the Red Roses of Hope Charity for Children. He told me that the charity was bringing in roughly six million dollars a year and that one of Dory’s biggest ongoing dilemmas was figuring out what to do with all of the money, $500,000 every month, more during the holidays. He told me how Dory used direct mail advertising and email newsletter marketing with devious techniques to convince potential donors that their contribution was going to save children from dire conditions. He told me how she brainstormed for hours about how to appeal to people’s empathy and sympathy. He explained how she ran test mailings to see what kinds of baby pictures got the most response, which vulnerable toddler photos made people write bigger checks.

  “It sounds very manipulative, preying on people’s emotions and fears and worries,” I said.

  He nodded. If the news of her murder was stressful, he didn’t show it. “One time Dory was talking about the wording on a mailer. She said she always has two goals. First, she wants donors to think that good people want to help others. Second, she wants donors to worry that they or their families could one day need help, too. Like, someday, you might get run over by a bus, and your darling daughter would be at the mercy of the foster system, just like the sad little girl in the brochure picture. So your fears motivate you to send more money. Dory was always like that, figuring out how to play a person so that they would open their wallet.”

  “Did Dory ever discuss with you the best ways to distribute benefits to the kids who need help the most?”

  Kyle shook his head.

  “Did Dory ever meet with kids who needed medical help?”

  “No.”

  “Poor kids? Orphaned kids?”

  “Look,” Kyle said. “I’m sorry. The answer is no. Dory is a… was a scammer. The charity was basically a way to cheat people out of their money.”

  “You say ‘basically.’ Why the qualifier?”

  “I just say that because that was, you know, her intention.”

  “I don’t understand. A scam is a scam.”

  “But technically, it wasn’t. It was all legal.”

  NINETEEN

  T he statement was shocking in its boldness.

  “How could it be legal? How did she satisfy the demands of the state governments or the IRS?” I asked. “Surely, she had to jump through some hoops to justify her charity to the authorities. Didn’t she have to prove at least some level of giving?”

  Kyle was breathing hard. “I don’t know how it all worked. But they have some basic systems they use.”

  “Who is ‘they?’”

  “I’ve heard Dory talking to other charity people on the phone. It’s like any kind of business. The people in the charity business get together and talk shop. They have meetings. Conventions, even. Like right now there’s a mountain bike get-together for them up in Lake Tahoe, where Dory was going when she disappeared. They all go to play in the mountains. But instead of collecting charity, I think they mostly perfect their techniques.”

  “These scammers have systems for dealing with authorities?”

  “Yeah. A bunch of them, as far as I can tell.”

  “Like?”

  Kyle cleared his throat. “Well, one of them I know about is called donation value inflation.”

  “It has a name?”

  “Yeah, I guess it’s a standard thing some charities do.”

  “How does it work?”

  “I don’t know how other charities do it, but I can tell you how Dory did it. She’d order up ten thousand children’s T-shirts for a dollar each. Really cheap shirts she could get in bulk from Viet Nam. Then she had a printing company print something on them like, ‘Love Heals.’ The printing company charged a dollar for each one. So then she would own ten thousand printed T-shirts, and their total cost was twenty thousand dollars. Next, she’d find some way to give them away, sometimes just shipping them off to another charity like the Goodwill. Or when a natural disaster strikes, like a hurricane, she’d ship the shirts in bulk to a disaster shelter. Maybe some kids get them and use them. But maybe the disaster shelter can’t even give them away and they end up in a landfill. The main point was that she’d figure some way to get rid of the shirts and get a receipt for the donation.”

  “Giving away ten thousand T-shirts might be hard,” I said.

  “Right,” Kyle said. “But it was worth whatever it took, because the whole point was just to get paperwork saying she bought the shirts and then shipped them off.”

  “So where’s the scam?” I asked.

  “The scam is that the official word from Dory’s charity is that the plain version T-shirts are really worth twenty dollars each and she got them so cheap only because she’s such a shrewd shopper. After all, you can go into stores and find kids T-shirts selling for twenty dollars and more. Then she would claim that printing ‘Love Heals’ on the shirt adds another twenty dollars to each shirt’s value. So the Red Roses of Hope charity claims that each shirt has additional value because of the charity’s efforts. The total value of the shirts with printing is stated as forty dollars each. So each time Dory gave away ten thousand of them, she claimed a total charitable donation of four hundred thousand dollars.”r />
  “For shirts that cost the charity only two dollars each, or twenty thousand total.”

  Kyle nodded. He looked embarrassed, but he also looked a bit proud. “Yeah, I don’t really like my sister much, but she’s real smart.” He paused. “Was. She was very smart.”

  He shifted on the barstool. “My legs are killing me. Can’t you move the tape so they can be on the foot bar?”

  “No. If you want to stay out of prison, keep talking.”

  He took a deep breath, shutting his eyes. “Dory had a rule. We had to make two donations like this every year. That way she claimed she was making donations worth eight hundred thousand dollars a year. She’d put that on the tax and government forms, and she used that amount to convince her donors that Red Roses of Hope is being super generous. Her paperwork supposedly proved that the Red Roses of Hope donated almost a million dollars worth of goods to children every year, which was most of her net income. The donation value inflation made it look like most of the dollars she collected got sent out to needy kids.”

  “Where did the rest go?”

  He took a deep breath. “I don’t know how accounting works. But she talked about categories like executive salaries, staff salaries, office space, supplies, stuff like that. I think that used up the rest of her net income.”

  “So her net income was about one million a year,” I said. “Let me guess. Executive salary means money paid to her. And Dory’s staff is you. And the office space is this glorious house, and supplies are things like gas for the Corvette in the driveway.”

  Kyle grit his teeth. “Right.”

  “A few minutes ago, you said you thought the charity brought in six million dollars a year. If her operating income was one million, what happened to the other five million?”

  Kyle looked uncomfortable. “The main expense for most charities is how the fundraising works. For example, the Red Roses of Hope charity uses a separate company to do all of its fundraising. It’s called Fundraising Matrix Systems, LLC.”