(9)
She had been to San Francisco twice before, once on a job and the second time with a lover who wanted her to see the gay scene’s Mecca. Unfortunately Mecca was too out there for Ava, and the trip went badly. She flew home early, and alone.
It was a grey, dismal day, promising rain. Driving a silver Audi A6 she had rented at the airport, Ava exited the highway and started to work her way through Japantown and the Fillmore area to Lower Pacific Heights. She was impressed by how attractive the city looked, even in such gloomy weather. The twisting, climbing streets were lined with trees; colourful, quirky storefronts; and rows of red-brick Victorian-style houses.
She turned onto Post Street, which was mostly apartment buildings, and parked the car at the end of the road. She looked at herself in the rear-view mirror and realized she was a bit dishevelled from the flight. She brushed her hair back and fixed it with the ivory chignon pin, retouched her makeup, and smoothed out the front of her shirt, tucking it into her slacks. Presentable, professional, she thought.
The doorman smiled at her when she was still twenty paces away. He was positively beaming by the time she reached the entrance. “Hello, my name is Ava Lee. I called yesterday about viewing one of the apartments. Could you ask the rental office if they have time to show me a unit?”
He called inside on his walkie-talkie. Ava heard a woman’s voice answer that she was in a meeting and hoped Ms. Lee wouldn’t mind waiting. The doorman looked at Ava, his eyebrows raised.
“I have a colleague staying here — Jim Cousins. I could visit with him for a while. Could you ask if that’s okay?” she said.
“Certainly,” the woman said. “Mr. Cousins is in apartment 306. Tell Ms. Lee to come by my office on the ground floor when she’s ready.”
This is too easy, Ava thought as she walked through the door and into the building.
She felt a touch of nerves as she approached apartment 306. This was the time when expectations gave way to reality. If he was home she hoped he would be reasonable, if not accommodating. But she was prepared for just about anything. Over the years she had experienced everything — shouting, cursing, crying, threats, even physical attacks.
She knocked on the door and waited. Nothing. She knocked again and counted to twenty. She was about to turn and leave when the door opened. Jim Cousins stood in front of her, his hair tousled and pillow creases stamped on his cheek. He was taller than she had expected, definitely over six feet, and more handsome. He wore jeans and a white T-shirt that failed to hide his strong, lean physique. “Can I help you?” he said, not unkindly.
“Mr. Cousins, my name is Ava Lee.”
“I’m sorry, am I supposed to know you?”
“No, but I know you. I’ve been sent by the Ordonez organization to have a chat with you about the Kelowna Valley Developments project.”
She braced herself, preparing for her body to be slammed against the wall, for a fist to be thrust at her face, for a kick to be aimed at her groin, all accompanied by a shower of obscenities. This was when it always happened.
He shrugged. “Sure. C’mon in.”
Ava blinked in surprise and walked past Cousins into the living room. There were boxes everywhere. “I haven’t finished unpacking,” he said, closing the front door. “You want coffee or anything?”
“Instant is fine,” she said, still unsettled by his casual manner.
“We’ll sit in the kitchen,” he said.
Ava followed Cousins into the kitchen and sat at a small round table with two chairs. She pulled out her Moleskine notebook while he fussed with two mugs. “I just take it black,” she said.
He put a mug in front of her and then sat down. “Could you tell me your name again, and do you have any ID?”
“My name is Ava Lee and I’m an accountant. Here’s my business card.”
“An accountant, eh? You aren’t what I was expecting.”
“You were expecting someone?”
“Yeah, but not someone like you, and not this soon.”
“They hired detectives when they couldn’t find you on their own.”
“I borrowed a buddy’s car, drove to Saskatchewan, then crossed the border into North Dakota. They just wave you through there if you look like a local. I also don’t use credit cards or debit cards. That’s just my lifestyle — nothing sinister. I figured I’d be hard to track.”
“But why would you want to be so evasive in the first place?”
He smiled. His eyes caught hers and she saw no fear, no hesitation in them. “Philip asked me to stall for him, give him some time to get things sorted.”
“Philip Chew?”
“Who else?”
There were times when Ava wished her instincts were wrong. “I expected as much,” she said.
“Really? I’m surprised.”
“You don’t exactly have the background of a scam artist, and on first impression I don’t think you’re a good enough liar to get Philip Chew to buy in to some bogus land deal.”
“Why, thank you.”
They sat silently, drinking their coffee. “Could I have another?” she asked.
“How did you find me?” he asked, his back turned as he poured water into her mug.
“Through the Jersey bank,” she said.
“Shit. I told Philip I didn’t want to jump through hoops and loops, but he told me if I moved my money directly from Canada to the U.S. it would be caught in no time. So he sent me to this Jersey bank as a kind of halfway house. Some of my money actually just got here yesterday.”
“Your two million or so?”
“I was paid $2,030,000,” he said.
She opened her notebook. “Do you mind if I write this down?”
“Be my guest.”
“You’re an oil-field worker, I understand.”
“I was an oil-field worker. A technician, but still working outside,” he said. “I’ve worked all over the place. The last job was in bloody Fort McMurray — northern Alberta — those horrendous tar sands. I put in six months without a break, built myself a very nice bankroll, and decided to treat myself to an extended holiday in Las Vegas. That’s where I met Philip.”
Ava’s heart sank. There was no worse combination in the world than Las Vegas and a Chinese gambler.
“I play poker for relatively high stakes — ten- to twenty-dollar no-limit hold’em. I started off at the Bellagio but there’s a real pecking order there. If you’re not a high roller or a professional player you get treated like shit. So I moved my action to the Venetian and got in with an okay crowd. We played in a private room just to the side of the main area. Philip was one of the regulars. He and I played together for six or seven consecutive days.
“Everybody thinks poker is cutthroat but, you know, you can only play so many hands, and when you’re not playing a hand or you’re between hands, there’s a lot of chit-chat. It actually gets kind of social. That’s when Philip and I got to know each other.”
“What kind of poker player is he?”
“Not bad, not bad at all. He tended to play a little too tight and that worked against him, especially in Vegas, where they pick up on your tendencies really quickly. But it didn’t kill him. When he drank, well, that was another story. The more he downed, the looser he got and the more money he lost. He didn’t drink that often, though. I figure he was down maybe thirty or forty thousand for the week we played together. Not that he gave a shit. He never lost his cool.”
“How did you do?”
“I was up two thousand. It should have been more, but I lost a couple of monster pots the last two days I was there.”
“So you and Phillip played poker together.”
“And we talked. He told me about his business, about his big-time brother. I told him about my rather crappy existence. Despite the difference in our lifestyles, we hit it off. On my fourth day at the table, Philip asked me to join him for dinner. We ate at the Chinese restaurant in the Venetian, comped, of course, and he opened up a bit more. We did the same the next night and the night after that. On the sixth night he asked me if I wanted to do some business with him. I told him I wasn’t a businessman. He said not to worry, that he would look after all the details. All I had to do was follow his lead and act like I owned a company.