“In principle, yeah. But we’ve got to talk about what kind of work you’ll be doing, how long it’s going to take, all that.”
“Well, sure.”
“I’m not thinking a gut renovation, just so you know.” Rick put a hand on Jeff’s shoulder, on the coarse cotton duck of his barn coat, guiding him out of the room and toward the stairs. “Minimal destruction. Repairs and improvements, mostly. Second and third floors. Paper over the cracks.”
“I don’t know as I agree about that, Rick. There’s rotten wood all down through the middle of the house. Serious water damage. Probably from a worn pipe boot-water’s been leaking into the ceiling for years. Or maybe it’s from stopped-up gutters or leaking chimney flashing. Rain’s been seeping down into the house for years, making wet spots. Causing wood rot and mold. Gonna have to cut out the rotten wood and plaster in some parts. Not everywhere. Just some parts.”
Rick groaned. “You serious?”
“I’ll take you through and show you.”
Rick shook his head. “I believe you. But I’m gonna want you to draw up a plan. Put it down on paper so there’s no misunderstanding.”
“Sure, sure.”
“How soon could you do it?”
“I could get started on it tonight. Like I said, it’s slow, this time of year.”
“Sounds good,” Rick said.
As soon as he’d gotten Jeff out of the house, Rick rummaged in the kitchen drawers and found a flashlight. He clicked it on but its batteries were dead. He found a D cell battery nestled among an assortment of stray Ziploc sandwich bags and swapped it for one of the old ones, and that provided enough juice to generate a feeble light.
He went back upstairs to his father’s study. Its window looked out onto the Hollenbecks’ yard, which meant that Jeff could see into the room. But pulling the venetian blinds closed would cast the study into darkness, and the overhead light was burned out here, too. It also would look strange for him to pull the blinds, as if he were trying to hide something from Jeff.
He left them open and returned to the crawl space. It still smelled of squirrel urine, but now he barely minded. He directed the sputtering beam of watery light at the tarp-covered pile. He yanked at the tarp, hard, and popped some more of the staples. He pulled the flap back and shone the light to see what was there.
It was a neat square stack about a foot and a half tall and maybe two or three feet per side. It gave off a musty odor. From what he could discern, by directing the failing light back and forth over the pile and lifting random packets, it was all banknotes. Top to bottom.
He was able to count 398 packets before the flashlight died. Most of them-290 packets-were hundred-dollar bills; the rest-108 packets-were fifties. He found a dog-eared gas station receipt in his wallet and scrawled a calculation on it. The total was 3,440,000 dollars.
More than 3.4 million dollars.
He felt a strange vertiginous sensation, as if he were plummeting headfirst into space. His head was spinning, swimming. He picked up one of the packets of hundreds and rifled through it with his thumb. He inhaled its musk. He could smell mildew and tobacco, solvent and ink and sweat. Some of the banknotes looked as if they’d never been circulated: They were crisp and unmarked. Others were dog-eared and creased.
He glanced at the off-center engraving of Ben Franklin on the front of the banknote, with shoulder-length hair and a constipated expression. It certainly looked legit, not counterfeit, though he was no expert.
How long had this pile been walled up here? The bills looked new-uncirculated, anyway-but they’d probably been inside the wall for a few decades.
He only knew he couldn’t leave them here.
3
He grabbed a handful of plastic supermarket shopping bags from the broom closet-a couple from Star Market and a couple from Whole Foods, from the old days, when they used to give out plastic bags. The packets of cash fit into six bags, but when he tried to lift one of them, the bag broke and the cash tumbled to the floor. He doubled each bag, then hauled them downstairs two at a time, handling the flimsy bags gingerly. When he’d gathered them at the foot of the staircase, he tested carrying two at a time. Not possible; the weight he could manage, but the cash was too bulky. He didn’t want to risk a bag failure between the house and the car, cash spilling across the driveway.
Especially if Jeff were watching from next door. Why the hell wasn’t he off on a job somewhere, renovating a Watertown condo or building a spec house? What did he do all day when he didn’t have a job scheduled?
The trunk of his old red BMW 3 Series-the red had been a mistake, one of a long line of mistakes; cops really did go after red cars more often-was stuffed with crap. A gym bag, a pile of magazines he’d optimistically planned to read on the elliptical trainer, a set of jumper cables. He rearranged the junk, jamming old Entertainment Weeklys and Back Bays as far back as possible, until there was room for the six bagsful of cash. Then, after looking around outside to make sure Jeff-or anyone else-wasn’t for some reason watching, he trundled the bags carefully to the trunk.
Then he got into the driver’s seat and sat there, thinking for a moment of where he might take 3.4 million dollars for safekeeping. The obvious place, of course, was a bank. A safe-deposit box. He didn’t have one; all he knew about safe-deposit boxes was what he’d seen in the movies and on TV. He seemed to remember a standard size of a few feet long by maybe eight or ten inches wide. Did they come in larger sizes? He assumed you could request a larger one if you wanted.
His bank had a branch office in Harvard Square. He started the car and maneuvered down Clayton Street to Huron Ave, and then over to Garden Street toward the square. He’d begun to think more clearly now, and he started having second thoughts about carting six grocery bags of cash into the Bank of America. Was it even legal to store cash in a safe-deposit box? He pulled the car over to the shoulder in a no-stopping zone and switched on his blinkers.
He loaded the Safari browser on his phone and searched. The answer wasn’t clear. Banks had to notify the IRS of any deposits of more than ten thousand dollars. But that referred to deposits into bank accounts. Not stashing away packets of cash.
Still, in this post-9/11 age, banks probably had to pay close attention to the movements of large quantities of cash, right? In case it was connected to ill-gotten gains? Maybe the US government could even confiscate your cash if it thought you were engaged in criminal activity. He wasn’t sure, but it wouldn’t have surprised him if that were true.
If he wandered into the Harvard Square branch of the Bank of America toting six shopping bags full of cash, mostly hundreds, that was as good as blowing a trumpet and announcing to the world that he was a coke dealer. He would be observed, no question about it-how could any banker who wasn’t too busy texting or checking her Facebook page fail to observe him carrying in a load of cash? Then the teller would summon the assistant manager, and…
It no longer seemed like such a good idea to bring all this cash into a bank.
In fact, it didn’t seem like such a good idea to carry his cash anywhere in those crappy supermarket bags. Not just because of the risk of the bags’ splitting, but also because anyone could see their contents. That was just asking to get mugged.
He turned off his blinkers and pulled back into traffic and headed back the way he’d come, then over to Mass Ave, where he found a 7-Eleven. Parking the car in a space he could monitor from inside the store, he quickly bought a box of Glad trash bags (ForceFlex, black, extra strong) and returned to the car. Standing at the trunk, about to pop the lid, he suddenly became aware of how exposed he was.