"From the laundry business."
"A nice touch of irony," I said. "Kill Cousin Charlie with his own filthy lucre."
"No," she said. "The money is coming from Julian. He inherited a chain of dry cleaning shops from his bachelor uncle. Julian figures we can pull it off for about three hundred thousand dollars."
Everything fell into place. A million questions were answered in a microsecond. This was my kind of game. No wonder the FBI couldn't get a handle on Irish Spring. Fairfax and Woo were not trying to launch a trafficking operation; they were attempting to shut down Cocaine City forever and put every Cousin Charlie out of business from here to kingdom come. Frank would have loved them for it.
"Let's go to my place for dinner," Clarissa said.
"I want to stop at the motel and pick up something."
We talked about generalities: weather, traffic and music. I was soon signing for a FedEx package at the motel. We pulled into the basement of Clarissa's condo building.
"Come along," she said. "Let's go across the street to the deli and get something for dessert. I feel a chocolate attack coming on."
"You order, I'll pay," I said.
We left Deli Delicious with pineapple mousse, chocolate chip cookies an obscene triple chocolate decadence and one apricot fool.
Clarissa warmed up some of yesterday's pasta, whipped up a sauce and threw it in the microwave. We were soon at the table. We didn't talk much until we got to the dessert.
"Call me naïve," Clarissa Woo began. "Just a moment, I'll get the coffee."
She was anything but naïve. The apricot fool was decadently creamy and the chocolate crust was disappearing rapidly. I tried to restrain myself and savor it while I waited for her to fuss over our coffee.
"We were all wrong about you. This is so embarrassing. Julian and I thought you were CIA."
I couldn't help it. I tried to stifle the laughter but couldn't. I almost choked but there was no way, I was going to spit out a chunk of the crust of the apricot fool; it was too good.
Taking a moment to recover, I finally said, "Want to hear something funny?" It was supposed to be a rhetorical question. I continued without pause. "The FBI thought that Julian was CIA or else a big time trafficker with Asian connections."
"We wanted to get close to someone in the CIA so that we could pitch our proposal to them."
We were at the - I'll show you mine stage. I decided to stall, to remain for as long as possible in the land of the never never that lies between overture and commitment.
"They are the wrong people. You'd have to mess it up a bit first and put in a touch of stupidity and maybe then they will bite. I think you should stick with your beetles. They're innately more intelligent."
"You seem to know something about the way that they operate."
"You mean the beetles?"
Clarissa Woo smiled. "I mean the CIA, Silly."
"Only what I read in the papers. However, I did begin to develop my suspicions about them when I cottoned onto the fact that drugs ending up in Arizona were being piped through Nicaragua."
"And how were you involved?"
"Drug detail."