The Money Plot

By Tyson Blue

On a peaceful balcony overlooking the Erie Canal, Walter Parker listens to a client’s story of hidden cash, laundered bills, and a family secret unearthed in a rose garden.

I was sitting at a small iron table on the balcony of Mulconry’s Irish Pub in Fairport, New York, east of Rochester, watching boats make their way under the town’s famous lift bridge, which carried traffic over the Erie Canal. I was nursing a Guinness while I talked with Ron Case, the client who had hired me to take care of a small problem for him.

“I trust the services were performed to your satisfaction?” I asked, taking a sip from my glass.

“They were,” he said with a tight smile. “I assume the fee was satisfactory as well?”

I had verified that the funds had been transferred to my account, from which they would be moved to a more secure account shortly.

“It was,” I told him, setting the glass down. “Perhaps we can do business again sometime.”

“I hope I won’t need them again anytime soon, Mr. Parker,” Case said with a wry grin. He knew me well enough to hire me to do his dirty work for him, which entitled him to know me as Walter Parker, but not well enough to know me as Ray Vincent.

I finished the stout and set the empty glass on the table, watching strands of foam trickle slowly to the bottom of the glass. I reached for my wallet to leave a tip, preparing to get up. Case waved a hand to stop me.

“No, no, I’ve got it,” he said, reaching for his own billfold. He reached in and pulled out a bill. He glanced at it and froze. I looked at it.

The bill was a ten, but it didn’t look like any ten-dollar bill I’d ever seen.

It was pale and yellowed, with dark stains across it. The paper was thin and flimsy. From the printing, it looked like an old silver certificate, but not like any circulated bill I remembered. Case glanced at it, then up at me.

“Didn’t know I had that with me,” he said, sliding the bill back into his pocket, not in his wallet but loose.

“What’s with that?” I asked him, “It’s not counterfeit, is it?”

“No, it’s legit,” Case said, “but it’s got a pretty interesting history. If you’ve got a few minutes, I can tell it to you.”

He gestured at the seat I’d just vacated. I shrugged and slid back into the seat. Out on the canal, a bell began to clang. After a second, the bridge began to lift straight up to let a boat pass through. And while that went on, Case proceeded to tell me the history of the bill in his pocket, just as I’m telling it to you.

Back in the early ‘70s (Ron began), the summer after my wife and I were married, we went with the rest of her family to spend a week in Canada at their cabin in the Kawartha Lakes country, near Peterboro and Bobcaygeon. On the way, my wife told me a story.

When they were young, she said, they would make this same trip up to Canada every summer. They would prepare for weeks, and late at night when the kids were all supposed to be in bed, her parents would go down into the washroom in the cellar, where there was a big sink filled with a mix of bleach and water.

In the water were dozens of pieces of paper, soaking in the smelly mixture, the smell of which seared their noses as they crouched at the head of the stairs in the nightclothes and watched as their parents plucked the dripping bills from the sink, their hands encased in rubber gloves. They’d run their fingers down the bills, wiping the excess water off them, and then hang them on lines strung around the room.

When the lines were full and the sink empty, they would drain the sink, pull off their gloves and go upstairs. The kids had crept off to bed while the cleanup was going on, and the parents never knew that their kids had any idea what they were doing. But the kids had ideas.

They had seen stories on the news and on television shows about counterfeiters, and although they had no idea how fake money was made, they knew that the papers that were hanging up in their cellar to dry looked kind of like money, except that they weren’t quite the right color.

Maybe, they figured, their parents just weren’t very good counterfeiters. And maybe that was why they always took the bills up to Canada to spend them, since Canadians had their own funny-colored money and didn’t know as much about what American money was supposed to look like.

And maybe that was why their father was always so nervous going through Customs, telling the kids not to say a word unless someone asked them something. Maybe he was afraid that one of them would say something, and their car would be pulled over and searched, and they would find the funny-looking money and they’d all go to jail for smuggling counterfeit money out of the country.

This had gone on until about five of six years ago, when all the mysterious preparations and strange smells down in the cellar had ceased. No explanation for the practice had ever been offered.

“Well?” I said when she had finished.

“Well, what?” she asked.

“Why don’t we ask them what it was all about?”

She thought that over, a smile slowly spreading over her face. She turned to me.

“Why don’t we?”

And so, on the second night we were there, everyone was gathered around the fireplace in the cabin’s large main room, watching logs snap and pop and fill the room with a pleasant warmth and the smell of wood smoke. As everyone drowsed in their places, my wife leaned forward.

“So, Dad,” she said, causing her father to wake from his semi-doze and shift in this recliner to look her way. “There’s something we’ve all been curious about for a long time, and we want to know what it’s all about.”

“What’s that?” he said, cocking his head and giving her a baleful side-eye.

My wife let the moment draw out, savoring it a little before going on.

“What’s the story about all that money you were washing in the cellar when we were getting ready to come up here? What was up with that?”

Her father glanced quickly at his wife, who suddenly found something particularly fascinating in the crocheting project in her lap, and pretended not to hear.

“What money?” he said. “We just went to the bank to get money,” he began. “You know, you went with me to the bank to get it—”

“Not this year,” she interrupted, waving her hand back and forth as though shooing away cobwebs. “I mean back when we were kids. It happened every year.”

“How did you find out about that?” he asked indignantly, trying to gain control of the conversation. “You kids were asleep!”

“No we weren’t,” my brother-in-law said.” That damn bleach stunk up the whole house, and we snuck down to see what the smell was. We saw you taking all those funny-looking wet bills out the laundry sink and hanging ‘em up to dry. I remember you wouldn’t let anybody go down there during the week or so before we left for Canada.”

“Yeah,” chimed in my sister-in-law, from her seat to my right. “We all thought you were counterfeiters, and you brought the money up here to spend because you weren’t very good at it, and thought people in Canada wouldn’t notice it didn’t look right.”

A log in the fireplace gave a loud pop, and my father-in-law gave a shout and jumped about a foot off his chair. He’d been a bomber pilot in World War II, and sudden loud noises often provoked that reaction. But as he settled back in his chair, he began to laugh.”

“Well”, he said, “you got part of it right.”

That made everyone quiet down for a second, trying to figure out which part they’d gotten right—being counterfeiters, not being very good at it, what?

And then, my father-in-law told us the story of the “laundered” money.

During World War II, a lot of products were needed for the war effort by what was then called the War Department—things like rubber, steel, paper, gasoline and oil and foodstuffs like sugar and dairy products. Allocations for the civilian population for these products were restricted, and they were rationed.

Because there was always a greater demand than there was available supply, a thriving business evolved for those products which were in short supply—for the right price. In a word, bootlegging.

When someone says “bootlegging”, the first thing that leaps to mind in alcohol—Al Capone, fedoras, machine guns, Eliot Ness. But my wife’s uncle, Lloyd, was a bootlegger of a different stripe.

He ran a dairy, and had a lucrative military contract to produce dairy goods for the Armed Forces. And he produced a commodity that many people in the Rochester area wanted, and which was in very short supply due to rationing, and those who could afford to were willing to pay a pretty penny to get it.

Ice cream.

For most of the war, Lloyd ran a lucrative bootleg ice cream business out of his dairy, selling surplus product after hours to those who could afford it. It might not have been the kind of money he could have brought in selling liquor, but the Feds weren’t watching it nearly as hard and no one was likely to rat him out—not if they wanted to keep having those little dishes of chocolate or vanilla for dessert, that is.

And it still generated plenty of money, all of it in cash, and all of it decidedly under the table.

That created a problem, namely, what to do with it. Lloyd couldn’t put it in the bank, since he’d have to account for it. He could spend it, but it would have to be done discreetly, a little at a time, so as not to draw attention to him, and lead to questions about where it came from.

The answer lay in his back yard.

Lloyd’s wife had planted several elaborate rose gardens in the back yard, and over the years, Lloyd had sealed the cash in tin cans and buried them at night in the rose gardens. He had kept a map showing how many cans there were and where they were located. The map was kept in an envelope taped to the underside of the desktop in his study.

And years later, lying on his deathbed, Lloyd had called my father-in-law to him. With only the two of them present, Lloyd had told his younger brother the secret of the rose gardens, a plot of land that would yield a mighty cash crop. He told him about the map, and where it could be found. He told my father-in-law to take it with him and to guard the secret with his life. And he had done just that.

Lloyd soon shuffled off this mortal coil, and one night not long after, armed with the map, shovels, and two small flashlights, my in-laws had scuttled into Lloyd’s back yard and retrieved the cans, loading them into boxes in the back of their car, and moved them to their home a few blocks away. The rose garden had been restored as much as possible to its original state.

On arriving home, my in-laws had opened the cans and found that they had a problem. Over the intervening years, the cans had corroded and begun to leak. Water, containing minerals from the dirt, as well as chemicals from fertilizers and plant food, had gotten onto the bills and stained them considerably. In this condition, they could not possibly have been circulated without arousing a lot of questions that would be hard to answer.

The solution was to literally launder the money—to soak it in a mixture of bleach and mild detergent to try to get as much of the stains out as possible. This succeeded in getting most of the stains out, but it also took out some of the dyes in the ink, and left the bills looking strange and discolored. Passing them in stores would still raise some eyebrows.

More thought gave rise to a possible solution. The highlight of every summer for the family was the annual trip to Canada. In another country, which had its own money, but which gladly accepted American currency, they could hopefully spend the cash, a little at a time, without arousing as much curiosity and unwelcome attention.

They decided to try this at once, on this year’s trip, and to their surprise, it had worked perfectly. When anyone questioned the discoloration of the money, my in-laws blamed it on washing the bills along with clothes, a chemical spill, or simply shrugged and said that’s how it looked when they got it.

Over the years, the money had been brought up to Canada a little at a time, and had been successfully spent throughout the Kawartha Region of Ontario, a little bit here, and little bit there, and no one ever the wiser.

As the boat passed under the elevated lift bridge, the bells began to clang and the roadbed lowered until it was back in place. The barriers lifted and traffic began to hum across it once again. Case had fished the bill out of his pocket again, and regarded its mottled face as it nestled in his palm.

“Some of the money was so spoiled it had to be burned,” he explained. “But except for one or two pieces they kept as souvenirs, the bulk of it was spent in Canada.

“So you see,” Ron looked back up at me and concluded, “my in-laws weren’t counterfeiters, they were money-launderers. They also violated the Internal Revenue Code by not reporting it as income, and probably a handful of other laws I don’t know about, but it’s all done now, and the statute of limitations has probably run on most of it, so who gives a shit?”

He snickered and put the bill back in his wallet, which he slid into his pocket. We both stood up again, and I held out my hand. Ron grabbed mine and we shook.

“Pleasure doing business with you,” I said. “And thanks for the drinks—and the story.” I walked off the balcony, went down a short flight of stairs, turned and headed through the crowded bar area and out the front door.

I paused a moment to allow a man wearing shorts and a t-shirt and playing a set of bagpipes to stroll past me, then crossed the street, heading into the parking lot to find my car. It was a long way back to New Hampshire from here, and I was anxious to get started.