Mayfield Enterprises Pt. 01

"I made coffee," she said.

I guess she understood the look I gave her. "I didn't put anything in it," she said. "I'll have a cup with you."

I Poured a cup for both of us and sat across the table from Micki.

"I've been thinking about our situation. We can't dismantle Mayfield Enterprises," Micki said. "at least not yet."

"Why not?" I said.

"Our biggest concern is the purchase contract for that hotel and casino in Deadwood. South Dakota. I read through the purchase contract again this morning, and there is a clause in the contract that requires Mayfield Enterprises to pay a ten percent advance for due diligence, before April 10. That would be $150,000 that we would not get back if we don't go through with the purchase."

"If we refuse to pay the due diligence what happens?" I said.

"They will sue us, and we will end up paying the $150K plus court costs. We will have to purchase the casino and try to make it work for us. I think we should at least check it out before we give up on it. Besides, your Corvette is leased by Mayfield Enterprises. You don't want to give that up do you?"

Chapter 11

After eating some breakfast, I told Micki that I was going to take the plywood and the tarp from the gravesite and put them in Nesbit's garage because I didn't want them to be found anywhere near our house.

"Then I am going start searching his house to make sure there is nothing there to connect either of us to Nesbit or anything that might cause someone to come looking for that bastard."

"I'll come with you," Micki said.

When we got to the house, I told Micki to search through the bedroom and all of Nesbit's clothes for anything that could connect him to either of us. While she did that, I went back to the study. I shut down the computer and put it in a box to be taken with us. I emptied all the drawers. I found several keys in one of the drawers and put them in the box and took every scrap of paper from the desk and put them into the box as well. I was about to throw the blue notebook into the box when it occurred to me that I had never even looked inside it.

The blue notebook was another of Nesbit's detailed plans. As near as I could tell, this plan had already been executed two years before Nesbit had started fucking with my life. This time, Nesbit's victim was a young woman that he referred to only as Clare. He was after an inheritance she received from her grandfather. Nesbit had convinced the woman to give him a large sum of money to invest in land in North Carolina. The day after Nesbit got the money, he was supposed to have left town on his way to North Carolina. Instead of leaving town, he stole a car and used it to force Clare's car off the road and over a one-hundred-foot cliff. After that, he ditched the car and left town with the money.

When Micki came into the study, I handed her the blue notebook and said, "Read this. It might make you feel a little better about what you did."

Micki sat down with the notebook. When she finished reading it, she started to cry. "He was a monster, and it's my shame that I couldn't see him for what he was."

I gave her a minute to calm down then asked if she found anything during her search of the bedroom.

"A few restaurant receipts. I tossed those in the trash. Nothing else. I'll have to come over here Monday to put his trash can out for pickup. Any place else we need to look?"

"No. I already looked through the hall closet and the kitchen. I emptied the contents of the desk into the box. We'll bring it with us and take a closer look at the contents when we get home.

Back home, Micki and I went through the papers in the box we brought home and tossed anything that wasn't important to us, in the trash. One item of interest was the closing statement for the purchase of Nesbit's house. Turned out that the house was owned by another LLC named Nesco. I opened Nesbit's laptop and searched for any files pertaining to Nesco and found them hidden in the music folder. I handed the laptop to Micki so that she could read the files.

While Micki studied the Nesco files, I continued sorting through papers. One thing I almost missed was a receipt for the rental of a safety deposit box at the Ashville Savings and Loan. The name on the receipt was Thomas Mayfield. Another step Nesbit had taken toward taking over my life. I wondered if the key to the safety deposit was among the keys I found in Nesbit's desk. There were five keys, and one of them looked like it might be for a safety deposit box and another of the keys looked like it belonged to a post office box. I mentioned the safety deposit box and the key to a post office box to Micki.

"There is a lot of money tied up in Nesco. The $500K Dave invested in Mayfield Ent came from Nesco, leaving a balance of about $540K. In addition to the money, Nesco owns Dave's house, and apparently, it owns another house in the Cayman Islands.

"The address for Nesco is a PO Box in Ashville. I'll go to the Ashville Post Office tomorrow and see if the key you found opens that box. The safety deposit box could be a problem. I don't know what we can do about that." Micki said.

"I wonder if one of these other keys is for the house in the Caymans. You think maybe, Nesbit has a bank account down there?" I said."

We spent the rest of the day talking about Mayfield Enterprises and the likely purchase of the Deadwood Saloon Hotel and Casino. We decided that we would have to pay the due diligence of $150K in April. Then we would both go to Deadwood in May and see if we could find a big enough problem with the property that would allow us to back out of the purchase contract without losing our due diligence money. Until then I would go back to Memphis to work on the projects assigned to me while Micki returned to her job.

On Sunday morning, before leaving, I told Micki that I hoped that now that Nesbit was gone, I would be able to trust her to not stab me in the back.

"You won't have to worry about me. We're both in this together now and we will need each other to make this all work," Micki said.

As I walked out the door, I told Micki I would see her in two weeks.

Chapter 12

Over the next two weeks, I finished the two projects I was working on in Tennessee, so I put in for a week of vacation. When I got home, Micki brought me up to date on what she had been doing. She told me that she had been checking the Nesco post office box daily and the only mail, other than junk mail was a Visa bill for Nesco. Micki said that she found Nesbit's password and was able to sign on to Nesco bank accounts and paid the Visa bill.

I told Micki that I was thinking of going down to the Cayman Islands to check out the house Nesco owned down there. Micki said that she would like to go with me, but she could not get the time off work on such short notice.

I flew down on Sunday arriving at 2:00 PM. I took a cab from the airport to the house on Grand Cayman. It was a two-bedroom bungalow with a great view of the Caribbean. I knocked on the door but got no answer, so I tried the keys I brought with me and was able to open the door. The house was furnished but obviously had not been occupied for a while. There was a layer of dust on the furniture and the house smelled musty from being closed up for a long period of time.

I emailed Micki and told her about the house. She suggested that I hire a cleaning service and contract them to clean the bungalow once a month unless we called and asked them to get the bungalow ready for visitors. Their services would be paid for by Nesco. Our plan was to use the house as a vacation home and possibly rent it out when we weren't using it. I stayed until Thursday, enjoying the weather and the beach, then returned home.

When I got home Micki said that she had some ideas she wanted to run by me.

"I am thinking that we should merge Nesco with Mayfield Enterprises. That way we can sell Dave's house here and keep the Cayman house," Micki said.

"How do we do that?"

"You will have to fake being David Nesbit so we can go to an attorney and tell him that you need to give me your power of attorney so that I can act on your behalf in the merger of Nesco LLC with Mayfield Enterprises LLC."

"How am I going to pass for Nesbit? I don't look like him."

"Start by growing a mustache. When it grows in, I will darken your hair and style it to look like Dave's. I believe I can make you look enough like the pictures on Dave's driver's license and passport to pass for him. I already have a lawyer lined up. He knows me so he won't be suspicious. I think we can pull that off. Once I have the POA, I'll create a business agreement for the merger of the two businesses along with an agreement to buy out Nesbit's share of Nesco."

"How do you plan to pay Nesbit for his share of the company?"

"We will open an offshore account in the Cayman Bank in Nesbit's name and pay the money into that account. Later we will take the money back," Micki said. "One more thing, you need to go to Ashville Savings and Loan and open that safety deposit box."

It took me two weeks to grow a mustache long enough to look like Nesbit's. Micki colored and styled my hair to make me look enough like Nesbit to fool the lawyer. I was nervous the day of our appointment with the lawyer, but as it turned out everything went the way Micki planned it.

Micki went to work on the merger while I headed to Ashville to try to get access to the safety deposit box. I had no problem getting access to the box. When the woman that escorted me into the vault left me alone with the box, I opened it.

The contents of the box were a surprise to me. There was a 32-caliber handgun, $20K in cash, a passport in my name, but with Nesbit's picture, and a passbook for the Grand Cayman Bank. The passbook indicated that the account at the Grand Cayman Bank had a balance of more than $1Million. I suddenly felt like my legs were going to give out. I took a few deep breaths to calm down then continued my search of the box. There were several papers that didn't mean anything to me, so I put them in my briefcase along with the gun, the money the passport, and the passbook. The last thing in the box was a card with phone numbers and what looked like passwords. There was no indication of what the passwords were for or who the phone numbers belonged to.

When I got home, I showed Micki what I had taken from the safety deposit box. The first thing she did was hand me $10K and then take the other $10K for herself. Then Micki got on her computer and was able to log onto the Grand Cayman Bank website and was able to get into Nesbit's account using one of the passwords on the card I found.

"What should we do about all that money he has stashed in that bank?" I said.

"Since it's a numbered account, there is no name associated with it. Now, because we have the account number and the password, we have control over that money," Micki said.

Micki changed the password for the account to make sure no one else could get access to it. Then she said, "That will be our money. I suggest that we leave that money there and save it for a rainy day.

"Now that we have erased David Nesbit from our lives it's time to move forward and try to do something useful with Mayfield Enterprises and the Deadwood Saloon Hotel and Casino. That should keep us busy. I suggest that we go up and look at the property and see if there is any way to get out of the deal. If not, we will need to start learning how to run a hotel and casino.

End of Part One