Lost Light (2003) Read online

  I looked at him for a long moment, the whole time wondering if she was outside the door listening.

  “So what do you want from me, Law? To pull the plug? I can’t do that. I can get you a lawyer if you want, but I’m not —”

  “And she doesn’t treat me right, either.”

  I paused again. I felt a tugging sensation in the pit of my guts. If what he was saying was true, then his life was more of a hell than I could imagine. I lowered my voice when I spoke.

  “What does she do to you, Law?”

  “She gets mad. She does things. I don’t want to talk about it. It’s not her fault.”

  “Listen, you want me to get a lawyer in here? I could also get a social services investigator.”

  “No, no lawyers. That’ll take forever. No investigators. I don’t want that. And I don’t want you to get in any trouble, Harry, but what am I going to do? If I could pull the plug myself I would . . .”

  He blew out a burst of air. The only gesture his body would allow him to make. I could only imagine his horrible frustration.

  “This is no way to live, Harry. It isn’t living.”

  I nodded. None of this had come up on the first visit. We had talked about the case, what he could remember about it. His case memory was coming back in chunks. It had been a difficult interview but there was no sense of self-loathing or desperation. No more depression than would be expected. I wondered if it had been the alcohol that had suddenly brought it out.

  “I’m sorry, Law.”

  It was all I could say. His eyes looked away, up to the television screen which was over my left shoulder.

  “What time is it now, Harry?”

  This time I checked my watch.

  “Twenty after. What’s your hurry, Law? You expecting somebody else?”

  “No, no, nothing like that. There’s just a show I like to watch on Court TV. Comes on at twelve. Rikki Klieman. I like her.”

  “Then you’ve still got time to talk to me. Why don’t you get a bigger clock in here?”

  “She won’t give me one. She says the doctor says it’s bad for me to be watching a clock.”

  “She’s probably right.”

  It was the wrong thing to say. I saw anger flood his eyes and I immediately regretted the words.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t —”

  “You know what it’s like not to be able to raise your own goddamn wrist to look at your fucking watch?”

  “No, Law, I don’t have any idea.”

  “You know what it’s like to shit in a bag and have your wife take it to the toilet? To have to ask her for every goddamn thing, including a taste of whiskey?”

  “I’m sorry, Law.”

  “Yeah, you’re sorry. Everybody’s fucking sorry but nobody’s —”

  He didn’t finish. He seemed to bite off the end of the sentence like a dog getting a hold of raw meat. He looked away and was silent and I was silent for a long moment, until I thought the anger had drained back down his throat into the seemingly bottomless well of frustration and self-pity that was down there.

  “Hey, Law?”

  His eyes came back to me.

  “What, Harry?”

  He was calm. The moment had passed.

  “Let’s go back. You said you were going to call me because there was something you forgot. You know, when we went over the case before. What was it you forgot to tell me?”

  “Nobody’s come here and talked to me about the case, Harry. You’re the only one. I mean that.”

  “I believe you. I was wrong about that. But what was it that you forgot before? Why were you going to call me?”

  He closed his eyes for a moment but then opened them. They were clear and focused.

  “I told you that Taylor insured the money, right?”

  “Right, you told me that.”

  “What I forgot was that the insurance company—offhand I can’t remember the name of —”

  “Global Underwriters. You remembered the other day.”

  “Right. Global Underwriters. As a condition of contract Global required that the lender—that was BankLA—scan all the bills.”

  “Scan the bills? What do you mean?”

  “Record the serial numbers.”

  I remembered the paragraph I had circled on the newspaper clip. It had apparently been true. I started doing the math in my head. Two million divided by a hundred. I almost had it and then lost the number.

  “That would be a lot of numbers.”

  “I know. The bank balked—said it would take four people a week, something like that. So they negotiated and compromised. They sampled. They took ten numbers from every one of the stacks.”

  I remembered from the Times story that the money was delivered in $25,000 bundles. That math I could do. Eighty bundles made $2 million.

  “So they took eight hundred numbers. Still a lot.”

  “Yeah, I remember the printout was like six pages long.”

  “And what did you do with it?”

  “Let me have another taste of that Black Bush, would you?”

  I gave it to him. I could tell the flask was just about empty. I needed to get what he had and get out of there. I was getting sucked into his miserable world and I didn’t like it.

  “Did you put out the numbers?”

  “Yeah, we put out the list. Gave it to the feds. And used the robbery guys to get the list out to all the banks in the county. I also sent it to Vegas Metro so they could get it into the casinos.”

  I nodded, waiting for more.

  “But you know how that goes, Harry. A list like that is only good if the people are checking it. Believe it or not, there are a hell of a lot of hundred-dollar bills out there, and if you use them in the right places people don’t raise an eyebrow. They aren’t going to take the time to run the number down a six-page list. They don’t have the time or the inclination.”

  It was true. Recorded money was most often used as evidence when it was found in the possession of a suspect in a financial crime such as a bank robbery. I could not remember working on or even hearing about a case where marked or recorded money was actually traced by transaction to a suspect.

  “You were going to call me back because you forgot to tell me that?”

  “No, not just that. There’s more. Anything left in that little flask of yours?”

  I shook the flask so he could hear that it was almost empty. I gave him what was left and then capped it and put it back in my pocket.

  “That’s it, Law. Until next time. Finish what you were going to tell me.”

  His tongue poked out of his horrible hole of a mouth and licked a drop of whiskey from the corner. It was pathetic and I turned away as if to check the time on the television so he didn’t have to know I saw it. On the tube was a financial news report. A graph with a red line trending down was on the screen to the side of the anchorman’s concerned and puffy face.

  I looked back at Cross and waited.

  “Well,” he said, “about, I don’t know, ten months or so into the case, close to a year—this is after me and Jack had moved on and were working other things—Jack got a call from Westwood about the serial numbers. It all came back to me the other day after you left.”

  I assumed Cross was talking about an FBI agent calling his partner. It was not an uncommon practice within the LAPD for investigators to never refer to FBI agents as FBI agents, as if denying them their title somehow knocked them down a notch or two. There had never been any love lost between the two competing organizations. But the main federal building in Los Angeles was on Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood and it housed the whole sandbox of federal law enforcement. All jurisdictional biases aside, I needed to be sure.

  “An FBI agent?” I asked.

  “Yeah, an agent. A woman, in fact.”

  “Okay. What did she tell you guys?”

  “She only spoke to Jack, and then Jack told me. The agent said that one of the serial numbers was wrong and Jack said, ‘Is t
hat right? How so?’ And the agent told him that the list had wound through the building and eventually across her desk and she’d taken the time to scan the numbers into her computer and there was a problem with one of them.”

  He stopped as if to catch his breath. He licked his lips again and it reminded me of some sort of underwater creature poking out of a crevice.

  “I sure wish you had more in that flask, Harry.”

  “Sorry, I don’t. Next time. What was the problem with the number?”

  “Well, as far as I remember, this gal, she told Jack that she collects numbers. Know what I mean? Whenever a flier comes across the desk with currency numbers on it, she puts them into her computer, adds them to the data bank. She can run cross-matches, things like that. It was a new program she was working on. She’d been doing it for a few years and had a lot of numbers in the box. Tell you what, I need some water. My throat—too much talking.”

  “I’ll go get Danny.”

  “No, no, that’s not—tell you what, just go to the sink and put some water in that thing you got and I can drink from that. That’ll be fine. Don’t bother Danny. She’s been bothered enough.”

  In the bathroom I filled the flask halfway with water from the faucet. I shook it and brought it out to him. He took it all. After a few moments he finally continued the story.

  “She said one of the numbers on our list was on somebody else’s list and that was impossible.”

  “What do you mean? I’m not tracking this.”

  “Let me see if I remember this right. She said that one of the hundreds that was on our list had a serial number that belonged to a hundred that was part of a bait packet taken in a bank robbery about six months before our movie set robbery went down.”

  “Where was the bank robbery?”

  “Marina del Rey, I think. I’m not sure about that, though.”

  “Okay, so what was the problem? Why couldn’t the hundred from the earlier bank robbery get recirculated, land back in a bank and then become part of the two million sent to the movie set?”

  “That’s what I said and Jack told me that it was impossible. He said the agent said the guy who took that bill in Marina del Rey in the first place got caught. He had the bait pack on him and he went to the federal clink and the bill was held as evidence.”

  I nodded and thought about this, trying to get it right.

  “You’re saying that she was telling you that it would have been impossible for the hundred on your list to have been part of the movie delivery because at that time that hundred-dollar bill was in evidence lockup in regard to the Marina del Rey bank robbery.”

  “Exactly. She even went in and checked the evidence to make sure the hundred was still there. It was.”

  I tried to think about what this could mean, if it meant anything at all.

  “What did you and Jack do?”

  “Well, not much. There were a lot of numbers—six pages’ worth. We figured maybe we just got a bad one. You know, maybe the guy who recorded it all had messed up, transposed a number or whatever. We were running on a new case by then. Jack said he’d make some calls to the bank and Global Underwriters. But I don’t know if he did. Then, soon after that, we walked into the shit in that bar and everything else sort of drifted away . . . until I thought about Angella Benton and called you. Things are starting to come back to me now, you know?”

  “I understand. Do you remember the agent’s name?”

  “Sorry, Harry, I don’t remember the name. I might’ve never had it. I didn’t talk to her and I don’t think Jack even told me.”

  I was silent while I considered whether this was a lead worth pursuing. I thought about what Kiz Rider had said about the case being worked. Maybe this was the angle. Maybe the people she told me about were FBI agents. While I was working it over, Cross started talking again.

  “For what it’s worth, I got the idea from Jack that this agent, whoever she was, sort of came up with this thing on her own. It was her own little program she was running. Almost like a hobby. Not on the official computer.”

  “Okay. Do you remember if you ever got any other hits on the numbers? Before this one?”

  “There was one but it didn’t go anywhere. It came up pretty soon, in fact.”

  “What was that?”

  “It came up in a bank deposit. I think it was Phoenix. My memory’s like Swiss cheese. A lot of holes.”

  “You remember anything about that one at all?”

  “Just that it was a deposit from a cash business. Like a restaurant. Something we weren’t going to be able to trace any further back.”

  “But it was pretty soon after the heist?”

  “Yeah, I remember we jumped on it. Jack went out there. But it was a dead end.”

  “How soon after the heist, can you remember?”

  “Maybe a few weeks. I don’t know for sure.”

  I nodded. His memory was coming back but it still wasn’t reliable. It served to remind me that without the murder book—the case documentation—I was severely handicapped.

  “Okay, Law, thanks. If you remember or think of anything else, have Danny call me. And whether that happens or not I’ll be back to see you.”

  “And you’ll bring the . . .”

  He didn’t finish and didn’t need to.

  “Yeah, I’ll bring it. You sure you don’t want me to bring somebody else? Maybe a lawyer that could talk to you about —”

  “No, Harry, no lawyers, not yet.”

  “You want me to talk to Danny?”

  “No, Harry, don’t talk to her.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  I nodded my good-bye and left the room. I wanted to get to my car so I could quickly write some notes about the call Jack Dorsey had gotten from the bureau agent. But when I came from the hallway into the living room Danielle Cross was sitting there waiting for me. She was on the couch and looked at me with accusing eyes. I threw the look right back at her.

  “I think it’s almost time for a show he wants to watch on Court TV.”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  “Okay. I’m leaving now.”

  “I wish you would not come back.”

  “Well, I may have to.”

  “The man is on a delicate balance—mentally and physically. The alcohol upsets it. It takes days for him to recover.”

  “Looked to me like it improved things for him.”

  “Then come back tomorrow and have another look.”

  I nodded. She was right. I spent a half hour with the man, not my life. I waited. I could tell she was working up toward something.

  “I assume he told you that he wants to die and that I’m the one keeping him alive. For the money.”

  I hesitated but then nodded.

  “He said I mistreat him.”

  I nodded again.

  “He tells that to everybody that comes visit. All the cops.”

  “Is it true?”

  “The part about wanting to die? Some days. Some days it’s not.”

  “What about the part about being mistreated.”

  She looked away from me.

  “It’s frustrating, dealing with him. He’s not happy. He takes it out on me. One time I took it out on him. I turned off the television. He started crying like a baby.”

  She looked up at me.

  “That’s all I’ve ever done but it was enough. I hate what I did, what I became in the moment. Everything got the better of me.”

  I tried to read her eyes, the set of her jaw and mouth. She had her hands together in front of her, the fingers of one hand working the rings on the other set. A nervous gesture. I watched her chin start to quiver and then the tears started to come.

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t know. The only thing I knew was that I had to get out of there.

  “I don’t know, Danny. I don’t know what any of us are supposed to do.”

  It was all I
could think of to say. I walked quickly to the front door and left. I felt like a coward walking away and leaving them alone together in that house.

  7

  Loose lips sink ships. The theory of the case pursued by Cross and Dorsey four years earlier was simple. They believed that Angella Benton had intimate knowledge through her job about the $2 million that was to be delivered to the film location and had set the robbery and her own death in motion by either intentionally or mistakenly talking about the money. Her loose lips planted the seed of the robbery and, consequently, her own demise. Being the inside link to the robbers, she had to be eliminated to cover their tracks. Because she was murdered four days before the robbery, it was believed by the two investigators that her involvement was unintentional. She had somehow furnished the information that led to the robbery and needed to be eliminated before she realized what she had done. She also needed to be eliminated in a way that would not draw suspicion to the impending cash delivery. Thus the psychosexual aspects of the crime scene—the tearing of the clothes and the evidence of masturbation—were in a way simply window dressing on the misdirection.