“Law, there’s no drinking bottle in there. What do you want me to do?”
“Goddamn, she probably took it. She knows what I’m up to. You have the flask?”
“Yeah, right here.”
I tapped it from the outside of my sport coat.
“Bring it out. Let me have a taste.”
I pulled the flask out and opened it. I brought the mouth to his and let him take a swallow. He coughed loudly and some of it spilled down his cheek and neck.
“Ah, Jesus!” he gasped.
“What?”
“Jesus . . .”
“What? Law, you all right? I’ll get Danny.”
I made a move toward the door but he stopped me.
“No, no. I’m fine. I’m fine. I just . . . it’s been a long time, is all. Give me another.”
“Law, we’ve got to talk.”
“I know that. Just give me another taste.”
I held the flask to his mouth again and poured in a good jolt. He took it down well this time and closed his eyes.
“Black Bush . . . Jesus, is that good.”
I smiled and nodded.
“Fuck the meds,” he said. “Give me Bushmills anytime, Harry. Any fucking time.”
He was a man who couldn’t move but I could still see the whiskey work into his eyes and soften them.
“She won’t give me anything,” he said. “Doctor’s orders. Only time I get a nip is when one of you guys comes by and visits. And that ain’t often. Who wants to come and see this sorry sight . . .
“You gotta keep coming, Harry. I don’t care about the case, clear it, don’t clear it, but keep comin’ to see me.”
His eyes moved to the flask.
“And bring your friend there. Always bring a friend.”
It was beginning to dawn on me. Cross had held back on me. I had come to him the day before I went to Taylor. Cross had been the place to start. But he had held back in order to bring me back—with a flask. Maybe the whole thing, his call to reawaken the case in me had all been about one thing. The flask.
I held the wallet-size container up.
“You held back on me, Law, so I’d bring you this.”
“No. I was going to have Danny call you. There was something I forgot.”
“Yeah, well, I already know it. I go talk to Taylor and the next thing I know I get a visit from the sixth floor telling me to lay off, it’s being worked. By people who don’t fuck around.”
Cross’s eyes were darting back and forth in his frozen face.
“No,” he said.
“Who came to see you before me, Law?”
“No one. Nobody’s come about the case.”
“Who did you call before you called me?”
“Nobody, Harry, I promise.”
I must have raised my voice because the door to the bedroom suddenly opened and Cross’s wife stood there.
“Is everything okay?”
“Everything is fine, Danny,” her husband said. “Leave us alone.”
She stood in the doorway for a moment and I saw her eyes go to the flask in my hand. For a moment, I thought about taking a drink from it myself, so she might think it was there for me. But in her eyes I could see she knew exactly what was going on. She didn’t move for a long moment and then her eyes came up to mine and held for a moment. She then took a step back and closed the door. I looked back at Cross.
“If she didn’t know she knows now.”
“I don’t care. What time is it, Harry? I can’t see the screen too good.”
I looked up at the corner of the television screen where CNN always carried the time.
“It’s eleven-eighteen. Who came out to see you, Law? I want to know who is working the case.”
“I’m telling you, Harry, nobody came. As far as I knew, the case was deader than these goddamn legs of mine.”
“Then what was it you didn’t tell me when I was here before?”
His eyes went to the flask and he didn’t have to ask. I held it to his chapped and peeling lips and he drank deeply from it. He closed his eyes.
“Ah, God . . . ,” he said. “I’ve got . . .”
His eyes opened and they jumped on me like wolves taking down a deer.
“She’s keeping me alive,” he whispered desperately. “You think this is what I want? Sitting in my own shit half the time? She’s getting a full ride while I’m alive—full pay and medical. If I’m gone she gets the widow’s pension. And I wasn’t in that long, Harry. Fourteen years. It’s about half of what she gets with me alive.”
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 that 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.”