by Reason of Sanity (17 page)

The chief starts. “Peter, this is an interesting case that the Pacific Division detectives brought to us. Do you think we should file on it? And if so, what charges would be best here?”

I know what they’re all in there for – to have a good laugh at Vinnie’s expense. And because I’m there on his behalf, the laugh will be on me too. I didn’t practice law for over twenty years to be humiliated like this, but it’s difficult to see how to avoid it today.

“Gentlemen, I appreciate your giving me the opportunity to come in here and make a fool out of myself and I’m sure you’re all waiting for a good laugh at the expense of my client and me, but all I have for you is some statistics on deaths of armored car guards. If you want to laugh about that, then please be my guest.

“As for my client, he was just working for a living. I noticed on the way in here that there were several restrooms out in the hall. My client didn’t have one, so that’s another reason for you to laugh. If you can stop laughing long enough to give an honest, hard working guy a break for taking a leak when he had to, then I’d be grateful. If not, then I’ll just have to go to court and face a jury with twelve hard working stiffs, just like my client, who found himself in an embarrassing position while at work and took care of it the only way he could.

“As for the brandishing, the weapon wasn’t real and it was holstered – not waved or exhibited in a menacing way. The only time he exited the vehicle was when he felt that nobody was watching him, so I don’t think any fair-minded person would consider that to be a rude and threatening exhibition.

“I’ll leave all my data he re for you guys to go over and if you decide to file on this case, I’ll be very disappointed. In my past twenty years of doing business with this City Attorney’s office, I’ve found it to be a responsible, professional group of lawyers who don’t look forward to wasting the taxpayers’ money with frivolous prosecutions. I hope you’ll continue to uphold that reputation.

“If you don’t have any questions, then you’ll have to excuse me, I’ve got a capital case coming to trial next week and there’s a lot of preparation work to finish.”

I stand up and wait for a few seconds. The chief speaks. “Thanks for coming in Pete, we’ll see what we can do on this one.”

I thank them all again and make my escape, feeling that my integrity is still intact. I don’t hear any laughter coming from the room as I exit their department. No smiles from the people at the desks either – it wouldn’t surprise me if they had the meeting piped through the public address system, as a form of office entertainment. I hope they were disappointed.

Because the Drago and Blitzstien cases still are connected in my mind, I’ve got to figure out why. The sequence of events is simple to see. First, Mike Drago slips and falls in the bank. Second, he’s brought to the hospital. Third, the bank gets robbed. Fourth, Mike Drago gets killed by Harold. What’s wrong with this picture? Let’s see – we have a slipand-fall, a hospital admittance, a bank robbery and a murder. If this were a puzzle of some sort, I would separate out two pairs of happenings: the slip-and-fall and the hospital… then the bank robbery and the murder.

I already know about three of the four items in our chain of events. The only thing I don’t know anything about is the bank robbery. The fact that it took place in the same bank where Mike Drago slipped and fell, and on the same afternoon, is just too coincidental to be random. I send a dog-mail message to the kid, telling her to pull some strings and get a copy of the police report on the bank job. The local cops handled it for the first day until the Feds stepped in, but I should still be able to get copies of reports, security videotape, interviews, or anything else that our locals have.

It takes a few days, but the kid comes through and I’m given a bunch of pages from the police files that smell like chow mein. Hmmmn… I wonder what restaurant could have been the ‘drop zone’ for this stuff.

From the police reports, witness statements and notes taken from viewing security cameras outside the bank, it looks like this gang is composed of two or three guys who make no getaway. That’s interesting. If you’re going to pull a bank robbery, I would think it’s nice to have a getaway strategy – some way to take the fruits of your crime away from the scene of the crime. But not here. No getaway, no getaway car, no getaway driver, no nothing. The bank robbers and their loot simply disappear into thin air.

I start to compare the police notes on the other three robberies that this gang pulled off since starting their career a month or so ago. None of the banks were in freestanding buildings of their own. Each bank was on the first floor of a large office building.

Okay, that can answer one question. They didn’t have to drive away – they just melted into the scenery of the building. Maybe they used the elevator and went up to an office. Wrong. The witnesses had them carrying sacks of money out of the bank, but lobby cameras in each building show nobody getting into any elevator carrying anything like that.

We’re still at square one. No wonder so many crooks get away with things. It’s tough for us armchair detectives to sit here and figure how they did it.

Rex Stout created Nero Wolfe, the original armchair detective. He rarely left his brownstone and instead sent his legman Archie Goodwin out to do the fact gathering. Wolfe would then summon all the usual suspects to his home, and at the end of the story in true black-and-white-movie style, he would conduct the ‘show down,’ during which time an antagonistic police inspector would stand there and watch while Nero Wolfe explained his solution to the mystery and named the culprit.

Unfortunately I don’t have an Archie Goodwin. I do have a Jack Bibberman, but he doesn’t even come close to Archie’s talent level. Jack has to write things down. Archie had a photographic memory. Archie carried a gun; Jack carries a cellphone and a small pepper-spray, to protect him from dogs when he serves papers on people. The comparison could go on and on, but suffice it to say that I’m no Nero Wolfe and Jack B. is no Archie Goodwin.

Therefore, without the pairing of such talented detectives, it’s unlikely that I’m going to solve these bank robbery cases. The phone rings. It’s Stuart, in another panic. Vinnie’s been arrested again, but not for peeing on a tree. The Feds have him and they think he pulled off the bank robberies!

he FBI has a nice suite of offices in the West Los Angeles Federal Building on Wilshire Boulevard and Sepulveda, just off the San Diego Freeway and Stuart is waiting for me in the lobby as I get off the elevator on the tenth floor.

“Pete, this is terrible. They think Vinnie did the bank robberies and they’ve seized my armored truck. I think they’re going to arrest me too. I don’t know what to do.”

There’s no calming him down, so I just let him babble on for a minute or so and then walk away, go over to the receptionist, show my State Bar card and ask to speak to the senior agent in charge of the bank robbery detail.

After a few minutes, Special Agent Bob Snell comes out to greet me. If you look up ‘FBI Agent’ in the dictionary, you should see a picture of him. He’s about six-foot-three, full head of straight silver hair, conservatively dressed in a dark suit with a white button-down shirt, shoes with laces, and he’s got a square jaw with a dimple right in the middle of it. If you saw him on the street you would immediately place him as either an FBI agent, politician, or an airline pilot. He asks me to follow him back to his office. Stuart starts to follow us, but when he gets cold stares from both Agent Snell and me, he retreats to a chair in the lobby.

O nce in his office, Snell tells me that the only information he’s at liberty to disclose is that Mister Vincent Norman was arrested outside of a supermarket with a bag of stolen currency in his hand. He was putting it into the rear of his own armored truck. Snell was surprised at the level of sophistication that Vinnie achieved. He said that he’s never encountered a bank robbery gang with their own armored truck.

There are only two kinds of people in this world those who think that Vinnie is sophisticated and those who have already met him.

I’m shocked, but not like Claude Rains was shocked when he found out that there was gambling in Humphrey Bogart’s club in Casablanca. What really surprised me was his thinking that Vinnie was sophisticated. I mean, I like him a lot, but of all the words in the English language, the one that just doesn’t apply to Vinnie is ‘sophisticated.’

I tell him tha t there just has to be some mistake here and let him know about Vinnie’s ‘peeing with a prior’ incident. It doesn’t work. He assures me that their case is solid and if I’m representing Vinnie, he’ll send me copies of the report. I ask to see my client and Agent Snell tells me that he’s still being processed, but I can visit with him tomorrow at the Federal Detention facility on Terminal Island. That’s a nice little facility the feds have near San Pedro, a few miles from the Port of Los Angeles.

Out in the hall, I firmly grip Stuart by the arm and walk him into the elevator. “Stuart, I know that Vinnie didn’t rob any banks, but he did have the stolen bags of currency in his hands and he was putting them into the back of your armored truck. I think you’ve got some explaining to do because I haven’t got the time to get involved in a federal criminal case this month.”

It’s late in the afternoon now and the feds always tire me out, so I tell Stuart to be at the boat tomorrow morning – and to have his explanation all ready. I expect a full report of how Vinnie got into this situation – and it better be good.

Stuart followed my instructions and he ’s here at the boat. His explanation is just one more reason why I’d like to own screen rights to ‘The Vinnie Story.’ He tells me what the unbelievable chain of events were.

After a long day at the cemetery and completing two funerals with the armored truck, Vinnie stopped by a Ralph’s Market at about nine in the evening, to get some milk and food for his apartment. The armored truck was too wide to fit in the normal parking spaces, so he pulled up right in front of the main entrance and left the truck’s blinking emergency lights on while he was inside shopping. He also left the back door to the truck slightly ajar, so that with arms full he could manage to get the doors open to put his grocery bags in.

After his shopping was done, he put his bags into the rear of the truck, slammed the door shut and drove home. When he got to his apartment, he had two things to do. First, he wanted to get his groceries inside so that the milk and ice cream wouldn’t go bad. Next, he wanted to drive over to a sewer, where he could pump out the porta-potty that Stuart had installed for him to use on those long hot days. When he went inside to hook up the drain hoses, he noticed two bags of money in the back of the truck. At first he didn’t know they were full of money, but upon opening up one of them, he realized what they were. One main clue is that stenciled quite clearly on each bag were the words “property of Brinks Armored Transit,” and an ID tag from Ralph’s Market.

Vinnie called Stuart and told him what happened. Stuart reasoned that when the truck was parked in front of the market, they must have thought it was Brinks coming to make the evening’s regular pick-up, so a helpful market employee, seeing the truck’s back door open, walked out and tossed the money bags in.