Lost Light (7 page)

“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.

 

L
oose 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.

Conversely, if she had been a willing participant in the robbery scheme, it seemed likely to the investigators that her death would have come after the robbery had been successfully accomplished.

It seemed like a solid theory to me as Lawton Cross had recounted it during my first visit to his home. It was probably the way I would have gone if I had been allowed to stay on the case. But ultimately the theory didn’t pay off. Cross told me that he and his partner had worked a full field investigation on Benton but never came across the one clue that opened up the case. They spent five solid months on her. They traced her movements, personal habits and daily-life routines. They studied her credit-card, banking and telephone data. They interviewed and re-interviewed all family members and known friends and associates. They spent eight days in Columbus alone. Dorsey went to Phoenix to chase down a single hundred-dollar bill. They spent so much time at Eidolon Productions that for one month they were given their own office at Archway Pictures in which to conduct interviews.

And they got nothing.

As is often the case with a homicide, they amassed a wealth of knowledge about the victim but not the key piece of information that led to the identity of her killer. They ended up knowing who she had slept with in college but not where she had spent the last evening of her life. They knew her last meal had been Mexican—the corn tortillas and beans were still in her digestive tract—but not which one of the city’s thousands of such establishments had served her.

And after six months on the case they found absolutely no link between Angella Benton and the robbery, aside from the surface connection of her job as a production assistant for the company that was making the film in which the cash was to play a starring role.

Six months in and they were at a dead end. What they did have in the way of evidence were the forty-six slugs and shell casings collected after the shoot-out, the blood collected from the getaway van and the semen collected from the murder scene. It was all good evidence to have; ballistics and DNA could tie a suspect to a crime with zero doubt—unless your lawyer was Johnnie Cochran. But it was the kind of evidence that was icing on a cake; the kind that links a suspect and weapon already identified and usually in custody. It didn’t do much as far as getting you that suspect. After half a year on it they had the icing but no cake to put it on.

When they reached this dead end it was time to evaluate the case at the six-month mark. This is the point where hard choices are made. The probability of clearing the case is weighed against the need for the pair of investigators to work other cases and help shoulder the caseload of the division. Their supervisor took the case off full-time status and Dorsey and Cross went back into rotation at RHD. They were free to work the Benton case as often and as much as possible, but they also drew new investigations. As could be expected, the Benton case suffered for it. Cross had readily admitted this to me. He said it became a part-time investigation, with Dorsey doing most of the follow-up while Cross concentrated on the new cases they were assigned.

Then it all became academic when the pair got shot up in Nat’s bar in Hollywood. The Benton case went into the OU files. Open-Unsolved. And it was orphaned. No detective likes a hand-me-down file, which the Benton case was. No one likes the idea of going into a file and proving his colleagues were wrong or misguided or possibly even incompetent or lazy. Added to this deterrent was the fact that the Benton case was now haunted. Cops are a superstitious species. The fate of the two original investigators—one dead, the other in a chair for life—was somehow inextricably bound to the cases they had worked, whether directly related or not. Nobody, and I mean nobody, was going to take on the Benton case now.

Except me. Now that I was out of the official game.

And four years later, I had to trust that Cross and Dorsey had done their job well in the investigation of Angella Benton’s death and its connection to the robbery. I had no choice really. Covering the ground they had already trod to a dead end didn’t seem to be the way to go. That was why I went to see Taylor. My plan was to accept their investigation as thorough if not flawless and approach it from a different direction. I was operating on the belief that Cross and Dorsey found nothing linking Benton to the robbery because there was nothing to find. Her death had been part of a plan, a carefully planned misdirection within a misdirection. I now had a list with nine names on it that had come out of my three-mile ride with Taylor. All the people involved in the planning of the money shoot. Everyone—as far as he knew—with knowledge that the cash was coming, when it was coming and who would bring it. I would go from there.

But now I had been thrown a curveball of sorts; what Cross had told me about the serial numbers and how at least one of them had been wrong. He said he had left it to Dorsey to pursue and didn’t know what had happened. Shortly thereafter Dorsey was dead and the case died with him. But now I was interested. It was an anomaly and it had to be dealt with. Coupled with Kiz Rider’s warning and oblique reference to “these people,” I felt something stirring inside that had been absent for a long time. A small tug toward the darkness I one time knew so well.

 

I
drove back into Hollywood and ate a late lunch at Musso’s. A Ketel One martini for openers, followed by chicken pot pie, creamed spinach on the side. A good combination, but not good enough to make me forget about Lawton Cross and his situation. I asked for a second martini to help with that and tried to concentrate on other things.

I hadn’t been back to Musso’s since my retirement party and I missed the place. I had my head down and was reading and writing some notes when I heard a voice in the restaurant that I recognized. I looked up and saw Captain LeValley being led to a table with a man I didn’t recognize. She was commander of the Hollywood Division, which was only a few blocks away. Three days after I’d left my badge in a desk drawer and walked out she called to ask me to reconsider. She almost convinced me but I said no. I told her to send in my papers and she did. She didn’t come to my retirement party and we hadn’t spoken since.

She didn’t see me and sat with her back to me in a booth far enough away that I could not hear her conversation. I left by the back way without finishing the second martini. In the lot I paid the attendant and got in my car, a Mercedes Benz ML55 that I’d bought used from a guy moving to Florida. It had been the one big extravagance I allowed myself after retiring. In my mind the ML55 stood for Money Lost: $55,000, because that was what I paid for it. It was one of the fastest sport utility vehicles on the road. But that wasn’t really why I bought it. The low mileage on it wasn’t the reason either. I bought it because it was black and it blended in. Every fifth car in L.A. was a Mercedes, or so it seemed. And every fifth one of them was a black M-class SUV. I think maybe I knew where I was going long before I started the journey. Eight months before I would need it I’d bought an automobile that would serve me well as a private investigator. It had speed and comfort, it had dark smoked windows, and if you looked in your mirror and saw one of these behind you in L.A. it wouldn’t cause a second thought.