The End of the Dream (24 page)

He looked up suddenly and caught her. He said, “Don’t look at me.

Keep your eyes on the ground.”

“You really like it here, don’t you?

“ she asked. “Yeah, “ he said in a deep voice, “but I don’t think I’m coming back here anymore.” Patti hoped devoutly that he meant it. He did mean it. But he had planned very, very carefully so that this final dip into their vault was flawless and rewarding. Scott and Steve had driven Scott’s blue van to Seattle the night before and parked it near the bank. On the day of robbery, Scott had driven up a “drop car, “ an untraceable older white station wagon. But when he ran from the bank Scott headed for his own van, leaving the station wagon for someone to tow away. It was as clean of prints, hairs, fibers, bits of paper, as any vehicle could be. He had seen to that. Scott could well afford to lose his small investment in the station wagon. Back in the barn, he and Steve Meyers counted the money, elated at the size of the take. It was enough that they didn’t have to think about another bank robbery for a long time. When he walked out of the Hawthorne Hills branch of the Sea first Bank for the third time, Scott had carried away $114,000. He had now stolen almost $475,000 from one neighborhood bank alone. Sea first security mobilized to stop the daring daytime robber who had hit them yet again, despite the deterrents they had installed.

They had him on camera, but that was the only place they had him. They didn’t believe he would come back to this particular branch but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t hit one of their myriad branches in the Seattle area.

Who was he? Who was the man who seemed fixated on one small neighborhood bank? None of the bank employees knew him, or they believed they didn’t know him. None could really describe him. By the time Scott had rolled down the interstate, he had wiped all the makeup off his face and he looked like any guy driving south on I-5. Scott planned never to use the same drop car more than twice, and he decided that it wouldn’t be Steve who bought the next anonymous car. They looked too much alike. They were both dark, about the same size and age, and both of them had very heavy eyebrows that almost grew together at the bridge of their noses. He would have to get someone else to buy a good solid but forgettable used car for Steve to drive in the next job. After the robbery, Steve drove back to San Francisco. He returned to sculpting, but with the dull sense that a hand would tap on his shoulder at any minute. There was no question any longer if there would be a next job. There would always be another bank robbery waiting in the wings. Disillusioned with his oldest friend and sick at heart, Kevin left the Seattle area. He said good-bye to Ellen, promising to come back. He needed time to think about where his life was going, and there was a woman in Oklahoma half mystic/half spiritual teacher who welcomed him as a student. Kevin chose his own solitary road, not sure where he was headed. When he returned from Oklahoma, however, he was amazed to see his paintings take on a new grandeur, a luminous quality. On his last camping trip with Scott, they had slept under the stars on one of the San Juan islands and awakened to a majestically shrouded sunrise. Kevin’s photographic memory allowed him to recreate that scene in a huge painting he called “San Juans at Dawn.

“ In “Waterspirit, “ he painted the ocean, as blue as the sky, endlessly rolling toward the shore. All of his work was suffused by golden light.
 
In Oklahoma, it had been easier for Kevin to shut his mind to whatever mischief Scott and his brother were up to. He knew Ellen still saw them occasionally. She had a heart gentler than any he had known other than his sister Dana’s, and she’d reported to him that Scott and Steve seemed somehow sad and lost. Kevin wasn’t worried that they could draw Ellen in, she was too good, protected by some spiritual light that kept the worst traits of human nature from touching her.

Although the FBI, police agencies and bank security teams kept their eyes on the lookout for the bank robber whom they had now dubbed “Hollywood” because of his elaborate makeup, he seemed to have gone to ground during the spring of 1994. Looking back over the nine bank robberies he had carried off so far, they compared notes on all the surveillance photos and his MO. His approach never varied, he said the same things, carried what appeared to be the
 
$241looked around the bank and realized instantly that someone was missing. A woman customer had managed to slip out the door and flee. Her call for help would be superfluous, however. Seattle Police patrol units were already racing toward the Queen Anne bank in response to the silent alarm. But not soon enough. The man in the mask was gone. The frustrating thing was that the witness statements were sickeningly familiar and sparse in detail. There was no question it had been Hollywood. They had him on camera again. He had once again managed to avoid the dye-pack bills, but he’d taken the bait bills. If he tried to spend them, they might just lead the task force to him. Scott Scurlock had reason to feel secure and smug. Ten robberies and no slipups.

What he didn’t realize was that, with every bank robbery, his chance of being caught grew. The sheer odds of chance said that something, sometime, would go wrong. Even Willie boss wasn’t impervious to that.

And something had gone wrong on Queen Anne Hill. Someone had seen him as he left the bank. A woman living a block from the bank was pulling weeds in her front yard on that Wednesday morning in July. Parking is at a premium on Queen Anne Hill, and strange vehicles stand out. She noticed a dark blue vana Ford Aerostarparked across the street and thought idly that she hadn’t seen it before. Some ten to fifteen minutes later, she saw a man walking rapidly toward the van. He was carrying “a greenish mesh bag.” As she watched, the man hopped l into the unlocked driver’s door and sped off down the street. No, she told disappointed FBI agents she had not been able to get a license number.

No, there was something about his face that kept her from really seeing him. A newly hired bank teller at the Interstate Bank told the investigators that he had not been on duty at the time of the robbery but he had seen something unusual the evening before. As he left work at 5,40, he had noticed a man standing near the bank doors, jotting notes in a personal planner. When he saw the witness watching him, he had quickly gotten into a blue, American-made van with tinted windows. The teller described the man as being in his late thirties, white, around six feet tall, with brown receding hair combed straight back. He had a neatly trimmed reddish brown mustache. He wore a brown jacket and sunglasses. Had he seen Scott? Quite possibly. Had he seen what Scott really looked like? No. He had only seen one of Hollywood’s many disguises. Although the investigators in Seattle didn’t realize it, Hollywood had pulled eleven bank robberies not ten.

Just three weeks before in June he had failed miserably in Portland, Oregon, 165 miles south of Seattle. Initially, his plan seemed sound enough. He had arranged for someone still unidentified, but not Steve Meyersto buy two vehicles for him in the San Jose area. One was a Nissan station wagon and the other was the dark blue Ford Aerostar van.

Scott had Steve drive the van to Portland, while Scott drove the station wagon. They left the station
 
wagon there. Although Scott wasn’t very familiar with Portland, he had picked out a bank to rob, and he needed a drop car waiting in that city. Maybe he was riding on a winning name, because he chose the Hawthorne branch of the First Interstate Bank. He and Steve Meyers drove down to Portland a couple of times to sit surveillance on the bank. Scott decreed that June 24 would be the day they expanded their operations into Portland. It was a fiasco almost from the beginning. Scott picked up the station wagon and they drove separately to the bank.

The weather was gooda bad sign according to the Scott Scurlock bank-robbing checklist. Steve drove around the bank with his scanner set to the Portland Police Bureau’s frequency. He was too nervous to park, so many of the streets were one-way and he didn’t want to risk getting caught too far away from Scott. That was a good decision because Scott wasn’t inside the bank very long before the robbery alarm was broadcast over the police frequency. Steve picked up the radio and called to Scott inside, “Get out! “ Someone had apparently seen Scott going in and called 911 on a cell phone. Scott got out, but without any money. The teller hadn’t been able to open the vault, and Scott hadn’t had time to get the other tellers to empty their cash drawers.

They abandoned the Nissan station wagon where Scott had parked it and headed for the bridge over the Columbia River and into Washington State.
 
They barely spoke as they headed north on I-5 for Olympia. So, in the summer of 1994, there were cracks in the perfect facade of Hollywood.
 
He’d failed in Portland, and he’d been seen with his blue Aerostar van twice at the Queen Anne First Interstate Bank.

Steve went back to San Francisco and his flight attendant girlfriend, Sari. In August, they moved to Sonoma. Scott flew down to help them move. This was something he had always done for his friends Kevin, Steve, even Mark. Aside from their necessary close association when they carried out their carefully orchestrated bank robberies, Steve and Scott were still friends.

Scott saw his friendship with Steve as comparable to the closeness he saw between movie bank robbersa fantasy version of true male bonding.

He and Steve climbed mountains together, fixed up houses together, drank together, helped each other move, and robbed banks together.

Steve was now as close to being Scott’s best friend as anyone could be, he had long since replaced his brother, Kevin. It was two decades past The Shire days in Hawaii and the world had changed. The lines on Scott’s handsome face had deepened noticeably, but his thick hair had no gray strands, and he was in virtually the same physical condition he had been in in his twenties. He had done none of the things that make a man grow up, he was father to no one, husband to no one. He traveled when he liked and answered to no one. He was still in awe of his own father and was always anxious to please him. The Swiss banker was as close to a steady girlfriend as any woman could be to Scott.

She lived with him in Olympia for about a year during 1993 and 1994.

She
 
, must have known that the large amounts of cash he gave her to launder in a Swiss bank account under her name had come from some murky source, but she didn’t comment on it. A percentage of the money was hers to keep. Scott paid his mortgage and his credit card bills through her account. Like many women before her, she loved Scott Scurlock. If being with him meant that she ignored parts of his life, she accepted that.
 
Kevin came back to Seattle, and he and Ellen and her girls still visited the treehouse occasionally. They sometimes came down when Scott was off on one of his journeys around the world.

One time, the girls were exploring and found some of the white masks they had made with Scott years before. “They remembered how Scott had showed them how to make masks, and how much fun they all had. We used some kind of plaster of Paris stuff, “ Ellen remembered.

“Now, they looked like death masks. One of my girls said, Look at this one. It looks like Scott. And it did.” During the times when Scott was home, Ellen noticed an uncharacteristic anxious, strained quality about him. Nothing seemed to make him happy and he was often short-tempered.
 
He confessed that he wasn’t sleeping well, that he was haunted by nightmares. He felt as if something was following him or waiting for him. When she asked what, he couldn’t or wouldn’t say.

Maybe he didn’t know. He still looked like a movie star, despite the dark circles that purpled the skin beneath his eyes. It still seemed to cheer him up when Ellen brought flowers to the treehouse. He handed her a hundred dollars once, and told her to bring as many flowers as it would buy. She brought back armloads. He gave her more money and asked her to buy things for the treehouse kitchen. She bought dishes, pots and pans, and small appliances, and rearranged the kitchen shelves, hoping it would make Scott happy, as if flowers and neatness might erase the worried lines from his face. Ellen’s daughters didn’t realize that Kevin and Scott weren’t the buddies they had once been, although of course Ellen did. They went through the motions. The couple brought the girls down to clean up Seven Cedars. Afterward, they would still have bonfires. They made what they called “electric dogs’hot dogs cooked with two nails and a piece of wood, hooked up to raw electric power with live wires. It was a little dangerous, but the adults didn’t let the girls hold them. The wieners were cooked in seconds. One night, Scott gobbled down four hot dogs, but he was still hungry.

Ellen cooked another one for him, but it slipped off the nails and fell to the ground. Scott didn’t notice. “I picked it up, wiped off the dirt, put catsup on it and popped it in a bun for Scott, “ she said.

“He said, Man, what did you do to this one? This is better than the others. We all laughed.” For a moment, everything was OK again.

Ellen and Kevin packed up the sleepy kids and were walking toward the car when they looked back to where Scott had been piling debris on the campfire. He had always had an obsession with fire, building bonfires that were just at the edge of being dangerous. This one was beyond being on the edge.

Now, Scott was urging Steve to throw on stacks of bone-dry boards, paper, and boughs higher and higher over the flames. With a Whoosh, the fire soared toward the lower limbs of trees. “The whole place is going to go up, “ Kevin yelled. “Stop! STOP! “ Already, sheets of flame were heading for the barn. Kevin and Ellen headed back to help.

Working with shovels, boards, and a single garden hose, it took them all night to get it under control. It almost seemed that Scott had meant for Seven Cedars to go up in flames. And, in a sense, it may have been better if it had. The officers, detectives, FBI agents, and private bank security companies that were searching for Hollywood were primed for him to hit again in the second half of 1994. But after the July 13 robbery at the Queen Anne Interstate, he seemed once again to have gone into hiding. They figured he might have been spooked because he’d been seen not once, but twice. The off-duty bank teller’s hard look in the parking lot the night before the robbery could not have been lost on him. And he must have noticed the woman gardening in her front yard who stared at him as he ran from the bank with a laundry bag full of money in his hand. True, he was in disguise both times, but he was used to being completely invisible. Until Queen Anne, no one had spotted him before or after. Worse, perhaps, the witnesses both described a dark blue minivana Ford Aerostar. Scott had no need to risk another bank robbery in the latter half of 1994. His three Seattle hits earlier in the year had netted him $240,000. He could afford to lay back in the weeds and wait.
 
Although Hollywood would soon become Mike Magan’s obsession, he wasn’t the criminal who initially prompted Mike Magan to search out bank robber sit was another group of robbers who used disguises. In the late fall of 1994, Seattle detectives and FBI agents were still looking for the gang dubbed the Abe Lincoln Bank Robbers, six individuals, all of them dressed like Abraham Lincoln, who were hitting north end banks with annoying regularity. Some of them were clearly men, others might have been female, and there were probably accomplices working outside the banks.