Lost Light

27

The next morning I spread the documents I had rescued from the engine compartment of Lawton Cross’s muscle car across the table. I went into the kitchen to brew a pot of coffee but found out I was out of coffee. I could go down the hill to the store but I didn’t want to leave the phone. I was expecting Janis Langwiser to call early. So I sat down at the table with a bottle of water and started in on the reports Cross had copied and taken home almost four years before.

What I had was a copy of the currency report prepared by the bank which had loaned the cash to the movie company, and the time and location sheets that Lawton Cross and Jack Dorsey had been working on before their schedule became crowded with other cases.

The currency report was four pages of typed serial numbers taken from randomly selected one-hundred-dollar bills contained in the shipment to the movie set. The report was prepared by two people listed as Linus Simonson and Jocelyn Jones. It was then signed off on by a bank vice president named Gordon Scaggs.

Simonson was a name I knew. He had been one of the bank employees at the movie set on the day of the heist. He had been wounded during the shoot-out. Now I knew why he was there; he had helped prepare the money shipment and was most likely there to baby-sit it through the day of filming.

Scaggs was also a name that was familiar to me. It was among the names given to me by Alexander Taylor when I had asked the film producer who specifically knew about the cash delivery to the movie set. I no longer had the list of nine names I had collected from Taylor. The FBI had taken that during the search of my home. But I remembered the name Scaggs.

Committed to studying everything about the case I could get my hands on, I scanned the listings of currency numbers, thinking maybe something would stick out. But nothing grabbed me. The numbers were like an unbreakable code locking away the secret to the case. It was simply four pages of numbers in no particular sequence.

Finally, I put the currency report aside and took up the alibi sheets. I first checked for the names Scaggs, Simonson and Jones and saw that Dorsey and Cross had indeed run out T amp;L checks on all three of the bank employees. Cross had taken Scaggs and Jones while Dorsey ran down Simonson. Their locations were checked against key times in the murder of Angella Benton and the subsequent movie set heist.

All three were cleared by alibi of physical involvement in the crimes. Simonson, of course, was at the scene of the heist, but he was there as a representative of the bank. His being shot by one of the robbers also tended to add weight to his clearance. This did not, of course, clear them of ancillary involvement. Any one of them could have been the mastermind behind the heist who had stayed in the background as the plan was carried out. Or, at the very least, any one of them could have simply been the source of information on the delivery of money to the movie set.

The same went for the other eight names in the T amp;L report. All were cleared by alibi of active involvement in the crimes. But I had no other files or reports to indicate what had been done to determine if they had a background connection to the crime.

I realized I was spinning my wheels. I was trying to play solitaire without a full deck. The aces were gone and there was no way I could win. I had to get all the cards. I took a swig of water and wished it was coffee. I started thinking about how important the play with Peoples was. If it didn’t work, I was done. Angella Benton’s outstretched hands might haunt me for the rest of my life but there wasn’t anything I was going to be able to do about it.

As if on cue the telephone rang. I went into the kitchen and picked up. It was Janis Langwiser, though she didn’t identify herself.

“It’s me,” she said. “We have to talk.”

“Okay, I’m in the middle of something. I’ll call you right back.”

“Good.”

She hung up without a protest. I took that as a sign that she now believed what I had told her about my house and phone being bugged. I also took it as a sign that Peoples was acting in the way I had hoped he would. I grabbed my keys off the counter and went out the door.

I drove down the hill. At the place where Mulholland wraps around the other side of the hill and meets Woodrow Wilson at Cahuenga I saw a vintage yellow Corvette waiting at the light across from me. I knew the driver, sort of. Every now and then I’d see him jogging or driving the ’vette past my house. And I’d seen and spoken to him in the police station on occasion, too. He was a private eye who lived on the other side of the ridge from me. I put my arm out the window and gave him the sweeping palm-down salute. He did likewise back to me. Smooth sailing, my brother. I was going to need it. The light changed and he went south on Cahuenga while I went north.

I bought a cup of coffee in a convenience store and used a pay phone next to the Poquito Mas to call Langwiser back on her cell. She answered right away.

“They came in last night,” she said. “Just like you predicted.”

“Did you get it on the camera?”

“Yes! It’s perfect. Clear as day. It was the same guy in the first surveillance. Milton.”

I nodded to myself. The call to my house the night before in which Janis said she’d locked the memory card in her office safe had been the bait and Milton had taken it. Before leaving her office I had set up another one of Biggar amp; Biggar’s cameras-the radio-on her desk and trained it toward the bookcase which hid the safe.

“He stumbled around looking for a while but then he found it. He took the whole safe out of the wall. It’s gone.”

She had emptied everything from the safe the night before. I had put in a folded piece of paper. It said, “Fuck you, with a capital F.” I imagined Milton unfolding it and reading it-if he had managed to get the safe open.

“Anything else hit in the offices?”

“A couple drawers pulled out here and there. The quarter jar in the coffee room. All just cover to make it look like a regular burglary.”

“Anybody call the police to report it?”

“Yes, but nobody’s shown up yet. Typical.”

“Keep the surveillance out of it. For now.”

“I know. Like we said. What should I do now?”

“You still have Peoples’s e-mail address?”

“Sure do.”

The night before, she had gotten the e-mail address rather easily from a former colleague who worked at the U.S. Attorney’s office.

“Okay, send Peoples another e-mail. Attach the latest surveillance and tell him I’ve changed the deadline to noon today. I hear from him by then or he can start watching CNN for the results. Send it as soon as you can.”

“I’m on-line now.”

“Good.”

I sipped coffee while listening to her type. Andre Biggar had included in the briefcase I borrowed the computer attachment Langwiser would need to view the memory card taken from the radio camera. She could now attach a file containing the surveillance recording to an e-mail.

“It’s away,” she finally said. “Good luck, Harry.”

“I’ll probably need it.”

“Remember, call me tonight by midnight or I’ll follow the instructions.”

“Gotcha.”

I hung up and went back to the convenience store for a second cup of coffee. I was already wired from Langwiser’s report but I figured I might be needing the spare caffeine before the day was finished.

When I got back to the house the phone was ringing. I got the door unlocked and got inside just in time to grab the phone off the kitchen counter.

“Yeah?”

“Mr. Bosch? John Peoples here.”

“Good morning.”

“Not really. When can you come in?”

“I’m on my way.”