Lost Light

6

The drive out to Woodland Hills took almost an hour. It used to be in this place that if you waited, picked your spots and went against the grain of traffic, you could get somewhere in a decent amount of time. Not anymore. It seemed to me that the freeways, no matter what time and what location, were always a nightmare. There was never any respite. And having done little long-distance driving in the past months, being re-immersed in the routine was an annoying and frustrating exercise. When I’d finally hit my limit, I got off the 101 at the Topanga Canyon exit and worked my way on surface streets the rest of the way. I was careful not to try to make up for lost time by speeding through the mostly residential districts. In my inside coat pocket was a flask. If I got pulled over, it could be a problem.

In fifteen minutes I got to the house on Melba Avenue. I pulled my car in behind the van and got out. I walked up the wooden ramp that started next to the van’s side door and had been built over the front steps of the house.

At the door I was met by Danielle Cross, who beckoned me in silently.

“How’s he doing today, Danny?”

“Same as always.”

“Yeah.”

I didn’t know what else to say. I couldn’t imagine what her view of the world was, how it had changed from one set of hopes and anticipations to something completely different overnight. I knew she couldn’t be much older than her husband. Early forties. But it was impossible to tell. She had old eyes and a mouth that seemed permanently tight and turned down at the corners.

I knew my way and she let me go. Through the living room and down the hallway to the last room on the left. I walked in and saw Lawton Cross in his chair-the one bought along with the van after the fund-raiser run by the police union. He was watching CNN on a television mounted on a bracket hanging from the ceiling in the corner. Another report on the Mideast situation.

His eyes moved toward me but his face didn’t. A strap crossed above his eyebrows and held his head to the cushion behind it. A network of tubes connected his right arm to a bag of clear fluid that hung from a utility tree attached to the back of his chair. His skin was sallow, he weighed no more than 125 pounds, his collarbones jutted out like shards of broken pottery. His lips were dry and cracked, his hair was an uncombed nest. I had been shocked by his appearance when I’d come by after his call to me. I tried not to show it again.

“Hey, Law, how are you doing?”

It was a question I hated to ask but felt I owed it to him to ask.

“About what you’d expect, Harry.”

“Yeah.”

His voice was a harsh whisper, like a college football coach’s who has spent forty years screaming from the sidelines.

“Listen,” I said. “I’m sorry to come back so soon but there were a few other things.”

“Did you go see the producer?”

“Yeah, I started with him yesterday. He gave me twenty minutes.”

There was a low hissing sound in the room that I had noticed when I came by earlier in the week. I think it was the ventilator, pumping air through the network of clear tubes that ran under Cross’s shirt and out of his collar and up either side of his face before plugging into his nose.

“Anything?”

“He gave me some names. Everybody from Eidolon Productions who supposedly knew about the money. I haven’t had a chance to run them down yet.”

“Did you ever ask him what Eidolon means?”

“No, I never thought to ask. What is it, like a family name or something?”

“No, it means phantom. That’s one of the things that’s come back to me. Just sort of popped into my head while I’ve been thinking about the case. I asked him once. He said it came from a poem. Something about a phantom sitting on a throne in the dark. I guess he figures that’s him.”

“Strange.”

“Yeah. Hey, Harry, you can turn off the monitor. So we don’t have to bother Danny.”

He had asked me to do the same thing on the first visit. I moved around his chair to a nearby bureau. On the top of it was a small plastic device with a small green light glowing on its face. It was an audio monitor manufactured for parents to listen in on their sleeping babies. It helped Cross call to his wife when he needed to change the channel or wanted anything else. I switched it off so we could speak privately and came back around to the front of the chair.

“Good,” Cross said. “Why don’t you close the door now.”

I did as instructed. I knew what this was leading to.

“Did you bring me something this time?” Cross said. “Like I asked?”

“Uh, yeah, I did.”

“Good. Let’s start with that. Go into the bathroom behind you and see if she left my bottle in there.”

In the bathroom the counter surrounding the sink was crowded with all manner of medicines and small medical equipment. Sitting on a soap dish was a plastic bottle with an open top. It looked like something normally found on a touring bike but a little different. The neck was wider and it was slightly curved. Probably to make the drinking angle a little more comfortable, I thought. I quickly took the flask out of my jacket and then poured a couple ounces of Bushmills into the bottle. When I took it out to the bedroom Cross’s eyes widened in horror.

“No, not that! That’s a piss bottle! It goes under the chair.”

“Ah, shit! Sorry.”

I turned around and went back to the bathroom, pouring the booze out into the sink just as Cross yelled, “No, don’t!”

I looked back out at him.

“I would’ve taken it.”

“Don’t worry. I’ve got more.”

After the piss bottle was rinsed and returned to the soap dish I went back out to the bedroom.

“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.”

“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.