“Damn, I never got the chance to go shopping and get myself that present you promised.”
I smiled. She was kidding and I could tell.
“That’s okay, you can still do that.”
“Is everything okay, Harry?”
“Yeah, fine.”
“You want to talk about it?”
Not on this line, I thought but didn’t say.
“Maybe when I see you next time. I’m too tired right now.”
“Okay, then I’ll let you go. What should I do with your cards? And you know you left your bag on my backseat.”
She said it like she knew I had done it on purpose.
“Um, why don’t you just hold on to that stuff for now and maybe when I get past this thing I’m working on I’ll come back out and get it from you.”
It was a long time before she answered.
“Just give me a little more notice than you did today,” she finally said. “So I’m ready.”
“Sure, no problem. I will.”
“Okay, Harry, I’m going to go back in. Maybe talking to you will have changed my luck.”
“I hope so, Eleanor. Thanks for doing this for me.”
“No problem. Good night.”
“Good night.”
She disconnected.
“And good luck,” I said into the dead line.
I hung the phone up again and tried to think about the conversation and what she had meant. Just give me a little more notice than you did today. So I’m ready. It was like she wanted a warning before I came out. So she could do what? What did she have to get ready for?
I realized that I could drive myself nuts thinking and worrying about it. I put Eleanor and all of that aside and grabbed a beer out of the refrigerator and took it out to the back deck. It was a cool and clear night and the lights of the freeway far below seemed to sparkle like a diamond necklace. I could hear a woman’s laughter carrying up the hillside from somewhere down below. I started thinking about Danny Cross and the song she had gently sung to her husband. In love and in loss the night is always sacred. It’s only a wonderful world if you can make it that way. There are no street signs pointing to Paradise Road.
I decided that when all of this was over I would go to Vegas and not turn back. I would throw the dice. I would go see Eleanor and take my chances.
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
