“You looked like you saw something important.”
“Oh, nothing. I’m just looking at everything. I have just a few more questions.”
“Good. I should get downstairs. We’re closing soon.”
“I’ll get out of your hair, then. Mr. Vaughn, was he part of this process in which the money was prepared and the serial numbers documented?”
She shook her head once.
“Not really. He sort of supervised us and came in a lot, especially when the money came in from the branches or the Federal Reserve. He was in charge of that, I guess.”
“Did he come in when you guys were dictating the numbers and typing them into the computer?”
“I don’t remember. I think he did. Like I said, he came in a lot. I think he liked Linus so he came in a lot.”
“What do you mean, he ‘liked’ Linus?”
“Well, you know.”
“You mean Mr. Vaughn was gay?”
She shrugged.
“I think he was, but not in an open way. It was a secret, I guess. It was no big deal.”
“What about Linus?”
“No, he’s not gay. That’s why I don’t think he liked Mr. Vaughn coming in so much.”
“Did he say that to you or was that just your take on it?”
“No, he sort of said something about it one day. Like he joked, saying he was going to have a sexual harassment suit if this keeps up. Something like that.”
I nodded. I didn’t know if this meant anything to the case or not.
“You didn’t answer my question before.”
“What was that?”
“About why you are focusing so much on all of this. The currency numbers, I mean. And Linus and Mr. Vaughn.”
“I’m not really. It just seems that way to you because that is the part of this you are familiar with. But I’m trying to be thorough about all aspects of this. Do you ever hear from Linus anymore?”
She seemed surprised by the question.
“Me? No. I visited him in the hospital once, right after the shooting. He never came back to work, so I never saw him again. We worked together but we weren’t really friends. Different sides of the tracks, I guess. I always thought that was why Mr. Scaggs picked us.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, we weren’t really friends and Linus was, you know, Linus. I think Mr. Scaggs picked two people that were different and weren’t friends so we wouldn’t get any ideas. About the money.”
I nodded and didn’t say anything. She seemed to go off into a thought and then she shook her head in a self- deprecating way.
“What?”
“Nothing. It’s just that I was thinking about going to see him at one of the clubs but thought they probably wouldn’t even let me in. And if I said I knew him, it might be embarrassing, you know, if they called him and he acted like he didn’t remember or something.”
“Clubs? There is more than one?”
She closed her eyes to suspicious slits.
“You told me you were being thorough. But you really don’t even know who he is now, do you?”
I shrugged.
“Who is he now?”
“He’s Linus. Like he only uses his first name now. He’s famous. He and his partners own the top clubs in Hollywood now. It’s like where all the celebrities go to see and be seen. Lines out the door and velvet ropes.”
“How many clubs?”
“I think at least four or five now. I don’t really keep track. They started with the one and then they kept adding.”
“How many partners are there?”
“I don’t know. There was a magazine story-wait a second, I think I saved it.”
She bent down and opened a drawer at the bottom of her desk. I heard her shuffling its contents around and then she came out with a copy of Los Angeles Magazine, the coffee-table monthly. She started turning its pages. It was a glossy magazine that listed restaurants in the back and usually ran two or three long feature articles on living and dying in L.A. Behind the gloss was a bite, though. Twice over the years writers from the magazine had done stories on my cases. I always thought they had come closest of any media reports to the truth of a crime in terms of its effects on a family or neighborhood. The ripple effect.
“I don’t know why I was holding on to this,” Jones said, a bit embarrassed after just saying she didn’t keep track of her former coworker. “I guess because I knew him. Yeah, here.”
She turned the magazine around. There was a two-page opening spread on the story under a headline that said, “The Night Kings.” There was an accompanying photo of four young men posed side by side behind a dark mahogany bar. Behind them were shelves of colored bottles lit from beneath.
“Can I see that?”
She closed it and handed it across the desk to me.
“You can have it. Like I said, I don’t think I’ll ever be seeing Linus again. He has no time for me. He did what he said he was going to do and that’s that.”
I looked up from the magazine to her.
“What do you mean? What did he tell you he was going to do?”
“When I saw him in the hospital. He told me the bank owed him a lot of money for getting shot in the… uh, you know. He said he was going to get it, quit his job and open up a bar. He said he wouldn’t make the mistakes his dad made.”
“His dad?”
“I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t ask. But for some reason, opening that bar was Linus’s life ambition. To be king of the night, I guess. Well, he got there.”
Her voice had a mixture of longing and jealousy in it. It didn’t work well with her and I wished I could tell her what I thought of her hero. But I didn’t. I didn’t have everything I needed yet.
Thinking I had taken the interview about as far as I could, I stood up and held up the magazine.
“Thanks for your time. Are you sure you don’t mind me taking this?”
She waved me off.
“No, go ahead. I’ve looked at it enough. One of these nights I ought to just put on my black jeans and black T-shirt and go on down and see if I can catch Linus for a minute. We could talk about the good old days but he probably doesn’t want to hear about them.”
“Nobody does, Jocelyn. Because the old days weren’t that good.”
I got up. I wanted to offer her some words of encouragement. I wanted to tell her not to be jealous, that what she had and what she’d accomplished were things to be proud of. But the sheriff’s helicopter took off and banked across the street and over the bank. The place shook like an earthquake and took my words with it. I left Jocelyn Jones sitting there thinking about the other side of the tracks.
36
The magazine had been published seven months earlier. The story on Linus Simonson and his partners was not a cover story but it was hyped on the cover with a line that said, “Hollywood’s After Hours Entrepreneurs.” The story was hooked to the impending opening of a sixth club in the foursome’s lineup of all-star late-night establishments. The article referred to Simonson as the king of the night crawlers, the one who parlayed the whole empire out of one hole-in-the-wall bar he had bought with a legal settlement. He had taken that first club, in an alley off of Hollywood and Cahuenga, renovated it, cut the lighting in half and brought in female bartenders who
