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.