Lost Light (2003)

by Michael Connelly

  “Was Mr. Scaggs his mentor, too?”

  She shook her head and slightly blushed, I think, but it was hard to tell because she was very dark-skinned.

  “No, the mentoring program is a minority program. I should say ‘was.’ They suspended it a year ago. Anyway, Linus is white. He grew up in Beverly Hills. His father owned a bunch of restaurants and I don’t think he needed a mentor.”

  I nodded.

  “Okay, so you and Linus were in there for three days putting all of this money together. You also had to record serial numbers off the bills, right?”

  “Yes, we did that, too.”

  “How was that done?”

  She didn’t answer for a moment as she tried to remember. She swiveled slowly back and forth in her chair. I watched a sheriff’s helicopter land on the roof of the station across Santa Monica.

  “What I remember is that it was supposed to be random,” she said. “So we just took bills out of the bricks at random. I think we had to get about a thousand numbers and record them. That took a long time, too.”

  I leafed through the murder book until I found a copy of the currency report she and Simonson had put together. I unsnapped the binder’s rings and removed the report.

  “According to this you recorded eight hundred of the bills.”

  “Oh, okay. Eight hundred, then.”

  “Is this the report?”

  I handed it to her and she studied it, looking at each page and her signature at the bottom of the last page.

  “It looks like it but it’s been four years.”

  “Yes, I know. That was the last time you saw it—when you signed it?”

  “No, after the robbery I saw it. When I was questioned by the detectives. They asked if that was the report.”

  “And you said it was?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, going back to when you and Linus made this report, how did that go?”

  She shrugged.

  “Linus and I just took turns typing the numbers into his laptop.”

  “Isn’t there some sort of computer scanner or copier that could have recorded the serial numbers much more easily?”

  “There is but it wouldn’t work for what we had to do. We had to randomly select and record bills from every pack but keep each recorded bill in its original pack. That way if the money was stolen and split up, there would be a chance of tracing every pack.”

  I nodded.

  “Who told you to do it that way?”

  “Well, I guess it came down from Mr. Skaggs or maybe Mr. Vaughn. Mr. Vaughn was the one who dealt with security and the instructions from the insurance company.”

  “Okay, so you are in the vault with Linus. How exactly did you record the money?”

  “Oh, Linus thought it would take forever if we wrote down the numbers and then had to type them into a computer. So he brought his laptop in and we entered them directly. One of us would read off the number while the other typed.”

  “Which one of you did which?”

  “We both did. We switched. You might think sitting at a table with two million dollars in cash on it is a real thrill but it actually was boring. So we switched around. Sometimes I read and he typed, and then I’d type while he read out the numbers.”

  I thought about this, trying to see how it could have worked. It might appear that having two employees put the list together would provide a double-checking system, but it didn’t. Whether Simonson was reading off numbers or entering them on the laptop computer, he was controlling the data. He could have made up numbers in either position and Jones would not have known it unless she looked at either the bill or the computer screen.

  “Okay,” I said. “Then when you were finished you printed out the computer file and signed the report, right?”

  “Right. I mean, I think so. It was a while back.”

  “Is that your signature on there?”

  She flipped to the last page of the document and checked. She nodded.

  “That’s it.”

  I held out my hand and she gave me the document back.

  “Who took the report to Mr. Scaggs?”

  “Probably Linus. He printed it out. Why are all of these details so important?”

  Her first suspicion of where I was going. I didn’t answer. I flipped the report she had been studying to the back page and looked at the signatures myself. Her signature was below Simonson’s and above Scaggs’s scrawl. It had been the order of signing. Simonson, then her, then it was taken to Scaggs for final sign-off.

  As I held the report up to the light from the porthole, I thought I saw something I hadn’t noticed before. It was only a photocopy of the original or maybe even a copy of a copy, but even still, there were gradations in the ink in Jocelyn Jones’s signature. It was something I had seen before on another case.

  “What is it?” Jones asked.

  I looked at her while putting the document back into the murder book.

  “Excuse me?”

  “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 were prized more for their looks and tattoos than their skills at mixing drinks and adding bar tabs. He played the music loud, charged a $20 cover and didn’t let anyone in wearing a tie or a white shirt. The club had no name on the wall outside and no listing in the phone book. A flashing neon blue arrow over the front door was the only indication of a commercial venture. But soon the arrow was no longer needed and was removed because there was always a line of clubbers stretching from the door down the alley.

  The article stated that Linus—he was referred to by first name through most of the article—then partnered up with three buddies from his days at Beverly Hills High School and started opening new clubs at a rate of one every six months. The entrepreneurs primarily followed the pattern that worked with the first club. Buy a rundown establishment, renovate and reopen, put the word into the pipeline and wait for it to spread through the ranks of the Hollywood cool. After the nameless bar, the lounges the group opened tended in style and name to follow a literary or musical theme.

  The second bar the group bought, closed and then reopened was Nat’s Day of the Locusts, a nod to Nathanael West and his classic Hollywood novel. It wasn’t their name. The place had been known as simply Nat’s for decades and most patrons probably believed it was named for Nat King Cole. Either way the name was cool and the group kept it.

  Nat’s was also the same place Dorsey and Cross had gotten shot up in. The article reported that the murder had acted to depress the sales price of the place. In fact, it was a steal. But once the bar was reopened—without a name change—and marketed to the night crawlers, the place’s history only added to its mystique. It was another immediate and huge success for the high school pals who called their burgeoning company Four Kings Incorporated.

  For a long time in my life I did not believe in coincidence. I now know better. But there are coincidences and there are coincidences. Kiz Rider coming to my house and laying the high jingo on me as Art Pepper was playing it—that was coincidence. But as I sat in the Mercedes and read the magazine article, I wasn’t accepting the happenstance of Linus Simonson buying the bar in which two detectives who investigated the heist of $2 million he counted and prepared for shipment were shot. I didn’t think it was coincidence for a moment. I thought it was pure arrogance.

  Besides the nameless bar and Nat’s, the foursome also opened places called Kings’ Crossing, Chet’s and Cozy’s Last Stand, named, according to the article, after a friend who had disappeared. The place which had occasioned the magazine story and was due to open was to be called Doghouse Reilly’s, after an alias used by private eye Philip Marlowe in a Raymond Chandler novel.

  The story didn’t delve deeply into the financing behind the four-man operation. It was more interested in the glitz than the underpinnings of the supposed success story. It was taken and reported as a given that the first establishments supported the group’s expansion in a continuing cycle. Profits from the first bar financed the second and so on.

  But the picture wasn’t purely positive. The article’s writer ended the story with a suggestion that the four kings might become victims of their own success. The theory espoused was that the population of black-clad night crawlers was finite in Hollywood, and that opening and operating six lounges did not convincingly expand the client base. It only spread it out. The article noted that there were also many pretenders to the throne, a raft of inferior, uncool bars and lounges that had opened in recent years.

  The story ended by noting that on a recent Friday night at midnight, there was no line of night crawlers waiting to get into the nameless club. It cynically suggested that it might be time to put up the blue arrow again.

  I dropped
the magazine into the binder and sat there thinking about things. I had the sense that things were coming together. I felt anxious because I knew instinctively I was close. I didn’t have all the answers but experience told me that they would come. What I had was the direction. It had been more than four years since I had looked down on Angella Benton’s body and I finally had a solid suspect.

  I opened the center console and got out the cell phone. I figured there would be no harm in calling my own home number. I checked messages and found I had two. The first was from Janis Langwiser. It was short and sweet.