The Plodder's Mile -- Chapter Six

CHAPTER SIX

Ray paced a trail in the cheap motel carpet. He was turning over the details of the day in his head. He had returned to Ridgeway the very next day, less than 24 hours after the train had been here and he had thrown the parcel between the wheels.

Could it have gotten caught in the undercarriage of the train? Did it get ground up into a bunch of zeros and ones? “Nah,” Ray thought to himself, since there would have been something left of the bills if they had been destroyed. But what if they had caught under the train, and had dropped off somewhere between here and this Hicksville where the train had stopped?

Maybe he had walked up and down the wrong part of the tracks, and the money was still sitting somewhere just a mile or so away, waiting patiently for Ray to come back and pack that bundle back to its proper home.

Or maybe someone else had found it first.

Ray knew he could go crazy trying to figure out what could have happened, so he decided to focus on what he would do next. It was time to make another list.

Officer Greg Jones had his own worries, which he tossed around in his mind, wondering how much longer he should ponder the possibilities before he called Smitty and bounced a few ideas off of him. There was definitely something wrong, but to find out what the real problem was would take some careful thinking, and some even more careful investigation. “This’ll be out of my jurisdiction, if I’m lucky” Greg muttered to himself, looking at the bundle which was still sitting on his desk.

“Smitty” Harold Smith had told him the robbery netted the thieves $100,000 or thereabouts. The bundle had $1800 in it, but was clearly designed to look more like $100,000 – or thereabouts. Was it the same robbery? If it was, then where was the rest of the cash?

In most cases, if John Graham had turned in a real stack of $100,000, Greg would have had to turn it over to the state immediately anyway. But the local jurisdiction regulations said he could keep amounts up to $2000 in the local evidence lockers as long as it was verified by at least two officers. His deputy had helped him fill out the proper paperwork and they had both signed off on the amount. State detectives would arrive tomorrow to take the money back to the bank. All the ducks were in a row, but something still didn’t make any sense.

Where was the rest of the money?

Smitty wondered the same question out loud. “So you have 18 one hundred dollar bills, but the package was made to look like it should hold more?”

Jones nodded into the phone, but said, “Yeah, and it’s a pretty good job of making it look like a big bundle of money. If someone was picked up and you found this on their person, you would probably not stop to count the bills until you got back to the station.”

Now Smitty was nodding. “So to you, this looks like it’s meant to mislead us long enough for the real money to escape?”

“Yeah,” said Greg. “But if you guys didn’t find the money on the train, and this was left on the tracks, where’s the rest?”

“I can think of three places,” Smitty intoned, trying to sound superior, like the city cop he was.

“I can think of four,” said Jones.

Smitty was not one to take a challenge lightly, so he started in on his three guesses, hoping to deduce the fourth on his way.

“Okay,” he said, drawing in a breath, “the three I’ve got are one, the money is still on the train somewhere; two, the small guy we didn’t find still has the money; or three, there is another package of money somewhere out there on the railroad tracks.”

Smitty came up empty. Harold Smith had to admit defeat and ask his friend for a fourth possibility. Just as an inkling was coming into his brain, too.

The friend. But Jones beat him to the punch.

“I hate to say this, Smitty,” said Jones as he drew in a quick breath, “but I think we have to watch my friend John Graham, too.”

He had talked about Francis Bacon. Christopher Marlowe’s name came up and the suspicious early death of this great writer came up, too. Woody Allen’s name came up, but only as comic relief to an otherwise deadly boring subject for high school students. John Graham liked to read Woody Allen’s essay called “But Soft…Real Soft” to his classes as a summary of how ridiculous it was that there were people at major universities worldwide who were paid handsome salaries to debate year after year who really wrote plays from 400 years ago. John Graham didn’t care who really wrote the plays, and certainly the students could give a flying leap less who wrote them. But it was one of the things John thought students who had taken a drama class in high school should know before they graduated and pretended to go out into the world trained and ready for the workplace.

But the lecture had the desired effect. He had been distracted, too, and realized that he hadn’t thought about the money for almost an entire hour. Now that class was over, however, his thoughts did return to another aspect of this new adventure in his life. He began to think how cleverly he had handled the entire situation, even planning several scenarios in advance in his mind.

Scenario one. If his police friend Greg Jones decided the money was really at John’s house, and got a search warrant for it, John had hidden the money in so clever a place that he was almost certain no one would ever find it. Result: he could keep the money and spend it slowly over a lifetime.

Scenario two. He became so overcome with guilt at having kept the money that there was no clear way to keep it without going crazy. John had decided that if this happened he would simply take the money to another town and drop it off at the nearest church or charitable organization. With the amount of time he was spending lately contemplating his options, he was smart enough to realize that this could be a distinct possibility. Crazy didn’t seem that far off.

Scenario three. He gets caught with the money, through insanity, as he had imagined before, or through carelessness. He could brag about the money to someone somewhere someday and find himself the center of suspicion. At this point, to plead insanity would not be a bad idea. Then he could return the money and beg forgiveness for his moment of weakness. His church preached repentance and forgiveness at least once a month, and it seemed to him that those with shortcomings were favored by pity at least, and usually respected more later by the congregation for having shown weaknesses.

Scenario four. John Graham knew there was another possibility out there, that there was always the unseen, the unexpected that always showed up and slapped you across the kisser with the Homer Simpson-like “Doh!” that someone who hasn’t thought everything through usually deserves. This was danger waiting to happen. John had once heard a Secretary of Defense call these the “unknown unknowns”. There was nothing you could do about it, so the best defense was not to worry about it. You could worry if you wanted to, but you would still get slapped up side of the head.

“Greg?”

“Yeah, this is Captain Jones.”

Smitty bent over the phone on his desk. “Hey, Greg, Smitty here.”

“Harold!” said Greg, a little too loud.

Harold Smith was trying not to talk too loud, because a major investigation had just fallen into his lap thanks to the help of his good friend in Ridgeway. He didn’t want to share this good fortune with anyone else in the department just now, and when a major event broke here at the office, everyone wanted a piece of the pie for their own claim to fame. “You were right on the money, buddy.”

“It’s from the robbery?” said Jones.

“The serial numbers match the last bills of $100,000. Whoever made the fake package may have had access to the entire amount,” said Smitty. “But why would they make a decoy?

“Maybe they made it on the train to distract us. So what do we do next?”

Smitty paused. “Wait just a minute. Zabronsky just came in the room. I’ll call you right back.”

Smitty had called Jones back earlier in the evening and filled him in on all the details. Unfortunately, there just wasn’t enough on the bank robbery case to work 24/7 on it, so when the next call came in, he was out the door with his partner.

It was way too late for the local gas station lights to still be on, especially when there was no one around watching the place. The police had been called by a guy who stopped for gas and had figured out after pumping it, there was no one to pay. Paranoid about being caught not paying for gas or else feeling his patriotic duty calling, he was still there when Smitty pulled up.

“This doesn’t look right,” he said, getting out of the car.

“Thanks for coming over so fast,” said the nervous customer, waving a twenty in the air. “I pumped my gas, but can’t see anyone to pay.”

Smitty looked around at the gas station, still fully lit though it was long past the posted closing time. One of the sliding glass doors was open, and music was playing inside the booth.

“Maybe the guy is in the john,” Smitty said, motioning to the back building. “Have you checked back there?”

The customer shook his head no, and Smitty motioned for his partner to check it out. Smitty walked over to the booth, and taking the information from the customer, also took his twenty. “Thanks for reporting this, and if there’s anything else we need, I’ll call you at your home number, or come by your house.”

There was no need to keep extra eyes around that would only keep asking stupid questions like, “Could you give me my change from the drawer?” Smitty explained that nothing could be touched until it they figured out what had happened, and that the change from the twenty would be mailed to him.

The now irate customer left muttering something about getting screwed by the cops every time he tried to do something good. Smitty called for another team to come in and help search the area. Then he called the corporate number on the booth to tell them one of their gas stations was unattended.

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