The Bubble Gum Thief (18 page)

“It looks disgusting.”

“Yeah,” Walton replied with a mouthful of molten cheese. “But it tastes
so
good.” He tossed some oyster crackers into his
chili and shoveled the mix into his mouth. “So why did the officer offer you condolences?”

“He’s a lieutenant.”

“Okay. Why’d the lieutenant offer you condolences?”

She’d evaded the question as long as she could. “Because Michael Brodsky was my boyfriend.”

Walton dropped his fork, and it bounced off the plate and into his lap. He dabbed his napkin in his water to wipe away the stain. “Seriously? Oh, my God, I’m sorry, Dagny.”

She slid her hand across her cheeks to make sure they were still dry. “That’s why I wanted this case so badly.”

“And they let you?”

“Yes.”

“Because the Professor is buddies with the president? Did he call the president and get him to intervene?”

“He threatened to. The Director seemed to know how that would play out.”

“Yeah, the Director’s already in hot water with the president.”

“How do you know that?”

“Don’t you watch
Meet the Press
?”

“It’s been awhile.”

“Well, the Director’s kinda on thin ice. So are the weird things about the Professor true?” It was a sudden turn. “Like that he was a CIA mole spying on Hoover?”

“I don’t know.”

“Aren’t you working on his memoirs?”

“We’re mired in grade school.”

“I heard that he once killed another agent.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“I don’t know. He’s pretty intense.”

“The man’s a pussycat.”

Walton leaned back and laughed. “Were you sitting in the same classroom I was?”

“He’s harmless.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Hey, would you do something for me?” she asked. “And I don’t want you to take this badly or—”

“Sure. Whatever. What do you need?”

“Would you mind talking less?”

“Huh?”

“Silence is golden, right?”

Victor slumped in his chair. “Okay.”

Dagny didn’t feel like finishing her soup, so she just watched Victor scoop up the remaining remnants of his chili with little of the exuberance he had shown at the beginning of the meal. She thought it was strange that he hadn’t asked a lot of questions about Mike. She couldn’t tell if this was a sign of emotional intelligence or ignorance. Either way, she appreciated it. She was tired of hugging people.

Silence turned out to be just as bad as noise. “So why’d you join the Bureau?” she asked.

He smiled, happy to be engaged again. “My dad was an agent, so everyone assumes I’m just trying to follow in his footsteps. But mostly, I was bored. I couldn’t see myself at Deloitte forever, and didn’t want to stick around and make partner, because that would just make it harder to leave. You worked at a law firm, right? So you know what I mean?”

“Yeah.” She knew.

He finished the last bite of chili, then crushed some more oyster crackers onto the plate to sop up the last of the sauce. “You’re not finishing your soup?”

“I’m not very hungry,” Dagny replied.

“I am.” Victor pulled her soup bowl across the table and finished it off.

Chesley Waxton unlocked the door to his bank and let them into the lobby. Within a single sentence, Waxton’s voice fluctuated
from a whisper to a shout and then back again. “I already talked to some of your guys.” He was an old and ugly man. His back arched forward, cheating him of at least three inches of height. A few remaining strands of hair were combed across the great bald expanse of his head. He wore his cuffed pants high enough to show some skin above his socks, and his white dress shirt was so thin that Dagny could see his nipples.

“We’d like to get a little more information.”

“So you don’t have my ball?” Waxton’s lip quivered with disappointment.

“No, Mr. Waxton.”

“Phooey.” He led them to his office, and sat behind his desk. Dagny and Victor took their seats across from him.

“Mr. Waxton, tell me about the ball.” She took out a pad of paper and began taking notes.

Waxton reached down beneath his seat and pumped his chair a bit higher. “I bought that ball twelve years ago. My pride and joy. Most important ball in Reds history if you ask me.”

“More important than ’76?” Victor asked.

“That wasn’t as good a series!” Waxton yelled, perhaps unaware of his volume.

“How much did you pay for the ball?” Dagny asked.

“Twenty-four thousand three hundred and eleven dollars.” Waxton turned back to look at the empty spot on his shelf where the ball once rested. “And it’s worth a lot more.”

“It seems like the robber knew where the ball was. He went right to it.”

“Oh, he knew. But anyone who watched the news would have seen it. It was right there behind me,” he said, pointing over his shoulder, “when I was on Channel Nine.”

“You were on the Channel Nine news? When was that?”

“Twelve years ago. When I bought it.”

“To your knowledge, has there been anything else written, anything else in the media since then that would suggest where you kept this ball? Subsequent interviews, photographs?”

“I don’t think so. The whole thing was a story for about a day.”

“Who had access to this office? Who would have seen the ball?”

“My employees, of course. And we have a cleaning service. I’ve had business meetings here. But I gave my calendars to you guys already, so you should have all that.”

“So lots of people?”

“Yes. A lot of people over the years.”

“Tell me about J. C. Adams.”

“I thought that was already cleared up. J. C. grew up around here. I knew his mom and dad. Good kid. Great athlete. After that injury at USC, he was down on his luck a bit. Joined the police. I asked him to sign some jerseys—gave him some money for that.”

Victor perked up. “Wait a minute. J. C. Adams is
the
J. C. Adams? The football star?”

Waxton leaned forward, as if noticing Victor for the first time. “Is this kid really a federal agent?” he asked Dagny.

“It’s Take a Child to Work Day,” Dagny responded. “Adams said he did some security work for you?”

Waxton laughed. “It was more like unsolicited advice. He came to my office and signed the jerseys, and I gave him fifty bucks. As we’re walking out, he starts looking at the cameras. Tells me I need a security upgrade. Asks me to give him a tour, so I point out the cameras, tell him a little about what they do. A couple of the cameras are dummy cameras. He tells me that I’m fifty years behind the times, and that he could design a new system for me. I try to be polite, tell him that I’ll think about it, and next thing I know, he sends me a written proposal for a system that would cost close to fifty thousand. He claimed that the bank could make commercials, that the whole thing would pay for itself. Said he’d direct
the commercials if I let him use the equipment on some film he wanted to make. Ridiculous. So that was the end of that.”

Victor raised his hand. “Why’d you have dummy cameras?”

“Most bank robbers only take a few thousand dollars. It doesn’t make sense to spend much more than that on security,” Waxton explained.

“Why do they take so little?” Victor asked. “You’ve got a lot more in the vault, right?”

Dagny answered before Waxton could. “It takes too long to get into the vault. A robber figures he has two minutes after the silent alarm is pushed. So he usually takes what’s in the drawers and runs.” She turned to Waxton. “Tell me about what he said to you. Something about sins.”

Waxton seemed to fall into a trance, as if he were reliving the robbery. Finally, he shivered. “It was the strangest thing. He kept making me repeat, ‘The sins of the devils remain with them in hell.’ He made me say it over and over.”

Dagny had read the CPD report, but it didn’t jive with Waxton’s new account. “In the report, they had ‘The sins of the devils remain with them in
heaven
.’ Now you’re saying ‘hell.’ Do you remember which it was?”

“Devils wouldn’t be in heaven. I’m pretty sure it’s ‘hell.’”

Dagny wrote “Angels?” on her notepad and underlined it twice.

After concluding their interview with Waxton, Dagny and Victor wandered out to the bank’s lobby, where Dagny snapped pictures and Victor leaned against the front doorframe and pretended to write notes on a pad of paper. “How tall are you?” she asked. “Five eight?”

“Six foot, exactly.” He seemed to take umbrage at the question. “Do you think I look five eight?”

“The tape measure on the doorframe says you’re about five eight.”

“Well, it’s lying.”

“Switch with me.” Dagny took Victor’s place. “How tall?”

“Five five and a little.”

“I’m five nine and a little. Every foot on this thing has an extra two-thirds of an inch.” She grabbed a pair of gloves from her backpack and tugged along the top of the tape measure. It lifted easily from the frame. Magnetic. Another magnet held the bottom of the measure at the floor. The tape hung loose between them. Dagny rolled the measure and dropped it into a Ziploc bag.

She returned to Waxton’s office and asked about the door marker. “Didn’t even realize we had it,” he replied. “Maybe it was something Adams did.”

“It came from Adams?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it was in his proposal.”

“Can I get a copy of that proposal?”

Waxton opened the bottom drawer of his desk. Dagny looked down at the unruly stack of mangled papers that filled it. Waxton shuffled through them, then shuffled through them again. He stuffed the papers back into the drawer and walked out to a large lateral cabinet, five shelves high, in the hallway outside his office. Waxton opened the top-shelf lid. Several stacks of papers were crammed into the space. Half a pile fell to the floor. Dagny looked through the papers that fell while Waxton thumbed through what was left in the drawer.

“Maybe you can keep looking and fax a copy to me?” Dagny handed Waxton her business card. “It’s important, Mr. Waxton, so we need for you to keep looking.”

“I will,” he promised.

Victor drove while Dagny worked on her laptop. She found J. C. Adams’s address on the Hamilton County auditor’s website, traced the route to his home on Google Maps, and fed Victor the directions. “So our guy isn’t six foot, he’s six four?”

“He’s called an unsub; and yes, he’s six four.”

“You know, J. C. Adams is six four.”

“How do you know that?”

“He was on my fantasy team. What’s unsub short for?”

“Unidentified subject, which you should know.” Whether or not the unsub in question was J. C. Adams, it was easier to find someone who was six four than someone who was six foot even. Fourteen percent of men are six foot or taller; fewer than one percent are six four or more.

Jumping on Google, she searched for “The sins of the devils remain with them in heaven.” She found nothing. Then she tried “The sins of the devils remain with them in hell.” Still nothing. She tried both with “stay” instead of “remain,” but found nothing. She tried “The sins of the angels remain with them in heaven” and several other permutations to no avail. Dagny went to the LexisNexis website and tried the same searches in the news database, hoping an old article might contain the phrase. It took several attempts, but she finally found it in the fourth paragraph of a newspaper article from Memphis in 1996: “The tellers at Hammerty Bank report that the man wore a blue-and-orange ski mask, and muttered ‘The sins of the angels remain with them in heaven’ repeatedly during the holdup.” The article indicated that the identity of the bank robber was unknown and that he was still at large.

Dagny ran another search: “rob! W/10 Hammerty.” The first few stories concerned another heist in 2001, but the eighth story reported that someone named Reginald Berry had been convicted for the 1996 robbery. Dagny e-mailed both stories about Reginald Berry to the Professor and then told Victor what she had found.

“I saw you write it on your notepad when you were talking to Waxton,” he said. “You wrote ‘angels.’ If you thought Waxton had the quote wrong, why didn’t you ask him if it could have been about the sins of
angels
in heaven? Was it because you didn’t want it to get back to Fabee if they interviewed him again?”

The kid was smarter than he looked.

J. C. Adams lived, appropriately enough, in Mount Adams, a wealthy hilltop community that overlooks downtown Cincinnati. Row houses lined the narrow, steep streets. His house was a three-story contemporary stucco marvel, hanging over the hillside on cantilevered beams. Dagny and Victor pulled into the short driveway, walked to the front door, and rang the bell.

The golden-haired quarterback answered wearing a USC T-shirt and boxer shorts. It was dark inside, and he shielded his eyes when he spoke. “Jesus, do you know what time it is?”

Dagny looked at her watch. “It’s four thirty in the afternoon.”

“Really?” He smelled of alcohol. “Well, I guess you’re here to apologize?”

“I have nothing to apologize for.”

“Oh, yeah, well, why don’t you come in and see the mess they made.”

The home was indeed a mess. Papers were strewn across the floor. DVDs and compact discs lay in piles at the bases of shelves. There was a hole in the wall next to a La-Z-Boy, and another one in the kitchen. The carpet was stained and stiff in spots. A glass trophy case was cracked.

“They did all this?” Dagny asked.

“Huh?” Adams replied, confused. “No, they did this,” he said, pulling a black leather couch away from the wall and pointing to a scuff mark.

Dagny laughed. “You’re not exactly ready for
Cribs
.”

“I just bought a place in LA, and it’s completely pimped. In a week, I’m out of this hellhole.
Cribs
was canceled, by the way. Who’s your friend?” Adams asked.

Victor smiled and extended his hand. “Victor Walton Jr.”

“
Special Agent
Victor Walton Jr.,” Dagny corrected.

“I was such a big fan of yours. I thought you were great, man.”

Adams’s frown flipped to a smile. “Thanks, man.” He turned his attention back to Dagny and brought the frown out
of retirement. “So why’d you send your goons here? Because I guessed you were thirty-eight?”