“So,” Detective Bradley said, looking like he thought he was being a really cagey guy, “A Mr. Glenn Johnson came into the branch.”
The girl – Jenny Kim was her name – shook her head, sending the tears streaking down her face and running every which way. It had done a real number on her mascara; she looked like a drowning raccoon.
“No,” she said, her voice hoarse, “Jackson. Mr. Glenn Jackson.”
Bradley looked at her coldly for a minute, then pretended to glance at his notes and smiled.
“Of course. Glenn Jackson. My mistake.”
I sighed. He was playing the trick – which always works on douchey Law & Order spinoffs – of trying to get her to make a mistake when she repeated her explanation, trying to catch a lie or an error that would make her story fall apart.
I sighed again, just to make my position clear. Bradley gave no indication of having noticed, but Colby glanced at me. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. His cards were so close to his chest they were ticking his bronchi.
“Mr. Jackson, he’s not a client at your branch, though, is he?” Bradley asked.
“No. He said… he said he’d had some good luck and come into some money, and he wanted to give some to his sister.”
“And Ms. Jackson does bank with you.”
Jenny slumped. “Ms. Wheeler does. Yes.”
She was staring down at the table, now, so I couldn’t see her eyes, but her tone told me that despite her posture she was moving past fear and confusion and getting closer to pissed off. I wasn’t sure how Bradley would react to that. I didn’t think it would go well for Jenny, although it might be less boring for the rest of us.
She was gazing down the edge of the precipice of an utterly ruined life, and the spurking hell of it was, it didn’t even matter. Her story hadn’t changed the last five times she’d told it, and it wasn’t going to just because it didn’t fit Detective Bradley’s worldview.
This Jackson guy had come into the branch, with an old suitcase that was full of cash. Small bills, but enough of them to make a big difference if you were down and out. Johnson had been pretty down and out, it sounded like – Jenny had thought he was a panhandler at first, and maybe he was. But even a panhandler gets called “Sir” at the bank when he has a bag of cash money and wants to make a deposit.
If he’d just done that – just passed his money on to his sister and left – it would still have turned out to be a problem, but it wouldn’t have been one for Jenny. But Jackson had decided to change his small bills into big bills, Jenny said, because he was going to do some travelling and didn’t want to lug the bag around. So he’d given her cash, she’d given him cash. Not what you’re supposed to do when someone doesn’t have an account with the bank, but Jenny hadn’t seen any harm. She’d been touched that he was giving his sister some of his new-found wealth – making restitution, he’d said – and wanted to help him out. She’d been doing a good deed, and of course it wasn’t going unpunished.
Because a few hours later, when that transaction had been reviewed, the stacks of cash that Jenny Kim had carefully counted for Glenn Jackson, thousands of dollars in five and ten-dollar bills that she’d traded for the bank’s fifties and hundreds… they were gone. Where they had been, there were stacks of dried, dead autumn leaves with no particular cash value at all.
And Jenny Kim was well and truly spurked.
