Harry agreed to help me—sorta. He refused to expend so much as an iota of FBI resources on what he termed “another one of your leisure-time pursuits,” but he gave me the name of someone who might. In exchange, though, I had to give him both of my hockey tickets, which meant that, instead of our attending the game together, I had to spend Monday evening watching it on TV while Harry took his wife. I didn’t mind too much. Harry’s wife once called me a wastrel. I wasn’t sure what the word meant, so I looked it up—a wasteful or good-for-nothing person, spendthrift, squanderer. The following day I sent three dozen long-stem American Beauty roses wrapped in baby’s breath to her office. The next time we met she asked what she’d get if she called me a penny-pinching skinflint. We’ve been friendly ever since.
I didn’t bother to call, but instead drove to the headquarters of Midwest Farmers Insurance Group bright and early Monday morning. I managed to finagle my way upstairs, where I was stopped by an officious woman who demanded to know my business. I told her. She told me not to move. I didn’t, not even to sit in one of the chairs in a lobby that was tastefully decorated for Christmas, while she disappeared into a suite of offices. A few minutes later, she returned and escorted me to an office with a splendid view of the Mississippi River as it flowed between downtown St. Paul and Harriet Island. There was a desk in the office. On the desk was a nameplate that read MARYANNE ALTAVILLA. Behind it sat a young woman dressed in a severe black jacket and skirt and white dress shirt. Her hair was nearly the same color as the jacket and skirt. It was pulled back in a ponytail.
“Mr. McKenzie,” she said.
I waited for my escort to depart before I replied.
“Really?” I asked. “Mr. McKenzie? How ’bout a little love?”
Maryanne left her chair, circled her desk, and gave me a hug.
“How are you?” she asked. “It’s been a long time.”
“I’m well. You?”
“Couldn’t be better.” Maryanne returned to her chair. “How’s Nina?”
“Spectacular.” I glanced around her office. It looked like she had moved in three days ago; there were very few personal touches to be seen and not a single Christmas decoration in sight. “I love what you’ve done with the place.”
“You don’t like my office?”
“You’ve only been here, what? Fifteen months? I thought you millennials were all about your creature comforts.”
“No, that’s you boomers.”
“Hey, hey, hey. Gen X.”
“No kidding? I thought you were older than that.”
“Really, Maryanne?”
“Anyway, millennials are minimalists. We like to keep it simple.”
I stared at her for a few beats. Maryanne was pretty enough to be a psychic medium. She was also the smartest woman in the room no matter what room she was in, which was a big reason why she was named chief investigator in Midwest Farmers’ Special Investigations Unit before her thirtieth birthday.
“So?” she asked. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“Two words—the Countess Borromeo.”
“That’s three words. What about it?”
“How much money did I save your insurance company when I recovered it?”
“Four million, give or take a few dollars. Why? Have you heard about another missing Stradivarius?”
“No, but I’m in a position to save you some more money.”
“I’m listening.”
“Leland Hayes.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“He robbed an armored truck for $654,321. A friend with the FBI told me that Midwest Farmers took the hit.”
Maryanne retrieved the electronic tablet that was lying on top of her desk and transcribed what I told her.
“When did this happen?” she asked.
“About twenty-two years ago.”
That made her pause.
“I was in the second grade twenty-two years ago,” Maryanne said.
“I bet you were at the top of your class, too.”
“I could go all the way up to five on the multiplications table. McKenzie, I don’t know anything about this.”
“If I could see the case file…”
“No.”
“I might be able to recover the loot.”
“How much would that cost us, I wonder.”
“Less than $654,321.”
Maryanne stared at me while she drummed a tuneless solo on her desk with the fingers of her right hand. I waited.
“You have a track record with us going all the way back to that embezzler, Teachwell,” Maryanne said. “The Countess, the Jade Lily—that cuts you some slack.”
“How much?”
She drummed some more, stopped abruptly, and looked at her smartwatch.
“Buy me lunch,” Maryanne said. “Twelve thirty. Kincaid’s.”
“Owwww, pricy.”
“You said it yourself, McKenzie—we millenials like our creature comforts.”
Kincaid’s was one of the more upscale restaurants in St. Paul, as its prices suggested. You wouldn’t think that a guy with my money would care, but I’ve discovered that the older I get, the more I reflect the blue-collar values I learned growing up in Merriam Park. I managed to get a window table with a view of the Landmark Center and Rice Park beyond, both decorated for the holidays, plus an outdoor ice rink where couples skated hand in hand in large circles. Maryanne Altavilla joined me five minutes later. She ordered a cup of lobster bisque and an open-faced crab sandwich. I had a Wagyu sirloin with crispy green-onion potato cakes and roasted green beans. It was very good. Not as good as the steak you can get at Rickie’s, but still …
“The question at the time—did the money belong to or was it in the care, custody, control, management, or possession of a federally protected financial institution?” Maryanne said. “It was ruled, against the strenuous objections of our legal team, I hasten to add, that the money had not yet reached its destination even though the crime had taken place in the parking lot, that it was not in possession of Midway National Bank at the time of the robbery. Therefore, according to the contractual relationship between the bank and the messenger service, it fell upon the armored truck company to make good the loss, which meant it fell on us. By the way, the vocabulary has changed since then. The armored truck business is now known as the cash-in-transit industry or simply referred to as the cash management business.”
“All this means…?”
“Midwest Farmers had to write a check—$654,321.”
“And?”
“We’d like to get it back. I ran it by my supervisor before I came over, and he said exactly what I thought he’d say—if you find it, he’s sure that we can come to a mutually beneficial arrangement.”
“That’s what I figured, too,” I said. “How much help are you willing to give me, though?”
Maryanne reached into her pocket and pulled out a flash drive. She set it on the table next to her plate. I reached for it, but she set her hand on top and drew it back.
“McKenzie,” she said. “We both know how this works. The money belongs to whoever digs it up.”
“Finders keepers, losers weepers.”
“Especially if it’s not still conveniently stashed in the canvas bags used by the armored truck company so the rightful owner can easily be identified. There’s no law that says you’d have to turn it in. If you take this, though, I will consider it a personal contract between you and me that you will return the money to Farmers.”
“For a substantial reward, you might add.”
“Half, maybe more. Anything we can recover at this point would be a bonus.”
“My lawyer would tell you that a verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on,” I said.
“So would ours, and we have hundreds. Do we need a paper contract, you and I?”
“This is where it gets complicated.”
“In what way?”
“To find the money, I might need to enlist Ryan Hayes.”
“The son?” Maryanne said. “The son who helped Leland Hayes rob the armored truck in the first place?”
“He did it against his will.”
“Is he out of prison?”
“The BOP kicked him loose about six months ago. He’s now an upstanding member of society.”
“I’m sure.”
“Convincing him to help will be a problem,” I said. “I might need to offer him an incentive.”
“This is an issue because…?”
“It’s against the law for a criminal to profit from his crime.”
“Riggs v. Palmer, Plumley v. Bledsoe, the slayer rules—I see where you’re going.”
“So…”
Maryanne started drumming her fingers again. Because of the white linen tablecloth it didn’t sound nearly as loud as it had in her office.
“Our business arrangement is with you,” she said. “Recover the money and you’ll be handsomely rewarded. Whatever you do with the reward is none of our business. I don’t even want to know.”
I plugged the flash drive into my computer back at the condominium and pulled up the contents. In Minnesota, an insurance company has thirty business days in which to conduct an investigation and either accept or deny a claim, and Midwest Farmers Insurance Group used every damn one of them to find the money Leland Hayes stole before agreeing to pay off Midway National Bank. It had half a dozen investigators working the case. At least that’s how many handwritten field reports were scanned into the case file Maryanne Altavilla had given me.
There was no evidence of fraud, so the Special Investigations Unit spent all of its resources attempting to track Leland’s movements before and after the robbery took place, more often than not retracing the efforts of the FBI. There were documents, of course, and plenty of them. Plus transcripts of witness interviews, photographs, and even video.
A lot of time was also spent trying to follow the money. The $654,321 came in denominations of $1 to $100 bills that had been gathered from cash-intensive businesses like supermarkets, check-cashing stores, and other banks. And it was unmarked. No one had bothered to paint a tiny blue dot in the upper right corner of each bill or taken the time to make Xerox copies of them—remember Xerox? Also, this was long before 9/11. There was no Patriot Act, no Homeland Security, and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, aka FinCEN, was just getting started. However, the Bank Security Act was in place, as well as the Annunzio-Wylie Anti-Money Laundering Act and the Money Laundering Suppression Act, which demanded that banks report cash transactions of $10,000 or more, as well as any suspicious monetary activity. The FBI couldn’t find a single Suspicious Activity Report in the greater five-state area that could help lead them to the cash, however.
Nor could it answer the basic question—why did Leland Hayes come back to St. Paul?
He could easily have left Minnesota in the hours between the time he robbed the armored truck and when I encountered him. He could have driven north and crossed into Canada, for that matter. In those days, a passport wasn’t required; you could do it with a driver’s license. Even if he loved his son, which he clearly didn’t, there was nothing he could have done for him. Plus, he must have known that Ryan would give him up the first time he was asked, which he did. So what was he doing on Arcade Street—without the cash—three hours after the heist?
I took notes.
It was my intention to reconstruct Leland’s movements myself, interview all of his known associates, as the cops would label them, along with his neighbors, and visit his old haunts. It was the coldest of cold cases. Most of the people who knew Leland were probably long gone by now, and those who weren’t—let’s just say memory is a tricky thing and let it go at that. On the other hand, the statute of limitations had long ago rendered everyone involved in the heist not guilty on all counts. Witnesses who had nothing to say twenty-two years ago might have plenty to talk about now. At least, that’s what I was hoping for, although, honestly, I didn’t like my chances.
I was reading a transcript of an interview with a woman named LaToya Cane, described by the investigator as an “uncooperative, unmarried African American woman”—“unmarried” was underlined twice as if that meant something—when my cell started playing “West End Blues.” The caller ID read NINA TRUHLER.
“Hey, you,” I said.
“McKenzie, you should drop by the club,” Nina said. “Butch Thompson is playing solo piano during Happy Hour. You love Butch Thompson.”
“I do.”
“I’ll even buy you a beer.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean why?”
“You know I hate surprises almost as much as Bobby Dunston does.”
“Can’t a girl just want to spend time with her beau?”
“Beau? Does that make you my belle?”
“I like that—ma belle amie.”
“Nina…”
“There’s a man here. A young man, old enough to drink but just barely. He asked members of my waitstaff if they knew who you were. They said they did, but you weren’t around and they didn’t know if you were going to be around. He said he’d wait. They shouldn’t have done that. Sorry.”
“That’s okay. What about the man?”
“My people said he was very nice, very polite. Right now he’s sipping a beer and listening to Butch. He’s African American, not that that matters.”
“What does matter?”
“McKenzie, he’s carrying a gun.”
“Call the police.”
“What? Why?”
“You have a sign on your door, don’t you—management bans guns on these premises?”
“Yes.”
“Call the cops. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”