Marks was thirty-seven. He’d served in Vietnam, but in a clerical capacity in Saigon — not out in the boonies. There was only one prior arrest on the rap sheet. At the age of eighteen he’d stolen the landlord’s typewriter and sold it for $25, which he then lost in a schoolyard crap game. His mother had bought another typewriter for the landlord and the case had been dropped.
After his army service and two years of G.I. Bill attendance at a junior college in Santa Ana, Marks had gone to work for a former Vietnam buddy in a shady scheme to sell cut-rate (and worthless) vitamin pills to minor drugstore chains. When the venture went bankrupt under the threat of F.D.A. scrutiny, Marks had drifted into other jobs, mostly in the sort of selling operations that were next door to frauds but just within the law — mail-order junk, real-estate scams, pest exterminating. According to the dossier, one employer had fired him because she suspected him of having embezzled $3000, but nothing was proved and no charges had been brought against him.
Thurston had dealt with Marks’s kind before: the cruel solipsists, the me-first sharpies with clever brains and the moral convictions of hungry pariah dogs.
Among the confidential reports in the dossier was an interview with a casual chum of Marks’s who’d worked as a bartender in Van Nuys. “He said he’d just got himself a job in some bank over there someplace around Ventura Boulevard. He said it didn’t pay much. So I ask him why he took the job, and he gives me that funny smile, like, you know the way he smiles like he knows something nobody else knows, and he gives me, you know, that old Willie Sutton line about I go to banks because that’s where the money is. You know.”
So he might had had it in mind to rip off the bank even before he applied for the job there. In any case he’d had eight months to study the operations — the bank’s arrangements for the handling of negotiables. On the morning of the theft Marks had gone into the vault to get a deck of traveler’s checks, and according to his confession he’d simply slipped the sheaf of bearer bonds under his shirt and walked out with them.
By the time the theft was discovered that afternoon, he’d been out to lunch for an hour and had had plenty of time to dispose of the bonds, at least temporarily. Like everyone else who’d had access to the vault he was searched thoroughly that evening before leaving the bank; they hadn’t found anything on him then. But within a day or so the F.B.I. and police had built up a strong circumstantial case against Marks — access, opportunity, fingerprints on the bond shelf, and mainly the simple fact that the movements of everyone else were accounted for.
When they arrested Marks he was indignant at first, insisting he was innocent; but apparently his lawyer had persuaded him that the evidence against him was too potent to deny. In a cheerful abrupt switch Marks had confessed and entered a plea of guilty to a relatively minor larceny charge, in a bargaining agreement reached between his lawyer and the prosecutors. The federal judge, in sentencing him, had imposed the maximum penalty because of Marks’s adamant refusal to make restitution; but the maximum punishment was only four years, which meant about two and one-half years of actual prison time, given the parole system. And because he was judged a nonviolent white-collar offender, Marks had been remanded to the Atlanta facility, which was the government’s principal institution for the incarceration of sophisticated or genteel prisoners. Ever since a counterfeiter named Handy Middlebrooks had become Inmate Number One in 1902, the Big A had been the Feds’ hostelry for the quiet ones: Eugene Debs, Rudolph Abel, Earl Carroll, Congressman John Langley, Governor Warren McCray. Cons elsewhere called it The Country Club.
Now, watching the entrance from his illegally parked car, Thurston wondered if even this — the choice of site for his 28-month incarceration — had been part of Ned Marks’s plan. In his confession Marks had said, “I am relieved and glad to have the uncertainty over with. No longer must I be in suspense as to whether I will be apprehended for my crime. I freely confess my wrongdoing but ask for leniency in view of the fact that I did not at any time place anyone’s life or good health in jeopardy.” Marks apparently had been coached by his lawyer to talk like that.
It was transparent self-serving piety but perhaps there was some truth in Marks’s expression of relief. He hadn’t tried very cleverly to destroy evidence. He hadn’t provided an alibi for himself or tried to put the blame on anyone else. He hadn’t even complained when the maximum sentence was passed.
Now Marks had paid his debt to society and the insurers had paid theirs to the bank — and it was Thurston’s job to get it back.
The Deputy Warden had given him a look at Marks yesterday through a window — Marks hadn’t seen him — and now Thurston had no trouble recognizing him when Marks walked out of the Big A and loitered a few minutes until a radio-call taxi drew up for him. Marks was short and a bit on the plump side. Thinning dark hair, a tiny mustache, the vanity of a small-time con artist.
Thurston put his rent-a-car in drive and shadowed the cab at a leisurely distance. He was fairly certain Marks would go straight to the airport but with nearly three quarters of a million dollars at stake it was worth playing by the rules.
When Ned Marks boarded the flight for Los Angeles, Thurston was eight rows behind him in an aisle seat and reasonably certain that Marks hadn’t made him yet.
The tall guy was either a cop or F.B.I., Ned Marks guessed. Trying to look inconspicuous. But he was still there even though Ned had spent ten minutes in the men’s room and the rest of the passengers had gone on to baggage claim by now.
Well, that was all right. At least now Ned knew what the guy looked like. Tall and fashionably shaggy, a lot of loose brown hair. Could have been an actor in a shaving cream commercial. Good muscle tone, it looked like, but that was all right too; Ned wasn’t going to get in the ring with the guy.
He went across to the information desk and waited his turn in the line. The cop, or whatever he was, had gone over to one of the car rental counters. Ned said, “My name’s Arnold Creber. I think someone left an envelope here for me?”
“Could you spell the name, sir?”
Two minutes later he had the envelope and was out on the curb waiting for the shuttle bus. He didn’t bother to look up when the tall cop got on and walked past to sit down a few seats behind him. The guy was a fool if he didn’t think he’d been spotted by now.
The envelope contained the car keys and a note from Marie. He skipped the lecture part and focused his attention on the parking lot designation — Lot 6, Row D. The license plate number was on the key tag.
He got off the bus carrying just the little shoulder bag — the things he’d had with him 28 months before when he’d checked into Atlanta, and his $428, and the car keys.
The cop was hanging back, bumbling around the parking lot pretending He couldn’t remember where he’d left his car. Ned found the clunker where Marie had parked it. First he checked the trunk. The suitcases were there. He got in and turned the key, dubious about the cheap old car, but it started right up and he grinned amiably at the tall cop when he drove out onto the oval airport drive. Left the stupid oaf standing there flatfooted.
Well, there might be another one covering him in a car. So he did a few maneuvers designed to disclose a tail — up and down Freeway ramps. There was a brown car half a block back when he turned onto the Freeway again and he wasn’t sure about it, but when he got off the Freeway at the Ventura Boulevard exit he didn’t see any brown car in the mirror. It didn’t matter a whole lot. Let them follow him if they wanted to waste time and gas.