Lost Light

the file I had kept on Angella Benton. There was also the file from Lawton Cross’s garage and a black binder full of documents two inches thick. I assumed it was the copy of the LAPD’s murder book. I got excited just looking at it. It was the full deck of cards I had been looking for.
    “Where’s the rest?” I asked.
    Peoples walked around behind the desk and opened the middle drawer. He removed a file and dropped it on the top of the desk.
    “In there you will find subject location reports covering the two dates you requested. I don’t think they will help you but it’s what you wanted. You can look at them here but you cannot take them with you. They will not leave this office. Do you understand that?”
    I nodded, deciding not to push it.
    “What about Aziz?”
    “When you are ready I will put you in a room with him. But he won’t talk to you. You’ll be wasting your time.”
    “Well, it’s mine to waste.”
    “Then, before you leave here, you will call your attorney and instruct her to turn over to me the original and all copies of the surveillance recordings you have from last night and the night before.”
    I shook my head.
    “Sorry, that’s not the deal.”
    “It certainly is.”
    “No, I never said I would turn over the recordings. What I said was that I would not go public with them. There’s a difference. I’m not going to turn over the only leverage I’ve got. I’m not stupid, John.”
    “We had a deal,” he said, his cheeks beginning to quiver with anger.
    “And I’m keeping the deal. Exactly as offered.”
    I reached into my pocket and pulled out a cassette tape. I held it out to him.
    “If you don’t believe me you can listen for yourself. I was wearing a wire last night in the booth.”
    I watched his eyes register that I now even had him directly tied in.
    “Take it, John. Call it a goodwill gesture. It’s the original. No copies were made.”
    He slowly reached up and took the tape. I moved around behind the desk.
    “Why don’t I take a look at what you’ve got in the file while you go do whatever you have to do to get Aziz ready?”
    Peoples pocketed the tape and nodded.
    “I’ll be back in ten minutes,” he said. “If anyone comes in here and asks what you are doing, close that file and tell them to see me.”
    “One last thing. What about the money?”
    “What about it?”
    “How much money from the movie set heist did Aziz have under his car seat?”
    I thought I saw a small smile start to play on Peoples’s face, but then it went away.
    “He had a hundred bucks. One bill traced to the heist.”
    He stayed long enough to see the disappointment on my face, then turned to the door.
    After he left the room I sat down at the desk and opened the file. It contained two pages that had security stamps on them and had words in the middle of paragraphs and then whole paragraphs blocked out with black ink. Peoples clearly wasn’t going to let me see anything I had not bargained for-or extorted from him, as he had put it.
    The pages were taken from what I assumed was a larger file. There was a coding in small print at the top left corner. I reached into the cardboard box and opened my file. I took out one of the loose sheets of note paper and wrote the code number from each page down. I then read what Peoples was allowing me to read.
    The first page had two dated paragraphs.

    5-11-99-SUBJECT confirmed in Hamburg at •••• in company with •••• and ••••. SUBJECT seen in restaurant by •••• approximately 20:00 until 23:30 hours. No further detail.
    7-1-99-SUBJECT passport scan at Heathrow at 14:40 hours. Follow up determination arrival on Lufthansa Flight 698 from Frankfurt. No further detail.

    The paragraphs before and after these two were completely blacked out. What I was looking at was the log in which tabs on Aziz had been kept over the years by the feds. He was on the watch list. This is what it amounted to. Sightings by informants or agents and airport passport checks.
    The two dates on the page were on either side of the murder of Angella Benton and the movie set heist. It by no means cleared Aziz of active or background involvement in the crimes. Yet, if I believed the document in front of me, he was in Europe both before and after the occurrence of the crimes I was investigating. But it was no alibi. Aziz was known, according to the Times article I had read, to travel with false identification. It was possible he had slipped