“Twenty after. What’s your hurry, Law? You expecting somebody else?”

“No, no, nothing like that. There’s just a show I like to watch on Court TV. Comes on at twelve. Rikki Klieman. I like her.”

“Then you’ve still got time to talk to me. Why don’t you get a bigger clock in here?”

“She won’t give me one. She says the doctor says it’s bad for me to be watching a clock.”

“She’s probably right.”

It was the wrong thing to say. I saw anger flood his eyes and I immediately regretted the words.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t —”

“You know what it’s like not to be able to raise your own goddamn wrist to look at your fucking watch?”

“No, Law, I don’t have any idea.”

“You know what it’s like to shit in a bag and have your wife take it to the toilet? To have to ask her for every goddamn thing, including a taste of whiskey?”

“I’m sorry, Law.”

“Yeah, you’re sorry. Everybody’s fucking sorry but nobody’s —”

He didn’t finish. He seemed to bite off the end of the sentence like a dog getting a hold of raw meat. He looked away and was silent and I was silent for a long moment, until I thought the anger had drained back down his throat into the seemingly bottomless well of frustration and self-pity that was down there.

“Hey, Law?”

His eyes came back to me.

“What, Harry?”

He was calm. The moment had passed.

“Let’s go back. You said you were going to call me because there was something you forgot. You know, when we went over the case before. What was it you forgot to tell me?”

“Nobody’s come here and talked to me about the case, Harry. You’re the only one. I mean that.”

“I believe you. I was wrong about that. But what was it that you forgot before? Why were you going to call me?”

He closed his eyes for a moment but then opened them. They were clear and focused.

“I told you that Taylor insured the money, right?”

“Right, you told me that.”

“What I forgot was that the insurance company—offhand I can’t remember the name of —”

“Global Underwriters. You remembered the other day.”

“Right. Global Underwriters. As a condition of contract Global required that the lender—that was BankLA—scan all the bills.”

“Scan the bills? What do you mean?”

“Record the serial numbers.”

I remembered the paragraph I had circled on the newspaper clip. It had apparently been true. I started doing the math in my head. Two million divided by a hundred. I almost had it and then lost the number.

“That would be a lot of numbers.”

“I know. The bank balked—said it would take four people a week, something like that. So they negotiated and compromised. They sampled. They took ten numbers from every one of the stacks.”

I remembered from the Times story that the money was delivered in $25,000 bundles. That math I could do. Eighty bundles made $2 million.