“I didn’t think about that,” Susan said, and looked at him through tear-filled eyes. “My friend was all fucked up, Matt. She had nobody else to turn to. I had to help.”
“Where did you get the money?” he asked, ignoring her.
“It was mine,” she said.
“Where did you get it? Specifically, did you take it out of the bank? Is there a record of you making a substantial”—Of course there isn’t. If there was, the FBI would have known about it, and told me—“withdrawal—”
“No,” Susan said. “I had it. I had a quarterly dividend check from Chrysler that day, and I had just cashed it—I was going shopping—and I gave her the money.”
“No, you didn’t,” Matt said.
“What?”
“You will swear on a stack of Bibles that you didn’t give her any money. I don’t think the FBI knows about that, and we don’t want them to know. You cashed the check to go shopping, didn’t buy anything, and just kept the money around and pissed it away on routine expenses. How much was it?”
“Three thousand and change,” Susan said, very softly. “Matt, I’m not a very good liar.”
“Well, you fooled me, honey. You told me you were just not interested, and I believed you.”
“Oh, Matt!”
“I’m serious. You’re a good liar, which is a good thing.”
“Matt, there is something about money. . . .”
“What?”
“I’m holding some money for Bryan.”
“From the bank jobs?”
She nodded.
“Jesus Christ, why?”
“Because he asked me to. Or he got Jennie to ask me to. Same thing.”
“Did he tell you why?”
“Against the possibility of his being arrested—”
“The inevitability,” Matt interrupted.
“—to hire a good lawyer.”
“Shit,” Matt said. “He’s stupid. For one thing—let me explain how this will work—for one thing, the FBI knows all about the bank robberies. He did another one a couple of days ago, in Clinton, New Jersey. Dressed up like a woman, by the way.”
“Jennie called me—my God, that’s only this morning—and asked me to come visit her and the baby.”
“What baby?”
The FBI doesn’t know anything about a baby. An infant in arms considerably cuts into the number of wanted females meeting a physical description. I would have been told. It would even have been in their movie.
“They have a baby boy.”
“Jesus H. Christ! Wouldn’t you consider that a little irresponsible, considering their circumstances?”
“Maybe it happened to them the way it could have happened to us just now,” Susan said.