“Price was very accommodating,” I said.
Raymond took off his reading glasses and began polishing them with the wide end of his tie. “Look at the third line, Lydia. The allocation was for the affordable housing project on San Pedro Street.”
“That was eighty thousand dollars,” I said.
“Yes,” Raymond said, replacing his glasses. “But the recipient line is completely blank.”
I looked at the empty box on the copy. “He said his staff would find the original sheet.”
“An omission like that does not happen by accident in a public ledger,” Raymond said.
At half past four, the shadows had stretched across my desk on Wilshire Boulevard. A courier left a heavy manila envelope on the reception counter, departing without asking for a signature. Inside was a single sheet of paper with the city seal, dated March ninth.
The document looked identical to the one on my desk, except the blank line was gone. A company called Pacific Coast Consulting was listed in neat, typed letters as the recipient of the eighty thousand dollars.
I stared at the two documents on my desk, realizing the numbers did not match.
The faculty lounge at UCLA smelled of old carpet and stale coffee. Outside the tall windows, the eucalyptus trees after the morning rain smelled sharp and clean, but inside, the air was dry and still. Raymond spread the two photocopies across a low wood table, next to a stack of heavy cream-colored paper containing official city subcontracts from the previous fiscal year.
“This looks like an intentional diversion, not a bookkeeping error,” Raymond said.
He reached into his pocket, took out his reading glasses, and polished them with the wide end of his tie before putting them on.
I pointed to the loops of the cursive signature on the bottom of the anonymous March ninth sheet. “It is not the clerk from the housing department, and it is certainly not the treasurer.”
