Chapter 7

I don’t know if you’ve ever been arrested or not, but it’s a nightmare. Especially when two of the five people being arrested resist it.

That would be Val and Rudy.

Val felt like saying, “But we didn’t do anything!” should be sufficient to stop the cops in their tracks. When that was ignored, she got insistent and then frantic. I’m pretty sure she figured that, as the oldest, she’d be blamed for everything. If not by the police, then by our parents.

Rudy insisted the money was not counterfeit. I suspect that was because he’d already made the connection that, if one (or both) of the bills we’d tried to rent scooters with was fake ... well, the rest was probably fake, too. Suddenly, he’d gone from riches to rags, and he couldn’t allow that.

The police weren’t too impressed with that argument, either.

It’s not fun being put in handcuffs. It makes you feel very helpless. It’s also not fun being searched. I guess on the mainland they don’t do that to juveniles. This wasn’t the mainland.

The clerk came out from the back, holding both bills by one corner.

“I stopped handling them once the pen registered they were counterfeit,” she said. She pointed at Rudy. “He’s the one that handed them to me.”

“They can’t be fake,” whimpered Rudy.

Valerie was still freaked out by what was happening. She kept jerking at her cuffs and saying, “We didn’t do anything!”

I figured it out.

“Officer,” I said, looking at one of them. “We got paid this money for a job we did. There’s more at our hotel.”

“Then let’s go get it,” said the man, smiling.

They’d brought a van with them, one of those smallish looking ones like they have a lot of in England, and they stuffed us all in the back of that. One policeman sat in there with us and made it clear there would be no talking.

When we got to the hotel, the guy who had been driving opened up the back and looked at me.

“Let’s go,” he said. “Just you.”

“Can you take these off?” I asked, turning to show him my cuffs.

“No. Don’t worry. You can just tell me where it is and I’ll collect it.”

Which is why I was paraded through the lobby of the hotel. The concierge looked startled, but didn’t come investigate. The cops had already taken my key card away from me when they searched us. He opened the door without knocking. I was hoping Mom and Dad would be there, but they weren’t. I found out later it was good they weren’t, because they’d have been arrested, too.

I told him where the rest of the money was and he shook my bag out on the bed. The only sign he was impressed was a short little whistle he made when the bundles tumbled into view.

He put the money back in the bag, leaving everything else lying on the bed. I found out later that he’d seized the bag as part of the evidence. Then he marched me back to the van and we all went to jail.

We were questioned, of course. I don’t know about what the others said, because we were interrogated separately. I say I don’t know what they said, because that part of the process, right after we were put behind bars, was still highly charged, emotionally, and it’s hard to remember everything. Later we’d have time to think about things and our memories of subsequent events are a lot better.

The guy who talked to me was one of the arresting policemen. He filled out a form with the usual questions: Name, age, citizenship, address, phone number, place and date of birth. He wanted to know if I had any scars or tattoos for some reason. I answered all his questions, but I kept trying to tell him about Tom and Jerry.

“We’ll get to that,” he said, several times.

But we never did. After he filled out the form, he took me back to “our” cell. They only had two and those shared one barred wall. At least they’d put us together in the same cell, but there was a woman policeman there who barked at us every time somebody tried to say something. She said, “No talking!” with a faint accent I couldn’t identify. She was also the blackest human being I’ve ever seen. Her skin was so black, it looked almost blue.

I did find out later that the reason Mom and Dad didn’t get thrown in the cell with us was Rudy. He insisted they had no idea about the money. They asked him more questions, I guess because he was identified as the one who handed the clerk the money. I guess they believed him. When our parents finally got there, frantic after having been alerted by the concierge that (at least) I was in police custody, and then having found my clothes scattered on the bed there was some shouting, but nobody else got cuffed.

Then began the long, convoluted and painful process of explaining things. I must admit that, from my vantage point, years later ... it was also interesting.

They would not release us. They might have believed Rudy when he claimed our parents were ignorant of their children’s ‘shenanigans’ but we were also the hostages that ensured they wouldn’t leave the island. Mom wanted to stay in jail with us, but they wouldn’t let her do that, either. Eventually, Mom and dad left, after getting a promise that they’d be kept apprised of the continuing investigation. But after our parents left, all they did was give us supper and leave us in the cell. Nobody asked us anymore questions at all.

Instead, they called in the United States Secret Service to complete the investigation. It turned out our two fakes were part of ten that had been discovered on the island in the past two days. The quantity we had, though, shocked everybody and got the big dogs involved.

It happened fast. We spent a sleepless night in jail and right after they fed us breakfast, we met the two agents the United States had sent. They both talked to us, both individually and then, later, as a group. The initial interviews were separate, and strangely relaxed. They were also very short.

“I’m Dan Roddenberry,” said the guy dressed in a suit who came into the room I’d been taken to. It was actually the kitchen. There was a counter with a coffee machine on it and a microwave. A refrigerator stood on one wall. I guess crime was pretty low-key on the island and they didn’t need a proper interrogation room. The cells were probably more for drunks to sleep it off in than for criminals.

“United States Secret Service,” he added, showing me a shiny gold badge. It was shaped like a star, with rounded points. It looked more like a sheriff’s badge than something I’d have thought the secret service would have. “I already talked to Valerie.”

“Bobby Simpson,” I said. I wasn’t cuffed, but I didn’t offer to shake his hand. I wondered why he told me he’d talked to Val. “I can explain this, if somebody will listen to me,” I said.

“That’s why I’m here,” he said. “I bet you want to tell me about Tom and Jerry.”

“Yes!” I said.

“I’d like to hear about them,” he said.

So I told him that they’d wanted to take pictures of us and offered to pay us. I’d thought about this all night, staring up at the faint light from a street light that shown on the ceiling through a tall, thin window in the wall of the cell. Obviously I had to explain why somebody would pay us so much money just for taking pictures, which meant I had to admit we were nude for these pictures. I made it clear we’d been staying at a nude resort, so that the nude part didn’t need further explanation. I didn’t think it was necessary to talk about the real reason we’d been paid so much.

Remember, I was only sixteen at the time. I believed most of what other people told me, so I expected to be believed. Especially when I was telling the truth! Okay ... a lot of the truth.

“What kind of pictures?” asked Agent Roddenberry, casually.

“Well, it’s a nude beach,” I explained. “So we were nude.”

“All of you?”

“Sure. We’re kind of nudists at home, too,” I offered.

“I see,” he said. He had a pad in front of him, but wasn’t writing anything down.

“Tell me about the negotiations these men made with you.”

So I described how we’d been climbing on the rocks and Tom and Jerry came along and wanted to take pictures of us doing that.

“So they gave you fifty-seven thousand dollars for pictures of you guys climbing rocks naked.” He smiled.

“Yeah,” I said. I suddenly felt nervous.

“And that’s all?”

My voice suddenly felt unreliable, so all I did was nod.

“I told you I talked to Valerie,” he said. “When I leave here I’m going to talk to the others.”

I nodded again.

He stood up.

“Here’s the deal. We have you passing counterfeit currency. We have you in possession of over fifty thousand dollars of more counterfeit currency. That’s a slam dunk in court. Presto, you go away for fifteen years. But don’t worry, your brother and sisters will be right there with you for company. Maybe they’ll even let you form a choir. You know, like the Von Trapp singers in Sound of Music?”

“But we didn’t make that money!” I croaked.

“You’re not being charged for printing it, just passing it. Two different animals,” he said.

“What about Tom and Jerry?” I moaned. The thought of fifteen years in prison felt like fifteen tons of sand on top of me. I’d be thirty-one-years old when I got out! My life would be over! “They had more! They had a whole briefcase full of it!”

He sat back down.

“Well, as far as that goes, I’d rather have them in custody than a bunch of kids. But nobody seems to be interested in helping us find them.”

“I am!“ I gasped.

He put one fingertip on his lips, as if he was thinking about that possibility for the very first time.

“That would go a long way toward mitigating your own punishment,” he mused.

“It would?”

He stared at me. “If you help us find them and bring them into custody, I’ll recommend to the US Attorney that he go light on you.”

“Deal!” I croaked.

I wanted to bite my lip almost instantly. It was saying “Deal” that had gotten us into this mess in the first place.

It was all bullshit, of course. I know that now. But when you’re a callow kid, you believe what adults tell you. Especially what secret service agents tell you. The fact is they knew how unlikely it was that five teenagers had figured out how to print all that money. Plus we were all juveniles and it was highly unlikely that anybody would go to jail. They believed that “Tom” and “Jerry” existed, if not that that was their true names. It really was those two that they were after. And they wanted them badly. I guess the bills were pretty good fakes, at least to the naked eye.

But if they told us the truth, that we had been duped and nobody would think seriously about prosecuting us, it was quite possible all cooperation on our part would end. That had happened to them before, I’m sure. And they didn’t know us from Adam. For all they knew we hated the government and would love to stick it to them.

Quite the opposite. By the time the whole fiasco was over we’d be on a first name basis with them.

But that would be later.

Basically, they’d gotten the same, lame story from all of us. If they’d leaned on Tawny she probably would have told them everything. But they were leery about playing hardball with a fourteen-year-old. Still, she was the one who gave them a clue as to why we had that much money. When asked what we had to do for it she said the same thing about the boulders, but then added that we had to “hug and kiss and stuff.”

Agent Roddenberry had been staring at me for what seemed like ten minutes. There was a clock above the sink, though, so I knew it had only been one. He looked at his watch. I looked at the clock. It was ten-thirty. Yesterday at this time we’d been impersonating shipwrecked kids who went sexually crazy. It was hard to believe.

“If we’re going to work together, we need to be able to trust each other,” he said.

“Sure,” I said. Wasn’t that obvious?