A suitcase full of money

I've been working close to three years on a novel and have just realised something very important: the plot needs a missing suitcase of money. I wish someone had told me this at the start. Maybe if I'd phoned up Elmore Leonard he could told me with barely a sniff at the manuscript. It's amazing to me that you can labour on a book for so long, getting the characters right, the dialogue just so, the settings nicely described, without realising that what it really needs is a suitcase of money. Not all do. But mine did need one and now it has one.