The Town: A Novel

by Chuck Hogan

  A minute later he was slamming the door of the Caprice and crossing the street. From Uno’s, he told himself, he could get a better look. Then the Walk sign stayed white, and his feet carried him all the way across Brookline Avenue to the sidewalk outside the bank.

  One quick pass by the windows was all he could afford. The bank door opened as he approached it, him reaching out to hold the door for a black lady in a wheelchair—and the next thing he knew, he was inside, telling himself to scrawl something on a deposit slip and get the fuck out.

  Then he was in line for a teller, smacking himself on the thigh with his rolled-up Herald. This was something a sweaty-eyed arsonist did, returning to the scene of the crime. A whiff of bleach hit him, even if it was present only in his mind.

  “Oh, hi.” She made him right away, Jesus Christ, this skinny-necked black teller with her hair flour-sacked on top of her head, smiling. “Haven’t seen you for a while. Meter change, right?”

  “Yeah, thanks.” He pried a dollar bill off his damp fingers and pushed it through. He had the slimmest of angles on the hallway to the door of the manager’s office from there. Someone was moving around.

  The teller leaned toward the perforated bulletproof partition. “Did you hear we got robbed?”

  “Yeah, was that this branch?” Cameras perched on the wall behind her like little one-eyed birds, him keeping his head down, making himself watch her hands. “Everybody okay?”

  “I’m fine, I wasn’t here.” She made a four-quarter stack with dry, delicate brown fingers and pushed them forward like casino chips, speaking low. “But our assistant manager was beaten. Badly—he’s still in the hospital. The manager was supposed to be back today—you know the blond girl, carries her keys on a strap?”

  “Okay, maybe.”

  “Not to open, just to be here—her first day back. She never showed.”

  The words actually rose in his throat, Doug almost informing her that the plum Saturn was parked out in back. A brain virus, it had to be. He choked on his swallowed words, scooping up his quarters and walking away, half-blind, not even trusting his mouth with a cordial Thank you.

  DOUG WAS SAFELY BACK inside the Caprice when it hit him, his theory, and he would not sleep again unless he proved it right or wrong. That was what he told himself as he drove back over the short bridge toward Fenway, parking there and jogging a block under the warming sun to Boylston, across Park Drive into the Back Bay Fens.

  The Fens was a park laid out around a dead-river pond, a city oasis glowing hormonally emerald in the full-on puberty of spring. Inside the bike paths along Park Drive were the Fenway Gardens, five hundred fenced lots staked along meandering dirt-and-pebble lanes. A couple of times in early April he had followed Claire Keesey here on her lunch hour, watching from a distance as she sat on a crumbling stone bench, picking through a Tupperware salad under the pale green fingers of a willow tree. She had sat with perfect posture, as though posed for one of the pictures in the thick fashion magazine open at her side. She usually embezzled a few extra minutes of lunch hour beyond her allotted sixty.

  His landmark for locating her plot was a rain-hatted scarecrow dwarf at the end of the row, fashioned out of basket wicker and tilted on a crucifix of broken ladder. Nothing else anywhere looked familiar to him. Spring had sprung and the gardens were completely transformed.

  He saw her kneeling on the ground, going at it hard with a hand fork, clawing the soil as though it were a memory that would not die. When she stopped and got to her feet for a water break, Doug saw that she was dressed not for gardening but for work—a soft pink sweater-blouse over a long, muddied skirt, both ruined. She reached for a spading fork and pushed up her dirtied sleeves, resuming her all-out assault on the earth.

  People on bicycles or walking their dogs slowed as they passed her, one feisty little gay pug yapping at her with concern. Claire Keesey never looked up. A shirtless man eyed Doug from three plots down, and Doug bashed him with a look, starting back quickly to his car, the mystery of Claire Keesey clouding his mind.

  10

  STAINED

  DUE TO A QUIRK OF either geography or city planning, the C branch of the MBTA Green Line subway made twelve stops along a three-mile straightaway between Boston’s Kenmore Square and Boston’s Cleveland Circle—all of them in the town of Brookline. The old-fashioned trolleys ran aboveground there, on tracks that cleaved the length of Beacon Street. At the St. Paul stop stood a half-block-long, three-story Holiday Inn hotel with a glassy corporate atrium, where on four Tuesday mornings each year the Boston Bank Robbery Task Force and associated agencies assembled for a breakfast meeting.

  The BRTF was formed in late 1985, at a time when alliances of federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies routinely failed due to conflicting mandates and general bad blood. It was a shotgun marriage: the Massachusetts region had seen fifteen of the nation’s sixty-five total armored-car robberies in that year. By the early 1990s, the task force had halved that number—significant progress, but not enough to shake Boston’s title as the Armored Car Robbery Capital of America. Gains had also been made in reducing the number of bank robberies, pushing the regional total below two hundred per year, and showing a whopping 73 percent clearance rate, as compared to 49 percent nationwide.

  The full-time investigative arm of the BRTF, headquartered at Lakeville, was composed of five FBI agents, two Boston police detectives, and three Massachusetts state troopers. Today’s informational meeting included associated members of the Massachusetts Department of Corrections, the Cambridge Police Department, a guest speaker from the Drug Enforcement Administration, liaisons from every major area bank chain and armored-transport company, and a representative from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston—all sharing information and identifying trends over croissants and cranberry juice.

  That morning found Frawley unusually impatient. He had spent the entire day before in his Cavalier with Dino, shadowing a Northeast Armored Transport truck on a tip from the Organized Crime section. Fifty-four stops at supermarkets, convenience stores, and nightclubs throughout Saugus and Revere, and they’d be back at it again tomorrow—leaving him little time to pursue the Brown Bag Bandits from the Kenmore Square heist.

  Frawley was a doodler and a good one. As the suit from the Federal Reserve Bank outlined concerns regarding the Big Dig—the Central Artery reconstruction project that included, as part of its ten-year overhaul of the city’s crumbling highways and fallen arches, a major tunnel within a few dozen yards of his institution’s gold bullion vaults—Frawley added hash-mark scarring to the egg-eyed hockey masks lining the margins of his schedule memo. He did them mug-shot style, full-face and profile: two small bean holes for the nostrils, a flat, expressionless slot for the mouth, and the twin tribal triangles at the pits of the cheeks. Tracing the masks was a dead end: a visit to a Chinatown costume store showed him dozens of easily adaptable Friday the 13th party masks staring down from the walls.

  Hunting a disciplined crew was most difficult because it eliminated Frawley’s two greatest advantages over bank robbers: their stupidity, and their greed. He could not rely on their compulsion to pull reckless jobs, leaving him fewer opportunities to capture them.

  He wandered back to the raided vault in his mind. The yawning cabinet, the plundered cash drawers: he tried to let that feeling of violation wash over him again. He remembered the bait bills and dye packs left behind, untouched. Pro bank bandits, like practitioners of any arcane craft, were a superstitious bunch. Frawley hadn’t touched them either, being superstitious in his own way, himself the student of a dying art. He was the last in the long line of bank detectives. The bloodline traced directly from the first stagecoach Pinkertons to himself. If he couldn’t be there at the beginning, he figured the second-best place to be was right where he was, at the tail end. Credit cards, debit cards, smart cards, the Internet: the dawn of the cashless society meant the twilight of the modern bank bandit, and the coming of a new breed. Identity theft and e
lectronic embezzlement were the future of financial crime. The next Adam Frawley would be a pale, deskbound Net-head hunting cyber-thieves with a mouse and a keyboard instead of an Olympus Pearlcorder and a blue Form FD-430. Adam Frawley would soon become obsolete. The techniques, the tradecraft, everything he knew about banks and vaults and the men who robbed them, and all he had yet to learn—it would die with him, the last bank robbery agent.

  Below the cartoon masks, he sketched the handset of a telephone and connected the two by a coiled wire. This wire was his only tangible lead now. It was the phone company tech the Brown Bag Bandits exhibited, in the Kenmore Square job as well as the others the task force now suspected them of: credit unions in Winchester and Dedham; the Milk Street Pawn cut-in; ATM jobs in Cambridge and Burlington; a co-op in Watertown; two banks just over the New Hampshire border; last September’s weekend spree of three Providence storage facilities, for which they had disabled the ADT Security System network across most of eastern Rhode Island; and the nontech armored-car heists Frawley hunched them for, in Melrose, Weymouth, and Braintree. All three-and four-man crew jobs, all of them spread out over the past thirty months.

  Frawley had found fresh wounds running up a telephone pole around the corner from the BayBanks, left there by a lineman’s spikes. A Nynex crew in a cherry picker worked for three hours to diagnose and repair the junction-box reroute.

  No one Frawley had talked to inside the Monopoly game that was the booming telecom industry could satisfactorily explain how a thief could locate the particular cellular antenna—disabled one and a half miles away, on the roof of a Veterans Administration Hospital on Roxbury’s Mission Hill—responsible for bouncing the bank’s backup alarm signal to the Area D-4 police station.

  He sketched a cell tower with suturelike antennas, then fleshed out the tower, letting it grow into the Bunker Hill Monument.

  The bleached crime scene, stolen surveillance tapes, and torched work van left them with no physical evidence at all. Frawley’s only hope now was that the subpoena would prove out, this one seeking not just Nynex service logs but employee records and home addresses. He would run down any leads involving phone company employees residing in the Town—possibly opening up the case to a “Charlestown witch hunt” defense at trial, but right now it was all he had.

  On top of all this was the phone call he had received just prior to the start of this meeting, informing him that Claire Keesey had yet again failed to return to work.

  His felt pen moved incessantly, all these things playing inside his head, finding expression here and there in automatic writing: gloved hands aiming BANG! cartoon guns; fat moonshine jugs labeled BLEACH; dollar signs hashmarked with stitching scars.

  He willed himself not to check his wristwatch again as an enormously pregnant DEA agent outlined the positive impact that falling heroin prices might have on note-passers. Apparently a price-and-purity war was raging between the Colombian cartels and the traditional Asian heroin producers, the Colombians gaining East Coast market share by wooing needle-wary smokers and snorters. At $5 per thumbnail-sized bag, street H was now stronger than coke and cheaper than beer.

  Heroin use was also rising in Charlestown, but along with the institutional anachronism of the neighborhood, Townie drug addicts retained their affinity for the bad-boy drug of the late 1970s, angel dust. Dust came sold in small packets, or “tea bags,” the powder acting as an anesthetic, a stimulant, a depressant, and a hallucinogen—all at the same time. Its status as the outlaw drug of all drugs surely accounted for its special appeal within the Town.

  But his mind was wandering again. He focused on the tablecloths, their bright coral pinkness reflected in the water glasses like floating lilies. Outside the right-hand wall of windows, the dreary street was drawn in charcoal pencil, smudged by the all-morning drizzle.

  Frawley’s and Dino’s pagers went off at the same time. Frawley sat back to read the display on his hip, showing the Lakeville office phone number, followed by the code 91A. The FBI offense code for bank robbery was 091. A was shorthand for “armed.”

  Dino had his phone, Frawley rising with him, both of them in suits for the meeting, moving away from the tables. Dino held his phone elbow high, as though cell-phone use required a more formal technique than regular telephones.

  “Ginny,” he said. “Dean Drysler.… Uh-huh.… Okay. When was that?” He stepped to the wall, looking out the weeping windows to the western end of Beacon. “Got it.” He hung up, turned to Frawley. “Note-passer. Just happened. Claimed gun but didn’t show.”

  “Okay.” Hardly anything to shake them out of a meeting for. “So?”

  “Coolidge Corner BayBanks, intersection of Beacon and Harvard.” He pointed out the window. “Two blocks that way, across the street.”

  Frawley tensed, then looked for the door to the lobby. “I’m gonna run.”

  Frawley was out of the room fast, new-shoe-running over a slippery carpet into the lobby, blowing past the doorman in his silly vest and out into the gray mist. Down a steep, turnaround driveway, across busy Beacon against the light, then following a low fence along the trolley tracks until he could cross the slick inbound lane of Beacon ahead of onrushing traffic, up the rising sidewalk past a Kinko’s and a post office and a whole-foods market.

  He covered the quarter-mile in no time, arriving outside the corner bank with his hand on his shoulder piece. The sight of a dapper man dancing back and forth there with keys in his hand, searching hooded faces, told Frawley the thief was already gone. Frawley drew his creds out of his jacket, flapped it open.

  “My God, you got here fast,” said the branch manager, silver eyeglasses perched ornamentally on his face.

  “How long?” said Frawley.

  “One, two minutes. I came almost right out after him.”

  Frawley scanned in all four directions, the intersection calm in the rain, no one reacting to a man running, no cars tearing out of handicapped parking spaces. “You don’t see him?”

  The manager craned his neck until the rain specks on his glasses made him draw back under the overhang. “Nowhere.”

  “What’d he have, a hat? Sunglasses?”

  “Yes. Scarf around his neck, tucked into his jacket, to his chin. A caramel brown chenille.”

  “Gloves?”

  “I don’t know. Can we go back inside?”

  Frawley saw blue cruiser lights about a half mile up the inbound lane, cars pulling over for them. “After you,” said Frawley.

  It was a handsome old bank, well-appointed, underlit. Customer service was corralled in the center by a low, wood-railed office gate with a thigh-high swinging door. Green-shade banker lamps illuminated boxy computer monitors. The teller booths and a currency-exchange window lined the rear.

  The customers and service reps stopped their buzzing, all eyes turning to the manager and the overdressed FBI agent. In back, the tellers had left their windows to huddle with their co-worker in the rightmost window.

  “Make the announcement,” said Frawley.

  “Yes,” said the manager. “Umm—everyone? I’m sorry to say that there’s been a robbery here just now, and—”

  A collective gasp.

  “Yes, I’m afraid so, and we’re going to have to suspend our transactions for at least an hour”—a confirming glance at Frawley—“or two, perhaps even just a bit more, so please, if you would, bear with us for a few minutes, and we’ll have you on your way.”

  Frawley’s call for a show of hands of anyone who’d seen the bandit leave the bank got him nowhere. Customers are usually never aware that a note job is going down until afterward when the manager locks the front door.

  Dino arrived at the same time the police did, shaking their hands and generally keeping them out of the way while the manager let Frawley in back with the tellers.

  “CCTV or stills?”

  “What?” said the manager.

  “Close circuit cameras or—” Frawley looked up and answered his own question. The vide
o cameras were placed too high on the wall. “Those aren’t even going to get under his hat brim,” Frawley said, pointing. “Seven and a half feet high, max—make sure those get lowered. Do they slow to sixty frames after the alarm is punched?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  The others remained huddled around the rightmost teller, hands of support on her shoulders and back. She was an Asian woman in her midthirties, Vietnamese perhaps, tears dripping off her round chin and spotting her salmon silk shirt, her nude nylon knees chunky and trembling.

  Her top drawer was open, its slots still full of cash. “How much did he get?” asked Frawley.

  A woman wearing a long hair braid of gray and silver answered, “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?” said Frawley.

  “She froze. She’s a trainee, this is her second day. I saw she was in trouble, and I saw the note. I hit my hand alarm.”

  The note lay just inside the window slot, scribbled on a white paper napkin, wrinkled like a love letter held too long in a sweaty hand. “Did you touch this?”

  “No,” said the Vietnamese teller. “Yes—when he first pass it to me.”

  “Was he wearing gloves?”

  The head teller answered for her. “No.”

  “Anybody see the gun?”

  The Vietnamese teller shook her head. “He said bomb.”

  “Bomb?” said Frawley.

  “Bomb,” said the head teller. “He was carrying a satchel on his shoulder.”

  The note read, in a shaky, frightened slant, “I have a BOMB! Put ALL MONEY in bag.” Then, larger, bolder: “PLEASE NO ALARMS OR ELSE!!!”

  The word please jumped out at Frawley. “A satchel?”

  The head teller said, “Like half a backpack. Not businessy. Gray.”