Big Stick-Up at Brink's!

by Behn, Noel;

  “There’s something else on her, so that’s why I gotta be careful. There’s this sign that makes my work easy. Pasted right on her is a warning from ADT [American District Telegraph]. Touch this pete and you’re up shit creek is what ADT’s telling me, we got the beauty covered with all our alarms. We got her bugged.

  “That ain’t gonna stop me, see. She’s breathtaking. Breathtaking and delectable. She’s so gorgeous I’m overcome. I take off the sack. I go up and plant a kiss. Give her a smacker. Not a hard one ’cause I don’t wanna set off that ADT bug, but a good loving smack to tell her I’d be back real soon to take care of her good.”

  The calls grew frantic, were eventually abandoned. Pino drove over to the longshoremen’s office, learned that Sandy hadn’t been in for two days. A tip at Cassiday’s Café led to the Head House Bar, where Richardson and Faherty lay draped over a table.

  “You drunk?” Pino demanded.

  “Sleeping,” came Sandy’s mumbled and belated reply.

  “You’re goddamned sloshed!”

  “Unh-unh. Goddamn sleeping,” Faherty added.

  “Don’t tell me what you are! I can see what you are. You’re both goddamned pie-eyed and sloshed.”

  “Incorrect,” Richardson mildly objected, trying to raise his head. “We were goddamn sloshed an hour ago. Now we’re sleeping.”

  “Up the rebels,” Faherty rejoined.

  “Up yourself and look at me!” commanded Pino.

  “You do the honors,” Faherty suggested to Sandy.

  Richardson raised from the table, sat semierect and swaying.

  Pino studied Sandy’s bruised and eye-flickering face. “You’re a goddamn drunk and a goddamn disgrace. You’re nothing but a drunk street brawler.”

  “We … were not brawling,” Richardson tried to explain. “We were set upon by unknown assailants. Ask Mike.”

  “Mike ain’t here!” Pino barked.

  “Oh, they musta kidnapped the poor fella. Well, ask Jimma if we weren’t set upon.”

  Pino stared angrily at the snoring Faherty and then back at Richardson. “Because of your horrid conditions, I ain’t gonna tell you why I came over,” he warned.

  Richardson yawned, nodded and started teetering forward. Pino caught him by the lapel and forced him back in the chair.

  “Don’t you have no sense of pride?” Sandy was asked. “Don’t you have no ordinary curiosity?”

  “Curiosity? About what, Anthony?”

  “Our partner.”

  “Which one?”

  “Whaddaya mean, which one? How many do you think we got?”

  “So many I can’t count.”

  “This is our biggest one—that’s which goddamn one!” Pino shouted. Then, realizing he shouted, he sat down and leaned forward. “Our legitimate one,” he explained. “A fifty-fifty partner, only we take both fifties, see? Sandy, we just gone into business with Mr. Brink’s.”

  Richardson squinted dimly at Pino. “We’ve been in business with him for two and a half years.”

  “Yeah, but now he’s selling out. He’s giving us the keys and full title.”

  Sandy cleared his throat. “Are you saying, more or less, Anthony, that you got through his door?”

  “Got through the door? Mother of God, I moved in. I took rooms with a bath. Sandy, I kissed her!”

  “Kissed who?”

  “A luscious lady with an unbelievable shape. You won’t be able to keep your hands off her.”

  “Anthony, what are you talking about?”

  “I found the pete. I went up and laid a smacker on her.”

  “You kissed a safe?”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Rooms with a Bath

  Sandy didn’t have to be on Hull Street at 5 P.M. to see the last Brink’s truck of the day turn in from Commercial Street, to see the driver shift gears and gun the engine, to watch the truck groan and creak, ascend the slope and turn again, this time into the second-level garage. He didn’t have to see that because Tony Pino had told him all about it, and they didn’t get there in time to see it anyway. They didn’t get there in time to see the foot patrolman come around the corner from Commercial Street and check the three. North Terminal Garage doors along Prince before departing the area via tiny Lafayette Street. But Tony told Sandy all about the cop, explained how the tour was over by 6:15 P.M. every evening except on Friday, when for some inexplicable reason he showed up an hour later.

  This was Richardson’s first visit to the joint, the first time Pino would be taking any crew member in—a Cook’s tour deluxe, with no small dosage of histrionics provided. Sandy arrived in time to see the light in the fifth window over the playground go off, was then told to watch Prince Street, did and saw two men emerge from the door nearest the Commercial Street corner. He had to run to keep up with the jubilant, high-stepping Pino as they climbed Snowhill. Rather than enter the building via Commercial, Tony followed a new route, one he had established during the four days following his discovery of the vault room—into and across the second-floor common garage on Hull Street, past the door to the auxiliary garage used by Brink’s, exiting by the pair of sliding doors at the other end, then opening and wedging the two squeaking sliding fire doors leading into the Brink’s garage itself.

  Pino no longer used paper bag masks, no longer bothered with peeking each truck. So confident was he of the terrain that he ran along explaining in full voice, not whispers, all that he had found in the section in bygone days.

  There was no reason for him and Sandy pulling their bandanas up over the bottom of their faces and sneaking up on the rotunda—other than the suspense of it all. Pino had quit checking the window since the night he found the vault. He allowed Sandy the honor of using the pick to open the door into the guardroom. Once through the door on the other side of the room, Richardson got on his knees as instructed and followed Tony through the small door in which the money cart had been found. The space they came out in, fronted by a metal screening, was called the money room cage by the company. Pino had searched it several nights earlier, as he had done with the large counting room into which they now walked. The large chamber was amply illuminated by street light coming in from the two large and one small fronting windows. Here, between the cage to the money room and windows, stood three double rows of back-to-back desks and one single row. They crossed back to a door beside the money room cage, entered and followed a long hallway leading toward Prince Street and came out in a small lobby. To the left was a metal door; to the right was a guardroom window. Straight ahead were windows looking out over Prince Street.

  Sandy was told this was as far as Tony had come in his search and screening of the territory. More rooms existed to the right—behind the guard booth window and the door in the long hall they had just come down.

  Pino led the way back into the money room cage, under the small metal box floor door and out into the L-shaped money room itself. A door was opened at the garage end of the longer end of the L. Richardson stepped into what the company called the control room and Pino referred to as the rotunda. The long fronting and two short siding windows provided a complete view of the unlit garage. Pino pointed to a set of buttons to the side of the counter which ran under the windows. These, he said, were the buttons that electrically opened the door leading into the guardroom from the garage, as well as the door that led from the guardroom into the shorter L section of the money room. Particular attention was given to the metal ring near the counter. Sandy knew what it was on sight, a pull alarm—hook a finger in the ring and pull and the alarm goes off. “My God, it’s a cheap variety at that,” Richardson commented. “Not cheap, the cheapest there is,” Pino rejoined, “and I’ve found three more of them in other parts of the joint.”

  They left the control room by the side door facing Hull Street. Once through they were standing in the garage end of the vault room.

  “Anthony, needless to say, was having the time of his life conducting the tour,” says Richardson. “It had be
en a shock so far, a total shock. Brink’s was absolutely wide open. The alarms they had were a laugh, and the locks in their doors were pathetic. What was more deplorable was that they kept all the doors inside open. Except for the door to the guards’ room, everything else was left open. When Anthony showed me the stomp button, it was worse than deplorable. After all, Brink’s is paid millions of dollars to guard other people’s money, and here Anthony and I are running around through the joint like two kids in a deserted ice-cream parlor. There’s no excuse for that. I was upset, and I don’t know why I should have been. We’d been watching this company for four and a half years, and they were screw-ups from top to bottom. When I start putting together what I saw up here, adding cheap alarms and cheap locks to the fact that no guards are present and no other security is apparent, you can easily reach the same conclusion as Anthony. Brink’s is a chintz.”

  Pino continued his tour of the rear of the vault room, picked open a cabinet lock and showed Sandy a small arsenal of rifles and handguns, then picked open a second and smaller cabinet affixed to the wall. Keys for every Brink’s truck hung from nails.

  “Anthony had made copies of most of these keys years before,” says Richardson. “That’s what we’d been opening up their trucks with. But it was still a sight. Everything was so far.

  “The section of the room we were in was dark. Both Anthony and I had penlights with us, but we were only using his. He showed me several of the money carts they had there. These were new to me. The money trays and the sacks on the counter weren’t. You might say I’d come across them in the course of other Brink’s business. The General Electric box was out in this area, too. This is the big metal box on wheels that started it all—the one Anthony spotted back in ’44. Needless to say, the box and trays were empty, but I imagined how they would look full.

  “We gave the box a playful shove. It squeaked when it rolled.

  “Anthony, of course, had saved the best for last. He had intentionally led me around the long way and got me fascinated with other things in the joint. It was easy to be fascinated.

  “When we came around the corner, or what I thought was a corner, I was flabbergasted. There was the vault. As Anthony put it, ‘luscious to behold.’ I estimated she stood somewhere of eight feet high and about nine or ten feet wide in front. The front was built out of concrete block. The door reached right up to the top and was possibly three and a half to four feet wide. The door, of course, was dialed shut and had a heavy opening device on it—two bars across, one down the middle.

  “If you can believe something right out of my own character,” Sandy confides, “I repeated what Anthony had done. There we were, standing in the dark with only the playground lights to see by, and I became the victim of an irresistible compulsion. I walked up and kissed a metal safe.

  “I kissed her carefully because she was obviously bugged. We had, in our travels, learned that smoke undeniably leads to fire. The signs attached to the safe usually tell the truth. I had no doubt that ADT had a bug somewhere on her. If we could beat the bug, I was certain we could burn or blow up the safe with no difficulty. We’d tangled with ADT alarms before, and I was pretty sure we could find this one and put it out of business. In fact, we started searching her then and there.

  “We had a brief discussion first about electric alarms—wireless alarms. From what we’d seen, Brink’s wasn’t going to spend an extra penny if they could help it, and wireless alarms are more expensive.* We went on the assumption that wires would be hooked in somewhere.

  “I got up on the chair. I had little choice. Anthony was so corpulent a [chair] leg could buckle from his weight or he could have a more difficult time balancing over in the corner. I had situated the chair on the lip in the corner of the two safes. Did I mention the small safe? At the far end [garage end] of the big box, the vault, was a smaller safe—probably a utility safe for ordinary company business. It was pressed right against the big box and was high itself but not as high as the big one. It came right over the lip. The big box was elevated a few inches on a cement platform. I would say the platform came out eight or ten inches beyond the box. That was the lip I was trying to set the chair on. Only three of the legs would fit, so I began over in the corner where the small safe was—the corner between the big box and small safe. If the chair rocked here, which it did, I could brace myself on the small safe. Only Anthony could come up with a situation like this.

  “I began feeling around the top of the big box and vividly recall a chuckle. I recall turning around and seeing Anthony sitting on the counter flashing his pen-light off and on when he was supposed to be looking for wires.

  “I watched him for a minute and whispered, ‘Anthony, what the hell, might I ask, are you doing?’

  “He went right on sitting there, chuckling and flashing his penlight off and on. I might add that Anthony is by no means a chuckler.

  “I must admit I got pissed off. Here I am up on top of a chair, trying to balance on three legs while I’m feeling around in the dust for wires, trying not to leave marks in the dust—and there’s Anthony down there having the time of his life. I believe I said something eloquent like, ‘Is this lunch hour or are you partaking of another comic book?’

  “‘Oh, a real funny comic book, Mr. R.,’ he said back. ‘Come by and look for yourself.’

  “I managed to jump off the chair without breaking my neck and wiped away footprints from the seat. I put it back near the counter where we had found it. I mention all this because it occupied my time. For a moment or so I completely forgot Anthony likes nothing better than topping one surprise with another. And if you think there was nothing up here that could top seeing that vault and Brink’s criminal indifference to security, you’re wrong.

  “Anthony hands me a clipboard he had taken from the wall. That’s what he had been chuckling over. My penlight is flashing off and on, and I’m stupefied. Schedule sheets are clipped to the board. Schedules telling exactly what trucks are going out of Brink’s every day and exactly how much each delivery is. Each delivery was specified and itemized—eight hundred thousand dollars to be delivered to such-and-such a factory at seven on truck whatever … fifteen grand to be delivered to such and such a bank at seven forty-five on another truck. It’s right there in front of me on these sheets. Everything. Everything we spent years trying to find out by tailing trucks and hanging around dropoffs is marked down.

  “I’m sure you can see the obvious impact of this on us. I’m standing there in front of the box on a Tuesday night. The top sheet on the clipboard is for Wednesday morning deliveries. Everything that is supposed to be delivered, therefore, has to be in the box at this moment. I ran my fingers down the list of each delivery—the column that had the dollar value of each delivery. I remember it added up to four million seven hundred thousand dollars. Almost five million dollars was sitting and waiting less than five steps away.”

  “Hello, who is this?” Jazz Maffie asked as he picked up the phone at Jimmy O’Keefe’s restaurant.

  “Stretch,” Tony Pino whispered, “this is Stretch.”

  “Who?”

  “Stretch!”

  “I don’t know no Stretches.”

  “What the hell you mean you don’t know no Stretches?”

  “Listen, whoever you are, the only Stretch I know is in the can.”

  Maffie hung up, lit a fresh cigar and waited beside the cloak room. The phone rang, was answered by the hatcheck girl, who then handed the receiver to Jazz.

  “Hello, who is this?”

  “It’s the only goddamn Stretch you know, and I ain’t in a goddamned can,” Pino bellowed.

  “Yeah, well how do I know it’s the same Stretch I used to know?”

  “You know by listening to my fucking voice!”

  “I got a cold. I can’t hear too good.”

  “You come meet me at the regular place in twenty minutes and you can see for yourself!” Pino shouted.

  “Hey, you think I’m a sucker, whoever
you are? I don’t go anywhere till I know who I’m going to meet.”

  “Then how the goddamn hell you ever gonna know it’s me if you can’t tell my voice and won’t go and look?”

  “Oh. You got a point,” Maffie said. “I’ll tell you what. You describe yourself.

  “Describe myself?”

  “You know, tell me how you look.”

  A long pause ensued.

  “I’m five eight,” Pino finally said.

  “The guy I know is shorter.”

  “Okay, so I’m five seven.”

  “Thin or fat?”

  “In between.”

  “You ain’t the guy I know!”

  “I’m chubby, not goddamn fat!”

  “In the face or all over?”

  “You can’t be chubby in one place. When you’re chubby, you’re chubby all over.”

  “You’re starting to sound like the guy I know. You have any relatives I might’uv met?”

  “How’s a brother-in-law sound to you?”

  “Sounds good, depending on what he does for an honest living.”

  “He used to be a presser and takes care of a diner, and he just went bankrupt in the women’s clothes business. Now, for the love of God, do you know I’m me?”

  “Oh, sure. How you been, Stretch?”

  “The goddamn question is where the hell’uv you been? I been calling all over.”

  “Oh, I been right here all the time.”

  “Then why didn’t you pick up the goddamn phone?”

  “’Cause I thought it was a setup. I thought it was somebody imitating you.”

  “Why to Christ would you think an insane thing like that for?”

  “Oh, well, I thought you got pinched. I figured the only reason I hadn’t heard from you in four weeks is you was pinched and went to the can.”

  “Well, get your ass over to the regular place. I’ll pick you up at the regular place in twenty minutes.”

  “Oh, I can’t meet you then.”