by Patrick Mann
“Right!” Joe felt on top of the world. He snapped his fingers under Boyle’s nose. “Back-door key.”
“Back d—” Boyle stopped, began feeling in his pockets. “Here,” he said, pulling a key off a leather-covered key ring and handing it to Joe.
“I don’t want it. Just march it back to the rear door and use it. I’ll be right behind you.” Joe followed Boyle to the back door and watched him carefully switch off the alarm devices before opening the lock. He swung the door open slowly.
Joe kept his hand on the Police Positive .38 tucked in his belt. “Move out a ways. I’m looking for something.”
“What?”
“You’re as nosy as that insurance guy, huh?” Joe surveyed the rear of the bank. A parking area backed up all the stores on this side of the street. The grimy Mustang stood about a hundred yards away, and damned if its motor wasn’t running. Eddie’s big, fleshy face, as seen through the windshield, looked as gray and soft as vanilla pudding.
Littlejoe gestured to him, made a key-turning motion, and waved him to come out of the car. It took the dumb show a while to penetrate Eddie’s thick head. Then he switched off the engine and hopped out of the car with such alacrity that he stumbled and almost fell. A mean little smile crossed Joe’s mouth. Bigger they are . . .
Eddie trotted over to the rear door of the bank. “Here’s the scam,” Littlejoe told him before he had a chance to open his mouth. “We’re holing in for the night. You too.” He turned to Boyle. “Which car’s yours?”
“That blue Merc there. But you don’t th—”
“Shut up with the you-don’t’s. I do what I do. You do what I tell you to do. Eddie, lock up the Mustang and get back in here. Move it.”
Joe and Boyle watched the heavyset young man trot through the thickening heat toward the car. He followed orders and was back in a few moments. “Listen close,” Littlejoe told him then. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re still the driver and nothing else but the driver. Dig? Just keep the fuck out of the way and out of sight.”
Eddie’s tiny eyes widened as he stepped inside the bank, but whether with awe or excitement or just relief from the hot sun, Joe didn’t know. He didn’t much care now, either. After starting to sour around the edges, the caper was beginning to straighten up.
At first nothing had gone right, from Don’s phony-baloney tip-off to the suspicious Armenian. Never mind. It was going right now. Littlejoe hadn’t earned his rep by panicking when the odds went bad. An all-night stand wasn’t hard work for fifty grand, as long as Eddie kept out of the way and Sam stayed cool and nobody loused up any more than they had already. Sam’s cut of fifty would keep him calm enough. As for Eddie, five grand was about his speed, or maybe less.
Keeping Boyle and Eddie ahead of him, Joe locked up the rear door and ushered everyone back into the rear of the bank. He surveyed the scene.
Had he covered everything? Cash in the cash drawers. Travelers’ checks. No sense trying to get into the safe deposit boxes, because the holders’ keys were needed. Littlejoe’s gaze came to rest on Marge’s breasts. She’d probably love a little jab or two from the old Avenger. Something to talk about later. Never had it before with witnesses, huh? Ellen’s irritating snuffle broke through his thoughts.
“Dry it up,” he told her.
What had he missed? Chickenfeed in their handbags, nothing in the way of jewelry. Boyle probably had fifty in his wallet, but let him keep it. He was going to donate his Merc in the morning anyway. No sense being a hog. What else? Bearer bonds? Not in a cheesebox branch office like this. The telephone started to ring again.
Boyle blinked. Sam flinched. He was the jumpiest of them all, Littlejoe noted, except maybe the crying broad. Why should he take Boyle’s word that the vault was clean? Better give it a last look-see.
“Sam,” he said, all business now, “move these people behind that lobby sign. Boyle, let the fucking phone ring.”
“It’s probably a personal call,” Boyle volunteered.
“Fuck it. All of you just stand there nice and calm. First one gets out of line, Sam knocks off. He’s very good with that forty-five. Boyle, tell them what a forty-five slug does to you.”
“What’s that?”
“No guts, huh?” Littlejoe smiled recklessly. “It goes in small, like a keyhole.” His eyes were on Marge now. The phone kept ringing. “And where it comes out it carries away a chunk of meat the size of a football. Got the picture?”
He watched her sag. “Marge, you’re coming with me into the vault.”
“There’s nothing left inside,” Boyle reminded him.
Ring. Ring.
“We’ll see.” He herded Marge ahead of him into the tiny room. He moved up behind her and pressed himself against her buttocks. “Feel it?” he demanded.
“Y-yes.” Her breathing was fast and light now.
“Want it?”
“Not here,” she said after a long moment. “You know, you’re something else, Littlejoe.”
“You bet that sweet soft ass of yours I am.”
“In a spot like this, nobody I know could even get it up.”
He burst out laughing. “Tell that one to the reporters tomorrow. Baby, you’re gonna be on TV. Tell them how it felt.”
She pulled open some steel drawers. “Satisfied?”
Behind him the telephone kept ringing. He had gotten so excited that he’d almost blanked it out of his mind. This was a real high now. The excitement of holding someone completely in your power. This was better than Tina, who did what he told her because she liked being humiliated. But this Marge broad was a tough one. She reminded him of Flo, only his mother didn’t have this kind of shape.
“Gimme your home phone, baby,” he whispered in her ear. “When the heat’s off, we’ll get together for a few laughs.”
She shook her head slowly. “You are too much, Littlejoe.”
“Remember the name, huh?”
“It’s just a nickname, though.” Her voice sounded worried.
“Right. Open those doors.”
Only ledger books lay on the shelves. Still standing behind her, he started to cup her breasts. She had a fairly heavy-duty brassiere on, and the feeling wasn’t the same as when he fondled Lana’s.
Ring. Ring.
Marge turned to face him, inches away. “Who tipped you about the payroll, somebody here in the shop?”
“Right. If the cops ever get me, I’ll tell them it was you.”
She smiled slightly off-center. He saw that she had small, white teeth with sharp edges. “With a friend like you . . .” She let the thought die away.
Ring.
“Okay, out of the vault.”
They entered the rear of the lobby. Sam had that stiff look about him again, Joe saw. What was bugging him now, the phone?
“Cheer up,” he told Sam.
Eddie had been standing next to him, and this, too, might have depressed Sam. “Eddie,” Littlejoe ordered, “find yourself a place to sit down on the vault floor. I want you out of sight in case we get any more nosy Armenians.”
“Huh?”
“Move, shithead!”
He watched Eddie’s hulk waver indecisively for a moment. It had been a mistake taking this tub of turd inside the bank, but what else had there been to do with him? Under the new plan, where they stayed the night here, Joe couldn’t afford to send Eddie away with the Mustang. He had to have him under control. But one thing was certain, he wouldn’t give Eddie a gun. That was just too risky.
The driver disappeared in back, muttering under his breath. Littlejoe grinned at Sam. “He’s not a partner, baby,” he said. “We drop a fiver on him and we split the fifty grand just two ways, you and me.”
Sam’s dour face brightened slightly. “And you’ll take care of Mick from your cut?”
Littlejoe frowned. The kid didn’t have even a basic idea of security, throwing names around that way. “I said I would and I will,” he told Sam in a severe voice. The phone’s ringing w
as beginning to bug him too.
“What does that make it for me, Littlejoe?”
His frown deepened. Tell the kid anything to calm his ass. “How does twenty-five grand strike you?”
He’d expected a smile, but all Sam did was nod slowly up and down. What had made the kid smile before? Joe tried to remember. Oh, yes. He turned to face the bank people. “Here’s the layout. It’s ladies’ night in the vault. There’s enough room for the three of you and Eddie if nobody starts to let farts.” He grinned boyishly.
“You, Boyle, are out here in the main room. The rules are simple. Any of your people in the vault start acting up—crying, hollering, anything—you get it. We march you back to the vault and put a slug through the roof of your mouth. Your brains spatter all over the ladies. It’s simple. They get a load of your mind.” He started to laugh and for a moment couldn’t stop.
Now Sam was smiling. That’s what it took, Joe noted.
Ring. Ring. Ring.
“Okay, Boyle, take the phone. Same deal. Put him on hold.”
The manager trudged through the empty lobby to his desk. “Boyle speaking.” He listened for a long while. “Hold on.” He punched the “Hold” button. Then he looked across the lobby at Littlejoe. “It’s for you.”
A sharp jab of cold shot across Joe’s shoulders and down his spine. He could feel gooseflesh crinkling the skin of his forearms. “Me?”
“Man says he wants to talk to you.”
Littlejoe’s legs felt strange under him as he walked stiffly across the lobby. It couldn’t have been more than twenty feet, but he was aware of each time his heel came down on the vinyl floor tile.
He stared down at Boyle. “Me?”
Boyle nodded, handed him the telephone, and punched a button.
Joe cleared his throat. “Hello?”
The man’s voice was thin and slightly nasal. “What are you doing in there?”
“Who is this?” Joe asked.
“This?” the voice echoed. It took on a sarcastic tone. “This is Detective Sergeant Moretti.”
“Wh-what?”
“We got you completely by the balls. You don’t believe me, I’m staring you right in the eye. Right now. Just look across the street at the insurance office, asshole.”
10
The detectives’ room in the precinct house had been relatively quiet at three that afternoon, also hot and smelly. The brick building was the same in which the police station had been housed since 1937. At the personal expense of some earlier detective, probably during LaGuardia’s time, a heavy, noisy oscillating fan had been put in one corner of the smallish room.
Moretti looked up from his paperwork and stared at the fan. It had been making peculiar noises for at least the past ten summers in which Moretti had sweated out his shifts as a detective, but today he suddenly heard a new note in it, a second, lower, irregular hum beneath the normal one.
He frowned, his thoughts distracted for a moment by the fan, which provided just enough flow of air to keep detectives from dying of heatstroke on days like this one. When was the last time anybody had oiled the damned thing, he wondered. Of course, they made fans to last in the old days. Maybe all he had to do was get up, go over, and kick the damned thing. Or maybe he wasn’t hearing a new noise. Maybe he was just cracking up from the heat.
He turned back to his typewriter, which he suspected of being even older than the fan, probably one of those office Royal 400s made during World War II. Painstakingly, with two fingers of each hand, he rapped out a brief description of the case he was just concluding, or trying to conclude, one of those misty office-theft jobs in which everybody was lying, absolutely everybody.
He pulled out a red bandanna and wiped his forehead, then got up to go to the toilet. “Jerry,” he grunted at the other detective in the room, “I’m taking a personal.”
The other detective looked up from his copy of the Post. “Squeeze it but don’t stroke it.”
In the toilet the urine-and-carbolic smell was stronger than in the rest of the precinct house. Sometimes, on a hot, muggy day like this one, as you stepped into the room you nearly lost your breath for a moment. Over the years Moretti had tried to work out a way of holding his breath for the length of his pee, but it never worked. Eventually he always had to take a breath. In the john.
He examined his eyes in the mirror. Normally they were average size, dark gray, bedded in a network of fine wrinkles as if they’d been carefully placed in a nest of crumpled Kleenex. Today they looked small and bloodshot. Moretti had an air conditioner in his bedroom, even though his wife never felt heat. He also had an air conditioner in the living room of his tiny two-story brick semi-detached house in Hollis, farther out in Queens. The man who owned the house to his right was a fireman. The owner to the left was a transit-system cop. It was that kind of neighborhood.
Moretti also had an air conditioner in his car, a three-year-old Rambler. When he went out on assignments, interviewing people in stores, offices, homes, everywhere he went, there was air conditioning. Not in the detectives’ room.
He peed and returned to the mirror to figure out what was wrong with his face today. Of course, at the age of forty, things started going wrong all over, not just the face.
The nose, small when he was a teenager, had thickened over the years. So had the cheeks. That was to be expected. From a sort of good-looking kid, Moretti had matured into a slightly slimmer version of his old man, with that same stocky Calabrese body, wide shoulders, short, powerful arms, big hands. Un vero contadino, Moretti thought, a real peasant.
Lucky for him he wasn’t as short as his old man or he’d never have made it on the cops. But he was an inch or two over the minimum height and he’d scored well on his exams and he’d had a little political pull, what the boys call a rabbi, who could pull strings, after he passed the sergeant’s exam, to get him this post.
That had been ten years ago, his tenth on the force. He wasn’t doing that well, was he? He should have made lieutenant two years ago, but the shake-ups after the corruption exposures had turned everybody so goosy that even his political rabbi couldn’t help him.
So that’s why you look different, he told his reflection: You’re getting old and you’re getting to be a loser. You don’t have to lose a lot to be a loser, he thought. You only have to lose one thing, like a lieutenant’s bar.
Also, a man aged faster in this line of work. And more than that, a cop aged faster in a place like New York City than a place like, say, Dubuque.
Not that Queens was so bad—most of the loonies and junkies gravitated to Manhattan—but that still left plenty of weirdos for this borough. Not just petty thieves. Not just hustlers and con men and grifters and heist guys, not just shoplifters and check kiters and gypsy-switch artists. No, Queens had its share of hard guys, too. Armed robbery was common. Murder happened often enough in this precinct to keep Homicide busy. Rape was coming up fast as the new fad crime.
And if it wasn’t bad enough, Moretti thought, what people did to people, now there was a whole new brand of loony that tortured animals and killed them. Not that the cops got involved in crimes against animals, just that the idea of a mind that would do this alarmed detectives like Moretti, who understood a little about the human soul. Not much, he told his face in the mirror, but enough.
In this case, not much was too much.
He turned and left the toilet. He had been in there so long that he’d lost his sense of smell. His olfactory nerves had been paralyzed by the powerful piss-Lysol combination. As he got back to his typewriter, the telephone was ringing. Jerry jerked a thumb at it, as if to say he’d answer, but Moretti was in charge. He picked up the telephone.
“Detective Sergeant Moretti.”
“Tony?” a man asked.
Moretti frowned. His Christian name was Gaetano. Only his close friends ever used Tony, and this wasn’t the voice of a close friend. “Who’s this?”
“Lou.”
“Come on, Lou. Give m
e a last name.”
“Lou Bagradian, for Christ’s sake, Tony.” The man sounded hurt. “You know. I got the Aetna agency.”
“That Lou. Wus machts du?” Moretti spoke not only Italian and the Calabrese dialect, but knew enough Yiddish and Greek to get prompt service in any sandwich deli. He knew Bagradian wasn’t Jewish, but it seemed like a thing to do, after he’d presumed to call him Tony.
“Listen, did your prowl car check the Chase branch at closing time today?”
Moretti sat forward in his chair. “Lou, stop questioning the cops. Tell me what you want to tell me.”
“Don’t take my head off, okay? I’m just a citizen doing my duty. I would hope to God somebody would return me the favor if I ever needed it.”
“The Chase branch,” Moretti reminded him.
“Yeah. First of all, two guys went in there just at closing.”
“That’s shocking.”
“No humor, Tony, please,” the caller said in an aggrieved tone. “If you want honest citizens to back up the cops, let’s have a little respect.”
“You got it, mein kind.”
“The next thing is that Leroy, the guard, doesn’t pull down the Venetian blind like he always does. No, one of these two guys pulls down the blind.”
Moretti sat up straighter. “Yes?”
“He was carrying a florist’s box, this one guy. I mean, you could hide a gun in a florist’s box. Anyway, I call Boyle over there to see if everything’s okay.”
“And he says yes?”
“Yeah, he says yes, but it takes him about fifteen rings to get the phone and then only after the guy with the florist’s box stands over him. In other words, he—”
“I get the picture. What explanation did Boyle give?”
“They’re guys from Chase. Systems men, some nonsense like that. But this is the thing that bothers me, one of the guys looks like some garage attendant or something. And the other one is all dressed up like a high-class pimp. I mean, like bank guys they don’t look. No way.”
“Jerry,” Moretti told his partner, “check Holmes. See if they had an alarm from the Chase branch.” Then, into the phone: “What else, Lou?”
