Cops and Robbers

by Donald E. Westlake

  Anyway, that’s the section where most of the new buildings are concentrated, but there’s others going up all over the place. The World Trade Center way downtown. Sixth Avenue across from Rockefeller Center. And a couple up in my precinct, including this one where they’d just had the death and where I was going to get myself interviewed.

  A guy I was talking to in a bar a couple years ago said it was his opinion that the main characteristic of New York is that it’s going through all the phases of the phoenix at once. You remember reading about the phoenix in high school? That’s what he said New York was; but all at once. New York is living, and it’s on fire, and it’s dying, and it’s ashes, and it’s being reborn, all at the same time and all the time. And boy, those buildings look it, coming up out of brick rubble where yesterday’s buildings were knocked down, coming up new and clean and pretty, and every once in a while killing somebody along the way.

  The interviewer was a light-colored spade, with a moustache. You could see he thought he was the hottest thing in Bigtown. He and the director and the sound man and a couple other people fussed around a while, getting everything set, and then they started the interview. Somebody had written a little lead-in paragraph for the interviewer to say, and he had it on a clipboard he held in his other hand. The hand without the microphone, I mean. He had it on the clipboard, but he’d memorized it, because once he started talking he never looked at the clipboard at all.

  Here’s how it went: “Tragedy struck today at the site of the new Transcontinental Airlines Building on Columbus Avenue when a worker fell thirty-seven stories within the uncompleted building to his death. Patrolman Joseph Loomis was among the first at the scene.” Then he turned to me and said, “Officer Loomis, could you describe what happened?”

  I said, “The decedent was a full-blooded Mohawk Indian employed in putting the steel framework of the building up. What they call working the high iron. His name was George Brook. He was forty-three years of age.”

  The interviewer had been looking me straight in the eye the whole time I talked, as though I was hypnotizing him. As soon as I stopped, he whipped the microphone from my mouth back to his and said, “What apparently went wrong, Officer Loomis?”

  I said, “Apparently his foot slipped. He was on the fifty-second story, which is as high as they have so far reached, and he fell thirty-seven stories and landed on the concrete floor at the fifteenth. He fell through the interior of the building, and the fifteenth is the highest story that they have a floor finished and put down.”

  Zip, the microphone went back over to him, and he said, “He found death thirty-seven stories down.” Zip, the microphone came back to me.

  I said, “No, he was probably dead from about the fortieth story on down. He kept hitting different metal beams on the way. They knocked some parts off him.”

  A spade can’t turn white, but he tried. His eyes looked panicky, and very fast he said, “There are many full-blooded Mohawk Indians working the high iron, aren’t there, Officer Loomis?”

  He wanted to change the subject? I didn’t give a damn. I said, “That’s right. There’s a couple tribes of them live over in Brooklyn, they’re all steelworkers.”

  Zip. “That’s because they have a special affinity for heights, isn’t it?” Zip.

  I said, “I don’t think so. They come down pretty often. About as often as anybody else.”

  You could see I’d suddenly caught his attention. He was interested in spite of himself. He said, “Then why do they do it?”

  I shrugged. I said, “I suppose they have to make a living.”

  Not on television. His eyes filmed over, and in the furriest of brush-off voices he said, “Thank you very much, Officer Loomis,” and turned away from me, ready to go into a closeout spiel.

  Screw him. Just to louse up his timing, I said, “My pleasure,” as he was opening his mouth again. Then I turned around and walked off.

  I watched it that night, and all they used was the very first part of what I’d said. The rest was something the interviewer did on his own after I’d left; he stood in the same spot, with the construction going on behind him, and told you what happened. He said, among other things, “He found death thirty-seven stories down.” So much for accuracy, the bastards.

  I don’t know what Paul said, but he didn’t get on the tube at all. He claimed afterwards it was anti-Semitism.

  Tom

  Two big Mafia men had got picked up in our area the night before, and Ed and I were among the six plainclothesmen assigned to take them downtown this morning. These were really very big important Mafia people from New Jersey, and it was rare to find them actually in the city like this, where we could get hold of them. One of them was named Anthony Vigano and the other was named Louis Sambella.

  Nobody knew if there was going to be any trouble or not. It wasn’t too likely anybody would try to break them loose from us, but it was just possible some enemies of theirs might take a shot at them while they weren’t surrounded by their bodyguards. So a lot of precautions were taken, including transporting them in two different unmarked cars, with three officers in each car.

  I was driving one of the cars. I was alone in the front seat, and Vigano was squeezed in the back seat with Ed on his left and a detective named Charles Reddy on his right. We drove downtown without any incident, and then we had to take them up to a hearing room on the fourth floor. Arrangement had been made ahead of time, so we were met by a couple of uniformed cops at the side entrance and taken to an elevator already waiting for us.

  Vigano and Sambella were very similar types; heavy-set, florid, their faces fixed in that expression of contempt that people get when they’ve been bossing other people around for a long time. They were expensively dressed, but maybe overdressed, the stripes a little too dominant on their suits, the cufflinks a little too big and shiny. And too many rings on their fingers. They smelled of after-shave and cologne and deodorant and haircream, and they weren’t fazed a bit.

  Nobody had said a word all the way down in the car, but now, once we were in the elevator and headed up for the fourth floor, Charles Reddy suddenly said, “You don’t seem worried, Tony.”

  Vigano gave him a casual glance. If it bugged him to be called by his first name he didn’t show it. He said, “Worried? I could buy you and sell you, what’s to worry? I’ll be home with my family tonight, and four years from now when the case is over in the courts I won’t lose.”

  Nobody said anything back. What was there to say? “I could buy you and sell you.” All I could do was stand there and look at him.

  6

  They both had the day off, and were at home. There was a birthday party going on in the kitchen of Joe’s house. It was his daughter Jackie’s ninth birthday, and the kitchen was crammed with kids and mothers, a lot more of them than the room could really hold. But nobody seemed to mind. The kids seemed to enjoy being squeezed in together like that, and the mothers were having a good time pretending to be working too hard.

  Joe stood in the kitchen doorway, watching with a little grin on his face. He got a kick out of the racket and the mess the kids were making, and he also liked looking at the mothers’ bodies as they moved around trying to keep things organized. It was a hot day anyway, and the kitchen was small, and everybody was sweating, and nobody was wearing a lot of extra clothing in the heat. The women were very sexy moving around, with their hair plastered to their foreheads and their faces shiny and their dresses wet in the small of the back and their legs making brushing sounds against each other as they walked.

  Joe had a little fantasy going in the back of his head, in which he would catch the eye of one of the mothers and give her a little come-here kind of head gesture, and she’d come over and say, “What is it?”

  “Telephone,” he’d say.

  “For me?” she’d say.

  “Come take it in the bedroom,” he’d say. (He grinned to himself at that sentence, he really liked it.)

  So they’d go in
to the bedroom and she’d pick up the phone and turn to him a little confused and say, “There isn’t anybody here.”

  And he’d grin at her, and maybe wink, and say, “I know. What do you say we rest a minute?”

  And she’d grin back, and give him a look, and say, “What do you have in mind, Joe?”

  And he’d say, “You know what I have in mind,” and he’d put her down on the bed and fuck her into the basement.

  All of which was going on in the back of his mind, while mainly he was just standing there, leaning against the doorjamb, getting a kick out of watching all the kids at their birthday party.

  Tom came into the house, coming in the front way for once, because he knew the birthday party was going on in the kitchen and he’d figured Joe would be staying far away from it. He searched the house, and was surprised at last to find Joe practically inside the kitchen, standing there in the doorway and letting the waves of heat and noise roll over him.

  Tom tugged at his elbow. Joe, enjoying the party and his fantasy, gave him an irritable look and didn’t move, but Tom made a head gesture meaning come-with-me-I-want-to-talk. Joe nodded at the kitchen, meaning he wanted to stay and watch the party, but Tom jabbed his thumb urgently toward the living room and finally Joe gave up and went with him.

  The two of them walked into the living room, where it was a lot quieter, and where Joe said, “Okay, what is it?”

  Excited, talking in a half-whisper, Tom said, “I’ve got it!”

  Joe was feeling very irritable. “You got what?”

  Tom held up one finger and grinned. “Half,” he said. “I’ve got our problem half-solved.”

  Joe displayed his irritation by humoring Tom in a heavy-handed way. “Which problem was that, Tom?” he said.

  “The heist.”

  Suddenly Joe was frightened of being overheard. “For Christ’s sake!” he said, and looked over his shoulder toward the kitchen.

  “It’s okay, they can’t hear us with that racket.”

  Joe hadn’t been thinking about the robbery idea, and he didn’t want to think about it. To get it over with, he moved in closer to Tom and said in a low voice, “All right, what is it?”

  This time, Tom held up two fingers. He said, “You remember, we decided we needed two things. Something we could turn over right away for a lot of money, and somebody with a lot of money to do the buying.”

  Joe nodded, listening but not really involved. His attention was still back with the party and his fantasy. Up till now, they’d both enjoyed talking about the robbery at dull times when there was nothing else to do, like while driving in to the city to go to work, but it was only a theoretical kind of thing that they said they were going to do but that neither one of them really intended to pull off. Now there’d been a change, and the robbery had grown more real to Tom. That hadn’t happened yet with Joe, so he just nodded, listening with half of his attention, and said, “Yeah, I remember.”

  “I’ve got the buyer,” Tom said.

  Joe frowned at him, and didn’t bother to hide his skepticism. “Who?”

  “The Mafia.”

  “What?” Joe stared at him. “Are you crazy?”

  “Who else has two million dollars cash? Who else buys hot goods at that volume?”

  Joe looked away, gazing across the living room, starting to think about it. “Christ, Tom,” he said, “they do, don’t they?”

  Tom said, “I told you about those cargo heists on the piers that I worked on that time. It all went straight to the Mafia. Four million a year, they figured that was worth.”

  Joe thought about it, looking for flaws. “But that wasn’t one robbery,” he said. “That’s over a whole year.”

  “They’re in the business.” Tom said. “That’s the point.”

  “All right,” Joe said. “So what do we sell them?”

  “Whatever they want to buy,” Tom said.

  Tom

  Joe and I had talked it over and decided together how best to approach the Mafia. We decided we didn’t want to go through channels, starting with some rank and file punk on the streets. That way, either we wouldn’t get to the top at all, or the word would filter out through some informer somewhere along the line, and we’d be in trouble before we even did anything. Besides, the Mafia is always talked about as though it’s a business, and in any business, if you’ve got a problem or a proposition, you should go to the top and leave the clerks strictly alone.

  So we decided the thing to do was make our pitch directly to Anthony Vigano. He was, as he’d said he would be, out on bail, so it should be possible to get to see him. We decided it would be better if just one of us approached him, and since it had been my idea in the first place I was the one who would go. Also, Joe didn’t feel very much like doing it. It wasn’t his kind of thing.

  There were files on Vigano downtown, and because of my identification I had simple and easy access to the files. They included Vigano’s address, over in Red Bank, New Jersey, plus a lot of other information about the things he’d been involved with over the years. He’d spent eight months in jail when he was twenty-two years old, for assault with a dangerous weapon. Other than that, he had more arrests than I had hairs on my head, but no convictions. He’d been a union officer a few times in his life, and he had an import-export business for a while, and he was a major stockholder in a New Jersey brewery, and he was a part-owner of a trucking company down in Trenton. The arrests had involved drugs and extortion and receiving stolen goods and bribery and just about every crime on the books except playing hookey. There had even been two attempts to get him on income-tax charges, but he’d wriggled out of both of them, too.

  There had been three attempts on his life over the years, the last one nine years before, in Brooklyn. He traveled with bodyguards, one of which had been killed that time in Brooklyn, and so far he didn’t have a scratch on him. And apparently there hadn’t been any more internal disputes since the Brooklyn incident.

  His place in Red Bank was an estate near the shore there, a full square block surrounded by a high iron fence and eight-foot-tall hedges. I got the Chevvy and drove over to New Jersey and took a spin around the place once, by day, just checking it out, and through the closed iron gates you could see the black-top road curving in through crew-cut lawn with big oak trees on it, and leading over to a three-story-high brick mansion with white trim and four white pillars on the front. There were two or three expensive-looking cars parked in front of the house, and a casual-looking guy dressed like a gardener was hanging around just inside the iron gates. Gardener, hell.

  A part of our thinking in this situation all along had been that in our position we could get supplies for the robbery right from the force itself, from the Police Department, and now for the first time we put that idea into effect. There’s a room upstairs at the precinct full of disguises, including dresses and false stomachs and all kinds of things; I went up and checked out a moustache and a wig and a set of horn-rim glasses with clear lenses. Then I turned over all my identification to Joe, and took the train down to Red Bank. The idea was, I wanted to visit Vigano without him being able to return the favor.

  I took a cab from the station to Vigano’s place. If the driver knew anything about the address, he gave no sign of it. I paid him, got out of the car, waited for him to drive away, and then walked over to the gate.

  Somebody inside the gate suddenly flashed a light in my eyes. I put my forearm up to block it, and said, “Hey! You don’t have to blind me.”

  A voice said, “Whadya want?” It was a gravel voice, the kind you make with pizza and cigars.

  I kept my forearm up. I didn’t want all that light on my face out here. I said, “Get that God damn light out of my eyes.”

  It took him a couple seconds longer; then he lowered the flashlight beam till it was aimed at about my belt-buckle. I still couldn’t see anything past it, but at least it wasn’t blinding me. And it wasn’t showing my features big and clear to anybody observing.r />
  He said, “I still want to know what you want.”

  I lowered my forearm. “I want to see Mister Vigano,” I said. I was suddenly feeling very nervous. I was here without any of the protection I usually carry. Not so much the gun, as the status of being a police officer.

  He said, “I don’t recognize you.”

  I said, “I’m a New York City cop, with a proposition.”

  He said, “We don’t take defectors.”

  “A proposition, that’s all,” I said. “I’m willing to go see somebody else.”

  Nothing happened for maybe ten seconds, and then all of a sudden the light went out. Now I couldn’t see anything at all. “Wait there,” the voice said, and footsteps went away.

  After a minute or so my eyes adjusted to the dark again, and I could make out lights in the house inside there. I didn’t know if there was anybody standing inside the gate or not.

  I waited nearly five minutes. That gave me plenty of time to come to the conclusion that I was an idiot. What the hell was I doing here in the first place? This whole robbery thing was just something Joe and I talked about in the car, going into the city and going home. Sometimes we talked and thought as though we were serious about it, but were we? Was I really going to steal something and collect a million dollars and go live in Trinidad? That’s just daydreams.

  The reason I became a policeman is because I wanted a civil-service job. I took a couple of the state civil-service exams, and I became a clerk in an Unemployment Insurance office in Queens, and one day when I had nothing to do I read a police-recruiting poster on the billboard in the office. The idea I got from the poster was that being a policeman combined civil service with a little bit of glamour or excitement. The clerk job was too boring to put up with anymore, so I switched over. And the poster didn’t lie. Being a policeman is exactly that; civil service plus excitement.