Cops and Robbers

by Donald E. Westlake

  Tom said, “But that’s just what we didn’t want. Nothing we had to carry away from the scene, nothing we had to hide, nothing to get caught with, nothing to be used as evidence against us.”

  “Nothing,” Joe said. Then he spread his hands and said, “What the hell, you’re right. We did talk it over, we did agree. Come on, let’s go. I need a drink.”

  Tom was going to argue some more, but Joe had turned away, walking back toward the squad car. And Tom thought, what’s the point in arguing? We’ve already done it, and we did it this way, and it was the right way. He dropped the plastic bag into the trunk, and shut the lid.

  They got into the two cars, and Joe led the way back uptown to the police garage. The parking space he’d taken the car from was gone now, but there was another one near it. Joe left the car there without doing anything under the hood; tomorrow morning, a mechanic would find the car had mysteriously fixed itself. If he was a normal mechanic, he’d first take it for granted there’d never been anything wrong with the car other than a stupid driver, and second take credit for having fixed it.

  Tom was waiting around the corner in the Chevvy. Joe walked around and got in, and they drove back over to the Port Authority. While Joe stayed outside in the car, Tom went in and changed back to civvies. When he came out, Joe said, “I wasn’t kidding about that drink. My nerves could use one.”

  Tom was agreeable; the idea of a drink was a good one to him, too. “Where do you want to go?”

  “Nowhere we’re known.”

  “I’ll find a place over in Queens.”

  “Good.”

  Tom drove across town and up to the 59th Street Bridge and over to Queens. They found a bar on Queensboro Boulevard with nobody in it except the bartender and an old fellow dressed in striped railroad coveralls. The railroad man was sitting at the bar, watching an afternoon game show on the television set mounted at the end of room. They ordered a couple of beers, and sat in a booth to drink them.

  They were both in the mood for a drink, but they had different reasons. Tom was hoping liquor would make him feel happier, more like celebrating their success, and Joe was in the kind of a bad mood that requires a bad-mood drunk. So they sat in a booth and socked it away for a while and did very little talking.

  It was about two-thirty when they first went in there. About an hour later, which was five or six rounds later, Tom roused himself and looked around and said, “Hey.”

  Joe turned his head and stared at him. He was already feeling pretty bleary. He said, “What?”

  “We’re making a mistake,” Tom told him. “We’re making one of the basic mistakes of the whole world.”

  Joe frowned, not following the meaning. He closed one eye and said, “Which mistake is that?”

  “That’s the mistake,” Tom said carefully, “where a fella pulls a job and then goes right out and gets drunk, and while he’s drunk he talks about it. Happens all the time.”

  “Not to us,” Joe said. He was a little indignant.

  “Happens all the time,” Tom insisted. “You know that yourself. You’ve picked them up your own self, I know you have. And so have I. My own self, I’ve picked them up.”

  “We’re smarter than that,” Joe said. He drained his glass.

  “Well, look at us,” Tom said. “What are we doing, if we’re smarter than that?”

  Joe looked around. There were only the four of them in the bar; railroad man, bartender, Tom, Joe. “Who am I gonna talk to?”

  “The night’s young,” Tom told him. Looking out at the daylight past the front windows, he said, “In fact, the day’s still young.”

  “I’m not gonna talk,” Joe said. He sounded a bit belligerent.

  “You said that pretty loud,” Tom told him. “Also, you’re in uniform.”

  Joe looked down at himself. He wasn’t wearing the hat or the badge or the gunbelt, all of which were locked up in the trunk of Tom’s Chevvy, but his shirt and pants were identifiably those of a police officer. “Son of a bitch,” he said.

  “I’ve got a better idea,” Tom said.

  Joe looked at him, interested. “I could use one,” he said.

  “We’ll go home.”

  “Shit, no!”

  “No, wait, listen to me. We’ll go home, and we’ll go down into my bar. I got my own bar, remember?”

  Joe frowned, thinking about it. “You mean the basement?”

  “It’s in the basement,” Tom said, with dignity, “but it’s the bar. It isn’t the basement.”

  Joe studied that one. “It’s in the basement,” he said thoughtfully.

  “That may be true,” Tom said. “But it’s the bar.”

  “If you say so.”

  “It isn’t the basement.”

  Joe nodded, judiciously. “I get the idea,” he said.

  “So that’s where we’ll go,” Tom said.

  “To the bar,” Joe said. “In the basement.”

  “In the basement.”

  “And drink there.”

  “And drink there,” Tom agreed.

  “That’s not a terrible idea,” Joe said.

  So that’s what they did.

  14

  Their hangovers were beyond belief, and they both had morning duty the next day. They rode in together in Joe’s car, both of them stunned by last night’s drinking, and by too little sleep, and by this morning’s heat; it was going to be a hell of a day, they could see that already.

  They had the radio on in the car, and it was full of yesterday’s robbery. The first they heard of it was when the news announcer said, “Two men, disguised as police officers and apparently driving a New York City Police Department car, made off yesterday with nearly twelve million dollars in negotiable securities in what police term one of the largest robberies in Wall Street history.”

  Tom said, “Twelve million? That’s good.”

  “It’s bullshit,” Joe said. “They’re padding it for the insurance company, just like anybody else.”

  “You think so?”

  “I guarantee it.”

  Grinning, Tom said, “I’ll tell you what we’ll do. Ten million or twelve million, we’ll still let Vigano have it for the two million we said to begin with.”

  Joe laughed, then winced and took one hand off the steering wheel to clutch his forehead. Still holding it, but still laughing, he said, “We’re a couple of sports, we are.”

  “Quiet a second,” Tom said, and patted the air.

  On the radio, they were still talking about the robbery. The announcer had been replaced by somebody interviewing a Deputy Police Commissioner. The interviewer was saying, “Is there any chance at all that these actually were police officers?”

  The Commissioner had a deep voice, and a slow dignified manner of speech, like a fat man walking. He said, “We don’t at this time believe so. We do not believe that this was a crime such as police officers would have committed. The police force is not perfect, but armed robbery is not in the pattern of police crime.”

  The interviewer asked, “Is it possible they really did use a Police Department squad car to make their getaway?”

  The Commissioner said, “You mean stolen?”

  “Well—” said the interviewer. “Stolen, or borrowed.”

  The Commissioner said, “That possibility is being investigated. The investigation is not yet complete, but so far we have no evidence of any stolen police vehicle.”

  “Or borrowed,” said the interviewer.

  The Commissioner, sounding a little irritated, said, “Or borrowed, yes.”

  “But that possibility is being investigated?”

  Heavily, sounding like a man having trouble holding onto his temper, the Commissioner said, “All possibilities are being investigated.”

  Joe said, “That wise-ass reporter could lay off on the borrowed for a while.”

  “We’re safe on that,” Tom said. “You know we are. We worked it out, and there’s no way anybody can figure out what car was used.”<
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  Joe said, “We’re safe on that? What do you mean, we’re safe on that? Where aren’t we safe?”

  “We’re safe all over,” Tom said. “You were talking about the car, that’s all. I’m saying they can’t get to us through the car, there’s no way.”

  “I already knew that,” Joe said. Squinting out at the traffic, he said, “I should have worn sunglasses.”

  They both had sunglasses on. Tom looked over at Joe and said, “You are wearing sunglasses.”

  “What?” Joe touched his face and felt the glasses. “Jesus Christ, it must be bright out there.” He lowered the glasses slightly, looked at the glare, and shoved them back into place. “I should have worn two pair,” he said.

  “Wait,” Tom said. “They’re still talking about it.”

  A different interviewer was on now, asking questions of the Inspector from the downtown precinct who was in charge of the investigation. The interviewer was asking him, “Do you have any leads or suspects so far?”

  That’s the question they always ask, and it’s the one question that can never be answered while an investigation is still going on. But they always ask it, and the spokesman has to deal with it somehow. What the Inspector said was, “So far, the best we can say is, it looks like an inside job. They knew exactly what to take, negotiable instruments as good as money.”

  The interviewer said, “All bearer bonds, is that it?”

  “That’s right,” the Inspector said. “They were very explicit with the girl they sent into the vault to get the stuff for them. They wanted all bearer bonds, no bond worth less than twenty thousand or more than a hundred thousand.”

  “And that’s what they got,” said the interviewer.

  “Exactly,” said the Inspector. “To the tune of almost twelve million dollars.”

  “And the fact that the robbers wore police uniforms?”

  “Definitely a disguise,” the Inspector said.

  The interviewer said, “Then you’re confident the robbers have no connection with the Police Department.”

  “Absolutely,” said the Inspector.

  “And that’s more bullshit,” Joe said. “We’ll be lucky they don’t run the whole force through the line-up, give Eastpoole a look at us all.”

  “I’d rather not,” Tom said.

  “If they do,” Joe said, “I hope it’s this morning. I don’t even recognize myself right now.”

  “We drank too much last night,” Tom said. “We shouldn’t do that.”

  “Not when we got to work.”

  “Not anyway,” Tom said. “That’s the way you get fat.”

  Joe gave him a look, then faced the highway again. “Talk about yourself, pal,” he said.

  Tom didn’t have the strength to be insulted. “Anyway,” he said, “a year from now, we won’t have to go to work at all anymore. Not ever.”

  “I want to talk to you about that,” Joe said.

  “About what?”

  “About how long we stick around.”

  Tom roused himself toward anger. “Are you going to start that again?”

  Joe, being low and intense even though it made his head hurt more, said, “A year is too long, that’s all, too much shit happens. You do what you want, I’m giving it six months.”

  “We agreed—”

  “Sue me,” Joe said, and glowered at the traffic.

  Tom stared at him, and for a few seconds he was boiling mad. But then the rage suddenly drained out of him, like water out of a sink, and all he felt was tired again. Looking away, he shrugged and said, “Do what you want, I don’t care.”

  They were both silent for a couple minutes. Then Joe said, “Besides, we’ve still got Vigano to think about.”

  Tom kept looking out the side window. He wasn’t mad about the six months anymore; in fact he agreed with it, though he’d never admit that. But the Vigano thing was something else. “Yeah, that’s right,” he said.

  “We’ll want to give him a call,” Joe said. “You call him, right? You know him.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Tom said. “I’m the one he’s got the arrangement with, how I’m supposed to call and everything.”

  “When will you do it? This afternoon?”

  “No, not today,” Tom said. “It’s not a good idea to do it today.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, in the first place, I’ve got too much of a headache to think straight. In the second place, we ought to let a couple days go by, maybe a week. Let things quiet down a little after the robbery before we do anything else.”

  Joe shrugged. “I don’t get the point,” he said.

  “Listen,” Tom said, “what’s the hurry?” He was getting annoyed again, and that was making the headache worse, and that was making him more annoyed. “We’re going to be here six months no matter when I call Vigano.”

  “Okay,” Joe said. “Do it any way you want.”

  “So there’s no reason to rush. He’ll keep.”

  “Fine with me,” Joe said.

  “Just let me do it at my own pace.”

  “That’s what I’ll do,” Joe said. “Forget I brought it up.”

  “All right,” Tom said. He was breathing hard. “All right,” he said.

  Vigano

  Vigano slowly turned the pages of the book. He was sitting at a wooden table in the library of his own home, turning the pages, looking at the faces on each page. Marty was also at the table, looking through a second book. The other books were being studied over at a second table by everyone who’d had a look at the guy who’d come here a month ago to ask what he should steal that Vigano would pay two million dollars for.

  The messenger who’d brought the books down from New York was waiting in a car in the driveway. It had cost a lot of money to get the loan of these books for the night, and the messenger had to get them back no later than six tomorrow morning. The books contained the official photo of every policeman currently on active duty with the New York Police Department.

  During the day, these same books were being looked at by the employees and guards of the stock brokerage that had been robbed. So far, according to Vigano’s information, they hadn’t come up with anything.

  Neither had Vigano. The faces all began to blend together after a while, all those eyebrows, hairlines, noses. Vigano was tired and irritable, his eyes were burning, and what he really wanted to do was kick these goddam books across the room.

  If only Marty hadn’t lost the son of a bitch the night he was here. Afterwards, it was easy to see the thing had been a set-up, the cop at the head of the stairs in Penn Station had to have been the first guy’s partner, but at the time there hadn’t been any way for Marty to guess that. He hadn’t been present for the conversation, he hadn’t known there was a possibility the guy he was following was a cop, nor that he’d spoken about having a partner. Later on, when they’d compared notes back here at the house, it had been easy to see what had been done.

  It had been simple and clever, like the robbery. Whether the two of them were really cops or not, they were fast and shrewd, and they shouldn’t be underestimated.

  Whether they were cops or not. That was the worst of looking through these lousy books, there was still a good chance the guy wasn’t really a cop at all. At what point was he disguised as a cop and at what point was he a real cop? He and his partner had been disguised in police uniforms when they’d pulled off the robbery; had his claiming to be a police officer while he was here in this house been simply the same disguise?

  All the faces in the books looked alike. Vigano knew he wasn’t going to get anywhere, but he believed in being thorough. He would look through all the books, every one. And so would Marty, and so would the others. It wouldn’t do any good, but they’d do it.

  One way and another, Vigano was determined to find those two. Cops or no cops.

  Tom

  Sometimes on the night shift Ed and I go out and do a turn around the precinct in our Ford, rather than sit in the Detective
Division squadroom and wait for the calls to come in. The night shift is when you get most of your street crime, and it sometimes helps to be out there and in movement; often, when a squeal comes in, we’re already in the neighborhood, and can get to it faster with instructions from the dispatcher than if we’d actually taken the phone call from the complainant ourselves.

  So that’s what Ed and I were doing that night, around one in the morning. This was nearly a week after the robbery. Joe and I hadn’t talked about the robbery at all since the morning after in the car, and I hadn’t yet made my phone call to Vigano. I hadn’t worked out in my own head any reasons for not calling Vigano, I just hadn’t seemed to get around to it.

  The robbery itself had stayed hot news for three or four days. It was linked up with some department-store holdups in Detroit from a couple of years ago that had also involved guys wearing police uniforms, but that seemed to be about the only lead the authorities had. An interdepartmental memo had come through, asking everybody to think back to the day of the robbery and try to remember anything unusual they might have noticed in connection with any patrol car on that day, or with any other member of the force. That was about the extent of the investigation within the Police Department, but even that was too much for the PBA. The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, which I must admit is very rarely benevolent about much of anything, raised such a stink about that memo, and the implication it contained that police officers might actually have been involved in the crime, that the Commissioner himself called a press conference to apologize and say the memo had been “ill-judged.” And that had been about the last newsworthy item in connection with the robbery; for the last day or two, there’d been nothing about it on television at all.

  It was beginning to look as though we hadn’t made any mistakes in planning the job or pulling it off. Now all we had to do was not make any of the normal post-crime mistakes, such as getting drunk in public and talking about what a sharp operator you are, or hiding the loot some place where it could be found by the wrong person, or spending the money right away in a big spree, or quitting our jobs and taking off to live a completely different life. We knew all the mistakes, we’d seen them all from the other side. So far, we seemed to have done all right for ourselves.