The Giveaway bn-3

by Tod Goldberg

  “How am I supposed to know if I should be worried if you don’t even tell me what you’re doing?”

  “You’re the hero, Michael,” she said. “I’m just the damsel in distress.”

  Sometimes I want to kiss Fiona. And sometimes I have, and more. And then, sometimes, I wish I was in Abu Dhabi negotiating a transfer of black-market pearls into the hands of a terrorist, who would then get arrested at the airport while smuggling them into the States and I’d get to interrogate him for a nice long night.

  Ah, the good times.

  “I’m just saying,” I said, “that I want you to be careful. People might come through you to get to me. Just be vigilant.”

  “Just so we’re clear,” she said, “this is actually about you?”

  “No,” I said.

  Fi looked at me for a second, and I couldn’t tell if she was taking all of this seriously or not. I wasn’t sure if I was at first, but I was by the end. “That’s terribly sweet, Michael,” she said softly. And then she slapped me. “And that’s for not being sweet enough to pay attention in the first place and forcing me into this weird serious conversation with you.”

  My face hurt. “You feel better?”

  “Somewhat.”

  We drove in silence for a few minutes while I did jaw exercises to get my bite back in line and Fiona calmed down from her brief flirtation with actual human emotion and physical violence; her two basic states of being.

  I turned down a palm tree-lined side street just off of 207th and parked in front of Zadie Grossman’s house. All around the home were the long shadows of the high-rise condos, which gave the street an eerie darkness even in the middle of the day. The house also seemed anachronistic compared to the luxury we’d passed on our way here-one- and two-million-dollar homes, driveways lined with Lincolns and Cadillacs, all the plastic surgery a ninety-year-old needs in order to feel seventy-in that it just looked like a poorly decorated starter home. There were the flamingos, of course, but also a rock lawn and palm trees that looked closer to dead than paradise. It seemed oddly familiar.

  And that station wagon, too.

  “If he’s a bank robber,” Fi said, “why does his mother live in such a hideous home?”

  “He’s been in prison for twelve years.”

  “How long has he been out?”

  “Six months,” I said.

  “That’s plenty long to get a decent score. At least get rid of those flamingos. Dreadful taste.”

  This could have been my childhood home, I thought. I suppose I could have ended up robbing banks, too.

  “And why am I here?” Fiona asked.

  “To keep Bruce honest,” I said. “Crook to crook.”

  “You might not like what you hear,” she said.

  “I’m prepared for that.”

  Fi got out of the car and I followed her up the walk, but even before we got to the door, Bruce Grossman opened it up, stepped out and closed it quietly behind him. “My mom’s sleeping,” he said, his voice just above a whisper.

  He was tall-at least six-three-and had a body roughly the shape of a pear. His head, neck and chest were skinny, but his stomach slouched over his belt line and his legs were chubby, too. He wore a button-down blue shirt that he’d tucked into cargo shorts. On his feet were sandals and socks. He looked, essentially, like a tourist. I couldn’t fathom him robbing a stash house, much less one belonging to a motorcycle gang.

  Bruce reached into his back pocket and pulled out a photo and handed it to me. It was of an old woman, her hair gone, sitting poolside reading that morning’s Miami Herald.

  “What’s this?” I said.

  “Barry said you might want a proof-of-life photo,” Bruce said. I handed it to Fiona, who looked at it for a moment, shook her head and gave it back to Bruce. “Do you want a lock of hair or something?”

  “The picture is fine,” I said.

  Bruce looked at the photo for a second and a smile crossed his face. “When I was a kid? She had a perm. One of those tight ones, remember? Crazy, right?”

  I nodded.

  “And now she’s bald. She always said I made her pull her hair out, but this isn’t my fault,” Bruce said. He laughed then, though it wasn’t very funny. “Anyway, I appreciate you coming by. Do you want to see all the loot? And then, what, we just drop it off?”

  “No,” I said.

  “No?”

  “Bruce, this is my friend Fiona,” I said.

  “Friend?” Fiona said. She was angry. I’ve tried my whole life to avoid angry women. Avoiding angry Fiona should be a national pastime.

  “Associate,” I said.

  “Associate?” Fiona said.

  I looked at Bruce. He seemed perplexed.

  “What is the right answer, Fiona?” I said.

  She cocked her head at me and then ran her tongue over her teeth. I’ve seen nature videos where panthers do the same thing. “What is it you want me to do here?” she said. “That will determine my answer.”

  I took a deep breath. “Bruce, this is Fiona. She’s going to interrogate you about your story, because you’ve clearly lied to Barry about how you came across this information you need returned. I feel like you’ll probably lie to me, which will cause both of us great pain and sorrow, so I thought my… Fiona… could get the truth out of you without either of us getting hurt in the process.”

  Bruce got a queer look on his face. “Is she going to torture me?”

  “Maybe,” Fi said.

  Bruce took a step back toward the door.

  “No,” I said. “No, she is not. No, she is absolutely not. Are you, Fiona?”

  “Everyone is so dull around here,” she said, a noticeable pout in her voice.

  I handed my keys to Fiona. “Fiona is going to take you for a drive, Bruce. If she likes what she hears, she’ll bring you back here and we’ll have a deal. If she doesn’t like what she hears, she’ll drive you back here and I’ll be gone. Understand?”

  Bruce looked over both of his shoulders and then back at both of us. We stared back at him. “I thought someone was going to come up and blindfold me. That’s how the FBI does it.”

  “I’m not the FBI,” Fiona said. She took Bruce by the hand and guided him toward the car, even opened the passenger door for him. He looked back at me, shrugged and climbed in. Fi locked him in, which gave him a visible start.

  “Don’t hurt him,” I said.

  “Not even a little?” Fi asked.

  “Not even a little,” I said.

  Fi sighed. “One day,” she said, flirtation coming back to her, “you’re going to regret that I wasn’t allowed to hurt more people.”

  She got into the car without another word, but I was pretty sure that finding out the validity of that threat would be either the best or the worst day of my life.

  I watched the car round the corner at the end of the street and disappear and then made my way inside, in case Bruce’s mother woke up and needed something, because even a burned spy knows how to make a glass of water.

  4

  The way Bruce Grossman figured it, robbing safe-deposit boxes was a victimless crime. If people kept large sums of money in safe-deposit boxes-and there were always large sums of money to be found-that meant those people were probably crooks. If you’re a normal person, there’s no good reason to keep your money in a place hidden from use. Oh, sure, maybe you harbor fears that the Nazis are coming or the Commies are coming or the end of the Mayan calendar is nigh and the world is coming to an end, but even still, what would having money hidden away do for you? People who hide their money do it because they are doing something wrong.

  That’s not to say he robbed safe-deposit boxes to get back at the bad guys, because that wasn’t the case in the least. Starting out, he just wanted to have things. A nice house. A nice car. A place for his mother in a safe neighborhood in Miami. Maybe some flash cash, just so the ladies knew he was more than a receding hairline and an odd personality, because, shit, he knew he wasn’t
all that. No, starting out, that money got him places. Opened doors. Got return phone calls from smart girls.

  And if he got in deep with somebody, say at the bookie’s joint, he just had to pop a score in some no-name town and come back with whatever money he needed to pay off his debts. Used to be, before a night out in Detroit-back in the 1980s, that was his place to go, right in the middle of the country, easy in, easy out-he’d find a credit union near Wayne State, get what he needed and go.

  But later, it was just about cost of living. He moved his mother to Miami after his father died-this was in 1992-and her bills just started piling up. At this point in his life, Bruce considered himself excellent at what he did, to the point that, in an irony even he was aware of, he had to start keeping his money in safe-deposit boxes. He even robbed a bank he had an account and safe-deposit box in, just to deflect interest, not that he thought any was coming his way. His mom, though, was in her seventies and the ailments kept compounding. So he did what any enterprising businessperson, or good son, would do: He made as much as he could and then quietly retired to Florida.

  And it was a good life, at first. Bruce spent the next few years in a condo across the street from the house he bought his mother, so that way he could come over and look in on her, replace a lightbulb or two, even take her out to dinner once a week. Most nights, he drove his red Corvette convertible down to South Beach and threw money around, met a couple nice girls, even a couple guys he considered friends, guys he’d fish with, that sort of thing. And, of course, his friend Barry, whom he helped with a few start-up business ventures initially. Importing stolen items. Understanding weak points in the ceiling mortar of old buildings. Hosting pyramid schemes.

  But there was something about retired life that just wasn’t as exciting as robbing banks. So he’d periodically case places, you know, just to stay in shape.

  And then just in case happened. His mom got her first bout of cancer, in her lungs. Doctors took out most of her left lung, a bunch of lymph nodes under her arm, stuck her in chemo for six months, radiation for another three. Thing was, she had crap for health insurance, just like everyone Bruce knew, apart from Bruce. She had Medicare, but Bruce wanted her to have good doctors, not the hacks who got government money. So out of his own pocket he flew her up to Johns Hopkins, out to LA to Cedars, even to some quack in Montreal who thought she should eat only pork and drink only lime juice.

  Then, one afternoon, sitting in the waiting room at the transfusion center over in Coconut Grove, a place his mom liked to go just because it had better magazines than the chemo spot in Aventura, he got an idea while hearing two nurses bitch about their husbands.

  “You know,” one said-she was Cuban, so he always thought of her as Fidel-“my idiot husband, if he loses a toe, his insurance policy gives him five hundred thousand bucks. A whole foot, a million. Some nights, I think about just chopping off his big toe and getting out of town, you know?”

  The other nurse, who was pretty, so Bruce just thought of her, and thought of her, and thought of her, said, “Dismemberment insurance is what keeps me sane. Bad day here, I think, cut off my pinkie, retire to the Caymans, get away from Peter forever!”

  The nurses laughed and high-fived each other, but Bruce started thinking about the future, about taking care of his mom, about maybe doing something good after doing so much bad all these years.

  When he got home that night, he called his insurance agent and upped his coverage, added dismemberment to the buffet, said he was doing so much fishing he was afraid he might lose something important. His agent laughed. He laughed. Even told his buddies on the boat one day. They all laughed.

  And then he started plotting a way to lose a finger, maybe two, just to keep his mother in the station she’d grown accustomed to. He also thought one more good job would seal the deal.

  Now, sitting in the car next to this whack job Fiona, he wasn’t sure any of it was worth it. She was pretty, for sure, but he was supposed to be in business with Michael Westen, who according to Barry, was like a Jedi. He liked the idea of hiring a Jedi to help him out. Figured he could tell a few lies, leave out some key points, what would Obi-Wan know? But then this Fiona girl… she frankly scared the crap out of him, so he just figured he’d tell the straight truth, see where that got him. Worse came to worst, he was in the same position as he was ten minutes ago. But she was cute, so there was that.

  “In retrospect,” Bruce told Fiona, as they rounded yet another street filled with old ladies out on their porches talking on their portable phones or playing solitaire, “I should have just chopped my finger off and been done with it.”

  “You’re enthralling me with your tale of woe,” Fiona said. “And most of it even seems plausible, except for the part about smart girls thinking you were cute, but what happened with the stash house?”

  It was stupid, Bruce had to admit. After getting released from jail, minus a finger, minus the $500 he had to pay to lose the finger, but plus the $750,000 his insurance paid out that he was able to give to his mom for her bills while he was inside, he moved in with his mom, determined to just be a good son, which he felt he was. Good citizen, which meant he wouldn’t help his friend Barry do anything cash-based, just give him some occasional advice, maybe even get a job working at the Starbucks across the street, or the one next door, or even the one half a block away.

  And for two months it worked. Well, apart from the Starbucks thing. He got a job instead working at Kinko’s, just to pass the time. But then his mom got sick again-this time the cancer was in her liver-and he started thinking about giving her some comfort. She was eighty-eight now and even if it all worked out with the cancer, how much longer did she have?

  The thing was, he couldn’t go back to prison. And the last time he’d robbed a bank he found out the hard way that banks in Miami in the late nineties weren’t like crap-ass savings and loans in small towns in Oregon: You could break into the safe-deposit boxes, you just couldn’t get your ass back out, at least not with a broken leg. And that was twelve years ago. So Bruce went looking for a stash house, something run by drug dealers, so they’d be working from straight cash, and preferably crystal meth or coke dealers, since they frequently got high off of their own supply and couldn’t stand to be locked up at home.

  It only took him a couple of weeks of scouting, first by going to the colleges at night and watching the dealers pull up to the fraternity houses to make drops, and then later tinkering around the hot spots in South Beach, looking for actors and actresses and models with runny noses and then seeing where they went. A couple of times he thought he’d found a good spot to rob, as they were in nice neighborhoods lined with expensive homes, but then he got to looking and realized that those nice places had security systems and Neighborhood Watch and talkative kids on bicycles who might notice something.

  So when he finally found the ideal spot-a piece-of-crap house on the edge of the Everglades-and an ideal pair of marks-two stupid longhairs with modified motorcycles that roared like injured lions, which made them about as inconspicuous as Siegfried and Roy used to be, and who just let people walk in all day and buy drugs-he went to work. If he’d been younger, that would have meant getting city plans of the house, taking pictures of all the angles, maybe even enlisting a getaway car, but at sixty- five, and with these morons, it seemed easier to wait for them to leave for the night, break in through the ceiling-his go-to route, since these guys weren’t gonna call the cops anyway, and because there’s less absorbent surface to leave fingerprints and such-and rob the place.

  Which is exactly what he did.

  Two in the morning on a Saturday-your basic come-down time-both morons hopped on their bikes and headed out, messenger bags over their shoulders to make their drops in Miami, and Bruce headed in. Popped through roof tiles into the attic, out through the attic door with a rope ladder and into a bedroom closet, which was good because it was right where he needed to be. File cabinets of paperwork, boxes, bags-actual bags! — of
cash. And drugs. Ziplocs filled with crystal meth, crack, pills. It was pitch-dark in the closet and the door was locked from the outside and, smartly, made of steel. On that measure, these boys were wise. Everything else, not so much.

  Bruce took all the money, of course. Filled his car up. And then thought, you know, what drug dealer keeps paperwork? And so he broke back in and took the files, too, thinking he’d have a few more arrows in his quiver. Maybe some car information, house deed… who knew? He didn’t try to read anything in the dark, just took everything he could and got the hell out, thinking that if his mom got really sick, whatever he found would be worth something to someone. Plus, he really couldn’t lose another finger.

  “How much money?” Fiona asked.

  He hated to tell her, since he had the sense that maybe she’d robbed a few places in the past, too. “Three hundred,” he said.

  “All of that for three hundred dollars?”

  “Thousand,” he said. “Three hundred thousand.”

  “Oh, my,” she said. Weird. Maybe she liked him, since her voice took on a much huskier tone. “And when did you find out it was a Ghouls’ house?”

  “That night when I started going through the paperwork. I didn’t even think twice about it then, though,” Bruce said, though actually he’d been quite happy. “But then word got back to me that they were looking to find out who would be stupid enough to do the crime, lots of money being thrown around to find out, which meant that soon enough they’d find me. That’s why I just want to give what I have back, before they put it all together.”

  Fiona reached into her bag and pulled out her cell phone. “Anything else you care to add?” she asked.

  “Are you single?” he asked. Worth a try.

  “I’m free any night for the right price,” she said, smiling, “and my price right now includes men with all of their fingers, so you just missed out.”

  She dialed a number on her phone, still smiling, still giving off one vibe, but clearly not meaning it. She must have robbed banks, Bruce thought.