Carol’s face, which had been radiant, almost joyful, turned to darkness. “The money. Where’s the money coming from?”
“Don’t worry about money,” Jerry said.
Carol turned to me with baleful accusation.
“I had nothing to do with his decision. I tried to talk him out of it.”
“You weren’t sincere.”
“Every person does what they really want to do.”
“Jerry, don’t,” she said to him. “Don’t risk what little we have left.”
“I’m doing what I have to do. I might’ve done it anyway.”
“What if something happens?”
“Nothing’s going to happen. We’re both pros.”
“That’s why you spent your life in prison—because you’re a pro?”
“That’s where I learned to be a pro. Carol, we owe a thousand in hospital bills right now. It’s going to cost and cost. We need money and I’m going to get it.”
“I don’t care if I die in a flophouse or right now this minute! I’d rather do that than see you locked up or shot down in the gutter.”
“None of that’s going to happen.”
“It could with him. He doesn’t care.”
The statement, made without anger, stirred a chord. Her words were close enough for me to blurt, “That’s not true.” I wanted to argue, but who can argue with a dying person?
“Don’t get on Max’s case,” Jerry said. “Can’t you see how I feel—what I’ve got to do to be a man in my own eyes?”
“We don’t need it.”
“Yes we do.”
“Not that much. I’d rather stick my head in an oven.”
“If you were that cruel I’d be right behind you.”
They verged on tears and I did too. They stared at each other, both in anger and agony. “Do what you want,” Carol said. “It doesn’t matter. I won’t be here very long.” She spoke tonelessly, suddenly drained of fire. “Just don’t tell me anything about what you’re doing.”
When we left fifteen minutes later, the episode of wounding had been healed, covered with layers of small talk and tenderness. Both chose to withdraw rather than hurt the other. Jerry had held his ground, yet Carol’s remonstrations hung in the background and the scars would be there. I was a detached bystander. Carol was friendly to me—and it was sincere. It was no modification of her opinion of me, but merely an acceptance despite that opinion. Maybe she really decided that because of death’s proximity such intense concern was ludicrous.
Walking down the corridor, under the hard lights, Jerry sagged. All at once the powerful frame was gaunt (or I saw gauntness for the first time) and he reeled. His face was bloodless. The scene in the room had unnerved him, sapped the last reserves. He was like a man in a trance as we drove back toward the motel.
But the human mind, when it reaches the bottom of the abyss, must bounce back or disintegrate entirely. Filled with Scotch and Seconal, Jerry collapsed on a chair. Hours later, though groggy and stiff, he’d bounced back. After splashing cold water on his face, he grinned. “Why don’t you give that Wop gangster a call and see what’s happening? If I’m thinking about action I won’t really be thinking. That’s the way I want it.”
“I can dig it,” I said—and I could.
8
THE next day, Saturday, in late afternoon Jerry was going to bring Carol from the hospital. It was better that she didn’t see me, but I spent the morning with him at the apartment, doing chores that had been ignored. Full of cold beer and marijuana, we watered flowers, cleaned the swimming pool, raked leaves, and dusted the apartment. Jerry had risen out of his despondency. He seemed more the easygoing man I knew; it was not diminishment of loss of love, it was the resilience of someone accustomed to loss.
In the afternoon I went back to the motel, sat basking beside the swimming pool and watching college football on a portable television set that two middle-aged men brought out. It was a yellow-warm day, the sun gentle, though in late afternoon the air turned chill.
I drove into Hollywood to eat. When I returned at dusk a note was scotch-taped to the door: “Mr Johnny T. called and left message that the game is for 8:00 tonight.”
I’d been waiting with almost angry anticipation for this message. Now, holding it, the butterflies of imminent danger—a not totally unpleasant sensation—came to life in my stomach. I walked down to the motel office and used the pay telephone to call Jerry.
“It’s tonight,” I said. “I’ll call the guy about the guns.”
“We’ve just been here ten minutes. What’ll I tell Carol?”
“She told you not to tell her anything. Just say you’ve got to go somewhere for a couple hours. You can’t balk now.”
“What time is the move?”
“They’re starting at 8:00. Give ’em an hour to get comfortable.”
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
Next, I dropped a dime in the slot and dialed Abe’s club. He answered and said that Manny had taken the evening off. Abe thought he might be shacked up with a broad he’d met the night before. I hung up and dialed Manny’s apartment in West Hollywood. I listened to the unanswered ringing for five minutes and hung up, cursing in frustration. I went back to my room and stood at the window, waiting for Jerry and watching the hillsides turn from orange to purple. When Jerry arrived, I went back to the telephone. Still no answer from Manny’s apartment.
So instead of charging through a door and robbing a dozen semiracketeers (later joyfully counting fifteen or twenty thousand dollars on a bed) we spent the evening parked on a tree-lined street of apartment buildings in West Hollywood, waiting for Manny to come home. At 11:00 we realized the heist was a dead issue. Jerry laughed. I, too, saw the humor—but I also felt the burden of being a fool.
“Let’s go home,” Jerry said. “I’m hungry.”
“We can kiss this one off for good. That dago isn’t going to help us anymore. I suppose we could wait every night—but I can’t wait very long.”
“Neither can I. Is anything else pending? I need to make a couple grand in the next week or two.”
“Just that jewel move and it’s gonna take time to put together.”
“We could start looking for a jewel score. Make a list of all the first-class jewelers and start looking ’em over. You check Pasadena and the east side. I’ll get Beverly Hills.”
“Yeah, but that’s still a future thing. It’d take a month at least. Meanwhile you need a couple grand—and I’ve barely got gas money. What we should do is look at some banks. We can get that together in a week or two.”
Jerry was turning the key in the ignition when headlights sprayed through the back window. It was Manny’s automobile. He got out, his movements indicating that he was slightly drunk. I stepped to the sidewalk and called him. He came over, grinned, and leaned over to see who was in the car. He didn’t know Jerry. His grin sandpapered my irritation.
“Where the fuck were you?” I snapped, not intending such anger to show; it was just a goof. He wasn’t supposed to spend his life waiting for my call.
“I been balling some freaky debutante at her pad at Laguna. What’s up?”
“Nothing now. We wanted those guns—but it’s too late. We fucked off a score because you weren’t here.”
“It wouldn’t have mattered. The dude picked up those guns yesterday afternoon. I was going to call you last night but I lost your number.”
What he’d said registered several seconds later. When it did, I looked at his flap-jawed grin and punched him without warning. The left hook landed on his eye, split the flesh open, and dumped him flat on his back. The follow-up right hand punch sailed over his head because he was on the way down.
“Hey! Goddam!” he yelped. “What’s that for?” He was more frightened than groggy or hurt. He raised himself on an elbow and wiped the blood away from his vision.
“You asshole!” I said.
“Man, what’d I do?”
“Never mi
nd.” The whole fiasco was aggravated beyond endurance by his casual failure to tell me about something so important as the man taking back the firearms. “Shitass, you were off sucking some broad’s cunt when you should’ve been taking care of business. If we had known in time, Jerry could’ve brought a shotgun, and I still had the small revolver.” I drew back to kick him and he wriggled to get away. He stayed prone, believing himself safer on the ground than on his feet.
Jerry had run around the car; he was holding my arm and pulling me back. “You crazy motherfucker! Cool it. Somebody’s gonna call the heat and we’ll be busted for a chickenshit street brawl. There’s no money in that.”
Jerry eased me into the car and we drove away. On Sunset Boulevard, amid the exploding neon, passing the sidewalks filled with women in high skirts and men in expensive clothes, I cursed, “Cocksuckin’ motherfuckin’ punk bastards. We’re fuckin’ snakebit.”
“We’ll get it together. Don’t sweat it. This is just one of those things. Fuck it. Tomorrow we’ll start working on something else.”
No sooner was I back in the motel than two ideas burst almost simultaneously into mind: The market Willy Darin had spoken of, and the pawn shop beside the Monticello cocktail lounge. The pawn shop would provide the arsenal and a few hundred dollars (L&L Red could sell the merchandise); the market would be worth the two thousand Jerry needed—and my end would get me an automobile, clothes, a month’s rent.
I was already keyed up to commit a crime. I’d go tonight, alone, to take the pawn shop with a burglary. The trunk of Mary’s car had a tire iron and a long screwdriver, all I needed to use on the wall. At 1:10 I was on my way to commit the burglary, stopping in Hollywood to buy rubber gloves at an all-night drugstore.
The parking space directly behind the barber shop’s back door was empty when I pulled into the lot, lessening the distance I’d be exposed while carying the loot. I backed in, cut the motor, and finished the last of a cigar, meanwhile watching the rear entrance of the cocktail lounge. The night was quiet. Business was slow. Half-a-dozen automobiles were in the lot. Nobody came or went. Nothing stirred signals of warning.
Extinguishing the cigar butt with deliberation, I slipped on the gloves, hefted the tire iron and slipped through the shadows to the barber shop’s door. A tinkle of glass—and ten seconds later I was inside, pausing motionless to see if there was any reaction to the breaking glass. All remained silent, unstirring.
It was precisely as it had looked during my earlier examination. The pawn shop’s flank was soft and unprotected. I stabbed into the wall with the tire iron. The plaster was dry and soft; it fell away, pattering lightly to the floor. The sound would not escape the building. From outside came flashes of light and motor noise as automobiles went past. Every sense was keyed to anything erratic in the night’s pulsations, the slightest variation, the crunch of footsteps, an automobile that sounded wrong, an unusual silence. Any of these would make me freeze and turn like a predatory animal caught in a beam of light.
I kept working. Plaster piled on the floor, scrunching underfoot. I used the screwdriver and tire iron together to snap the wooden slats behind the plaster. In fifteen minutes there was a hole large enough to crawl through. The pawn shop’s storeroom was beyond and it was lighted enough to see without a flashlight. Valuables in pawn-filled bins along the wall and floor. They were gathered by item, guns together, typewriters together, and each was tagged with the name of the person who’d pawned it.
I widened the hole with my hands, breaking off sharp edges, and squeezed through head first, coming down on my hands and dropping into a crouch. Motionless, I listened for the space of a minute. The possibility always existed that there was an alarm I’d missed—or that someone (perhaps drunk) was sleeping inside.
Both the pawn shop and surrounding night remained undisturbed. My fear-stimulated heartbeat now throbbed with the pace of success. For a moment I felt misgivings, for into my thoughts came visions of the persons who owned these things. Perhaps a sentimental value was attached to something they’d been forced to pawn. It was the reason I’d never burglarized homes. Taking money, or what had monetary value alone, was impersonal, especially if it was from a source that could withstand the loss. To cause someone emotional pain was something else.
This pang quickly disappeared. The middle of a crime is no place for throbbing conscience or meditation.
My first move was to the back door, looking for hidden alarms. I found none, nor did I expect to; such things were expensive. Yet facing years of prison I could ill afford to take things for granted.
Now I unfastened the lock on the back door for an escape route, although I would remove what I was stealing through the hole in the wall. If I opened the door the alarm would ring—but if I needed to flee the ringing would make no difference. Using the hole foreclosed taking large articles, but all I really wanted was firearms. Whatever else I got would be frosting.
The light was from the pawn shop’s front room, making it unnecessary to use a flashlight. I was grateful. Once I’d made entry through the roof of a liquor warehouse with the aid of a hand drill and keyhole saw. I used a flashlight and saw a twelve-foot drop into an office. I hung down and let go—and crashed through a glass roof over the office that I’d missed with the flashlight. Miraculously, only my hand was slashed, but it could just as easily have been my throat. Contrary to the advertising by the electric company, as a burglar I preferred that lights be left burning.
Now I moved to the side of the archway into the front room, kneeled beside the arch and peered around, keeping my head near the floor so no silhouette would be visible from outside the windows. Automobiles flashed by occasionally. A vintage safe stood near the front window under the light. It would have taken me thirty minutes to open it with a sledge hammer and chisels—even less with an acetylene torch. It was too heavy to move and I couldn’t work in front of the window even if I had the tools. I felt like a cat staring at a canary protected by a cage.
The pistols were in the display case. I stepped back into the storeroom, dumped trash from a cardboard crate and filled it with cameras and small business machines that would fit through the hole. Half a dozen rifles and two shotguns stood together, each with a tag around the trigger guard. All the rifles were .22s, which didn’t interest me except to sell—but one shotgun was a double-barrelled .12 gauge.
I pushed everything through the hole into the barber shop, then crawled through to put it in the car and return for what was in the front room. The most dangerous moment would be when I rushed out and began stripping the display case. By loading the car now I’d be able to leave immediately after the second trip—time enough to get away if someone saw me and made a telephone call.
Plaster crunched beneath my shoes. Shadows in the barber shop writhed as automobiles passed. A door slammed, followed by footsteps and the resonance of a woman’s laughter. A couple was moving from the cocktail lounge to an automobile, passing me ten feet away. The man’s hand stroked her rump suggestively. When they drove away, taillights blazing momentarily as they paused at the street, I slipped out through the door with an armload of rifles. In thirty seconds I was putting the box of cameras in the back seat.
Back in the barber shop’s darkness, I waited to see if I’d aroused anyone. The night remained undisturbed.
Sweat dripped from my forehead and chin and I was breathing heavily as I wriggled through the hole. I’d been working hard and moving fast under pressure. Pausing to pick up the tire iron, I peered through the arch just long enough to make sure nobody was on the sidewalk in front. I moved quickly to the display case—it had a lock—and bashed in the glass, the sound exploding in the silence. In thirty seconds I’d scooped out four pistols, one a Browning .380 automatic, my favorite handgun. Pistols in hand, I remained kneeling behind the case. The front window had several musical instruments; they’d sell easily but would be too bulky, especially with the ungainly load I already had.
A row of pegs on a wall conta
ined wristwatches, each with a tag. They were a bonus. I loaded my pockets.
Three minutes later I turned the old Plymouth through dark streets toward L&L Red’s hilltop cabin. Behind me was the pillaged shop, a hole ripped in its side. Suddenly, I envisioned the pain and anger on the owner’s face as he examined the crime; each moment would make him find something else missing. Remorse swelled through me—not exactly remorse but a hope that he was insured. Instantly, deliberately, I hardened myself against such feelings. I needed no justification for what I’d done, and even if I did it was easy to imagine him as a vile, penurious Shylock, a man lacking in both compassion and courage. I was able to make myself despise the man without ever seeing him. He was a squarejohn citizen, a believer in the death penalty, a coward, a dog. It was a blanket condemnation, irrational—the same as his kind had been giving me all my life.
Jerry Shue had a tool room and workshop. He locked the shotgun in a vise and sawed off both the barrel and stock, smoothed the former with a file and the latter with sandpaper. The shotgun now resembled an eighteenth-century handgun. Jerry wrapped the middle of the barrel with electrician’s tape so it could be held from the top while being fired. He tacked a long thong in a loop from the handle so it could be hung from the shoulder inside a coat.
Leaving the guns behind, we drove to look at the market. Everything was like Willy said. I went up the stairs and walked into the manager’s office. He looked up, startled, and I offered to sell him some shopping carts. He wasn’t interested. I saw what I wanted to see: the safe was beside the door.
“How is it?” Jerry asked when I got back in the car.
“It’s bear meat. If we brought the cannons we’d get him right now.”
“That good, huh?”
“Does a bear shit in the woods?”
The getaway would be more difficult than the robbery itself. The market sat on an intersection. The street to its right side was one way, becoming a freeway on-ramp. The parking lot had wide access to this street and was the logical route. It would also be the first one covered when the alarm went out. A narrow driveway ran along the other side of the market toward the street in front, but if we went that way and turned left away from the market’s face we’d be in a shopping mall two blocks away, a maze of one-way streets and streets where automobiles were not allowed. If we came down the driveway and turned right, we’d pass right before the market’s front window—and we’d have to pause for a stop sign outside the main entrance; then we’d pass beneath the freeway to another stop sign. Yet just beyond the second stop was a residential street to the right (easier to turn into than a left turn, which was important on a getaway) and half a mile later we would turn onto Mary Gambesi’s street a block from her driveway. We’d disappear down the driveway. We’d use Mary’s car with stolen license plates taped over those that belonged to the car. Jerry’s station wagon could be at the curb in front. We’d visit Mary, return her car, count the money, and stay out of sight until the noon rush.
No Beast So Fierce Page 16
