The Lagotti Family Series

by Leopold Borstinski

  This reflected his overall mood when, having been forced to work late to hear the bad news about the Pooled Deposit drops, he arrived back at his house with Rita and her casserole getting cold in the kitchen.

  Carter found Rita sat in the dining room in front of her plate, long since emptied with just a thin film of gravy left on its surface. His plate was there, waiting for him, congealed in a beef and potato sculpture.

  HE SAT DOWN opposite her and, before he could say anything, she barked: “You’re late.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “You’ve made me sit here and eat on my own. You’ve made me waste my time cooking for you for it to go to waste.” Beat.

  “Why didn’t you phone?”

  Carter sighed. He really didn’t have the energy for an argument with Rita tonight. He was pissed off having to deal with the Pooled Deposit drop and her moaning at him was doing him no good at all.

  “I was busy at work,” he hammered out these words, staccato and stood up realizing he hadn’t poured himself a much needed scotch yet. He could sense Rita fuming as he scuffed out of the dining room, into the living room to get to the glass and bottle and returned back to his seat.

  “I find it hard to believe you couldn’t spare two precious minutes to tell me you were going to be late.”

  “Well, that’s exactly the case. We were called into a meeting after hours and then I came home. It’s not like I went out partying ‘till the small hours.”

  “Chance’d be a fine thing,” she snorted. Carter looked at her with steely eyes. He had no time for this shit, and besides, Rita was normally far more accepting of little things like this.

  “What?”

  “If you’d told me you were going to be late, I could’ve spent some more time with a friend of mine in the afternoon.”

  “Friend? What friend?” Carter had always worked on the assumption Rita was at home during the day. He’d never spent a single moment of his life wondering what she did when he wasn’t in the house. Carter worked on the basis she was somehow frozen until he reanimated her by getting back into their home. An unrealistic belief if he’d ever bothered to pay attention to it.

  “I have friends, bucko. Good friends I like to spend time with.”

  “Where d'you go to meet your friend?” said with a sneer in his voice

  “We had lunch in the Baltimore Regal Hotel just out of town. If I’d known you were going to be late, we wouldn’t have had to rush.”

  “Rush? Lunch would have been over hours before I knew I was going to be late. Anyway, I wouldn’t have been able to get in touch with you if you weren’t at home.”

  “Yes, we had to rush because of you,” she said, still a pile of anger at the back of her voice, but a stillness and calmness was present too. She stood up from the table. “We had to rush afterwards.” The last word was spoken slowly, clearly, drawing all the life out of it and as she uttered it, she moved one hand over her groin and mimed massaging herself, so he could see the contours of her thighs through her dress and the shape of her groin.

  “We had to rush because of you... Clear the dishes, boy. I’m going to bed.” And while still massaging herself, Rita floated out of the room and up the stairs. Carter heard the bedroom door slam shut.

  “Bitch! She’s fucking someone else,” he thought as he took the dishes into the kitchen to soak before he did as he was bid and washed the crockery. “Who the fuck is fucking my wife?”

  By the time he left the house some twenty minutes later, the cutlery was sparkly clean, he’d knocked back half a bottle of hard liquor and his anger had seeped into moroseness.

  MARY LOU GOT back to Lansdowne that evening in good time given it was her only appointment of the day. Mary Lou sat in the Dolce Caffe for about ten minutes before Carter appeared. He sat down next to her at their booth at the back and ordered a coffee with milk.

  “How was your day?” she enquired.

  “Same old, same old,” Carter replied, but Mary Lou sensed that wasn’t the whole story.

  “Yeah...?”

  “Well, the new payroll roster is being rolled out and they’re changing the drop times at our branch. Now, the money’s going to get delivered to us before the bank opens instead of during the day when there are more people around. But that doesn’t matter...” A gulp of coffee.

  “... as much as I’ve been co-opted onto the roster. When there’s a Pooled Deposit I’m going to be one of the staff who take it in and get it into the safe. Once a month I’m going to have to be in at six in the morning, for Christ’s sake.”

  Mary Lou let this information hang in the air. Pooled Deposit simply meant a payroll worth over half a million - this was what they’d been waiting for all these months.

  “Goddamn. How much notice are they going to give you?”

  “The previous week we’ll be told if there are any Pooled Deposits the following week, so I’ll get no more than seven days.”

  “Damn. That’s not good for us, is it?”

  “No, we’ll lose a chunk of one of our weekends if I have to be in that early,” he trailed off into his own disappointed thoughts.

  “But that still leaves us loads of nights when we can be together doesn’t it?” she asked hopefully.

  “Yeah... yes, of course. And because it’s a new roster, looks like the first Pooled Deposit is going to be on June 16.”

  They finished their coffees while Mary Lou stroked Carter’s leg to show she felt his sadness, but in reality she just saw dollar signs. Dollars held by Frank or dollars held by Carter, finally.

  The bus couldn’t turn up fast enough for Mary Lou; the trip home lasted a lifetime. She zoomed off the bus and made her way back to the apartment as quickly as her skirt let her.

  MARY LOU SHOT through the door with a smile on her face, threw off her coat and skipped over to Frank’s armchair to fling herself on his lap.

  “What’s up, babe?” asked Frank having wheezed at the moment she landed on him.

  “Have I got some good news, hon’!”

  “What good news?”

  “They’ve arranged next month’s payroll runs.”

  “Oh?”

  Frank set bolt up with a straight back, holding Mary Lou around the middle to stop her falling on the floor.”

  “The second week of June. The biggest run is going to be in the second week of June...

  “... and that’s when we hit the bank.”

  “For sure!”

  “Do you know when in the second week exactly?”

  “Not quite. Usually they use Monday to receive the cash, Tuesday to hold the cash and Wednesday to transport it to the other branches.”

  “So it’ll be Tuesday, then?”

  “Most likely, but I won’t know for sure until the end of the previous week.”

  “Okay, game on. Sounds like we have a plan. Sounds like we have a fucking plan.”

  And they did.

  THEY SAT IN each other’s arms for a spell, soaking in the meaning of the news Mary Lou had imparted a few seconds ago. She thought about the planning, the talking, the time she had spent with Carter the past nine months. Of the fact this was all going to be a memory soon. She imagined how Frank would react when he got into that vault and found there was no money in there. How Carter would deal with laundering all that money. And she asked herself, yet again, whether she would be better off with a class act like Frank or the risky Carter. Who in fact was most likely to actually steal the money? To walk out of that bank with the cash in a bag. The truth was she had no goddamn clue.

  As the future seemed so unclear, even in the midst of the almost absolute certainty of the date of the job, Mary Lou decided the best thing to do right now was to live in the moment. Live in the here and now because if nothing else that was very clear and very certain. She kissed Frank over and over again and so began another night of tasting each other’s bodies until they fell asleep.

  Beyond the moment and despite the class act her Frank undoubtedly was,
Mary Lou was beginning to believe maybe Carter could pull it off. Mainly because no-one would suspect him of doing anything as audacious as robbing a bank: not JH, not Grimble and certainly not Frank. And if that was the case she should follow the money and that would be in Carter’s pockets.

  29

  LATER IN THE evening Mary Lou went over to their trysting place to cook linguini and make sure she’d understood everything Carter had said to her. He arrived way too late to eat: the pasta had gone cold and Mary Lou knew that meant Carter had been back to the house with Rita and they’d had another in a long line of arguments. It was part of Mary Lou’s job to hear him and make him feel safe again and she braced herself for just that task.

  When Carter did arrive, he was in a foul mood. She could smell on his breath he’d way more than his usual one shot of scotch. His breath and his generally aggressive air.

  “How’d it go at work, dear?” she asked but he snorted and replied: “Shit.” But that was all she could get out of him.

  Swaying with liquor, Carter noticed another meal gone cold on a table and rolled his eyes, sighed, turned round and switched on the TV to slump in a chair, watching blindly at whatever game show was broadcast.

  A few minutes later a ham sandwich appeared on the arm of the chair and he grabbed it and stuffed it down without a word. Missing two dinners had made him hungry. Carter put the plate on the floor by his feet and carried on staring at the TV.

  “Better?”

  “S’pose. Those shit heels at the bank. It just pisses me off, it really does. I’ve been working there for five years and that pinhead George slaps me with the first Pooled Deposit duty. What’s the point of putting the time in, if you don’t get anything back? I mean...” Gulp of whiskey. “... is that what I’m worth to them? Just a hired hand to open a door and count some bags of cash, f’Chris’ sake?” Gulp of whiskey.

  “Well, say something for fuck’s sake? Am I right, or what?”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “Yeah.” Gulp of scotch. “And another thing...” Gulp. “... how long do I have to wait for a promotion? I’ve brought in so much money through investments, they can’t have failed to notice, surely.” Gulp and a dribble of whiskey onto Carter’s chin, wiped off with his spare hand.

  Mary Lou hadn’t seen him like this before. He’d be grouchy with her if he and Rita had had an argument but this was clearly more than the next scene of the final chapter of their relationship and marriage. There was an unpleasant edge to Carter tonight and Mary Lou didn’t like it. “Booze changes a man,” she thought as Carter started railing against anything said on the TV program before him. Even the ads.

  She had a couple of options at this point. She could walk out the door and leave him to stew in his own juices and deal with the consequences once he’d sobered up. She could ply him with more booze until he fell asleep, but that might mean he started getting nasty to her and there was no way she was going to put up with that - from him. Or she could keep seeing the night out and hope his mood changed because she really did want to check she’d got the right date in her head for the first Pooled Deposit run.

  Mary Lou weighed all the options and figured the smartest move was to extricate herself from the apartment and try again another time. She could be home in about fifteen minutes and that was a much better idea than to stay in the same four walls as this fucker right now.

  So while Carter ranted at the TV, Mary Lou grabbed her coat and walked out into the Halethorpe night.

  CARTER LOOKED ROUND at the sound of the door slamming shut to see the absence of Mary Lou. Later, when the TV crackled white noise at him, he fell asleep in the armchair, his whiskey glass out of his hand and onto the floor. The bottle long since emptied.

  When he woke up at around six thirty, Carter couldn’t feel his toes as the apartment was quite cold and he’d been in the chair all night. He twisted left and right looking for Mary Lou and ran into the bedroom in the hope of finding her there, but there were no signs at all. Then he remembered not seeing her before he went to sleep and the door slamming on his rant.

  “I am an asshole.”

  There was no-one to disagree with such a clear self-assessment, so Carter nipped into the shower to take the cobwebs of alcohol out of his brain, put his clothes back on and headed to Lansdowne to grab breakfast in the Dulce Caffe before starting work.

  The irony of Carter’s arrival for breakfast before seven was entirely lost on him as he was still feeling sorry for himself. The previous night’s haranguing had fled his mind; now he was sorry because he’d forced Mary Lou to leave the apartment rather than deal with his mood.

  The one clear thought Carter did have during his time at the Dulce was that if the Pooled Deposit drop was happening next month, the chances were Frank Senior would want him to grab the cash on one of those days. This gave him a cold judder down his back and a sinking feeling in his stomach, but there was no getting away from it. One way or another, he was going to pay his debt back. And this way, he’d be able to not just be clear and free of money problems, but he’d also rid himself of Rita and all those problems too. And he’d gain Mary Lou if he hadn’t fucked everything up with her last night.

  At a quarter to nine, Carter left the diner and headed to the First Bank of Baltimore’s Lansdowne branch. First, as usual, he went into the staff kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee, just as he did every morning. Then he went next door opened his locker with the key he had attached to his house fob. Inside was an emergency cut throat and shaving foam, toothbrush and toothpaste. All on the top shelf along with a spare hair brush. Beneath, resting on the floor, was one of his black cases. Empty, sagging in the middle under its own weight. Waiting for a time to be used.

  Carter then swung by the kitchen to grab his coffee and headed for his desk. Underneath, leaning on one side, was his other case. Also waiting for the moment to spring into action. Grimble stared at him so Carter grimaced a smile back just to annoy him.

  The cases were ready. All Carter had to do was fill them with cash and leave the bank before the end of a Pooled Deposit day. June 16 or thereabouts.

  TWO NIGHTS LATER, Carter and Mary Lou met up at the apartment. Carter entered first and he sat on the sofa until she arrived. When he heard Mary Lou’s key in the door, Carter stood up and put his hands in his pockets.

  Mary Lou opened the door, looked at him and smiled.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi, dear.”

  “Um...”

  “Yes?”

  Mary Lou hung up her coat and sat down on the sofa. The far end of the sofa, back straight, legs together and hands held on her knees. Carter sat down to mirror her.

  “Well?”

  “Mary Lou. I behaved badly last time we were here. I’d got bad news at the bank, had bad news at home and it was all too much for me.”

  “Right.”

  Calm voice, head slightly angled to one side, listening.

  “So I shouldn’t have turned up drunk and all. And shouldn’t have laid that shit down on you... Sorry.”

  “Thank you for the apology.”

  Carter put his hand out and Mary Lou held it with a light touch and a gentle squeeze. Her body relaxed a bit and her legs were less clenched together.

  “Thank you for coming over this evening and listening to me. Again.” Carter smiled at Mary Lou because he knew the amount of time she’d spent hearing his problems and talking through their solutions. She smiled back, still cautious.

  “I just don’t want my behavior to change how you feel about me. I was genuinely scared you wouldn’t show. I don’t know what I’d do without you...”

  Mary Lou put her other hand around his so it was sandwiched between hers. Her fingertips touched his knuckles and that was comfort enough for him.

  “You mean so much to me. Once Rita is out of my life, we can be together properly.”

  “And I’d really like that too. It’s not easy...”

  “I know, I know.”

  �
�But I have to be sure we’re good. I have to be sure I’m going to be safe with you. I’ve had relationships before where he’s got nasty and I don’t want to be in that kind of situation again.”

  “Oh god! Oh god. No, I mean. I’d never do anything to hurt you. Christ.”

  “Or make me think you might hurt me. That’s important to me too.”

  “God. I’m so sorry,” and Carter crumbled, crying and folding his body forwards so his head and damp tears were dripping over their hands. Eventually he stopped and she carried on stroking the back of his head to reassure him.

  He sat back up and blew his nose. His red eyes dry but doleful. Mary Lou’s body was totally relaxed by now. She smiled at him and stood up.

  “There’s one thing,” she stated with a glint in her eyes. Mary Lou turned and faced Carter, still sat on the sofa. She unzipped her skirt and it dropped down by her feet. Her rose was in his eye line and he could smell her on his tongue.

  “Lick me until I feel better about you,” she said. And he did.

  30

  PETE WAS IN a strange old mood and he wasn’t too sure why. Yes, he’d been whoring around for a week or two with nothing to show for it other than a sore head and a sore dick, but he was used to both those sensations and it didn’t bother him any. No, this was different and he didn’t think he’d experienced anything quite like it before in his life.

  After four hours tinkering under the hood of one of the Fords, the Wheels gradually began to realize what was up: he wanted to see Lucy again. He wanted some companionship. So Pete finished the work on the engine and motored down to the Joppa exit of the I-95 and scooted down the South Mountain Road in search of the taste of Java.

  There she was in her tight-fitting waitress overalls and dress, with one hand on her hip and the other pouring coffee into a mug.