Westlake, Donald E - Novel 32 (13 page)

 
          
“The
idea is to get out of this,” Joe said. “Remember?” Tempted against all his
resolves, Tom shook his head and said, “Ahhh, Christ.”

 
          
“One
year,” Joe said.

 
          
Tom
held out a few seconds longer, but finally he shrugged and said, “All right.
One year.”

 
          
“Good,”
Joe said. He grinned, a lot happier than before, and grudgingly Tom grinned
back.

 
          
That
was one of the days when our schedules didn’t match. Joe was in the city
working, and I had the day off. Naturally it was raining, so I moped around the
house and read a paperback and watched some of the game shows on television.
Mary took off in the car for the Grand Union in the middle of the day, so when
the show I was watching came to an end I wandered back into the bedroom to take
a look at my old uniform. If we ever really did do this robbery, that’s what
I’d be wearing for my disguise.

 
          
I
hadn’t worn the uniform in three or four years, but it was still there, hanging
in the bedroom closet, pushed way down to one end, behind the raincoat liner
for the raincoat I left in a restaurant two years ago. I laid it out on the bed
and looked it over for a minute; no holes, no buttons missing, everything fine.
I changed into it, and studied myself in the mirror on the back of the closet
door.

 
          
Yeah,
that was me, I remembered that guy. The years I’d worn this blue suit, hot
weather and cold, rain and sun. For some damn reason I suddenly found myself
feeling gloomy, really sad about something. As though I’d lost something
somewhere along the line, and even though I didn’t know what it was I felt its
absence. I don’t know how to explain it any better than that; it was a sense of
loss I felt.

 
          
Well,
crap, I didn’t come in here to get the rainy-day blues. I came in here to check
out my disguise for the big robbery. And it looked
fine,
it was in perfect shape, no problem.

 
          
I
was still standing there, trying to forget that I was feeling sad about
something I couldn’t remember, when all of a sudden Mary came walking in, and
looked at me with her mouth hanging open.

 
          
I’d
thought she’d be at the store at least another hour. I turned and gave her a
sheepish grin, and tried to figure out what the hell I was going to say to her.
But I couldn’t think of a thing, not a single word came into my mind to explain
what I was doing here in the bedroom in my old uniform.

 
          
After
her first surprise, she helped me out of my paralysis by making a joke out of
it, coming farther into the bedroom and saying, “What’s this? You’ve been
demoted?”

 
          
“Uh,”
I said, and then finally my brain and my tongue started working again. “I just
wanted to see how I looked in it,” I said, and turned to study myself in the mirror
again. “See if it still fits.”

 
          
“It
doesn’t,” she said.

 
          
“Sure
it does.” I turned sideways and gave myself a good view of my profile. “Well,
it’s maybe a little tight,” I admitted. “Not much.”

 
          
Past
me in the mirror I could see her smiling at me and shaking her head. She’d kept
her own figure almost exactly the same, in spite of having kids and being a
housewife for years, so she was in a good position to be thinner- than-thou if
she wanted. And even though it was ridiculous, I felt defensive on the subject.
I turned and said, “Listen, I could still wear it. If I had to, I could. It
wouldn’t look that bad.”

 
          
“No,
you’re right,” she said. “It isn’t terrible.” I couldn’t tell if she meant it
or if she was humoring me.

 
          
Being
agreed with was just as bad as having an argument. I patted my stomach, looking
at it in the mirror, and said, “I’ve been drinking too much beer, that’s the
trouble.”

 
          
She
made an I-wouldn’t-argue-with-you face, and walked over to the dresser. I
watched her in the mirror. She picked up her watch from the dresser top and
headed for the door, winding it. In the doorway, she looked back at me and
said, “Lunch in fifteen minutes.”

 
          
I
said, “I’ll have iced tea today.”

 
          
She
laughed. “All right,” she said.

 
          
After
she went out, I gave myself another critical look. It wasn’t that bad. A little
tight, that’s all. Not bad.

 
          
There’s
a strange sense of dislocation in leaving one’s family at ten or eleven o’clock
at night and going off to work. There’s more of a feeling of
leaving
them, of a deep break between
family life and job life. Neither Tom nor Joe had ever gotten over that
atmosphere of loss, but it was another of the things they’d never discussed
together.

 
          
Maybe
if they’d worked the midnight-to-eight shift all the time they would have
gotten used to it, and not felt any stranger about it than a guy who leaves for
work at eight in the morning. But constantly switching around from shift to
shift the way they did, they never really got a chance to become used to the
idiosyncracies of any one schedule.

 
          
Since
the incident with the little kid out at Jones Beach, they’d done most of their
talking about the robbery in the car on the way to or from work, and they both
seemed to prefer for that the drive at eleven o’clock at night, heading in
toward the city. The sense of dislocation from home and family probably helped,
and so did the darkness, the interior of the car lit by nothing but the
dashboard and oncoming headlights. It was as though they were isolated then,
separate from everything, capable of concentrating their minds on the question
of committing the robbery.

 
          
This
night, they were both quiet for the first ten or fifteen minutes in the car,
westbound on the Long Island Expressway. Traffic was moderate coming out of the
city, but light in the direction they were going. There was plenty of leisure
to think.

 
          
Joe
was driving his Plymouth, his mind only very slightly on the road and the car,
but mostly away, on Wall Street, in brokerage offices. Suddenly he said, “I go
back to the bomb scare.”

 
          
Tom’s
mind had been full of his own thoughts, involving burying the bonds and calling
Vigano and figuring out the safest way to make the switch for the two million dollars.
He blinked over toward Joe’s profile in the darkness and said, “What?”

 
          
“We
ought to be able to do that,” Joe said. “Phone in, tell them there’s a bomb in
the vault,
then
answer the squeal ourselves.”

 
          
Tom
shook his head.
‘Won’t work.”

 
          
“But
it gets us in, that’s the beauty.”

 
          
“Sure,”
Tom said. “And then a couple other guys come to answer the squeal before we get
out again.”

 
          
“There
ought to be a way around that,” Joe said.

 
          
“There
isn’t.”

 
          
“Bribe
a dispatcher to give the squeal to us instead of one of their own cars.”

 
          
“Which dispatcher?
And how much do you bribe him? We get a
million and he gets a hundred? He’d turn us in within a week. Or blackmail us.”

 
          
“There’s
got to be a way,” Joe said. The bomb-scare idea appealed to him on general
dramatic grounds.

 
          
“The
problem isn’t to get in,” Tom said. “The problem is to get away afterwards with
the bonds, and where we stash them, and how we make the switch with Vigano.”

 
          
But
Joe didn’t want to listen to any of that. He insisted on the primacy of his own
area of research. “We’ve still got to get in,” he said.

 
          
“We’ll
get in,” Tom said, and all of a sudden the idea hit him. He sat up straighter
in the car, and stared straight ahead out the windshield. “Son of a bitch,” he
said.

 
          
Joe
glanced at him.
“Now what?”

 
          
“When’s
that parade? Remember, there was a thing in the paper about a parade for some
astronauts.”

 
          
Joe
frowned, trying to remember.
“Next week sometime.”
It
had been on Wednesday, he remembered that.
“Uhhh, the
seventeenth.
Why?”

 
          
“That’s
when we do it,” Tom said. He was grinning from ear to ear.

 
          
“During the parade?”

 
          
Tom
was so excited he couldn’t sit still. “Joe,” he said, “I am a goddam
mastermind!”

 
          
Skeptical,
Joe said, “You are, huh?”

 
          
“Listen
to me,” Tom said. “What are we going to steal?”

 
          
Joe
gave him a disgusted look. “What?”

 
          
“Give
me a break,” Tom said. “Just tell me, what are we going to steal?”

 
          
Shrugging,
Joe said, “Bearer bonds, like the man said.”

           
“Money,” Tom said.

 
          
Joe
nodded, being weary and long-suffering. “Okay, okay, money.”

 
          
“Only
not
money,” Tom said. He kept grinning,
as though his cheeks would stretch permanently out of shape. “You see? We still
got to turn it over before
it’s
money.” “In a minute,”
Joe told him, “I’m going to stop this car and punch your head.”

 
          
“Listen
to me, Joe. The idea is
,
money isn’t just dollar
bills. It’s all kinds of things.
Checking accounts.
Credit cards.
Stock certificates.”

 
          
“Will
you for Christ’s sake get to the point?”

 
          
“Here’s
the point,” Tom said. “Anything is money, if you
think
it’s
money. Like Vigano thinks those
bearer bonds are money.”

 
          
“He’s
right,” Joe said.

 
          
“Sure,
he’s right. And that’s what solves all our problems.”

 
          
“It
does?”

 
          
“Absolutely,”
Tom said. “It gets us in, gets us out, solves the problem of hiding the loot,
solves
everything”
“That’s
fucking wonderful,” Joe said.

 
          
“You’re
damn right it is.” Tom played a paradiddle on the dashboard with his
fingertips. “And that,” he said, “is why we’re going to pull off that robbery
during the parade.”

 
          
I
drove the squad car down Columbus Avenue to a Puerto Rican grocery near 86th
Street. I pulled in to the curb there and said to Lou, “Why don’t you get us a
coke?” “Good idea,” he said. He was a young guy, twenty-four years of age, his
second year on the force. He wore his hair a little too long, to my way of
thinking, and I almost never saw him without razor cuts all over his chin. But
he was all right; he was quiet, he minded his own business, and he had no bad
habits in the car. At one time or another I’ve had them all, the farters and
the nose-pickers and the ear-benders and everything else. Lou wasn’t the good
friend that Paul was, but I have done a lot worse.

           
I'd picked a Puerto Rican store
because it would take him longer in there to buy two cokes than in a regular
store. The little Puerto Rican groceries all over town are filled with men and
women, all of them four feet tall, most of them sitting on the freezer case,
all of them yammering away at top speed in that language they claim is Spanish.
Before anybody can hit a cash-register key and take your dollar and give you
your change, he has to yell louder than everybody else for a minute or two, to
make sure he’s got his point across. Then, with your change in his hand, he
thinks of the clincher argument and starts to yell again. So I was going to have
all the time I needed.

 
          
I'd
switched off the engine before Lou got out of the car. I watched him crossing
the sidewalk in the sunlight, hitching his gunbelt, and once he was indise the
store I opened my door, stepped out, went around to the front of the car,
lifted the hood, and removed the distributor cap. Then I shut the hood again,
and got back behind the wheel.

 
          
We
had a heat wave starting. It wasn’t eleven in the morning yet, and already the
temperature was almost ninety. From the feeling of my shirt-collar on the back
of my neck, the humidity was up over the top of the scale.
A
hell of a day to be at work.

 
          
Hell
of a day for a parade, too. They wouldn’t call it off, would they?

 
          
No.
The Wall Street ticker-tape parade is a tradition, and traditions don’t care
about the weather. They’d have their parade.

 
          
And
Tom and me, we’d get our two million.

 
          
Lou
came out with the two cans of soda. He got into the car, handing me mine, and
said, “They sure do like to talk.”

 
          
“They
got more energy than I do,” I said.
“In this heat.”

 
          
We
popped the tops, and the both of us drank. I was in no hurry for the next step.
I scrunched down in the seat a little, putting my face over by the open window,
looking for a breeze. There wasn’t any.

 
          
“It’s
too hot for crime,” Lou said.
“A nice lazy day.”

 
          
“It’s
never too hot for crime,” I said.

 
          
“I’U
bet you,” he said. “I’ll bet you there isn’t one major crime in this city
today. Not before, say, four o’clock this afternoon.”

 
          
Talk
about a sure thing. I almost took him up on it, except I didn’t want him
remembering the conversation afterward and starting to wonder why I’d been so
eager to take his money. But talk about a lock!

 
          
What
I did, I said, “What about crimes of passion? A husband and wife get mad at
each other, they’re irritated anyway because of the heat, and
pop
, one of them goes for the butcher
knife.”

 
          
“All
right,” he said, conceding the point.
“Except for that kind
of thing.”

 
          
“Oh,”
I said, “now you’re making exceptions. No major crime, except this kind and
that kind and the other kind.” I grinned at him, to show him I was kidding and
that he shouldn’t get sore.

 
          
He
grinned back and said, “I notice you don’t want to take the bet.”

 
          
“Gambling’s
illegal,” I told him.
“Except OTB.”
I straightened up
and took another swig of soda and said, “Time to move on. We got an hour before
we’re off duty.”

 
          
“At
least when we’re moving there’s a breeze,” he said.

 
          
“Check.”

 
          
I
hit the ignition key, and of course nothing happened.
“Now
what?”
I said.

 
          
Lou
gave the key a disgusted look. “Again?” he said. Because this would be the
third time in a month we’d had a car break down on us; which was what had given
me the idea.

 
          
I
fiddled with the key.
Nothing.
“I told them they
didn’t fix it,” I said.

 
          
“Well,
shit,” Lou said.

 
          
“Call
in,” I told him. “I’ve had it.”

 
          
While
he called in to the precinct, I sat there on my side of the car looking
long-suffering and drinking my coke. He finished and said, “They’ll send a tow
truck.”

 
          
“We
ought to
drive
a tow truck,” I said.

 
          
He
looked at his watch. “You know how long they’ll take to get here.”

 
          
“Listen,”
I said. “We don’t both have to hang around. Why don’t you shlep on back to the
station and sign us both out?”

 
          
“What,
and leave you here?”

 
          
“It
doesn’t matter to me,” I said. “No crap. There’s no need us both being stuck
here.”

 
          
He
wanted to take me up on it, but he didn’t want to look too eager about it, so I
had to persuade him a little more. Finally he said, “You really don’t mind?”

           
“I got no place to go anyway.”

 
          
“Well
... Okay.”

 
          
“Fine,”
I said. And, as he was getting out of the car, I said, “Be sure to sign me out.
I won’t go straight back.” “Will do,” he said. He climbed out to the sidewalk,
bent to look in the car at me, and said, “Thanks, Joe.”

 
          
“You’ll
do the same for me next time.”

 
          
“Yeah,
and there will be a next time, won’t there?”

           
“Count on it,” I said.

 
          
He
laughed, and shook his head, and shut the car door. I watched him in the
rear-view mirror as he walked away; around the comer and out of sight.

 
          
I
sat there almost half an hour before the tow truck showed up. They use them all
the time in midtown these days, towing the tourists’ cars away. But this one
finally got there, and the two guys got out of it, and one of them said to me,
“What’s the problem?”

 
          
“It
won’t start, that’s all.”

 
          
He
gave the car a squint, like he was a doctor and this was the patient. “I wonder
why.”

 
          
That’s
all I needed, an amateur mechanic. All the towman is supposed to do is tow the
car off to where it can be fixed. I said, “Who knows?
The
heat maybe.
Let’s take the thing in and get it over with.”

 
          
“Keep
your shirt on,” he said.

 
          
“I
don’t want to,” I said. I looked at my watch. “I’m off-duty in fifteen
minutes.”

 
          
So
they put the hook on the front, and I sat behind the wheel of the squad car,
and they towed me over to the police garage on the West Side, over near the
docks. That block is practically nothing but Police Department, with police
warehouses on the north side and the garage in the middle of the block on the
south side. The garage is a sprawling red-brick building, three stories high,
with ramps inside so you can drive all the way up to the roof. It’s an old
building, with black metal window frames, and I’ve heard it was once used to
stable police horses. I don’t know if that’s true or not, I was just told it
one time.

 
          
Extending
westward from the garage to the far comer is a fenced-in area full of patrol
cars and emergency vehicles and paddywagons and even a bomb-squad truck,
looking like a big red wicker basket. Most of those vehicles are junk, and are
kept around simply so that the mechanics can cannibalize parts off them to keep
clunkers like the car I was sitting in more or less in running order.

           
Extending eastward from the garage
to the comer are three or four more warehouse buildings, partly owned or leased
by the Department, and partly civilian. About five or six years ago somebody
found a load of slot machines in one of those buildings, down in the basement.
Nobody
ever
figured that one out.

 
          
The
block is one-way, and runs west to east, and both curbs were lined with police
vehicles, most of them not working right now. The entrance to the garage was
also clogged with vehicles, and more of them were parked on the sidewalk
between the front of the garage and the cars parked at the curb. This is a
block that cabdrivers avoid like the Black Death, because you can get stuck in
a traffic jam here forever, and which civilian driver is going to honk at a
traffic jam caused by the Police Department?

 
          
Like
the jam we caused right now. The tow truck came down the one open lane in the
middle of the street, and stopped in front of the garage. I looked in the
rear-view mirror to see if we were blocking anybody behind us, but with the
front end of the car up in the air all I could see was a rectangle of blacktop
directly behind me. I didn’t much care anyway, one way or the other.
If somebody was behind us, tough.

 
          
A
mechanic came wandering out of the garage with a clipboard in his hand. He was
a colored guy, short and heavy-set, wearing police trousers and a sleeveless
undershirt. It was a filthy undershirt. He walked around the tow truck and came
ambling down to the squad car, and said to me, “Problems, Mac?”

 
          
“Won’t
start,” I said.
“Dropped dead on me.”

 
          
“Give
it a try,” he said.

 
          
Now,
that was stupid. Did he think we would have gone through all of this, dragging
this car downtown on a hot day like this, without first having given it a try?
But that was what they always said, every time, and there was no point arguing
with them. I gave it a try, and all it did was click. I spread my hands and
said, “See?”

 
          
“Can’t
do anything with it today,” he said.

 
          
“I
don’t care,” I said. “I’m off-duty two minutes ago. My partner-went on in
already.”

 
          
He
sighed, and got his clipboard and a pencil ready.
“Name?”

 
          
“Patrolman
Joseph Loomis, Fifteenth Precinct.”

 
          
He
wrote that down,
then
went around to the back of the
car to copy down all the appropriate numbers. I waited, knowing the routine
because I’d been through it too many times already, and when he came back I
already had my hands ready to take the clipboard before he started extending it
to me. “John Hancock,” he said, and I nodded and took the clipboard and signed
my name in the line where it said
Signature.

 
          
I
handed him the clipboard back, and he turned and waved it at the driver of the
tow truck. “Put it down there somewhere,” he said, and waved toward the far end
of the block.