Dog Day Afternoon (9 page)

“Who are you to go against the rest of the country, something special? We elected him President. So he’s a thief president. But, shit, he’s
our
thief.”

“You can say that again. The whole fucking country’s full of thieves cheating on their taxes, stealing from supermarkets, robbing the fucking insurance companies blind on hospitalization and auto damage, cheating on their husbands and wives, lying about expense money, cheating on overtime pay.”

“Listen to who I gotta be sorry for now, the insurance companies? The biggest thieves in the whole world?”

“Next to the telephone company.”

“Please, don’t get me started.”

Joe turned away to hide a smile. He glanced at the clock over the bar and saw the time was three o’clock. But his wristwatch, which he set every morning by the radio time check, showed that it was two fifty-eight. He watched a woman pushing a baby stroller rush up to the bank. A black guard let her in. He held the door open for a moment, glancing at his own wristwatch, then closed and locked the door.

Littlejoe continued to look. What happened next was instructive. Another customer hurried up. He rapped on the window, and the guard waved him away. Instead of leaving, the man stayed there, evidently spotting a customer inside the bank who would have to be let out. A moment later the guard allowed the mother with the stroller to leave, but he still refused to let the man inside. Time: three five.

Good to know the guard obeyed the clock no matter what. As a customer, Joe hated guards who were slaves to the clock. But he liked knowing this one could be counted on to keep out anybody who arrived after three sharp.

The routine of the branch bank wasn’t that complicated. A few days of watching had uncovered it for Joe. He’d used three different places from which to do his spotting, this tavern being the most recent.

He knew the bank’s morning opening procedures and he knew its closing routine, down to the fact that at three ten the guard lowered a Venetian blind on the southeast corner of the building so that, when the prowl car drove by at some time between then and three twenty, it kept right on going. This elementary security routine was what Joe had wanted to know. Each bank had its own, usually involving the raising or lowering of a blind, the placement of a window sign, the turning off or on of a light.

Tomorrow was Thursday. Littlejoe was looking forward to casing the job one more day, to see how the cash was delivered, whether by bank truck or Brink’s or what, and when the delivery was made. Then he’d have a whole week to check out the routine one more time and make sure there were no slipups. That was the way he’d worked it out with Don, who had been cooperative once he’d been forced to help. As he sat there nursing his beer, Joe couldn’t help thinking that Don had been almost too cooperative.

Was it possible he was planning to blow the whistle? There were a lot of ways of doing it, including the good old American-as-apple-pie anonymous telephone call. But Littlejoe felt that, if he were in Don’s shoes—passed over for fifteen years, never promoted—if given the chance to play hero, he’d want all the credit for tripping up the heist. It was a clear shot at a promotion. In fact, looking back over the whole thing as he sat there in the tavern, Joe began to wonder if he hadn’t been set up for this just to make a hero out of Don.

Stranger things had happened. You didn’t get to be a hip legend in your own time by believing everything that was laid in front of you. Or, if Don wasn’t that clever, you didn’t pull off daring daylight heists on information squeezed reluctantly out of a frightened closet queen who might have second thoughts and turn in your ass out of sheer fear.

It dawned on Joe as he finished his beer that he had worked himself into a tight spot. Sooner or later the big-shot creep whose .45 he had stolen would miss the gun and start making inquiries. Sooner or later Don’s nerve would give and he’d figure a way of turning a minus into a plus for himself. Sooner or later his cousin Mick would wonder what the carbine was for and the Maf would muscle in on the whole caper. Sooner or later Tina and her father would get fed up and put the Mustang on the police stolen list. Sooner or later Lana would leave him for somebody who could pay for her operation. Sooner or later his upstate relative would start to ask questions. Sooner or later Sam would have second thoughts, remember how bad jail had been, and crap out of the whole deal. Sooner or later . . .

There were too many loose ends, too many leftovers. Too much hanging over his head. But one thing could solve all his problems.

Joe got to his feet with such a violent movement that his elbow knocked over the empty beer glass. The bartender glanced questioningly at him. Joe shook his head. He went to the door and hesitated before opening it, before going out into the thick, damp heat of another dog day afternoon.

“. . . and it’s thieves like you who want a thief in the White House. Otherwise his ass would’ve been out of there so fast it’d make your head spin.”

“You better believe it, buster. Thieves like me and fifty million others. Why should we elect some honest square to front for us? We want somebody just like us, and boy, have we got him.”

“What about the honest people?”

“Let ’em wake up and join the show.”

Joe pulled the door open and strode out into the blast of hot air smelling of fresh bread. The traffic noise roared and shook the air as trucks rattled past. Everybody who was in on it, including dopey Phil, who was driving the car, knew they’d pull the job a week from tomorrow. That gave everything a solid week in which to fall apart, go sour, trip him up and ruin him.

Okay. In that case, they’d hit the bank not a week from tomorrow but tomorrow. One week early. Fast, hard, and so cleverly that they’d leave everybody standing around flatfooted with their mouths open. Let them learn a thing or two from Littlejoe. You don’t get to be a legend for nothing.

8

T
he rendezvous was on a residential block in Elmhurst, another in that belt of lower middle class communities that stretches across Queens from the East River to Nassau County. These neighborhoods bear names left over from some earlier time when they were independent communities or, perhaps, only a momentary gleam in the eye of a land developer.

The block of one-family houses reminded Littlejoe of his mother’s block in Corona, some miles away. In the absolute sameness, as if sliced off a piece of something much larger, cake or cheese or something like that, it reminded him of the block where Tina and the kids lived in Rego Park, and his father-in-law’s semi-detached row house and garage in Flushing, and his grandmother’s apartment block in Ridgewood. Nobody escaped.

He had let the Mustang get very dirty over the past week. Even the windows were dusty. A slight rain three nights before—which had been expected to break the heat wave but never made a dent in it—had left the fenders splashed with mud. Joe had carefully splashed more mud on the license plates, front and back. He bore his father-in-law no grudge, didn’t want him involved in an armed-robbery rap, and especially didn’t want any unexpected witness to come up with a handy license number to give the cops.

The carbine was no longer in the trunk. Now encased in a white florist’s box, it had been shoved under the front seat. The .45 lay in the glove compartment, with two tan poplin hats, the kind fishermen use. Joe had bought them in a camping-goods store on Second Avenue in the Village. He’d bought them a little too big for his head and Sam’s.

He’d also bought large, cheap sunglasses, the wraparound kind with thick frames. He played around at one point with the idea of paste-on moustaches, but decided they’d be too much trouble. The glasses and the hats, jammed down, brims drooping, would be enough.

He’d driven the car from East Tenth Street, bringing Sam with him. He’d expected the kid to be wearing his usual clothes, jeans and a thin body shirt, but Sam had surprised him. From somewhere he’d borrowed a very sharp suit, six-button, nipped in at the waist, wide shoulders, the color of Breyer’s vanilla ice cream, sort of a creamy white with a pattern of tiny black spots, like traces of vanilla bean. His trousers matched, and instead of sneakers he was wearing a pair of multicolored bump-toe, clog-heel boots that added four inches to his height. He’d chosen a white shirt with ruffled front and cuffs, and a wide orange tie. He looked terrific, Joe decided, so elegant he almost didn’t look like Sam at all.

Littlejoe hadn’t deviated that much from what he normally wore: the same shoes, a plain white business shirt like the kind he’d worn when he worked in the bank, an odd pair of chino slacks, and no jacket. Joe Anonymous. Not that he wasn’t capable of dressing up to an occasion. He’d once shown on a chilly autumn evening along the Christopher Street meat rack in short shorts, sandals, and a sleeveless underwear top with big holes. They’d talked about it for weeks.

Today, however, was business. Sam was dressed so elegantly that witnesses would be certain to spend a lot of time describing a Sam who never existed, at least not in those clothes. And Littlejoe would be Mr. Anybody from Anywhere.

Now for the bad news. The driver, Phil, one of the kids Sam crashed with in the Bedford Street pad, was not going to be in on the job. Littlejoe had learned this late last night when he and Sam, leaving Mick’s more reputable leather bar at about midnight, had seen a squad car stop across Christopher Street. The two young cops who jumped out of the car had proceeded to hassle Phil and another guy for a few fast minutes before packing them into the car and driving off. Exit Phil.

As if this weren’t bad news enough, the replacement driver, Eddie, was worse. Thinking back over last night, Littlejoe realized he’d panicked. They’d been so close. Losing Phil had stopped him from thinking straight, and in his panic he’d begged Mick for a reliable guy. Not from the organization, just somebody Mick vouched for. He’d been given a name, Eddie. And he’d told Mick the time and place of the rendezvous.

From the moment he’d seen Eddie walking toward them, a block away, Joe had known the choice was a mistake. For one thing, Eddie was big, damned near six feet tall, which he knew would spook Sam. Secondly, Eddie was beefy, a mixture of teen-age muscle and beer-belly flab acquired in the five years or so since he’d stopped being a teen-ager. And third, as it soon developed in talking to Eddie in the car, he was a no-good son of a bitch.

“No probs, man,” Eddie had said in a tone of utter confidence so fake that even to a stranger like Littlejoe it stuck out a mile. “I drive like a goddamned angel.”

“I don’t need no angel,” Joe said in a gruff voice, trying to reestablish dominance. “I just need a fucking dummy who keeps his fucking mouth shut and don’t drive through no fucking red lights. Think you can remember that?” he added insultingly.

With Eddie in the front seat, there was almost not enough room for Joe and Sam. Joe watched Eddie’s lumpy profile, the fatty chin, the thick neck, the tiny pig eye, the puffy ear. He looked like some kind of club palooka, good enough to take a few clouts on the chin and then dive for the money.

“Hey,” Eddie said weakly, the bully whose bluff has been called. “Listen, man, they ain’t no call to rank me that sharp, okay?”

“Whatever gave Mick the idea you could drive for me?” Joe bored in relentlessly.

The air in the car was growing hotter by the second. Eddie turned his beefy hands palms up. “All he told me, this was a heavy caper and you needed a heavy driver.”

“Heavy, not fat.”

“Shit, man, that ain’t fat,” Eddie responded, almost in a whine. He pummeled his belly several times, and Joe watched the shudders traverse his flesh in jellying ripples. Another five years and this would drip with meat like Tina.

Sam groaned softly, almost under his breath. “If that ain’t fat,” he muttered, “then it’s shit.”

Eddie turned to face them with a scraped-together show of bravado. “What the fuck is this, the U.S. Marine Corps? You wan’ a driver, you got a driver.”

Littlejoe and Sam greeted this with glum silence. All he needed, Joe thought, was a slow-witted dumdum at the wheel. The plan was split-second and the one who needed to follow it second by second was Joe himself. Eddie had only to drive, wait, and drive again. The responsibilities were 99 percent on Littlejoe, where they belonged.

“Tell me again what you do, Eddie.”

“Like, I drop you guys at the bank when you tell me, I mean, where you say, and, like, you know, keep on driving around the block and park behind the bank and keep the motor going and just cool it till you show.”

“And what happens when we show in back of the bank?”

“I mean, I wait till you’re in the car, right, and then I like take off for Queens Boulevard, west to Horace Harding, then you tell me my next move.”

Joe glanced at his watch. Two thirty. He got out of the stifling car and stood in the hot sun for a moment. This was another scorcher, today. The sky was cloudless. New York couldn’t expect a drop of rain. The temperature had been climbing all morning, from eighty overnight to ninety at the moment. Ninety-five was forecast. Littlejoe leaned forward, squeegeed his forehead with a finger, snapped the finger toward the sidewalk, and sent a spray of sweat droplets onto the cement. They vanished almost at once.