Ed McBain (27 page)

"I ... I..."

"You knew the symptoms. You watched, and when you thought the time was ripe, you couldn't resist boasting about what you'd done. Mary was making a call. You also knew how these calls worked because you made them yourself. There was usually a pause in the conversation while someone checked with the chef. You waited for that pause, and then you asked Mary if she knew why she was feeling so ill. You asked her because you weren't making a call, Freddie, you were plugged in on her extension, listening to her conversation. She recognized your voice, and so she answered you in English. You told her then, and she jumped up, but it was too late, the convulsion came. Am I right, Freddie?"

Freddie nodded.

"You'd better come with us," I said.

"I ... I still have to stamp the quotations on these," Freddie said.

"Mr. Godrow will get along without you, Freddie," I said. "He'll get himself a new boy."

"I ... I'm sorry," Freddie said.

"This is terrible," Godrow said.

"Think how Mary Chang must have felt," I told him, and we left.

A continuing character in the 87th Precinct novels is a villain known as the Deaf Man, Carella's nemesis, even as Moriarty was Sherlock Holmes's. Whenever the Deaf Man is on the scene, the cops of the 87th behave like Keystone Kops. He made his first appearance in
1960,
in a novel titled
The Heckler.
Since then, there have been five other novels in which the Deaf Man has wreaked havoc in the old Eight-Seven, the most recent of which was
Hark!
Traditionally, the Deaf Man will concoct a brilliant caper that is foiled not by any clever deduction on the part of the Eight-Seven's stalwarts, but instead by pure chance or misfortune. But think about this:

Five years before the Deaf Man made his first appearance, I wrote the following story about some guys planning to rob a bank. It appeared under the Richard Marsten byline, in the September
1955
issue of
Manhunt.

"F
RIDAY IS OUR BIG DAY," THE GIRL SAID.

She drained the remains of her Manhattan, and then fished for the cherry at the bottom of the glass. Anson Grubb watched her, no sign of interest on his face.

The girl popped the cherry into her mouth and then touched her fingers lightly to the napkin in her lap. The gesture was a completely feminine one, turned gross and somehow ugly by the girl herself. She was a big girl, her hair inexpertly tinted blonde, her lipstick badly applied. Anson had never liked cheap merchandise, and he winced inwardly as the girl munched on the cherry, her mouth working like a garbage disposal unit.

"The first and the fifteenth," the girl said around the shredded remnants of the cherry, "and Friday is the fifteenth."

"Payday, huh?" Anson asked, sipping at his scotch, apparently bored with all this shoptalk, but with his ears keyed to every syllable that came from her mouth.

"The steel mill and the airplane factory both," she said, nodding. "Can't we have another round, Anse?"

"Sure," Anson said. He signaled the waiter and then added, "Well, it's only twice a month, so that isn't too bad."

"That twice a month is enough to break our backs, Anse," the girl said, impatiently looking over her shoulder for the waiter. "On those paydays, we must handle close to $500,000, cashing checks for the plants."

"That right?" Anson said.

"Sure. You'd never think our little bank handled so much money, would you?" The girl gave a pleased little wiggle. "We don't, usually, except on the first and the fifteenth."

"That's when the plants send over their payrolls, huh?" Anson asked. The waiter appeared at his elbow. "Two of the same, please," he said. The waiter nodded and silently vanished.

"This is a nice place," the girl said.

"I figured you needed a little relaxation," Anson said. "Enjoy yourself before the mad rush on Friday, you know..."

"God, when 1 think of it," the girl said. "It's enough to drive you nuts."

"I can imagine," Anson said. "First those payrolls arriving early in the morning, and then the employees coming to cash their checks later in the day. That must be very trying."

"Well, the payrolls don't come on Friday," the girl said. The waiter reappeared, depositing their drinks on the table. The girl lifted her Manhattan, said, "Here's how," and drank.

"Oh, they don't come on Friday?" Anson said.

"No, they'll reach us Thursday afternoon."

"Well, that's sensible, at least," Anson said. He paused and lifted his drink. "Probably after you close those big bronze doors to the public, huh?"

"No, we don't close until three. The payrolls get there at about two."

"Oh, that's good. Then the payrolls are safe in the vault before three."

"Oh, sure. We've got a good vault."

"I'll bet you do. Do you want to dance, honey?"

"I'd love to," the girl said. She shoved her chair back with all the grace of a bus laboring uphill. She went into Anson's arms, and he maneuvered her onto the floor skillfully, feeling ' the roll of fat under his fingers, his mouth curled into a distasteful smile over her shoulder.

"Yep," the girl said, "Friday is our big day."

No, Anson thought.
Thursday
is our big day.

Jeremy Thorpe stood at the far end of the counter, the ballpoint pen in his hand. He took out his passbook, opened it before him, and then drew a deposit slip from one of the cubbyholes beneath the counter. He flipped the deposit slip over so that he could write on the blank yellow surface, and then he knotted his brow as if he were trying to work out a tricky problem in arithmetic.

He drew a large rectangle on the back of the deposit slip. On the north side of the rectangle, he drew two lines which intersected the side, and between the lines he scribbled the word "doors." In the right-hand corner of the rectangle, he drew a small square resembling a desk, and he labeled it "mgr." Across the entire south side of the rectangle, opposite his "doors," he drew a line representing the half wall dividing the tellers' cages from the remainder of the bank. He jotted four lines onto this to show the approximate position of the cages, and another line to indicate the locked doorway that led to the back of the bank and the vault. In the left-hand corner of his plan, the east and north sides intersected in a right angle which he labeled "counter."

He folded the deposit slip in half, slipped it into his coat pocket, took a new deposit slip from the cubbyhole, and filled it in for a deposit of five dollars. In the space that asked for his name, he did not write Jeremy Thorpe. He carefully lettered in the words "Arthur Samuels." He brought the deposit slip and a five-dollar bill to one of the cages, waiting behind a small man in a dark suit.

This was the third time he'd been inside the bank. He'd opened an account close to a month ago with fifty dollars. He'd added twenty dollars to it last week. He was adding five dollars to it now. He'd used different tellers for each deposit. The teller who took his passbook and money now had never seen Jeremy Thorpe before, and he certainly didn't know his name wasn't really Arthur Samuels. The teller stamped the book, put the money and deposit slip into his drawer, and handed the book back to Jeremy. Jeremy put the passbook into its protective case, and then walked directly to the doors, glancing once at the manager's desk which was on his left behind a short wooden railing. The big bronze doors were folded back against the wall, and the uniformed bank guard was chatting with a white-haired woman. Jeremy pushed open one of the glass doors and walked down the stairs into the sunshine. This was Tuesday.

From the soda fountain across the way from the bank, Carl Semmer could see the bank very clearly. There was a driveway to the right of the bank, and a door was at the end of that driveway, and the payroll trucks would roll up that driveway on Thursday. The guards would step out and enter through the door at the end of the driveway, and the payrolls for American Steel and Tartogue Aircraft would be carried back to the vault, awaiting the demands of the employees' checks next day. He had sat at the soda fountain counter on two payroll delivery days thus far. On both those days, the American Steel payroll had arrived in an armored car bearing the shield of International Armored Car Corp. On the fourteenth of last month, it had arrived at 2:01
P.M.
On the thirty-first of last month, it had arrived at 2:07
P.M.
On both occasions it had taken the guards approximately six minutes to deliver the payroll and back the truck out into the street. They had then turned left around the corner and been out of sight before an additional minute had expired.

On the fourteenth, the Safeguard Company's truck bearing the second payroll had arrived at 2:10, several minutes after the first truck departed. On the thirty-first, the Safeguard Company's truck arrived while the first truck was still in the driveway. It waited in front of the A&P alongside the bank's driveway, and when the first truck swung out into the street and around the corner, it pulled up to the rear door at 2:15. On both occasions, each truck was gone and out of sight by 2:22
P.M.

Carl had watched these operations with careful scrutiny. He was now watching an equally important operation.

The big clock on the outside wall of the bank read 2:59. He glanced at his own wristwatch to check the time, and then his eyes moved to the front steps where he saw Anson Grubb starting for the doors. Anson entered the glass doors and moved into the bank. Carl's eyes fled to the clock again. The big hand was moving slowly, almost imperceptibly.

Three o'clock.

Jeremy Thorpe started up the front steps of the bank. From behind the glass doors, the uniformed guard shook his head, smiled a sad smile at Jeremy, and then began closing the big bronze doors. Jeremy snapped his fingers, turned, and walked down the steps again and turned left toward the A&P. Carl studied his watch. It took thirty seconds to close the big bronze doors.

He kept watching the front of the bank. At 3:05, one of the bronze doors opened, and an old lady started down the steps. The door closed behind her. At 3:07, the door opened again, and two more people left the bank. At 3:10, four people left. At 3:17, two people left. At 3:21, Anson Grubb left the bank. Carl knew he would be the last person to leave. He paid for his coffee and went back to the furnished room at the other end of town.

This was Wednesday.

"The payroll trucks should be gone by 2:25," Anson said that night. "We'll give ourselves leeway and say they'll be gone by 2:30. Add another five minutes to that in case there are any foul-ups inside the bank, and we can figure the money'll be safe in the vault by 2:35."

He scratched his chin thoughtfully. He was a tall man with wild black hair. His eyes were blue, and his nose was long and thin. He wore an immaculate blue suit, and a black homburg rested on the chair beside him. One knee was raised as he leaned onto the chair, the trouser leg pulled back in a crease-preserving manner.

"Where's the plan, Jerry?" he said.

Jeremy Thorpe rose and walked to the dresser. He opened the top drawer and removed an eight-by-eleven enlargement of the plan he'd sketched onto the deposit slip. He brought this to the table, put it in the center under the hanging lightbulb and said, "I'm no Michelangelo."

The other men studied the plan once more. They had seen it often enough since Jeremy had drawn it up, but they studied it again, coupling it with their own memories of what they'd seen inside the bank, giving the two-dimensional drawing a three-dimensional reality.

"What do you think?" Anson said.

"Looks good," Carl answered. He was a short man with a pug nose and bad teeth. He was smoking now, and the gray smoke of his cigarette drifted up past the cooler gray of his eyes. He wore his brown hair in a crew cut.

"Jerry?"

"I like it," Jeremy said. He blinked his eyes. Now that the time was close, he was getting a little nervous. The nervousness showed in his pale features. He tweaked his feminine nose, and his lids blinked again, like short flesh curtains spasmodically closing and opening over his brown eyes.

"Only two of us are going in, you understand that, don't you?" Anson said.

Carl nodded.

"Jerry?"

"I understand."

"You think we can knock it over with just two inside?" Carl asked. "Maybe we all ought to go in."

"We can do it," Anson said.

"There's just one weak spot in the plan," Jeremy said, blinking.

"What's that?"

"The last guy to leave."

"How do you figure that to be a weak spot?"

"Suppose the timing is off? What happens then?"

"The timing won't be off," Anson said. "Look, you want me to run through this again?"

"Yeah, I'd feel better if you did," Jeremy said.

"Okay. The trucks are gone by 2:30, we're figuring. The money is in the vault by 2:35. Carl is across the street in the soda fountain, watching all the time. If anything happens to delay the trucks, he gives us a buzz before we leave here, and we postpone the thing to the first of next month. So there's no chance of a slipup there, right?"

"Right," Jeremy said.

"Okay. At 2:45, assuming we get no call from Carl, you and I leave here. It takes us five minutes to drive from here to the parking lot on Main and West Davis. That's a public parking lot, so we don't have to worry about attendants or anything. We just pull the car in, and leave it. Time: 2:50. We walk to the bank. It takes only four minutes to walk to the bank, we've timed that a dozen times already. That would put us in the bank at 2:54, but that's a little too early, so we dally a bit, getting to the bank at 2:58. We've entered as late as 2:59 with no trouble from the guard at the door, so there shouldn't be any trouble at 2:58.1 go straight to the manager's desk. At three o'clock, four things are going to happen."

"Go ahead," Jeremy said.

"One: the bank guard is going to close those big bronze doors so nobody else can come into the bank."

"Yeah."

"Two: you're going over to the bank guard, Jerry. You're telling him a holdup is in progress, and that he is to behave normally, letting no one into the bank and letting anyone out who wants to go out. You got that?"