Cops and Robbers Page 17

  Before the robbery, I’d thought it would be very tough to come back to work after it, that I’d have a hard time going through the regular grind knowing I had a million dollars salted away. But the fact was, I seemed to enjoy the job more than I had in years. The robbery had been like a vacation. It was true I didn’t actually have Vigano’s million dollars yet, but I took it for granted I was going to get it, and I didn’t care. Except for that morning with the hangover, I’d been actually happy to go to work every day I’d had duty since the robbery.

  Partly I suppose it was the vacation idea; committing the robbery had been such a total break in the routine that it gave the routine a kind of fresh lease on life. But also, for the first time in my life I could look forward to an end of the routine. I mean, an end other than death or retirement, neither of which prospect had ever cheered me very much. But now the routine was going to end at a time when I’d still be young enough to enjoy it. And rich enough to enjoy it, too; a hell of a lot richer than I’d ever thought I was going to be.

  Who wouldn’t be happy working six months for a salary of one million dollars?

  Then there was another thing. Weather affects crime, believe it or not. If it’s too hot or too cold, too rainy or too snowy, a lot of crimes just don’t get committed; the people who would have committed them stay at home and watch television. This last week had been very hot, and my tours had been quiet and peaceable. I’d caught up with a lot of my back paperwork, I’d relaxed, I’d taken it easy. Even if I weren’t being paid a million dollars for it, I wouldn’t have minded very much working this last week.

  Which changed, all of a sudden. And it was a very small thing that made it change, small and stupid. I never really entirely understood why it made such a big difference inside my head.

  It was the night Ed and I were on the night shift, and out driving around in the Ford. Things had been quiet for about an hour until a little after one o’clock a call came in that somebody had been attacked over in Central Park. We were pretty close to the park at the time, so Ed, who was driving, said, “Shall we head on over there?”

  The squeal hadn’t been directed to us, though we’d heard it on the radio. “Sure,” I said. “Let’s see what’s going on.”

  “Fine,” he said.

  There was no urgency, since we weren’t the primary team responding to the squeal, so we drove over without siren or red light, and stopped near the park entrance at West 87th Street. We got out of the car, unlimbered the pistols in our hip holsters, left the guns holstered, and walked into the park.

  We could see the group ahead of us, down the black-top path and under one of the old-fashioned street lights they have in there. One guy was sitting on the black-top, and three others were standing around him. One of the standing men was in uniform, all the others were in civvies.

  When we got a little closer, I could make out the faces. I didn’t know the patrolman, but the other two standing men were detectives from my precinct; one was named Bert and the other Walter. They were talking to the guy sitting on the ground.

  I recognized him, too. Not individually; I mean I recognized his type. He was a homosexual, young and slender and delicate, wearing tight pale-blue chinos and white sandals and a white fishnet shirt. He was pretty obviously what’s called a cruiser, a faggot who hangs around one of the gay areas of the city looking to get picked up. They very frequently get beat up, too, and sometimes they get killed. They also have a higher incidence of VD than any other group in the city. I won’t say it’s a kind of life I understand.

  At the moment, this one was scared out of his mind, terrified, trembling all over. He was so fragile-looking, he looked as though he might break his own bones with all that shivering he was doing.

  When we got close enough to hear voices, it was the boy on the ground who was talking. He could hardly speak; his voice was trembling and his throat apparently kept closing up on him. All the time he struggled to talk, his hands kept fluttering around. I hate to say they fluttered like butterflies, but that’s what they reminded me of.

  He was saying, “I don’t know why he’d do it. There wasn’t any reason, there was just—There wasn’t any reason. Everything was fine, and then—” He stopped talking, and let the fluttering of his hands finish the story.

  Walter, one of the plainclothesmen, preferred words to hands. Not sounding at all sympathetic, he said, “Yeah? Then what?”

  The hands fluttered to his throat. “He started to choke me.” The street-light glare was in his face as he looked up at us, bleaching out whatever color was left in it, reducing his face to little more than a twisting mouth and staring eyes. With that face, and the gracefully twitching hands, he suddenly also reminded me of pantomimists I’ve seen on television. You’ve seen them; they cover their faces with white make-up, and wear dark clothing and white gloves, and they pretend to be in love, or to be an airplane, or to be mixing a martini. This one seemed to be doing a pantomime impression of terror.

  Except that he was talking. Hands still at his throat, he said again, “He choked me. He was screaming awful things, terrible, and just choking me.” His hands trembled at his throat.

  Walter, still not sympathetic, said, “What was he saying?”

  The expressive hands came down, flattening out. “Oh, please,” he said. “Oh, just terrible things. I don’t even want to remember them.”

  Walter’s partner Bert was grinning a little as he watched and listened, and now he said, “What did you say you were doing just before the attack?”

  Evasiveness cut through the young man’s agitation. Suddenly nervous as much for his present situation as for what had happened to him in the past, he gestured vaguely with both hands, looked away from us all, blinked, and said, “Well—” He stopped, ducked his head, twisted his shoulders around. “We were just talking, just—” He looked up at us again, looking like the heroine of a silent movie melodrama, and said, “Everything was fine, there wasn’t any reason at all.”

  “Talking,” Bert said. He jerked his head to the right and said, “Over there in the bushes at two in the morning.”

  He clasped his hands together. “But there wasn’t any reason to choke me,” he said.

  I wondered why he kept reminding me of silent things—pantomimists and silent movies—when he was steadily talking. Of course, as much as anybody was really listening to him, he might as well have been silent. He’d thought he’d found a friend, and he’d been betrayed, and that was most of the pain he was showing us. But we’d all seen it before, and we had other ways to describe it. All Walter and Bert were hearing—and all I’d be hearing, if I was the one who’d have to fill out the report on this—were the facts. Like that old police show on television used to say, all we want are the facts, ma’am.

  Walter was saying now, “Can you give us any identification on him?”

  “Well …” He thought about it, sitting there in the middle of us, and said, “He, uh, he had a tattoo.” He said it as though he were proud of having remembered, and expected a gold star.

  Ed said, “A tattoo?” The incredulity in his voice was almost comic.

  I looked at Ed beside me, and saw he was grinning. Looking down at that poor jerk and grinning. I thought, Ed’s a nice guy, he’s really a very nice guy, decent and straight. What the hell was he doing grinning down at some poor bastard who’s been betrayed and choked and humiliated by some other son of a bitch?

  And me, too. I was in the ring around the guy, one of the five cops standing around him, brought out to do our duty to protect him from bodily harm.

  I took a step backward, as though to get out of the circle. I really didn’t understand it myself, it was just a feeling I had, that I didn’t want to be a part of this anymore.

  The guy on the ground was explaining about the tattoo. “On his forearm,” he said. “His, uh, his left forearm.” He pointed to his own left forearm. “It was in the shape of a torpedo,” he said.

  Walter laughed, and the guy pouted
at him. He was getting over his fear now, and his normal mincing mannerisms were returning to him.

  That wasn’t the way God had made him. And none of us were the way God had made us, either.

  I remembered again that hippie talking about what the city does to people, and that none of us had started this way.

  Bert was saying, “What about a name? He give you any kind of name before you went off in the bushes with him?”

  He raised his eyes again, and clasped his hands in his lap. Christ, he looked like Lillian Gish. Wistfully, remembering having liked the bastard, he told us, “He said his name was Jim.”

  I took another step backward and looked up at the sky. It was one of those rare nights in New York when you can see a few stars.

  Joe

  I’d been in a bad mood ever since we pulled it off. Tom didn’t feel that way, he was going around happy and chipper and easy in his mind, but as for me, most of the time I felt like punching somebody in the head.

  It would have been a different thing if we had the money in our hands. Even if we had the bonds, something we could sell, something we could touch and hold and know that this was the result of our labors. But what did we have? A blue plastic laundry bag full of air.

  I’m not arguing. I know the case for doing it that way, and we did it that way, and I agree with it. As Tom said, the Mafia is not going to give away two million dollars if it doesn’t absolutely have to, so we can take it for granted when the time comes to make the switch they’ll try to double-cross us. And, since they already know this is a one-shot operation, we’re never going to be useful to them again, they’d be smart not only to cheat us but also to kill us.

  Why not? We’re the only connection between the bond robbery and the mob, the only ones that know the whole story. Kill us, and they not only save two million dollars, they protect themselves from getting implicated just in case we should ever get picked up by the law later on.

  So they’ll try to double-cross us, and they’ll try to kill us. We knew that before we went ahead and did the job. Because the next step is, we’re the ones who decide the method of transfer. And to bring us to the transfer point, they have to produce the cash, the two million for us to look at and touch. We can make it a part of the arrangement, that we see the cash before we give them the bonds.

  They’d expect that. They’d expect us to be careful with them, because they’d expect us to be afraid of them.

  What they wouldn’t expect is a double cross right back.

  As Tom said, money isn’t just green pieces of paper in your wallet, it’s credit cards and charge accounts and all kinds of things. It’s bonds. It’s anything you think is money.

  You know what we stole from Parker, Tobin, Eastpoole & Company? The idea of ten million dollars. And that’s what we figured to sell Vigano. His newspaper and television set would tell him we did the job. He’d have no reason to think we didn’t have the bonds anymore. So when the time for the switch came around, they’d have to have real cash, and all we’d have to have was a good plan and a lot of luck.

  But the point is, we’d be needing that anyway. Double-crossing them on the bonds wouldn’t make any difference, they were going to try to cheat us and kill us whether we showed up with ten million dollars’ worth of bonds or two dollars’ worth of ripped-up newspapers. It made no difference whether we conned them or not. And in pulling the robbery, it had been easier not to carry the bonds away with us, to destroy them. So that’s what we did.

  You see, I understand the argument and I agree with it. But that still didn’t change the fact I would have liked something in my hand afterward to show me I’d accomplished something. And not having anything meant I was spending my time in a really lousy mood.

  For instance. When I was on duty now, I was becoming a real hard-ass with the tickets. I was giving them out left and right, citing store owners for dirty sidewalks, hitting delivery trucks for driving down streets where commercial traffic was prohibited, even going after jaywalkers. I’m telling you, I was mean.

  Paul was out of the hospital now, so that was good, but he wasn’t back on duty yet. He’d have a couple months at home for rest and recuperation, the lucky bastard. In the meantime, I still had Lou to contend with.

  He wasn’t bad, but his attitude needed work. He was over-eager, that was his problem. For instance, Paul would have known how to calm me down when I was out there ticketing the entire population of the Upper West Side, but so far as Lou was concerned I was tough but good. It got so he was becoming pretty nearly as mean as I was, though nobody is ever going to top the time I ticketed the pregnant woman for obstructing the sidewalk with her baby carriage. That’s one of those records where you retire the trophy.

  As an example, though, of where Lou’s attitude went overboard, there was the night about a week and a half after the robbery when we really did lose our car for repairs. Which I already considered ironic.

  What happened, late at night we caught sight of these two guys coming out of a jewelry store on Broadway. We yelled at them to stop, and they jumped into a four-door Buick parked in front of the shop and took off southbound. I was driving, and I could keep on their tail but I couldn’t catch up with them, not with the piece of crap I was driving. I’d been putting in requests for a new car for eight months, and never even got a response.

  Meanwhile, Lou was on the radio. But shit, that time of night, everybody’s either already got problems of their own or they’re off someplace cooping. You know, having a doze.

  The Buick headed straight down Broadway, with me a full block back. I had the siren and flasher going, mostly to make other traffic stop up ahead and keep the clown in the Buick from killing somebody while running a red light. Of course, at that time of night, nearly four in the morning, there’s practically never any traffic anyway.

  He was a good driver, I’ll say that much for him. His brake lights didn’t go on until less than half a block before he made his right turn onto a cross-street in the Fifties. His inside wheels left the ground as he shot around the corner, but he made it without losing control, and by the time I came screeching around the intersection after him he’d leveled himself out and was tear-assing away, the other side of Eighth Avenue already, heading due west along a narrow side street with cars parked along both curbs and just barely room for two cars next to one another in the middle.

  “Jesus!” Lou yelled. “We’re losing him!”

  Boy, are you hot to trot, I thought, but I was too busy driving to say anything out loud.

  The light was with us both on Ninth Avenue, though it wouldn’t have made any difference. We both shot through, him not getting away but me not gaining any ground. What we needed was another car in front of us, to head him off before somebody got hurt.

  The block between Ninth and Tenth is mostly red-brick tenement buildings, half of them with shops in the ground floor, but the block between Tenth and Eleventh is warehouses, and there’s trucks parked along both sides instead of passenger vehicles. The same thing is true between Eleventh and Twelfth, and after that you can’t go any farther west without a boat. That’s the Hudson River out there, and you have to turn either north or south.

  He wasn’t quite as sure as I was on this narrow street, with the parked cars crowding in on both sides, and that was doubly true after we crossed Tenth and he was traveling down between two walls of trucks. The trucks take up more room than cars do, leaving less space down the middle for driving, and I could tell the guy in the Buick didn’t care for that. Given another two or three miles of the same kind of street and I probably could have caught up with him. But what actually happened was, he almost creamed a cab on Eleventh Avenue.

  The light was red down there. Big-sided trucks were parked along both curbs right down to the corner, restricting everybody’s vision, making a kind of tunnel out of the street. The trucks and the warehouses also probably contained my siren too much, so that it couldn’t be heard by somebody out on Eleventh Avenue.

/>   And there was somebody out there; a cab, going north, traveling empty. He was probably on his way to check in at one of the garages farther uptown on the West Side, having been out for eight or ten hours hacking around the city. In other words, tired. And alone in the area, so far as he knew. And with the light in his favor.

  Well, he entered the intersection just as the Buick did. And he was damn lucky God had given him fast reflexes because he just about stood on his brake with both feet and threw an anchor out back besides. The Buick swerved to its right, just nicked the front bumper of the cab on the way by, swerved to the left again, and kept going toward Twelfth Avenue.

  And here was I, half a block away. The cabby had to figure the first guy through was a nut, but with me he could see the flashing red light even if he had all his windows closed and maybe air-conditioning on and couldn’t hear the siren. So he had to know I was a cop. And twice in a row he did exactly the right thing.

  Because he hadn’t managed to completely stop before the Buick went by. In fact, the nose of the cab was still down like a pig looking for truffles, and the vehicle was still in motion. Which put it right directly in front of me.

  “Stop!” yelled Lou. As though I could have stopped by then, any more than the cab could. It takes a long distance to stop, hundreds and hundreds of feet—the only time you can stop on a dime is when you’re walking.

  Besides, the cabby was doing his second right thing in a row. The instant the Buick was past him, he hauled in that anchor, switched both feet away from the brake and over to the accelerator, tromped down hard, and yanked that yellow mother out of the intersection.

  I had to swerve left to miss his ass, just as the Buick had had to swerve right to miss his nose. But I did miss, and I never took my foot off the accelerator, and I entered the next block in fine shape.