Bank Shot Read online

  ‘Sure. You?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘Dortmunder?’

  Dortmunder nodded. He was frowning across at the blank television screen.

  Kelp went out to the kitchen, and May said, ‘What do you think of it, really?’

  ‘I think it’s the only thing that’s come along in a year,’ Dortmunder said.

  ‘But do you like it?’

  ‘I told you what I liked. I like to go to a shoe factory with four other guys, walk into the payroll office, walk out with the payroll. But everybody pays by check.’

  ‘So what are you going to do?’

  From the kitchen, Kelp called, ‘We can get in touch with Murch, have him check it out. He’d be our driver.’ They could hear him popping can tops out there.

  ‘I got to go with what’s there,’ Dortmunder said, shrugging. Then he shook his head and said, ‘But I really don’t like all this razzle-dazzle. I’m like a regular cowboy and the only place left to work is the rodeo.’

  ‘So you look it over,’ May said, ‘you see how it pans out, you don’t have to commit yourself one way or the other yet.’

  Dortmunder gave her a crooked grin. ‘Keep me out of mischief,’ he said.

  That’s what she’d been thinking. She didn’t say anything, just grinned back, and was removing a cigarette ember from her mouth when Kelp came in with the beer. ‘Why don’t I do that?’ he said, handing the cans around. ‘Give Murch a call.’

  Dortmunder shrugged. ‘Go ahead.’

  7

  Stan Murch, in a uniform-like blue jacket, stood on the sidewalk in front of the Hilton and watched cab after cab make the loop in to the main entrance. Doesn’t anybody travel in their own car any more? Then at last a Chrysler Imperial with Michigan plates came hesitantly up Sixth Avenue, made the left-hand loop into the Hilton driveway and stopped at the entrance. As a woman and several children got out of the doors on the right of the car, toward the hotel entrance, the driver climbed heavily out on the left. He was a big man with a cigar and a camel’s-hair coat.

  Murch was at the door before it was halfway open, pulling it the rest of the way and saying, ‘Just leave the keys in it, sir.’

  ‘Right,’ the man said around his cigar. He got out and sort of shook himself inside the coat. Then, as Murch was about to get behind the wheel, the driver said, ‘Wait.’

  Murch looked at him. ‘Sir?’

  ‘Here you go, boy,’ the man said and pulled a folded dollar bill from his pants pocket and handed it across.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ Murch said. He saluted with the hand holding the dollar, climbed behind the wheel, and drove away. He was smiling as he made the right turn into 53rd Street; it wasn’t every day a man gave you a tip for stealing his car.

  It was rush hour, and several cabs had to be hustled out of their jocks before Murch reached Eleventh Avenue. Three times he got the supreme accolade: Cabbies in his wake opened their doors, put one foot on the pavement, stepped out, and shook ther fists.

  The West Side Highway was no good at this time of day, as Stan Murch well knew, but it was possible to make fairly good time if one drove under it, down along the docks. You had to be willing to go around trucks parked sideways every block or so, but that was all.

  The Brooklyn Battery Tunnel was hopeless, as usual, but at rush hour there just isn’t any sensible way to get to Brooklyn, so Murch waited it out, revving the engine in park and drumming his fingertips on the steering wheel to a stereo cassette of ‘Mantovani Swings Bartok for Sleepy Lovers’; these cassettes were very nice, particularly in a tunnel where the radio couldn’t pick up anything.

  On the other side, Murch paid the toll, angled across seven lanes of fist-shakers, and took an obscure exit marked ‘Local Streets’. While the rest of the world faced stop-and-go traffic on Flatbush and Prospect Expressway, Stan Murch angled down through neighborhoods that hadn’t seen a strange face since the Brooklyn Navy Yard closed, and in the general vicinity of Sheepshead Bay he stopped in front of a metal garage door in a long gray brick wall and honked three times. A small door beside the garage entrance carried a sign reading ‘J & L Novelties – Deliveries’. This door opened; a thin black man with a sweatband around his head leaned out, and Murch waved at him. The thin man nodded, disappeared, and a second later the metal door began to creak upward.

  Murch drove into a huge concrete room that looked much like a parking garage, with metal support pillars spaced all around it. A dozen or so cars were scattered around the walls, leaving most of the space empty. These were all in the process of being repainted. A used oil drum next to one pillar was half full of license plates, most of them from out-of-state. A dozen men, most of them black or Puerto Rican, were working on the cars; this was obviously an equal-opportunity employer. A battered plastic radio in a far corner raspingly played W.A.B.C., a local shlock-rock station.

  The thin black man with the sweatband motioned for Murch to leave the Imperial over against the wall to the right. Murch left it there, went through the glove compartment on the off chance, found nothing of interest, and walked back over toward the door. The thin man, who had shut the garage door again, grinned at Murch and said, ‘You sure do bring in a lot of cars.’

  ‘The streets are full of them,’ Murch said. ‘Tell Mr. Marconi I’d appreciate the money in a hurry, okay?’

  ‘What do you do with all your money?’

  ‘I’m the sole support of my mother.’

  ‘She isn’t back in the cab yet?’

  ‘Still got the neck brace on,’ Murch said. ‘She could drive, but people generally don’t like a ride in a cab with a driver with a neck brace on. It’s a superstition, I guess.’

  ‘How long’s she got to keep it on?’

  ‘Till we settle out of court,’ Murch said. ‘Tell Mr. Marconi, will you?’

  ‘Sure,’ the thin man said. ‘But, by the way, he isn’t Mr Marconi any more. He changed his name to March legally.’

  ‘Oh, yeah? How come?’

  ‘The Italian-American Defamation League made him do it.’

  ‘Huh,’ Murch said. He rolled the new name on his lips: ‘Salvatore March. Doesn’t sound bad.’

  ‘I don’t think he’s happy with it, though,’ said the thin man. ‘But what’s he gonna do?’

  ‘True. See you around.’

  ‘So long,’ said the thin man.

  Murch left and walked four blocks before he found a cab. The driver gave him a mournful yet frantic look and said, ‘Tell me you want to go to Manhattan.’

  ‘I’d like to tell you that,’ Murch said, ‘but my mother’s in Canarsie.’

  ‘Canarsie,’ said the driver. ‘And I thought it couldn’t get worse.’ He faced front and headed across the sixth and seventh circles of Brooklyn.

  After a while, Murch said, ‘Listen, would you mind a suggestion about the route?’

  ‘Shut your face,’ said the driver. He said it softly, but he was hunched forward and his hands were gripping the steering wheel very hard.

  Murch shrugged. ‘You’re the boss,’ he said.

  They got there eventually. Murch gave him a nearly 15 percent tip, in honor of his mother, and went inside to find his mother walking around without the brace on. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘What if I was an insurance adjuster?’

  ‘You’d’ve rung the doorbell,’ she said.

  ‘Or looked through the window.’

  ‘Don’t give me a tough time, Stan,’ she said. ‘I’m going crazy cooped up in this house.’

  ‘Whyn’t you go for a walk?’

  ‘I go out with that brace on,’ she said, ‘kids come up and want to know am I a publicity stunt for Beneath the Planet of the Apes.’

  ‘Little bastards,’ Murch said.

  ‘Language.’

  ‘I tell you what. I’ll take tomorrow off, we’ll go for a ride.’

  She perked up a bit. ‘Where to?’

  ‘Montauk Point. Break out the maps. Let’s figure a route.’

&nbs
p; ‘You’re a good boy, Stan,’ his mother said, and soon the two of them had their heads together over road maps opened on the dining-room table. They were like that when the doorbell rang.

  ‘Damn!’ she said.

  ‘I’ll get it,’ Murch said. ‘You put on your brace.’

  ‘I’m using it,’ she said.

  Murch looked at her, and she didn’t have it on. ‘What do you mean, you’re using it?’

  ‘You put it upside down on the drainboard,’ she said, ‘it’s just perfect for drying socks.’

  ‘Aw, Mom, you don’t take this seriously.’ The doorbell rang again. ‘What if that’s an insurance adjuster and you’ve got socks on your neck brace?’

  ‘I’ll put it on, I’ll put it on,’ she said, and went away to the kitchen, while Murch moved more slowly toward the front door.

  It was Kelp out there. Murch opened the door wide and said, ‘Hey, come on in. Long time no see.’

  ‘I figured I’d –’

  ‘Mom! Forget it!’

  Kelp looked a little startled.

  Murch said to him, ‘Sorry, I just didn’t want her to put her brace on.’

  Kelp tried a smile but went on looking baffled anyway. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I just figured I’d –’

  Murch’s Mom appeared with her neck brace on. ‘You called me?’

  ‘Hey, Mrs. Murch!’ said Kelp. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I wanted to tell you to forget it,’ Murch said.

  ‘I couldn’t make out what you …’ She stopped and frowned at Kelp. ‘Kelp?’

  ‘You hurt your neck?’

  Disgusted, she said, ‘I put this thing on for you?’

  ‘That’s why I called to you,’ said Murch.

  Shaking her head as best she could in the brace, she turned away again, saying, ‘This thing is cold, and it’s wet.’

  Kelp said, ‘You put it on for me?’

  Murch said, ‘Well, if you’re gonna put socks on it, it’s gonna be cold and wet.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Kelp said.

  ‘I don’t know how much longer I can put up with this,’ she said and left the room.

  Kelp said, ‘Why don’t I go out and walk around the block and then come back?’

  Murch looked at him, bewildered. ‘What for? You feel dizzy or something?’

  Kelp glanced around. ‘No, I guess not. Everything’s okay, I guess. I must’ve come in while there was already a conversation going on.’

  ‘Something like that,’ Murch said.

  ‘I thought so, yeah.’

  ‘Well, come on in.’

  Kelp was already in. He looked at Murch and didn’t say anything.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ Murch said. He shut the door and said, ‘We were just in the dining room.’

  ‘I’m busting into dinner? Look, I can –’

  ‘No, we were just looking at maps. Come on in.’

  Murch and Kelp went into the dining room, just as Murch’s Mom was coming in from the other direction, patting her shoulders and saying, ‘It’s my cashmere sweater and it’s all wet.’

  Murch said to Kelp, ‘You wouldn’t have something lined up, would you?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I would. You free to look it over tomorrow?’

  ‘Oh, hell,’ said Murch’s Mom. ‘There goes our ride out to the Island.’

  ‘Out to Long Island?’ said Kelp. ‘That’s perfect, that’s just what I want, couldn’t be better.’ He approached the table with all its maps. ‘Is this Long Island? Here, let me show you the exact spot.’

  ‘You two talk,’ Murch’s Mom said. ‘I’ve got to go change out of this wet sweater before I get a stiff neck.’

  8

  When Dortmunder walked into the O. J. Bar and Grill on Amsterdam Avenue at eight-thirty the next night, there was nobody in the place but three subway motormen, the television set high up on the wall, and Rollo, the bartender. The television set was showing three people scaling a wall, all burdened down with coils of rope and little hammers and walkie-talkies; they were a Negro, a Jew, and a beautiful blond Swedish girl. The three subway motormen, all Puerto Rican, were talking about whether or not there were alligators in the subway tunnels. They were shouting back and forth at the top of their voices, not because they were mad at each other – though they were – but because their jobs had got them used to talking at that volume. ‘It’s in the sewers you got the alligators,’ one of them shouted.

  ‘Them scum tunnels we got, you don’t call them sewers?’

  ‘People bring up alligators from Florida,’ the first one yelled, ‘little alligators for pets, they get tired of them, they flush them down the toilet. But in the sewer, not in the tunnels. You don’t flush toilets into subway tunnels.’

  ‘Not much, you don’t.’

  The third one, the gloomiest of them, shouted, ‘I run over a rat the other day, down by Kingston-Throop, this big.’ And knocked over his beer.

  Dortmunder strolled on down to the end of the bar while Rollo sopped up the spilled beer and drew a new one. The motormen started shouting about other animals that were or weren’t in the subway tunnels, and Rollo came heavily along the bar toward Dortmunder. He was a tall, meaty, balding, blue-jawed gent in a dirty white shirt and dirty white apron, and when he reached Dortmunder he said, ‘Long time no see.’

  ‘You know how it is,’ Dortmunder said. ‘I been living with a woman.’

  Rollo nodded sympathetically. ‘That’s death on the bar business,’ he said. ‘What you want to do is get married, then you’ll start coming out at night.’

  Dortmunder nodded his head toward the back room. ‘Anybody there?’

  ‘Your friend, the other bourbon,’ Rollo said. ‘Along with a no-proof-of-age ginger ale. They got your glass.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Dortmunder left the bar and headed for the rear, past the two doors with the dog silhouettes on them and the sign on one door POINTERS and on the other door SETTERS and past the phone booth and through the green door at the back and into a small square room with a concrete floor. None of the walls were visible because practically the whole room was taken up floor to ceiling with beer cases and liquor cases, leaving only a small opening in the middle big enough for a battered old table with a green felt top, half a dozen chairs and one bare bulb with a round tin reflector hanging low over the table on a long black wire.

  Kelp and Victor were seated at the table side by side, as though waiting for a big-stakes poker game to start. A bottle of bourbon and a half-empty glass stood in front of Kelp, and a glass with ice cubes and something sparkly and amber stood in front of Victor.

  Kelp, cheerful and optimistic, said, ‘Hi! Murch isn’t here yet.’

  ‘So I see.’ Dortmunder sat down in front of the other glass on the table, which was still empty.

  ‘Hello, Mr. Dortmunder.’

  Dortmunder looked across the table. Victor’s smile made him squint, like too much sunlight. ‘Hello, Victor,’ he said.

  ‘I’m glad we’ll be working together.’

  Dortmunder’s mouth twitched in what might have been a smile, and he gazed down at his big-knuckled hands on the green felt of the table.

  Kelp pushed the bottle toward him. ‘Have one.’

  The bottle claimed to be Amsterdam Liquor Store Bourbon – ‘Our Own Brand’. Dortmunder splashed some in his glass, sipped, made a face and said, ‘Stan’s late. That isn’t like him.’

  Kelp said, ‘While we wait, why don’t we work out some of the details on this thing?’

  ‘Just like it was really going to happen,’ Dortmunder said.

  ‘Of course it’s going to happen,’ Kelp said.

  Victor managed to look worried while still smiling. ‘Don’t you think it’ll happen, Mr. Dortmunder?’

  Kelp said, ‘Of course it’ll happen.’ To Dortmunder he said, ‘What about the string?’

  Victor said, ‘String?’

  ‘The crew,’ Kelp told him. ‘The group engaged in the operation.’

/>   ‘Oh.’

  ‘We don’t have the job planned out yet,’ Dortmunder said.

  ‘What plan?’ Kelp asked. ‘We back up a truck, hook on, drive the thing away. Dump the guards at our leisure, take it someplace else, bust into the safe, go on about our business.’

  ‘I think you skipped over a few spots,’ Dortmunder said.

  ‘Oh, well,’ Kelp said airily, ‘there’s details to be worked out.’

  ‘One or two,’ Dortmunder said.

  ‘But we have the general outline. And what I figure, we here can handle it, plus Stan to do the driving and a good lockman to get into the safe.’

  ‘We here?’ Dortmunder asked. He gave Kelp a meaningful look, glanced at Victor, looked back at Kelp again.

  Kelp patted the air in a secretive way, hiding it from Victor. ‘We can talk about all that,’ he said. ‘The question now is the lockman. We know we’ll need one.’

  ‘How about Chefwick? The model-train nut.’

  Kelp shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘he isn’t around any more. He hijacked a subway car to Cuba.’

  Dortmunder looked at him. ‘Don’t start,’ he said.

  ‘Start what? I didn’t do anything; Chefwick did. He got to run that locomotive that job with us, and he must’ve flipped out or something.’

  ‘All right,’ Dortmunder said.

  ‘So he and his wife went to Mexico on vacation, and at Vera Cruz there were these used subway cars that were going on a boat to Cuba, and Chefwick –’

  ‘I said all right.’

  ‘Don’t blame me,’ Kelp said. ‘I’m just telling you what happened.’ He brightened suddenly, saying, ‘That reminds me, did you hear what happened to Greenwood?’

  ‘Leave me alone,’ Dortmunder said.

  ‘He got his own television series.’

  ‘I said leave me alone!’

  Victor said, ‘You know someone with his own television series?’

  ‘Sure,’ Kelp said. ‘He was on a job with Dortmunder and me one time.’

  ‘You wanted to talk about a lockman,’ Dortmunder said. Somehow his glass was empty. He splashed in some more of the Amsterdam Liquor Store’s Own Brand of bourbon.

  ‘I have a suggestion,’ Kelp said. He sounded doubtful. ‘He’s a good man, but I don’t know …’