Cops and Robbers Page 7

  After all, he wouldn’t ever have anything else to do with the guy unless there really was a multi-million-dollar bond theft on Wall Street. Which would get into the papers and onto the television news, no doubt about it. Anybody calling up and claiming to be Mr. Kopp and claiming to have stolen bonds would be given the brush-off right away unless there had been a robbery to match, one that Vigano knew about from his own sources.

  So assume the guy was on the level. What was the likelihood he’d actually go through with a robbery and get away with it? Very very thin. And if he didn’t do it, Vigano wouldn’t have lost anything.

  But if he did really pull it off, Vigano would stand to gain a hell of a lot.

  It was a nice position to be in. Vigano toasted himself with Michelob, and Marty came in, saying, “Yes, sir, Mr. Vigano?”

  Vigano turned to him. “The guy that’s going out now,” he said. “I want his name and address and what he does for a living.”

  “Yes, sir,” Marty said, and left again.

  It would probably come to nothing. But just in case something good did come out of it, Vigano wanted to have his homework done. It’s the details, he thought, that make the difference between a winner and a punk.

  He got to his feet, selected a ball, and bowled a strike.

  Joe

  When Tom and I talked over the Mafia idea, one thing we agreed on right away was that if the mob found out who we were, there was no way we could go through with it. Neither of us wanted mobsters around with that kind of hold over us. Either we could contact Vigano and stay anonymous, or we’d have to give up that idea and try to think of something else.

  We took it for granted, the two of us, that Vigano would have Tom followed after their conversation; if he talked to Tom at all. So the first most necessary thing was to break Tom loose from the people tailing him.

  The last train to Penn Station from Red Bank pulls in to New York at twelve-forty. There aren’t many people on that train, particularly on a week night, which was part of the reason we’d picked it. Also, where it came in at Penn Station there was only one staircase up to the terminal.

  I was in uniform, and I got to the station fifteen minutes ahead of time. We’d rehearsed this three times, and the train had never been anywhere near this early, but we wanted to be absolutely sure. I went to the head of the stairs leading up from that platform, and stood there, waiting.

  Standing there, it occurred to me this was the first time in my life I’d worn the uniform when I wasn’t on duty. I’ve never been exactly gung ho for the force. The only reason I was in that uniform at all was because the Army didn’t need any tank drivers the day in basic training when I got classified. The choices open to me were cook or military policeman or something else, I forget what. Something crappy. They were also picking orderly-room clerks and finance clerks that day, but my test profile wasn’t too good in the right areas for those jobs. What I really wanted was to drive a tank, but I wound up an MP.

  I was an MP for a year and a half, eleven months of it assigned to the Vogelweh dependent housing area outside Kaiserlautern, Germany. I dug it. I got a kick out of carrying a .45 around on my hip, and doing the target shooting, and driving around town in a jeep at night to keep the white troops and the black troops from beating each other’s head in. I hadn’t had any job at all before I was drafted, I mean nothing that I wanted to get back to, and I never had any interest in college, so when I got out of the Army the question was what would I do for a living, and the answer was plain and simple. Go on the same as before. The uniform changed from brown to blue, the sidearm changed from a .45 automatic to a .38 revolver, and you had to be a little more careful how you dealt with people, but otherwise it was pretty much the same job.

  Which was nice at first, it made for a nice transition from soldier to civilian. But after a while the same job gets to be a drag and a bore and a pain in the ass, no matter what it is. Whether you’re carrying a gun or not, driving around the city or not, it doesn’t matter; it gets boring.

  For a long time, it seemed as though there was always something else to take up the slack, keep me interested in life even when the job was dull. Getting married, for instance. Having kids. Moving out of the apartment out to Long Island. Those are like the mountains, and the valley is your dull everyday life.

  It had been a long time between mountains.

  For the last couple years, I’d been thinking about women, about maybe shacking up with somebody somewhere. Get me a girl in town, somewhere in my precinct. I was pretty sure a girl on the side would drain off all this stored-up boredom again, at least for a while, but somehow I never seemed to get started at it. My heart wasn’t in it. I knew it was possible, I personally knew four guys in the precinct who had exactly that kind of arrangement, but it was like I didn’t have the energy to make the first moves, to look around in any way more than just eyeing my friends’ wives and wondering how they’d be in the sack. Maybe I was trying to keep myself from disappointment, maybe down in the bottom of my brain I had the idea a girl on the side would finally be the biggest letdown of all. With no place left to go from there.

  I heard the train come in, down below; the way the brakes squealed, they could probably hear it up on 42nd Street. I stood at the head of the stairs, just to one side, looking down. The stairs were concrete, and wide enough for three people abreast, and they were flanked on both sides by amber tile walls.

  Tom got to the stairs first, the way he was supposed to. If I hadn’t already seen him in the disguise I wouldn’t have recognized him. The wig was a different hair color, and longer than his usual hair, and it seemed to change the whole shape of his head. Then he had a David Niven kind of moustache, which made his face look younger for some reason. And the horn-rim glasses changed his eyes entirely, so he looked like an accountant somewhere.

  As for me, the uniform was my main disguise. People rarely look past the uniform to see the individual man. The only extra disguise I wore was a droopy moustache, like a western sheriff’s, and I’d put that on more for the hell of it than because I thought I really needed it. There wouldn’t be any reason for anybody to tie me up with Tom.

  About a dozen other passengers came along behind Tom, the usual number for this train, and it wasn’t hard at all to pick out Vigano’s men from among them. Three of them, all dressed differently but all unmistakably hoods, with hard faces and hunched shoulders.

  I was surprised at how hard it hit me, when I saw those three guys among the bunch of people coming up the stairs behind Tom. Up till that second, I guess I really hadn’t believed it; that Tom would go through with it, or that he’d get in to see Vigano, or that Vigano would wind up listening to him and believing him. But it must have happened, or those three guys wouldn’t have taken the train.

  Tom was moving fast, coming up the stairs two and three at a time. The three shadows were mixed in with the pack, all of it moving more slowly; when Tom reached the head of the stairs, the nearest other passenger was still eight steps down.

  Tom went by me without a look, the way he was supposed to. He went past, and I immediately stepped forward to block the staircase. I held my arms out and said, “Hold up a minute. Hold it, there.”

  Momentum kept them coming up a few more steps, but then they stopped and all looked up at me. People obey the uniform. I saw two of Vigano’s men pushing their way up past the other passengers toward me, and the third one going back down the stairs; probably to look for another way up. But there wasn’t any, not from that platform. By the time he found another exit it would be too late, and he’d come up in the wrong place anyway.

  They were all milling around on the stairs, a dozen of them packed in tight together. New Yorkers expect that kind of thing, so there wasn’t any major complaint. One of Vigano’s men, having shoved himself up to the front of the pack, where his head was at the level of my elbow, looked past me down the corridor, watching Tom hustle away. He made an irritated face, but tried to keep his voice neutral
when he said to me, “What’s the problem, officer?”

  “Only be a minute,” I told him.

  His eyes kept flicking back and forth between the corridor and me, and I could tell by his expression when Tom turned the corner down there. But still I held them all, while I counted to thirty slowly. The third hood reappeared at the foot of the stairs and trotted up them, looking disgusted.

  I stepped to the side, slow and casual. “Okay,” I said. “Go ahead.”

  They streamed past me, Vigano’s men moving at a dead run. I watched them go, and I knew they were wasting their time. We’d practiced this enough, Tom and I, so that we knew how long it would take him to get to the nearest exit and out to where his car was parked, with the special police permit showing on the sun visor. By now, he was probably already making the turn onto Ninth Avenue.

  I strolled the other way.

  7

  There was a certain amount of leeway in setting up the work schedules at the precinct, so Tom and Joe could usually adjust things around to be on duty at the same hours. They got cooperation from the precinct because it was understood they had a car pool together. If they’d both been patrolmen, or both on the detective squad, they could probably have worked it out one hundred per cent of the time, but operating out of two different offices the way they did there were bound to be times when the work schedules were in conflict, with nothing to be done about it.

  Because of one of those conflicts, it was three days before they got to talk about Tom’s meeting with Vigano, and when at last they did get together Joe was too worn out to pay much attention. He’d been on a double shift, sixteen hours straight, caused by some special activity over at the United Nations. In fact, it was the stuff at the United Nations, involving a couple of African countries and the Jewish Defense League and some anti-Communist Polish group and who knows what all, that had created the conflict in the work schedule in the first place.

  It wasn’t that Joe himself had had to go over to the UN, but a lot of uniformed men from the precinct had been sent down there for the duration of the special circumstances, and that meant the guys who were left had to double up to cover the territory.

  That was one of the big differences between the patrolmen and the detective squad. The detectives were chronically short-handed, and used to it, but there was never any time when orders would come down that would strip out half the men from the squad and leave the rest to take up the slack. The patrolmen though, were under normal circumstances up pretty close to full strength, until every once in a while the phone would ring in the Lieutenant’s office, a couple of buses would pull up out front to take the boys away, and the ones left would have to start scrambling. Like today.

  Today, the result was that they rode back together in Tom’s car that afternoon with Tom excited and ready to talk, and Joe just sitting there as though he’d been hit by a fire hydrant. In fact, having come to work eight hours before Tom, he had his own car in the city, the Plymouth, and was just leaving it there, because he didn’t think he had the stamina to drive it all the way home. He’d come back in with Tom tomorrow, and drive the Plymouth home tomorrow night, if all went well.

  At first, Tom didn’t realize just how far out of it Joe was. They got into the car together and Tom headed for the tunnel, and as they drove he gave a quick rundown on what Vigano had said. Joe didn’t make any response, mostly because he was barely listening. Tom tried to capture his attention by talking louder and faster, trying to push some of his own enthusiasm into Joe’s ear. “It’s simple,” he said. “What are bonds? They’re just pieces of paper.” He glanced over at Joe. “Joe?”

  Joe nodded. “Pieces of paper,” he said.

  “And the great thing is,” Tom said, “we can actually do it.” He gave Joe another look, with some annoyance in it. “Joe, you with me?”

  Joe shifted around in his seat, moving his body like a sleeper who doesn’t want to wake up. “For Christ’s sake, Tom,” he said, “I’m dead on my feet.”

  “You aren’t on your feet.”

  Joe was too tired for humor; it just made him grouchy. “I been on my feet,” he said. “Double shift.”

  “If you pay attention to me,” Tom said, “you can say good-bye to all that.”

  They were just entering the Midtown Tunnel. Joe said, “You really believe in this?”

  “Naturally.”

  Joe didn’t make any answer, and Tom didn’t say anything else while they were in the tunnel. Coming out the other side, Tom said, “You got change?”

  Joe roused himself and patted his pockets, while Tom slowed for the toll booths. Joe didn’t have any change, so he got out his wallet. “Here’s a dollar,” he said.

  “Thanks.” Tom took the dollar, gave it to the attendant, got the change back, and passed it to Joe, who sat there looking at the coins in his palm as though he didn’t know what he was supposed to do with them.

  Driving away from the booth, Tom said, “How’d you like a job like that?”

  “I don’t want any job at all,” Joe said. He dropped the coins in his shirt pocket and rubbed his face with his palm.

  “Just standing there all day,” Tom said, “taking money in.”

  “They all rake off a little,” Joe said.

  “Yeah, and they get caught.”

  Joe squinted at him. “We won’t?”

  “No, we won’t,” Tom said.

  Joe shrugged, and looked out the side window at the black buildings and brick smokestacks of Long Island City.

  Tom said, “The big difference is, we won’t do it over and over. One big job, and quit. I go to Trinidad, you go to Montana.”

  Joe turned his head to Tom again. “Saskatchewan,” he said.

  Tom, thrown off the track, frowned at the trucks he was driving among, and said, “What?”

  “I thought it over,” Joe told him. He was beginning to wake up despite himself, though he was still in a bad mood. He said, “What I’d really like to do is get Grace and the kids out of this country entirely. But completely out, before it goes to hell altogether.”

  “Where’s this you want to go?”

  “Saskatchewan.” Joe made a vague gesture, as though pointing northward. “It’s in Canada,” he said. “They give you land if you want to be a farmer.”

  Tom gave him a grin of surprise and disbelief. “What do you know about farming?”

  “A hell of a lot less than I’ll know next year.” They were now on that part of the Expressway lined on both sides with cemeteries, and Joe brooded out at it all. It’s like somebody’s idea of a sick joke, all those tombstones stretching away on both sides of the Expressway just a couple miles from Manhattan; like a parody of a city, in bad taste. Neither of them had ever mentioned it to the other, but those damn cemeteries had bugged them both from time to time, over the years of driving back and forth. And the funny thing was, they bothered the both of them more in the daytime than at night. And more on sunny days than rainy days. And more in the summer than in the winter.

  This was a sunny day in July.

  Neither of them said any more until they were past the cemeteries. Then Joe said, “I’m really thinking about that, you know. Just pack everybody in the car and take off for Canada. Except with my luck, it’d break down before we got to the border.”

  “Not if you had a million dollars,” Tom said.

  Joe shook his head. “There are times,” he said, “I almost believe we’re gonna do it.”

  Tom frowned at him. “What’s the matter with you? You’re the one that’s done it already.”

  “You mean the liquor store?”

  “What else?”

  “That was a different thing,” Joe said. “That was—” He moved his hands, trying to think of the word.

  “Small-time,” Tom said. “I’m telling you to think big-time. You know what Vigano had?”

  Small-time wasn’t the word Joe had been looking for. Irritated, he said, “What did he have?”

  “His own b
owling alley. Right in the house.”

  Joe just stared. “A bowling alley?”

  “Regulation bowling alley. One lane. Right in the house.”

  Joe grinned. That was the kind of high life he could understand. “Son of a bitch,” he said.

  “Go tell him crime doesn’t pay,” Tom said.

  Joe nodded, thinking it over. He said, “And he told you securities, huh?”

  “Bearer bonds,” Tom said. “Just pieces of paper. Not heavy, no trouble, we turn them right over.”

  Joe was wide awake now, interested, his irritation forgotten. “Tell me the whole thing,” he said. “What he said, what you said. What’s his house look like?”

  Joe

  To me, Broadway in the Seventies and Eighties is the only part of Manhattan that’s worth anything at all. Paul and I cover that area in the squad car a lot, and I kind of like it. The people are maybe a little uglier-looking than the average, but at least they’re human; not like the freaks in the Village or the Lower East Side. Midtown has all the pretty people, all those marching men in their suits and good-looking girl secretaries out wandering around during lunch, but that isn’t where they live. There isn’t anything human or livable in that area at all; it’s just stone and glass boxes that the white-collar people work in all day. On their own time, they go somewhere else.

  Anyway, we’re supposed to cover the cross-streets and West End Avenue and Columbus and Amsterdam and Central Park West, but whenever I’m at the wheel I tend to be on Broadway. Unless I feel like doing some fun driving or giving out some tickets, in which case I go over to Henry Hudson Parkway.

  Two days after Tom and I had our talk in his car about Vigano, Paul and I were heading south on Broadway, me driving, when all of a sudden, half a block ahead of us, two people came struggling out of a hardware store onto the sidewalk. They were both male, both Caucasian. One was short, heavy-set, fiftyish, wearing gray workpants and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up above his elbows. The other was tall, lanky, twentyish, wearing army boots and khaki pants and a green polo shirt. At first, all I could see was that they were struggling with one another, going around in a circle as though they were dancing.